Alison said in response to Mairead,

>I would rather knowledge was built on dynamic relationships, which seem
>less static than Aristotlean boxes and (to me) closer to actualities.
>The instabilities and inherent transformative qualities of relationships
>aren't built into traditional categorical knowledge, or, rather, are
>glossed. Rather than a grid laid on top of something, a closer and
>specific attention to whatever or however it is and behaves.

Quite hard to match the ease of Alison's prose, and I don't disagree with
the general premises of her comment. But I'm afraid it's abstract enough to
make MFA free versers, Oulipeans, Language poets, and New Formalists alike
nod in agreement.

Actually, when Alison asked "Does it really matter?" she helped me to better
understand what my initial question was leading at (as well, when Candice
said I was a "smart guy" I pretended she was not being sarcastic and became
stimulated to think more). And one point I believe I was trying to make is
that this "traditional categorical knowledge" Alison would transcend comes
in all shapes and sizes-- obvious ones like the pentameter, say, and less
obvious ones (though no less pervasive or reified) like Authorship, or the
deeply assumed "knowledge" that poems are most naturally written in lines
that stop before the margin demands it.

I'm certainly not saying that poems shouldn't be written in lines(!), and
the whole issue of prosody is full of turbulences, as Alison says-- but
"specific attention to whatever and however" poetry "is and behaves" might
best, for us today, involve attention to the transformative qualities of all
sorts of "non-poetic", ideological matter *outside* the poem and not just to
the dynamic relationships of compostional proceedings inside it (the artist
with blinders approach which has consigned Poetry, how could it not, to a
minor, academic concern within the general culture).

What I'm talking about is attention to where we are in the culture, why we
write, and what happens to the writing when it's written, issues which, even
amongst the "avant-garde," seem to me to get rapidly reduced to
proto-romantic banalities when they are raised. I think this is what Mairead
was saying more elegantly than I in noting that shimmering zone between
"inside and out"-- between Poetry and its institutional surround-- as space
into which writing has barely begun to move (Language poetry made some
tentative gestures and is now in hasty and desperate retreat), and I agree.
And it's in this sense of a more expansive attention that prose can become
transfigured into something more, so that what one gets is not a "prose
poem" but poetry, and of as complex and subtle prosody, perhaps, as anything
written in lines...

It seems to me, at the present moment, anyway. David Bircumshaw is right
that it's a very thick topic.

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