In a dream last night, I was at an event aswering questions, and someone asked, “How do you know when you’ve written a poem?” I had a pretty good answer, or at least so it seemed in the dream. So let’s see how much I can remember here.
The first part of my answer was that you know when you’ve written a poem when you’ve been moved by something you wrote. We are always our first audience, so if it doesn’t move you, then it’s not likely to do much for someone else, and conversely, if it does move you, you may not need anyone else’s approval.
When that’s not enough, and you want your poem to join in a conversation with others, then you read other poems and compare what you’ve written to what else is going on out there. I recommend reading both contemporary poets from literary magazines and recent books as well as classic poetry or poetry from around the world. Expand your reading, and you will expand your poetry. Know what magazines are publishing, and you’ll have a better sense of where to send your work. But just remember that there are so many kinds of poetry out there. You can find your own space.
If you really want to test your poetry against others, then take a class like the workshop I’m teaching this semester. We’ll read lots of poems and discuss how poetry works. You’ll get confused, but hopefully out of that confusion you’ll also distill a clearer sense of your own about what makes a poem. If you want to get really confused, then join an MFA program, and we’ll talk about poetry and about writing for a couple of years, you will write a ton, and you will really develop your own sense of craft. But ultimately, it will still always come back to your primary audience, yourself as your first reader, and the other audiences you now know you want to reach.
But I knew that wasn’t enough for my dream interlocutor, who would probably want a more specific answer for what makes a poem. For me, something is a poem when it says at least one thing clearly, yet also is open to multiple levels of meaning and interpretation. Not everyone would agree, but I tend to like poetry that can be understoond on first read, at least on some level, and I like poetry that rewards multiple readings. Something is a poem when it is said in a way that there may be no other way that can quite say it. And something is a poem when its sounds and rhythms add to the multiple layers of meaning, when it is beautiful enough to be memorable or is disturibingly beautiful enough to be haunting. Something is a poem when you can hear it one day, come back and read it the next, pick it up again years later, and still find something in it you didn’t see the first time, or that you return to it over and over, even if the meaning doesn’t shift but because that meaning is so solid and so useful or so beautiful.
And as you are writing, something is becoming a poem when you can return to it over and over, and in revision you can continue to explore it and discover new meanings, new fascinations, and new ways to refine it, until you are done with fiddling and ready to let it go into the world as it is, when you can continue as its first reader to find newness in it that you didn’t realize when you wrote it. A poem is a poem when you can revisit it afresh with every new reading, and it doesn’t grow tired, even when you’ve moved on to writing new poems.
There are many kinds of poetry and many poets who challenge my definitions of poetry in productive and provocative ways (including my students who do that every day). And all of that can be poetry or some of it may be bleeding into fiction or creative nonfiction or other forms in interesting ways. To come back to my original answer: as long as it moves the writer, then it is poetry to them, and if it finds readers who are moved by it as well, so much the better.
Kendall Dunkelberg 