A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-One-Hundred-And-Eighty-One

In the introductory session for workshop, tonight, Matthew Olzmann asked everyone to consider their definition of poetry.  He offered his own thoughts on the matter, pointing to the idea of it as an art, and as an attempt to create empathy, to give the reader an experience from outside their own life, that might be alien to them, inaccessible for their normal self.  As well, he spoke of the notion that the form is an element of the content in a poem, which I tend to agree with.  I have heard many definitions of poetry from teachers, and their is always a sense that it is not possible to really reach anything conclusive, maybe not even anything truly descriptive.  

It took me a bit of time to think through my own thoughts on this tonight, to come to something at all coherent, and I can only call this one way of thinking about it, certainly not the only way, not even my only way.  One thing that I've always thought about poetry, is that it is the effort to bring the reader to a place where they can have a certain experience in response to the poem.  I often imagine it in an almost cartographic sense, as if the poem is a map to a certain mental locale, that the act of reading is intended to lead one into that particular experience.  That is, poetry is an effort to create an experience in language, not only to communicate a literal meaning.  

None of that is, of course, a real definition, but I think, after considering it a bit, I have one that feels a bit better.  Poetry is an effort to use language to communicate aspects of experience that are not and cannot normally be conveyed through language.  I can elaborate this, by offering ideas on how that is achieved, but that doesn't seem necessary to the core notion.  Again, this isn't intended as the definition, but a way of considering poetry.  I would be curious what others think.  Perhaps I will have a chance to share it in class this week. 

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