What is a poem? (a partial discussion)

 

What is a poem?

      Foolishly, I want to give this question a shot.

It’s a marvel that after some 4,000 years of poetry (and thinking about poetry), and  millions of poems that this question remains largely unsettled, is still contentious and seems to reside on a slippery philosophical slope.  There is about this the quality of “trying to nail down water”, but it seems via the common experience that we all share (in one sense or another) with poems and our collective ability to identify poetry on sight or on sound doesn’t make it more definable, but maybe has made it less so. However, I  think (on some optimistic days) that poetry and the poem can be defined.

     Poet Kaveh Akbar recently tweeted:

1)     “Mary Leader once told me ‘a poem is a thing.’ That’s still my favorite

definition, the narrowest definition I’m willing to accept. Anything else is needlessly excluding someone.”

     And later he tweeted (after an online covfefe tweet thread):    

2)    “If someone hands me a bag of dirt and tells me it’s a poem,

 it gets to be a poem. It might not be a poem that satisfies me intellectually or brings me any delight, I may not want to spend much time with it, but it’s a poem because the person who built it called it a poem.”

     These are definitions of “poem” with which I must take issue.  I would call them careless, sort of “cutesy” definitions which do not adequately take things seriously and that make claims without bothering to reason about their topic.  (Of course, they are only Tweets, so how seriously do they need to be taken?  Otherwise, it would be a kind of devaluation of thought and scholarship to make such claims, a reductio ad absurdum.  Also, I’m unsure who gets to decide what “gets to be a poem”, but it requires more than snap judgement).

     Regarding claim 1)  “a poem is a thing”, my counter example is “(the universe is a thing, a poem is a thing, therefore) the universe is a poem”.  This seems to me an analytically false assertion.  Though I might argue that the universe is a poem in some metaphorical sense, this is really not helpful in defining “poem”.  It seems to me that random or cosmic processes outside the scope of human control (i.e. the universe) are by definition not poems.  At a minimum, poetry and poems rely on humans and human consciousness to exist.  Therefore, if something can arise and exist independent of human beings, it is not poetry or a poem. We do live and study in a human context, it would seem.  Poems, I think, do not occur randomly in nature or as geological results. Each poem is the work of a human (or humans).   An example: the Biblical Creation (if true) is not a poem. But the Bible’s account of Creation may be a poem.

     Claim 2), “a bag of dirt is a poem” is a proposition that seems to be a bit more persuasive. A bag of dirt results from human action.  A bag is a human fabrication, is filled by a human with dirt excavated by a human and it takes a human to make a (symbolic) claim to the effect that the bag of dirt is a poem.  The bag of dirt as poem fulfills the requirement of interaction with human consciousness, so why would it not be a poem if so stated?

     For one thing, stating that something is true (i.e. that a bag of dirt is a poem) does not make it true. Akbar’s bag of dirt claim is not universally, nor even micro-marginally recognized as true. It ignores all previously accepted definitions of poetry and snipes outward with a devalued, insulting metaphor for the poem.  Aside from that, the bag of dirt claim seems to be saying that anything created by a person can be claimed to be a poem. I rapidly disagree.

     Even so, the bag of dirt as poem claim needs to be countered in some kind of meaningful way. What does minimally qualify as a poem?  People have struggled with this question as far back as we know (and likely, beyond).  But I am prepared to make some conditional statements that advance us beyond the dirt bag poem.

     First, the primacy of human consciousness has to be a given as essential in the definition of the poem. Although we can argue for parallel processes to the poem to exist, as in bird song, bird calls, dolphin and whale songs and utterances and perhaps other corollaries in the natural world of fauna; classification of these creatures’ sonic and compositional phenomena as poems is a stretch. I’ll just say that the consciousness of parrots and dolphins with respect to poetry is beyond my scope here.

     I think that a poem can be located only in the consciousness of a human, in a human’s memory, in an utterance by a human or the consciousness of someone hearing / perceiving a poem and can be represented as an artifact created by a human (on a page, in a file, as a stone carving, or in other media). The agency of a poem’s creation is human consciousness – the poem is a phenomena arising therein.  (The universe and a bag of dirt do not qualify in this way.)

