Hindsight is 30/30

So it’s that time of year again. Better prep your Facebook newsfeed and inboxes for a flood of poetically inspired cascades of consonance and artfully articulated alliteration. That’s right, 30/30 has come again and the poet folk raise their collective heads to force out a manifestation of madness for the thirty days of April.

As any poet will tell you, it’s a grueling process (I’m already three days/poems behind). Still, there’s something very rewarding and uplifting to see the community of poets step into the light of spring just as the cold of winter is being shaken off. Perhaps the illuminating warmth of poetry is enough to counteract the eternal winter brought about by so many people singing Frozen’s “Let It Go” (we all know that’s the reason this winter has gone on so long, don’t even lie).

Of course, there have always been a lot of questions about “what is poetry anyways?” I’m somehow certain that there have been more answers given to that question than times that the question has actually been asked. It’s not our fault, really, poets love poetry! I remember when I met Pulitzer Prize Winning poet Galway Kinnell, and he described a poem as “a soft and loving thing.” Of course, I’ve written many poems that I would never in a million years describe as being soft or loving, but I think that perhaps he meant that poems have an ability to curl up inside of people–even angry poems–and touch them. Poetry can be a gentle light cuddling up inside your heart, even if it’s topic is intense or full of rage and despair. I think that this is because poems allow for a connection of thoughts from writer to poem to reader in a stream of consciousness way that prose doesn’t always necessarily convey.

Kinnell went on to give his own definition of poetry: “touching a part of your consciousness that was previously untouched; going farther into yourself.” Poetry as a sort of self-focus and self-reflective examination of the writer’s consciousness is fascinating. The poem, in this sense, is not for the reader but for the poet. However, what I’ve often found is that when it comes to writing poetry, the more specificity that the writer puts in from their own life and experience, the more relatable the poem becomes to readers. Readers can tap into that intimacy between writer and poem, which exists more strongly if the writer has experience and passion towards the topic.

Honestly,  I never really thought that I’d ever accept something as constraining as a definition for poetry–or art in general really! Something I’ve come to cherish as a writer is that writers set out to break rules. In fact, what seems to make poetry distinct from prose is that poetry breaks the normal rules of syntax and grammar in order to transform a page into a canvas for word art. Poetry operates on a visual level, a content level, and an auditory level! With so much going on, how could you possibly constrain it to a definition? But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way we see the world as defined and separated by the idea of internal versus external. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve begun to see that there is no binary there, as there is no external reality. Everything is internal (and not necessarily just in that everything is based on perception which is internal but that perhaps we are far bigger than we give ourselves credit and to say that everything is inside of me implies that “Me” is something large enough to incorporate all things). In this way, the separation between ourselves and all the people and things around us is revealed as an illusion. However, since the world we live in seems to depend on that illusion it can be hard to break out of that perception. Hence poetry and art in general.

Poetry (in my tentative, tenuous, fluid, and ever-changing definition) is the utilization of the perception of separateness in order to promote the perception and simultaneously make manifest the unity that exists amongst all things.