Crediting the Felt Difference

Ines Zgnoc/Amazone 7, The Different View. CC BY-SA 3.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. She wasn’t the first, of course, to put the thought into words, but Laura (Riding) Jackson asserted pretty clearly that if you have to explain what a poem is about or is doing, you might as well be writing prose; you can’t say a poem is about x, y, or z and still call it a poem. Or as she insisted, “to tell what a poem is all about ‘in so many words’ is to reduce the poem to so many words, to leave out all that the reader cannot at the moment understand in order to give him the satisfaction of feeling that he is understanding it. If it were possible to give the complete force of a poem in a prose summary, then there would be no excuse for writing the poem: the ‘so many words’ are, to the last punctuation-mark, the poem itself.”1 There’s the rub, and why I and probably so many others end up confused, intimidated, whatever, about poetry: maybe because in our minds, “liking” is equated in some way with…