What is Poetry?

What is Poetry anyway?

A Mosaic of Responses

Ezra Pound, early twentieth century USAmerican poet

Here’s my paraphrase of what Ez sez:

It’s useful to think about all poetry as having three aspects though some poems emphasize one aspect more so than others:

Phanopoeia = description = the poem throws images on the mind

Melopoeia = musicality = the poem’s sounds & rhythms evoke emotional correlations

Logopoeia = mindfulness = the poem stimulates thought (and feeling) in relation to the poem’s words & word groups

W’ei T’ai, 11^th century Chinese poet

Whaddya say W’ei?

“Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words.

“This is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which overwhelm him and keeps nothing back to linger as an aftertaste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the hands and feet involuntarily waving and tapping in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up the spirits.”

Louis Zukofsky, twentieth century US American poet

What’s the news, Lou?

“I'll tell you. / About my poetics— / music / speech / An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music.”

(from “A12” a poem)

Like this:

     Music

     Speech

In a poem called “City Midnight Junk Strains” Allen Ginsberg, twentieth century USAmerican poet, says that Frank O’Hara, another twentieth century USAmerican poet, has a “a common ear for our deep gossip.”

In a book called Quote Poet Unquote someone named Liam Rector is credited with the statement “Poetry is deep gossip.” Sadly neither Ginsberg nor O’Hara is mentioned by Rector or the book’s editor, Dennis O’Driscoll.

Here are several more statements about what poetry is from Quote Poet Unquote book:

DAVID GASCOYNE, Stand, Spring 1992

Poetry is like a substance, the words stick together as though they were magnetized to each other.

SEAMUS HEANEY, Sunday Independent, 25 September 1994

Poetry is language in orbit.

YVES BONNEFOY, Times Literary Supplement, 12 August 2005

Poetry is an act by which the relation of words to reality is renewed.

MARK DOTY, The Cortland Review, October 2000

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.

LEONARD COHEN, The Sunday Times

Poetry is a verdict that others give to language that is charged with music and rhythm and authority.

UMBERTO ECO, The Independent, 6 October 1995

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON, PN Review, March-April 1993

Poetry is language wrought by feeling and imagination to such a pitch that it enacts and embodies the thing it says.

DAVE SMITH, Local Assays, 1985

Poetry is a dialect of the language we speak, possessed of metaphorical density, coded with resonant meaning, engaging us with narrative's pleasures, enhancing and sustaining our pleasure with enlarged awareness.

JOSEPH BRODSKY, The New Yorker, 26 September 1994

Poetry is a dame with a huge pedigree, and every word comes practically barnacled with allusions and associations.

CAL BEDIENT, Denver Quarterly 39, no. 2, 2004

Poetry is the eroticization of thought—psychic vitality.

MATTHEW HOLLIS, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2004

Poetry is... a kind of leaving of notes for another to find, and a willingness to have them fall into the wrong hands.

CHARLES WRIGHT, Quarter Notes, 1995

Poetry is language that sounds better and means more.

ANNE ROUSE, The Sunday Times, 28 January 2001

Poetry is about the intensity at the centre of life, and about intricacy of expression. Without any appreciation of those, people are condemned to simplistic emotions and crude expressions.

FRIEDA HUGHES, The Guardian, 3 October 2001

Poetry is a way of communicating a vast array of thoughts and feelings by concentrating them into minimal, or even single, points which describe the whole.

JOHN SIMON, Dreamers of Dreams, 2001

Poetry is the meeting point of parallel lines—in infinity, but also in the here and now. It is where the patent and incontrovertible intersects with the ineffable and incommensurable.

DON McKAY, The Toronto Star, 4 June 2007

Poetry is language pointing beyond its own capacities.

HAROLD BLOOM, The Art of Reading Poetry, 2006

Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative.

PETER FALLON, The Poetry Paper, no. 3, 2006

A poem is words at work, on us and for us.

ÁGNES NEMES NAGY, A Hungarian Perspective, 1998

A poem is partly grace, partly discovery, and partly a struggle to squeeze out a little bit more, to conquer another foot of territory from the unconscious.

P.J. KAVANAGH, BBC Radio 3, December 1990

A poem is an attempt to find the music in the words describing an intuition.

NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL, RTÉ I television, July 1995

A poem is a smuggling of something back from the otherworld, a prime bit of shoplifting where you get something out the door before the buzzer goes off.

WILLIAM H. GASS, The Georgia Review, Spring 2004

A poem is like a ghost seeking substantiality, a soul in search of body more appealing than the bare bones mere verses rattle.

CAROL ANN DUFFY, Out of Fashion, 2004

A poem... is the attire of feeling: the literary form where words seem tailor-made for memory or desire.

JAMIE McKENDRICK, The South Bank Show, October 1994

Every poem is an answer to the question what poetry is for.

After I thought I’d finished this collection I found this statement from Audre Lorde’s Power, Oppression and the Politics of Culture: a lesbian/feminist perspective:

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

Paul Celan*

“The poem is the detour from you

to you; it is the route. It is also the

route of language toward itself, 

its becoming visible and 

mortal: wherewith the poem 

becomes the raison d’être of language.”

*Celan was a German-speaking Jew in Eastern Europe. He survived World War II. His town in a place called Burkovina that was then Romanian and now Ukrainian was first occupied by the Soviets and later by the Nazis. He spent much of the war in Nazi-run labor camp. His parents were handed over to the Germans and killed.