What Is Poetry?

That’s a pretty hefty question for a first post, one writers have been trying to ask as soon as there were writers, but I have at least the start of an answer.

The word “poetry” comes from the Greek ποιέω, which means “I do” or “I make.” This root comes into English in biology, too, in the word “hematopoiesis,” the process of making new blood cells in the marrow.

When the Greeks talked about poets, they often used the word ῥαψῳδόσ, like rhapsody. Rhapsodes were oral poets and singers, but their name comes from a verb that means “stitch” or “sew.” Rhapsodes are people who stitch songs and string together words.

The connection between manual crafting and poetry isn’t so different from English. Latin gives us the word “texere,” from which we derive both “text” and “textiles.” Texere is the Latin verb for weaving.

Etymologically speaking, poetry is something that is created, crafted, and carefully stitched. It is generative, but it is also artificial. Words are as flexible as fabric and as stubborn as a seam. Poetry is the ultimate art form: creating with that which is already created (language), boiling it down to its most necessary parts. This is distilled language, where each word is as carefully placed as a stitch on a piece of embroidery.

A poet is a maker.

Her medium utilizes sight, sound, and the imagination. Poets don’t just stitch ideas; they stitch sounds, inflections, meter, denotations, connotations, punctuation, spacing, etymological histories, line breaks, and the actual letters on the page.

And every stitch matters.