An approach to poetry: “0ne person talking to another.” ~ T S Eliot
“What every poet starts from is his own emotions.” ~ T S Eliot
“…the credibility of this honoured but hard to define category of human achievement called poetry.” ~ Seamus Heaney
Full disclosure: I have not been, consciously anyway, overly obsessed with the question “What is poetry?” I have tended to avoid a certain wrestling angst, contemplation of my poet-navel, a raising of Romantic anxiety, where this is concerned. While I suspect I can find certain subconscious reflections in myself on “the poetic”, “Poetry” and related queries, I have just gone about the business of writing poems. The proof that I have not been as complacent as I might sound is that often, at poetry readings, I have remarked to friends nearby, “Where is the poetry?” Behind that complaint lies some formulation of what poetry ought to be.
I have also tended to use “poetry”, “the poetic”, to describe other kinds of art. For example, when I have been moved by a really fine dance performance, the best way I can describe it, is as “poetry.” In my poem ‘elemental’, I have written of “those sexy dancers/barrelling through space,/arching, escalating over breath,” my attempt to capture a certain breath-stopping moment of the poetry of dance.
But, what is poetry? Well, most fundamentally it is a literary form, distinct from prose or drama (though obviously there are similarities, overlaps, continuities between and within those). The form of the poem (leaving room for experimentation etc.) is distinct. It is a literary structure marked uniquely by its diction and particular use of language, usually heightened (even in plain statement); its metric and rhythmic patterns, including that created by use of the breath to shape the line; the use of image, symbol and metaphor. Its concentration of content and form, its distillation of message and meaning, not only underlines the uniqueness of poetry, but makes it enormously challenging both to write and unravel. If writing is discovered by the serious writer to be hard work, demanding thought, technical skill and an awareness of the literary tradition in which and out of which one is writing, then the creative writing of good poetry is even more daunting.
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