Poetry is the queerest thing that happens to a culture—with the power to capture the center and yet exist at the margins. It is where the magic takes place, boundaries are pushed and systems evolve. Culturally, the marginal unit is one that changes language, structures, and how we make sense of the world.
In a global situation where the unraveling ecological emergency entwined with a set of overlapping crises, often termed polycrises, damaging any prospect of human existence, poetry with its hold at the margins, offers a promise, or at least a possibility.
Author Rob Hopkins in his book From What is to What if: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, argues that we do have the capability to effect dramatic change but we’re failing because we’ve largely allowed our most critical tool to languish: human imagination. Poetry conserves imagination—shared equally between the poet and the reader.