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

[Bob Grumman]

>     > 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.
Then propose something as a poem and see if my definition fails to 
settle whether it is or not.

> 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.
The same would happen if you were trying to define a house cat, a meal 
or a song.  As I said, beauty is that which gives a person aesthetic 
pleasure--and all emotions break down into pleasure or pain, it's just a 
matter of defining what kind of pleasure or pain is involved.  Aesthetic 
pleasure mostly involves the senses but can include other kinds of 
perceptions.  That people have been as stupid about what beauty and 
pleasure is as they have been about what other sacred things like poetry 
are is irrelevant.


> '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'd rather be nihilistic (in Nietzschean sense) than absurd. 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
Everything is a different order of things.  Naturally, people don't 
worry about the definition of things they don't think important.  But to 
defend your side of this debate, you really need to bring up something 
you think can be defined. 

Sorry to be short about it, but this really does seem to me to reduce to 
obscurantism versus rationality to me.  To priests keeping what they 
make money or some other kind of reward off of undefinable to provoke 
awe from the ignorant--however sincerely in probably most cases. 

I'm probably a logical positivist intolerant of what seem to me bogus 
questions. I'm certainly a reductionist. 

--Bob
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