National Poetry Month: What Is Poetry by Ann Staley

What Is Poetry 

Charles says it’s about “the lining” and “directional flow,” 

 

By Ann Staley 

Robert Frost says it’s “What gets lost in translation.” 

He also said, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, 

the poem must ride on its own melting.” 

That funny poet who wrote as an insect, Don Marquis 

says “Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.” 

And Gwendolyn Brooks said, “Poetry is life distilled.” 

The “Fog” poet said, “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” 

and Robert Browning, “All poetry is placing the infinite with the finite.” 

Auden, that great English poet says, “Poetry is the only art 

people haven’t yet learned to consume like soup.”

TS. Eliot, who sold insurance by day, insisted, “It’s a mug’s game.”

In a definition that now reads like prophecy, Sylvia Plath wrote, 

“The blood jet is poetry/There is no stopping it.” 

Nathalie Sarraute wrote, “Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.” 

The surrealist film maker, Jean Cocteau, “Poetry is a religion without hope.” 

John Ashbury, supposedly the greatest American poet alive today, 

noted that Poetry “is mostly hunches.” 

And Emily, who should know, wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” 

 

 

My point being, we all carry around a definition of poetry 

and we may not realize what that is until we see something which 

challenges our definition — something like “The Whistler.”  

It’s what doesn’t fit which helps us understand what we think does fit,  

& brings forth our definition of a poem. 

 

 

I have often compared a poem to steam rising from a hot cup of coffee, 

or the shape-shifting forms of clouds, the mesmerizing fire’s flame,  

the empty spaces between words, the negative space surrounding the poem,  

the pauses during a conversation, that intake of breath as a comet passes, 

what we see from the corner of our eye. 

 

 

Now you tell me.