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Poetry is the work of a poet; he is a craftsman like any other. The notion that anybody can be a poet is ridiculous. It's the same as saying anybody can be a mason: it takes rigorous devotion and effort. Anybody can be inspired, but not anybody can write a functioning poem-- that is a, a work of rhythmic literature that uses figurative language to convey something. That "something" is what makes poetry so difficult. A poem taps into some aspect of the plethora of human emotion, making poetry universal regardless of time or place; that is, even if a reader can't identify with the situation or time period of the poet, the underlying sentiment will tap into something already within the reader. Poetry is that machine which artfully created to make the reader confront that which always existed.

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There is a smell like rosemary and tobacco at night so I write. Ink? I prefer the eye straining array of electroluminescence. Letters sparking into stale black and forming complex thoughts and images for someones fatty acid enriched nerve centers.

To speak to the soul, translating jealousy into cleverly worded praises; fancythat. Living history, sentencing my story to view as a public record. Experience,imagination and the passing along of secrets.

Writing is the evening you pluck a girl's florets one by one until you arealone in the bathroom. You've got overly tempered bricks just waiting to find the foundation of the earth. Finely aged over a twelve hour period, now bursting forth in a violent exchange of matter. How bright your light had shown just a moment ago!

There is reality in word.

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Poetry, as I've said on occasion, is cryptography in its most intuitive form. The idea of forming a direct emotion or reaction based on indirect means. In few other mediums can an artist take hold of something as structured and formal as the written word and bend it to meet the needs of human nature. At least, not without the strange body gestures and slitheryness of interpretive dance. My apologies to all of those who are waving their ballet shoes in protest.

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A balancing act between prose and song.

It shouldn't need enjambment to separate it from prose.

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Poetry is prose-- prose
with attitude and a mind of its own.
But poetry is not prose.
It is not a lifeless block of text
on a page, nor is it
as blunt; though
it is as daunting.

Poetry is the thick soup
of the creative mind, seeping
down to nourish those organs
of the spirit
that exist but are not tangible.
But poetry is not soup.
Poetry does not leave the body
feeling as if it had just eaten,
but it leaves the mind sated.

Poetry is.

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Poetry is the expression of one's innermost thoughts. It can be full of emotion, can make you feel great emotion, and expresses views.
Poetry is like spilling one's inner soul out onto paper or computer screen.
No matter what it is about, how it is written, poetry is just self-expression.

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Poetry is dead. An unfortunate state of being for such a noble art form but I stand by it. Just take a look in the search bar, type in poetry, and look at the "popular" deviations. Half of what will show up isn't even literature and the other half ranges from incomprehensible confused thoughts that try to be as confusing as possible to attain some nonexistant mysticism or are teen angst taken to such an extreme that words that should be beautiful or haunting, like sorrow and loss, become nothing but an ear-splitting whine.

Luckily though, hidden in the mountains of meaningless words, are literary zombies, the walking dead proving that words can still be beautiful. Deny the popular and look at the no name poets out there (that preferably do not have superflous x's or numbers in their username) and maybe, just maybe, poetry can mean something again.

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I tried to define that once to my adoptee from Adopt-A-Writer. I told her that poetry is a game of language where words are used for their aesthetic qualities, for their ability to massage the pre-frontal cortex (that's the language center of the brain, right? anyone?), rather than the ability to tell a story. There's something wrong with that definition though: Prose can be just as aesthetically pleasing, and the first poets (Homer, Beowulf's author[s], biblical prophets) told stories using poetry. I think what makes poetry unique is how revolutionary (to borrow Robert Bly's term) the language use can be. Grammar can be exploited in aesthetically pleasing ways and new words can be formed with meanings that are understood without being defined, perhaps even felt rather than understood.

