The tradition of art inspiring art is a long one. Perhaps we might even see a redundancy there and shorten the sentence to “Tradition inspiring art is a long one.” Or more accurately, “Traditions inspiring art are long.”

At the moment I’m reflecting on my poetry collection, 50 Preludes & Fugues, which springs in part from Dmitri Shostakovich’s 20th century homage to Bach. There are, we should note, two sets each with 24 preludes with fugues. I became acquainted with some of these piano pieces in college, via a budget LP recording apparently with the composer at the keyboard. (Memory had a young American pianist, as it is, but now I think it was the composer himself at the keyboard.)

And then these engaging, sometimes haunting, works disappeared from general public awareness.

Decades later, a Naxos CD set of the complete cycles by Konstantin Schebakov allowed me to rediscover their range – the discs were often playing as I drafted and revised the new poems. Still later, through a Christmas gift from my younger stepdaughter, I gained the opportunity to closely examine Keith Jarrett’s exploration on the ECM label, after hearing selections of his performances on public radio broadcasts.

What continues to amaze me is how different the two interpretations are. The Russian Schebakov is crystalline, restrained, centered on each chord and its ringing. The American Jarrett, in contrast, develops the phrasing – these pieces sing. Which version do I prefer? Or which is, in some way, “better”?

I can’t say. Instead, I’d argue that each is a counterpoint for the other, both springing from the same root. And that as a consequence, we’re all richer for their advances.

In the arts and if faith, we all build on deep roots that have come before us.

Even poets will often have difficulty defining exactly what a poem is. As if there’s a single measure for poetry to begin with.

To call it “slow prose” seems to me to slight both poetry and prose. Robert Bly once faulted traditional English-language poetry for the way it’s commonly functioned in the role of sermons, with any inherent wildness diluted or tamed. How much politeness can a poem contain, anyway?

One distinction might arise in parallels to music. There are good reasons composers set poetry and not prose to a score – and not all of them have to do with metrics or form. A good poem has much of the indefinable emotional sensation of listening or performing music, apart from any linear explanation. Both somehow take us into the darkened recesses of our soul.

Maybe I’ve come too much under the spell of what Bly instead calls “leaping poetry,” which can be found throughout the oral traditions of so-called primitive peoples or in many pages of Scripture, including the Bible, or in the visions of Asian, Latin American, or French poetic seers.

Not that it’s easy to veer far from our roots in linear composition, or at least speech. Many contemporary poems obviously arise as a strand of journaling or even confession – and I’ll plead guilty there, too, though hopefully I’ve compressed, distilled, and transformed my material into something, well, full of imagery and free flight that makes a particular become universal as well.

There’s also the continuing struggle of just how far a poem can run from the very basis of language itself and still communicate some underlying sensation or experience. Choosing pieces to read before an audience, as I’ve found, can lead to a much different selection than I’d have for on-page presentation, where more linguistically fragmented work might be more engaging.

Could it be, then, that the question then isn’t so much what a poem is but rather what it are? And then, how many of those elements exist in this work or that?