Glossary Entry: What is Poetry?

What does a “concentrated imaginative awareness of experience” even mean?!

If you’re like me, the Merriam-Webster definition for poetry shown above doesn’t do much. Similarly, Wikipedia would define it as “a form of literary art which uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language”, which does little to distinguish it from prose. I write poetry but couldn’t tell you what it really is. The word “poem” comes from the Greek word poema: “a thing made or created”. Similarly, “poet” comes from a word meaning “maker”. So what is being made?

Attempts at defining poetry are often formal, mentioning rhyme, meter, or line breaks—qualities most students come to hate by the end of high school. But formal definitions break down so easily because there are virtually no barriers in poetry. For instance, here’s a controversial poem by Aram Saroyan: lighght. 7 letters that could communicate a number of things, depending on how you read it. It’s clear that while formal devices can be used to describe a large number of works, they cannot capture the essence of poetry.

Other attempts are metaphorical: “emotion put into measure” (Thomas Hardy), “a phantom script telling how rainbows are made” (Carl Sandberg), or “that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you think” (Allen Ginsberg). These descriptions are beautiful and intentionally ambiguous — these writers recognized the difficulty of providing a concrete definition and instead chose a short arrangement of words that provoked some idea about what a poem is.

And perhaps that is the closest we can get. We can arrive at some sort of feeling about what a poem is, much like a poem can shed some sort of light on what it is like to live, but never tell us the definition of life. They can nudge us in a direction. And for the particularly curious, this inconclusiveness can be poked and prodded a little by looking at the margins of a genre — not at Shakespeare and Dickinson, but a spoken story on Youtube that proclaims itself a slam poem, ASL poetry that cannot be translated into words on a page, or a particularly eloquent note left on the fridge by your mother.

In “Lost Voices”, Darius Simpson and Scout Bosley illustrate how their voices are silenced in society by lip-syncing their own lines and letting the other speak them. Can this poem be read from a page and still be the same poem?

“Contours of Chile” by Martin Gubbins doesn’t look like your typical poem. What might surprise you even more is the audio of a reading of this piece.