What is poetry to you?
 

What is poetry to you? Why do you write? I can count on two hands the number of poems I've written since I started writing about three years ago. I typically write to work out some personal problem, and as such most of my poems are esoteric and introspective. I enjoy writing, but I have a hard time writing unless given a school assignment, and that's been a non-issue for close to a year now. How about everyone else here?

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.)

Editing poetry! I can only imagine that is fairly challenging. Prose, at least most prose, has a generally accepted structure and grammar to follow. Poetry... not so much.

I've written some poetry in the past. But not in a long while. I wrote a poem that I read during our wedding ceremony that I was pretty happy with, but even that was a long time ago now.

Outside of classic poetry, I'm not much of a reader of poetry. Modern poetry just doesn't do much for me. It seems that the author is more in love with themselves than with the language or their subject.

at this point, poetry seems to me to be defined in two ways:

the person making something understands it as poetry
it is published as poetry

there's so much activity that happens under this rubric--most all of it under the commercial radar, in that curious gift economy of on-line pieces, chapbooks, broadsides etc. and it seems to have very little in common that it's hard to see much holding it together except that it's all called the same thing.

personally, i've learned alot from reading various poets--particularly mei-mie bursenbrugge lately---but i'm not an avid reader (by comparison with the folk i know who are). i devote quite a bit of attention to writing, for better or worse. but no matter what it looks like, i understand it as prose.

I will use poetry to express the images in my mind, heart, and life. For some reason my feelings come out much more defined in writing, than in speech.

Highly charged language.

Poetry to me is letting go of what is bothering me, a creative outlet for anger and pain.
But it is also is something that makes me happy. I don't always share my poetry, I am just worried about negative feed back. The ones I do show are light hearted ones, not ones that make me look like an emo.