I've been on the road the past couple weeks, and missed the Belle-inspired What is a Poem? conversation, but here are two late-in-the-game responses.

The first is a poem by Angel Boyar (who was my student at San Quentin in the 1980s), and the second (in response to Matthew Biberman's post) is a story about Frank Bidart, who came to San Quentin as a guest artist.

WHAT IS A POEM?

I am a poem
The world is a poem
The butterfly is a poem
Nothing is a poem
God is a poem
This poem is a poem
Speaking in tongues is a poem
A rock is a poem
Shit is a poem
And the corn in it too
Is a Poem.
Food is a poem
I eat poems
I write poems
I talk poems
I see poems
I drown poems in more poems
Water is a poem
Crying is a poem
Joy is a poem
A poem is what is a poem
I am speaking in poems
Don't ask what is a poem
Just read the goddamn poem
And leave it alone
A poem is invisible!

And here is a section about Bidart's visit, taken from my Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin. Bidart had agreed to visit my class, but a lockdown meant there was no class that night. Instead we got permission to visit one of my students -- Elmo Chattman -- who was doing time in the hole. Witnessing the conversation between these two men remains one of the big gifts in my life.

As Bidart and I walked down the long tier to Elmo’s cell--both of us decked out in those camouflage-green vests--we were surrounded by the sound of a baseball game blaring from what seemed like every TV in the block. For the next hour or so, Elmo and Bidart stood on either side of the bars talking of poems while noise filled the cavern around them: “Strike three!” then “He’s out!” followed by both raucous cheering and booing.
I watched the two men search for some body equivalent of the handshake the bars and heavy screening rendered impossible. This was the moment I most often placed my open palm on the screening as a gesture of touch through so much layered steel. But Elmo and Bidart, who were after all strangers, instead leaned toward each other very slightly in greeting.
Elmo seemed to recognize that he was the host, and he welcomed Bidart to East Block with the dignity of a man receiving a guest to his home, though it happened to be humble. My heart filled with sensation watching Elmo’s ability to be precisely who he was, precisely where he was, without either apology or self-righteousness. I was equally moved by Bidart, this gentle-seeming man standing within East Block’s prison-at-its-roughest essence. I had no idea, of course, what his mind was noting or his body registering, but to all appearances Bidart was calm, meeting Elmo as a man and a poet. The two men began to discuss the process of transcribing what one hears in one’s head to the page, and I backed away to give them some degree of privacy.
The same steadiness I now observed in Bidart had impressed me at his reading in Berkeley earlier that week. There, too, the man had stood against gray concrete, for UC Berkeley’s Architecture Building nearly matched East Block for cold, stark presence.
In Berkeley, Bidart had talked between poems about what it was to grow up in the Bakersfield of the late 40’s and early 50’s when you were a boy who knew yourself as gay, when you were a boy who loved opera and refinement. Bidart was talking of difference, of sensing oneself as an Other, but that Berkeley audience kept encouraging Bidart to take easy jabs at Bakersfield’s lack of cool.
That audience laughed, praising itself, as I grew angrier and angrier at what, to me, seemed arrogant privilege. Bidart resisted irony. He did not deny the difficulty of growing up different, but he refused to pander to the crowd.
Here in East Block, I watched a similar honesty. Although grunts and whoops surrounded Elmo and Bidart as they talked of poems and the writing of poems, nothing in Bidart’s stance indicated disdain for the men all around us. He just quietly--with beauty and attention--continued to talk to Elmo.
Suddenly a huge roar enveloped East Block and when it died down, Bidart asked what it was like to write in the midst of such noise. Elmo spoke of staying up half the night to write and to read during the hours the block was nearly still. Bidart said he, too, often needed to withdraw from the world, to disconnect his phone, to stay inside solitude, in order to write.
Elmo passed his copy of “The War of Vaslav Nijinksy” through the open food port and asked Bidart to read. Bidart turned his body so that enough light might fall on the page, and then began:

Suffering has made me what I am --
I must not regret; or judge; or
struggle to escape it

Bidart continued. Then there was a break in the ballgame and, for a few moments, silence swelled, surrounding Bidart’s pauses. Another onrush of cheering filled the block before Bidart went on:

There is a MORAL HERE
about how LONG you must live with
the consequences of a SHORT action, --