What is a poem? Why write one in lieu of a short story novel or play? Poetry seems easier to write since many poems are “pieces d’occasion” scribbled out as declarations of love as in the case of Plutarch and Laura, Dante and Beatrice or death such as in Thomas Grey's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Indeed passion produces sinners and grief requiems. Many people who resort to poetry fail to realize there are journeyman poets like instance, the Pulitzer Prize winner, Jorey Graham. There are many poets that also write in different media. Eliot wrote a play, Murder in the Cathedral. Nabokov was a novelist but one of his greatest works was a book length poem Pale Fire. There is no poets union but there are practitioners who are not polymathic in their endeavor. Poetry is their medium as was the guitar wax for Chuck Berry. So what defines the poet's metier? Economy, rhythm and meter, liberal use of figures of speech, synecdoche, metonymy simile and metaphor and lastly color. Isn’t the spectrum the palette of the painter? Color as it’s applied to prosody refers to lights darks shadows, bright and dim. Poets turn the lights down, the sound up then begin to swing.
