Here's a short poem from Robin Robertson's collection The Wrecking Light:

MY GIRLS

How many times
have I lain alongside them
willing them to sleep
after the same old stories;
face to face, hand in hand,
till they smooth into dream and I can
slip these fingers free
and drift downstairs:
my face a blank,
hands full of deceit.

This one struck me because it so deftly captures the experience of lying down beside a small child who can't fall asleep by herself, complete with the bad conscience of the father who tells his girls that he will stay with them all night even though he knows perfectly well he is lying to them, not beside them.

But something crossed my mind when I read the poem: it describes an experience, but there is a way in which the poem does not become an experience itself. I suspect that those who have not shared the experience Robertson describes will not get that much out of the poem; or rather, they will learn something from the poem, but the poem will not be memorable for them as a poem, but only in terms of its content.

I've recently come to realize that many contemporary poets and readers of poetry don't particularly like this kind of poem: the one that presents an experience but in a sense does not become an experience itself. But I'm perfectly happy with poems like this, which capture a feeling and communicate something about that feeling, even if they don't create a feeling of their own through their shape or the process of reading them.

It may seem as if I am describing Robertson's poem as lacking something, but I am not: to me, it is complete, even if I recognize that there is a perspective from which it might seem lacking.

I better stop trying to make sense here, and just hope that I have made sense to others, even if not to myself. :-)