Julia Schwartz

May 23, 2004

The Very Definition of Poetry

            Before anything else, it is essential to focus on the one point that perhaps might be the only issue of importance throughout this entire discussion: there can’t really be any set definition of poetry because there are, indeed, no set parameters that define the bounds of that limitless entity we identify as poetry. Maybe, in that mind, the very definition of poetry is in fact that it cannot be contained enough to elicit a definition.

            In Il Postino, Mario defines poetry as that which makes him fall in love. “[It] can do a lot of damage to people,” he says, implying that love is damage. Without poetry, Mario feels that he would have remained a simple postman, but the teachings of Pablo Nerd the poet urged him to be something more: the poetry he learned to write showed him a deeper side of himself. That other side of him is what damaged him, for in writing, he unwrapped his feelings. Realizing the pain and anguish he had inside when he let it out and examining it though the world of poetry made the world a harsher, more damaging place to Mario, hence, his perception that it damaged him.

            However, Mario is indeed wrong in this assertion, for the unraveling of his feelings was not damage, though it may have hurt him, but growth. In unveiling those deeper feelings that were perceptive and painful, he understood more about himself and was able to appreciate the finer, more beautiful things in life more through the their contrast with the unpleasant. This exercise in contrast is what pushed him toward the cliff of love, allowing him to fall off. When he saw what true beauty, inspiration, and goodness were, he was able to find it within Beatrice, thus falling in love with her. His relationship with her brings out a whole new him, led by the tender, romantic poems he writes her. Words are not “the worst things ever;” in fact, they are the best, introducing Mario to his soul.

            Mario’s second mistake is when he iterates that “poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it, but to those who read it.” It really belongs to both the writer and the reader. The writer cleanses herself with poetry, pouring her emotions into words, examining her life and circumstances, and hoping to somehow eternalize the flicker of a momentary struggle. With the poem, she hopes to understand something, to find a resolution satisfactory enough to allow her to continue onward with her life and immortalize that feeling so that is can be relived, cherished, and honored forever.

            The person who reads those words can never experience the exact same intensity of thought as the writer, for that person will never be in the writer’s shoes, as the saying goes. The reader might never know the situation that prompted the poem, and certainly would not find himself in one identical. Instead, the reader finds something in that poem to relate to his own life, interpreting it in a way that makes sense to him, in a way that eternalizes his own intense emotion. Interpretation of events, places, things, and images is how we all create our own perception of the world, and poetry is just the same. When a person reads a poem, she reads words that a person wrote, but her soul hears a message that person sent. That message is the essence of poetry, its heart. That message is something we all can always relate to somehow, and our adoption of that message in a way poignant to us is how we make a poem our own.

The poet Robert Cording uses poetry to examine certain situations and extract meaning from them. Certain such examinations include those in which people die unfairly. Through all of his poems, Cording expresses a deep regret for lives that have unfairly been destroyed, either by nature or the nature of man. In all situations, Cording is aware both of the sadness in the loss of a life, and the effect of this loss on those people who were close to disaster. In all cases, the tragedies destroy a piece of the witnesses, and try as they might to help, their efforts were in vain. In his poem “Against Consolation,” the attempts were in vain because of the constraints of time. In “Blind” and “For Primo Levi,” they were in vain because the intense hatred and myopia of a few people held the power of life and death insurmountable to a single soul. And, as mentioned, in “Last Things,” they were in vain because of the ultimate power of nature and God’s determining faith.

These three themes – death, time’s passage and how we fit into it, and God’s role in our lives – are what Cording’s examination of life are built upon. He struggles with death, and how to face it – he is against consolation, as the title of his book and title poem proudly proclaim. And he examines time and God thoroughly – they are two constants in a world of inconsistency.

Many of Cording’s poems express astonishment at the perpetuity of time and how humans seem to be merely a flicker in the stratosphere of life. “Everything… goes on, endlessly beginning,” (“Narcissus”) and humans are only one beginning in this endless series. Whether we are here or not, “the days repeat and repeat, each day one that has already passed” (“Blind”). We are then insignificant to the world as a whole, for we individually have no impact on it – it only has an impact upon us.

The world impacts us in our relationships with other people. Loss reminds us of our mortality, and scares us. As Cording asks in “In My Study”, how do we know that we will live on in memory? That we will not simply be forgotten – “thrown away”? Many of his poems prove, however, that people are remembered. He remembers them in specific poems, or, as in “In My Study,” he remembers what their lives were like – in “Questions,” the speaker listens as an old, decrepit woman remembers her youth and her wedding.

We live on in memory. As long as we live well enough – as long as we nourish relationships and create memories and enjoyment – we will never really die. In our own way, this is how we can conquer death; it is how we can learn to live with the way the world is. In this way, we can turn illusion into reality, or vice versa, for we can turn what was once reality into imagination. Through memory, we can resuscitate “the tangible fullness of a moment / bearing down on us in all its final unreality” (Cording – “Distances”).

This “tangible fullness of a moment” is exactly what poetry can grant us over and over again. When we read the words of a poem, we remember the exact feelings with which we read or wrote that poem and what they meant to us then, for our minds will never forget that interpretation. With that, we can go back in time to a moment, and bring that moment with us, be it to remember or to use to move through to the next.

            As Marianne Moore says in “Poetry,” poetry is the way by which we discover “a place for the genuine” – for “what is important beyond / all this fiddle.” The importance will never become obsolete; we will always be able to find a useful correlation between our past poetry and our present states. Thus, poetry is the vehicle by which we enter the lands where our souls and our feelings are not clear and not understood – but examined.

            This confusion - this paradox - that defines poetry is referenced by John Ashbery in his poem, aptly titled “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” when he says that “You have [poetry] but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.” A poem is had when it seems to directly reference the particular feeling someone is experiencing at the present point in time, when she thinks that the poem is written to describe her exact circumstance at that time. Yet it is really not had, because, as previously mentioned, the feelings on which the poem was based were not those feelings of the reader, just ones that hold certain parallels. “The poem is you,” says Ashbery – the poem is your interpretation of it; it belongs to you when you mold it to become your own by finding the threads of reality in it that tie directly into your being.

             Poetry is an amphibious vehicle, for it is one that can dry our tears, or one that can turn the fountain on. Some poems bring us strength; others gently peel back the stiff outer layers of our skin and allow the sensitive stuff inside to cry. The one undying constant of poetry is that it always teaches us something new. With every poem comes a new realization about life and the way we ourselves function in it, about what is important and what isn’t very important. Poems can bring out a new side of something, be it event or object, as they highlight the more subtle aspects of it to create a new, more specific and very unique identity for it.

            Poetry is almost always considered gentler and more romantic than prose, and there is a reason for this. With a poem, only the words that are necessary are used – the superfluity that often is required with prose is axed, and all that remains is the essentials, those few words that really describe a particular emotion. The intensity and precision of these words bring a description – a flash of feeling – to life, and whoever is reading the poem will no longer be reading, but feeling. The ability to make someone feel is the power of the poet. By charging his readers with emotion and showing them a new side of themselves and their lives, the poet has been granted the ultimate gift: of giving.