what IS a poem?

I didn’t shower today and I’m still wearing the clothes I fell asleep in last night. My permanently dented couch probably wishes I’d left the house today, but instead I paced the apartment to get my 10K steps in and worked steadily to finish my writing workbook. Since I’m making confessions, can I also admit that I don’t really love Audre Lorde’s poetry? Her essays are brilliant and I was thrilled to get permission from her estate to reprint “A Woman Speaks” in my forthcoming poetry collection. But most of her poems just aren’t my cup of tea. I found the same to be true when I was reading the collected poems of Gwendolyn Brooks last winter. It’s okay to say that, isn’t it? I wouldn’t expect any reader to love everything I write! I subscribe to poem-a-day from the Academy of American Poets and reading a poem at the start of each day has taught me a lot about my tastes as a reader. Today I reviewed the 30 poems I wrote for NaPoWriMo and picked the ones worth including in my writing workbook. I didn’t call it a poetry workbook because it’s more generally about finding ways to express yourself. I also can’t claim to be a poetry expert, as I discovered when trying to teach my Canarsie sixth graders about Walt Whitman. Many of the students found it difficult to write anything other than sentences. They could write a letter to a loved one or describe their daily commute, but most struggled to let go of the rules that govern prose. There are prose poems, of course, but I think free verse is the most accessible type of poetry and wondered why they found it so challenging. I’m waiting on proofs of my workbook and suspect I’ll need to go back and model the techniques I’ve proposed. There are quite a few of my poems in the book but they only show up as the finished product; I demonstrate how I revise my work but I’m not sure that’s enough. I added some simple art activities and suggested would-be portraitists check out the work of Mickalene Thomas (right) and Makeeba “Keebs” Rainey (above). It could be a fun book to complete with a class or a book club. I’m hoping it will appeal to teens and adults alike, and it’s only $8 so perhaps that will temper folks’ expectations. I’ll leave it to the experts to teach us how to write sonnets and villanelles. I managed to write one of each for Say Her Name but wouldn’t turn to either of those forms when I need to get something off my chest. There’s more than one way to be a poet—I wrote that in Say Her Name and need to keep reminding myself that my approach is as valid as any other!