What does poetry do?

Asks Tom Beckett in his interview with Jean Vengua. Her answer:

It records, it makes visible and audible – sensible; it makes the interior apparent to the senses. It’s another way of bringing forth awareness within the matrix of language and living and dying. It begins with a state that for me is childlike and playful, seemingly grounded in the body; and it often branches out into the ludic, the ludicruous – which is delightful when it happens. Poetry reports back to me (I mean that in a broad sense, of course, but in my blog, Diaryo I literally shaped my poems from news reports), it tells me what’s going on, and sometimes what’s going on is funny, lyrical, erotic; sometimes it’s full of despair, and I see the language breaking up inside of me or turning cold, becoming self-centered, cliché, awkward or lonely; disappearing into dead space, self-censorship, silence. When I say that poetry is a practice of staying with the discomfort or dissonance, I include in that also terror.

Poetry reports back to you. Now, that's one reason to read the whole piece.