Why Still Poetry?

‘Why Still Poetry?’ explores poetry as one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring forms of expression – a timeless act of resistance, remembrance, and meaning-making. The essay argues that poetry is not merely a literary genre but a vessel through which human conscience, empathy, and collective memory survive across eras. In a world shaped by conflict, speed, and technological overwhelm, poetry becomes a space where language heals, slows us down, and reconnects us with our shared humanity.

Drawing on philosophy, cultural history, and the intimate nature of poetic creation, the essay reflects on why poets continue to write despite difficulty, doubt, and the demands of modern life. It presents poetry as both a personal necessity and a universal bridge – a force that preserves identity, awakens moral awareness, and offers hope, beauty, and resistance in times of uncertainty.

Why Still Poetry?

Istanbul, November 2025

Poetry is a word that is easy for the tongue yet difficult for the mind; but once one begins to understand it, the situation reverses. It becomes a word that is easy for the mind yet difficult for the tongue. This paradox is clear and decisive for everyone engaged with literature, for poetry is, in truth, a single word that contains all words within itself. When we speak of poetry, we speak of an act that has existed almost since the beginning of humanity and will continue until its final days. Pablo Neruda says in one of his poems, ‘You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming.’ Poetry, in a sense, is like that. If poetry comes, we cannot prevent it. But here lies the real question: to whom does poetry come? Poetry comes to those who cannot remove it from their minds, to those who search for poetry in everything, who believe that everything has its own poem, who know how to listen to the poetry of things.

Humankind, in succession, has written to prove its existence, to express itself, to understand and describe what it sees and hears, and to leave a trace for the future; the subconscious root of all this lies in the quest for immortality, found in philosophy, in the history of thought, and in ancient sacred texts. This is the fundamental reason we write. In other words, we write to reveal the human being, the thoughts that make humans human, and the language – that mysterious, magical world filled with secrets – that unites us. This is a process that will never change until the end of the world; it is an inevitable phenomenon.

We poets are often asked: how did you become a poet, why does one write poetry? To speak frankly, these questions preoccupy all of us for a long time. We write poetry because we believe, with the deepest place in our hearts, in the sincerity and tenderness of narration. We believe in the conscience of people. Because even if people do not experience what others have lived, they possess the capacity and ability to understand, to empathize. This turns all the happiness, pain, sorrow, joy, mourning, and celebration into the shared material of humanity. Thus, whether it is a poem, a novel, or a story, what we write makes us happy, heals us, transforms us. It lifts our burden, forms a smile on our face, or gives us the possibility, the hope, the strength to oppose oppression, to resist injustice, to seek and defend rights, to love and to do something good for others. All these rightful acts are vital for the subjects of the narrative, for they bring a vast hope, a great support: liberation from feelings of loneliness, misfortune, fatalism, and the relief born of having one’s suffering understood and shared. Sometimes poetry is also the hardest of all acts: ‘to find true friends who will share, celebrate with us our joy, our success, our happiness, our salvation, our victory.’

Human beings – and what makes them human, the concept of the human itself – though the world, conditions, and eras have changed for thousands of years, do not change in essence. Our fears, our anxieties, our joys and happiness, the basic things that cause these feelings, the fact that we experience them, and our desire to express what we live – our wish to narrate life – are still similar to the first humans. This is, in a way, a form of resistance. When we hear so often the question ‘What is the purpose of this resistance you show?’ its answer, in general terms, is the effort humanity makes against annihilation, the rebellion, the desire to prove its existence, the wish and effort to leave a trace behind. The answer to the question ‘Where does poetry stand in humanity’s resistance to life?’ is this: poetry is the most colourful activist of resistance, the heart of resistance itself.

In today’s world, where wars, sorrows, oppression, alienation, devaluation, and denial cover most of the earth, the question Why Still Poetry? is crucial. Because poetry is not only an important weapon for defying time; it is also a vessel, a means of time travel that helps us understand what happens within a line that has both a beginning and an end. To read a poem written years ago means both to understand the poet and to understand the era, the world, the people that became subjects of those poems, and therefore to understand humanity in a broader sense. The question of what role poetry plays in forming bonds between people may still be one of the reasons we continue to write, for poetry slows the exhausting pace of life, helps us think deeply – and within that depth lie discoveries. Poetry creates an infinite space where everything can coexist; it is one of the rare realms that can hold opposites together – including our shared humanity.

