"Poetry is when you make funny line breaks and put words in an unnatural order." [source concealed to protect the innocent]

To people who have no need for poetry, who don't seek it out, there doesn't need to be a more functional definition than that, actually. Words scattered around a page in a most un-proselike way without the neat blocks of rhymes that hallmark(tm) used to do. Definitions can be cut only as fine as the need. But even intuitively among the distinterested, there's a clear dichotomy between poetry and verse -- just like there can be the general word cow or and the homoglyph cow that connotes the female, no one is confused on what is what. Even though the general word is poetry, a particular beast, like limerick, is verse. Not to disparage the one or the other because we need both, but there is no mistaking one for the other.

Everyone has a rough intuitive grasp of salient categories - animate vs. inanimate, music vs. non-music, them vs. us and yet things are not so simple as they seem. The human brain is a pattern maker. Sometimes it runs amok and gets its human shot over disputes over words, like ours, right, choice. Fortunately the poetry debate hasn't got the blood that heated. But between fire and indifferent ice, which would you choose?

Is it the dispute, over which label, moot anyway? As usual, tolerance and listening to different sides of how and why sheds light, but not everyone has the time or interest to go into all the ins and outs. Poetry is comprised of melody, meaning and communication. The matter of mapping poetry to meaning is relatvism trickiness at its best. Poetry = What I have no direct use for but some seem to find interesting enough. Who wants to referee the messy call of exactly what is and is not tagged with any particular label? For example, coral and slime mould seem to have properties of both plant and animal kingdoms, a Muslim's call to prayer seems to have a melody yet is adamently not music, Geneticists Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza said that the obvious "race" is at best overstated. (85% of genetic variation is individual to individual within one ethnic group, tribe or nation, 8% between ethnic groups, 7% between "races". This means that two randomly picked Swedes have 12 times the genetic difference as the difference between one of the them and an Apache man according to Stephen Pinker reporting in The Language Instinct from their October 1970 Scientific America article). Fine art and folk art are also not discreet binary poles. Grandma Moses painted a primitive style but Monet and the Group of Seven also were not taken as fine art initially, but now seem to be. Borders of inclusiveness shift.

For some, there's poetry and then there's verse. Or there's, poetry:  words that are the shortest verbal route to move me to laughter and tears, or words that leave me cold as someone else's cup of tea left behind and about as useful

When a phrase in conversation comes out poetically, we see poetry is beyond form, or even words (See also What's wrong with (end) rhyming?) But to define poetry too broadly is to weaken its use. Human vision, to see, needs contrast. To retrieve memories of anything, we need judgements and categories. We need defined edges even if they have to be re-established sometimes as the relative positions and context changes. But poetry, like intelligence, is hard to hem in. If you look closely, no peg is exactly square nor round. Confounding. There are so many different kinds and ways of each.

So why is a particular poem, poetry? Is there a difference between poetry and verse? Why all the snobbery? Vaguery? Must poetry rhyme? Is it, like art or crime, open class, so long as people or a single person swears by it as a sponsoring member, it's in? Is there an absolute? Are there grey areas? How much energy should I put into concerns about going grey? What was I saying? Oh yes, let's see if we can find a satisfying definition of poetry.

Poetry: To communicate clearly but indirectly, when necessary using resonant rhythms and cadences to evoke a recognition or deeper understanding of the facet of life the poet intends to convey.. Like diplomacy, it can only work between people respecting the same ground rules and therefore speaking the same language, expecting the same things, with the same sense of humor and taboo, yet at the same time there's some musical quality to poetry that is not even bound by language barriers.

Poetry lets you get around your the barriers you create for yourself. "Poetry, like prayer, can help you determine who you really are instead of who you believe you are." -- Sal F. Marino,  chairman emeritus of Penton Media Inc. and an Industry Week Editor.

Poetry's a pinhole camera of the poet's world. Poems are spittoons, opera, the therapist, a confidente, mantras, the king's translator, a 1-2-3 craft kit, a note in a bottle, a steak knife, an elastic band, or just irrelevant text that is someone else's concern. I believe poems are stones, beyond kicking around in the shoes as an irritant you want to fish out and skip over a lake surface.

The reader brings herself to the words and sometimes can't distinguish between what she's seen and what was there to see. If she feels fiercely or feels something and if she has the pieces of language or experience to add to the words a breath of life, it is a poem. It's like a stone on the ground remaining a stone until picked up by a hand that knows how to make it into a hammer, kickball, proof of evolution or God, part of a wall or a weapon.

Poetry can be a stone. Cold. Dead. Propagandist tool or indistinguishable from a camaflaged toad or the ground down stone of mountain-earth. But a stone is a stone and a poem is a poem. When a worker stops pounding his stake with a stone and throws it at a passing soldier, no one says, a hammer was thrown. Someone may say it was only a clod of earth or a piece of wood. There may be no effect. He may miss, the soldier may overlook it, he may become a martyr or among the disappeared. Some may be transfixed by the arc and implications of the stone, or  no one may even see the stone being thrown and only see the actions that fall out of the movement of the man who used the stone.  And what of the stone? When did the stone become a tool and when does it revert back to being a stone? Does it have inherant meaning?

Each has their own awareness, filter and agenda for the stone. To know what the stone represents personally, socially, politically, financially, as a memento on e-bay is up to the historian, activist, geologist, entrepeneur or family of the fallen man honored. Why is who is right an issue? Can't we all be right, even if not to each other, but still right? The action of lives around the stones and road is likely what holds the most attention, rightly. A stone, a poem, it doesn't matter. But, unnervingly, unignorably, it does. So let's be civil as our natures will allow when the stones could fly...and remember there are lives on both sides of every stone.