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It Might Be Poetry, but Is It Good?

One of my students—a bright, inquisitive young man bent on non-conformity—asked me, almost defiantly, to define poetry. The poem at hand was "Engaged" by Octavio Paz, translated by Muriel Rukeyser—a balanced piece in three stanzas of sky, sea, and citrus, exploring life, love, and death in repetitive lines. "...a boy and a girl. / Sucking their oranges, giving their kisses / like waves exchanging foam. / ... a boy and a girl. / ... like clouds exchanging foam. / ... a boy and a girl ...." The student found it tedious, trite, and bland. In other words, not poetry.

Not wanting to give an acquiescent textbook definition, I considered offering a heartfelt explanation of my personal poetic: Poetry is words arranged with rhythm infused with irony and analogy. Poems are paintings of emotion, shouts of subtlety, capsules of thought to be taken as needed; dispensed as inspired.

The problem: how to convey this esoteric verbal artistry to a group of young college students. On the one hand, they've been taught, via attitude, all of their academic lives that poetry is meaningful in ways that they don't understand—that poetry is immortal and unreachable and therefore unattainable because their teachers stood before them and told them that, yes, so much does depend upon a red wheelbarrow. And it has nothing to do with white chickens.

At the same time, many of these disoriented students writhe in the inarticulate challenges of young adulthood, and poetic feelings arise and emerge, demanding to be documented. So they write, some of them quite well, knowing but not understanding that there is a distinction between real poetry and the expressive constructions they make with words—which are, ironically, more real to them than the ethereal timelessness of William Carlos Williams.

Perhaps the struggling artist uses poetry as a means to express tangled feelings; the jilted lover, as a means to untangle emotion and artfully spit blame; the brooding anarchist, to release the spirit of social injustice to the waiting world. But as veteran poet Theodore Enslin once said, "Here's a caveat: Don't use poetry."

Poetry is not a tool. It is not a therapy. It is not a drain through which flow the rants and longings of the angry and confused. Poetry just is. It is the manifest expression, through a myriad of forms, of messages from the unwriteable self to the unsilenceable voice. In other words, what we feel and think below the level of language becomes articulated in the images, ironies, and analogies of our poems, which in turn are read by those who seek to unravel these enigmatic messages.

I've spent my academic career—beginning as early as sixth grade, when I struggled to determine how Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool" and Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods" existed as integral parts of the same animal—trying to identify the markings of poetry. In its innumerable forms, poetry reaches out to readers with the singular desire to ignite the sparks of inquiry and understanding. That's it. That's all.

A poem, once written, becomes its own being, and all it wants to do is make a reader breathe more fully while she sighs, "Yes, that's it." All poetry has to do is appeal to its audience, allowing for varying audiences of varying tastes. That said, how can I, as a teacher of college English, profess that one set of words on a page is poetry and another is not? Quite simply, I realize, this is not at all my place.

My job is to expose students to poetry that survives and finds its way into the anthologies: John Keats, William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood, and dozens of others who've added their voices to the world poetic. I introduce the poems, we read them—both alone and aloud—and we discuss the sounds, the images, the emotive powers. I teach students to pay attention to what the poem says. To heft the weight of each word and feel the balance among the lines.

This kind of careful reading moves us closer to the answer my inquisitive student actually sought. He didn't like the poem we were studying and wanted me to tell him whether or not it was really supposed to be good. Perhaps he was a budding poet, himself, and wanted to know how "Engaged"—with its simplicity and redundancy—made it into a literary anthology while his work lay unrecognized in thin, self-published volumes.

My student wanted a formula, and I had none to give. There is no prescribed guideline for the creation of poetry, only the inspiring models of existing poems. I told my student and his classmates that if they wanted to learn to identify good poetry, they should read more, discover what they like, and appreciate its preciseness and intricacy. Remembering that tastes vary with individual style, I felt safe in defining good poetry as that which works.

Good poetry is careful in its presentation: no words linger extraneously, no punctuation intrudes gratuitously. Its images are crisp and its analogies apt. It flows like clear water over smooth stones. Poets practice creation, and these creations—the poems—seek those of us who need to find melodic entities that reach through our ears into our souls and remind us that we are real, we are special, we are individual, and we are one.

Wendy Balke, M.A., is a student and writer of poetry. She teaches English at two colleges in the Seattle/Tacoma area.