I+Guess+It+Is+Poetry

I got the idea for this post in another topic that was being discussed. In the topic "Define It" I described the Simpsons episode where Moe the bartender becomes a poet because Lisa rearranges a bunch of little phrases that Moe had lying around. The funny part about this was that Moe just accepted the fact that he was a poet without questioning Lisa. She called the phrases she threw together a poem and the rest of society believed it. I was just curious as to how many of you believe that if you say a piece of writing is a poem, then it is a poem. We discussed this in class and someone brought up, "Well, then my journals for religion are poetry!" And Br. Tom asked something very intriguing, "Are they your own ideas and thought put down onto the page or are they notes?" I think that this makes a lot of difference when deciding if something is a poem or not, the fact that it was your thoughts being put on the page. I know that almost everything you write our your thoughts. Heck, this post is all of my thoughts, but I do not believe it is poetry. So, help! How do you feel about believing something is poetry just because someone else says it is? 1204086456

If you had asked me that question at a previous point in my life, I would have told you never. I used to disregard any form of poetry that did not follow a strict formula. As I have grown older, I have grudgingly accepted that blank verse, free verse, and other unrhyming, loosely styled forms of poetry can be poetry because my view was simply too limited. There is no other word to describe them. But I still believe that we have to draw a line in the sand, somewhere. Here's why.

In class, we discussed the purpose of words. They are supposed to be relative - that is, they must relate to a specific idea that we have. And they are also supposed to have some inner meaning all too themselves when put together. When looking at an indvidual word, however, only the first applies. My word is "poem." What is a poem? We know what a pencil is. It is a cylinder filled with graphite. The pencil that we see may be different from the one that is produced, but we would still recognize the product as a pencil. The word "pencil" relates back to this graphite cylinder. But if the word poem means anything that we want it to, then it loses that quality. We can no longer know what somebody means when somebody says the word poem. It could be anything, even your religion journals. The word is useless. I want to keep the integrity of that word. I want that word to relate to something. Thus we need to define it. It's okay that your religion journals aren't poems; that does not make them any less valuable. If we define our terms, then the word poem would be a lot more meaningful. 1204092374

I think that if anything can be a poem as long as you say it is that people will go to the extremes--is a book poetry just because I say it is? No. Poetry has to be defined to some degree even if the definition is extremely broad, right? In class a couple of weeks ago, Br. Tom said that someone (the name escapes my memory) defined poetry to be, "The kind of attention that is different from the kind of attention prose receives." Even though this definition is very broad, it is still clear that poetry has to contain words and receive a different attention than what prose writing receives. Does anyone else agree with this definition? 1204140564

I think it's more of accepting the actuall piece as a poem, not thinking that it is. If you accept it, you're respecting the writer's wishes. I don't think it matters how the poem looks, sounds, or is spelled out... it's still poetry because they said it is. I wouldn't doubt original ideas placed on paper. As long as they're organic, they have meaning to the writer, and the writer claims it is a poem, I'll accept it as poetry. Cdu, I don't think that you caught on. It's if the writer states it is a poem, we must accept it as a poem. Of course, someone cannot look at the Declaration of Independence and title it poetry. It must be the orignial writer that states what it is. 1204148111

I agree with Beth. It’s all about the writer’s intent. If the writer intends it to be a poem than it has only two other criteria to meet in my book. Does it have some form of written communication, like words, and does it communicate some type of experience or message. I like the broad definition of poetry to be writing that requires different attention than the attention that prose requires. I don’t think that we have to define what poetry is and what it isn’t. I mean, poetry is an extremely personal form of literature anyway. I think everyone has their own right to define poetry however they want. That is one of the good things about poetry, is that it is so broad and yet so personal. I think if we create a set definition for poetry then we will miss some of the meaning in poetry. In some ways it is necessary to define poetry but in a lot of cases the definition should be very broad and loose. 1204155079

I do think poetry has to have some kind of form, no matter how minute. I don't think you can "define" poetry, per se, but I think that there has to be some sort of structure. For instance, if someone keeps a diary where they write down their thoughts about the events that occured during their day, I don't exactly think that would be considered poetry. In my mind, those are merely notes about the events of someone's life. Someone could just as easily take those notes, however, and turn them into a poem by giving them some kind of structure or pattern. I'm not saying that they have to rhyme or anything, but I do think they have to resemble some kind of pattern in order to be a poem. 1204162969

I don't think what other people say has any bearing on whether something is poetry: if you believe that it is, then it is, and if you don't, then it isn't. Poetry is all about the mindset that you are in when you are writing: if you are actively trying to write a poem, then whatever you write will be poetry. It does not matter whether or not the poem is good or bad: what is on the paper will be a poem. The same is true of the opposite: if you sit down and write a school essay, then that essay is not poetry because your intent was to write an essay, not poetry. Other people have no right to deem a piece of writing poetry or not: only the author has the right to do that. 1204245970

I have always believed that worrying too much about classification for things is pointless, and that it is time that should be spent understanding the poem (or not poem) that you are reading. But really I think that poetry is partically up the writer and partially up to the reader. If you are writing something, or have written something and you think that its poetry, then it is. I don't see how it could be anything else, if you create something that is new and unique how can anyone else tell you that it is not what you say it is. On the other hand if someone reads something and believes that it is poetry, then why not. If people can find a deeper poetic meaning to something and think that it is poetry then it is. I don't know art, but I know what I like. I think that poetry, like any art, is in the eye of the beholder. It means whatever it means to you, and nothing else and nobody else should be able to tell you that you're wrong. 1204259386

I think also that when someone goes to write something that before they place the pen on the paper, they have in mind if something is poetry or prose. This, I believe is what decides the classification of a work of writing. I agree with JKo that we spend too much time trying to classify things, because we are not the authors of these works of art and we do not know their original intentions. In response to SZD's original comment about religion journals and are they poetry because they express your thoughts and emotions. I would have to say no they are strictly prose. I agree with dsu on this issue. Ialso have to write journals for religion and I know that when I sit down at my computer to type, I am typing strictly prose because that is what I have sat down to do and that is what my mind set is. I'm not sure if this really makes sense to anyone else, but it makes sense to me and I hope it could help Szd. 1205409426

I agree with TRu about the integrity of the word "poem." If we just start calling anything and everything a poem, when someone mentions that they have written a poem, you will have no idea what he comes out with. It could be a short story with choppy sentences, it could be a limerick, it could be an essay, or even a speech. If there is no specific definition, how are we to know what a poem really is? It's kind of like Pope's "Essay on Criticism" -- he calls it an essay, but is it really? I don't think so, it's a poem to me. Just because the author says that it's something, does it make it true? If I said that there was a monkey crossing the road, and everybody else says that it's a deer, does it mean that it's a monkey because I said it is? Does it mean that everybody else should think it's a monkey because I said it's a monkey? No. I say that there should be a more distinct definition for a poem because there will never be a clear distinction between branches of literature if someone didn't come up with a definition. 1205456953