Last night on a long trip I was listening to NPR and got the Writer’s Almanac. Garrison Keiller was reading what sounded like a story to me, but he ended by giving the title and saying “a poem by so-and-so.” I am not so naive as to suggest that all poems must rhyme, but I’m not sure how to spot the difference between a poem and a story. How do the more learned amoungst us know?
When it comes to poetry, I am most definitely not one of the learned. And the idea that comes to my mind is not a foolproof way of distinguishing poetry from not-poetry, though I’ll throw it out and see what people think.
In the past, I’ve heard poetry described as “economy of words” – the art of conveying ideas succinctly and elegantly without falling prey to verbosity (which pretty much rules me out of ever being a successful poet).
I think that notion applies equally well to the extreme succinctness of Japanese haiku and the epic poetry of, for example, Virgil. It’s not the overall length of the work that counts, it’s the structure of the language that is used to tell the story.
So for the real poets out there, am I way off or kind of close? 
I don’t have a boolean function such that X is poetry, and Y isn’t, but I have a sliding scale of how poetic something is (even if it is not intentionally poetry, such as a speech or a novel.)
I use the standard textbook criteria such as meter, rhyme (sound in general), symbolism, brevity, etc., but I don’t really absolutely hold you to something: in addition, you could write painfully beautiful not-really-poetry and have it be better than glurgy verse which I would grudgingly admit is almost poetry.*
But in general, I don’t ask myself how poetic something is, I simply ask myself if I like it.
I.e. glurgy stuff usually has some semblance of rhyme and sometimes meter, but is usually painfully lacking in word economy (much like my posts :))
I must add that I wouldn’t consider myself much-learned about poetry, as a matter of fact much of that education is from Keillor as well. However, IMHO, learning about poetry is like dancing about architecture, to borrow an analogy.
The poet.
Robert Frost defined poetry as “what’s lost in the translation.” That definition works for me. I also like the “economy of language” definition.
Also, poetry should be about imagery (not necessarly imagisim), allusions, and the beauty of the language itself. It’s the ultimate “show not tell”. Rhyme (internal, external, slant etc), meter, alliteration, assonance, consonance, are all very important but they don’t make a poem.
Ultimately though, to me poetry is very much like pornography. I know when I see it…
Poetry is that which is neither poetry nor drama(a plaY). Usually one can identify poetry by the rhythm and sometimes by rhyme. The other option is by the way that it is written on the page. In the case of the poem which inspired this question, I assume that it was written on the page in a way which “looked” like poetry, even if it didn’t sound like poetry. Poets often take advantage of the opportunity to write in less than complete sentances, and do other things which they might not do in prose.
I would say that poetry is literature which has structure independent of the meaning of the words. In our culture, that structure most commonly takes the form of rhyme (the fact that two words rhyme has nothing to do with the meaning of the words), but it could also be alliteration, meter, or a host of other things. Heck, I’d be willing to say that those silly paragraphs written without the use of the letter “e” would qualify as poetry, of a sort.
Mind you, this is not at all how I would define good poetry. A piece can follow such constraints and yet suck, and a piece can follow no constraints at all and yet be good (in which case I would consider it good prose, not poetry).
Interestingly, there’s a poem that I love by Howard Nemerov that answers this question as best as I’ve ever heard it put.
Because You Asked about
the Line between Prose and Poetry
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
Poetry is that portion of literature where the lines don’t go all the way across the page.
Tris