https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/what-is-a-poem/281835/

Extract:

There is at least one kind of utility that a poem can embody: ambiguity. Ambiguity is not what school or society wants to instill. You don’t want an ambiguous answer as to which side of the road you should drive on, or whether or not pilots should put down the flaps before take-off. That said, day-to-day living—unlike sentence-to-sentence reading—is filled with ambiguity: Does she love me enough to marry? Should I have sex with him one more time before I dump him?

But such observations still don’t tell us much about what a poem really is. Try crowd-sourcing for an answer. If you search Wikipedia for “poem,” it redirects to “poetry”: “a form of literary art which uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonoaesthetics, sound symbolism, etc.” Fine English-professor speak, but it belies the origins of the word. “Poem” comes from the Greek poíēma, meaning a “thing made,” and a poet is defined in ancient terms as “a maker of things.” So if a poem is a thing made, what kind of thing is it?

The four dimensional shapes in Dirac’s head

broke into four much simpler shapes instead.

How can we dream of 4 dimensions when

The head has only 3 in any man?

The complex brain imagines when it can

We could look inside its wider scan

Dreams bring more dimensions visions grand

then we turn to food like fish and chips

Mathematics tortures as I knit.

In the end it’s patterns that we need

The rhythm of Life a slower nature needs

Rhythmic poetry echoes our own rhythms

The way the heart beats and the flow of blood.

Music is biology at play

The joy of being alive is well and good

There is no no need for willpower and its strains

Does the River have to push itself?

Does the tide need training who could tell?

Imitating these is poetrys stealth.

Overwork is easy but it’s wrong.

Distracks us from the pain of life and death

Both can come together in a song

Let your mind be vacant till you find

The evidence that there is another mind