Baraka_Guru

My favourite definition of poetry was given to me by one of my favourite professors in university (I studied literature). He was a classically trained Oxford scholar who felt the essay was dead in the age of the Internet. Interesting guy.

Anyway, the way he put it was: "Poetry is the longest distance between point A and point B."

That works for me. The intent of poetry is not to relay information...it's to, as the Russian Formalists had put it, defamiliarize us with situations of which we may or may not have direct personal experience. It is more about language than it is about meaning. A good love poem isn't so much about the voice's lover as it is about the poet's love of language—otherwise, the poet may not have written the poem; he would have been too busy spending time with his love....

Wordsworth had written a number of things about poetry in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that I tend to enjoy. His philosophy on the craft isn't necessarily the mode today, but it certainly was the turning point from what was being written in the Ivory Tower to what is now written by just about anyone, whether good or bad.

I have a lot more to say about this, but I don't have the time. I'll be sure to revisit this.

I'll leave you with this: I haven't written much poetry, but I've read it widely. I'm looking into setting up a writing schedule, as my interest in writing poems has increased lately. (Not only did I study poetry in university, but I edit poetry for book publication.)

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot