Can anyone tell

Me if this

Is a poem or

not?

Doyle Cross, Dagenham, Essex

Michael Rosen writes: The problem with definitions of poetry is that they are either too limiting or too general. At the end of the day, it's poets, publishers and audiences who decide. As the questioner implies, this means that there are areas of great disagreement. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is written in "verse" and yet we don't usually call the whole cycle, or even one of the individual tales, a "poem".

Proverbs, aphorisms, slogans and formulaic jokes such as riddles often display the characteristics we associate with poetry: pattern, rhythm, compression, musicality and the like, but are rarely called poems. Ever since people started writing free verse there have been some readers who thought that these poets had indeed written poetry while other readers were sure that it wasn't.

Interesting problems arise with the 1611 Authorised Version translations of the Psalms and the Song of Solomon. Nowadays, many readers would regard these as poetry. They can be contrasted with John Donne's sermons, including the famous "bell tolls" piece, or Martin Luther King's "I have a dream", both of which have the rhythms one might associate with free verse poetry and yet few would call these poems.

This said, it is quite possible to take up a non-categorising position on all this: "I don't care what it's called, do I like what I'm reading or hearing?" After all, when we're in conversation with people not many of us ask ourselves if we had just heard an example of irony or sarcasm, litotes or hyperbole, ellipsis or deixis and the like. If we can avoid getting stuck in the "what is it?" position, it's perhaps easier to enjoy the way all kinds of language users create patterns with words that intrigue us. The questioner has written what is a classic self-referential sentence and laid it out on the page according to the tradition of free verse. Nice one, but not worth sweating over whether it's a poem or not.