Poetry: n; (1) any literary form that is not prose.

I know that
your passion cannot be constrained by
automatic word wrap.

But
It isn’t poetry
simply because the lines don’t reach
the end of the page.

It was the bad war poetry that finally did it. I know it’s verboten to mock Americans’ first experience with grief in a generation. And the bad poetry is part of the ‘national healing process’—it’s therapeutic, we’re told. But we’re talking about stuff I wouldn’t show even my therapist.

Once upon a time, poets invented forms that employed or exposed peculiarities of language. It was the difficulties of the forms that laid down the rules of the game and defined poetry. Some forms required rhyme; most defined certain patterns of meter. The richly toned Vietnamese language allowed the possibility of tonal echoes of words throughout a work, and the vogue for Vietnamese court poetry in the eighteenth century was for double meanings to be encoded backwards and diagonally through the poem, which was written in a grid. These backward echoes could be manipulated to create a second interpretation for the whole poem, and poets who could make the explicit text an elegant metaphor for the subtext were celebrated.

Modern authors frequently lament that these rules are arbitrary and confining. They restrict creativity, they whine. But restrictions aren’t all bad: they give a poem a trellis to grow on, and moreover they demand a facility with language. Would-be poets can’t simply stick in the first word that comes to mind (or that rhymes with ‘kiss’); instead every word must be considered because every syllable is restricted by its neighbors above and below; every foot must fall appropriately. In this way the imagery is forced to stretch, and allegory extends beyond the facile and ham-handed metaphors of the quotidian. There is more to it than repeatedly jarring the reader’s brain with 1 1/2-pica falls,
thump
            thump
                        thump
                                     to the next line.

It’s a natural corollary of the contemporary obsession with equality that causes this ignorance of form and leads to the assumption that poetry is a matter of genius or inspiration. Since all writers are equal, the situation and not the observer must define poetry. Thoughts spoken are conversation; thoughts with headlines are journalism; thoughts with line breaks are poetry. A good poem thus leaps fully formed from the forehead of the poet, just below where the divine ray of inspiration strikes. If a poem is, as Willian Carlos Williams said, “a machine made out of words”, this is like shaking a paper bag full of machine parts and expecting a turbine to fall out.

This isn’t how poetry is written. Poetry is hard work. Expressing simple thoughts is easy, and we do it all day long. It’s made easier yet because a word choice with deviation from the speaker’s actual intent is insignificant; it doesn’t matter to the judge whether you ran or fled after stealing that lobster from a restaurant. He looks at your statement from only one perspective. All the permutations of word with their shades of meaning are flattened into one general idea. This is useful in everyday life; interestingly, it reduces miscommunication. But in a poem these slight differences can be combined to create meaning.

As any shady jeweler knows, a flaw in the raw material can be hidden if a rock is viewed from only one angle. But poetry is held up to the light and considered from every perspective. A poet must consider how light reflects from each connotation of every chosen word—it’s the only means by which he can convey his crystallized thought to a reader. When he’s done, if he has produced a poem, it is something worth being warmed by the cupped hand and considered in clarity, color, and cut.

Good poetry, like any synthesis, is hard work. It requires more work than telling a friend at the mall that you’re “like, totally bummed about those two towers in New York”. But if it demands more than does a cocktail party conversation, the rewards are concomitantly greater. A good poem communicates a personal perception yet evokes sympathy in the reader. It is communication concentrated: a good poem might express in a dozen lines an idea that would take exhaustive pages of prose yet is too delicate to tolerate volumes of text. It is an opportunity for a writer meticulous and knowledgeable to distill pure experience and offer it up to the reader.