What is Poetry? (insert after reading first poem of those chosen for April 7)

 This was the precursor to Abby Murray's poem, Introduction to Poetry: 

It's been two weeks of brutal violence and shootings and by all means I should not be feeling hopeful. How many people are dead now, who were alive at the beginning of the month, who also planned on having time to themselves later, when work quieted down, when the kids were back in school, when a symptom improved, when they could finally see someone they missed, when the car was fixed, when a bill was paid off? How much does all that hope weigh when it's suddenly ripped from so many people and dropped on the ground?

I don't know. But I can feel it, and so can you, so it must be heavy. And unwieldy too, I don't know how to hold it and move forward, it's like trying to walk for miles with an armful of rocks.

And yet. My mom went to the grocery store on Wednesday, nervous as so many of us are now, to be in a country where guns and the violent reign, and she came home with a few daffodils bunched together in a rubber band. They just looked so good, she said. They're in a glass bottle in front of me as I write this, and I can smell them waking up, getting to work, filling the room.

An anthology of poems called How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope was released on Tuesday, and because I'd pre-ordered it, it arrived on Tuesday afternoon. It is wonderful. Small. Soft, colorful cover of reds and yellows and browns. A couple of the poets in it are too syrupy for me but most of them speak straight into the bloodstream in a way that balances the bitter, the savory, and the sweet. Ross Gay, Jane Hirshfield, January Gill O'Neil, Joy Harjo, Molly Fisk, Terry Kirby Erickson.

When Mae comes home from school and plays in the corner with her bin of Legos, I can hear her singing in Spanish while I write. She pauses to pick two stubborn bricks apart and I can hear her baby-breathing, the exhale kids have that echoes the way they breathed as newborns, concentrated and intent. If moments can be too good, they are these.

And I wrote four poems this week.  When  does that happen? It is getting a little easier to type and although I still can't extend my arm all the way I can send emails for almost an hour before needing to put a bag of hot rice on my elbow.

Spring is crashing into us and we are carrying the hope of those taken from their families. It is bright yellow and blooming and real and it needs us to take it with us wherever we are going and there is no time for strategy.

The poem below is from a prompt from my Monday group. I have been surrounded by good poems all week, and I was asked last Friday in a workshop what poetry is.

And we hear Mae's Spanish in the second line, (perhaps -- I looked up to return and to begin and in all the multiple possibilities, indeed, the verb dar does work for both)...

And why not make up meanings from ancient times, throw in some biblical "honey" with the an undertone of "expensive", reflecting a contemporary American obsession with money.

And just in case you didn't believe that poetry can mean "star that moves"... wiki will soon correct you:

"The word Dhrupad is derived from DHRUVA the steadfast evening star that moves through our galaxy and PADA meaning poetry." and you will learn about the connection to ancient devotional music.

From concrete, Abby moves on to metaphoric... and whether you want to prove that "thirst" (title of play by Eugene O'Neill)  is what  some people call poetry, pronouncing it "persistent cat" or "honest disease"(or amuse yourself by reading Jeffry O'Neill https://www.jstor.org/stable/374060?seq=1)

yes, however you explore everything ever written, spoken to understand POETRY... we are in agreement: 

Poetry is what it is, and isn't.  A Nope and Welcome Home.

Now that we're buttered up and having fun, pretending we know all the history referred to, although largely clueless, we would like to believe there is some language that can mean "begin" and  that sounds like "return" in another... We are given a front row seat to observe an exercise in creating... and how creative invention loves to dress up what some want to believe is "historical" fact.

The desire to believe in something actual, the suspicion of pretense of fact, the delight of an unexpected surprise such as "daffodils win" (mother's gift which helps her daughter poet hold up the heaviness of the world..." -- that tricky act of grabbing horns of a dilemma on an actual raging bull (metaphorically and metonymically ) with all its ambiguous paradox is both target (skin) and craft (arrow for that bull's eye)... I love that the poem ends on flame.