what is poetry for.pdf

MoebiusVolume 3Issue 1Movies in MindArticle 114-1-2005What Is Poetry For?Ginger Adcock HendrixCalifornia Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo, ******@ this and additional works at: The Gamut is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts at ******@CalPoly. It has been accepted forinclusion in Moebius by an authorized administrator of ******@CalPoly. For more information, please ******@ CitationHendrix, Ginger Adcock (2005) "What Is Poetry For?,"Moebius: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article at: Is POETRY FOR? Ginger Adcock Hendrix About ten years ago I went unsuspectingly to my mailbox and found an acceptance letter for my first published poem with a check for $50-and, in the same stack, a letter from the IRS telling me lowed $500 in back taxes. (What, exactly, they thought they were tax-ing is still a mystery to me, as I was a two-part-time joblliving-on-student-Ioans graduate student at the time.) Questions of taxability aside, this was the moment I first asked the question: "What is poetry fort" Stay with me. I'm about to talk about something you think you know -pletely. I'm thinking of the Inuit people-all of their seven gajillion words for ice. A well-studied linguist will tell you that all those words are a true proof of the ev