[New-Poetry] What is Poetry?

[jforjames at aol.com]

Jackson's quote is a good one...though it's like so many quotes that have some "certainty" in their saying.
He's framing the battle for poetry's soul as 'either/or' or 'zero sum' matter. That poetry can live with?unceartainty 
and indeterminancy should be pretty well established by now. It seems to me that's?much the fashion
of poetry these days, particular post-avant poetry. Personally, I wouldn't want to avoid a?poetry?strove, 
at times, for fixity and exactness. I think a poet is capable of finding the stil-point amid the welter.

It's curious that Jackson uses the verb 'illumine'...which means to?shed light, and more?generally, to show cleary.
So we 'illumine' what is?obscure (mysterious, inscrutable, etc.). The 'walls of mystery' made me think of Plato's wall 
within the cave. And living with 'doubt and uncertainty' is a notion close to Socrates' notion of 'aphoria'. Then 
Jackson seems to veer off at?end this quote with almost a nod to someone like Robinson Jeffers (or eco-poetics), 
'with a return to elemental awe and wonder'. (Jeffers' sonnet "Return, e.g.).

No answers here...only observations.
Finnegan



It's the Negative Capability letter. To his brothers.?
?
*several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, /when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason/-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. *?
?
The thing is, poetry is kinda different from life. In life, we probably have to reach after fact and reason pretty early on. In poetry, we allow ourselves a little more time. We can be of three minds, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds.?
?
I've asked this before, but since we're back to it again...what is Keats saying about Coleridge? The conventional wisdom seems to be that he's criticizing for a limitation -- I think he's praising him for a superior quality. I suppose that to try and answer this question might constitute an */irritable reaching after fact and reason/, *but what the hey.?
?
Jeff Newberry wrote:?
> It's funny that you mention Keats, Mole. I've been reading through > his letters. I'll try to track down the passage you reference. I'm > pretty sure that I know what you're talking about.?
>?
> Jeff Newberry?
>?
> On 7/1/07, *TheOldMole* <Opus40-01 at opus40.org > <mailto:Opus40-01 at opus40.org>> wrote:?
>?
> Keats kinda said the same thing.?
>?
> Jeff Newberry wrote:?
> > " . . . one of poetry's chief aims is to illumine the walls of?
> > mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable. I think poetry ought to be?
> > taught not as an engine of meaning but as an opportunity to learn to?
> > live in doubt and uncertainty, as a means of claiming indeterminacy.?
> > Our species is deeply defined by its great surges of reason, but I?
> > think it high time we return to elemental awe and wonder."?
> >?
> > --Major Jackson, "Does Poetry Have a Social Function," Poetry,?
> January?
> > 2007?



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