Whisper it: I used to hate poetry. I found verse too fey, too empty, too performatively artful. Then I realised two things: A, I was an idiot and B, poetry was everywhere. In Alanis Morissette lyrics, in faded graffiti tags, in snippets of old movies. I mean “Of all the gin joints in all the world, she had to walk into mine” — it’s the kind of sonnet opener Shakespeare would have killed to write, no?
But the more I dived into the art, courtesy of a Masters in Creative Writing course, the more I realised something. Compared to other literary forms, poetry is the most concerned with unravelling what defines it. Grappling with its genre like a snake eating its own tail.
Yet while most definitions are artful and vivid, they can lean towards the esoteric. A line often tagged to writer Jean Cocteau, for example, notes that “the poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.” A better bon mot than it is a definition.
In a bid to get to grips with my fledgling poetry, I figured I’d take a stab at three analogues of my own. You may find them equally unhelpful, and what’s wrong with that? Ask ten people to define love and you won’t get the same answer. The richest concepts are the hardest to unpack. The ephemeral, slippery nature of poetry is its key, and maybe the point isn’t to successfully unlock it, but to enjoy trying.
Here they are:
1. Poetry is Like a Cucumber (Words with the Water Squeezed Out)
There is power in the act of condensing. Have you ever pickled anything? Leave a cut cucumber swimming in salty brine for ten minutes. Return to it, and the flavor is intensified threefold. A cucumber that has lost all its excess, flushed the water away and retained what is essential. That’s what poetry is to me, compared to say, a novel. The poet cuts away every syllable that isn’t needed, so the reader is left with the fullest taste imaginable.
2. Poetry is Pornography (It's Slippery Stuff)
There’s a famous quote from a Supreme Court judge who, overseeing an obscenity trial and asked how he defined pornography, sputtered “I know it when I see it.” A line that has the pulse of poetry itself, no? And the gleam of truth. We know poetry when we see it. Perhaps that’s the most important test of all; if it echoes against the little bones in our ear that react to poetry.
3. Poetry is Engine-Noise (We're Here for the Sound)
Fiction, nonfiction, flash fiction — these matters are concerned with happenings. They are plot-forward, concerned with propulsion. A big-nosed street racer, urging on the guy behind the wheel (that’s you, reader).
Now poetry, it moves forward too. Things happen: wheelbarrows stand in the rain. Ravens cry “nevermore”. Travellers choose between two paths in the wood. The difference is that we’re here for the journey, not the destination. The plot can take a back-seat: we want the noise of the engine and the way it makes those hairs rise. You know, the ones on the back of your neck.
Written by Daniel Seifert - Member of PSNY
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Writer Bio: Dan's writing is published or forthcoming in The New York Times, Consequence, Open: The Journal of Arts and Letters, and the anthology Missed Connections: Microfiction From Asia. In 2023 he was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and longlisted for the Letter Review Prize. He is currently undertaking a Masters in Creative Writing at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore. Find him on Twitter @DanSeifwrites