I know. When asked, “What is jazz,” Louis Armstrong didn’t actually say this. He said, “If you still have to ask, shame on you.” But the way it’s often misquoted makes a better story. Besides, either answer reveals something about both the nature of jazz and the nature of the person asking.
The question here, though, is, “What is poetry,” and as with most questions worth asking, there’s not a single answer.
“The best words in the best order,” wrote early 19th century British poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
His contemporary, William Wordsworth, claimed, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.”
American poet, Emily Dickinson, said, quite graphically for the middle of the 19th century, if “It makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Fellow American, Robert Frost, said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” He also said, “Poetry is what gets left behind in translation.”
Someone (I don’t know who – maybe one of my teachers) said, “The difference between poetry and prose is that poetry turns,” and that seemed a pretty reliable distinction right up until prose poetry became popular.
Someone else, a rebel, or cynic, or relativist at least, said, “Poetry is whatever the poet says it is.”
And maybe my favorite definition comes from Carl Sandburg, who said, “Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.”
All of these sound good. They’re clever, and they’re all accurate in a cryptic, enigmatic, evasive, not-really-very-helpful, stubbornly defiant, visceral sort of way.
One of the simplest and most inclusive answers is that poetry is usually patterned language, but even at that, the pattern might be breath, syntax, syllables, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, parallel structure, length, motif, mimesis, etc., such that, again, the definition is only mildly useful. Countless wonderful poems have been written across the centuries using each of these patterns as the foundation of their poetic form, and I would encourage every reader or writer of poetry to be open to the possibilities that each of them provides for conveying the fullest sense of our experiences.
I have now published 19 of these columns on poetry, so perhaps it’s time I offered a definition of what I’m writing about. The truth, however, is that even though I have taught poetry for more than 40 years and written more than 2000 poems of my own, I don’t know how to say exactly what poetry is, not just because it is ineffable, but also because it is infinitely protean, taking on whatever form is needed for the individual poem in the time and place it is experienced. There are certainly things we can say are not poetry. Robert Frost, again, said, “There are roughly zones,” and I think that may be about the best we can say without going all the way back to Armstrong’s statement on jazz, “Man, if you gotta ask . . . .”
I’ve written two collections of poetry on the nature of poetry and more than 500 essays, columns, and reviews of poetry, and talked about the practice of poetry, the process of reading it or writing it, the experiences of being a poet in the world today, and just about everything else one might say about poetry, but in all of that I’ve never quite created a singular definition of poetry. Likely because I’m just not sure any reliable definition is possible. The poem, “The Art of Poetry,” from my recent collection, The Song Is Why We Sing, probably comes as close as anything I’ll ever write. For those who need a definition, maybe it will help in a vague, evasive, visceral sort of way.
The Art of Poetry
The art of poetry is this —
this moon so bright it can light up a night
so dark you can’t see nothing
except what you can see
by the light of this moon ,
so bright it can bring light straight to you
no matter where you are
what time of day or night it is
wherever you might be
when the light of this moon finds you,
so bright you can’t escape it
no matter how dark the shades you wear
how big the brim of your hat
trying to shield your eyes
how thick the fingers
you splay across in front of them
how many different ways
you try to deny the light of this moon.
The art of poetry is this —
you may as well raise your head and look up,
you may as well take off that hat
and stand bare-headed to soak it in,
you may as well put your hands down and take up a pen,
you may as well open your eyes and realize
there ain’t no way to escape it,
it is insidious
it is omnipresent
it is eternal
it was here at the beginning
and it will be here at the end
it is what wakes you up in the middle of the night
calls memory back from darkness
shows you how any two things are alike
moves you to the chair
gives the words the shape they take
it is what won’t sit still inside you.