Silence, like language, is a structure full of secrets. It contains the past, the present, the future; definitions, expressions, realities, reasons, truths, falsehoods, games, lies, and all the things we deem important or trivial. In truth, when we poets strive to use language aesthetically, we serve the language itself. In this paradox, the winner is not the poet but the language. It is this magical, indecipherable side of language that makes us endure such difficulties. This hope throws us into an endless journey of search. The effect poetry awakens in a person is one of astonishment, admiration, existence, hope, and resistance – and these are what lie beneath poetry’s power.

Poetry contains a deep and rich accumulation of knowledge, language, culture, and history, and it is open to intuitive, semantic, and linguistic discovery. From another perspective, poetry already exists; we merely discover it. We find a unique piece from a hidden, infinite treasure – and this precious fragment becomes our weapon of existence and resistance against the order, wars, pains, meaninglessness, crudity, and brutality that seek to erase culture, belonging, and humanity.

To use an experimental language – to contribute to human development, to create shared spaces for people, to reveal what was unnoticed and unspoken, to make injustices heard, to resist oppression, to reveal truth, essence, and purity, to make wars, conflicts, destruction, and upheaval visible and known, to know, understand, and tell humanity and human states, to create a collective memory of existence, and to protect our world, the universe we inhabit, the air we breathe – poetry holds great significance for all of us. Poetry changes, transforms, makes us love, develops, humanizes, and heals. It gives humans the pleasure of reading, understanding, imagining, and contemplating differently. It transcends time and place. It builds bridges between a woman and a man living in completely different conditions, in entirely different eras, thousands of years apart. It is both personal and collective. Whether reader or poet, poetry offers one of the most aesthetic ways for human beings to make their voices heard beyond time and space. It is a great act of resistance – against prohibitions, repression, silencing, annihilation, and death. It is the poet’s task to transcend the helplessness of language to express despair, and to reach the beauty of language to express beauty. When people recite poetry together, with one voice, they reach the common human.

Poetry is also important because it carries a hidden treasure within itself. It is one of the most beautiful ways to transmit cultures, emotions, thoughts, aesthetics, history, insights about the future, our age, realities, dreams, hopes, the people who will one day vanish, works, ideologies, ideas, figures, perspectives, knowledge, and art to future generations. Poetry is a safeguard, a deliverance, and a freedom against forgetfulness and madness. It is the only way to remain a child in a time that rushes forward. One line makes a poem; one line makes a poet. But this is not easy. The poet’s ability, when necessary, to use a closed and symbolic language to convey meaning only to those who wish to understand turns poetry into a special form of communication, a secret weapon, a magical code. Poetry enables the passage from one reality to another, to destroy and rebuild what exists, to construct it anew in its most beautiful form. Thus poetry, with its unique power, becomes a shield against fear and hatred, against the urge to consume, possess, and destroy, while holding within it a profound spirituality that inspires. Within poetry’s treasure lie rhythm, rhyme, meaning, metaphor, irony, symbols, games, and ornaments. With its ability to hold fragility and strength at the same time, poetry has the power to end wars between words and also the wars between people. And beyond all this, poetry is also a weapon against the possibility – and the danger – of artificial intelligence enslaving humankind.

As we all know, human beings are strange creatures. Alone, they are one thing; in a small group, another; and when together as a crowd, entirely different. Their perception, comprehension, conscience, and behaviour change accordingly. In this sense, poetry is open to different readings. When a poem is read collectively, recited by one voice, language can become objectified. Poetry will be a resistance not only against death and oppression but also against artificial intelligence and the mechanized order, against demonic systems, against anything that seeks to turn us into emotionless beings. In this way, poetry will become the purest form of memory we can pass on to the future – the most distilled essence of our collective consciousness – and the most powerful way of revealing the truth that will destroy falsehood. It will stand as the proof of our existence, the symbol of love, unity, and togetherness.

A poet who writes poems for the purpose of existence reaches a single conclusion: to become the poem itself. The word surpasses the speaker, then surpasses speech itself. In language there lies an accumulation reaching from the origins of humanity to the present day. As language accumulates, it both preserves the essential and renews itself. In the poems of the fortunate poet who can capture a fragment of this ungraspable treasure, one can hear the music of words. What is unseen but felt – shared intuitions – bring people closer together. An inner whisper and vibration bind people with invisible threads. The poet’s role, in this sense, is vital and immense. Every living person has the power to influence destiny, the possibility to change fate – but to do this through words is the most skillful, the wisest way. The poet is the one who holds the power to command letters, words, and sentences. They create concepts, give names, find new meanings, and through their poetry protect them all. To name is to define. Therefore, the poet, by setting forth definitions through words, transforms thought first into image and melody, then into an object, and touches the essence with a magic wand, directing it toward eternity. The poet is also the witness of their own time – of the time in which they live, move, take inspiration, and express themselves through unique images, meanings, and structures. When we assign poetry the duty and mission of returning to essence, of self-knowledge, it becomes a means that abolishes distances.

