THIS IS A POEM

This is the first stanza.
This is the second stanza.
This is the third stanza.
This is the fourth stanza.
This is the fifth stanza.
This is the sixth stanza.
This is seventh stanza.
This is the eighth stanza.
This is the ninth stanza.
This is the tenth stanza.
This is the eleventh stanza. 
This is the twelfth stanza.




---------------------------------------------------

 
I am a person who has taken one hundred million creative writing and poetry classes. Thus, I've been over the But What Is Poetry? question one hundred million times and in each of these debates we (i.e. me, other students, professors, various scholars who have written essays concerning the problem) inevitably come to a consensus that most things can be considered poetry; even everything is poetry. That said, in the 18th century the But What Is Poetry? debate would have gone quite a bit differently. Poets like Samuel Coleridge and Lord Byron and John Keats relied religiously on the poetic staples that we still discuss in remedial high school English classes: form, rhyme, meter, etc. However, in the anything-goes, internet-heavy, artistic free-for-all that is the 21st century, poetry doesn't have to be defined by the classicism that it was first designed with. In fact, it doesn't even need to be contained within the parameters of words or language at all. 

For instance, prose poetry has become a widely accepted poetic "form" in recent years, yet it's still controversial because traditionalists are asking, "If it's prose, how is it poetry?" And thus the But What Is Poetry? question spins around again and everybody gets all flustered and upset about what poetry can or cannot be. (Check out "The Straightforward Mermaid" by Matthea Harvey and "Heroic Moment" by Charles Simic and see what you think.)

Or Flarf poetry, which has only occurred since the early 21st century and couldn't exist at all without the presence of the internet. Read "Mm-Hmmm" by Gary Sullivan and try not to fall in love.

Another post-internet "form" is the pseudo-spam Twitter account that we all known and luv, "Horse ebooks," which some experimental scholars have not-even-jokingly started analyzing in actual universities as poetry.

Moreover, there's "Drift" by Caroline Bergvall --- which my poetry class studied and analyzed last semester --- that has almost zero concrete language or narrative, and actually relies on scribbled, visual "stanzas" to convey its message. And it's still poetry, despite its apparent lack of recognizable English "language."

There's "In the Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound, which is two measly lines but is featured in basically every single poetry anthology ever. Similarly, there's an actual poetic form called a monostich which is any poem that is composed of a single line. (For example, a monostich by Ralph Hodgson which reads in its entirety: "'Skunks,' the squirrel said, 'are send to try us.'")

And these examples are, like, 0.0001% of all the other experimental poetic forms that exist. There is so much new, weird, avant-garde poetry that is just sort of hanging out on the internet, or in flimsy little chapbooks in indie bookstores, or in new Bohemian anthologies that aren't quite being taught at BYU yet.

In crafting my own medium-specific poem, I came upon the problem that if I accepted everything as poetry --- or everything as art --- then this project became extremely difficult in its inherent prescription of finding loopholes and nuances to work with. If everything is poetry, then there is no specificity to explore, you know? So finally I decided to mess with poetic form in all the ways I've been describing. Like, "If a poem is ______, then is it ______." So the tenth "stanza" --- which is constructed of regular English words --- then links you/the audience to a .jpg of a few panels of the comic Orc Stain via the internet (is the process of the linking part of the poetry?), and thus says, "Okay, so this comic is poetry." Then stanza eleven links you to a Girls music video, and says, "Not only is this video poetry, but also the song is poetry." And then stanza twelve links you to a clip from Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla, so that film is poetry, and Godzilla is poetry, and Mechagodzilla is poetry, and the characters' dialogue is poetry, etc. etc. 

It's like in the excerpt from Understanding Comics, when Young Scott McCloud says, "Sure, I realized that comic books were usually crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable, kiddie fare -- BUT -- they don't have to be!" In poetic terms, I come from a place that started out as, "Sure, I realized that poems were usually stiff, flowery, rhyming, pretentious, esoteric, highbrow, formulas -- BUT -- they don't have to be!" They can be whatever ~thing~ a person messes with, that calls on tropes of the nature of speech (if not speech itself), or that uses one thing/process/idea/feeling to describe (in whatever form that describing actually takes) to describe another thing/process/idea/feeling.