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

[jfq at myuw.net]

I agree that it's as easy to define a poem as it is to define a meal. It only appears to become difficult when you start trying to express those things that aren't really expressible in plain language. The problem is that people often try to express publicly things for which there are no public criteria for the meaningfulness of. I disagree that the effects of aesthetic experience will be detectable in the brain. I'm sure though that we will some day find analogs of the aesthetic experience in the brain just like we have with motor function and whatnot. The aesthetic experience is private and the only ground we have for believing other people have them is that other people often report having them in relation to the same things that make us have them. you can't go any deeper than that, grammar won't support it.

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007, Bob Grumman wrote:

> 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
>
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