Everyday Canvas

On Poetry

Prompt: "Poetry is meant to be heard." Mary Oliver
Do you agree with this?

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I love Mary Oliver. Still, I think poetry has to be felt internally, first. Hearing the sounds does have an effect like music comforting the soul, but to me, it comes second, not first.

The sounds of the words and lines depend on an external sense, the hearing, but feeling has to do with the heart and the mind. The way I look at it, meaning tops everything else in any art but especially in poetry, which, as an arranged piece, has many sides to it such as topic, message, rhythm, and word choices.

Most newbie poets have the impression that poetry means using a poetic language and techniques to express important thoughts or ideas in a more beautiful, complex, or compressed way than prose, and that its beauty, complexity, and other heightened external qualities make it what it is. I may accept their assessment only from the point of view that the full beauty of a language, any language, can only be released through poetry.

It is true that poetry has a lot do with the deft handling of the language, but that may not be enough on its own because language needs the meaning and the feeling of the poet to become poetry.

This is why it is very difficult to comment on, let alone review, any poem. We can only do this from our own impressions and understanding of the work. The poet herself or himself might have had a very different take on that very poem.

I think, on this topic, I am more inclined to go with Emily Dickinson’s words. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”

Hence, as far as poets and poetry aficionados go, I say, “To each, his own!”