Recently, I have been thinking about what exactly poetry is. I submitted to an experimental poetry contest and was tasked with breaking boundaries I was rather uncomfortable with breaking. I would like to divulge about the nature of poetry as pertaining to my first blog post as well as through defining what it is not.

What poetry is not explicitly is a song, novel, videography, painting, or a play. What poetry can be, however, is a performance like a play, musical like a song, prosaic like a novel, artistic like a painting, and visual like a video. This much is true. And people oftentimes describe novels or parts of novels, and songs or parts of songs, as poetic. What do they mean when they say this? What makes a song poetic, despite the agreement that the song is a song and not a poem? One thing someone might say is the intention. The problem with that is if the only way to tell the difference between a song and a poem is by intention for it to be one or the other, then there is not any actual tangible difference. And there is perhaps an argument to be made that videos, songs, novels, paintings, and plays are poetry, although I would quickly shoot that down be returning to stating that they can be poetic, that is all.

Then we return to the original thought: what makes something poetic? If I were to regard a painting, say perhaps the Mona Lisa, I could see myself recognizing the artwork as poetic. Specifying why, I could see myself pointing out the way she smiles. Maybe it is a statement on something larger than the painting itself. Maybe it touches the heart, it recognizes something deep about humanity, or maybe something surface-level about humanity. So I would like to make the argument that “poeticism” is the ability for something to talk to you about the heart of humanity. Let’s try this with something else that I would consider poetic. I think it is poetic how butterflies grow their whole lives, eating to become winged in their final form, only to die soon after. They spend their whole life, just a few weeks, working towards becoming these beautiful creatures, going through a metamorphosis and then just days after laying eggs, fall back to the earth as if they were never there. Life itself is poetic, how man attempts to control, but is nevertheless to succumb to death. And the brevity of beauty as well. This is poetic by how it talks to me about life, what it is beyond survival and reproduction, how it makes me feel. The poetic thing opens up a conversation about who, what, where, when, why, and how we are as humans. But if dolphins or chimpanzees were just some bit more intelligent, then something poetic would reflect on themselves or the system they are in, as they are able to recognize something as poetic. As such, it is less about humanity, (unless of course you are a human), and more about you and the system you occupy. It is philosophizing via emotion and artistry.

It appears we have come to some sort of consensus on what it means for something to be poetic. Something is poetic if it philosophizes directly to you about yourself and your “system” via emotion and artistry. In this definition, artistry refers to explicit or implicit art, “system” refers to a broader physical or more so metaphorical or conceptual space that you occupy, and to philosophize is to grapple with or question deep, critical ideas, concepts, or issues. To rephrase with these explanations, poeticism is the actual philosophical conversation directed at you or your conceptual space discussed via emotive artistry. These will be the definitions of poetic and poeticism used.

Back to the original thought: what is poetry and what is poetry not? I believe it is safe to say that poetry is strictly poetic, and that oftentimes, poetry that fails to be poetic is often considered to be definitively that which is bad poetry. I think it is also safe to say that a poem is not a song, or a play, or a video, or a painting. I think it is also safe to say that poetry is an art form, and more specifically, a written art form. It needs to be poetic via written language. If the poem as a whole cannot be written with a symbolic, script language, or spoken aloud in some linguistic coherence, then it cannot be a poem. This is not to say it is not artistic or valuable; this is strictly the necessity of categorization.

I suppose I will have to admit that there is a slight necessity for the intention going into a work of art to decide what it is. We have agreed that poetry is a poetic, written art form, either read in symbolic, script language, or spoken with linguistic coherence. I suppose it can also be musical, colorful, videographic, prosaic, or performative. But there is certainly a Venn diagram that can be made of this. One circle is poetry, another is any other art form. The definition of poetry, those characteristics would go inside the poetry circle. The bare definition of another art work would go in the other circle. What goes in the middle is what they could both share, which would be the intention to be the art form they are, which would be incredibly small, and then also some other things which are generally true. Consider a poem read aloud with musical elements, comparing that to a song. The poem will have musicality, so they share that; there is some sense of instrumentation or well-intentioned sound. They also share that intention for what it was made to be, but this is small. What differentiates the two is their strict definition. I will not go through the same exercise we just did with a song, but once you define a song, as long as you can ensure that the poem “circle” of the Venn diagram we have constructed here is not basically absolutely overlapping with the “song” circle, then you are good to call one a poem and the other a song.

In conclusion, I would like to relate this all back to my first post, where I discussed the theory of probable poetic goodness via order and substance. That theory was constructed under the main presumption that a poem is something intentioned to be a poem and it always has these two qualities which you can generally measure. I would like to combine that idea with what I have constructed here. Poetry has three qualities which you can always measure: substance, form, and poeticism. These are good indicators for recognizing a truly “good” poem. Along with this, a poem can never be any other artwork, only similar to other artworks. This is done by a careful analysis of the artwork and the definition of the intended artwork. If what your work does, at bare minimum by strict definition, overlaps completely with another defined artwork, then it is not the artwork as you intentioned it. One can experiment with poetry by pulling from aspects of other artworks and ideas. There is a whole world of contemporary poetry waiting for the 21st century poets who so desire to be different. I still warn, however, to not get carried away into an absolutely different type of art, to lose yourself in your artistry.