[Rhina P. Espaillat]

I've been wondering for decades now why it is that in the United States it seems crucial to poets to define and define and define what they do, not in order to see it more clearly or do it better, but in order to be certain of whom to include among themselves, and whom to exclude. In Latin America and in Spain, to the best of my knowledge, that drawing of a "line in the sand" has never seemed useful, much less imperative. In fact, the common situation is for the same poet to write both formal and free verse, often in the same book, without making any bones about it, explaining it, or feeling that there is anything about it that requires explanation. Borges wrote both, and both very, very well, and it would not occur to anyone I can think of that his free verse is really prose in disguise. That each reader may have a preference for reading one or the other, in general or in the work of a specific poet, is another matter, but has that kind of "line in the sand" really done much for poetry, for our capacity to understand one another, or for our power to beguile one another into the enjoyment of--and experimentation with--whatever it is we love and would like to share? I suspect Nyctom is right:
showing formal verse to people who think they don't like it, and encouraging them to try it for the sheer playful joy of it, works better than telling them that what they've been writing so far is prose--which often has the added disadvantage of being untrue, as when the poet is Stanley Kunitz, or Jorge Luis Borges, or a great many others I can think of who happen to write in a way that I don't write in but can admire in the work of others. The other approach--defining the work of others in ways that shuts them out of where they themselves believe they are--simply raises hackles and shuts ears that we might open through persuasion. If a definition shuts out of the category of "Poetry" that which FEELS like poetry to the mind and sense, because it does something with perceived reality that prose doesn't normally do, and touches something in the reader that prose doesn't normally touch, by whatever means, then it's the definition that needs changing, not the written work.