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

[JforJames at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/14/2007 8:14:39 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net writes:


>  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
 
Bob, it's hard for me to believe you are so self-satisfied with your  
definition
of poetry. The definition you put forth is only encompassing because it is  
vague.
There is little in that gets to essence of what poetry is: "(1) words; (2)  
literature..."
And dragging 'beauty' into is a big mistake, and has the mustiness of many  
antique
attempts to try to define poetry which often focus on 'beauty' or  
'sublimity'. And then
to relate beauty to the word 'pleasure', which itself is  problematic, and so 
much related
to taste, culture and perception. 'Beauty' in fact is one of  those words 
aetheticians and 
philosophers have spent endless ink trying to pin down and probably no  
closer now 
than when they started, and it's word that shifts in meaning over time. As  
poetry has.
 
I rather be nihilistic (in Nietzschean sense) than absurb. I don't think  
many people
through history have struggled with the definition of a housecat or a meal.  
It's a different
order of things, but that should be obvious to someone as analytic as  you.
Finnegan
 
 



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