[Clay Stockton]

I also prefer to distinguish between verse and prose, but I think a little more can be said about what makes some verse (and some prose) poetry.

A smart professor of mine (who, it has to be noted, preferred to oppose prose not to verse but to poetry) told our class one day that "in prose, the basic unit of meaning is the sentence, whereas in poetry, it is the word."

Now, I don't take that as gospel truth, and I know there are all sorts of holes one can poke in it, but I find it to be a useful comment because it gets at the way poetry and prose focus attention differently.

I think that the conversation about what makes poetry poetry and not something else probably starts with a description of how poetry distinctively focuses a reader's attention, manipulates her expectations, and marshals her powers of memorization. All of which is waaay harder to describe than line-breaks, but more grounded in observable and describable mechanics (and, as Alicia pointed out, more unique to poetry) than the mimicking of consciousnesses.

Of course, I'm not smart enough to get specific about how any of this works. But I thought I'd put my two cents out there because I couldn't remember anyone mentioning attention or even memory in any of these poetry v. prose discussions. The discussion always seems to come back to "poetry is very good verse," but we never say what we mean by "good." Speaking very provisionally, I think that good verse is that which directs a reader's attention to the, for lack of a better term, "multivalence" of its individual words; creates and then thwarts a reader's expectations; and (here I'm on really thin ice) effortlessly triggers a reader's process of memorization.

I guess I think this explains why nearly all poets, even those averse to Murphy-style feats of memorization, have untold numbers of poem-fragments lodged in their heads. The fragments are those parts of poems that surprised them with the fitness of their wording, which is to say, the beauty, and therefore were gathered into their memories.

--CS

Originally posted by A. E. Stallings:
Well, a basic working definition is that verse is written in lines. The problem with "poems" for me is prose poems, which are certainly not verse. I prefer to think of them as lyric paragraphs...

[Mark Allinson]

Here are some further thoughts on what constitutes poetry, from various folk.


Poetry aims to combine instruction with pleasure.

- Horace.


A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness ...

- Robert Frost


The poet ... brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

- William Wordsworth


Mere air, these words, but delicious to hear.

- Sappho


In poetry you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

- Wallace Stevens

There is another world and it is this one.

- Paul Eluard


If I read and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as though the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know. Is there any other way.

- Emily Dickinson


Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.

- Octavia Paz


There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This siezes a tender virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry, glorifying the countless mighty deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. But if any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found.

- Plato, Phaedrus


Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions that consciousness wishes to slide by.

- CK Williams


The purpose of poetry is to remind us
How difficult it is to remain just one person,
For our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
And invisible guests come in and out at will.

- Cszelaw Milosz, "Ars Poetica"


Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

- Marianne Moore


For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem - a thought so passionate and alive, that like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own and adorns nature with a new thing.

- Emerson


Wonder - is not precisely Knowing
And not precisely Knowing not -
A beautiful but bleak condition
He has not lived who has not felt -

- Emily Dickinson



[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited December 08, 2005).]

[Daniel Haar]

'I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cries-cross in the same way.-And I shall say: 'games' form a family.' - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Just replace "games" with "poetry" and that would work well enough.

[A. E. Stallings]

An interesting discussion!

Speaking of poet-critics: The greatest essay that deals with this and related questions (what is poetry? What is the difference between poetry and mere verse?) is, to my mind, Housman's The Name and Nature of Poetry, which everyone here should read if they haven't already done so. It touches on all the issues we have touched on, and is wide-ranging besides. It is also a delightful specimen of excellent prose.

I was going to quote the famous passage (which I shall do below), but also this:

"When one begins to discuss the nature of poetry, the first impediment in the way is the inherent vagueness of the name, and the number of its legitimate senses. It is not bad English to speak of 'prose and poetry' in the sense of 'prose and verse'. But it is wasteful; it squanders a valuable word by stretching it to fit a meaning which is accurately expressed by a wider term. . . . the name of poetry is generally restricted to verse which can at least be called literature, though it may differ from prose only in its metrical form, and be superior to prose only in the superior comeliness of that form itself, and the superior terseness which usually goes along with it."

Housman comes to confess, however:

"Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognised the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connexion with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: 'A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up.' Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats's last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, 'everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear'. The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach."

[Gregory Dowling]

Thanks, Mark, for bringing together all those definitions. And of course the Housman is wonderful too.

Here's one from James Fenton, which I've always found helpful:

"The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the phrase 'heightened speech'. Poetry is language to which a special emphasis has been given, whether by paring it down and arranging it pleasingly on the page, in lines whose length may be baffling to all but the poet, or by the traditional means which include:

raising the voice in order to be heard above the crowd;
raising the voice in order to demonstrate its beauty and power;
chanting the words;
reciting the words rhythmically;
punctuating the units of speech (what will become the lines of the poem) with rhymes;
setting the words to tunes;
setting the words to tunes and singing them in unison, as in a drinking song."

[nyctom]

When requested to give a definition of "jazz," Louis Armstrong replied, "If you have to ask, you just don't have it."

Extrapolate wildly.

[Terese Coe]

Michael, it's true the writing is Cameron's and it's certainly turgid, but I'm not sure why it matters that he is part of a think tank. I'm grateful to the author for the series of quotations, which absorbed me to the exclusion of the byline. The hunter as prey, for example, is a revealing metaphor for the artist.

The examination of what can be transmitted in translation seems accurate as well, though I'm not sure how useful it is to the translator.

Trying to define a state of consciousness has always seemed to me a losing battle, but again I appreciate the presentation of this list as rasa, yugen, duende, lachrimae, and so on for whatever value one can derive from it. None of it is particularly definable, or perhaps I don't want them to be definable. Cameron's attempt may be even more futile than the act of writing a poem, but it's the search that is provocative. I imagine someone else could examine the same quotes with far more lucidity, but I doubt it's the think tank interfering with his capacity to communicate.

What piqued my curiosity most (and I find it odd Cameron does not mention the Geshe's name or book, if there is a book: I'd like to see what else the latter wrote about "poetry") was the concept of poem as transmission of consciousness, and only Alicia commented on that at all. Considering the amount of time and energy that has been devoted to the attempt to define a poem, I feel the Geshe (or more likely, his tradition) has struck a vein there. Too bad we are given no clues as to its origin—as Cameron doesn't seem to want anyone else to know! That to me is the weirdest fact on his page.

Consciousness may be as indefinable as a poem, but at least it's a clue, and a penetrating one. Valuable because it leads to further explorations.

[Gregory Dowling]

Tom, the way I heard it, it was Fats Waller who was asked what "Swing" was: "Lady, if you got to ask, you aint got it."

[nyctom]

Hmm, that jazz website must have gotten wrong. Thank you for the correction.

Ah well, it seems like a good day for Jack Teagarden and a big mug of hot chocolate. That's poetry too!

[Rose Kelleher]

poetry is the science of using words in such a way that a state of consciousness present in one is summoned in another.

The other problem I have with this definition, besides its being applicable to prose as well as poetry, is that not all poetry is intended to replicate a state of consciousness "present in" the poet. Maybe the poet intends to create a whole new, unique state of consciousness that never existed before the poem existed.