On the Shelf

Library@Nite

Are you a school student whose parent works, and therefore can’t make it to the library during the day? Or, perhaps you’re a working parent with a school student, and also can’t make it to the library during the day. Well, we here at the Downieville Library have a solution for you — student and/or parent. Once a month, the library is open in the evening. It happens on the second Monday of each month, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. Everything that is on offer during our regular daytime hours (Tuesday, 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM, and Thursday, noon to 4:00 PM) is on offer during Library@Nite. Your next opportunity for this late opening is Monday, April 14. See you here!

What is Poetry?

April is designated as National Poetry Month in Canada and the United States. It was first instigated by the Academy of American Poets in 1995, with the first National Poetry Month being celebrated in 1996 in the United States, and 1998 in Canada. We are now in April, hence this discussion.

Recently, one of our children asked me for a definition of poetry. I could, of course, have shared an encyclopedic definition, e.g., “poetry [is] literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm” (Britannica), which is almost word-for-word the dictionary definition in Merriam-Webster.

Instead, I shared the following from An Introduction to Poetry, by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia: “What is poetry? Pressed for an answer, Robert Frost made a classic reply: ‘Poetry is the kind of thing poets write.’ In all likelihood, Frost was not trying merely to evade the question but to chide his questioner into thinking for himself. A trouble with definitions is that they may stop thought. If Frost had said, ‘Poetry is a rhythmical composition of words expressing an attitude, designed to surprise and delight, and to arouse an emotional response,’ the questioner might have settled back in his or her chair, content to have learned the truth about poetry. He or she would have learned nothing, or not so much as one might learn by continuing to wonder. The nature of poetry eludes simple definitions. (In this respect it is rather like jazz. Asked after one of his concerts, ‘What is jazz?’ Louis Armstrong replied, ‘Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.’)”

There is also this from the Academy of American Poets: “Poetry is a human fundamental, like music. It predates literacy and precedes prose in all literatures. There has probably never been a culture without it, yet no one knows precisely what it is.”

In a further effort to answer the question, I share this poem of my own creation:

Perchance, a Poem

Perchance, this musing is a poem; well,
Obviously, this musing is a poem; but,
Even though this musing is a poem,
There are those who might say,
“Really, this musing is not a poem;
You can’t convince me that it is”.

I say, “This musing is a poem,
Such as you, yourself, could do.

Forget all that you thought you knew.
Release your imagination, and let
Everything become a possibility.
Even punctuation and grammar are yours to control.
Don’t limit yourself to correctness.
Open your soul.
Mayhap you, too, will muse a poem.”