The Purpose of Poetry?

Diagnosis

The consultant’s room

a gallery

exhibiting the scans.

my head

an apple sliced,

my core on public view.

To launch the show

an invited few

stand round, comment

on the pictures,

discuss design,

flaws in execution.

I have no trained eye

to appraise

the work of art.

My interest more visceral,

I await

their verdict.

(Copyright Gill Garrett 2011)

A couple of years ago I was at a poetry reading by Andrew Motion. After the session a very earnest woman in the audience asked him "What is the purpose of poetry actually? What is its real value?". I can't remember the poet's response verbatim, but I recall wondering why things have to have a value outside themselves, whether some things can't just exist on their own merits. After all, we are human beings, not human doings - sometimes simply being is enough!

But I believe that often poetry does have enormous value in presenting the world in a different light from that in which the reader / listener usually perceives it, making them perhaps rethink beliefs and ideas. Some months ago a Health Poems Project was devised in the North West; although funding cuts (of course!) have since narrowed its scope, some of the poems submitted for that project are now to be used on a forthcoming NHS Research and Development Team website. The organisers hope that "they'll help reseachers, practitioners and patients make more creative links with each other ... help in training nurses (and) enable researchers to understand the patients' viewpoint".  My poem featured above is to represent the neuroscience category on the website; if it goes any way towards meeting those expressed aims I shall be delighted..