February 20, 2025
by Douglas Manuel, poetry faculty
“[P]oetry may / not change the world but it might change you,” Evie Shockley writes in her nourishing poem, “job description.” As I wrestle with our current political climate and the literal flames that my part of the country, Southern California, is still reeling and healing from, I’ve found myself returning again and again to the question that Shockley’s poem directly addresses: “will poetry change the world?” Or more succinctly put, as Dana Gioia once pondered, “can poetry matter?”
On good days, when my before-day scribbling perches me on top of my writing routine, when my classes go well, when my son bedazzles me with the new language he’s acquiring (yesterday he said, “Scylla, the sea monster” perfectly as we were reading his toddler-friendly version of the Odyssey), I can find my way to agreeing with Shockley. I can see how poetry “heals, guides, feeds, & enlivens.” I can see, like Robert Frost, how poetry is a “way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” I can remember how I felt when I first read Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It” in undergrad: the deep pleasure and surprise of the poem’s final moments, “No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.” I possess a feeling of community and belonging that swaddles me up and fortifies me when I recall Nikki Giovanni’s decree that “Black love is Black wealth.”
And in memory I can find a newly motherless little nine-year old me reading Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son” and feeling cared for, loved, seen, and all those other modifiers and turns of phrase we use for the relief arts sometimes grants. Or how about in graduate school, when I first read Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas”? Oh the ecstasy, oh the sensual delight, of almost being able to taste bittersweet blackberries on my tongue as the poem’s last three words resolved the metaphysical, existential, ontological, epistemological exploration the poem begins with, “All the new thinking is about loss.” Young Doug needed these poems in a very real way, needed them the way my dog needs a walk, the way my son needs a diaper change.
Yet now I find myself feeling more like Auden, how he must have felt when he eulogized Yeats and wrote, “For poetry makes nothing happen.” I feel this way even though I know all the reasons that statement isn’t true, how it’s crap because the man who wrote those words also wrote, “‘You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart’” and anyone who could utter such a sublime, supple, insightful yet simple remix of the Golden Rule must believe in poetry’s power at least a little bit. And don’t even get me started on how most people who quote the “poetry makes nothing happen” line forget to mention the rest of the poem or even how the next lines talk about where and how poetry survives. I don’t have enough bandwidth for that today.
Today, I’m trying to see my way beyond some Theodor Adorno-like thinking, thinking that leads to me wanting to believe there’s no poetry after November fifth last year, no poetry after the executive orders, the billionaires, the dreary look in most of my homies’ eyes when we talk about the current state of things and the even drearier look they give me when we try to not talk about the current state of things because it hurts so much because we’re so fatigued, so wounded, so done. I’m so done. Are you done, too? Then, there’s a pair of us, my dear reader.
My father died on February seventh last year. He was a double amputee, didn’t have both of his legs from the knee down, had to go to dialysis four days a week, and was alone most of the time. Nobody but him and his TV and his music. On YouTube, he would watch P-Funk concerts late into the night and early morning and would often get noise complaints from the neighbors in his building for playing his music too loudly. When he was healthy, before diabetes, before his addiction to crack cocaine, before his long prison sentences, physically, he was the strongest man I knew. I saw him lift cars when jacks were malfunctioning, I saw him beat up multiple men at the same time who were trying to rob him, I saw him bench-press three hundred pounds. I’m telling you this because I want you to know how much my father’s physicality meant to him. I want you to understand that so you can be just as amazed as I was by my father’s lack of sadness. I want you to think about a man who could do all of that, broken down and alone in a one-bedroom apartment wheelchair-dancing himself to sleep every night, so very not unhappy.
I want you to know that he used to tell me, “As long as you’re alive, you still got a chance.” I want you to know that even though his doctors, everyone in our family, and even I told him that he’d never walk again that he always believed he would. I want you to know that he kept his walker and his crutches and his prosthetic legs. I want you to know that the last time I talked to him, a week before he died, he was telling me about how he was practicing standing with prosthetics again and how he could almost take a step. Simply put, I want you to know he never stopped trying and that his trying is the best poem I’ve ever read—his not giving up being more potent than all those words I’ve quoted above, more moving, resonating, compelling than all the poems I’ve ever read and/or loved.
No, I’m lying. I’m wrong. I can think of some lines that meet my father’s faith level of poetry: “‘Real’ poems do not ‘really’ require words,” Layli Long Soldier wrote. I feel a little changed, my dear reader, and I hope you do, too.
Again, I’m seeing that what Evie Shockley wrote was true.
Now, what are we going to do?
Douglas Manuel is the author of two collections of poetry, Testify (2017) and Trouble Funk (2023). His poems and essays can be found in Zyzzyva, Pleiades, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts.