Literature, be it poetry or prose, can broadly be broken internally into poetry and mystery as far as how I look at it. You'll note immediately that this critical rubric is agnostic to character and plot; it isn't actively attacked, but it isn't what the eye focuses on. This is deliberate. Those being the most obvious elements of a work often seem to distract the eye from what to me is the real meat of a piece of work, which is the small and the large, poetry and mystery. Character and plot are important but because they are a means of conveyance, a structural conceit through which we generate literature. But the work doesn't exist to express a character or a set of actions. It exists for those two titled elements. That is what literature produces.

Poetry as I define it is a variation on saying "the line". We see many overly-proscriptive approaches toward commentary on writing and craft that encourage people to cut, cut, cut exclusively, as thought writing is in the way of itself and the best amount is none at all. Economy of language is important, of course, but important in the sense that it is ideally an active choice made by the writer rather than one dictated by the outside. A long rambling story has a different feel than a sharp, concise one; this inevitably comes down to the smallest unit, the poetry. These are the choices writers make, whether to use one concrete word or a metaphorical phrase, to paint with an image or to state outright, but also within a clause to have the sharp or oblique angles of the commonly poetic or the subtle hues of the uncommonly poetic. A work, no matter its size or form, can always be broken into paragraphs, sentences, clauses, single words. Weighing them on the tongue is important both as a reader and as a writer and thus broadly as a human.

This dissociative approach to poetry is meant to inculcate something within you. We see written work often as a one-dimensional prescribed object, reading from left to right and top to bottom in an unbroken line without play or modification. This dissecting of a work into constituent pieces is one of the first ways we can exert agency over a text in a real way. The agency isn't for its own sake; our therapeutic journeys regarding the level of control we have over our lives aside, that is not the main function of diversifying our literary approaches. Instead, the purpose is to facilitate thinking sideways, laterally. When we isolate elements to ruminate on them, we have two options: to fix them with a monastic simplicity, to have them be the spare and sparse segmented thing, or to extend them via association. This last part is something we often if not always do while reading. We fill in gaps we might not otherwise know are even there around words and lines, our experiential and intellectual and emotional associations with images and words adding layers to a text that, while not written into the work, are absolutely and concretely there. There is no such thing as an objective read sans association. This is, in fact, what poetry counts on and how it works.

If poetics were mere wordplay, a shifting of words to and fro in atypical ways, it would merely be bad communication. Art via this lens is a distraction from a glorified Wikipedia summary, which would be the ideal form of any given work. The purpose of poeticism is to crack open a work to the influence of the reader's heart. If I am writing about a woman at a restaurant with her lover attempting to end things definitively as the happenstance which brought them into each other's lives departs and the aberrance of their relationship begins to wear on her and I say, "her hand, unsteeled," it accrues a different openness than if I were to say it as "her body showed no sign of malice or distress." Neither is better or worse than the other, but the associations and thus the contemplations we might have with each differ greatly. It is precisely when things are unclear but wrapped with a sense of definition that ponderance happens most often, our brain working to fill in the obvious epistemic gap between the word and the concept. This is not slipshod writing. This is the functor of poetry.

Cutting words, lines, or even paragraphs from a work to stand on their own is a useful practice both as a reader and a writer. Often when I'm trying to explain more involved forms of literacy, this is the first thing I suggest. We see people read too quickly because in their mind the purpose of literacy is to consume all of the text of a piece, whether a poem or a novel. But people who know poems inside and out do so because they have lived each line and each clause on their own, meditated on them like koans, stitched them together to watch as the shape of a pair departs radically from the lines alone but is still cloaked by their shadow. This is the mechanical practice of increasing the richness of your understanding; richness is not an affect of what you already knew and researched going in but how many layers you consciously or subconsciously allowed or provoked to develop within a work. As writers, attentiveness to this aspect is how you invited a reader in to psychological deform your work. Sometimes, you want a strict and commanding control, but others you want a reader to feel a sense of possession as well as to give them a mirror to better understand themselves. Literature opens us up to better understand our own hearts and desires not when it lectures us but when it allows these contemplations of poetics to emerge and when we as humans begin to critically question why our heart subconsciously fills in the gaps this or that way, why certain lines or clauses sting and why some hum and why some lie dead on the page. This cannot happen if you don't allow it, become mere character and event.

