‘What can poetry do for us right now? Can it help? Can it revive us? Can the alchemy of adding poetry to reportage deliver a remedy for the world’s gloomy predicament?’

Another difficult year has come to an end. The dominant mood is overwhelmingly low, as friends, family members, neighbours, colleagues, people on the radio and TV, are all reporting flat-out exhaustion—endless lockdowns, too much screen-time, separation from loved ones, worry about the future. . . We are all probably tired, too, of COVID-19 dominating news coverage, adding to the sensation of being caught in a bizarre rinse- and-repeat cycle. I do feel for the journalists who have had to live with the pandemic in that endless—and relatively unacknowledged—way.

What can poetry do for us right now? Can it help? Can it revive us? Can the alchemy of adding poetry to reportage deliver a remedy for the world’s gloomy predicament?

William Carlos Williams once wrote, in his poem ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’, that ‘It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.’ He’s telling us that, while we can’t rely on poetry to deliver news bulletins, poems do offer something vital that we would do well to take in equal doses to our daily news consumption. So, what is this vital aspect—or aspects—that can be found in poems?

Matthew Zapruder (drawing on ideas of Wallace Stevens) notes that poetry ‘draw[s] us into a different form of attention and awareness’ than prose, which can aid in the development and preservation of the imagination (Why Poetry, 2017). Further, Philip Metres suggests that the about them turns toward the ineffable. Great poems may confound or delight, teach or provoke—but they are great because their forms vibrate and resonate beyond political platforms, slogans, or formulae.’ Metres recognises that poetry as a form inherently resists the clutches of rhetoric by ‘opening into the possible’ (The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance, 2018).

These arguments about the value of poetry need only be extended slightly to appreciate the value of the ‘reportage’ poem (which we might consider a close relation of the documentary poem). Cultivating skills in creative thinking can assist us in conceiving of new ways in which to act in the world—to not just receive and process the news, for example, but to imagine solutions to the world’s critical problems.

In one of the first essays on documentary poetry (‘The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre’), Dorothy Livesay notes ‘a conscious attempt to create a dialectic between the objective facts and the subjective feelings of the poet’ through the writing of such works. This draws attention to another aspect that can make a reportage poem strong, in that we can glean the movement of a mind—as emotionally responsive as the rest of us—navigating the world’s ‘facts’ relayed to us through screen, soundbite, newsprint. Sometimes I wonder how changed the world would be if poetry became the new journalism. There’d be a lot of chaos, perhaps. But I think we’d all become smarter, and more empathetic, too.

Thanks to the extended Rabbit team—Amelia, AJ, Jeanine, Tracy, Zoe and the BSP interns—for their assistance in drawing together another wonderful issue. Special thanks to this issue’s guest poetry co-editors, Kent MacCarter and Micaela Sahhar—you are both brilliant, generous souls of the kind that keeps poetry alive, beating, vital.