Yes, poetry matters.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to give up.

The point of the pen touches the paper, and because we call ourselves poets, what flows out should be part of the world’s story. On days like this, our shoulders buckle under the weight of it all—no stanza has the fists we need, no syllable quiets the wail.

I remember a regularly scheduled open reading in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the evening of the Oklahoma City bombing 11 years ago. There was a television mounted on the wall above the bar, and as patrons filed in, absolutely no one lifted their eyes to the insistent images that had bombarded them all day. They were numb to the horrifying shot of the building with its gaping wound, suddenly deaf to dramatic bellow of news anchors.

That's not the kind of word they needed.

What they craved was the rickety stage, the static of the cheap microphone. One by one, poets trudged to the front of the room, the day slowing their stride, and spilled their pain to the room in poems penned in stark anguish, poems written on the subway from home to there. There were poems about the children who’d been dropped off at the Murrah Federal Building’s daycare center that morning, poems chronicling the search for survivors, poems about how an ordinary day had gone so wrong. The work was rushed, sloppy, florid. The work was raw, feverish, incensed. Nothing rhymed. I had never seen work so primal and necessary.

Say what you will about poetry, how flighty and hollow it’s become, how it flaunts its vapid self in commercials for lite beer and gym shoes. When we need it, on days like this, it becomes a throat—a throat wide enough for a chapter of the world’s story, even when it feels like that story is the last one we’ll ever tell.