My Final Definition

Poetry (n.): A Trick of Light

When I first began this semester of exploration, my definition of poetry was this: '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. Poems can make us laugh, cry, and get to the meaning of what is truly important in life. 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.' That is a large, grand definition for a word that is so important to me. Yet throughout these few months, I have come to find that exploration of poetry is one way of also discovering myself and my world as a writer. In September, I thought I knew what a poem was. Now I am aware that I am on a journey with words and my definition of poetry continues to grow and change as I read and live and write. Today, my definition of poetry is 'the unspoken truth.'

For the first day of class, I chose the poem “I Go Back to May 1937” by one of my favorite poets, Sharon Olds. It was hard for me to pick a favorite poem but I would say Olds' work has always been, and will remain, a body I connect with deeply. Her work speaks to me because she writes about subjects that resonate, such as love, childhood and parents, and she writes with a breathless vibrance that immediately makes me forget where I am. Her style – free verse, unrhymed, experimental in language and form – was essentially my definition of poetry. I considered metered and rhyming poetry as the kidney stones of poetry, something I could do without. This resistance came from years of badly-taught poetry in elementary and middle school, as metered verse was all we discussed and wrote ourselves. Once I realized as a senior in high school that there was such thing as free verse, a kind of poetry I could inhale and glean such strong emotion from, I didn't look back. I barely gave formed poetry a second glance – I just wanted freestyle. However, based on our studies, I soon realized I had overlooked a vital facet of the poetry realm.

Each poem we studied added a new facet of what poetry means to me, a sort of collection of wisdom nuggets. Each poet brought new words to love, new ideals to challenge me and a different way of looking at process, form and what it means to create. First, the classic and wonderfully bold Emily Dickinson, who is widely read and, in my opinion, misunderstood, taught me to slow down and appreciate what I would deem “historical poetry.” Her structured verses, often short and contained, with smart, snappy rhymes, were rich with wisdom and meaning when dug through. She showed me that rhyming poetry is not stupid and worthless, as I had once (ashamedly) thought. In fact, rhyming poetry takes more effort because a certain form must be followed, thought about, then appear as effortless. Her poem “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers” taught me that more formally structured poetry can be incredibly deep and full of life. While Dickinson may have lived as a recluse for most of her life, what her poetry brought to the world has lasted for over a century and should not be ignored. I have a newfound respect for poetry with form, because it tackles the same sorts of ideas as unrhymed poetry, while being beautiful to the ear and the eye in a different way from the unformed verse.

A second teacher who added to my definition of poetry was guest poet Peter Fallon. During his talk, Fallon said, “There was a time when I thought I would learn how to write poems – with practice – but you don't know anything when you start again. If you're lucky, you try to finish.” This spoke to the ungraspable nature of poems, and how not even poets can quite put their fingers on what it means to be a poem. The definition is there, spelled out, after the long, muddled search that is writing. A poet must write and write and rewrite in order to “find” the poem amidst a world of language and when one does, it is easy to read and say, there – that's poetry. Fallon reminds us that there is no set formula for poetry, that a poem can appear in so many different ways, and that when one does find that magic combination of words to create something meaningful out of them, it makes all the searching worth it.

I learned from Anne Sexton, the poet I researched in-depth for my individual poetry project, that almost any subject in life can make a great poem. Sexton struggled to be happy for most of her short life, and while she spent much of her time feeling suicidal, her poems reflect the moments in which she really lived – and they are such simple, relatable moments. In “The Fortress,” Sexton writes of taking a nap with her daughter and the reader gets a picture of a daughter's bare feet on a mother's back – a simple pleasure, but one that tugs at an undefinable chord in the human core, a moment that shimmers with life when put into a poem, and a moment worth freezing in time because the language catches the essential reality of the human spirit. Sexton writes poetry as it should be written: real.

From Czeslaw Milosz, an deceased Polish poet, I learned that poetry can make a difference not just for one reader, but for large masses of people. Milosz used his beautiful poetry to capture the feeling of war and much of his poems are subtle political messages without being too preachy. While the poems that used to stick with me were the ones I related to, the ones about eating cereal in a blue bowl while the cat goes around your ankles, Milosz helped me to realize that poetry can be a pleasure to read and also be life-changing. Poets are given such a wide, powerful platform; why not use it to do some good? Why not write poetry that will aid in the spread of comfort, change or justice?

Finally, I learned that poetry can come in so many different forms and still twist that same hidden chord I have come to love. We have studied a wide variety of poems this semester but there is a quality of life and necessity about each one that works; Jena Osman's “Dropping Leaflets” was put together from old 9/11 articles but it contains just as much momentum and feeling as Emily Dickinson's classic, rhymed and dashed poem “I Am Nobody, Who are You?” When I say poetry is an unspoken truth, I mean that it serves to put a finger on life – to capture it in time, on a page, to preserve something as small as a man looking out his window or as large as World War II. Poetry aims to present the world to readers as it should be seen and to also reveal the secrets of life everyone wishes they could put into words but never had words for. These secrets of time are what poets spend their lives searching to find the right words – they are the truth-tellers who take years to capture what we as humans fail to say with the tongue alone. In the opening of Against Forgetting, Carolyn Forche sums up why it is we need poetry: “If we have not, if we do not, what, in the end, have we become? And if we do not, what, in the end, shall we be?” (47). In the end, we must write poems and we must read them, if only to remember why it is that we exist. We must write to tell the truth, because who are we without words to help define our lives? Who are we not to search them out in the late night in order to remind another soul at a kitchen table feeling hopelessly lost that he is not alone? The words tell him that there is someone else who took the time to name his unspeakable core – someone else who feels it, too.