[New-Poetry] defining poetry

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2011/01/poetry_i_would_like_to_describ.html

Poets love to define poetry. And because poetry is so difficult to define, the definitions tend to be allusive and ambiguous. And yet, I love them, because they are also wonderfully alluring. 

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation," Robert Frost puts it. "Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted," Percy Shelley says. "Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes," Carl Sandburg writes. "Breathe in experience," Muriel Rukeyser says, and then "breathe out poetry." Even Sigmund Freud, not a poet, got into the act: "Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me." 

A poet who seems to have gotten there before many is the influential Polish minimalist Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), whose defiance against Nazism and Stalinism made him a post- World War II international favorite... 
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