WHAT IS POETRY?
Some food for thought for today:
According to Edward Hirsch's A Poet's Glossary (a must-have for any poet or any reader of poetry: 700 pages of terms and definitions related to poetry, explained succinctly and accessibly, with examples) poetry itself can be "defined" as:
"An inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language; an experience through words….Poetry is a human fundamental, like music. It predates literacy and precedes prose in all literatures. There has probably never been a culture without it, yet no one knows precisely what it is."
The "definition" goes on. But I love the distinction made here between inexplicableness and incomprehensibility. And the emphasis on poetry as fundamental. To all my prose-writing friends, I'm not going to rub it in, but….
