Poetry and Ghosts

I was just thinking about ghosts and how they can only communicate through sound, and not through any of the other senses. Poetry, likewise, was originally exclusively oral, and only recently has become a visual phenomenon. The ancient sort of chanting verse was closer to music in giving off vibrations that approach the tactile. (The deaf can dance to music, even though they can't hear it, because they can feel it.)
Does this mean hearing is our crudest sense, since it's permitted to ghosts, who are, according to most conceptions of earthbound, once-mortal spirits, damned? And hence no doubt stripped of their most valued privileges?
Such musing doesn't discourage me from poetry, since, after all, I don't literally believe in ghosts, of course. It just makes me want to work harder at making my poems seen, felt, smelled, tasted.
That was always the most evocative realm of the Tibetan Wheel of Life to me, the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. Since they have no stomachs, what are they hungry for? Expression, of course. Connection. An audience. Even hunger itself. Poets all, perhaps.

Uneasy Rhymes

"Hellish" and "relish."
Will keep in mind for my next sonnet (although it seems to call for a limerick.)

OK, so, yeah, I was having a really bad week. But now that the weekend's here, I feel quite un-hellish. Quite good, actually.

Last night I started the first phase of planning for an online lit journal, something I've been mulling over for about a year (and thinking about in a "someday" way for much longer.) Will take a while to get it off the ground... generating interest for quality submissions will probably be the hardest/most expensive part -- how much is a classified in Poet's and Writers? -- but it's fun to think about.

What is Poetry? P.2

Here are the rest of my definitions from the summer workshop's recurring assignment (including a few alternates I didn't submit):

Poetry is the jargon of the subconscious.

Poetry is nothing but if's, and's and but's.

Poetry is an oasis made of sand.

Poetry is reality's halfway house.

Sometimes poetry has to be mined deep in an underground shaft; sometimes it flows over like lava at your feet.

Poetry is the alchemy of language from experience.

This semester I'm taking a course on Poetics, so I'll probably have to come up with some more.

Writing too many lines of blank verse...

... in a row can make one go a little bonkers. After 42 straight lines of it, tinkered with until the wee hours of the morning, one might start scanning one's own name (iambic tetrameter, ended with a trochaic substitution?) and wondering if the caesura was intentional on one's parents' part.
My next poem will be a haiku.

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.