Shapes and Puzzles

FACED by a modern poem that we haven’t seen before, we may begin by posing the question, ‘What makes this piece of writing a poem?’ The ready answer is an obvious one, especially if you are a student, for the piece of writing will have been called a poem on the examination paper, or in the anthology in which it appears; or it may have been presented in the poetry class — it is Tuesday morning, and we always do poems in our Tuesday class, don’t we? And yet, despite those reassuring contexts, both students and general readers time and again find themselves unconvinced that modern poetry really is ‘poetry’. Confronted by a ‘poem’ which does not rhyme, which does not appear to have a regular metre and which therefore does not sound like a ‘poem’, how are we fully to accept that piece of writing as poetry? It may also be the case that the subject matter of the poem appears to be quite ‘unpoetic’, or that the tone of the poet or the speaking voice in the poem appears somehow inappropriate. How can we study such poetry with conviction?