Yesterday, at a poetry reading on Twitter spaces, the question was asked: what is poetry to you? The network was poor, it kept booting me out of the reading so I missed reading my poem and possibly answering the question in my own way but it gave me time to actually compose an answer. What is poetry to me?
Now, it is dangerous, I believe, to define writing. I say this because, writing is both a public and a private thing. It is public in the sense that there is an audience who reads the piece and gives feedback, and it is private because in spite of the research a writer may carry out to flesh out their writing, they still write from a place of bias. The writer has an opinion and their opinions are found in their works, for good or for ill. This position therefore makes defining writing a hurdle. Every writer has a sense of what writing means to them and I will not put myself in the position of the general arbiter for what writing can be.
In defining poetry, one has to also consider the criteria for what is good and what is bad poetry and this is also worthy of note: critics are individuals with differing tastes and their opinions though educated, can sometimes be wrong because education doesn't gift one with instincts and in the arts, I believe that have an instinctual knowledge of good work plays a more pivotal role than a masters degree in art criticism. One is a gift, an eye for the beautiful, the unique, the awe inspiring and the other is the regurgitation of rules and traditions, sometimes archaic and over indulged. A critic that can balance both can be considered a better critic. It may seem that I seek to make criticism an art but what is not within the realm of creativity?
Poetry, as I sat back and thought about it when the reading promptly ended, is attention, language and sight. I don't believe I have said something new here. I think different poets and writers have in one time or another defined poetry along these lines. Attention here means a poet can write only what they have read, heard or experienced. To get a proper image of this, the poet needs to pay attention. They need to give their focus to a thing and take in all the aspects of that thing, action, situation that they can. The average person can walk pass a rose, stop to take in its beauty and grasp it's fragrance but a poet must go further; they must identify its colour, the shape of its petals, its shadows, the height of its stem, the geography of its location, and so on. This is attention, a strong concern for the detail of a thing.
To achieve such observatory skill, the poet must be willing and open to seeing things differently. The sight of the poet is not the sight of seeing. The poet can see to understand the future they do not know. They can see to identify the minutiae of life. They can see to capture the living form of a thing. This close inspection is not normal but is necessary for a poet.
Finally, a poet must know the use of language. The poet must be willing to use language in any way possible to achieve the objective of the poem. Language is not a flower in a poet's hand. Language is a tool and it is a malleable tool. It is the office of the poet to explore the fringes of what language can be. The poet's language is not domestic. It is a wild, brutal, dangerous animal and sometimes it bares its fangs and there are times when it bites.
Language is the soul of a poem. It is where the attention and sight of the poet is expressed. It is the laboratory where the experiments are carried out and without language, there will be no poem or poet, just a sense of images and sounds, a collage that may or may not make sense. If a poet can take in the world, spend time in its ambience and grasp the form and ugliness, the beauty and meaning of the world, that poet can write a poem, a line, an epigraph that will hold all the world in its simple line. Poems are not written in ignorance of the world.
For me there, poetry is understanding and discovering the world anew. I write to learn of new ways of seeing, of thinking, of knowing. I write to see better within myself, to better defend myself against the rigors of living. To do this, I must observe, I must see, I must take note and I must be able to manipulate language into giving to my audience a sense of the nugget I have captured from listening, watching and feeling the world.
This may be a naive definition of what poetry means to me and I am quite sure that in a few years time, my opinions will change but these are my opinions and you don't have to agree with them. You just have to understand that even as I write this piece, I am learning something new about myself and that for me, is better than gold.
What does poetry mean to you?
Sorry to miss this when you posted it, I have not been spending so much time online the last few weeks.
There is nothing naïve about your description of what poetry means to you, it was beautiful to read your words, the poetry that you write is amazing, in my eyes anyway.
I would like to answer this also, hope you don't mind me writing a post about it as I think I have a bit to say.
I hope you are well my friend, looking forward to more of your writing xxxxx
Oh I don't mind you writing about it. I'm always curious to know what writers think about their craft. I enjoyed reading your post and I even grasp what you mean about writing from a dark place. I began writing in the same way and those elements still linger in my writing.
May the healing continue for all of us. I too have been offline busy with family affairs. Thank you for the gift. I'm grateful for your love.
Love and light
Osahon.