Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry
1 Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to
break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables,
wave lengths.
2 Poetry is an art practised with the terribly plastic material
of human language.
3 Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when
people say, 'Listen!" and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What
was it?'
4 Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to
the infinite points of its echoes.
5 Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths,
crypts, crosslights, and moon wisps.
6 Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers
of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth
dimension.
7 Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain
goat and the path of fresh drinking water.
8 Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one
thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not
yet a number for.
9 Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.
10 Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting
to fly the air.
11 Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into
horizons too swift for explanations.
12 Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an
illegible oath between.
13 Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and
unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.
14 Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.
15 Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of
the unknown and the unknowable.
16 Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob
with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.
17 Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate,
love, death.
18 Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a
hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.
19 Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with
riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a
white wind against a blue sky in spring.
20 Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along
with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.
21 Poetry is a sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden
frog.
22 Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a
mock of a laugh at losing it.
23 Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root
of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.
24 Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life
and then entombing it.
25 Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who
look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.
26 Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of
moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.
27 Poetry is a statement of a series of equations, with numbers
and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the
only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.
28 Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.
29 Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights,
delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and
another, 'How?'
30 Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.
31 Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose
path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and
bones, on the hard ways to the stars.
32 Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a
strap of facts.
33 Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies,
bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up
bewildering bastions.
34 Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and
why they go away.
35 Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between
white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.
36 Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and
biscuits.
37 Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire,
smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
38 Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a
deliberate prism of words.
Carl Sandburg