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

[Alexander Dickow]

My question would be: *why* define poetry in general?
(Other than, as in Bob's case, the sheer joy of
category, which I happen to share with Bob (and Jim
:P): there's an odd pleasure in typology even when
they fail empirically; if they do, they can still be
admired for their internal logic).
If one is uses such definitions, it might be in order
to break them: the poets I'll be doing thesis work on
-- Cendrars, Apollinaire and Max Jacob -- incorporate
any imaginable genre or form considered *at the time*
as "not poetry": commercial publicity, cheap novels,
visual images, prose (even entirely internally
coherent prose), whatever you can think of. Some kind
of historical notion of what "poetry" was thought to
be in 1901 might therefore be useful to the extent
these poets were revising or shattering that notion.
It's a repoussoir.
Amicalement,
Alex


www.alexdickow.net/blog/
   
  les mots! ah quel désert à la fin
  merveilleux. -- Henri Droguet