What is Poetry? A Serious Consideration

It is often the questions which seem the most inane and perhaps stupid that are actually those requiring the deepest consideration.  While I have considered myself a poet since a very young age, and have read and thought about poetry for most of my life, even when I might not have been writing it as much, only recently I have begun to reconsider many of my previous assumptions about this craft.  I owe much of this rethinking, of course, to Gregory Pardlo, whose class last week has reshaped a great deal of my thinking on these issues.  One element of that I am reconsidering, perhaps the most essential question of all, is that of the nature of poetry itself.  By that, I mean: what separates poetry from prose?

As a poet who also works in prose forms, it is a question that is strangely hard to pin down.  For most of my youth I had not been exposed to prose poetry, so I assumed the essential element was the line-break as a device.  Thomas Lux, my mentor as an undergraduate, suggested the concept of a poem as sculptural, in that it does not take the shape of the container but has a form that it keeps despite where it is placed.  These answers, however, leave out a great deal in terms of the poet's control over their work.

To offer some examples, a great many poets don't use punctuation, or may use it in erratic ways.  Others eschew traditional spelling.  The poet who does not do these things is making a choice, just as a poet who chooses to make a prose poem is making a distinct choice.  That is, a poet is in control of the nature of the poem, and of every element that it utilizes.  They are not merely choosing words to put on the page, but are even selecting how those words will function and what system, or elements of a system, will be employed.

Consider, for example, a list poem, in which the work consists entirely of a list of objects, assembled into lines.  It may be done, in this case, as a perfect sonnet.  The turn at the end is a shift in the last objects on the list that completely alters what the context seems to be.  The entire system of the poems construction is under the poets control.  The choices they are making take everything into consideration, even elements that are normally covered in a prose piece.  While a prose writer may choose to use idiosyncratic elements, doing so is a deviation, but for a poet it is a necessary choice to not make any such deviation.  

The earliest definitions of poetry had to do with following rules that were, by the nature of language, idiosyncratic.  Iambic pentameter and rhyme do occur in language, but they are an artifact that poetry imposes, as an example.  The writer of poetry was always intended to be making deeper choices about what to do and not do, and not following those forms was a deviation that is as conscious to a poet as following them would be to a prose writer. Every mark on the page is a choice, not merely in terms of the existence of that mark, but also the location of it in relationship to the rest of the text.  A poet might put a comma on a line alone.  That is a choice that would need to be defended, certainly, but not because it is "wrong".  The defense of the idea would center on the impact of the gesture.  Indeed, if it worked well enough, poets would applaud it immediately and not question it at all.  The bigger question is not even if it works, but what it means about the poets work.

In my mind, at this point, even the question of whether a line starts all the way to the side or somewhere else on the page, is one that I have to ask all the time.  I have most poems justified to the margin, but I choose to do that, even when I wouldn't consider otherwise in a poem.  That degree of intent isn't something I consider in prose.  Indeed, I don't care, at this point, about the use of indents or not on most prose I write, because those customs are so insignificant to the nature of the work as I conceive of it.  If needed for clarity, as when presenting a quote, I will do so, but generally, I find it to be unneeded.

To get to the point, though, my current thinking is that the division between poetry and prose is not in the artifact, but in the degree of intent being exerted by the writer.  In prose, the rules exist and are overtly broken, but in poetry every choice must be a considered one.  I've known famous poets who spent hours discussing and debating the inclusion of a single punctuation mark.  For a prose writer, that would not be the case, as it is a rule.  Even in places where a rule exists that has options, like the Oxford comma, it is a question of consistency.  A poet might be inconsistant on purpose, to make a point, or accentuate a change in voice.  Each moment is a choice for a poet, not merely for the whole of the work, but at this moment in it, and it often not enough to do a thing because that is the way you've done it before.