What is Poetry ?

I like the discussion of this by my friend, poet, and teacher James Graham, who focuses on the quality of ambiguity and the response from the reader.

(Excerpt from longer essay)

There are so many things that can be identified as poetry that it's nearly impossible to say what all poetry has in common. There's a grey area (no, a rainbow area) between poetry and prose. You can have poetry without rhyme, even without regular scansion. You can enjoy your poetry plain:

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records - Bessie, bop, or Bach.

(Langston Hughes)

...or fancy:

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

(Swinburne)

There's formal verse - like this Swinburne - so tightly metred and rhymed you couldn't insert a scalpel in it anywhere. There's controlled free verse. There's not-so-controlled free verse. There are concrete poems, typographical objects. So what does all poetry, or nearly all, have in common? What in the name of the muse Erato is poetry?

Well, this is what I call a poem. (Excuse my Spanish.)

Despedida

Si muero,
dejad el balcon abierto.

El nino come naranjas.
(Desde mi balcon lo veo.)

El segador siega el trigo.
(Desde mi balcon lo siento.)

¡Si muero,
dejad el balcon abierto!

Federico Garcia Lorca.

Farewell

If I die,
leave the balcony open.

The boy is eating oranges.
(From my balcony I see him.)

The sickleman sickles the wheat.
(From my balcony I hear him.)

If I die,
leave the balcony open!

It's quite well known that this short poem by Lorca can be seen in different ways by different readers. Some take it to be a serene acceptance of death, others as a complaint against death and longing for life to continue. It's like the optical illusion that could be a Greek vase or two faces. Which leads me to my first attempt to pin down what distinguishes poetry from other human utterances. It's the quality of ambiguity - which is not the same thing as difficulty - or to broaden it out a bit, multiple possibilities of meaning, so that another reader will see it slightly - or even radically - differently from the way I see it. Ambiguity is one of the sources of life and energy in poetry.

A subtext runs through your head as you take in this poem. It makes you bring something of yourself to it. Your own intelligence and imagination are set to work. The poem pushes buttons. What does it mean, for example, that he asks for the balcony to be left open after he is dead? (That is, beyond a literal meaning, which isn't really intended.) What's the difference between the first two lines and the last two? Of all the sights and sounds the poet might have represented himself as having seen or heard from his balcony, why especially the boy and the sickleman? (These aren't quiz questions. The answers are not at the foot of the page.) You read these few lines, and before you know where you are you're busy, busy.

The art in this is to be ambiguous, to leave the meaning open - but to be as clear as a mountain stream at the same time. As a Spanish critic puts it, 'to be at once clear and mysterious'. That is, to give a clear invitation to the reader to participate in making the meaning(s) of the poem.

To put it more mundanely, it's a little bit like gardening. The poem is a packet of mixed seeds; if your imagination is the right (well-drained, humus-rich) soil, and you put a bit of work in, they'll grow.

So poetry scatters seeds, in the form of words, phrases and images that germinate in the minds of many readers.

(ms2006)

In an oasis
Green with fragility
In the cross-fire of children shouting
An old man
His long coat heavy
His hands held tight and still behind his back
Drifts by my bench. And as he turns
In the late-day flaring, he seems to glow
Like a comet, trailing a frozen gaze
And an image –
Of a young man in khaki
Who seems to hug the earth -
From his choirboy mouth, soft amber sand
Emptying like an hour-glass.

POEM

INTO THE LIGHT (2005)

My hands spread a landscape
across the still-warm car-hood;
assessing straight yellow
through neat squares to the harbour,
or black diamonds across green.

I follow the diamonds
to an eye-lashed viewpoint;
picture your hair kite-tailing
over a sea less innocent
than the light blue on paper;

In the fold of the page, a tidal-wave rises.

*

In the cool
underside of summer,
we wade the stream of last year’s leaves.

In the buzz of flies,
under heavy boots,
the satisfying snap of bones.

*

Ambushed, you crash behind me
through wires of bracken; black berries
with their pretty pink flowers scratch
soft leaves sting. With no compass
in the high sun, I charge forward

to a dead end. We back track
past your flash of doubt, camouflaged
by your quick smile. You find an arrow
on a post, I steal a glance at the map
then we fall

into the light.

(MS 2005)

OF WALKING AND

POETRY

Giacometti's "Walking Man"...

Robert W. Greene (From The Ways of Walking)

If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking.
Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.
- Raymond Inmon

THE WALKING MAN OF RODIN

(Carl Sandburg)

LEGS hold a torso away from the earth.
And a regular high poem of legs is here.
Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs
Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear
And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors.
You make us
Proud of our legs, old man.

And you left off the head here,
The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles.

From Walking Home

Monica Ferrell

A cold yellow light on the cobblestones, you
Stumble from the bar like a wayward star
Fallen off its chart. October, the darkness
Takes your temperature, pressing a cool moon
Sliver to your fevering brow. You speak the moon,
Hieroglyphs of jade dropping from your stone lips.

Night rises out of the river like a bad Aphrodite:
Jet, burnished as a rococo tomb.
She walks you home, coyly taking an arm,
Dripping her curled locks over your shoulders
As if tonight all your kisses were hers.

...

Walking on Words by Matt Hughes

From: I'M WALKING BACKWARDS FOR CHRISTMAS

Spike Milligan

I'm walking backwards for Christmas,
Across the Irish Sea,
I'm walking backwards for Christmas,
It's the only thing for me.

I've tried walking sideways,
And walking to the front,
But people just look at me,
And say it's a publicity stunt.

I'm walking backwards for Christmas,
To prove that I love you.

My father considered a walk among the mountains
as the equivalent of churchgoing.
- Aldous Huxley

Dr. Hugo's Walking poems (animation)– Click here