[New-Poetry] and yet it remains undefined...

[Bob Grumman]

jforjames at aol.com wrote:
> Bob, I disagree with you about it not being hard to define poetry. 
> I've collected hundreds of serious attempts and many that were clearly 
> off-the-cuff. Many are attractive on some or another count or aspect. 
> But few get at it all. It's like defining any large and unwieldy 
> subject, it can't be done without simplifications that will damage, or 
> aggrandizements that gloss over.
>  
> Finnegan
>
All I can say back, Jim, is that I am analytical, you not.  I've seen a 
good many of the usually interesting texts you've come across that you 
feel try to to define poetry but which seem to me only attempts to say 
something clever about it.  I feel that in what you say here you're with 
the intellectual nihilists.  What is not large and unwieldy, considered 
in detail?  I say poetry is (1) words; (2) literature (or words and, 
sometimes, other matter, that seem primarily to be trying to provide 
beauty to those experiencing it in the view of a consensus of informed 
observers); (3) texts containing a significant number of flow-breaks 
compared to prose literature.  Beauty is that which causes aesthetic 
pleasure--which is fairly complex but is roughly some combination of 
sensual, narrative, people-related and ideational pleasure. with the 
first dominant (and its effects will, I'm certain, someday be detected 
in the brain); flow-breaks are line-breaks and similar pauses in the 
flow of the text's story or the equivalent.

Anyone can nitpick this but I doubt that there is more than one text in 
ten million most people would consider a poem that my definition would 
disqualify as poetry, or one text in ten million that most people would 
not consider a poem that they could find a better category for than what 
I define as poetry.

Ask yourself why there's so little controversy about what a meal is but 
so much about what a poem is.  One is all kinds of stuff entering the 
mouth, the other words, sometimes accompanied by other matter, entering 
(mainly) the eyes.  Defining music, at least for those sophisticated 
enough not to need to reject anything auditory that they don't like as 
music, is not very controversial, either, so far as I know.  (It's 
organized non-utilitarian sounds.)  I really think that the only genuine 
problem with defining poetry is that the priesthood that rules it fears 
they can only flourish in a climate of ignorance and babble, so refuses 
to accept analysis of it.

--Bob