What is Poetry?

Since taking this class, my ideas of what poetry is has changed. Before, I thought poems usually rhymed and made sense. I thought they had to have certain amounts of lines and follow a pattern. I now know, poems don't have to rhyme and they definitely don't have to make sense. There really are no rules to poetry. It's an abstract way of expressing your thoughts and feelings. A poem can turn a mundane subject into something interesting just by the way the words are arranged. Poems can be written in stanzas or paragraphs, written with no punctuation, or with words jumbled all across the page. Every element gives the poem a certain feel.

A poem that made no sense to me was "The Scent of Verbena" by Hinako Abe. No matter how many times I read this poem, I couldn't quite get it. I also got bored and stopped paying attention because there was no cool rhythm or play on words. The only thing I thought was interesting was the way the words were arranged like an hourglass. That's the cool thing about poetry, the words don't have to be in neat paragraphs with perfect punctuation. It's all up the the writer.

Punctuation and the way the words and lines are arranged in a poem are very important. In the poem "Standing Strong" by Ed Roberson, the only line that is isolated and with a period is "He wants to walk away from this." It's also the most concrete sentence in the poem, like it's the only concrete the author or subject of the poem is thinking. It's a strong statement and gets the point across.

I think a poem is made or finished when the writer decides it is. A poem doesn't have to be complete, in fact, the best poems I have read have been open to lots of interpretations. Poems can be extremely short or extremely long. They are finished when they leave the reader thinking about what they just read. I think a good poem doesn't straight out tell you what it is talking about, but they give you little pieces of the puzzle and leave the reader to put them together.

My favorite poems have a cool rhythm to them and sound pleasing when you say them. For one example, I like the way Langston Hughes' poems have almost a musical sound to them. They sound laid back and flowy. He uses slang and writes sounds like, "Oop-pap-ah-pa!" Another poem I think has cool rhythm and sound is