What is Poetry?

A weekly assignment for the workshop has been to come up with new definitions for poetry. It's one of those things for which there are seemingly infinite answers (although I might not think so by the last week of the semester :)

Here's what I've come up with so far:

Poetry is the by-product of narrative, exposition, and rhetoric.

Poetry is what still matters at the end of the world.

A poem is a discrete body of compressed language that would lose rather than gain meaning and impact if clarifying or additional information were added.

Poetry, like magic, is the intentional hallowing of objects.

Lyric poetry is more like dream logic in its confusion of the tenses of past, present and future, whereas narrative prose is linear like the conscious mind.

Much of a poem's music comes from the patterns and harmonies one hears but doesn't recognize.