Last week during ASTU, we had a lightning round in class about what comes to our mind whenever we think of poetry. As I was waiting for my turn to come, the only thing I could think of was that poetry is basically just words on a page. But the question made me think, later, about what I really think poetry and other forms of written writing is.
All forms of writing, including poetry, are just forms of communication from the writer to the reader. Unlike other forms of communication, I suppose, the primary physical mechanism of written language is its ink on a page, which can extend to the sounds it creates when spoken aloud. But what is most important about poetry in the current era, I think, is the vastness of meaning that it can convey. This is because as a genre, it is unbound by reasoning or logic, or strictness of form. In this way, poetry is a realm of freedom. I say this because the meanings of words in poetry, I think, are stretched beyond the meanings you can find for them in a dictionary. When used in a poem, words take on different meanings than they would have taken in other forms of written language, for readers of poetry are encouraged to look beyond grammatical and vocabulary rules and instead for their own personal interpretation of the words.
This freedom, of course, can be manipulated or misunderstood. Poems like “Photograph from September 11” and “In Flanders Fields” can be used as nationalist propaganda that makes it difficult for people to understand the precarity Judith Butler describes. Like any form of media, they can be used by a few to further an agenda. The poem “An Arundel Tomb” was misunderstood by many friends I know as a testament to perpetual romantic love, when its meaning was the exact opposite.
What is most important and interesting about poetry to me is how deeply it can evoke a certain emotion or thought, which can render a poem dear to us or memorable for the rest of our lives. Neil Gaiman wrote in his introduction to Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” that the book, or all stories in general, “is about what you find between its pages”; and I find this quote quite fitting in the realm of poetry.