Question:  What Should a Poem Be?

e e cummings

it is, i say, your hair and soft--still lacking
the spring:  and sweet the sounds—some child laughing.

Philip Larkin

The expectation struggles every rhyme
the poet writes. Get stuffed and take your time.

T. S. Eliot

It should connect the present and the past
instruct intrinsic valuesjust to last.

Wallace Stephens

Hidden sepulcher chants of sex and sin;
Ones' forming loves found outside and within.

Dylan Thomas

Two blank and crested cranes adorn the bluff;
I wait for words that come but arent enough.
 

Lord Byron

The start, a house—no reader needs to knock.
The end, a key, turned firmly in a lock
 

James Enelow

Invoked, my six, unseemly Virgils spin.
I pray these muses somehow guide my pen.