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When considering poetry, we must keep in mind its broader etymological roots - poesis, of the Greek for 'making'. This encompasses the man who pens a verse even as it concerns itself with the man who carves a table. Pursuant to this is the fact that a man who makes must elect to proceed with making. Making is an elective, therefore. All electives require an established motive, be it known or unknown - a man must be motivated to make before he will elect to. What motivates a man will implement itself in every facet of the making he was motivated to proceed with. God, beauty, wit, fame, money, etc. All of these notions serve as motives for what is made by the hands of man. What dictates that they should be motivational, however, is that a man must have a passion for something before it will motivate him to make on the grounds of it. Passion is what impels, is what forces a man into, or out of, circumstances. To be passionate about something may be mental, emotional, or physical, therefore, and transcends the romanticized connotations it has accrued. Making is passionate, therefore. Passion is not an elective, making is an elective. It is therefore clear that a man's passion may not be thwarted, only the manner of its manifestation - internal, external, instructive, constructive, destructive, and whatever else could make use of a comma in this list. Making is therefore necessitated by what passion motivates a man, the form itself is the only elective. One can elect to make his own demise to suit his own passion, in the form of suicide or alcoholism, mayhap. Making is reactionary, therefore. Art is made through electing to do so as a reaction to passion. All art is passion, therefore, and must be considered as such before any critical or analytical treatment may ensue. What motivates a making, what is intended by this motivation in the making itself; this is the root of all true critical assessment, and has primacy over all aesthetic assessment, though man has made it very clear that critical assessment will not cease at its root, and this breeds yet more manifold reactions to the passion which motivates. So long as man exists making shall remain inexorable, for passions themselves remain inexorable, reaction to passion therefore remains inexorable
At its crux, all art is equal, for the one constant in all making is that it is founded on a passion.
We move to define by the constancy of an object,
Therefore:
Art being a substrata of making, poetry being a substrata of art - Poetry is passion.

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Poetry is a chance to channel my own inner experiences and ideas into shapes that might make them more meaningful to myself and others. I can capture many dimensions of the commonplace and try to show their significance. People take their lives for granted, yet in every experience there are elements that make us grow as human beings - humor, mystery, beauty, suffering, desire, appreciation, striving, anger, compassion, a sense of purpose.

Poetry takes us beyond mental and emotional patterns and limitations and goes to the causes behind events. It helps us observe in a new, more free, creative and open way. Through poetry one may open the door to the unseen, and touch deeper layers of understanding.

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I have learned that not all poetry
lends itself to music -- some thoughts
need to be sung only against the silence.

There are softer and less tangible parts
of ourselves that are so essential to peace,
to open-hearted-ness, to unforlding the vision
and spiritual realm of our lives,
to exposing our souls.

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Poetry is Poetry,
As seasons to forest floor
Poetry is Poetry,
As nuclear devastation is to alliance.
Poetry is Poetry,
As starvation is to garbage-disposal.
Poetry is Poetry,
As everything is to vacuum.
Poetry is ambigious,
Poetry is Poetry.

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To me there is poetry, and there is Poetry. The former is the craft of using words to evoke specific feelings and thoughts by painting a picture in the mind, or making a pattern of sound, or deliberately eliciting in some way with words a certain thought that translates directly and in an unmistakable way from writer to reader. And it is a craft, like painting or composing music. Words and patterns of sound are the tools, as paint is to the painter. An ill-wrought painting may show us a tree in a field so that it is recognisable as a tree, while a painter whom has learned his craft well can depict that same tree in a way so that we identify with it; that it becomes a symbol for something other than itself, transcends the canvass and becomes a symbol for something complex and unspoken, perhaps even unspeakable, in our own minds. This applies in exactly the same manner to poetry.

As to 'Poetry' : sometimes a craftsman-- who knows his craft well enough not to have to think about every motion he makes in a deliberate manner--- finds that it is no longer 'he' who is painting or writing, but that he has become the channel for something inexplicable, something greater than his own mind. His job is therefore to simply to be quiet and allow his craft to form Thought into Art in the best possible way he can.

This is not to speak of sheer genius, which is another matter entirely.

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Poetry Is... the inner being, the emotional child, striving to contain the world in words, expressing who they are, what they see, what they feel. A release, an escape, stories depicting highlights, lowlights and times of nothingness, all in a few well-thought words. There is a fine line between poetry and the heart, they cross at times, the emotions make you laugh, make you cry, make you feel and come alive. Poetry makes your soul ache, your spirit soar, your smile sometimes impossible to remove.

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...many things to many people. To me, it's the attempt to make oneself whole, just as erotic love is the desire to unite the lover with the beloved. That suggests, of course, that one is incomplete: human beings are essentially incomplete, in my opinion. We are not, after all, gods. Eros is the desire for oneness with the "other," with that which we lack. Poetry to me is thus the attempt on the poet's part to "make love" to their readers, to unite with them in thought and emotion through the medium of language via the tools of metaphor, simile, meter, rhyme, and all the other "tricks" of the trade. It differs from other forms of writing in that the unification is more immediate and visceral, more "existential" (if you'll forgive my use of that word with all its baggage) because the words of a good poem "disappear," the medium is absorbed as it were, and the reader becomes the writer for a brief time, if only once removed. I speak here, of course, of the best poetry, poetry par excellence. Being thus pierced and inhabited, the reader deepens and broadens their experience of the world, and the writer, having transformed another and given up a piece of themselves, is gratified and satiated. Both smoke a cigarette and fall asleep. (No animals were harmed in the writing of this piece.)

