At Last: The Definitive Definition of Poetry!
April is National Poetry Month, so it seems like a good time to take another stab at this: In my years teaching literature and creative writing to university students, and in my years with SDSPS, one thing has always remained a little tricky, and that is defining poetry. Not that we need to, of course; poetry can exist for its own sake. But pardon me while I give it a try…
I’ve heard some people say that poetry is a way to tell our own stories, to reveal ourselves, to explore and share our own emotions, to create a historical record of our lives. And for some poems and poets, this is true. Poems can be our history, our legacy, a beautiful proof that we were here. But I’ve read and studied enough poems to know that even poems with a first-person speaker—the “I” of a poem—aren’t necessarily autobiographical. The poet Florence Ai Ogawa (Ai) wrote only first-person poems—devastating and poignant poems about the experiences of sharecroppers, abused farm wives, cruel mothers, young boys, and others. But she was an unmarried, childless, city-dwelling, modern-day university professor. We can’t assume every poem—even a first-person poem—is about the poet who wrote it.
Writing poems can be therapy. For some poets, writing is way to process and try to understand tragedy, loss, trauma, grief, disappointment. It can be a way to exorcise one’s negative emotions. It can also be a way to celebrate love, milestones, epiphanies, to share one’s triumphs and joys.
Poems can attempt to capture an image—a meadow bursting into bloom, a child begging at the side of road, blue shoes hung on a powerline over a busy street, a coyote pup hiding in a plum thicket, the smell of coming rain. A poem can capture and freeze a moment, image, impression, or revelation in time. That moment might be real/experienced, or it might be only in the poet’s imagination.
Poetry can be storytelling, but it can also be art. The poets’ tools are language, line breaks, sensory images, rhythm, sometimes meter and rhyme, stanzas, etc. Imagine standing in a museum. You look around at all the art. Some you understand, some you don’t. Some make you say to yourself, “I could paint that” (to which I say, “then do it!”). Some you don’t understand, but it makes you feel something, it makes a connection with you for some unknown reason. A Rembrandt hanging in a museum is very different from a watercolor of someone’s vegetable garden hung on a fridge with a magnet. But no one can convince me they aren’t BOTH art.
If you see a painting you don’t like or understand, you move on. This, too, is poetry: if you read a poem that doesn’t connect with you, or that seems too abstract, too baffling, too gritty or sad, or “over your head,” move on. You’ll find poems that DO make that connection, that DO make you feel something. There are as many kinds of poems, and as many reasons for writing poetry, as there are poets who write them.
Well, shucks. Once again, I guess I can’t define poetry. As we travel across the state with POETRY ON THE ROAD, I’m always amazed by and grateful for the incredible variety of poems we get to hear—historical, experiential, abstract, hilarious, surreal, serious, whimsical, sad, celebratory and more. SDSPS encourages you to read and write whatever kind of poetry you’re moved to write, and to remember: the South Dakota State Poetry Society offers a welcoming, supportive, encouraging home for EVERY kind of poet!
Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash