Perilous beauty–
and already Jane is digging out
her colored tennis shoes,
one mauve, one yellow, like large crocuses.
Excerpted from “For Jane Myers” by Louise Gluck
Is this a poem?
I was at a reading last night and some of the pieces presented were labeled poems. But what made them poems? Some had lyrical qualities. Perhaps some meter. Internally a rhyme sprinkled about for spice like thyme. But were they poems? It sounded like prose to my ears. I short story perhaps. My companion, a poet himself, suggested later that prose poetry would best describe a couple of the pieces. I called bulls*** on that. A cop out at best. I was confused. What had I heard? Poems. Prose. Words constructing thoughts. Images. An emotion or two. I found some of the descriptions of the works more interesting than the works themselves. Whatever the works were. So is it a poem just because someone names it as such? Words in the air didn’t take shape on a page where I could see line breaks. A pattern distinguishable as a poem by its shape. Does it matter? Is this a poem?