     Additionally, representations of a poem in text and in media are not the poem itself, but only signifiers of the poem.  The phenomena of the poem is the poem, I think.  The poem itself issues from and recurs within human consciousness.  When I read a poem from the page, it constitutes itself in my consciousness and becomes a poem again and not just abstract signifiers on a page.  A new poem I am composing is also constituted in my consciousness (this includes purported whispers from the Muse) and not from elsewhere.  (One can argue that found poetry originates elsewhere, but like any other new poem, it has to be constituted in the consciousness as poetry, and not as external to my consciousness).  I think the poem constitutes itself in the consciousness of both the poet and the audience of the poem - the poem isn't on the page, it's in the consciousness of all who enter it (by reading or hearing it).

     Some signifiers of poetry include media artifacts like: my 1974 copy of the Oxford Book of English Poetry (with the texts of all the poems inside); the voice-recorded poems and electronically stored text found on the Poetry Foundation Website, the Audible.com sound recording of the Iliad and the inscription of Emma Lazarus’s poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty.  The Universe and the bag of dirt may also be signifiers, but are explainable rather as found poetry, rather than of facsimile signifiers of poems.  Any poem encoded in the Universe and in the dirt bag are only poems when constituted as poetry in human consciousness, perhaps in the category of “found poetry.”

     Media signifiers of poetry are prescriptive of the poems they represent, rather than sources which accidentally or randomly elicit poetic phenomena in a person.  For instance, lines of poetry in a text such as:

                        Time’s hierarchic calligraphy

is a windstorm all its own              

etching city canyon walls

 

is prescriptive in a highly specific way that an (unlabeled) bag of dirt cannot be. It dictates the images and associations very specifically, describing that which it is representing.  It is also open to interpretation in a way that a dirt bag arguably isn’t.  It clearly originated in someone’s consciousness (mine, in this case) whereas a physical bag of dirt did not and cannot.  This poem fragment, like many others, represents thought itself, and also is not arbitrary and non-specific, as is the Universe.

     Aside from a poem being a phenomenon of human consciousness, what else can we say about it?  It seems to me that a poem must be capable of being uttered.  Whether or not it is ever uttered / pronounced aloud (or internally), a poem should be able to be said.  This is not true of “things”, “the Universe” or a “bag of dirt”.  We cannot directly convert these into speech, other than nominally or referentially (“It’s a bag of dirt!”)   Utterability is perhaps not the most obvious characteristic of the poem, but it is a very essential one.  (I am discounting difficulties with pronouncing an untranslated poem). 

    This leads us only as far as to position the poem alongside all other utterances (utterables?) that arise in human consciousness (prose, song, articles, conversation, cereal boxes).  A poem is distinguishable from other forms of potential utterance, (as well as from the Universe and the Bag of Dirt).  All instances of the class “Poem” must share some uniquely identifying characteristics (beyond those previously enumerated) in order to be distinguished from all other human communication. What are they?

     First, it seems to me that a poem requires words as an essential ingredient. I feel ridiculous saying this, as it seems obvious beyond obvious, but the dirt bag poem seems not to involve words and on that basis, is not a poem. One might argue that language poems might reasonably contain no words.  I think that sometimes surrogate sounds are used in place of words, but these too would be near-words, surrogates for words or word-like sounds each containing the idea of and approximating words – for all practical purposes: words.  I am having trouble locating poems in my experience that are free of words, or even those which use word-surrogates of some sort.  It seems to me that a poem centers on words.[1]

      My poems which arrive in my consciousness are uniformly comprised of words: strings of words, whole poems, phrases, titles, stanzas: word after word.  I do derive poems from other mental phenomena such as visions and ideas, but the poems that result are compositions of words, they’re verbal.  The poem as a word aggregation and / or a word composition seems a straightforward idea to me. A poem which contains no words is not a poem.

      Another feature beyond the inclusion of words and their ability to be uttered is there to distinguish a poem as a poem?  It is how the words are set by the poet in the poem. It seems obvious to me that the words of a poem need to be arrayed in an artistic fashion, using aesthetic considerations to do so.  By this I mean, the words taken together should sound and appear extraordinary as a result of the way that the poet has arranged them.  This feature might be labelled prosody – how the words in the poem work on our consciousness.

