By Maria Millers
August is that unpredictable month: warmer days, daffodils promising spring but still wintery… It’s also National Poetry Month initiated by Red Room Poetry.
This initiative highlights First Nations voices, youth ambassadors, accessible workshops, and region-wide events, affirming that poetry isn’t just for the city or page – it’s for every voice and place.
Many, still scarred from classroom experiences shy away, others believe that poetry can never address the complexities of a society as ours. And yet poetry an ancient form of storytelling is also the most suited to the digital age.
People sometimes ask what exactly is a poem? Defining poetry is a slippery exercise. The definition shifts with time and place. If you try to draw hard borders, someone will immediately hop over them and declare they’ve made a poem.
For 19th century Emily Dickinson poetry is defined by impact, an almost physical recognition of that impact:
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
She seemed little concerned about its form.
For others, going back as far as Wordsworth in the 19th century, poetry is about emotional truth and big feelings.
For T S Eliot, poetry was an act of craftsmanship, shaping language to transcend personal feelings. He experimented with diction, style and form and liberated poetry from strict traditional forms.
By mid–late 20th century there was Beat poetry, Confessional poetry, Performance poetry
Today poetry is no longer just something you read in a book. It’s heard, watched, swiped, scrolled, and sometimes even played with like a digital game.
For Andy Jackson, poet, essayist and recipient of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, 2022 poems are as diverse as humanity.
It’s hard to be definitive about what defines a poem, let alone a great poem.
A great poem takes risks, has something at stake. Such a poem haunts, follows us around, resurfaces in tender or critical moments. Just when I think I know what I love, what moves and provokes me, something unexpected comes along. Poems are as diverse as humanity.
Some decry the loss of traditional form. Again Jackson:
On first glance a poem needs line breaks, arranged intuitively to amplify or expand what’s being said but there are also prose poems, which I suppose also expand the voice of the poem because they don’t have breaks.
Good poems leave room for the reader to bring their own life to the page and leave the reader with an afterglow. The best poems stay with you. You find yourself repeating a line in your head, or suddenly understanding it differently weeks later.
So it seems poetry doesn’t have clean borders. A speech, a rap, a prayer, or even an advertising jingle might be considered poetic, depending on the context.
And poetry doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects.
Andy Jackson’s Human Looking draws on his experiences as a disabled person, living with the genetic condition Marfan Syndrome, challenging conventional perceptions of living in a body that often fails him.
Here we are at the enclosure, watching
a pair of giraffes in the distance, slowly
nodding as they walk away. Fences
like these keep us separate from the animals,
and the animals from us. My heart
so far is good. I’ve not followed my mom into
sudden agony and surgery. The okapis are threatened
and are here. I love their deep brown hides,
their zebra legs, their quietness. I’m torn
between reading the signs and just standing
here, watching them breathe. All our group
have Marfan, but it doesn’t have us.
Nearby, an ostrich is lowering itself gently
to the earth, its neck honest and determined
as a spine. I want a shirt that says no I don’t
play basketball. I play the clarinet and dance.
There’s surgery and medication. There’s a drift
of snow leopards, a pride of lions. We raise
money. We want to save ourselves.
Sarah Holland Batts’ The Jaguar is about watching her father’s decline, struggle and ultimate death from Parkinson’s disease and dementia. It details his pain and degradation and shows the daughter’s helplessness to alleviate it:
In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair
garlanded by summer hibiscus
like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche.
A flowering wreath buzzes around his head –
passionate red. He holds the gift of death
in his lap, oblong, wrapped in black.
He has been waiting seventeen years to open it
and is impatient. When I ask how he is
my father cries.
Grace Yee’s Chinese Fish is a memoir of migration, stereotyping, family violence and racism:
Look at what the large importation of aliens
has done to Australia. Ask
any real Australian what
he thinks of the New Arrivals. Let’s fill our
lovely country with our own kind.
Yours, etc. A STERLING KIWI.
