What is Poetry?

Thanks for reading my old poems that I posted within these few days and your positive reactions to my works certainly meant a lot to me. And that made me want to think and write about what poetry is for me. What is it for you, my dear fellow writers and readers? How do YOU see poetry in your life?

Containing the mysterious strong power, leaving unfamiliar new scent, messing up with my heart and always running away from me, poetry goes beyond all of my knowledge and intelligence. Like a beautiful butterfly that can never be captured in my hands, poetry is what is not mine, yet. However, it ironically keeps on making me attracted. Until the day poetry is finally captured in my hands, I would rather let poetry be undefined, for the combination of obscure thoughts never deserves to define poetry.

Unlike novels or short stories whose plots and characters have almost the dominant significance rather than the meaning that each word has, the importance that each word carries in a poem is quite enormous. In other words, if one cannot decode almost every word in a poem, he/she fails to understand it. This fact widens my ignorance and foreignness to English language and ends up revealing how unsophisticated my English really is. To be honest, poetry written in English and writing poems in English are threads to my English ability.

However, the reason why I am never ashamed of my poetry in English is because it is the consequence of following my heart. Namely, poetry is one tool to face who I am whether directly or indirectly. Like the case of the ancient Greek poet, Sappho, even though her works are discovered as fragments, as long as there is the strong power in the words in the poems, regardless of the languages of translations, the words shine by reflecting the pieces of the author. That idea perhaps might be what poetry to me is.

© 2015 Miki Martinez