What Is Poetry?

Early on in Opera Fever, her newest collection of poetry, Chelsey Minnis asks: “Is this a poem or the back of a shovel?”—something that can literally take off the back of your head. This January, I read a dozen or so noir novels from the thirties and forties. People were smothered with towels, bludgeoned in bathtubs, beaten to death with glass decanters, and killed by stray bullets at dance marathons. Some weeks, I watched a noir film every night. I watched YouTube videos about noir. Noir, one video explained, was a reaction to the Depression and the war: it gave form to a cynical vision of American life, depicting an amoral and violent world that many had come to think of as the dark reality underlying ordinary experience. The darkness feels revelatory and “real,” yet this effect was achieved through surreal German Expressionist-influenced artifice. Noir is highly stylized—chiaroscuro lighting, rain-slicked streets, hard-boiled speech—and yet it is one of the twentieth century’s great visual languages for representing “reality.”