Well…

Photo by Maria Krasnova on Unsplash

Not to be cruel to poetic profundity, but sometimes those deep musings really are more like a flushing of something… Just because it’s incomprehensible doesn’t make it good.

Read, if you will, one of my favorite poems by Billy Collins:

The Lanyard by Billy Collins | Poetry Foundation

Is that hard to understand? If you don’t know who Billy Collins is, see:

Billy Collins

Poetry is like music. It is descriptive, visual, concrete, concise. You could write a whole novel around that poem, “The Lanyard,” couldn’t you? But that would be a novel, not a poem. A poem must pack a gut-punch in every word, or it risks being prose. Prose would do well to borrow from poetry, though, or it risks being unnecessarily wordy. So poetry is good practice for more visual, impactful, emotional writing that appeals to the senses.