I can’t afford therapy so I write poetry.
- Precious Okoyomon
You’ve likely heard this sentiment before, whether about poetry, writing, or art. Poetry is: self-discovery, exorcism, healing. It’s rooted in nature, the body, and the heart. Or so the notion goes.
In her 1983 piece about growing up in a Barbadian immigrant family in New York, words are therapeutic to Paule Marshall, too.1 To her, the loquacious women of her community were spoken-word poets in their own right. Still, she writes, “the talk that filled the kitchen those afternoons was highly functional. It served as therapy, the cheapest kind available to my mother and her friends.”
I resist the idea of poetry as therapy. Yes, writing is therapeutic. Yes, it can be a process of self-discovery. I find creative release in writing down my feelings, too.
But I think that this frame diminishes the practice that poetry offers: of creating shared meaning and exposing the mechanics of our world and ourselves. Poetry as a class-less, intangible currency is a more compelling concept. For all its shared meaning, it’s still a personal commodity, selectively valuable.
Poetry becomes something to dispense, a method of gaining purchase on otherwise unfriendly ground.
Marshall changes course, too:
But more than therapy, that freewheeling, wide-ranging, exuberant talk functioned as an outlet for the tremendous creative energy they possessed.
Yes! How generative words can be. Now, poetry becomes something to dispense, a method of gaining purchase on otherwise unfriendly ground.
Callum Rice’s documentary, Mining Poems or Odes, hears from poet Robert Fullerton about how he learned to write behind a welder’s helmet, books like Das Kapital tucked into the back pocket of his coveralls. Fullerton’s lines carry the intellectual and creative presence of their author. With them, he buys a new way of being in the world, but still tangible and embodied like the steel structures he also helps to construct. His notebook of poems splayed open on the table might as easily be a billfold of banknotes.
Language as an economy - indeed, poetry as currency - doesn’t require anyone to be economical with language.
Not dissimilarly from disenfranchised Glaswegian welders, to be black, female, and foreign in America is to be invisible. The poetic women of Paule Marshall’s community may have been bound to their kitchen tables by systemic inequalities, their words largely unpublished, but the glimpse that Marshall gives into their vernacular shows it to be limitless and free.
But given the kind of women they were, they couldn't tolerate the fact of their invisibility, their powerlessness. And they fought back, using the only weapon at their command: the spoken word.
Like Fullerton at work as a welder, Marshall’s kitchen table conversations provided her with her first linguistic and literary education. With their inventive and meaning-filled language, the women of Marshall’s community gave her the cultural capital to transcend her circumstances.
''The sea ain' got no back door,'' they would say, meaning that it wasn't like a house where if there was a fire you could run out the back. Meaning that it was not to be trifled with. And meaning perhaps in a larger sense that man should treat all of nature with caution and respect.
The phrase “economy of language” is sometimes bandied about by literary critics to describe succinctness. Saying much with little is praised. Cue Hemingway and co. The sea without a back door contains a wealth of meaning that the phrase’s simplicity belies.
Language as an economy - indeed, poetry as currency - doesn’t require anyone to be economical with language. Less is not more. More is not better. Unburdened as I am from actually being an economist, I see poetry as a global currency without a fixed valuation or exchange rate. It’s more like a treasury, the measure of which is in how much it means to those who can access its contents.
I’m reminded here both of the STABIQ Treasure House in Liechtenstein and of a blue matchbox I had as a child, filled with broken shells, beads, and old buttons. Each precious, faded item felt as special to me as I’m sure those (alleged) Warhols and Rothkos inside STABIQ feel to their owners.2 Within the treasury of poetry, as in a vault or a button box, value is contextual.
Within the treasury of poetry, as in a vault or a button box, value is contextual.
And after all that, perhaps the most significant capital of poetry is still in the writing of it. More than a novel, memoir, or screenplay, poems are restrained in their form and their value is decoupled from their size. The privilege of time for long-form writing is swept away by the conciseness of the demand that a poem places on its author. Just a moment at the kitchen table or while soldering pipe joints is enough to mint a poem.
The richness of poetic exchange is for everyone. We can all afford to write poetry. I, for one, can’t afford not to.
Questions to Ask when you’re searching.
“From the Poets in the Kitchen,” by Paule Marshall, New York Times, Jan. 9 1983.
This podcast on billionaire divorce is seemingly unrelated to poetry but STABIQ makes a memorable cameo.