Definitions of Undefinables

 When asked to define poetry, I think every person would have a different idea. To state the obvious, poetry is words arranged on paper. Emily Dickinson knew a poem was a poem when “it made [her] body so cold no fire could ever warm [her]” (Flanagan). Every classmate on Tuesday had their own opinions as to what constituted poetry. For me, poetry defines the undefinable – it says what cannot be said by taking the deepest feelings or ideas closest to the human core and attempting to define them. How does one begin to express the kind of love in a lifelong friendship? The death of a grandparent? The firsthand effects of a bloody war? A poet certainly tries to put into words those most important feelings and experiences, so that a reader can look into a poem and say, there – I've felt that, too.

Poetry itself is not a new concept. For centuries, poetry has been written and shared and felt deeply, and while it has evolved and grown, there are fundamentals about poetry that I believe stay the same. The goal of poetry is to make the reader feel emotion, to approach life in a new way, to see the world at a different angle. Poetry shares the poet's personal experiences and differences but also connects people in new ways and gets to the heart of the human mind and soul. Most poems address or create within the reader some type of emotion – sadness, anger, love, hate, peace. They are expressions of life lived and I believe that anyone who has experienced life is qualified to write a poem. Poetry is often viewed by unfamiliar readers as an elevated form of writing that is almost untouchable, that only the very important are able to understand and think about and create, but human experience in itself is poetry. Poetry can get down to the bones of life in the simplest of ways. There are so many different ways to write and view poetry, and so there is a poem for everyone, a poem each person can connect with on some level.

A poet that I connect with deeply is Sharon Olds. She is a contemporary writer known for her accessible poems and she writes about everything from her parents and kids to sex to her earliest childhood memories – she even has a poem about a pet hamster. She takes the simplest parts of life and creates gorgeous poems with them. Because of this, her poems are easy to understand and accessible to the common reader. It is hard to name why her work resonates with me so much but I think it is the depth of emotion she uses for each piece, while not masking the idea with flowery or strange language and form. She doesn't say things in a round-about or confusing way – she writes the truth, plain and simple, but beautifully.

While I have never experienced a troubled childhood, or childbirth or a lot of the topics she chooses to write about, I can still relate to her poems and feel them very deeply because whatever emotion she has put inside them – the beauty of a sunset, how it feels to love a person, the loss of a pet – comes through to my experience in life. To be able to make a connection with a reader one has never met is what, in my eyes, makes a good poet. The other reason I connect to her poetry is that I have always loved language and its experimental forms. I love stumbling upon new ways of saying something, I love rolling the sounds of words around on my tongue and I love reading and being read to aloud. Her poems are rich in their manner of language, in how she chooses to describe objects around her, relationships, a walk in the park. It is the beauty and connection I feel to language that also makes Olds a delight to read for me.

Olds' poem “I Go Back to May 1937” was what I chose to share with the class. It is one of my favorites, not only for its descriptive language such as “tiles like bent plates of blood,” but because Olds' has taken the concept of a troubled childhood and transformed it through new eyes, through the eyes of her parents first meeting. I believe that shifts like these are what make poetry exciting and real.

In conclusion, poetry says what we as humans have trouble expressing. Poems can make us laugh, cry, and get to the meaning of what is truly important in life. They say the unsayable. They take that summer night when you were nineteen and kissing the very first boy you ever let stick a tongue down your mouth and they let you feel it on the page; the sweat dripping down his shoulder, the corn whispering behind you, the curled love there in your stomach; the same kind of love in all those words.