themarginalian.org · 11 days ago

Why Are We Not Better Than We Are: How Poetry Saves Lives – the Marginalian

When a massive tree crushes his friend on a remote Alaskan beach, writer Jon Mooallem finds himself kneeling in an icy creek, uncertain help will arrive, grasping for the only tool he has: poems memorized in college that he never imagined would matter. For over an hour, he recites Elizabeth Bishop, Auden, Frost - "like a radio DJ playing records in the middle of the night, unsure if anyone was listening" - while his injured friend hovers between consciousness and catastrophe. What felt like helplessness in the moment became, his friend later told him, an anchor of calmness in the terror. The question that haunts Mooallem - "Why are we not better than we are?" - finds its answer here: sometimes, pinned to the forest floor of crisis, we discover we already are better than we knew, and the seemingly useless things we've carried - a few lines of verse, a human voice in the dark - turn out to be exactly what saves a life.