What is POETRY ? ... Desire Glows

What is POETRY ?

"Poetry has an immediate effect on the mind. The simple act of reading poetry alters thought patterns and the shuttle of the breath. Poetry induces trance. Its words are chant. It's rhythms are drumbeats. Its images become the icons of the inner eye  -- the transformational power of poetry. The ways poetry naturally expresses the sacred experience, the non-dogmatic nature of poetry. Poetry is more than a description of the sacred 'experience' -- it carries the experience itself." ~  Ivan Granger
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Poetry
Poetry ( the term derives from a variant of the Greek term, poiesis, "making" ) is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry
This article you're reading right here
is about the art form of poetry.

Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a fundamental creative act employing language.

Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, or to evoke emotive responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly figures of speech such as metaphor, simile and metonymy[4] create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.

Some poetry types are specific to particular cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter; there are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other means to create rhythm and euphony. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition,[5] playing with and testing, among other things, the principle of euphony itself, sometimes altogether forgoing rhyme or set rhythm.[6][7] In today's increasingly globalized world, poets often adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages.
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History
Some scholars believe that the art of poetry may predate literacy.[8] Others, however, suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing.[9]
The oldest surviving epic poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer (in Mesopotamia, now Iraq), and was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, on papyrus.[10] A tablet dating to c. 2000 BCE describes an annual rite in which the king symbolically married and mated with the goddess Inanna to ensure fertility and prosperity; it is considered the world's oldest love poem.[11][12] An example of Egyptian epic poetry is The Story of Sinuhe (c. 1800 BCE).

An early Chinese poetics, the Kǒngzǐ Shīlùn (孔子詩論), discussing the Shijing (Classic of Poetry)
Other ancient epic poetry includes the Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey; the Avestan books, the Gathic Avesta and the Yasna; the Roman national epic, Virgil's Aeneid; and the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Epic poetry, including the Odyssey, the Gathas, and the Indian Vedas, appears to have been composed in poetic form as an aid to memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies.[13] [14]

Other forms of poetry developed directly from folk songs. The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the Shijing, were initially lyrics.[15]
The efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in "poetics"—the study of the aesthetics of poetry.[16] Some ancient societies, such as China's through her Shijing (Classic of Poetry), developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance.[17] More recently, thinkers have struggled to find a definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in context spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love poetry, and rap.[18]

Western traditions[edit]
John Keats
Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Notably, the existing fragments of Aristotle's Poetics describe three genres of poetry—the epic, the comic, and the tragic—and develop rules to distinguish the highest-quality poetry in each genre, based on the underlying purposes of the genre.[19] Later aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry.[20]
Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age,[21] as well as in Europe during the Renaissance.[22] Later poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry from, and defined it in opposition to prose, which was generally understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and a linear narrative structure.[23]
This does not imply that poetry is illogical or lacks narration, but rather that poetry is an attempt to render the beautiful or sublime without the burden of engaging the logical or narrative thought process. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic "Negative Capability".[24] This "romantic" approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract and distinct from the underlying notional logic. This approach remained influential into the 20th century.[25]

During this period, there was also substantially more interaction among the various poetic traditions, in part due to the spread of European colonialism and the attendant rise in global trade.[26] In addition to a boom in translation, during the Romantic period numerous ancient works were rediscovered.[27]

20th-century and 21st-century disputes[edit]
Archibald MacLeish
Some 20th-century literary theorists, relying less on the opposition of prose and poetry, focused on the poet as simply one who creates using language, and poetry as what the poet creates.[28] The underlying concept of the poet as creator is not uncommon, and some modernist poets essentially do not distinguish between the creation of a poem with words, and creative acts in other media. Yet other modernists challenge the very attempt to define poetry as misguided.[29]

The rejection of traditional forms and structures for poetry that began in the first half of the 20th century coincided with a questioning of the purpose and meaning of traditional definitions of poetry and of distinctions between poetry and prose, particularly given examples of poetic prose and prosaic poetry. Numerous modernist poets have written in non-traditional forms or in what traditionally would have been considered prose, although their writing was generally infused with poetic diction and often with rhythm and tone established by non-metrical means. While there was a substantial formalist reaction within the modernist schools to the breakdown of structure, this reaction focused as much on the development of new formal structures and syntheses as on the revival of older forms and structures.[30]

