One Wikipedia Definition Does Not A Poet Make

or, 10, 000 unemployed literary critics and we get you

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I’m afraid I need to concur with Heath. A person who, incidentally, has been featured several times in C(G), the top creative nonfiction and poetry publication on Medium which I created and currently maintain. He is also one of the most original and innovative poetic voices on Medium today. So it should not surprise you that I, too, find your actual, functional knowledge of poetics to be uncompromisingly rigid. And amusingly surface. Perhaps you should expand your terms of reference beyond the pages of Wikipedia, and increase your depth of exposure to works beyond the roses are red, violets are blue variety. Personally, I enjoy the breadth of poetic possibility allowed through the use of incongruous juxtapositions. Which is to say, strictly defined, I enjoy hybrid poetry. A form that by your definition, cannot exist.

I think Annie Dillard, author of For The Time Being, might take exception to your claim. In that book, which has been almost universally praised by critics, she manages to establish poetic connections among many things, not all of which include:

  • the travels of French paleontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin in China and Mongolia
  • the life and teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, the 18th-century Ukrainian Jewish mystic who founded modern Hasidism
  • a natural history of sand
  • an epic drama of rocks, glaciers, lichen, rivers, and of individual clouds as witnessed by painters, poets, naturalists, scientists and laypeople
  • Dillard’s visits to an obstetrical ward to watch healthy newborns emerge
  • her survey of tragic, horrific human birth defects; random encounters with strangers; her trips to Israel and to China

As the noted literary critic and memoirist Thomas Larson states in his essay, The Hybrid Narrative:

“ Dillard is trying to ascertain the dimensions of the natural world against the limits of her personal experience. She is pushing readers to meditate on the disparate encounters of unchanging fact and passionate observation.”

Which, if you haven’t guessed it Just Studying, Thomas Larson is pretty much defining … (incorrect use of ellipses duly noted)

Can you guess? (Ill advised usage of one line sentence duly noted)

Poetry.

One definition among many.

So yeah, nice try. Better keep studying.

A flight paramedic for 12 years, Allan returned to school in 2006 to obtain his MFA in creative nonfiction. Today, he is a qualitative researcher exploring the use personal and community narrative in communities infected and affected by HIV . Allan is also the founder and current editorial director of online lit journal C(G), and photography journal SNAPSHOTS,

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Educator, HIV researcher, former flight paramedic, MFA, poetry, creative non fiction, memoir, intersectional social justice, satire, dogs. https://allanrae.com