h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How would you define poetry?

Wow!!!!

There's so much for us here to review!!! I can see why you're so much in a hurry to show this page to everyone: it's the most accurate, most to-the-point, most detailed Guide entry I've seen so far.

Yeah, I know, you think I'm making fun of you. You believe I'm not taking this seriously. Well THINK AGAIN! I'm VERY serious about this. And I'll explain.

As far as I can see, there IS no good definition of Poetry, because Poetry can take ALL forms or none, whichever is most suitable for the occasion. Poetry can be made up of lines of words in all kind of rhyming rhythms, all the words being sensible, or they can be just a sequence of gibberishy non-words that seem to mean nothing to the majority of people but *do* have a meaning to the author and the few who believe they understand him/her.

So, there you have it. My opinion at this moment is actually a question: Is there a point in taking the poetry out of Poetry by trying to define the undefinable essence of it?

Festival

Pretty much the way I feel. I think everyone has their own inexpressible definition of poetry, so not only is it impossible to spell out, it's also subjective.

I have always felt that the point of poetry is that what is to one is not to another. So what one may feel in his heart is poetry, is simply to another a loose jumble of words. In poetry, the point of the piece is that there is no point but to incite peace.

This may be trite beyond words. For that I am sorry.
O-The-O

Subjective! You score a touchdown on an issue that I totally overlooked. You're absolutely right

don't be sorry, just be (yourself)...

And what you're saying is almost what I tried to convey, but in other words. No argument there.

Hmm, I'm not sure if we're actually doing the author of this article-to-be a favor. Except that (s)he now has a tiny bit of a definition for poetry -subjective and undefinable-, there's not much to base an essay on.

Some might call it a bad pun (though I wouldn't), but it's certainly not trite.

please help me here... what's "trite" exactly?

Poetry can be
Some words, some lines, sum feeling
It is 'revealing'

It may also be
Escape, disguise, an abstract
Way of concealing

That's cool! A poetic description (not a definition) of poetry.

# My definition, my definition is this....my definition, my definition is this...my definition, my definition is this... #

Po-et-ry: n, 1 a: metrical writting : VERSE b: the productions of a poet : POEMS s: writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm 3 a: something likend to poetry esp. in beauty of expression b: poetic quality or aspect (the ~ of dance)
-- Merriam Webbster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, page 898

That's all BS. The best objective definition of Poetry I can come up with is that it isn't prose. Other than that I have to agree with the subjectiveness of the artform that's been expressed above. I once tried to write an essay defining poetry, and ended up seriously not answering the question. Sorry, I can't help you too much...

Maybe by it's very nature poetry is not meant to be defined, just felt...

Hackneyed, overused, something like that....

"A poem should not mean/But be."

(last line of "Ars Poetica," by whom I can't remember.)

I've often tried to write poems, whether they're any good I don't know. I've got one about a train journey in my journal at the moment, and I'm still trying to write Arcadia - my Epic Poem.
But for me, poetry is just simple self-expression. It's a way of expressing and playing with an idea in words. Sometimes abstract, sometimes structured. HOW it is done doesn't really matter. The whole point is that you analyse or explore emotionally something, and express what you have discovered in words. You make something special out of your thoughts or your feelings or your beliefs - and that is Poetry.

The way that I would approach this assignment, where I still in the unfortunate days when I had to write essays about things , would be to say that "what is poetry?" is a very similar question to "what is art?". Poetry is, I suppose, art with words, and as such, is similarly bloody difficult to define adequately.

One approach might be to choose specific examples of poetry and then say what makes them so. Shakespearian sonnets, fair enough; something modern in free verse, fine; ideally you'd also have to find some really overtly experimental example and say why that was poetry. I seem to recall there was an entry in Private Eye's "Pseud's Corner" recently which was a (published) poem consisting of its title (which I don't recall, oops) and the "poem" itself, which was just the word "sad". (You can see why it got into Pseud's Corner.) So, you could examine whether this could be acceptably defined as poetry.

Poetry, like other art, has a lot to do with intention. Any old bit of text, out of the phone book, or whatever, is not poetry; a note you leave the milkman is not poetry, BUT it's possible to imagine a potential poem that took the form of a note to the milkman. (There may even be one in existence already.) To follow from this, would it be possible to cut a bit out of the phonebook, and present it intentionally as poetry? A poem has a voice behind it: someone that has something they wish to express and it also has a destined reader. (Even if you're just writing for yourself, it's you-the-writer writing to you-the-observer.) So, if the author thinks that bit of phonebook expresses exactly what she/he wants to say... is that poetry?

Anyway, by this token, if "sad" is presented for reading as a poem, I would say yes, it's poetry. It's just that what makes *good* poetry is another matter entirely...

Taking a bit out of the phone book and presenting it as poetry sounds a lot like taking a random object and presenting it as art...which seems to be an acceptable form of art these days.

Sometimes it even seems the only artform that is still practiced. Take music. They take a mike into a steel factory, record some of the noise, scratch the samples a bit, repeat them in some random order, and they call it house, rap, hiphop or whatever is hot at that moment.

Ugh...you're telling me. There's even a movement now to call turntablists "musicians." Give me the eighties, man.