HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: How poetry can fill a hole when words seem paltry
Mancunians receive a powerful demonstration of poetry’s capacity to define zeitgeist following the attack in #Manchester
Poetry is all around us – and yet it is nowhere to be seen or heard. Another way of saying this is that most people are in denial about poetry. For them, poetry is something you grow out of: the rhyming couplets of the nursery. Or it is something you escape: the incomprehensible verses of classrooms and exams. If you’re lucky, it is something you rediscover: you’re at a jazz club, there’s an open-mic session or a spoken-word slam and you realise that poetry need not be dull or difficult. But even this gentle revelation is not enough. In each of the above scenarios, poetry is still perceived as something that exists in a niche – for a life stage, or with a particular "type", or in a specific context. For the tiny minority who are avid readers and writers of poetry, its marginal status is a source of simultaneous despair and comfort. The despair comes from a sense that hardly anyone cares; that our noisy world, with its spectacle and its excess, does not appreciate poetry. The comfort...
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