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.

Don't you "hate it" when people use "quotation marks" just for "emphasis?"

These bloggers certainly do.

Hee hee.
I guess this trend has bugged me so much that I've refused to analyze what motivates well-meaning souls to do this. Now, thinking about it, I guess it's the idea of appealing to a higher authority, e.g. very important people want you to know that these items are "on sale," see? It's not just me, the poor schmuck writing this crappy sign by hand who says they're on sale, but very important people. That is my best guess.

Thanks to Mr. X for the link.

And in a similar vein:
Apostrophe abuse

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.

OT: Poetry in a Bottle P.2

My new second favorite beer: Orange Blossom Cream Ale by Buffalo Bill's Brewery
It's one of their seasonals (actually, their pumpkin one sounds kind of intriguing, too.)

New workshop

Much to my surprise, it's going well, at least so far.
Since this was the same instructor I'd had two years ago, who had been less than impressed with my style, even giving me an A- because it was "less polished than some of the others" (I think this was her polite way of saying it pretty much sucked) I'd had very low expectations for what she'd think of my new stuff, just hoping I'd learn some things about meter and form that would be useful, and of course, that I'd get that last workshop credit I need.
I guess she appreciated that my first submission was a ghazal (although not in the strict back-to-the-Arabic style that is the new model for ghazals in English) and in general, she seemed to dig it. I was shocked and relieved. I know that she's very accomplished with that particular form, and I trust her judgment in all technical matters; she's very meticulous and thoughtful; so it was a nice way to begin the semester.
And I was inspired to try to work the ghazal into a "true ghazal" for one of my revisions, since I guess, when it comes to poetry, I respond more to positive reinforcement than negative... playing right into the formalists' hands, aren't I? ;) Nah, to be fair, I think I really have improved since that first workshop and the one I took the following year (owing partly to taking a break from workshops, reading a lot of poetry, writing a lot of to-heck-with-it free verse stuff, and getting some of my confidence back) and maybe she's become more open, too, over the last two years. I think we'll get along swell... which is good, because I need to choose an adviser for my thesis soon.
And since any possible defensiveness I might have been harboring has dissipated, I'll be more open to "constructive criticism" on the next submissions. Like I said in the previous post, I've developed a pretty thick skin, anyway, based on the last workshop I took with an instructor who was less polite than this one (although also more of a character and more open to experimentation, which kept things interesting at least... I liked her better than most of my classmates did.)
But I guess it's nice to feel that there's not anything to prove now and it can just be about the work itself, which is the point, after all (and what I'm paying the big bucks for, not my precious little ego :)

Lines that knock my socks off: A. R. Ammons

from Corsons Inlet (Thanks to my workshop instructor for choosing this as one of the first two discussion poems for the class... The other one is this, equally amazing in an entirely different way, although both are perfect unions of form and function... bodes well for the course.)

the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness

and later in the poem...

no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities
of escape open: no route shut, except in
the sudden loss of all routes: