Poetry and Preservation

me·mo·ri·al [muh-mawr-ee-uhl, -mohr-] noun: something designed to preserve the memory  of a person, event, etc., as a monument or a holiday (from Dictionary.com)

We live in an era when preservation of memory is a function of proximity to a Verizon Hot Spot and access to The Cloud. When tweens capture images on field trips with their iPhones and upload them into PowerPoint projects the next day. When we have developed ways to truncate even the simplest of observations into 140 characters, and taken the vowels out of words we send to two-inch screens in the hands of friends 30 feet away rather than use our voices to communicate them. And it's good, knowing all this, to spend a moment understanding how poetry has served and continues to serve the practices of preservation in this era.


It seems generally accepted that poetry, at some point in our past, was essential in the recording of history. That in addition to being the oral vehicle by which epic fiction was captured, verse was part of the "historian's" tools for remembering and retelling the stories of their people, before even those people had the means or the inclination to commit those stories to paper (or stone, or any medium).

At some point, the act of recording no longer required the mnemonic devices of rhyme and meter, which required poetry, like any art, skill, or technology, to fill other niches in service of preservation, lest it become obsolete. Surely, poetry also morphed in artistic directions as well, which we can consider another time, but poetry continues to have an essential place in the memorializing of person and events.


Some say we are suffering from short attention spans because of the evolution of media; I see it a little differently. Perhaps we no longer need the same kind of attention span - largely because information is more universally and immediately available. However, when something is recognized as worth sharing, it may now shared with a highly distilled accompaniment of language - a tweet with a Tiny URL - requiring the "historian" to find only the essential accompaniment for what is to be shared. But just like there have already emerged a handful of tools for "tweeting" more than 140 characters while still using twitter, poetry will adapt and serve.


Whether indirectly or directly, poetry still serves us as a repository for memories. Maybe it's direct, like an elegy for someone in your community, or veiled in symbol, like "O Captian, My Captain", or indirect like the poppies we purchase outside churches and grocery stores that owe their existence to "In Flanders Fields." Maybe the personal elegy you compose for a departed friend, maybe the poem you turn to when asked to eulogize them. Poetry continues to play a role in memory because of the poet's focus and vision - focus to discern details in and around a person's life or the circumstances of their death, vision to see how those detail can be crafted into something memorable. Worthy of memory, and presented in ways that last. With its crisp and concise language, poetry may even find itself flourishing as it lends itself to being shared in small bits.

Poetry will find its place in today's version of memorialization the same way it adapted to the written word and every other innovation in its communication through the centuries. It's on the poets to make use of the tools and keep it well-crafted and relevant.