What is Poetry?

My sister and I were talking about communication, and how difficult words sometimes are.  They have their different meanings and connotations to different people, they have their ruts - phrases they stubbornly stick to, huge concepts and their antitheses that suddenly slide into people’s thought with a word or phrase that you use, till at some point you realize that, with the set of words you share, there’s no way of making yourself understood.  And my sister said, “perhaps poetry is the only place where words can be unchained.”  Which I thought was interesting - probably true even though in poetry the words are more constrained (and yes, I noticed the rhyme in my thought.)

Janice asked me yesterday, “What is poetry?” because I had told her about my new blog and she’s taking a poetry course.  I said it’s a good question.

I think one aspect of poetry is an agreement that the writer and the reader  make to unchain the words from their usual associations, to be open to new ones.  Sometimes the constraints of form - rhyme and meter, size and shape - divert the thought from more prosaic meanings so that the urgent questions - How does this make sense? Do I agree with it? - can be put aside.  New questions can be considered: How does this touch me? How does it sing?  

Both poetry and prose can share the admonition:  say exactly what you mean - don’t add words to be impressive, flowery, rhythmic or rhyming.  Don’t leave things out because you don’t know an easy way to say them.  The meaning is the gravity. The words are the water.  They fall down over the constraints of form in the most vertical route, at each moment, toward the sea.  The poetry or prose is the river that results.

I tried to write a poem this week about a walk I had with my friend Becca.  But following my own criteria, I had to admit that it didn’t pass.  So instead of sharing it, I will share a very bad sonnet about the process, from my “sonnet a day” collection:

Failing at Poetry

I tried too hard to write a poem today

Saturday, too, and it would not emerge

My urgency to post got in the way

Of needed clear-eyed dumping of the verse

Some images I liked - they sounded true

Some rhythms and some rhymes lined up quite nicely

But others lurched, and certain lines were trite

And I didn’t get the mood precisely

So though I wrote a clearly stated blurb

On what makes poetry and prose be good

To follow with that poem would be absurd

Would mock the truth of everything I said

I need to find the truth within a poem

Or I won’t find the words to bring it home.

©Wendy Mulhern
January 25, 2011