A topic worth revisiting: What is Poetry?

"Do I trust that poem?"  Peter Fallon, an Irish poet, asks himself this question every time he writes poetry.  As I have wandered my way through Intro to Poetry, I have learned much about what makes  a poem, such as form, imagery, creativity, and an interesting view of the world.  By reading poetry, I have been guided into someone else's life through the vessel of language.  To me, poetry searches for a way to tell truth about life, uses language to create beauty, and reaches into the social space to speak the language of the heart.

As a poem lays out what it has to say or the image it has, it exposes a new way of looking at the world.  In Dulce Et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen draws on experiences from the war, using horrible, desperate images to communicate what the war was like to the reader.   Soldiers trudge past exhaustion in the poem, only to be pushed to their limits once more by a gas attack. This time, one man hesitates a moment too long and dies an awful death, and Owen adds his own interpretation of the event:  if everyone would watch this death, they would no longer tell lies about the glory of dying for one's country.   Something I realized in this course was that a poem does not have to be historically accurate to speak the truth, and that may be the case in this poem.  Wilfred Owen may never have experienced a man dying from gas himself with all this vivid detail, but he can still communicate the terror and helplessness of other men.  Whether or not he was drawing on personal experience in the poem, it is powerful and raw, and it tells the world a truth about war and the lies we tell ourselves about it.

While Wilfred Owen told the world a section of truth about a very large event, World War I, through poetry, poetry can also be a very intimate snapshot of someone's life and resonate with us. In Fadwa Tuquan's poem "Behind Bars,"  she describes her forced separation from her mother, using vivid imagery of roses growing in blood in the middle of the poem.  The reader may have a harder time figuring out the exact situation the speaker is in and what the roses represent, but the empty, lonely image of her mother staring at Tuqan's old school things effectively reaches across barriers.

Next, poetry experiments with language and pushes boundaries, while still using form to bring the cold text on the page to life.  In the beginning of the class, I was oblivious to the valuable part that rhythm and rhyme had to play in poetry, as I associated them with nursery rhymes and hymns.  However, my mind began to open after looking at some of Emily Dickinson's more complex poetry, such as "Volcanoes be in Sicily."  This poem effectively utilizes form such as slant rhyme to draw the reader into the poem, instead of pushing the reader out.  Paul Celan pushed language to the limit in his poem "Todes Fuge," written in German.  He spins a poem that is a testament to what language can do, creating a feast for the reader's ear with a pulsing beat and hidden rhyme.  The poem tests boundaries of language in both German and English, as the translation by John Felstiner stretches and molds language, just as the original did.

To me, one of the most mysterious and wonderful things about poetry is that it captures some of the essence of humanity and brings them into the light of the social space.   In the anthology Against Forgetting:  Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, Carolyn Forche describes social space as "the space between the state and the supposedly safe havens of the personal" (Forche 31). By establishing a place between these two extremes, Forche helps to visualize a type of poetry that can provide a witness to human events.  Georg Trakl wrote in this space of the social, as seen in his poem "A Romance to Night."  Trakl juxtaposes contradicting images, both disturbing and serene, such as a mother and child sleeping, while laughter echoes from the whorehouse.  This poem only hints at its context of World War I, referring to the hands of the dead, but it draws these personal experiences and the political idea of war together into a place they can both inhabit:  a poem.  Poems that deal more traditionally with the personal also illumine the nature of life and humanity.    In Sharon Olds' poem, "To my parents," evaluated and appreciated by Kate Stoltzfus, "I Go Back to May 1937,"  Kate expresses the way Olds can take an everyday occurrence and make the mundane beautiful.  In this particular poem, I found something different, sensing some of the heaviest regret a person can carry, and yet the human desire to live and thrive seeps through as well.  Like music, poetry trolls the unseen depths of the human soul, and pulls up mossy objects hidden there.  We may only catch a glimpse of  these things out of the corner of our eyes, or we may be forced to stare at something head on, but either way, beneficial, malignant or benign, true poetry will not shrink from the mystery of what it is to be human.  

In conclusion, poetry is a form of art which searches for truth in life,  which births beauty into the world through language, and explores the whole human experience.  Poetry lives, as it sets a part of the author onto the page, which is picked up by the reader and made into a new creation.  Poetry helps us to begin to reach into the unknowable, unspeakable parts of life, carving the simple vessel of language into ships, schooners, dinghies, and ocean liners that sail us out of ourselves, and then back.  In the words of Bertolt Brecht, "In the dark times, will there also be singing?/ Yes, there will be singing./ About the dark times."