Last month, I had the unexpected opportunity to read my poetry to Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger when he visited my Creative Writing 350A: Intermediate Poetry Workshop class with Liz Rosenberg, a professor of English. Being face-to-face with the person most associated with the campus issues I hear about daily made me consider how the practice of writing poetry, which I’ve been doing since I was a freshman in high school, builds my ability to better understand what’s happening around me. I attempt to do so by connecting concepts from various different backgrounds — my friends call it overthinking, but I’ll let you know once I find a better option — and asking lots of questions. Really, though, what I’ve realized I’m doing is thinking like a poet. I want to suggest that understanding the world really isn’t that different from writing poetry. In fact, it actually uses a similar muscle.

So what’s the connection between poetry and the world around us? Well, I’d like to start by referencing a psychologist rather than a poet. Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University, advocates for understanding the difference between the micro and the macro, the up-close and far-away, the small and the big and how they connect. In particular, Gilbert writes that a few neurons are just a few neurons — they “[swap] electrochemical signals” and that’s it, according to an excerpt from Gilbert’s “Stumbling on Happiness.” Billions of neurons, however, are conscious. They are suddenly sentient. Understanding how those individual neurons work enhances your ability to understand something greater that they connect to: the conscious mind.

I think this is exactly what poetry does. It focuses on a particular experience and answers the question, “So what?” To write a poem is to trust that there is an answer to be found to that question. To be a poet is taking a lifelong leap of faith and making the active decision to believe in the power of looking for such connections between your own life and the world outside of what is immediately happening to you right now.

One of my favorite poets, Rudy Francisco, does this spectacularly. In just a few lines, he’s always able to make my jaw drop by taking something that at first seems irrelevant or random and making it something that I care deeply about and can relate to. He shows why things matter. In his poem “And Then After,” Francisco describes a fight he had that ended with yelling, and instead of continuing to talk about it, he looks out — really far out — to a woman in Palestine, writing that “I heard there’s a / woman in Palestine / who makes flower pots / out of used teargas grenades. / From this I learned / the explosion / is not how the story / has to end.”

In just these 30 words, Francisco is able to seamlessly connect two experiences, one of his own and one a whole world away. That’s what drew me into poetry when I started writing it — it helps me make sense of both my own experiences and the world at once. It doesn’t leave me out of the rest of life, it creates a constant web of relationships between what I experience and what I may not be able to see — sights that are definitely there, somehow, with the right connections. The daily events of my life might just be driven by neurons firing in isolation, but when combined with things like the experiences of others and my own past, they too can become sentient, living and breathing.

Up until now, when I’m considering picking up an English major with a concentration in creative writing, I’ve never formally studied poetry. However, in my individualized social systems science major, I analyze the systemic roots of daily issues we encounter, and the perspective of poetry has remained at the heart of it.

Former Binghamton University professor Elsa Barkley Brown calls the intentional attempt to make connections between various social issues and the experiences of all sorts of different people “relationality.” She relates this to Luisah Teish’s work, which describes “gumbo ya ya” as a Creole term for everyone talking at once. When Teish’s family gets together and they all talk at once, it seems like chaos at first, but becomes the only way she is able to see the whole picture. Brown writes, in the context of analyzing history, that “the events and people we write about did not occur in isolation but in dialogue with a myriad of other people and events. In fact, at any given moment millions of people are all talking at once.” Understanding that pieces of history are not only more valuable, but transformed when put together gives us a more complete way of seeing the world. It lets us tolerate the discomfort and difficulty of moving toward that poetic question, “So what?” about all the individual aspects of issues we encounter. It pushes us to try and see how they all come together.

Brown’s concept of relationality served as the guiding theme in my Sociology 100: Social Change: Intro Sociology class with Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz, associate professor and chair of sociology. We explored different cases all around the world, such as factory exploitation in the Philippines, forced medical sterilizations of women in 20th-century Puerto Rico and the racial discrimination and dehumanization of Black children by U.S. police departments. We saw how our everyday lives can be seen as connected to the people involved in these issues. As a middle-class, straight, cisgender, white male, I saw how the low cost at which I was able to buy the clothes I wear, the trust I’m able to have in my health care professionals and the lack of fear I feel when I see a police officer says so much about what goes on in the world. If I’m living this comfortable life, at whose expense is it, and who isn’t living that life? Or, as Brown phrases it, “What has happened here?” Asking these questions means the issues we see become more complicated, yet can be seen so much more holistically. I can’t answer them, though, unless I think like a poet.

It may sound weird, but for some reason, my favorite line from Francisco’s poem is, “From this I learned.” That phrase has always been one of the most magical lines in poetry for me. There doesn’t seem to be much special about it — it’s not beautiful imagery, it’s not immaculate rhyme and it’s just a few words together. But, they represent to me how powerful it can be to connect the everyday, regular, seemingly nothing-special things to the greater issues and phenomena we see in the world. When I hear it, I’m expecting a story about how someone saw a butterfly land on their coffee cup for the first time in several years turn into a connection to how they cannot force love, and maybe no one should. Poetry helps me ask, what did I learn from this? Why did this happen? What is this connected to? The same way a great poem connects the small, individual and personal to the large, group and shared, I feel we need to actively challenge ourselves to do so too if we are ever to understand why the social issues we see around us are occurring and how to solve them in the long term.

Max Kurant is a junior majoring in social systems science.