a series in partnership with the Massachusetts Poetry Festival
Jeffrey Harrison
This is the third installment in a series brought to you by Read Write Poem in partnership with the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which is being held Oct. 15-18 in Lowell and various cities across Massachusetts. Visit the organization’s website for a complete schedule of events, to watch videos of poets performing at the 2008 festival, for ticket information and more.
For this series, featured readers at the festival were asked to answer the question, “What is poetry?” Here is Jeffrey Harrison’s response.
What is poetry?
When a question is so vast and unanswerable, it is tempting to resort to humor, for instance by quoting Frost: “Poetry is what is lost in translation.” Or Paul Valéry: “Most people have such a vague idea about poetry that this vague feeling itself is their definition of poetry.” But those of us with more than a vague idea hanker for more than a vague (or funny) definition.
The other approach (which I’m already using) is to turn to what others have said. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of definitions out there, none of which is adequate in itself, or there wouldn’t be so many. Here are a few definitions of poetry (and of what a poem is) that I like, and that are not as well-known as Wordsworth’s spontaneously overflowing feelings, Coleridge’s “best words in the best order” or Dickinson’s unwarmable body and head with the top taken off.
Octavio Paz: “Poetry is memory become image, and image become voice.”
Osip Mandelstam: “Poetry is the plow that turns up time, so that the deep layers of time, the black soil, appear on top.”
Allen Grossman: “A poem is an occasion for loving exchange of perceptions among the company summoned.”
Wallace Stevens: “Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush.”
Charles Wright: “The poem should be a mixture of revelation and arrangement … ”
There’s a lot to dwell on here. And, come to think of it, one definition of poetry is a kind of dwelling, in the several senses of that word: a place of habitation as well as the idea of lingering and pondering. Reading and writing poetry provides us with a mental, emotional, and linguistic space in which to dwell, one where we are not in a hurry but have the time to ponder whatever it is we’ve turned our attention toward.
But maybe it’s impossible to say what poetry is, and maybe that’s why we keep writing poems, each poem trying to answer the question for itself.
Jeffrey Harrison is the author of four full-length books of poetry — most recently Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books, New York), which was runner-up for the 2008 Poets’ Prize — as well as of The Names of Things, a selected poems published in England by The Waywiser Press in 2006. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, he has taught at George Washington University, Phillips Academy, where he was the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence, College of the Holy Cross, the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program, and, during the summer, at the Frost Place in Franconia, N.H. He has new work in recent or forthcoming issues of The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Tri Quarterly, The Southern Review and elsewhere. For more information, go to http://home.comcast.net/~jeffrey.harrison/index.htm
Harrison will be reading as part of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in the “Four Poets from Four Way Books” reading, Saturday, Oct. 17, at 1 p.m. at the ALL Arts Gallery in Lowell. Learn more about the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival by visiting the festival’s site.
I love that notion of Mr. Harrison — each poem we write answers the question for itself. When I need a basic definition of poetry, I go to the term “poetry” in a specialized poetry dictionary. But that’s only a starting point, not an end point. All that Mr. Harrison offers above (metaphors for poetry, qualities of poetry, “should” prescriptions for the nature of poetry) develops and enriches that starting point. Thank you for this feature!
It is fun to read people’s definitions of poetry. It is like reading or listening to people’s descriptions of a fragrance, or a texture, or a flavor. Each is as unique as the individual who is trying to define it.
In the end, that seems to be what poetry is. It is in the perception of the individual. Trying to capture the essence of poetry is, using the words of Bob Dylan, an exercise to “try and catch the wind”.
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I very much enjoyed this author’s description of “what is poetry.” Rob, YES, to each person, poetry is something entirely different. To me is is a way to clarify thoughts, and put things in perspective..at it’s best it can appeal to anyone, from the man on the street, to the child with a mind, to the most artful types..and it SHOULD appeal to everyone. It is a gift to share.
I like Frost’s quote’poetry is what is lost in the translation’.Poetry is beyond prose.
Certain thoughts and feelings can only be expressed successfully in poetry.
There are big poems,medium poems and litle poems.I’m a little poem person,easily understood
and accessible but it’s all changing soon.I’m moving in with the big boys and intend to be completely lost in my own translation.
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