There's a recurring type of comment here, sometimes upvoted, sometimes downvoted, insisting that a piece isn't a poem. Recent examples:

"This is not a poem" / "This is not poetry" / "Not a poem" / "This is a standup routine" / "It's more visual art than poetry / "How is it still poetry?"

I don't think we're going to settle the "what is a poem" question today (you're welcome to try in the comments if you want), but I do have a small gallery of seven pieces for your consideration.

Which of these would you consider to be poems?

1. "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams
2. "Rape Joke" by Patricia Lockwood
3. Two poems from "The Day" by Kenneth Goldsmith
4. "Tender Buttons" by Gertrude Stein
5. "lighght" by Aram Saroyan
6. "Moonshot Sonnet" by Mary Ellen Solt
7. "Fake Hula for Alien Tiki" by Dan Taulapapa McMullin

A little background on each:

1. A famous poem from the modernist era, embodying WCW's maxim "no ideas but in things."
2. A relatively recent poem on the prose-poem side. Here is a thread from the formalist-leaning forum Eratosphere where you can see several people doubt that it's even a poem.
3. A type of found poem illustrating Goldsmith's idea of "uncreative writing."
4. A very experimental prose poem from 1914.
5. An extremely minimal poem, the financial support of which fomented some controversy.
6. A visual poem combining the iconography of lunar photography with the structure of a sonnet. Article that the image is from.
7. The Poetry Foundation lists this as an example of visual poetry.

Curious to read your takes on which of these you would admit to the poetry club, and which you'd keep outside.

Here are the results after 11 comments, doing my best to categorize your responses. Will update again later.

I love Persian poetry. Particularly Hafiz

EPILOGUE

1. I have learned how faces fall,
   How terror can escape from lowered eyes,
   How suffering can etch cruel pages
   Of cuneiform-like marks upon the cheeks.
   I know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair
   Can suddenly turn white. I've learned to recognise
   The fading smiles upon submissive lips,
   The trembling fear inside a hollow laugh.
   That's why I pray not for myself
   But all of you who stood there with me
   Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
   Under a towering, completely blind red wall.

2. The hour has come to remember the dead.
   I see you, I hear you, I feel you:
   The one who resisted the long drag to the open window;
   The one who could no longer feel the kick of familiar
   soil beneath her feet;
   The one who, with a sudden flick of her head, replied,

'I arrive here as if I've come home!'
I'd like to name you all by name, but the list
Has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.
So,
I have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble
words
I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always,
I will never forget one single thing. Even in new
grief.
Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth
Through which one hundred million people scream;
That's how I wish them to remember me when I am dead
On the eve of my remembrance day.
If someone someday in this country
Decides to raise a memorial to me,
I give my consent to this festivity
But only on this condition - do not build it
By the sea where I was born,
I have severed my last ties with the sea;
Nor in the Tsar's Park by the hallowed stump
Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me;
Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours
And no-one slid open the bolt.
Listen, even in blissful death I fear
That I will forget the Black Marias,
Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman
Howled like a wounded beast.
Let the thawing ice flow like tears
From my immovable bronze eyelids
And let the prison dove coo in the distance
While ships sail quietly down the Neva

I recently lost a cat very dear to me. I would be grateful for anyone who could share any poems about the grief that comes with it. Thank you

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarvis_Jay_Masters

Former Death row inmate at San Quintin, convicted as an accessory to the murder of a prison guard that someone else confessed to, but this information was not disclosed to the defense during trial. This poem was written in 1992 (and won a Pen award). Masters was taken off death row in 2019, and is currently imprisoned at the California Men's Colony.

Greeting by Ella Young

Over the wave-patterned sea-floor,

Over the long sun-burnt ridge of the world,

I bid the winds seek you.

I bid them cry to you

Night and morning

A name you loved once;

I bid them bring to you

Dreams, and strange imaginings, and sleep.

dialogist

Image Study

The margin is a widening condition. Stars asleep in the ward I left.
Between survival and not-: breathwidth. Between her stillsoft head and the barred bed-: two adult fists could fit. In the
apartment on unwashed sheets I look away from the blank crib instead at instead into a photograph on a screen. A face within looks across fathoms to meet my looking. Fear has a photosensitive surface. I make the light it needs. What else without her do I have to feed. Despite the respite of temporary distance my speculations leak through. All alike until animated in either direction of belief.
I assemble my theories, though it goes without seeing, my saying who she is. A margin of pixels, abyssal. I know no tomorrow. Nor the yesterday immobile in my hand. An object that cannot object depicts. The depiction can conjure but cannot be grief. A bond trails after and binds if one is lucky. One of us was lucky. You can't see my mouth. I've punctured there a grin.

Sarah Ghazal Ali

Published in Jewish Currents August 17, 2016

Hello people of the internet.
I'm mentioning in a story the poem "The collar" from The Book of Songs, it goes:
青青子衿，悠悠我心。
纵我不往，子宁不嗣音？

青青子佩，悠悠我思。
纵我不往，子宁不来？

挑兮达兮，在城阙兮。
一日不见，如三月兮。

Now, I found two different english translations of its ending, one is

I pace here and wait, upon the city tower.
One day without seeing you is like three months.

While the other is

How volatile are you and dissipated,
By the look-out tower on the wall!
One day without the sight of you,
Is like three months.

So my question is, does anyone here has any opinion on which translation is the accurate one? They seem to say opposite things! ^^"
Thanks a lot in advance :)

Sandy Denny's singing: who knows where the time goes?
and it isn't us, still partying on a Sunday afternoon,
slumped on a garden patio beneath a greasy sun,
after a night of pale, crooked lines;
after improvised cocktails of gin and raspberry vodka.

'She died at thirty one', someone says, plucking
an olive from an ashy slick.
'Fell down the stairs.'

And I'm aware I'm wearing grim, glittery rags; yesterday's knickers.
My back to honeysuckled brick, I flick tongue over gums
that taste like a gun in the mouth.

A mobile flashes MUM. No one picks up.
We know how mothers fret over the ticking clocks:
our one-bed flats,
our ovaries.

Instead we fill our plastics up with cider, and watch wasps as they circle spikes of lavender;
the big sky's cirrus scraps
- a Brimstone butterfly flaps, then settles on a blackened bone.

My friends, we are so lucky
and disgusting, and will pay for this tomorrow.

G.C.H

I have experienced this most in critique groups!! Every line has to take you somewhere and lead to an experience we never had before!! Billy Collins put it really well and I am going to use this a lot!!

" all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it" .

From 77 Dream Songs