What Is Poetry?

from Pearl and Other Poems

If I say it’s a poem, it’s a poem.

If I wanted to be more objective, I might say something like, “If it’s published as a poem, then, historically speaking, it is a poem. If it is widely circulated enough, and if enough people claim loudly enough that it is or is not a poem, then, historically speaking, it will influence our perception of what is and is not a poem.”

And I might go so far as to say that the history of verse is a history of unpoemish innovations that come to be called poetry.

Dickinson comes to mind—we like her so well because she created us out of thin air, crafting unpoemish poems that became central to our definition of what a poem is.

For an earlier example, look @ the way print technology shifted the defining onus of poetry from the aural to the visual, how a piece looks and reads and “sounds” on the page. Dickinson, whose poems are very much poems in this sense—literary rather than musical works—could hardly be termed a poet in this earlier, musical sense, dependent as it is on public performance, vocal talent, instrumental training, &c.

The same people who will cry most loudly that this or that is not a poem—as, for example, is so characteristically true of the response of more pedantic readers to some spoken word or hip hop—are the same who would have told Dickinson that her poems weren’t poems.

There were, maybe, seagulls.

In my experience—and I acknowledge the following as a personal bias that carries little authority into the realm of the objective or even stereotypical—the people who cry “not poem” have tended towards a certain kind of personality and a certain level of skill.

They have been, by and large, individuals with a degree of literacy—institutional, social, cultural, linguistic and otherwise—but not much imagination. (That’s not quite fair—let me at least say, they have not been savants and have had a somewhat restrained sense of vision.) They have also been, I have found, interested less in the substance of rational discourse than its semblance.

A fact that is, to my mind, self-apparent in the relevant claim: “This is not poetry.” This claim tends to be asserted on the basis of a mystical personal authority derived from communion with the universal-historical nature of verse—all while proclaiming itself to be a guardian of objective reason and culture—and is, as far as I can tell, largely impervious to the argumentative force of history, contemporary example, expert opinion, or the dictionary.

(c) 2014 lee sharks

from Pearl and Other Poems:
http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl

Stop Reading

Very few people know it, but the secret to great writing is: not reading. 

Once I was an ordinary boy child of indeterminate gender, like Pinocchio, but powerful poems transformed me, first, into Leto Atreides, God Emperor of Dune, and, second, into G. W. F. Hegel, author of Phenomenology of Spirit and Cranium Base Alpha for touchdown of Absolute Spirit on planet earth in Prussia. 

The way I achieved this was based on the simple principle of not reading. I started by avoiding all works of German Idealism, my own included, then proceeded each day to gradually taper my literacy, cutting out anything in the Continental tradition, works of poetry and philosophy, literary and historical works written more than 50 years ago, then any contemporary 'scholarship' or 'criticism,' anything with an empirical, analytical, or evaluative bent, works of genre fiction, pulp novels, the newspaper, comic books, instructions, and signs. 

I got stuck at this phase for quite some time, and it wasn't until I had a breakthrough based on the mystical experience of Nature that I was able to make progress. When I was walking in the woods, a squirrel fell on my head and it occurred to me that I was STILL thinking like a critic, infected with the disease of abstraction and self-examination: I needed to be like the squirrels, the trees, the organic poem that is Nature. 

From that point on I radically reconceived the my task. The only way to eliminate the stubborn dregs of reading that persisted, boil-like, to plague me--the way to fulfill my destiny and become a fully actualized poetic genius and/or godhead and/or Voice of the Ages and/or independently wealthy auteur--was to tear the weed out by its roots, as it were. 

To eliminate reading, I must eliminate thinking. 

To that effect, I immediately instituted drastic changes in the routines of my daily life. I stopped bathing. I stopped wearing clothes. I refused to cook my food. I defecated at will. At long last, the Mystery of Poetry had revealed itself to me, unlocked in the primitive glory of my transformation. An unspeakable, trembling destiny took shape within me, and I, Leto Atreides the 47th, became God Emperor of Dune, also known as the Poet Lee Sharks. My powerful mind control poems now allowed me to regulate the flow of melange on Dune, and also to become a gigantic worm-man, and also to harness the power of friendship, kindness, laughter, and magic. 

And it all started with not reading.