What is a Poem, Anyway?

A Collection of Short Essays on Poetry

My new book The Subcutaneous Art is available in paperback and Kindle.

I’ve spent a long time thinking about what a poem is. The short essays in my new book The Subcutaneous Art grew out of that thinking. The essays are written for readers who care about language, not just for poets. In the book I reflect on questions such as, what is a poem? What distinguishes it from verse? How do sound and sense conspire to make meaning? What role does form play? What does metaphor actually do?

Poetry resists conclusion. It is not a system for arriving at certainty but a means of engaging uncertainty. It begins, as Frost suggests, in delight but it does not end there. It presses forward into something harder won: a recognition that the world is not quite as we had thought it was.

What interests me most about poetry — and what these essays circle around — is its insistence on risk. A poem must proceed without guarantees, without the safety of foregone conclusions. To write a poem is to enter into a kind of negotiation with the unknown, using language not as a reporting tool but as an instrument of discovery.

My intent with this book is to bring the reader a little closer to the experience of facing the unknown on the page and to consider how poetry works, what it asks of us, and why we continue to need it.

*The Subcutaneous Art* is available now in paperback and Kindle on Amazon. I hope you’ll read it.

John Barr’s poems have been published in ten books, as well as in anthologies and many magazines, including The New York Times and Poetry. John was also the Inaugural President of the Poetry Foundation. His book, The Boxer of Quirinal, (published by Red Hen Press) was a 2024 finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for a Poetry Collection. You can view more of his work on his web site, or Instagram, and sign up for his free newsletter.