Interview with a Poet-Rowen Veratome
Thinking about Poetry
For you, poetry is…AND/OR… Poetry is not…
That’s a difficult question. The easy way out would be to discuss it like porn (“I know it when I see it.”) But I think that here I’ll take the route of false confidence.
Poetry is a space of mind in which language can be both wielded and understood with heightened malleability. I say “space of mind” because it seems incomprehensible that something like poetry could be an array of marks on a page; what you write down can instead be thought of as akin to the sheet music handed out to an orchestra of diverse instruments. In other words, the poem is a mindset, and what is written down is a set of instructions for obtaining it.
It’s ungainly to talk about these mind-spaces, though — so perhaps we can use words on the screen or page as a kind of shorthand.
Regarding these words, it’s tempting for me to bring up things like metaphor, rhythm, and the spatial positioning of words in relation to blank space. At the same time, I’m not sure that any specific qualities are necessary for a given conglomeration of language to count as poetry. For example, someone might write out an array of nouns without additional grammatical structure. Those nouns might evoke a vivid scene to the readers who give sufficient…
