A poet I know, reluctant to define what poetry can or can’t be, once suggested (somewhat facetiously) that a bag of dirt could be a poem if the poet deemed it so — calling to mind Marcel Duchamp’s ...

to love, even briefly, the elk of your own tongue. We become a myth that will cleave in the middle. I admire spooling lotus after lotus after. Fragment of my body: brown edges. The whorl of a question ...

Cambridge students were asked in an exam to write about a poem which included no words, just punctuation. How would you go about making sense of it, asks Jon Kelly. Turn over your papers, please.

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Cambridge students were asked in an exam to write about a poem which included no words, just punctuation. How would you go about making sense of it, asks Jon Kelly. Turn over your papers, please.