When my high school kid started a unit on poetry in her American Lit class, I was both surprised and delighted she asked for my help. As someone who reads and has published poetry, it’s not hyperbole to say I’ve been preparing for this moment my whole life.

My goal wasn’t just to help her with her homework, but to help her see that the interpretation of art is an act of creation in its own right. My father, another lover and reciter of poetry, used to tell me that words have flavors. Which means that, when put together in a certain way, they can create aromas and complete sensory sensations.

The result is that art transforms itself based on who is viewing it. Three people can view the same piece of art, and one sees a cake, another a loaf of bread, and the third discovers a stale cracker. Art is like a magic trick where both the artist and the viewer participate, but neither is quite sure what is going to come out of the hat.

We started with an analysis of Robert Frost’s Mending Wall, which initially led my daughter to think about boundaries and the benefit of setting them. Then we asked: Boundaries for who? And for what purpose? These questions became richer as we followed with an analysis of a modern poem created in response, Darrel Alejandro Holnes’ Amending Wall.

This helped her see that art is not static, but can also be a conversation across generations and people. A response to someone else’s creation is not just academic, it can be profound. Nearly all of Apple’s best products, for example, are responses to someone else’s first attempts.

Even as I tried to transform a homework assignment from drudgery into something fun, other questions lurked: What’s the point of learning this? How am I ever going to use it?

If viewed strictly from the perspective of a future career, I’d argue that learning to observe, hypothesize, collect data, and defend your ideas is an important set of skills in any job. Being able to do that in as many different contexts as possible is the key to learning and then applying it.

James Flynn conducted a study where he gave seniors at a top state university a test that gauged students’ ability to apply abstract concepts from economics, social and physical sciences, and logic to common, real-world scenarios. None of the students did well, regardless of major or grade point average. His main takeaway was that “There is no sign that any department attempts to develop anything other than narrow critical competence.”

I’d argue that’s a problem in an increasingly interdisciplinary world.

But more than that very utilitarian answer, art has the ability to get at topics that are difficult to understand any other way. Indeed, art can say the things we otherwise refuse to hear. Take this poem, from the collection North of the Cities by Louis Jenkins, one of my favorite poets:
​

Earl​
​

In Sitka, because they are fond of them,
people have named the seals. Every seal
is named Earl because they are killed one
after another by the orca, the killer
whale; seal bodies tossed left and right
into the air. "At least he didn't get
Earl," someone says. And sure enough,
after a time, that same friendly,
bewhiskered face bobs to the surface.
It's Earl again. Well, how else are you
to live except by denial, by some
palatable fiction, some little song to
sing while the inevitable, the black and
white blindsiding fact, comes hurtling
toward you out of the deep?

​

In just a little over 100 words, Jenkins describes our fear of death, the randomness of life, and our instinct to deny the existence of our whale-sized fear, that dark shape that moves just below the surface of our consciousness. The miracle is that art allows us to have that conversation, to recognize ourselves and laugh a little.

How silly, we might say. Giving all the seals the same name doesn’t eliminate the threat of the whale! And yet there we are, refusing to give up our burgers and gasoline fueled cars as climate change ramps up wild fires or floods that snuff out one town after the other.

At least it wasn’t our town.

But we can share a little empathy now. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they’re scared. We are all a resident of Sitka, but we are also all Earl, aren’t we? It’s art that makes it possible to even acknowledge it.

Art takes nothing away from the beauty of equations and code, of data and logic. I love those things too. But how can we possibly hope to do better in the face of the complex problems that plague us without art to spark the conversations we avoid, leaving an imprint on our mind, like an afterimage we cannot ignore?