WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT ISN'T

I am a poet. I write poetry. Whether it is art is up for argument. I have had my poems published in two publications, so I guess someone liked a couple of them. What's good to one , is not so good to another. Thus my point is, whether it is good or bad, it's still poetry by definition.

Then there are people who write things, beautiful things, but they are not poetry. They call it poetry. They call themselves poets. But I really don't know why, because what they write is not poetry, it's stuff like this:

STRADDLING THE BRINK
"The mirror is a foreign object
these days. We don't know
what we're seeing.
We are victims of our own
making,
paralyzed children,
mental quadriplegics
with no pity for them
or else too much."
-Belinda Subraman

That piece of work is lovely, it is insightful, it is well thought out. However, it is not poetry. It is a beautiful piece of prose with short margins.

I have a problem with people labeling something as "poetry" when it is actually "prose." I ran across "The Poet's Handbook" in 1990. I began reading the entries in "The Poet's Handbook" that ask for poets to send their work for possible publication in their poetry mag.

In these entries the editors of the various mags described the type of poetry they wanted for their mag, such as 'traditional', 'experimental, 'free-verse', etc. But they also mentioned stuff like "...no rhyming poetry". Or "If it rhymes, it'd better be good." And phrases like that. I was appalled! I couldn't imagine where these people got their idea of poetry. I knew there were different variations on poetry, but the essential element of poetry remained. How could they completely disregard the pure, original form of poetry? That was when I did some research; I simply looked up the word 'poem' in the dictionary.

POEM: a rhymed, metered composition, usually more imaginative than ordinary speech

Then I looked up Prose.

PROSE: ordinary language, not poetry

Thus, if it doesn't rhyme and it isn't metered, it's not poetry - by definition.

So, I can feel good calling myself a poet. An artist? That's another question entirely.

-Sherry Dedman-Sherritt

Back to Bum's The Word . . .