An excerpt from Take This for the Pain by Alex Boyd
WHY READ POETRY?
Love for poetry is sustained by a willingness to be unsure. W.H. Auden called poetry “the clear expression of mixed feelings,” to which I can only add that there’s no particular guarantee it will even be a clear expression and not leave the reader an extraordinary amount of room for interpretation. And while there’s something to be said for musicality and the joy of playing with language, my favourite poetry doesn’t indulge only in this but finds balance: inventive enough to be original and effective even as it’s accessible enough to have the reader find their way through.
I read the first poem that ever really moved me – and would certainly be among the reasons I became a writer – in high school. It’s simply called “My Father,” and it’s a poignant portrait by Alden Nowlan that includes these lines: “He eats slowly / surprised there’s enough / finishes wiping / his plate out with bread. / He is seldom happy / but I never saw a man so content with small comforts.”
Effective writing is built on details, and Alden captured me with his father using the bread to wipe clean his plate. In his book A Way of Being Free, Ben Okri writes “The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.” And what’s poetry, if not the emotional core of a story? A good poem can contain as much meaning as a novel, though stated more directly, and I love that directness.
Poetry may be concise and emotionally charged, but it has never become the popcorn of the literary world, simply because reading a book of poems means moving through a series of ideas and a requirement as a reader you practice discomfort in small doses. It’s work to be potentially bumped into a new perspective on every page, and even in prosperous times we rarely seem to display a lot of tolerance for uncertainty, never mind difficult times. But uncertainty is where ideas are born. Einstein said daydreaming was the only way to get to new ideas – the only way to take what you already know and assemble it in a new way – but you’d be hard pressed to find office managers who encourage an hour of daydreaming every day. Our culture both loves innovations and scoffs at time dedicated to dreaming up something new.
Maybe poets and poetry readers are less patient. Writing fiction requires constructing a village around what you want to say: plot and characters, all with believable motivations and history. And again, it’s about doing your homework and finding the right details. When someone goes on Twitter to suggest anyone financially comfortable shouldn’t write poor characters, I think that’s missing what fiction is about. As Neil Gaiman said, writing fiction is using lies to tell the truth. There’s a larger point that’s valuable, and it’s more about a dose of wisdom than it is about data. By contrast, poetry has a direct quality, it’s like a shot from a needle that can hit your bloodstream quickly, but it can’t be forgotten poets, also, are allowed to be inventive instead of always relating their lives directly.
In the same book, Okri writes: “To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people… Great leaders understand the power of the stories they project to their people.”
I find this to be a deeply cynical age that can’t even cough up a cheerful superhero film – at least, not often – for fear of seeming naïve. Because that’s what we do, culturally speaking: we assume only the naïve are happy, as though it couldn’t possibly be a wise and intelligent thing to choose to spend precious moments of your finite life electing to be happy, even saddled with the awareness you don’t have forever. I’m not sure I think anything bridges the distance between people with more speed and accuracy than worthy poetry that happens to really speak to the reader. Writing can feel like an act of faith that imposes an order on events, transferring them to a more manageable framework, like a fishbowl we can stand above and look inside. Even as reading suffers erosion and we move towards an increasingly visual culture, book lovers know the immense value and joy of collecting smatterings of wisdom and experience from books.
It’s desperately important reading be better taught in schools with greater allowance for students to enjoy it and pick the work that speaks to them instead of being forced to dissect something that may or may not interest them. When it comes to fiction, give them something they find hugely relatable rather then King Lear and they’re far more likely to become readers and eventually get to Shakespeare. A teacher once told me about students reading ahead when given a novel about being expelled. Why not give them graphic novels and books of poems also designed to appeal? Randall Jarrell: “One of the oldest, deepest, and most nearly conclusive attractions of democracy is manifested in our feeling that through it not only material but also spiritual goods can be shared.”
In a superb interview on the site for the National Film Board of Canada, Northrop Frye talks about “teaching the habit of reading,” and that “a democracy simply cannot function without articulate citizens. There is a very strong anti-intellectual current in society always, trying to pull the level down as far as it will go. And that anti-intellectual current is, of course, found among professional educators just as it’s found among everybody else… it’s a continual fight … to develop in people a kind of informed and articulate speech that you need to participate in a society with any freedom in it.”
And how is the battle going?
“The battle is always just on the point of being lost… the point is that it never stops.”
Excerpted from Take This for the Pain by Alex Boyd © 2026. Used with permission of Palimpsest Press.
* * *
Alex Boyd has written for publications such as The Globe and Mail and Taddle Creek magazine. He helped establish Best Canadian Essays, co-editing the first two collections of work selected from Canadian magazines. His poetry collections are Making Bones Walk (2007) winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and more recently The Least Important Man (2012). In 2018 his first novel was published: Army of the Brave and Accidental, a retelling of The Odyssey reviewed as “mely, original and profound.”
Order a copy of Take This for the Pain here on All Lit Up, or via your local bookseller.
For more Excerpted, click here.
