Reader Emails: What makes a poem a poem?

So, I asked Tumblr for a topic for a blog post today. youreyesblazeout asks:

If writing has no meter and no rhyme and no slant rhyme and no assonance and no consonance; if all it has is stream of conscientiousness[sic?] line breaks to signal the author's intent toward poetry. Do you consider it poetry?

And none of this, "if the author says it's poetry then it's poetry" business, either. :)

Oh, man. That question. You're probably far better off asking someone who has the stomach for poetic academia and sticky discussions about trying to define poetry as an art form, but I'll give it a shot.

Let's say you're reading a novel and a particular passage has within its paragraphs meter and slant rhyme and assonance and consonance, but no line breaks. Is that passage a poem? If it isn't, then can you adequately use those criteria to evaluate whether something is a poem or not? If it is, can you call the work prose when it's been infected with a poem? I don't think line breaks necessarily signal an author's intent towards poetry, either. Prose poems have long been an accepted form of poetry, and they lack line breaks.

On the other hand, I'm reminded of a study I read about recently (I'm sorry I'm not able to provide a link, but I've long since lost it) where researchers took a bunch of poems, culled out the line breaks, and presented them to readers in both their original forms and in more prose-like paragraphs. The words didn't change, but when the poems were presented in their normal columnar form, the readers took longer to ponder each poem, and certain parts of the brain were triggered that weren't triggered when the words were read in paragraph form. I'm not sure that means anything, except that maybe readers approach words differently when they think those words are poetry rather than prose, and their thought process when exposed to those words is different.

So maybe we can say "if the reader says it's poetry, then it's poetry." I think that's a statement we can see replicated in other forms of art. People have looked at Jackson Pollock's No. 5, 1948 and said "this isn't art" and people have looked at the same painting and said "this is art." Sometimes people comment on my work and they'll say about a certain poem, "this isn't poetry." I think that's a valid opinion, because their concept of what poetry should be differs from the concept of poetry held by the person who says "this is my favorite poem" about the same work.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I don't think you can underestimate the role of presentation in art. You can take a concert violinist who usually performs in ancient music halls in a fancy tuxedo for audiences of politicians and rich debutantes, and put him in the middle of a subway station in a dirty t-shirt and jeans at rush hour on a Friday and he will get a different response, even if he's playing the same piece of classical music on the same violin. Similarly, does a beautiful photograph in a DeviantArt account have less artistic value than a beautiful photograph in a museum? Is a poem spray painted on the pillar of an overpass less valuable than one printed in a leatherbound book?

If you say no, then you have to wonder why a concert violinist is more respected than a street busker, why the museum-displayed photographer can sell a print for such a higher price than the DeviantArt photographer, why one poet is called a vandal and the other a contributor to the culture.