In a world inundated with data, literature helps us seek truth, argues poet POOJA NANSI. It is where we learn to be patient with difference and contradiction, and thus understand how to live with one another. This article is based on her remarks at the “States of Unease” Public Forum 2026.
As a poet teacher and cultural worker, I spend a lot of time thinking about why it is necessary for a country to have a literary culture.
The poet Patricia Smith says, “You look to the news for the news and you look to poetry for the truth.”
I share that quote because I increasingly wonder if we are running out of places to look for the truth. Not facts. We have more facts and more information than any society in history.
The truth Smith points us towards is the kind of knowledge that helps us make sense of what it means to be human alongside other human beings, to discover that our lives are more intertwined than we first imagined. It asks for a willingness to stay with contradiction long enough for something more honest than certainty to emerge.
We’ve all heard that literature cultivates habits of attention and interpretation. What we hear less often is that these are civic habits too.
Before we can decide how to live together, we first have to learn how to understand one another.
When I talk about a literary culture, I mean the social life that grows around language and ideas. It is about the kinds of human capacities a society chooses to cultivate—and the kinds of public life those capacities make possible. It can live in classrooms, bars, dinner tables, whatsapp groups; in the conversations that move between them.
Think of it as an ecosystem in which people read, write, learn, think, argue, falter and grow.
A few Thursdays ago, I found myself at a spoken word night called Spoke and Bird, run by Steph Dogfoot.
At the very end of the evening, a young woman in a wheelchair came up to read. She shared that a few months earlier she had tried to take her own life. While she was in hospital, a friend asked her to make a list of things she wanted to do when she got out. Reasons to keep moving towards tomorrow. One of the things on her list was to read at this poetry night.
I’ve spent over twenty years working in literary communities, long enough to become cynical given how hard they are to sustain. You begin to wonder if all the endless labour is worth it, but every now and then something like this reminds you it is.
On the way home that night, I found myself thinking about the language we often use in arts leadership. Strategic plans. KPIs. Audience development. Measurable outcomes. Sure, those conversations matter. Public institutions should be accountable. But they also reveal what we choose to value. Literary culture often struggles within that logic because its deepest effects resist measurement. You can count attendance. You can count books sold.
But how do you measure the value of a place someone puts on a list of reasons to stay alive?
Culture isn’t something we can engineer into existence. It emerges through repeated acts of participation, until people begin to feel that a place has meaning and belongs to them. Institutions can fund that process, protect it—or defund it. But they cannot manufacture belonging from the top down. No matter how hard they try.
And when we underinvest in literary communities, we can’t be surprised, years later, when surveys tell us people aren’t reading.
Reading is only the most visible symptom. We are not simply measuring individual habits, but the consequences of a culture with fewer opportunities and spaces to question, interpret, be curious and stay with difficult feelings together.
The poet Muriel Roookeyser says, “If we fear it in art, we fear it in nature.” Art is one of the places where a society rehearses what it is willing to tolerate.
If we become uncomfortable with voices that unsettle us in novels, poems or theatre, we have probably become uncomfortable with disagreement itself. When our cultural life only makes room for what is orderly, measurable and agreeable, we can’t be surprised if our public life gradually begins to do the same.
When we measure the success of an arts event by attendance alone, we confuse reach with relevance.
When we reward only the marketable or the politically comfortable, the work that asks the hardest and most challenging questions is the first to disappear.
And when we replace organically formed spaces with carefully engineered ones, we mistake the appearance of culture for culture itself.
Together, these decisions work to narrow the range of stories, questions and ways of being that a society learns to recognise. And when we narrow what we can imagine, we also narrow what we believe is possible.
I return to the question I began with. Why does a healthy literary culture matter?
Because it produces a society confident enough to hold many different ideas of what a good life might be for ourselves and for others. Which is perhaps another way of saying that you look to the news for the news and you look to poetry for the truth.
– POOJA NANSI, the author of three poetry collections, is a recipient of Singapore’s Young Artist Award and France’s Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She served as Festival Director of the Singapore Writers Festival from 2019 to 2023. She teaches creative writing at Nanyang Technological University and recently completed a PhD examining performance, identity and belonging in Singapore. She currently serves as Chief Publisher of AFTERIMAGE Press.