What is Poetry?

The following is a personal interpretation of E.O. Wilson’s comments about biology from his book The Diversity of Life (1992).  I have substituted the framework of writing poetry for his references to the field of evolutionary biology.  What a mind he has, and what a writer he is!  Perhaps it is not so odd that what he has to say about science so easily translates into our endeavor to write.

From Chapter One, Page 8.

Perhaps poetry is a kid of hands-on reaching to grasp fuzzy abstractions in order to make them appear in an understandable shape.  We wander in and around a subject, looking for a pattern that imposes some order.  We seek a name or a phrase that calls attention to the object of our attention, hoping to make a connection.  We aim to capture a process, a reaction, a change that reveals how life flows so powerfully.  We cast our net of words, hoping to land almost anything at all.

Most ideas are waking dreams that quickly fade,  yet we continue to grasp at them before they dwindle to mere emotional residue.  We know that no one has captured a metaformula for how life is lived.  We accept that art is a stroke of luck aided by a mind set to receive.  And so, we hunt outward, and we hunt inward.

17 Responses

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  5. “Most ideas are waking dreams that quickly fade”…beautiful. For me, poetry is an exploration of thought and musings interwoven with emotion expressed in literary form. I should explore more often.

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