In a workshop I once took, a woman said she was wrote poems because poetry saved her life. She didn't say any more: and I, a fiction writer at heart, let my imagination trot into wild literal scenarios: a poem unspooling line by line to drop down to her as she hung, screaming, from a cliff's edge; a poem flapping into her face just as she was about to set foot into the street, keeping her from being splattered by a runaway ice cream truck. I knew what she meant, though: I've also felt a poem at the right moment bringing me away from moments of deep sadness and back into the good world: I've also felt, at times, that writing kept me sane and kind.

But I don't write poetry any more, though I read an awful lot of it. And though I'm sure some do find salvation in poetry, I read it for another reason--to rush the world into a startling unfamiliarity. Language, I think, is the most frightening and wonderful human invention that has ever existed; poetry is language whetted until it sings as it slides through the air.

One of my favorite poets, Richard Wilbur, says it so perfectly in his poem, "Lying"--one of the densest, most spectacular poems I know. "Odd," he says, "that a thing is most itself when likened." The language we use is only a representation of the thing we are experiencing; and yet, at its best, it touches a deep truth that makes the thing reveal itself more fully to us. For instance, in the same poem he writes this:

"How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed
To one side on a backlit chopping board
And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints
Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail."

You can see that onionskin so clearly in its shadow and light; more miraculously, you can see that onionskin amplified to become something larger than itself, more poignant, a flapping sail. Or, when he says this:

"...in the barnyard near the sawdust-pile
Some great thing is tormented. Either it is
A tarp torn loose and in the groaning wind
Now puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beast
Which tries again, and once again, to rise."

Wilbur's creating an emotional attachment to the inanimate thing, the tarp, by likening it to a wounded beast--he's actually making the tarp a more wondrous thing than it truly is by asking the reader to have sympathy for it, imagining its pain.

I need poetry for this reason: to take a moment to consider the world around me, to see it again as strange and heartbreaking and beautiful as I sometimes forget that it is.