On a snowy January day, years ago, I was looking for a sales slip in order to exchange a Christmas gift. As I sorted through the mess on my desk (the clutter in my study having reached Mephistophelian proportions), there was a thought in the front of my mind, that I had seen the slip recently but could not find it now. When out of the back of my mind there floated a line: Around this house things won’t stay found. Well, as a line of poetry this is hardly worthwhile, but I’ve learned not to ask questions. I jotted it down and went on with my search. Looking back I still don’t think much of the line, but in a couple of ways it shows how the mind generates poetry as a way of dealing with external reality. First, it has a twist in the way it looks at things, in the way things appear to it. Things are not lost, rather they won’t stay found. The line is not going to take the confusions of life lying down. It talks back; it is a retort to chaos. In the current parlance the line “has an attitude.” Second, the line was born simultaneously as a thought and as a pattern of sound. The rhythm of the words is as much a part of the meaning of the line as is the thought. “Around this house things won’t stay found.” Ou — ou — oo — ou. Four rhythmic stresses that reinforce by repetition the natural emphasis already in the individual words. Finally, the rhyme of the first and last words — “Around this house things won’t stay found” — picks up the whole thought as if with ice tongs. This is a declaration spoken in exasperation, not inviting disagreement. (I never did find the slip.)
Like many writers I keep a journal as a gathering place for thoughts and lines that show up unannounced. But if the thought does not arrive clothed in its own language, if the sound and 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 shoulders its way to you using all of its body. Poetry employs words in all of their aspects. Words so used shimmer and resonate, all at once, in their denotations and connotations, their public and personal 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.
It has been said that the difference between poetry and prose cannot be defined, but I disagree. The difference between them is that prose reports reality, poetry recreates it. Poetry does this by giving language co-equal status with non-lingual reality. Fine prose (I am thinking of Orwell) simply disappears into its own clarity; we readers end up looking at the thought, not the language. Not so with poetry, for which language is both a means and an end. In poetry the scaffolding and the house are one.