Mystery is poetics inverted. If poetry exists on the level of the word, clause and line, mystery is the thing that sits behind plot in terms of the most macro-scales of a work. The simplest mystery of any work of any form is why; the artist, spending time and effort, created this thing, and there was some motivation for doing so. The historical reality of the answer to this question is not as important as the one we feel out, especially when for so many writers the answer is "because it came to me," a confession that they are ignorant at least on a conscious level of what that motivating force was. Mystery is an attempt to take the building blocks, down to poetics but including character and plot, to attempt to see beyond them. What can only exist when every block is assembled this way? What emerges that would not be there if even one thing was cut?

This is often determined by a sense of feeling rather than thinking. Our active consciousness is frequently in the way of literature and art, which exists primarily to excite the subconscious, emotional and associative aspects of our minds, to make us feel. We can think structurally about what those feelings circle, what shape they make in their totality. After all, a work is not just one feeling but all of them, in sequence and in relationship to each other. This is true whether it was intentional or not; work exists beyond the author, connected by a silver thread that is valuable but not exclusive in its value. In terms of tangible structure, mystery is also inherent to all poetry. It is just as much the tangible why, the thing you begin to wonder as a reader and seek to understand as you are reading, whether its whodunit or how the spaceship works or what the flower salesman feels gazing out his window into the rain that we only see distantly. Mystery is the same structure whether it is tangible or intangible, physical or emotional. It is at all times a search, a sojourn. You can imagine any given work as a pilgrimage, where the plot may be the sequence of stations you stop at and the place you land in the end. The mystery, however, is why you go on the pilgrimage in the first place, the summed totality of all the things you are made to think and feel at each station, even or sometimes especially when they seem superfluous.

This is by its nature a non-judgmental form of critical reading. The purpose isn't to decide whether a work is good or bad but a skillset with which to deepen your emotional understanding of a work as well as to prompt and answer what you feel and why when you look at things. Does the work contain themes of fatherhood or is it something you are merely sensitive too due to the rage your father always showed that clouded the statement of his love? Inevitably, the answer to that question doesn't matter. That a resonance was made is the important part; connecting this downward to lines, images, clauses and upward to the overall revealed mystery of a work is how we begin to deepen our knowledge of why things that move us do as well as opening ourselves up to be moved by more.

Poe refers to mystery in this sense as unity of tone. He was building on the work of Aristotle, who presented three unities to his concept of ideal works of drama, those being time, place and action. Per Aristotle, a work should isolate itself to a single moment, as small as possible to contain the work; it should constrain itself to a single place, the location where the dramatic moment occurs, and not distract itself with ancillary materially; it should trim down extraneous action to allow only that which is necessary to achieve the dramatic moment. Obviously, work can do more interesting things than this and the self-complication of that formalism is how we get structures like the novel or the long-form poem, but his concepts are also a rough sketch of our still-idealized concept of the typical short story. Poe added unity of tone, or unity of language, in which a piece should be given a voice that isn't broken over its span. A great writer, in Poe's eyes, was one that had a plurality of tones applied over a plurality of works, not sullying themselves with each other but being cultivated as entirely different capacities within a single artist. These correspond in a sense to aspects of our subconscious, to the latency of our desires and the timbre and color of our wounds and joys which demand of us different things to manifest truly. The tone in a sense is the mystery. There is the concrete aspect to mystery, the firmly answerable why of a thing, but then there is the radically open one, the feeling or verve that generates a thing.

When we say it is important to read wide over a variety of voices, disciplines and forms, these two elements are why. They occur in all works, but the ways in which different writers, eras, scenes, genres or types of people develop their poetics and shape their mysteries differs wildly even when other formal aspects stay similar. It is also why in literary spaces we see sometimes writers who have an obvious technical acumen get slandered. If they are producing copies of things found elsewhere in a way that doesn't sum to some uniquely human thought, feeling, insight or experience, it hasn't contributed to the world of literature in a literal sense. It is from this fate that all bad poetry is spared. That most human art, to codify its feelings in clumsy verse, be it as children or teenagers or adults, is always a revelation of self and a concentration of sincerity. Poetry and mystery are ways to see both beyond a text but also deeper into it, to view constellations and galactic filaments as well as molecules and atoms.