The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade must be viewed as well as heard, or American culture as we know it will cease to exist. 

If you haven’t seen it, well, you’re breaking the law. But those of us in the clear can listen to the sixth season of the Dissect podcast, which covers Lemonade in extraordinary detail. As I’ve listened, I’ve become re-astonished that Beyoncé recites poetry—poetry!—between nearly every song. Specifically, the poetry of Warsan Shire. 

It may be old news (Lemonade was released in 2016), but this is a win for poets everywhere. One of our era’s preeminent artists uses Shire’s words not as window-dressing but as the connective tissue between each chapter of the film, expressing the protagonist’s journey from rage to grief to forgiveness to empowerment. 

Poetry’s prominence throughout Lemonade flies in the face of dismissals deeming poetry a niche interest: a sliver of shelf at the bookstore, an odd byway in the social media sphere, a linguistic chore reserved for lit classes and weddings. If Beyoncé saw fit to use verse, why shouldn’t we? 

*End of post*

But this is a question I ask myself a lot, and one worth spending some time on. Poetry’s value is not, after all, immediately evident. It’s tough to assess value when something brings in neither cash nor fame, neither good looks nor eternal life. Tougher still when the poem resists scrutiny, makes you work a bit before opening itself to you. I mean, one of the Shire poems in Lemonade depicts a baby—that is also a flower—crawling out of the speaker’s throat. 

We meet the poem’s (apparent) resistance, and the repulsion turns mutual. We conclude, I don’t get poetry.

A natural enough reaction: one still I throw at the page as both writer and reader. I follow quickly with, Why bother? Too much labor, confusion, and (perhaps) humiliation for too little payout. 

It’s times like this that I return to the following lines by William Carlos Williams: 

“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

I’ve chanted these words to myself when I blanched at this business of poeming, lacked lyrical motivation, prepared to defend my preferred genre before witnesses (be they skeptical, hostile, or apathetic). Even—especially—when that witness is me. 

It wasn’t until today that I read a chunk of Williams’ “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” the long poem that contains these favorite lines. In the section excerpted on the Academy of American Poets’ website (linked above), the speaker finds himself on the shores of the afterlife and calling out to his beloved in wordsong. 

Williams’ poem makes as good a case as any for his own rather audacious argument: namely, that poetry’s riches ward off death. Lovelessness—as both violence and neglect—can beget death, but this love poem, in the face of death, rather revels in life entwined: 

“We have stood / from year to year / before the spectacle of our lives / with joined hands.”

Not even hell can scare off the speaker. 

These lines read like a rescue. Even though we are not Flossie (Williams’ wife and the presumed object of the poem; also, come on, I wasn’t not going to shout out that jewel of a name), we experience the profound hope that this too could be us in our old age. That love—as the memory of flowers and a poem to a beloved and the sum of a long life—does conquer death. 

Am I saying you’ll die if you don’t read poetry? Of course not. William Carlos Williams is saying that. 

But his words warn against treating poetry as a pill to be swallowed with the waters of derision and irony. Against coming to the page pre-exhausted by words you haven’t read yet. 

I can’t emphasize enough that I speak from personal experience. I don’t get poetry. I’m a poet with clouded vision, an unsteady grasp of my craft, and a fragile ego. I’m not sure I’ll ever grow out of my preteen poet self, who wrote dozens of super-emo poems in a notebook that I hid under the bed. It’s not exactly a mystery why I would’ve done this; the mystery is how or why that impulse might have relevance now to anyone beyond myself. 

In future posts we can explore that. But for now I’ll leave it at this: poetry doesn’t exist for a pop superstar to incorporate it into her magnum opus. (If Shire had set out with that goal, I’m certain she wouldn’t have gotten anywhere close to Beyoncé’s radar.) We create poetry to transcend mortality. To find the beauty, wisdom, love, honor, glory, hilarity, grief, and well-articulated rage we can’t find anywhere else. Souls die daily for lack of what is found there. 

Please go read “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” Then watch Lemonade. You won’t be sorry.