What is Poetry Anyway?

I have been thinking this week – what exactly is poetry? How do we define it? It’s something I have often pondered. To me, it’s like an elusive mist - an illusion that takes a myriad of forms, which are all dependant on who is reading the poem at the time.

Can poetry ever be defined, labelled, pigeon-holed, or shoe-horned into a category? One thing I’ve noticed is the human obsession to label – to make sense of things and make them fit neatly. We have to have a reason for everything, and an explanation of it. But poetry simply refuses to put on its name badge, and I love it for this.

I think for different poets, poetry means different things. Poetry has evolved through the centuries, and is still evolving. We can trace poetry back into the furthest depths of time in its primitive forms. So it seems, as humans - as intelligent beings, we have more than a love of poetry, we have a real need of it.

So coming to this conclusion, I thought about what poetry means to me, and why I write it. Poetry is emotional – plain and simple. We can laugh at the clichéd image of the depressed poet, with his black polo neck, dark glasses and regular visits to the smoke-filled poetry reading club in the basement: spewing out his awful poetry to an audience pretending to understand his ‘high-brow’ ramblings; but I don’t mean emotional in this way. I mean that poetry is evocative. It brings the shadow of an emotion, thought, feeling or idea to the surface.

I don’t presume to call myself a poet, because I have a monumental respect for poets. Every time I read a good poem, I feel a high that no short-story or novel has ever given me. I feel a truth and a beauty that, in my opinion, only poetry can access. It’s as close to reality as any form of writing will ever take me.

So I don’t know how the accomplished poets feel, but for me, if I write a poem and one person, just one, reads it and tells me that they felt something, that it touched upon a feeling that they thought no one else had felt or could explain, then that’s where I see the awesome power of poetry.