Poets all over the world ponder, What is poetry for?

from The Daily Star in Bangladesh (with thanks to JforJames of the NewPoetry list for pointing out the essay):
Jayanta Mahapatra begins his 2001 essay “Of the Lowly Potato: Indian English Poetry Today” (recently reprinted in The Daily Star) with the assertion that “If you can get to its essence, even a lowly potato would be poetic,” but very soon moves on to complain that “more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in Indian history.” As JforJames points out, the piece at first sounds like “an Indian version of Dana Gioia’s ‘Can Poetry Matter?’ But it gets better when Jayanta Mahapatra makes his case for what should be important in poetry today” -- a simple statement that will resonate with any poet's experience:

“Poets are expected to make sense of life. If they find life today in fragments, they must not leave it that way. Perhaps they should have that desire to produce poetry that transcends the ills of modern life rather than poetry that helplessly mirrors them.”

Join in one of our Forum discussions about the purposes of poetry:
“Poetry is dead. Does anyone really care?”
“Where is the Renaissance? Do we need it?”
“The poet’s life and the poems”
“The debt of our art, poetry’s utility”