Is Poetry Useful? A Judge Defends the Useless Art
An engineer at a wedding asked whether poetry is useful. A contest judge stopped giving the polite answer and built a better one, with a line edit you can copy tonight.
Is poetry useful? An engineer asked me that at a wedding last March, holding a plate of dessert he never touched. He had just learned that I judge a monthly poetry contest, and he asked the question the way you might ask a man who collects bottle caps how the collection is going. Kindly. With a small, patient smile. I told him no, mostly it is not useful, and the smile got confused, because he was braced for a defense. I have stopped giving the expected defense. The honest answer is stranger and better than the pamphlet version, and it starts with admitting the question is rigged.
Is Poetry Useful? Check the Ruler First
When someone asks whether poetry is useful, they are usually holding one specific ruler: does the thing make money, save time, or solve a measurable problem. By that ruler poetry fails, and so does nearly everything people actually live for. Watching your daughter sleep is not useful. A three-hour dinner with an old friend produces nothing you can invoice. Grief, by this measure, is pure inefficiency, and yet nobody sane suggests we streamline it.
Usefulness measures what a thing does for something else. A hammer is useful for the nail, the nail for the shelf, the shelf for the books, the books for, what, exactly? Somewhere the chain has to end at something that is good in itself, or the whole chain hangs from a hook screwed into air. Poems live at the end of chains. That is not their weakness. That is the job description.
So when the question comes, I no longer argue that poetry secretly is useful, that it improves test scores or empathy metrics or quarterly morale. Some of that research exists and I find it faintly embarrassing, the way you would be embarrassed by a friend who justified sunsets with data on vitamin D. The stronger move is to question the ruler.
Wilde's Dare
Oscar Wilde ended the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1890, with a sentence people have been misreading for over a century:
All art is quite useless.
It sounds like surrender. It is actually a dare. Victorian critics demanded that art justify itself as moral instruction, that every novel improve you and every poem file a report on its social benefit. Wilde refused the premise entirely. Art, he insisted, needs no alibi. The rose does not bloom in order to teach the garden a lesson.
Notice what Wilde did not say. He did not say art is worthless. Useless and worthless are opposites more often than they are synonyms. Your wedding ring is useless; try telling anyone it is worthless. Run the inventory of what you would grab in a fire and watch the pattern emerge:
- a wedding ring that fastens nothing
- a ticket stub from a concert twenty years gone
- a child's drawing of a dog that looks like a chair
- a letter from someone who cannot write another one
Not one useful object on the list. The most precious things we own tend to be precisely the ones that do nothing.
The Poem That Did Nothing
A poem I scored last winter has been following me around since. It was about a widow ironing her dead husband's shirts, all seven of them, every Sunday, two years after the funeral. No revelation arrived. Nobody healed. The poem simply watched her set the iron down at the collar the way you would set down something sleeping. It was a quiet entry in a grief-themed month, and by every practical measure it accomplished nothing: it did not bring the man back, did not shorten her mourning, did not even win.
And yet I now think of that woman every time I iron a shirt, which means a stranger's interior life has taken up permanent residence in mine. Show me the useful object that can do that. My phone cannot. My car cannot. A poem of eleven lines did it in under a minute, and it keeps doing it, month after month, for free.
That is the thing the engineer's ruler cannot see. Poems do not act on the world. They act on the instrument you use to perceive the world, which is a far more leveraged place to work.
A Worked Example: The Useless Detail Carries the Poem
Here is where this philosophy becomes craft, because usefulness-thinking does not just make people dismiss poetry. It makes poets write worse. A writer who believes every line must earn its keep in information will cut exactly the wrong things. Watch:
Before: "My mother worked hard all her life / and never once complained."
After: "My mother saved rubber bands on the kitchen doorknob, / a fat striped planet of them, / still growing all through the chemo."
The before version is pure summary, all usefulness, information delivered at maximum efficiency, and it is dead on arrival. The after version spends two entire lines on rubber bands, a detail with no informational value whatsoever, and that useless detail is what carries the poem. The saving of worthless things becomes the argument. The word chemo lands harder because the rubber bands were allowed to be trivial first. Concrete, apparently pointless imagery is not decoration on top of the meaning. In a working poem, it is the meaning's delivery system.
If you take one revision instruction from this piece, take this: find the line in your draft that summarizes, and replace it with the small useless object it is hiding.
Five Uses Nobody Puts on a Grant Application
Having defended uselessness, I will now cheerfully contradict myself, because poems do do things. Just not the things the ruler measures. Here are five I would defend in any argument:
- Poems slow attention. Everything else you read today was engineered to be skimmed. A poem is the one text that physically cannot be skimmed without disappearing. Reading one is thirty seconds of attention with the throttle released, and most people cannot remember the last time they had that.
- Poems rehearse feeling. You will one day sit in a hospital corridor at 3 a.m. with nothing to say. People who have read poems arrive at that corridor with language already stretched to fit it. That is not decoration. That is emergency equipment.
- Poems store memory better than photographs. A photograph shows you what a moment looked like. A poem stores what it felt like from inside, which is the part photographs quietly lose.
- Poems keep company. Loneliness is mostly the suspicion that nobody else's inner life resembles yours. Every good poem is a signed affidavit that someone's does.
- Poems train precision, and precision pays rent. Here is the smuggled practical benefit. Anyone who has revised a poem twelve times writes sharper emails, cleaner apologies, better wedding toasts. The training happens in the useless gym and gets spent everywhere else.
Notice the pattern: none of these are what the poem is for. They are side effects of doing a useless thing with your whole attention. Chase the side effects directly and they evaporate.
The Economics of the Pointless Hour
Somebody always objects at this point: fine, reading poems is defensible, but writing them, for adults with jobs, is that not indulgence? I judge for an international contest that receives entries from poets in more than fifty countries, and I can report that the entrants are overwhelmingly people with full lives, nurses and accountants and students and retired teachers, writing at kitchen tables after everyone else is asleep. They are not shirking their real lives. The pointless hour is the part of the day where they get to be the author of something instead of the instrument of something.
Usefulness asks what a thing does for something else. A poem is where the chain of something-else finally gets to stop.
I would rather see a person spend that hour badly on a poem than efficiently on almost anything. The bad poem still did its work: for one hour, its writer paid the world the compliment of close attention.
Keep It Useless, Then Let It Travel
Here is my closing argument, and it is not a summary, it is an instruction. Protect the uselessness of your writing hour with your life. The moment you write to network, to brand yourself, to be seen writing, the rubber bands disappear and the summaries move in. The poems I remember from thousands of scoring sheets were all, without exception, written by someone who was clearly not calculating a return.
But uselessness is not the same as secrecy. A poem in a drawer is a letter you never mailed. Once the thing exists, let it travel: read it to one person, post it, or send it to a contest that will actually tell you what a stranger felt, line by line, criteria by criteria. The engineer at the wedding, by the way, emailed me in May. He had written a poem about his father's toolbox. It was not useful. It was not even very good yet. It was the most alive thing he had made all year, and he knew it, and that knowledge is the entire case.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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