Warum Gedichte lesen?

Weil Menschen, die Gedichte schreiben, tendenziell weird sind, und weil du dann nachklingst wie eine Glocke.

⊕Clive Thompson in 9 Ways to ‘Rewild Your Attention’

If you really want your brain to get out of its usual ruts, read poetry. This has several benefits. One: Poets are generally the weirdest cats around. Poetry has a very high strangeness-to-page ratio, which can be great for reformatting your consciousness. Two: The way that poets use language and metaphor is quite unlike how writers of prose (fiction and nonfiction) use it. The language can be oblique and brain-jangling, and they grab a metaphor and smack you upside the head with it, no pussyfooting around. Good poetry makes you ring like a bell.

Weil Menschen meist lesen (und schauen und hören), um Stückchen von sich selber zu finden.

⊕aus einem Essay von Freya Daly Sadgrove

people don’t read your poems to find out about you / they read them to find bits of themselves / which is why anybody reads anything / you aren’t interesting until you tell someone something about themselves they didn’t know or couldn’t have articulated.

Weil Gedichte alle Stimmen enthalten.

⊕U. A. Fanthorpe in diesem Interview

Poetry is important because it reaches the places that other kinds of writing can’t reach. I became aware of this myself when I was working as a receptionist in a hospital, and saw how much the doctors and nurses had to leave out of the queernesses and sadnesses of the patients because they were confined to prose. … Poetry has all the voices—wit, sincerity, pastiche, tragedy, delight, and most importantly it’s with us from the start of our lives to the end: at the start of our lives, with lullabies and mothers crooning to babies, at the end of our life, with hymns over a grave.