What is Poetry?

[flyguy69]

What is Poetry?
-John Ashbery

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow
That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire. Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believed it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us--what?--some flowers soon?

 

[champagne1982]

Poetry? I know it's a cop out to show you something as old an answer as this, to that question. You're welcome to read it anyway.

 

[Man Ray]

For me...

For me poetry is way of expressing very personal thoughts, emotions and desires. For these thoughts and emotions, these desires, to be read by one in particular. In the hope that some of the warmth and affection that I feel for this friend is conveyed by words and lines that I sometimes struggle to write...

 

[anonamouse]

What is poetry?

oh, oh, I think I know this one...
I heard it's like a conga line, no?
...the deification of the mundane
...the deification of the insane
it's what you do, when your ego grabs a hold on you, and you can't make the words go to the end of the page - that's prose

it's like a conga line

bullshit, bullshit
Bull-Shit

(I better put this smily bastard in, to let everyone know I'm just jokin')

I'll let you know, when I write some, fly

 

[flyguy69]

Poetry? I know it's a cop out to show you something as old an answer as this, to that question. You're welcome to read it anyway.

Thanks for sharing that one, Carrie. It takes a brave poet to tell poets what's poetry! Yours is a pleasant and wistful trip.

I think Robert Creely also compared poetry to a conversation, in which both the author and the reader are invited to listen.



Now let's all do the conGAH! Let's all do the conGAH!

 

[evelyn_carroll]

What is PoeTry

A failed attempt to write The Raven or The Bells.

 

[impressive]

I still like this answer:

http://english.literotica.com:81/stories/showstory.php?id=185705

 

[wildsweetone]

In my opinion, Poetry is -

A Serenade to the Soul.

 

[Zanzibar]

to me...

Poetry...

is what happens when you mental floss your brain,
breaking free those nagging thoughts
you knew were there, but couldn't reach

is the lingering taste of your experiences
brought out in multi-hued arrays

is letting your life overflow it's bounds
and sharing it with others (Of course, some say
a plumber helps with that.)

 

[wildsweetone]

Poetry...

is what happens when you mental floss your brain,
breaking free those nagging thoughts
you knew were there, but couldn't reach

is the lingering taste of your experiences
brought out in multi-hued arrays

is letting your life overflow it's bounds
and sharing it with others (Of course, some say
a plumber helps with that.)

A plumber you say?

Now there's a thought.

 

[flyguy69]

...
Poetry and eloquence are both, alike, the expression or utterance of feeling; but, if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind....

-John Stuart Mill, 1833​