My brother died of brain cancer in 1999. In the last days of his life he was often restless and terrified. Although he had never been a reader of poetry, or anything else for that matter, in his last days he turned to poetry for spiritual comfort. And not the kind of poetry or spiritual comfort you would think. He had no patience for poetry of "uplift," or cheap forms of reassurance. What he craved-what gave him solace-were poems that named his situation realistically, that accurately portrayed his fears, anxieties, and his physical and emotional pain. My brother needed poems that spoke the truth. And that in my view is the principle job of poetry-to speak the truth. By truth I mean a devotion to the fine particulars of human experience, to ourselves in all our frailty and evanescence, in all our irreducibly unique complexity. Truth in this sense is the opposite of Group Think, or the abstractions and formulas that dominate public policy and that so easily trample over the textures of the human heart.
For the past eight years, our government has engaged in policies designed to cut the individual down to manageable size. While all bureaucracies and governments engage in substituting neat lies for messy truths, the Bush administration has refined this practice to a pernicious art. What has offended me more than all the secret programs that have damaged so many lives around the planet is the sentimental public face of these secret programs, the arid heart behind the wet eyes of the "compassionate conservative." As James Baldwin once remarked, the palatable lies of the sentimentalist betray an aversion to experience, an inability to feel; they are "therefore always the sign of secret and violent inhumanity."
Political discourse in our country has become sloganeering; both sides of the aisle have engaged in an optimistic hatred of reality that has fostered a debilitating cynicism. In the public square, an addiction to categorical thinking and political expediency has violated the richness and diversity of human life and in so doing has undermined the very institutions they would ostensibly protect.
What can you do about this? You can read poetry. You can read a poem every day. At no cost to the public, poets such as Robert Hayden, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, and Lucille Clifton will lower the deficit of meaning that lately has been part and parcel of public office. These poets won't immunize you from the liabilities of power, but their best work will make it harder for power to deceive you. As our oldest technology of truthful human feeling, poetry will remind you of the supreme value of each and every human being; it will remind you of your frailties and imperfections. The fish bone in the throat of all devouring abstractions, it will preserve your love of particulars and make it harder for you to sacrifice any single life in the name of anything.
Alan Shapiro's most recent book, Old War, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008.
