[New-Poetry] Poetics (was Poetic Justice)

[lsg]

I'm wondering if Bob Grumman has invented a new art:  it is not poetry at all, but something else entirely.  Even though it is related to poetry, it may be so different as to deserve its own category.  Like songs and poems are related but are not categorized together.  Dance and acrobatics (gymnastics) are related but still different enough to own separate categories of endeavor...

Again...just a thought...and you all might have already covered this in depth...as I dip in and out of this list... I might have missed it.

lsg

PS  That situation of inventing new art forms is much different from the cases where thugs beat up on older poets to get their doggerel read.  When an artist actually invents a new art, he will probably need to explain it and compare it to its closest cousins.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bob Grumman 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views 
  Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2008 5:49 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Poetic Justice


  A breath-taking poem, Judy?  Too easy for me.  All I have to do is 
  repeat my many posts here and elsewhere about "lighght."  
  Breath-taking--when I have to emphasize, I first read it.  No poem, or 
  any work of art, remains eternally breath-taking for me.

  Why?  Because it was a pioneering minimalist poem, done when no one else 
  was seriously engaged in making one-word poems--though it's possible (I 
  don't know) that others had done one or two), and the idea of trying for 
  maximum intensity in a minimum of text was new and potent.  Even more 
  important, I'm fairly sure it was the first poem to exploit silent 
  letters metaphorically for its central aesthetic effect.  Third, it was 
  a good minor concrete poem, aside from its being a major infra-verbal 
  poem (poem dependent on what happens inside words rather than between 
  words).  Fourth, it is a brilliant (and original) expression of light 
  silently expanding.  By itself on a page, it makes those appreciating it 
  experience the awesome magnitude of mere light, which is probably the 
  most important thing in existence.

  Something similar happened to me when I caught on to Cummings's falling 
  leaf poem.  I was knocked into what I call "Manywhere-at-Once," which is 
  being (literally, I believe) in more than one fully-felt 
  generally-rigorously disconnected compartments of your brain at once.  
  Lots of other poems have done this to me, most of them very well-known, 
  but some not (including a few of my own!)  I mention the short ones 
  because it'd take too long to get into the longer ones. 

  One last shortie: Basho's haiku about the old pond.

  But I think it may be that there are poems that don't click the way 
  these do for me that are in other ways as valuable--Frost's "Stopping By 
  the Woods," for instance. . . .

  --Bob G.

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