Tuesday, September 11, 2012

What is a Poem?

Poems are what poets make. This may seem trivial, but it means much more than "philosophies are what philosophers make". On days when I feel like my intellectual life has been wasted, I remind myself that I'm much closer than I was a decade ago (and perhaps even very close) to having a good answer to the question, What is a poem? Also, these days, I'm even approaching an understanding of why poetry is important, i.e., why knowing what a poem is is a real accomplishment. That makes me feel better, which, not incidentally, is exactly what poetry is supposed to do.

3 comments:

Andrew Shields said...

I'm opening to lots of definitions of poems. But I find all definitions unsatisfactory that do not have anything to say about the role of verse in poetry. "A specific poem should make us more capable of feeling specific emotions": yes, and verse plays a role in the triggering of those emotions, or what you are talking about is no longer strictly "poetry."

Thomas said...

Yes, I agree that a poem must be a composition of words, but 'verse', I hope, will not demand much more, i.e. exclude prose poems. In yesterday's post I talked about strophes as constitutive 'atoms' of poems. But here too I'm thinking in quite broad terms.

Lisa Robertson, in "the prosody of the citizen" seems to argue for a comcept of "poem" that is mot just an arrangement of words, a kind of versification of gesture. The idea, I must admit, appeals to me.

Andrew Shields said...

"Prose poems" are definitely the stumbling block in my theory of verse. :-)

But I don't let it bother me, as the very fact of the phrase "prose poem" as a special category highlights how "poems" are otherwise written in verse (whether metrical or free or in songs).

Will respond to your long response to this sometime ...