What Is Poetry and Why Do People Write It?

Poetry is the practice of creating artworks using language. Sculptors use marble, steel, cardboard, or whatever material they choose. Musicians use sound. Painters use paint. Furniture-makers use woods and fabrics. And poets use language.

So what makes poetry different from other uses of language? Here are five things almost all poetry has more of than other language (the non-poetic kind):

• Attentiveness: Poets are extremely careful with the way they use the language. They pay attention to everything from spelling to the way the words sound and what they mean. They think about punctuation and the spaces between and around words. Most people simply do not pay much attention to these elements of language – but paying attention is the poet’s job. And poets want you to pay the sort of attention, too – to the language you read and use and to your life.

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Concentration: Poetry has more meaning, music, and emotion per word, per syllable, and per letter than other kinds of writing. Poets find ways to open up explosions of understanding and emotion – while using carefully selected combinations of words. More meaning, fewer words – a nice trick. Whenever you find language especially charged with passion, music, or significance, you are probably looking at poetry or something close to it.

• Experiment: Poets try to use language in as many new, surprising, and challenging ways as they can come up with. They use language in special ways to startle, awaken, or challe

nge you.

• Originality: Poetry says or does something new; it makes something new happen in the reader’s mind. This new thing can be a totally original observation about life, or it can be a neat way of saying something many other people have already thought or said. Whatever it is, you can tell it is original because it does not try to echo someone else’s way of saying it – it finds its own way.

• Form: Most people write from one margin across to the next. Sometimes they indent to show that a new paragraph is starting. But poetry is different: It is very often about form – the very shape or structure a particular group of words takes. The word form also refers to the way a poem is written (its mode). You can write a poem in the form of a prayer, a letter, and a laundry list. And all forms carry their own worlds of meaning. So poets think a lot about form.

Poetry is not the only way of using language to make art, of course – for example, short stories and novels are works of art, too. But poetry usually has a greater degree of attentiveness, concentration, experiment, and form than you find in most other uses of language.

Poets are interested in exploring experience through the written word. That includes any experience you can have, as well as the world of your dreams and fantasies – the story of civilization; the taste of nasi lemak; dancing with your father; imaginary worlds with imaginary inhabitants; sending your cousin off to college; leaving someone you love (or hate); a full moon transfiguring a winter sky; explaining the ways of god to humanity. The poet takes all these kinds of experience, and the emotions and feelings they bring with them, and makes them into art through the way he or she uses language. And that – because you use language, too – gives you an instant link to poetry as well.

So why do people write poetry? The reasons are as numerous as the poems themselves.

Some people want to

• Make nice with the gods, as in the Psalms or the Bhagavad Gita

• Tell the stories of their communities, as Homer did in The Odyssey

• Record history, as Anna Akhmatova did in “Requiem, 1935-1940.”

• Commemorate a moment of personal history, as Ben Jonson did in “On My First Son.”

• Take an achingly clear snapshot of experience, as Shirley Lim did in Monsoon History.

• Embody their feelings, as Muhammad Haji Salleh did in Si Tenggang’s Homecoming.

• Create a state of feeling, as Stephane Mallarme did in “Afternoon of a Faun.”

• Explore language, as John Ashberry did in “Corky’s Car Keys.”

If you have not read some or all poems, consider this list a good place to start.

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