what is poetry

This week's task is a discussion.

I never really thought about what makes a poem before I joined the Voiceworks committee. I've only just started calling myself a writer (and sometimes I still question that!). So in no way do I think that I'm any sort of authority on the subject of poetry, more of an interested party. Stacey and I have been sort of discussing what makes a poem on another of our posts.

So I thought I would pose the question to the general populace.

What makes something poetry?

Trying to write feedback for people's submissions in Voiceworks is kind of hard (and I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to reveal here) because when a poem is bad, you can tell. The worst ones are mostly self indulgent and cliched. But then there are a bunch of them that are just middle ground. Just okay.

Reading Mike Ladd's musing on the subject helped me somewhat, but doesn't settle upon anything concrete. This reminds me of the religious brochures we get delivered to our house. They're those Jehovah's Witness pamphlets that purport to answer all the questions we may worry about during our lifetime - "Is there a god?" and "Life after death?" for example - and the inside columns say things like "comforting facts" and "true story". Religion's biggest advertisements are the comfort and "we-can-answer-all-your-unanswerables" factors. Anyway my point is that maybe we're trying to define the undefinable. M'colleague Stacey and our inner associates would agree that there are questions about life that we aren't able to answer. Perhaps I'm being too grandiose to suggest that poetry lies on a similar level. But perhaps not. As far as I'm concerned (and I hope I don't put off too many readers), the Bible is another work of fiction. That's a topic for another day though.

Going down another path less traveled (oh HA HA), we periodically spoke about the poetry of language in my philosophy classes. It was brought up that language in its is just an attempt to represent things we see in the real world. You know, all that deconstructionism stuff. I am summarising poorly here - see how I'm struggling! The Mike Ladd essay speaks about the general poetry of language, the way we use metaphor to describe things - he even struggles to explain poetry without employing metaphor and poetical forms, and this is a guy that probably makes a living talking about it!

Perhaps there's just a certain je nais se quoi to poetry. That you just know when you read it and you think.. this is it. You connect with it on a level that you can't really explain. Is that good enough?

I'd also be interested to know what some of our readers think. A lot of people shy away from poetry because it intimidates them. Perhaps because they're not really sure what makes poetry good. Maybe some people don't think in poetical terms? But what are poetical terms.. Lyrical, clever, funny, touching, pretty, annoying, something you can't get out of your head for days? Just ideas or lines..

Two of my favourite living poets are Tao Lin (read a poem written by a bear) and Josephine Rowe - I really want her book How a moth becomes a boat.

Sometimes you just have to think: what's so great about this? And perhaps this brings up the broader debate about why we like the things we like? Is there any reason at all? There's only so far we can come up with concrete reasons for stuff! Please help me out, I'm "not waving, but drowning".