We keep changing what it means to be a poem. In English, we’ve widened the aperture from the accentual-syllabic line to anything with line breaks to anything at all that feels like poetry when we read it or hear it. I like this widening. I like the process of abstraction that it represents. That with each inclusion we shear things we once thought essential to the form and hone closer to what actually is. I like the opportunities it creates as well, all these new inessential elements we can use to produce poetic effect. And I like the panic of it. When we destabilize a definition and push it into the space of vague qualia we create a gold rush, a vacuum of hungry opportunity laced with experimentation, copy cats, dead ends, and alchemy. When we destabilize a definition there are some that will rush to stabilize it and there are some that will rush, without any hope of success, to finally, fully break it. Both of these impulses can be creative. Both can also be stupid.

In the interest of being extremely stupid then, I’d like to try both. Poetry is the experience of surprise and intimacy delivered with words. I don’t think it matters whether the surpise is intimate or the intimacy surprising so long as they’re both there, stopping your breath for a second. I like this definition because it’s simple and it fits exactly what I’m hoping to experience when I read a poem. I want that sudden, deep encounter with another person. I want to read the language on the page and, without really seeing it coming, drop straight through it to our shared interiority.

But, as promised, there’s a flaw in this definition, or really all definitions. There’s an oozing quality to language that we spend most of our life rightfully ignoring. When you read the definition of a word it’s made of words. When you read the definition of those words they’re also made of words. Sometimes they’re made of the same words you were looking up in the first place. The whole system is circular and self-supporting. It isn’t situated on any internal axioms or external truths, but on our shared usage. Words don’t have definitions. They have a sludge of possible meanings from which we pull something that’s just solid enough, for just long enough, to pretend it’s definite. Like ooblek, if we press on our language, all together, all at the same time, it feels solid.

Another potential definition then: poetry is the result of playing with goop; of lifting the pressure just enough to know we’re playing with a liquid without falling in.

Written on: May 6, 2026