If you’re a poet, have you ever read through what you wrote and asked yourself this question: How do you know if what you wrote is a poem?
For me, a poem is a sound train. The consonants as givens, the vowels, endlessly open, endlessly Ee—ii—o—oo—aa. Airy aspirates, diphthongs, fricatives, apocopes: Poetry is sound bites indeed. A poem is the shaped whistle of our speech in a profound dance with experience. Whatever language is (I think it happens in the bonding of what is human with all that is not), its use by poetry is paranormal, incantational, even pejorative.
A poem is a parley with unknown forces. It uses words like talismans to control the refractory material of experience.
Since I start things on the margin
-cocktail napkins, canceled checks,
timetables trying to be reliable—
and since I save it all, I know
there are good words buried and lost
in those fat accordion files, words
that sounded good at the time,
that I promised to get back to,
rhyme trains that never left Grand Central,
monikers that chattered like silverware
at 30,000′, sounds struck
sheer of sense-coin of a realm-
from a currency of air, pronounced
like blessings on an express world,
soul puffs, plain mistakes,
angels, working definitions of.
Like many writers I keep a journal as a gathering place for thoughts and lines that show up unannounced. But if a thought does not arrive clothed in its own language, if the sound and the sense are not born together, I typically don’t write it down because I know it’s not poetry.
Conversely you’ll know it is poetry when the language comes to you using all of its body.
Poetry employs words in all of their aspects. Words so used shimmer and resonate at once in their denotations and connotations, their personal and public histories, and of course in their sound, which is why a line of verse addresses the senses as well as the mind. And why hearing a poem is a tactile experience. In poetry the scaffolding and the house are one. It has been said that the difference between poetry and prose cannot be defined. I disagree. The defining difference between them is that prose reports reality, poetry recreates it.