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.
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.
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.
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.
