How does one describe a poem?
+A genre is a set of creative outputs that fit a given set of criteria. Genres are useful as a sort of shorthand when describing a thing of art: instead of noting, for example, all of the objects depicted in a still-life that aren’t people or land-features, we call it a still-life and get on to describing how the objects interrelate to each other on the canvas. If you ask me what kind of painting I’m working on, and I say, “a still-life,” you have an expectation of certain elements the painting will contain. If you happen to be an agent and try to sell the painting later, you’ll say to your prospective buyers, “It’s a still-life,” and whether the buyer is over the phone or standing in the gallery, they’ll know whether they’ll like it or not based on whether they like still-lifes. In the same way, they can call you up and ask if you have any still-lifes for sale right now, and get a simple yes-or-no answer for it. This is the first kind of genre, and it applies well within separate types of fundamentally-different media, such as painting, sculpture, film, or the written word.
A poem, obviously, is in this last category, and for some reason its designation is hairier than others’. People refer to all sorts of art, or even dispassionate events, as poetry; dancing is called “poetry in motion,” for example. I think the confusion is caused in part by the nature of writing as a medium, namely in that it captures thoughts more clearly and communicably than other art forms. While a picture can be “worth a thousand words,” as the old cliché goes, when those words are actually written out they can contain shades of meaning impossible to capture in the picture itself, at least as quickly as they can be absorbed in writing. It seems as though writing is akin to the fundamental nature of thought, or at least of spoken language, which our thought is steeped in.
So we know what writing is. What is a poem? Especially in a world with such forms as prose poetry, flash fiction, short-shorts, lyrical essays, lyrical ballads, et cetera, what makes a poem a poem?
@@ -54,6 +54,9 @@Poetry is a manipulation of emotion, or a communication of it. Prose has the space, the time to describe what’s going on, even if the author stands by the old adage of “show, don’t tell.” Showing in prose inherently involves more telling than poetry does, as poetry communicates a feeling itself. This definition may be broad enough to include certain dance performances or paintings, but that’s okay. I’m of the opinion that the more useful genre distinctions are those which describe the thing technically: verse, for example, or lyrical. Poetry is almost a value judgement, and that makes me a little uncomfortable.