What is a poem? (3.23.22)

We had what I consider to be a rewarding debate about poetry during today's Wednesdays@One salon.  In what surely was frustrating to some in our group, we spent nearly two-thirds of our time together discussing just the first two poems in our reading list.  

I love it when that happens!  (Not the frustration, the exploration.)

I also recognize that some in the group likely feel that we over-analyze individuals' poems from time to time.  But what we are really doing when we spend so much of our time on only one or two pieces--I should say, when I steer the conversation that way--is exploring certain foundational aspects of the art and how we practice it.

Today, the debate was around a writer's intention, the degree to which one can or should express one's emotions through a poem (without consideration for artistic matters), and how closely a writer should hew to poetic convention.

As you might expect, the discussion was all over the place, largely because we are not professional writers of poetry, not academicians of the art, and each of us is motivated to write for different reasons or needs and from different starting points as writers.  And also because our poetic vocabulary is not very uniform, even though the group has remained very stable over the years.

But because of those differences, our discussion was rewarding!  

Here are the questions that kept nagging me throughout the discussion:

• How do we decide that a piece of writing is a poem and not something else?
• What's the role of the writer's intention in the writing of a poem, and how important is that to the finished piece?
• Is "self-expression" justification for making poetry, is that what a poem is?
• How beholden should we be to the literary conventions associated with poems?

One writer stated that rhyme is what makes a poem a poem.  I was surprised that no one in the group pushed back against that notion.  Rhyme has not defined poetry for 150 years.  And we've devoted a great deal of time at W@1 debunking the "a poem must rhyme" idea in favor of "a poem must make language visible or palpable."  (See this blog entry or this one or this one for some discussion about the materiality of language as a requirement for poetry.)  Insofar as rhyme calls attention to language and how it works, yes, a poem may rhyme.  But rhyme's not the definer of poetry.  

Another of our writers implied that a poem's got to have metaphors.  Well, isn't all language metaphoric?  Next time you have an opportunity to read a legal brief, say in a contract of some sort, pay attention to the rich soil of metaphor the writing arises from.  So, the question isn't really whether a poem contains metaphors, but rather how metaphors are used in the poem, and why they are used.  And this idea returns us to the definition above, that a poem is a work of art in which language is made visible or palpable.  

A third writer insisted that poetry is free, in other words, there are no hard and fast rules about what makes for a poem, and in still other words (implied), a poem is a poem because I choose to call it so.  (Check out this blog discussion.) To which I would answer, a poem that appears to be "free" of the rules and conventions of poetry only appears to be so.  Otherwise, it's not a poem, because if it were actually free of convention, it would be unrecognizable as poetry.  In my experience, writers who insist that their poems are "free" of convention are ignorant of literary convention, and to their own use of it, and to how deeply they are beholden to it.  I've often found myself in that position when writing a poem, thinking that I've "dispensed with" certain kinds of rules, when in actuality, I've been thinking about them through the entire writing process!

Finally, all of what we said about poems and poetry today circled that old drain, "what is a poem?"  I hope we didn't totally go down the pipes and that there is still enough water in the tub to foster more discussion of the nature of poems and poetry in the months ahead.  And as much as we may like to relapse into the "je ne sais quoi" of the mystery of poetry, we really should, as dedicated writers, keep trying to define exactly what it is that makes a poem a poem.  We'll never get totally to the bottom of it, but the learning and growth will be in the trying.

Post-finally, I am thinking it's time for another project that forces us to consider our assumptions, and to work to define what poetry actually is.  I'll give it some thought.