As we all know – or at least sense – language is a structure full of surprises, rich with discoveries. It is festive, joyous. It makes people happy, nurtures, and transforms them. It settles into memory and never leaves. Thus we try to make sense of life through language. Poetry is the most aesthetic result of our search for meaning. Hegel placed poetry at the top of his pyramid of art. What is it that makes poetry so significant? Where should we search for the poetic? We can only reach the answers to these questions by truly understanding poetry. In this world full of pain, wars, and deaths, poetry allows us to pass between possibilities – and through these searches, we may reach truth.

Language is the name of existence. Poetry is born at the point where language fails to express. It is born to add new meanings to existence or to re-interpret it, to redefine the universe, to give everything its true name. The poet can only do this by questioning the meaning of everything. Thus they rescue language from falsehood – for language may contain lies, but it cannot itself be a liar. Therefore, in poetry, even if language resembles or does not resemble the object it signifies, it still gives the truth and the real. In this way, the resemblance between word and object is established in a unique, unrepeatable way.

Within poetry also lie goodness and beauty – the poetic essence that surrounds everything that exists. To bring forth and express the good and the beautiful is one of the most wondrous gifts of poetry. Poetry is the purest form of human expression, and that is why it matters. The language of poetry is very close to the language of childhood. Through introspection we discover that we have stories to tell; through this process, we rediscover the poetic language that once was ours as children, the language that was lost through life and the world. Over time, people have distorted the structure of words and changed their meanings – sometimes consciously, sometimes through overuse and negligence. Poetry, which contains meaning, structure, rhythm, sound, music, rhyme, irony, metaphor, hermetic order, wordplay, imagery, and landscapes that appeal to the eye, as an art form – could it be a way to restore words whose meanings have changed or whose forms have been corrupted to their original, pure state?

The language that God taught to humankind – language itself – is the structure that allows us to understand everything perfectly. If, as humanity, we could once again reach this divine perfection, then it would be possible to shape the entire world toward the good and the beautiful. In a world full of cruelty, wars, and savagery – a world of hypocrisy and deceit – only by truly learning the truth can we understand ourselves, one another, where we came from, where we are going, and the true purpose of our being here. Words, secrets, and characters that have been hidden long for such an environment so that they may reach their own truths.

The fact that words today do not fully correspond to their meanings can be understood by the example of a soldier who sacrifices his body to bullets and dies – or when we shout ‘bullet’ into a trench, it has no effect at all. In addition to these ironic and metaphorical examples, let us give a few realistic ones: if everything were named by its true name, then instead of ‘evil,’ we would say ‘an act not yet turned into good,’ or instead of ‘enemy,’ we would say ‘a person not yet become a friend.’ Such expressions would convey a transformative, positive power for humanity.

Sometimes, while trying to explain something, we suddenly utter words we never intended to say, causing an explosion – like a bomb in the middle of a conversation. What follows is either a deathly silence or a battlefield’s chaos. Sometimes, while writing something, from the very first word, from the moment we begin, we drift away from the initial dream, losing control, as if someone had taken our hand and made us write not what we had in mind but what had never crossed it. The same happens in speech: as if those words and sentences had suddenly been spoken by another language. The reverse can also happen – the lost expression we have been searching for years suddenly comes to us, perfectly formed.

Another version is this: someone else finds the line that touches us most deeply, and we cannot help but think, I wish I had written that. Or yet another: how is it that sentences and lines thought or written years ago by others suddenly come to our minds, even though we have never read them? What happens that these words come to us and others go elsewhere? Why does the inspiration come to us and not to someone else – or to them and not to us? And how does it arrive at that very moment? Who or what sends it? How does this surrender of will take place – this distribution, this gaining? Does what reach us from within know of our existence?

