Years ago I took some Harvard MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) with Elisa New. And during the class on Emily Dickinson she went through a list of very interesting questions about poetry.
She noted that certain Dickinson poems theorize about “what poetry is, what poetry is made of.” And then New goes on to ask multiple questions around the substance and boundaries of what poems are, what poetry is.
I’ve collected these questions and we’ll be exploring them for the rest of the year, starting with the opening inquiry: what is poetry made of…
….which you can’t very well answer, by the way, without speaking figuratively.
I would answer this by saying poems are made of heart and brain matter, the substance of yearning, suffering and joy, the desire to nail down the salty, sugary in-betweens-ness of our lives.
It is made of nothing from the periodic table of elements, not even the breath or paper it finds itself delivered upon. It is both a voice and not a voice in every sense of the word. It has no DNA or nucleus.
It has a big charge without any atoms.
It has no matter and yet it does.
Poetry is one of the only human things on Earth not made of carbon.
And this reminds me of a love poem from my first book, Why Photographers Commit Suicide, “Monogamous Carbon: A Classified Ad” written back in the early 1990s when I lived in Yonkers, NY, and was writing science poems for my MFA at Sarah Lawrence.
