What is Poetry?

Excerpt from an interview with the poet Li-Young Lee. Lee was a child of Chinese refugees raised in Indonesia who now lives and writes in Chicago. Follow the link below for much more about him.

“...I feel the real medium for poets is silence, so I could be writing in any language. To reflect the inner silence, to give it body: that’s all we’re doing.

“We use the voice to make the silence more present. It’s like architecture, where the medium is not really stone or metal, but the space they enclose. We use materials – brick, glass, words – to inflect space, both outer and inner.

“So I would say the real medium of poetry is inner space, the silence of our deepest interior.”

http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/us_poetry/Li/