by Kirby Congdon…….

In considering poetry, definitions becomes obscure. Each person’s imagination has its own references. It is difficult to appeal to every reader. One has to refer to whatever one knows or has experienced himself. Yet it is essential to commit oneself to all that and, so, avoid pat answers, convenient references or cliches. But it is also difficult to seek out what may be a kind of revelation.

We start out easily enough with a handy inspiration but how do we stay there, examining it with a hard look, and hopefully with uninterrupted concentration? We like to feel that we will come away, eventually, with something we did not know before.This may be a feeling perhaps of empathy or an awakening to a new idea, or it may be a sense of relief or some kind of understanding. In any case something happens that we didn’t expect. This is the genre of the poem. It is more than the dictionary definition: “a literary composition in verse expressing deep feeling or noble thought in an imaginative way.” Any politician can go there. And so can an eight-year-old.

It is when we ourselves have been changed that the influx of language says almost out loud what we mean. This is usually with an attractive vocabulary that is persuasive. But stunning ideas can come to us in vibrant and even violent words. Poetry as an activity may be controlled to please and mull us into “a mood” perhaps but a poem has a life of its own. It may achieve a literary independence of its own that affects our lives just as much as we may effect the life of the poem. We will have left the confines of verse and the demands of rhyme and will have learned almost inside a nanosecond what it is to be both alert and alive. Our work may sit for a long time in a file but the writer still has the comfort of knowing it is there, very much, I would think, like having been to confession, waiting to be recognized and forgiven!