What is Poetry? A Manifesto

Before posting any poems I'd like to let my readers, and fellow poets, know something about how I stand on poetry, since my ideas on this topic are, to say the least, different. Some might consider them unreasonable or perhaps even dogmatic. They don't really reflect my "standards," because I don't really have any "standards." As I said in the first post, I don't believe in bad poetry. However, my little manifesto is important to me because it conveys a sense of what I find most meaningful in a poem -- and that, it seems to me, is very different from the way most people approach poetry. It might sound unreasonably narrow minded, and I don't consider myself a narrow minded person -- but I do find it important to express the essence of what to me lies at the heart of true poetry. Take  it or leave it, this is how I feel.

What follows was written some time ago, and is based on posts lifted from another of my many blogs:

"What is poetry? And if not what is poetry then what is prose?" That's probably the best general definition. Gertrude Stein.