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

[Bob Grumman]

Alexander Dickow wrote:
> My question would be: *why* define poetry in general?
>   
Why define anything?  Quick answer: to facilitate communication. 

But I think your question is really why *explicitly* define poetry.  I 
say that because everyone does have a definition of poetry.  Otherwise, 
the word, "poetry," would be meaningless--no one would know what any 
other person meant by it.  Propagandists, demagogues, priests, 
professors, etc., don't want it defined explicitly for the same reason 
lawyers and politicians don't want laws defined explicitly--because then 
the law will have power, not they.  They don't want to be subjugated to 
it, they want to be able to use it to suit themselves.  So, to get back 
to poetry, if some critic hates formal verse, he doesn't want an 
explicit definition of poetry that makes it impossible for him to call 
for its destruction (or humiliation as not poetry); he wants a sloshy 
definition he can use against it.

I would add that what is of value is not just an explicit definition but 
one that is maximally objective, clear and tight.  As mine is.

> (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
>
>
>   
I would claim that my definition is final--partly because I take into 
consideration how it was that some things now considered poetry once 
were not considered poetry.  That is, I understand the flaws in previous 
definitions.  I also think that new forms of poetry don't so much 
shatter old (reasonable) definitions of poetry so much as they shatter 
old evaluative notions of poetry, which aren't definitions but weapons 
for the use of authoritarians.  Good definitions are not authoritarian: 
they free us of authoritarianism because they can not be used 
politically, only scientifically.


--Bob G.