What Is Poetry, Really?
In the United States, a lot of us grow up thinking Shakespeare, Wordsworth, maybe Bukowski, and a handful of others are the poets. Poetry becomes a narrow literary genre with prescribed forms and sanctioned voices.But poetry also exists as linguistic happenings that live freely outside of books. Why does the word “poet” conjure up a sonnet-writing turtleneck and not a reflective-vest garbageman howling hymns through the street at six in the morning? I prefer to view poetry as performance, as something that is always happening for the first time.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge said poetry is “the best words in the best order.” I don’t think the best word or the best order exists—partly because we can’t objectively classify a word as good or bad, and partly because the words we use to describe how we interpret the world were made by other people and communities in the first place.
So it feels like a waste of time to write what others think is poetry. Better to view poetry as something that happens around us—something we can collectively read and interact with.
Richard Hugo has a line I love:
“Writing has to do with being in love with your own responses to things.”
Poetry, then, is a medium in which an individual channels their interpretation of the world. But because language is imperfect, the translation from thought to word can never be direct. When we read others’ work, we’re always leaving room for an interpretation of an interpretation. If that’s the point of the poem, great. If not, it’s worth looking closely at how writer intention and reader interpretation actually meet.
Context Is the Other Half of the Poem
How much control does an author really have over the context in which their text is read?Reading a recipe for blueberry pancakes in the kitchen versus reading that same recipe at an open-mic poetry night has a completely different effect (somebody should do this, by the way). When the reader of a text isn’t in the same context the author imagined, the effect of the words shifts.
If we want to show readers our responses to the world, how do we close the gap of miscommunication? How do we bring writer intention and reader interpretation into a closer, more interesting relationship?
For me, poetry is an experience that occurs in a shared context between producer and receiver. When we are part of a shared moment with others, the function of language changes. It stops being just a tool for individual expression and becomes a medium for shared interpretation of the moment in front of us.
So maybe I’d adjust Hugo’s quote to:
“Writing is falling in love with the way language lets you interpret the world with others.”
Writing as Listening to Yourself
As I see it, we don’t really produce poetry; we receive or interpret it. That goes for the language and feelings inside our bodies too. The methods we use to turn feelings into language are ways of listening to ourselves. Writing is not the creation of poetry from nothing; it’s (to steal from Einstein) transitioning one form of energy into another.Some feelings and images are easy to access. Others are buried deeper and need to be triggered. The deeper ones are usually more interesting.
One exercise I use is what I call the crazy room. It’s a kind of meditation where you chant words and phrases over and over until they turn into something. It helps create a flow of energy—images and feelings—that I later mediate through editing, like carving organs from a slab of marble.
When you free yourself from “message” and the restraints of what’s supposed to sound “poetic,” and you let the language come first, inner feelings tend to surface more naturally. The message and symbols usually reveal themselves in the edit.
Someone once said we are always trying to write the same poem. Maybe they meant we’re always trying to understand ourselves. Writing from the bottom up—with emphasis on phrases, words, and sounds—rather than from an idea or thesis gives us a chance to listen to our inner language. The crazy room is a way to start with language and trust that your body will use it to communicate with you.
We Are All Poets
If I were to encourage someone to write poetry, I’d start here: we are all poets.Every time we receive language, we are engaging in a time-and-space-specific language happening that belongs uniquely to us. We should trust our own ways of seeing. Our minds don’t lie to us. All interpretations are valid.
Whenever we use language, it has never been used in that exact way, in that exact moment, before. It has a new meaning and is happening for the first time. That’s worth recognizing and celebrating.
Equally important: there is no such thing as Poetry with a capital P. Don’t try to create it—because that will always be someone else’s definition, someone else’s interpretation of the world.
Just record how you interpret the world, and the poetry will show up later.