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poetry is a form of expression. no more, no less.

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Poetry is art, and art is about expressing things you can't express any other way
Also "Art is not about what you see. It's about what you make others see"

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Poetry is like love. We can see a series of different actions and still bring them back to this one thing, love. Poetry is the same. Its diversity is seemingly endless.
Poetry can be reliving the past with all its emotion, casting on paper the emotions we currently feel or describing in utmost detail the things we live to or yearn for and hope to obtain in the future. This be done in a way unlike most other mediums such as prose or the spoken word. Poetry requires the author to write down that in his mind not as he thinks it, but work with these thoughts, play with them, twist them around a little until it is shaped to be with rhyme, rhythm, imagery, alliteration. Or whichever of the poet's set of tools.
Poetry is shaping words, poetry is saying what the mouth could not.

Poetry is.

Perpetual. Universal.
And yet individual and unique.

Poetry is a piece that can be read at any time, ages past or ages forth. And not by one people, but everybody fit with the mind to comprehend. And still it must tell your heart's tale and remains yours. Be open for others to read like the feeling are their own but have them remain true to your feelings. Poetry is us, in an often undiscovered way.

But in the end poetry is the poet's poem, and not a description.

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Poetry is sometimes the only thing that saves me from myself...

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Poetry is something you can
                  hold in your hands.            Poetry is something you can hold in your heart.
Script, with meter and rhyme.               Something that wanders.
Distinguished by its floral nature
                 and eloquent structure,       It can be quick and direct and dirty.
It’s written by the trained
                      and established             Poetry can be two words spoken by a child
Following the fixed and orderly
                     rules of poetic verse.       Or a clarity derived from a confusing moment.
(Or thanks to mr cummings, the
                    fixed, unorderly rules
                    of poetic verse.)
Poetry – true poetry –                           Poetry bristles and growls
                     bristles and growls                               at aggrandizing effluence –
                     at bare description.         Or it damn well should.

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Poetry is pure emotion somehow conveyed into words. Some claim they can write like that, but it is merely an illusion. Few in this world are given the gift of poetry. Those few rarey find other ways to pour out their feelings in an effective manner. Those many without the ability have other ways to relieve their heavy hearts. Many of them do not need poetry as poets do. But without poetry, the world would wither and die.
Poetry is song, waiting to be put to music. It speaks to the soul as nothing else does, though not everyone can hear is quiet murmurings. Those deaf to its words suffer silently, often without realizing it. They are not always worth pity.
Poetry is not something tangible, nor is it something nonexistant. Poetry simply is.

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Poetry is the proof that language is more ancient than reason; it proves also that language can be reclaimed, and connected once again to the shambles of living. Poetry is at home in those curious tunnels and gullies of the pre-rational mind.

You can learn to make poetry when you can learn to listen to the weight, the pitch, the rhythm, in short the music of words. Poetry is a voice that anyone who works hard enough can learn to project.

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Poetry is the art of omission: carving away detritus until something worthwhile is revealed.

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Poetry is warm, delicious pain
and I am the most obsessed of masochists.

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Poetry is a craft of emotions, not words. There are many who claim to be poets simply because they can string together a few words and make it sound good. Few poets can actually convey emotion, portray timeless conflicts within a line, bait the world with one word.

The truest of all poets, can make reality into whatever he, or she desires it to be. Whether it is a battle, a sunrise, timeless tales of the heroes of lore, the simplistic movements of insects or animals. A poet can make all of these appear any way he or she wants from majestic or magical, to pathetic or comical.

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Good poetry is always RE- poetry.

re(-)creation
redefinition
renaming
reenacting
rereading
rewriting
reseeing
replaying
replying

respecting & disrespecting

& distancing: poetry is not important. take something too seriously & it becomes a violent charicature of itself, in art -- poetry-- above all.

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In this start to my poetic experience, (writing) poetry is dragging a big ol' net behind you as you go about your daily business. The net catches images and phrases that jump at your brain as you scan each environment you walk through. It is unobtrusive, but it is still always there, and there appears to be no way of detaching it from your shoulder once it has anchored itself. Learn to live with it, lest the sawing of the rope distracts you from the prospect of the haul.

