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.