This question from Lance Phillips’ Here Comes Everybody questionnaire struck me as fun:

 

How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

 

It’s something that makes your dad pretty crazy. But beyond that, all art forms are extensions of our senses, how we see, feel, touch, hear or otherwise interact with the world. If dance is the art of your body in time, and music is the art of sound, and painting & photography arts of vision, then poetry is the art of language. Anything that language can do is appropriate as the material of poetry. Poetry’s role, in turn, is to fully explore what its medium can tell us about itself & the world. The role of any art is to explore what its medium can tell us of the world. When a dancer says of the Hokey Pokey, “That’s what it’s all about,” they aren’t necessarily kidding.