What is poetry?

EvilToasterElf wrote:

When I think of sacrifice of artistic autonomy for overt political statement, I immediate cringe remembering poetry "slams" that I've been to.

Do tell. I love "bad poetry" anecdotes.

Ms. Haiku wrote:

If you were to describe poetry in an image or include a certain consistent image in your poetry i.e., I think of poetry as fire, Neruda included wheat in a lot of his poetry, what would your image be?

When I first started writing poetry, and I wasn't very good at it, I came up with one phrase, that I only began to register as something important later

the phrase was Infinity's Tresspassers

that became kind of my arch-type for my characters in many of my poems. Which is why so many revolve around single moments, breaking points, ordinary people put in extraordinary situations

it's more of an idea than an image really, just transience

I don't know if I have any real images that repeat constantly, although authors are sometimes the least likely to find those repeat images in their own work

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

I swear that was a thread on A Moving Train the other day.

If by the other day you mean everyday then yeah it may have been.

It's also known as dialogue at every college campus in the US

movingfinger wrote:

thought i might interject a quote from Gertude Stein
"Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry."

It's ironic that the poetry in that passage is created through the repetition of present participles.

pearlmutt wrote:

i'd have to say poetry is everything that prose hasn't dared to do with words.

Sounds good to me. But one could take an ostensibly prose form, which communicates meaning through the agreement of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions and still, through the inclusion of assonance, alliteration, repetition and manipulation of rhythm, manage to convey an unspoken physical sensation that the words in themselves can't express in a syntactical, syntagmatic order. This prose would be poetic. Conversely, one could write a poem avoiding poeticisms such as rhyme or rhythm, almost embracing the most commonplace of language, but still create a striking work because of little anomalies in the text.


What does a poem need to be a poem, with its characteristic anomalies? Um, I think it needs tropes. Tropes facilitate metamorphosis: "reality" becoming magic or a truer reality beyond oppressive dominant epistemes. Poetry is inherently subversive. It needs ultimately to use tropes such as simile or metaphor or the hypnotic effect of repeated sound to transform our understanding of ourselves in society, whether we read the poem in its moment of production or three thousand years later: A good poem will be ambiguous enough in its use of tropes to construct a new way of beholding our "nature", physical or human, social or cultural, historical and psychological.