The useless poem-product unmasks our dependency on commodity goods, on the commodification of our lives and ourselves, and momentarily blunts its power. Faced with a poem, when we actually encounter one, we are returned to the depths of our being, to those regions of the mind and consciousness that commodification tends to deny or forget. We live on the go, always at the mercy of forces that we can’t perceive. We work, we love, we hate, we eat, we sleep, we survive, we fall ill, and finally we die, always or almost always swayed by the needs of the moment, always restlessly wandering the aisles of the Giant Supermarket. Even our attendance to artistic languages doesn’t completely elude this model: a film, a painting, or a piece of music also has an economic value and therefore market utility. But here comes something really useless, a handful of rhyming words, a poem. And it tells us to stop, to breathe, to listen. Listen to these words, to their sound. Listen to what’s welling up inside of you, as if from a part of your being that, though you’d forgotten it, is where you feel at home. You feel naked, defenseless, yet free, free in your breath and in your body, in which courses what Dylan Thomas called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” and for a minute Wallace Stevens’s necessary angel appears, capable of countering the pressure of reality with something gentle and vast.
https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/in-dialogue-how-does-poetry-help
Know Thyself 