The American Howard Nemerov’s wonderful short poem Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry is a gem.
It’s a poem about a winter scene. A poem about rain imperceptibly turning into snow.
It’s also, as the title suggests, a poem about the act of poetic creation. Nemerov creates a single image into which is crushed an intensity of meaning.
A simple scene that many of us will have witnessed transformed into a flight of the imagination that few of us will have considered.
Last week, Simon Armitage was announced as the new poet laureate, replacing Carol Ann Duffy.
Whether we need a poet laureate, I’m not sure. That we need poetry, at this time, more than ever – of that I’m certain.
In an age in which we too often desire answers to be black and white, in which we flee from ambiguity and complexity, and in which we find it difficult to see beyond the immediate or to read beyond literal, poetry gives us permission to wonder, permission to find the extraordinary in the mundane, permission to look anew at that which we imagine cannot be seen differently, to wrestle with what may seem unsayable or unimaginable.
A poem, as the Indian poet Meena Alexander suggests, “is a work that exists as an object in the world but also… allows the world entry”.
Or, as the poet George Szirtes puts it, poetry “is not a pretty way of saying something straight, but the straightest way of saying something complex”.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
