What Constitutes Poetry

 I’m used to poetry

being written

as regular sentences

randomly split up

and people claiming it changed their lives,

and even ending with the classic line,

”Now read this backwards.”

I’m lying, don’t do that. Because I don’t want to either, I wouldn’t make you do that. In actuality, I don’t have the burning hatred and disdain I normally see in my peers when poetry is brought up. I like it sometimes, actually. In a book I read, Circe by Madeline Miller, the classification is fantasy and historical fiction. Yet every time I try to describe the book, I’m drawn towards the word “poetic.” The book is written in sections of Circe’s life, every few chapters a new few hundred years (because this is Greek mythology so gods and their children live forever). The way each section ended was not absolute, but gave a different, more universal and sentimental outlook to the situation. To me, that broadened perspective, that satisfying ending that resembles the feeling of a fairytale book gently being shut like in every princess movie ever, was poetry. 

Looking more closely at my classification of “poetry,” I can see I expect resoluteness from a poem. Since poetry is art, it should make my dull experiences something more profound. When I don’t like poetry is when my interpretation is different than the teacher’s, and now I’m automatically wrong. If a different interpretation exists, that doesn’t mean your own doesn’t. There doesn’t have to be one absolute understanding of something for it to be real, like for any abstract noun, it can be up to the viewer’s interpretation.

So as we enter the poetry unit, 

I hope I learn to understand line breaks

so I can judge

The technicalities

Of these odd,

self-publishing

”authors.”