Click here to read the answers to AA Gill's poetry poser

One of the most satisfying things about words is their black-and-whiteness, the neat, austere simplicity of their process. Letters on a page are so direct, so literal. The connection between writer and reader is intimate, personal and immediate: a moment of thought held, suspended, in a few marks, then reinvigorated. It has remained the same since cuneiform was pressed into wet clay with a reed. Words on a page have no backstage, no sleight of hand, nowhere to hide the workings. Words are what they say they are. You read a sentence and you can see how it was made; you can trace the thought. You know how it’s done — just as long as it’s prose.

With poetry, however, the rules don’t apply. It’s a fish of a very different colour. On the face of it, it looks the same; the letters, the words, are familiar. But it isn’t what it appears. By some internal magic, poetry hovers above the page, over the words. It happens outside the black-and-white lines, as if the writing were clairvoyant, calling spirit meanings, voices from beyond.

Here we are, about to appoint a new poet laureate. And poets are ducking for cover, hands over their faces, Birkenstocks flapping, sidling out of the limelight like stage managers suddenly asked to audition for Hamlet. There are those who ask if we really need a poet laureate at all, paid with a butt of sack, clasped to the heraldic bosom of the Establishment, forced to be toasted at all those plastic dinners and stand in receiving lines, expected to trot out easily yapped pompty-pom doggerel for royal births, the Olympics and the launch of nuclear submarines. The poet laureate is an Aunt Sally, to be shied at by all the couplets of philistinism and ponce-bashing that the press like to indulge in.

Yet poets are not naturally showmen. Poetry is by nature and convention a secret art. Poems are coded messages for your eyes only, left under pillows, behind whisky bottles, tied to roses, written in water. There are no regular poetry reviews in cultural magazines, or poetry programmes on the telly. Nobody is televising their awards live. Poets fall a long way behind actors and musicians, artists and novelists, for celebrity. I expect Seamus Heaney and Wendy Cope could stroll hand in hand through most branches of Waterstone’s unmolested. Poems sell few and far, for little or less.

This reticence, this unfashionable shyness, belies the truth of verse: that most of us are gaffed, flayed, stitched up and stuffed by poems. We’re marked out and buoyed up by them. Even if we haven’t read a new one for a decade, still there are verses that are the most precious and dear cultural amulets we own, hidden in the dead letter boxes of our hearts. Ask anyone what’s right at the centre of their personal culture and it will be poetry. Snatches, lines of verse, we take them to our end. A poem is a thing that transcends its construction.

I write about 1,500 words a day, every day. I organise them with as much care as I can manage, I handle them with respect and pleasure, I enjoy their weight and effervescence, I pile them up and lay them in patterns. I love them with a gay abandon and defer to them with a lion-tamer’s wariness. They are the tools of my trade. I reckon I can make a craftsmanlike job of most wordy things, from a shopping list to a eulogy. But I have no idea, not the faintest inkling, of how a poem is made. Of course, I’ve tried. I’ve chopped the lines out. I’ve counted the syllables and I’ve counted them back again. I’ve stretched internal rhymes and made silk similes of sow’s metaphors, but it’s not poetry. It remains resolutely page-bound: prosaic, poetish pastiche.

The hardest thing after writing poetry is writing about poetry, as you must already have noticed. It makes the author sound either pretentiously airy-fairy or thuggish. For a start, nobody really even knows what poetry is; or, rather, nobody seems able to define satisfactorily what poetry is. It effortlessly jumps the fences put up to corral and protect it. The OED offers “imaginative or creative literature in general, fable, fiction”, which doesn’t begin to cover it, then begs the question by offering, “the art or mark of a poet”. And again, “composition in verse, or some comparable patterned arrangement of language”. The word “poet” got its first recorded use in

English in the 14th century with Chaucer. It came from the Norman French and, before that, Latin and Greek for “the maker”. People have written books defining what poetry is and isn’t, but they only tell you the mechanics. It’s like eviscerating a swallow to understand flight. I asked an editor what poetry was. She said: “It’s that which can’t be edited.”

You couldn’t make a poem from any of those descriptions, yet poetry is as plain and recognisable as a motorway sign. You know poetry the instant you see it; the first line tells you. Yet it has no rules. It can rhyme or not. It can have as many rhythms as a Brazilian ballroom, lines of any length, as much or as little punctuation as it feels like. But poems can also be as rigorous as mathematics and as capricious as 16-year-olds. Poetry exists outside grammar and convention, and it can tie itself in more manners and etiquette than a Japanese dominatrix, but it is unequivocally real and solid, the most monumentally profound and intimately touching declaration in the world, and it can have any number of subtly different meanings. Indeed, it can have no logical meaning at all, yet still be beautiful and touching and disturbing. A woman once wrote to Dylan Thomas saying that she loved his poetry, but was worried that her understanding of it was not what he’d intended. Thomas replied that a poem was like a city: it had many entrances. Poetry is the apex of culture, the spire of civilisations. It is the scalpel of emotion and the anvil of thought. It whispers and it bellows the unsayable with mere words.

How does it manage that? You can’t teach being a poet, you can’t train to be one. I was once a judge in a poetry competition, and I can’t tell you how many people who aren’t poets write it. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of where poetry comes from and how it arrives, but I do know it is the highest calling of a cerebral, emotional, aesthetic existence. Poetry, along with dancing and drumming, is probably the most ancient of all our arts. There was rhythm and rhyme before written language. Its meter resonates from our own heartbeats to make stories. Before somebody wrote down Homer’s Iliad, it was memorised and repeated. Poems lit up the memory of our collective past, told us who we were and where we came from, and they still do.

People who never read poetry still reach for it at the precipitous points of their lives. At moments of great happiness and terrible sadness, those emotional places where prose is leaden with its own wordiness, only poetry will do. There will invariably be verse at funerals and weddings, at war memorials and the desperate pleading for love. There is poetry for the unrequited and the inconsolable, for the ecstatic and the erotic. There is always poetry. We tell poems to God and call them prayers. The more I write prose, the more I read poetry. The more poetry I read, the greater and deeper its mystery, why it works in such fantastic profusion, from Victorian rumpty-tumpty epics to haiku. (Which, incidentally, I’ve never got the point of. Aren’t they just limericks that don’t make you laugh?)

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