What a fascinating conversation this is, on "what makes it a poem"! The fact that it can't really have any one answer makes no difference: what's important is that so much of value has been said, challenged and explored. I'm especially drawn to Richard Wakefield's "turning in 3 dimensions," because it echoes something that I've always felt and told my students: that poetry is a place where 3 roads meet. Those 3 roads have something in common with Graywyvern's "yugen," "calliditas" and "melopoeia," but they're not exactly the same. The poems that reach me at once and stay with me for life are those that join music--language used for the sake of pleasing the ear--with image--the visible made real in a way that makes the ordinary not quite what it was before--with a kind of short-cut in communication that makes me feel I've been spoken to directly, maybe by someone who lived hundreds of years ago.
A poem that works completely that way makes you feel wide awake, not just intellectually but physically, the way music does when you stand up on the dance floor to dance to it.
In fact, that's how I decide something is poetry: when it feels like that to a degree beyond the ability of prose to do so, even if it doesn't look metrically regular on the page, even if I can't scan it or recognize at once the devices that have been used to create the effect, even if it's not at all like what I write, I call that poetry. What Peter Richards calls "transportation from the ordinary" is part of that, an invitation to look at something you thought you knew intimately and see how strange it is, or conversely--as Coleridge says--how familiar something you thought "exotic" turns out to be.
Either way, it's the surprise that makes it poetry, the sense that you have not yet "seen everything," that the world can still seem new. As for the devices used to achieve
that, don't they depend on the poet's temperament, educa-tion, preferences, ear, experiences? I agree that everyone who wants to write ought to learn all of the tools other poets have used, and practice using them, because knowing more can only make him better at what he does, but whether what he builds is a poem or not doesn't depend on the tools he uses, but on the structure itself. If he can do it with a nail file, 3 toothpicks and a can-opener and it works--on the ear and the mind and imagination, I mean--isn't that valid?
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