Here lies the matter of fate, destiny, inspiration – of slips of the tongue, blunders, untimely speech. What lies beneath and behind the things whispered to us, dictated to us, made to be spoken or written by us? Do these confusions, tongue-twists, wandering pens, and errant hands arise because what we speak, hear, and read have drifted so far from truth and wisdom that we have lost clarity and meaning? Have expressions that lost their structure and meaning settled in our minds? Or – which inspirations, to whom, and by what means – do the most beautiful words, sentences, and lines come? To whom do they descend from the lips to the heart, and from there to the mind of humanity, these unique, immortal expressions? Some of their answers we know; some remain mysteries that we only sense. Human beings wish to share what they know, what they feel, what they dream – and poetry is, in fact, the way of expressing all of this in its purest form. The path to reintegrating reality into life, to reinterpreting it, passes through language – through the truth of what we express. And its starting point is the real words that were taught to us. From this perspective, poetry is the medium for sharing our good intentions.

Therefore, if we look at language from a pragmatic and functional perspective, we can say that it must be the voice of human conscience. Poetry – the most artistic form of writing, for it allows us to say the most with the least – helps us dream, gives us strength to resist, to hope, to heal, to change and transform for the better. Poetry consoles and heals humanity. It inspires us to become a source of inspiration for others. Through poetry we can change intolerable realities. Yet we must know that creating a work is both a birth and a giving birth. The act of writing poetry has both its causes and its positive and negative consequences. Poetry gives both reader and poet a wide vision and perspective – the ability to wander through time, to think deeply about past, present, and future, and to gain a universal sensitivity. In this way, it makes people reconsider actions that would end badly and dissuades them from doing them – providing a refuge for goodness, an escape from evil. Just as aesthetic works about war, wasted lives, and human cruelty create awareness, poetry too heals humanity. It brings enlightenment to those who have not yet realized their own wrongdoing. This effect reflects on our expressions. It is possible to heal language with our breath, for language is one of the most important elements shaping our individual and collective identity, our thought, and our existence.

Language is a message sent from the past to the future – and in another reading, it is an archaeological site of our present. This field allows us to reach truth. What keeps humanity alive is hope. Poetry is deeply connected with hope. Poetry gives hope to its poet, inspiration to its reader. Writing is not an easy task. It demands effort, discipline, and time at a desk, thinking, keeping a corner of your mind constantly occupied with writing. Though the process of writing poetry differs for each poet, in every poem there is a poem that speaks to its poet. If the poem speaks to its poet, then who is the real poet? What lies beyond poetry – what is at its end? Here, one must understand well the spiritual side of the matter.

Poetry also helps us protect our religious, national, cultural, and traditional identity – our mother tongue. If poetry is the purest, most aesthetic, and most meaningful form of language and communication, then it may become not only humanity’s, but perhaps humankind’s key to communicating with beings beyond the world, the key to opening ourselves to the universe. Through poetry, the shared compassion of humanity can grow; people may remember their human values, become sensitive and innocent again as they were in childhood, perceive what is humanistic through a common conscience, and learn to love one another without condition. The most striking method of intuitive perception may well be poetry itself.

From creation to this day, humanity has experienced revolutionary leaps: the discovery of writing, of electricity, of the internet, and of artificial intelligence. The next discovery will be Time Travel – a development that will raise us to a galactic level of civilization, a state beyond the earth. In this age of transformation, one might ask: why do we occupy ourselves with something so painstaking, so much like digging a well with a needle – the act of writing poetry – instead of pursuing technological endeavors? Why are we still poets? Moreover, why do we suffer from crises of productivity, falling from the peaks of language before reaching them, consuming ourselves in the process? Even if we were to write a great poem, some part of us knows that the best poem has not yet been written. What makes us, as contemporary poets, endure such hardship? Could we not have discovered a series instead of a verse? Could we not have found other ways to deal with our troubles, our anger, our unhappiness? What distinguishes poetry from all else? Is writing poetry an intellectual punishment for the poet? Are we, as Ibn Arabi said, becoming prisoners of our own decree? Why do we still read and write poems?

Poetry is a means of humanizing the world. Our dreams alone may not be enough, but through the shared transmissions that arise from poetry, it may be possible to create a world truly lived in a human way. Who knows – perhaps now, perhaps in an instant… For until now, so many beautiful words have been spoken about poetry, so many beautiful lines have been read, that perhaps the time has come to ponder them, to listen to the poetry of silence, and to be united. Let us continue, together, to add new meanings to poetry, to give poetry strength. Forever… Stay with poetry. Be with poetry. Become poetry.

The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Symbiotic Futures – Ecopoetics in the Age of Extinction, Disrupted Realities – Poetry and the Politics of Truth, Hybrid Selves – Gender, Identity, and Posthuman Intimacies, Poetic Infrastructures – Reclaiming Space, Building Commons, Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild, The Poetics of Care – Intimacy, Tenderness, Repair.