#i don't think instapoetry counts as poetry generally speaking

[septembersung]

We had Instapoetry as a topic in class, and we had a long discussion about what poetry is, etc., and the professor said, "everything that claims to be a poem is a poem." This reminded me of the book "How poetry means" by John Ciardi, which you recommended a while ago. Having read a lot of Instapoetry, I'm not sure my prof's definition is valid: if everything can be poetry, then nothing is. Just because something's structured in lines and stanzas doesn't make it a poem. What are your thoughts?

Your professor is as wrong as wrong can be. If I claim to be a pencil, does that make me one? Self-identification means nothing if it's not based in reality. If words don't have meanings, they... don't mean anything. So you're quite right. If any particular thing is a poem, poetry is nothing in particular.

The last century's experiment with changing the definition of art from "a work meeting specific criteria for creation and excellence in a given medium" to "this is art because I am an artist" and "it's art because I say it is" is a case study in degeneracy. "Anything is art" is a failed experiment. You can't get anyone to admit it though because it is so tied to a worldview - like all claims about art, it's really a claim about the nature and purpose of human beings and reality. And people get defensive when you question their religion.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics entry on "poetry" discusses versification, lineation, and heightened language as essential to this "verbal art." "Prose is cast in sentences; poetry is cast in sentences cast into lines."

Poetry is an art crafted of words that are extremely ordered. As Coleridge said, prose is words in the best order, poetry is the best words in the best order. Contemporary "free verse" like instapoetry, even if it contains incidental rhythm or the occasional rhyme or some other individual characteristic of poetry, is usually a single emotion, thought, or political statement stripped of the very layers of kinds of order that poetry is made of - meter, lines (distinct from inconsequential hits of the enter key,) heightened language, image (concrete, metaphorical, or imaginative), beautiful sound, "an experience irreducible to paraphrase," or even that delicate triangle balance of thought, emotion, and image that constitutes what's considered good contemporary free verse. It's not just about the content, but about what the physical (as it were) words are doing, and - this is where Ciardi comes in - how they do it.

I think the point about lineation is worth coming back to. You said "Just because something's structured in lines and stanzas doesn't make it a poem." Exactly this. Take this paragraph; I could go back through and format it to "look" like a poem, with shorter lines and stanza breaks, but that would not add anything to the content. Poetic lines have actual function in the meaning and experience of the poem.

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense, The sound must seem an echo to the sense."

Thanks for this ask!