Recently, postmodernism has come to convey more completely prose and poetry as distinct entities, and also among genres of poetry, as having meaning only as cultural artifacts. Postmodernism goes beyond modernism's emphasis on the creative role of the poet, to emphasize the role of the reader of a text (Hermeneutics), and to highlight the complex cultural web within which a poem is read.[31] Today, throughout the world, poetry often incorporates poetic form and diction from other cultures and from the past, further confounding attempts at definition and classification that were once sensible within a tradition such as the Western canon.[32]

The early 21st century poetic tradition appears to continue to strongly orient itself to earlier precursor poetic traditions such as those initiated by Whitman, Emerson, and Wordsworth. The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman has used the phrase "the anxiety of demand" to describe contemporary response to older poetic traditions as "being fearful that the fact no longer has a form", building on a trope introduced by Emerson. Emerson had maintained that in the debate concerning poetic structure where either "form" or "fact" could predominate, that one need simply "Ask the fact for the form." This has been challenged at various levels by other literary scholars such as Bloom who has stated in summary form concerning the early 21st century that: "The generation of poets who stand together now, mature and ready to write the major American verse of the twenty-first century, may yet be seen as what Stevens called 'a great shadow's last embellishment,' the shadow being Emerson's." [33]
Elements[edit]
Prosody[edit]
YOU and Wikipedia
R ON YOUR OWN 
Enjoy the Journey !
There is so much more to wonder with....
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Every Shaped Thing'  by Ivan Granger (1969 - )
 
Sighing,
every shaped thing
turns
heavenward.

Your altar
cannot possibly seat
the thousand thousand
idols.

Holding them,
what do you have?
Each gilded god
says:

"I am
impoverished
by the Sun.
I can only
point
up."
 

-- from Real Thirst:
Poetry of the Spiritual Journey,
by Ivan M. Granger
AbeBooks.com     

I wrote thiat poem when I lived on Maui years ago. I had just finished a meditation and stepped outside to gaze at the forest of eucalyptus trees. Slowly looking around, I saw how everything is reaching, turning, pointing heavenward.
The material world, when objectified can become a confusing tangle of solidity, separation, and objects of desire, but in that moment, with my mind at rest and my eyes clear, the world danced before me, filled with a golden light. And I saw that while the world hides the Eternal, at the same time it ardently reveals it.
In that pure moment it was clear to me that everything is giddy with its own inner light. Consciously or unconsciously, everything is always orienting itself toward the light from which it draws its own life. All of creation -- every person, every thing, even every idea, "every shaped thing" -- is just a reflection of the divine radiance present everywhere. That beauty, that luminosity is both the snare and the key for us as souls active within the material world.
Whenever we desire a thing... or person or experience, we artificially deify it. The desire and mental fixation becomes a form of worship. We may tell ourselves, "I want this, I want that," but what we unknowingly crave is not the thing itself, it is that spark of the Eternal glimpsed within it. The desired object becomes a "gilded god" -- false in the sense that it is not truly the wholeness we seek - but also, like an "idol" or icon, when approached sincerely and openly, it embodies something essential for us: it points to the Divine which it reflects.
The frustrating truth is that no individual can ever gather enough objects of desire to satisfy desire. Every time we acquire that desired object or experience -- a new job, a new lover, money, an ice cream sundae -- there is a fleeting sense of satisfaction... and then it is gone. Within minutes we are once again feeling desire and looking for the next object to hang that desire on. We're looking for the next thing that sparkles. But it is not the object we actually seek, it is that 'shine'.
And that shine is the spark of the Divine. When we learn to see in gold the glimmer of the sun, then we see that everything shines -- everything! -- ourselves included. It is not possessing that object or experience that we desire, it is that we ache to recognize and participate in that glow. And everything glows. Recognizing this is when the heart is truly satisfied and comes to rest.

Ivan M. Granger is the founder and editor of the Poetry Chaikhana, a publishing house and online resource for sacred poetry from around the world.

"In dreams, I need you.
In reality, I love you.
In truth, I am you --
the longing in between
is a work of sheer beauty."   -Roger Housden