What is poetry?

The following are all quotes of poets trying to explain what poetry is for them:

"Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that is to stop. You've got to stop what you're doing, what you're thinking, and what you're expecting and just be there for the poem for however long it takes." W.S. Merwin (Pulitzer Prize winner, 1971)

"Poetry began when somebody walked off a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, 'Ah-h-h!' That was the first poem." Lucille Clifton (she acknowledges her six children as the inspiration for much of her work, for three years this African American poet was poet laureate of Maryland, she teaches at Columbia University)

"A poem is anything said in such a way, or put on the page in such a way, as to invite from the hearer or the reader a certain kind of attention." William Stafford (poetry consultant to the Library of Congress---now called poet laureate---in 1970-71)

"Poetry is a conversation with the world; poetry is a conversation with the words on the page in which you allow those words to speak back to you; and poetry is a conversation with yourself. Many times I meet students and see a little look of wariness in their faces---'I'm not sure I want to do this or I'm not sure I can do this'---I like to say, 'Wait a minute. How nervous are you about the conversation you're going to have at lunch today with your friends?' And they say, 'Oh, we're not nervous at all about that. We do that every day.' Then I tell them they can come to feel the same way about writing. Writing doesn't have to be an exotic or stressful experience. You can just sit down with a piece of paper and begin talking and see what speaks back." Naomi Shihab Nye (poet who teaches at the University of Texas, Austin)

The poet Gary Snyder wrote the

following poem about poetry:

How Poetry Comes to Me                                          

It comes blundering over the

Boulders at night, it stays

Frightened outside the

Range of my campfire

I go to meet it at the

Edge of the light

For Snyder, and most other poets, writing is an intuitive process, an expression of your emotions and soul that flows out of you. Although it is an intellectual process, it is also an art form that requires that you look inside yourself and let what is there, come forth.

Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.

Robert Frost