Once home and in front of your notepad, MS Notepad, dA submission box or whatever your poison is, opening the net releases a wave of shivering catches. Some of the catches have rotted away while waiting in the net, sloughing off through the fiber even as you untie it. Some of the catches are dull, gun-metal gray; the kind of catch you see everyday under halogen lights at your local grocery store. These are best ground up and used for cat food. Still more of the catches are underdeveloped, an inch or two too small. These get thrown back into the ocean for another day's haul. A minority of the catch is made up of a regulation size and healthy colour. These are the mainstay of your operation; place them in a fishbowl and watch them swim around an interact with each other. Dine on them regularly and use them to provide solid energy to your poetry. Finally, and very rarely, you may find a catch so brilliant, so dazzling, so large, or so delicately small, so indefinable, or so common that you must prepare it specially. Here you must take caution, Because if you overcook it, or take the wrong cut, it will only poison the meal ahead. Take your time with these catches, and if necessary, seal them away in their own private aquarium for fresh use at a later date.

Once these catches, regular, spectacular, synergistic, or otherwise have been safely allowed to equilibrate in their respective environments, it is time to start preparing the recipe for their use. The important thing to remember is that not all recipes will work with all your catches. Sometimes a simple alfoil wrap with lemon and onion is sometimes all it takes to bring out the true flavour of the catch, whereas other times you will need to marinate, batter, soak, crumb, slice, preheat, reheat, grill, and/or fry your way into getting that perfect drop of poetry out of the damn thing. Cooking times can range from minutes to years and you will never know this beforehand. Sometimes you even need to forget the fact you are cooking it for it to finish! Other times you will need to cook it partway yourself before handing the recipe over to someone else to see if it is actually valid, before maintaining the watch again.

But these are only the basic recipes. Straightforward and precise compared to those of the Iron Poetry chefs, those towering warriors whose catches need not only to be physically cooked, but to be metaphysically cooked. To be thought about cooking, then perhaps wrapped in the previously cooked guts of another catch, before being thought about in two different stages of cooking at the same time from the perspective of another chef, before the dish is completed. All this, and I haven't even covered the choice of cutlery and crockery needed to indulge in the finished product!

Poetry is a difficult dish to master, indeed. But to see your guests and fellow chefs take that one, perfect, trembling mouthful, to watch the delight grow in their eyes as the layers of preparation are dissolved effortlessly in the saliva of their eager mouths.

Well shit, that's poetry itself.

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Poetry is more than just words on a page, it is an expresion of emotion in
its rawest and most beautiful forms.

Poetry is about more than what is written. It is about the unwritten
story, the hidden message that is only seen when you read between the
lines.
Poetry is a way of expressing and putting into words that which cannot be
seen, smelled, tasted, heard, or spoken. It is about expresing that which
can only be felt.

Poetry, in my opinion, does not have definition. That is what I find to be
the most interesting and beautiful about poetry. Few other art forms let
you express something that many different people who have nothing in
common can read and all gain something from and connect with on a very
deep emotional, sometimes spiritual level.

Poetry is what you make it, what you want it to be.

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Poetry is an emotion you can't shake,
it's the feeling that you express your life with.
It's the only thing that allows you to say everything and nothing at once.
Poetry doesn't require intelligence or superiority,
it doesn't depend on races.
Poetry is nothing more but writing how you feel,writing with your heart.

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Poetry is making sounds and words and the visual aspect of those words have an effect on whoever reads it. It is obviously hard, if not downright impossible, to define it, purely because there can be as many poetic notions as there are poets of poetry-readers.

For me, poetry should never try to have a clear goal to reach, like an ideal, nor should it try to portray any particular image or story. Rather, in an attempt to mimic the human mind insofar as it is possible, it should be vague in the use of its vast array of tools: by that being understood that it should be misty rather than tangible, fragmented rather than linear.

The poetry I like to read is that which makes me awe. I do not find much value in comic, grisly or simply overly-descriptive or situational. For me, the highest goal poetry can aim for is to cause psychological vertigo. Mostly because I tend to approach it, more than anything, as a religious experience. If not in powerful words you can find the divine, then I do not know where. And while not being a Christian, nor a follower of any particular religion, I can say that writings which do not try to be gospels are the ones which work best at this part-- again, it's the enthusiastic verse, not the preaching, that is divine.

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Poetry is bashing emotion in the back of the head, caveman-style, and then dragging it to one's cave for a bit of "eloquence."

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Poetry is the New Adventures of Language.

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Poetry just "is".

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Poetry is the transference of thoughts, perceptions and imaginings directly from one mind to another using the faulty, clumsy bridge of physical language; fortunately, some people take the trouble to figure out how to build better, more elegant bridges with the materials at hand.

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