You can lead a horse to water and hope they drink. That’s prose. But the experience of drinking, conveyed through the artifice and music of language? That’s a poem.

Crowd-sourced! I asked my friends on Facebook, “Tell me a thing you think a poem is, and a thing you think a poem is not.” Here are some of the answers I got:

• A poem is original, not a cliche.
  — Kirsten Huscusson
• I think a poem is words and a poem is not words.
  — Emily Doolittle
  
  
• Have you read Mary Ruefle? Madness Rack & Honey is one long essay I want to excerpt in answer to your query. I read the book that it is in daily.

  Poetry is often the only way to discover and become and describe that which we so desperately need to have in our world, between the lines of what is or we are – it lives in the spaces between and we carve it into existence with sound and pixels and ink.

  Poems are both birth and death. — Lisa Rokusek

• Poetry is vulnerability. Poetry is not packaged neatly for the masses.
  — Jamie Herron
• A poem is a distillation of a thought, a memory, or a feeling, but it is not a confession
  — Sheree Renée Thomas
• Poetry is where knowing quickens into music.
  — Klyd Watkins
• a poem is emotional truth/a poem is not factual
  — Julene T. Weaver
• every
  Thing
  is a Poem

  Not what a poem is Not
  rather
  what it need not be

  it need not be prettymoonjuneballoonflutteringlashessunsethandinhandandhearts

  but it can

  it can be
  the sound of choking
  in a hidden prison
  the numbness
  of three jobs two kids no words

  mass graves
  wildflowers
  a roach cleaning her antennae

  it can be
  the devout cliches
  of a dying elder

  the droning angst
  of a teenager
  trying
  to kill a secret

  bad grammar
  bad form

  yet with a voice
  a DNA
  of need

  a sloppy scrawl
  of run-on prose

  rhyme slanted
  hard enough to snap
  stuttered meter
  of a diseased heart

  It can be garbage
  repurposed
  or left to decay
  slipping the bonds
  of language

  the mnemonic
  of atoms whose existence
  writes itself
  — Elissa Malcohn

What is a poem?

I’ve been thinking about what makes a poem in terms of what is a poem and what is prose. I’ve been pondering this a lot—that line breaks on their own don’t make a poem, and that a prose poem is more than a block of text.

A while back, I said that a poem is music—that prose can be musical but in a poem, music is more important than narrative.

Now I want to add to my earlier response: Just as music includes the rests, the poem rests in the space on the page—always asking, “What’s next?” For me, a poem is what’s here and what’s left out—what can’t be seen or heard but only felt, a shift, a haunting. The not-said lingers in the space, engages me as the reader to go between the lines.

This is not about confusion but an intention and a respect. The poem intends to go its way and respects me as the reader to keep up with it. If the writing tells me everything, I become a bystander. I’ll still enjoy its music—a sensual turn of phrase, a run of alliteration, refrain, end or internal rhyme, all the poetry things. But does it invite me back?

What’s being said and not said sets up a tension and a desire to uncover what’s next. In this way, every poem is some kind of mystery. For me, the poem doesn’t need to answer the question (it might, but I don’t think that’s mandatory). The poem must ask a question.

As an example, I come back to music. In Western music, we want the songs we hear to resolve in their own key—on the tonic or the tonic chord (a melody in C ends on C). For me, a poem resists that resolution until the very last minute, or it doesn’t resolve at all, leaves me listening for it, singing it in my head.

Or a poem is like the composition of a painting, which isn’t flat but is guiding the eye—there is movement on the canvas and awareness of what isn’t in the frame. I especially like to think of post-modern lyric poems as abstract art, where the landscape is not painted for me but I as the reader am creating my own world, my own narrative or backstory.

We have image, metaphor, and music. We have what’s missing, and we have that moment, the turn that pivots our awareness. If the poem asks me to work with it a little, if it leaps and gives me a ledge to land on, but just enough of a ledge, then I become a part of the poem and it becomes a part of me.

Earlier, Mary posted about nourishment. This is what nourishes me, and this is where I want my poems to lead me.

Joannie Stangeland is the author of In Both Hands and Into the Rumored Spring, both published by Ravenna Press, plus two chapbooks, and a pamphlet of prose poems. Joannie’s poems have also appeared in Front Porch Journal, Off the Coast, Hubbub, Santa Fe Literary Review, and other journals. For more information, please visit her website.

What is a poem?

A poem is the inside of one person becoming the inside of another. Words together, not words alone. Words alone can’t make a poem, any more than a sacred text can make the divine. A poem is strangers talking across centuries. A meal shared between two people who’ve never met. The past breaking open the present. The present breaking open the past.

A poem is not about something but is something. An experience or emotion that passes holy into cell, sinew and vein, changing us with its dark, abundant breath. A poem is a rage at bombs and the odor of death; or snow geese, lovely, coming out from every page. A poem is the eggs of monkfish knitted into a gauzy shroud, buoyant, built for dispersal. A poem is gods in low hills holding thunder and flame. A poem is one eye, round as a coin, fixing fear upon you, the other, half shut.

A poem is sound and breath and feeling, rising from the page like the heat of summer rising from a road. A poem is fear braided into the strands of sinew connecting good-girl muscle to good-girl bone. A poem is atoms, quarks, and auras and all the love that lies between.

A poem is a door through which we move and are changed. A poem is the world aware of itself, alive to its own being. A poem is the gentle pressing of heat, the perfect distance from flame.

A poem is a sudden flock of birds across a blue wake; an eye that rises and falls. Wisp of seeing and being seen. A poem is quarrel, confusion and descent. Fragment of exaltation. A poem sings about the eye, billowing as if body and sky are one. A poem dreams of birds. Dreams of rain and ruin. Wisp of seeing and being seen. A poem dreams of itself dreaming of rain, its muscle sweet to its skin.

Lisa Dordal (M.Div., M.F.A.), author of Commemoration from Finishing Line Press, teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University. A Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals, including Best New Poets, Cave Wall, CALYX, The Greensboro Review, and Nimrod. For more information about her poetry, please visit her website at lisadordal.com.