What is poetry?

‘WHAT IS POETRY?’—the first session of the first day begins with a sucker punch. It is an unanswerable question and the German poet Jan Wagner, of whom this has been asked, knows it. He demurs, talks about how lifetimes are spent writing essays on it and then attempts an answer: “Expression of the greatest possible freedom in the smallest possible space.” Neat and amorphous, but not really a definition. What if the poet uses more than the smallest space? The next day in another session, as a young writer, Shubhangi Swarup, who edits India’s only Virtual Reality magazine, talks about poetry in the digital age, she asks: “Are words necessary for poetry?” / Madhavankutty Pillai, Open