What is Poetry?

(What is poetry to you...? In this prose poem, I indicated the craft, what wordsmiths poets are, as well as what the essence is to me, but realize that I made poetry sound perhaps rather sweet when there is also grunge, slam, anger, pain. Yet again, as a long-time meditator, I find writing poetry is like the deepest meditation, so the anger and pain are like storms on the ocean, a froth of waves, while the ocean itself is full with steady presence.)



We speak in tongues of poetry, rare spun silk woven into our raw edges.

And echoes, cadence, melody of image, for whom detail, hidden or overt, reveals breadths of vision.

Finesse, complex filigree patterns, considered interlacings of feelings in the verbal clusters of stanzas.

A poem of many voices, strands, cross-currents, opposing winds, and I prefer this to a single slant on, say, Rumi-esque love, or American violence.

Just as the ocean forms each spilling wave wetting our feet while the sand dissolves beneath us, poems should be carefully crafted with total emotional disclosure.

The surfaces, smooth, but buckled.

A self-consciousness of style, a sensitivity, the art of writing fine poetry.

Poetry emerges from our secret words to join the ocean of language through which we communicate. Poems play with grammars. The speaking voice is a tessitura, offered, sung in all its ranges.

Poetry is not only about your feelings; it is about the possibilities of language.

A poet, a jeweller of words, creating a cloisonne of images, a vessel of many colours and opacities like a turning shadow lamp.

If it is not alive, it isn't real.

Not to forget the dissolution of us.

The best poetry is the writing appearing and disappearing at the edge, on the precipices, of the known world.