      I think that another aspect determining whether a poem is a poem is word quality: aptness, sound value, verbal consistency, uniqueness, and inter-word resonance. These all may register a composition as a poem.  But here I think we are in a grayer area – word quality is not essential to  being a poem. Word quality is more subjective and variable, and a poem can arguably be poor in word quality and still be a poem.  This measure proves to be more of a secondary indicator to a poem. 

      Along with word quality, there are many more secondary indicator of “poem-ness” with which I am familiar: the presence of similes and metaphors, meter and form, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and various other qualities found in poetry may all occur or not in a given poem and it still may (or may not) be a poem.

     At this point, I am still far from an answer to the question of what a poem is. An utterable word aggregation with or without a quotient of word quality is still not a very successful description of a poem.  I have progressed from the Thing-Universe-Dirtbag formulation where I started, but not that far.  While it seems that the idea of the poem existing primarily as a phenomenon in the consciousness is an important sense of the poem, but this sense seems to live mainly outside the realm of the materialistic world in which I find myself.  I am too used to regarding the pages of my books as poems not as a collection of gateways to internal phenomena. 

       So, there is the question of the poem as a physical representation to consider.  What is there about a) the poem as seen on the page; and  b) the poem as heard that distinguishes a poem from other word-assemblages?  Do the physical manifestations of the poem help me say what a poem is?

        As far as visual consistencies between poems there are only superficial statements I can make about shared attributes. One of these is inner regularity.   Poems generally have an internal visual regularity that may be noted.  This can be noted in a similar line and section lengths and visually pleasing formatting on the page (e.g. descending or ascending line lengths, regularly alternating line positions, consistent spacing). The poem may be broken up into regular sections: cantos, stanzas, blocks, books.   So, in most cases I  can look at the text of a poem and say, that’s a poem because it looks like a poem. Poems are generally sight-recognizable. Of course, a text might just be “poem formatted” to look as though it is a poem when it isn’t.  I’m not sure I’m familiar with this sort of thing being done intentionally, but it is possible. Usually, if I recognize a poem on sight, it is because it was meant to be a poem (or as I have established, it represents a poem).  (So far, I have not commented on intended poems that don’t quite make the grade, and thus are not poems). I must ask myself also, how much is poetry writing convention and how much is essential to a poem being a poem?  Is looking like a poem essential?  Are parts of the visual representation essential to the poem being a poem?  Can it be that all of our poetry writing conventions are inessential?  It seems to me that the visuals and conventions (like stanzas) are just convenient instructions for the reader, in much the same way that punctuation guides reading. These conventions might signal poet and publisher intent, but they seem not integral to a definition of what is a poem.  Perhaps they only tell us that the text intends to be a poem.

       Does the sound of a poem being read participate in the identity of the read-object as a poem? When I hear one of my fellow poets reading a poem, I’m fairly certain that what they are phrasing is a poem or what intends to be a poem.  But are there absolute identity markers in the poem as read?  Often, as with the orthographic features of the poem, the phrasing, intonation, and rhythms of the reading are conventions.  They reveal the intent to communicate a poem, but are they essential to qualify the performance as a poem? I can hear both the conventions and the poem, but I am uncertain how to determine which is which, so I assume that the conventions of poetry reading are inessential to the nature of the poem.[2]

        With a) and b) above, I feel there are partial qualifications in each that move me in the direction of being able to answer the question, “What is a poem?” but which are inconclusive.  A text that is not a poem could be formatted in text or read aloud using poetic convention and only seem to be a poem.  Of course, this seems analogous to conspiracy theory logic, because what a poem is seems clear most of the time, but these qualifying details do seem to fall short in positive identification of a poem.

     This kind of approximation and unsurety seems organic to discussion of “what is a poem?” Efforts to define a poem are somewhat on the same scale as quantifying human consciousness or the universe.  The same kind of diminishing returns occur when proceeding from the general to the particular. The cloud of smoke gets thicker when I proceed to generalization.  The domain of the poem gets wider and taller and deeper the more we investigate.  However, it seems clear that a dirt bag and physical phenomena, whether natural or human-made,  aren’t poems.

 

 

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[1] While there are musical compositions known as tone poems, but these, I think are compositions borrowing the freedom of poetic structure and which are not really poems.

 

[2] When listening to a poem read on the Read Aloud feature of MS-Word, the robot feature reads my poem as if it were not a poem, dully and flatly, with a complete lack of affect.  The poetry reading conventions are stripped away and yet it is a poem being read.