Sunday Essay: What is a Poem?

Not all poems are brief and not all of them are hunting your jugular vein but there are ones that get you, that get under your skin, make your shiver and weep or stare into space...

I hope the reader will find it in their heart to overlook my personification of things and the assigning of “his” and “he”. I can’t use “it” here, I just can’t, he won’t let me.

                                          Essay: What is a Poem?

                                          Or Poetry: 
                                                             ”What it is,
                                                             what it ain’t, 
                                                          what it could be,
                                                         and what it cain’t.”

	To begin with and according only to me, a poem is extremely brief and should end as soon as possible and maybe even just before that, because abruptness in endings can sometimes be just the thing, unlike this introductory sentence.   Sometimes a poem carefully stalks its prey, laying cunning traps.  I have heard that the Siberian tiger can drive its prey mad until they beg for the end to come.  They have glimpsed inevitability and they devoutly wish for a consummation of their fate.  While we can’t all be tigers, we can aspire.
	The great poems leave you feeling as if the sands of time had etched a wall of granite and only that message remained, inevitable.  It is the distillation that makes a poem what it is.  It is not chatty or meandering.  But make no mistake, you are being stalked, no matter how charming the word play, no matter how winning the images.  You are the target and the sole reason for his existence.  He must win your heart or, failing that goal, gain your affection, at the very least.  If, after your brief encounter, you are not moved, you are just sitting there and you say, “Next”, believe me, he is weeping in the gent’s room.  
	When there is spontaneous combustion between reader and poem, each one dances around the barroom, looking to the world like fools in love.  One says, “I understand!” and the other says, “I am understood!”  They each say it with some relief because in that short but magical interval and in the slowly fading glow thereafter, they have banished loneliness, they felt utterly connected.  Should the reader decide to revisit the poem again later, they will rekindle their affair, this time with the added pleasure of a renewed acquaintance, great fondness and a growing affection.  It is one of the great friendships of this world, that of the reader and their beloved poem.
	Sometimes it is easier to give examples of what a poem isn’t.  It is not an essay, like this one, trying to explain something in prose as clearly as possible but never really venturing into the magical or mystical world that gives us the impetus to create a poem.  Essays are trying to explain something, to make a point that is laid out in paragraph one and supported in the ensuing paragraphs.  At the end they try to show you, in summation, what a stellar job they did proving their point.  A poem isn’t trying to prove a point.  It wants to grab your hand and lead you to where the tree line meets the field and there, hand in hand, you both stare in awe.
          A novella or novel often ventures into those magical worlds but it does it with paragraphs and pages full of sentences, some of them quite long.  A book describes in minute detail a lot of objects, a lot of people, a lot of events and then, hundreds of pages later, brings them to some kind of conclusion.  A poem usually picks one thing to zero in on, with a lens that zooms in to an ant’s antennae while simultaneously peering into the stars.  It seems to me that every good poem that I have read can always be seen as at least two ideas hugging each other tightly while tumbling down a hill.  A poem will try to tell you that these two are one and the same while creating a minute world where this may be possible.
	Above all things, a poem must have a point, especially since they are so small, like a closet.  It doesn’t take a lot of effort to build a closet but you can easily screw it up.  Something very compelling must happen in that closet, otherwise no one will go in there more than once.  If nothing compelling occurs, they close the door and conclude that they have just wasted one or two minutes.  There is not a lot of resentment there because the cost in time was so minimal, but they will not revisit it nor will they recommend it to others.  That is how a mediocre poem dies a natural death of ghosting from apathy or disinterest.  If you are not moved, you close the door and say “good riddance”.   If you are moved, you tell others and the world beats a path to that door.