Alicia Sometimes has made science and astronomy the focus of many of her poems. In her collection Stellar Atmospheres she takes the reader across the universe.
Increasingly Indigenous poets are writing their histories. Ellen van Neeren’s Throat is uncomfortable reading of discrimination as a black and queer woman:
… we don’t get to choose our grief
if you want to pick at mine
try it on
And who can forget the powerful voice of Amanda Gorman at the 2020 inauguration of President Biden. She highlights poetry’s power to unite and inspire on a grand public stage, even in times of political tension.
“We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always just-ice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it.”
A pioneer of Instapoetry, Rupi Kaur’s minimalist, emotionally raw lines made poetry approachable for millions. She can distil connection and loss in just a few lines:
god must have kneaded you and I
from the same dough
… how unfair it was
to put that much magic in one person
and sadly split that dough in two
More than ever before, poetry is instantly relatable and sharable in today’s digital age.
Andy Jackson is the 2025 Judge for the Judith Rodrriguez, Open Category of the Woorilla Poetry Prize, www.woorrilla.org.au
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Poetry was never a thing for me, but then
Not too many things were either, no things, nothings,
Being sacrificed on the altar of abuse at the earliest of time
Kinda did the head in, the heart too…
Took such a long time, almost a lifetime
To find a semblance of courage, or will, or whatever the right word might be, that elusive Will-o’-the-wisp sense of it’s ok, you’ll be alright, mate, don’t need to flight, mate, don’t need to turn out the light, mate, you can go on, go on, it’s ok to be, breathe into your gut, relax, the danger ain’t there anymore, neither real or imagined, and hah!, anyway, they’re all dead and you’re still kicking, forgive them of course, they knew no better, forgive but don’t forget, and hey, life’s pretty precious, eh?, when you consider the alternatives.
What is poetry?
I am the rhyme at the end of the line,
the sword on our lips we hear as we ought.
I am the star in the sky not the thought,
the rhyme absurd beneath the word sublime.
Swag of the hound a familiar sound
which is similar found, not the rhythm,
the bark or the beat, mountain or fathom.
My breath shall be bound and never profound,
heart of a flower or fountain of wheat.
I am the swell in a melody, bell
in a parody at the end of the street,
my voice as wind on a rock, clock on the fell.
I am the muse not the musical treat,
I am the last to be cast at your feet.
‘For the Love of Rhyme’ (AB) 2017
https://allpoetry.com/poem/13268316-For-the-Love-of-Rhyme-by-Barddylbach
Wordsworth said poetry ‘has the power to shape your mind’, (actually I think he said ‘re-shape your brain’), how you think and view the world.
What is poetry?
For me –
it is the language of our mind,
our soul and psyche,
the record of our journey.
A classical and modern art where
the philosophy of words, music and physics,
life itself come together,
where the muses have their say.
It is where we find our place
in the universe,
our inner voice, conscience
and imagination,
where the words and threads they weave
find and connect us with ourselves
and each other,
the quantum realm of nature.
Without it we are deaf and blind
to both beauty and injustice,
drowned by the silence
and indifference of living and surviving
in the world around us,
where we find the courage
to say what others dare not mention,
to fight the dreaded juggernaut.
Poetry brings us to the cliff edge
of raw emotion,
where we laugh and cry,
find our deepest unformed thoughts
and meaning, upon our senses,
on whim, fantasy or passion –
when in life or death I fly.
‘What is Poetry’ (AB) 2025
I love this article, thank you Maria 🙂
Thank you Maria.
