Poetry Is Impossibly Difficult to Define

A broadside from al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a wonderful project
begun by San Francisco writer and bookseller Beau Beausoleil.
See the collection at http://www.library.fau.edu/depts/spc/JaffeCenter/collection/al-mutanabbi/index.php

Kim Rosen, in an interview in The Sun (December 2010), describes poetry as "containing the grit of humanity right next to the vastness of being."

The other night, at a reading in memory of Baghdad's book-centric al-Mutanabbi Street, New Mexico History Museum curator Tom Leach introduced the event by saying that poems are "the opposite of war."

These thoughts cheer me. Poems are what I turn to to smooth away the distress of war, and to express my sadness/madness/uncertainty. These are also, often, the reasons why I write, though there are others.

Yesterday, getting ready for an upcoming performance, I pulled a recent favorite poem of mine, a stream-of-consciousness block of poetic language with myriad twists and turns. Trying to find it in my collection of papers, I passed numerous poems I had written that are fragmentary and challenging.

So, I see, in my own writing, there's room for every style of poem - from narrative to abstract, from disturbed to grateful.