I recently came across an article which contained a list of “poems to make you think”. The article link:
https://miniphilosophy.substack.com/p/how-to-make-the-unseen-seen?/
The list contained the following items:
• If — Rudyard Kipling
• Ozymandias — Percy Bysshe Shelley
• The Raven — Edgar Allan Poe
• Invictus — W.E. Henley
• The Road Not Taken — Robert Frost
• Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening — Robert Frost
• Desiderata — Max Ehrmann
• Phenomenal Woman — Maya Angelou
• Ulysses — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• The Lake Isle of Innisfree — W.B. Yeats
• Acquainted with the Night — Robert Frost
• Sea-Fever — John Masefield
• Dulce et Decorum Est — Wilfred Owen
• Ode to a Nightingale — John Keats
• Howl — Allen Ginsberg
All the poems can be accessed at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
No short treatise on poetry would be complete without an offering from the late Spike Milligan (written for a very young daughter):
“Tiny termite found some wood,
He tasted it and found it good;
And that is why your Aunty May
fell through the kitchen floor today”.
@JulianP
Spike Milligan and that termite unquestionably priceless!
One of the many poems that I can never unthink since I first read it and then heard Anthony Hopkins speak it much later in Interstellar – that transformational villanelle by Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ https://youtu.be/4eRTkP7LQKc?si=iDJOdHkvz9DoHOUX
Nice writing, Jon. I do love poetry.
“If” by Kipling remains my favourite.
One of mine too Michael, we can all agree on ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling.https://youtu.be/Ow5xbBnOU2A?si=HuFn1-NTOpivkfVP
Yes, “If” has been described by a modern Indian scholar as an excellent summary of The Bhagavad Gita.
A great article and great comments.
Two poems, the first by American poet Robert Moore, aka Red Hawk, from his book The Art of Dying
Nothing Left
Nothing interests me anymore.
The days crawl by like
worms after a hard rain and
I can sit here on my screened porch
from dawn until dark, doing nothing
just watching the shadows move
from one tree to the other until
everything is bathed in a pale dark,
like my empty heart.
Sports used to interest me but they have
been completely corrupted by greed
and a brutal disdain for the fans.
The newspaper once held some hope for me
because of the funnies, but no more:
Calvin and his tiger were the last breath
of true madness and common idiocy
left in a waste of the simply stupid.
TV is one crushing bore after another
interspersed with deafening commercials
duller than the worst shows.
I sit here on my screened porch and
all of a sudden here she comes again.
Every day this beautiful woman with
long brown hair nearly to her gorgeous butt
comes walking. Today she has on tight shorts
and her legs are splendidly muscled, the
calves curved and bulging, the thighs
2 tapering pillars of tanned flesh so fine
I can almost feel the hairs with my lips
and then she is gone over the hill.
Where was I? Oh, yes
nothing interests me
anymore.
And the second by Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt
In My Father’s Country (a poem of eleven pieces, two reproduced below)
II. Your Dying
Late, late, late, late, late.
You are late in your dying.
You, who always scarfed
your food before all,
a public school habit
forged in the war
where marrow was swopped
for jam, mutton for lamb;
you who finished first, dux, swot;
you who pathologically topped:
you are late. I can forgive
you your dying but not this
insistence. You always said
you’d go swift. I hate
that you’ve stayed. You took
your mind first, bon mots,
gallows wit, but still
your body persists. Your dying
has taken the better part
of two decades, as if,
handed this one last task,
you have resolved
to do it exhaustively-
methodical, a pedant above all-
but how can I deny you your time?
It’s your curtain call, your fall,
and though you always loved
baroque efficiencies, in the end
you’re less Bartok than Prokofiev,
a heavy touch, bombast and squall.
III The Hex
Your mother loved the bottle
but you were jovial, semi-teetotal,
somehow immune from the streak
of drink running matrilineally-
a swig, a swoon, the room awash
in a flush of swinging light-
that giddy rotten freedom
you eschewed for life.
Painful, then, that the hex
found you in another way:
sober syllables uttered drunk,
the slut, the sliding vowels,
the creeping lisp of Parkinson’s.
Indignities compound. Language
sluices away from you, bolts
like a gelding from the box.
In fright you find yourself half-cut
without a sip, your throat
uncooperative, over-oiled,
the words scrambling in a rush,
a stutter, a cable in garbled Morse
not even you can decode.