Hi Arthur (and all),
Well, I’ve finally got this machine working again! But there’s been too much 
happening here - and all the messages coming into my machine seem like a 
jigsaw rattling in the box. I sense I can't put all the pieces together too 
easily and still have a life. So, I’m just going to have to start from 
almost today!

Your piece is an interesting read Arthur. I guess every age, and probably 
every culture, has a need to redefine what it sees, and needs, as poetry.
I sort of feel you’re writing about a few things, though, that are distinct. 
You’re writing about the process of creating a poem (and how you, yourself, 
get a poem to started and get it to work). Then you’re writing about poems 
(and the history – and the pre-history - of the product more than the 
process). And you’re writing about the poet.
In out increasingly post-modern culture each of these subjects is under 
scrutiny (and is being re-evaluated). As an example of where the 
distinctions can be shown there’s the other recent mention of Valerie Laws 
painting words on sheep. I mean, is she (or the sheep) the poet? Is creating 
a (sheep) poem an arbitrary process or event? (And her appreciation of 
quantum physics, as well as sheep, makes her venture call into question some 
of the things you say about philosophy and science.) That her project was 
given a large grant (£2000) means it’s accepted as art (by critics and 
judges who share a responsibility for enabling poetry to happen). If I want 
to think about poetry I’m not so much worried about the past as intrigued by 
the future. My question isn’t why - but, what next?
And, because I sometimes wonder where poetry is and where it’s going, I also 
like the succinctness of Sally’s comment about tradition – I guess we all 
should be aware that there’s plenty of poems slumbering around us in books, 
and we can wake them up now and again and enjoy their company (till they 
start yawning and want to go back to bed). As I get older, and write more 
and more, it seems important for me to recognise that I need to read what’s 
been written before as well as what’s being written today. In other words 
“what next?” isn’t a totally open question!
In the past couple of years I’ve enjoyed reading Sean O’Brien’s The 
Deregulated Muse (a fine critical book of essays published by Bloodaxe). 
Somehow the conclusion he gives about the openness of our culture, and our 
poetry (our poetries), seemed an important thing to recognise. But I enjoyed 
all the more Bill Herbert and Matthew Hollis’s Strong Words (again a 
Bloodaxe book), where the last century’s perceptions of what poetry is, are 
explored. I felt, at the end of reading each book, that poetry has an 
important place as an art form in our world. Poems, I sense, can make Damien 
Hurst and Tracy Emin seem rather dated and passé.
And the definition Steven Waling offered (as told by Philip) seems a good 
touchstone for recognising a poem (…that it makes us look up, makes us see 
beyond what we see). But, to end on a personal comment, I was delighted when 
I was offered a photograph of a bridge for my new Collection: for me that 
says something about poetry, about poems, that can more clumsily be “said” 
as a means of getting to somewhere we might only have glimpsed before. But 
that definition isn’t saying everything, it’s just one that seems helpful. I 
think, in appreciating the poems, the picture says more than words that 
might only end up trying to blur the poems, stop them taking people places!
Bob







>From: arthur seeley <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: What is poetry?
>Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 20:32:08 -0000
>
>A while ago we had a debate that asked,What is Poetry?
>        I will risk it and give my thoughts on this recognising that it may
>well differ wholly or in part from other’s opinions.
>       So what is poetry? There are so many contentious, differing points 
>of
>view, that if I did succeed in defining it today I would be wrong tomorrow.
>Better perhaps to accept that many things could be presented as poetry,
>averred to be poetry, valued as poetry by different groups at different
>times. It might prove more fruitful to wonder if that is the right 
>question.
>Perhaps we should be asking ourselves Why is poetry?
>          It would not harm to look at the origin and history of poetry to
>get at some idea of what it actually is, how perhaps it originated, why it
>exists as an art form.
>            Poetry emerged along with dance as part of religious ritual, it
>was probably around in some basic form around evening fires before the hunt
>the following day when dance and music and sounds were used to create the
>‘magic’ for a good hunt.
>           Later to exorcise spirits or praise and appease the Gods
>            In our own English culture we have the bardic tradition when
>bards were seen as holy men and poetry was a form of guarding and
>communicating secrets of the tribe.
>           The golden years of Greek civilisation gave us much of the
>language of poetics strophe, stanza, iamb, trochee etc all emerged from the
>Greek. Strophe and stanza mean ‘turn’ as in a dance and dance was an
>important element in religious rites. I feel sure that when we refer to
>iambs and trochees , et al, as ‘feet’ we are remembering dance origins and
>that rhythm is the dictation of the patterns of dancing feet. There was 
>some
>notion of measurement in the use of rhythms like the analysis of a line 
>into
>iambs and trochees and their counting. Indeed the word measure was often
>referred to in dance, indeed as the dance itself.
>         There have been many developments and schools of style and form 
>and
>content since then , of course. I could not itemise them nor do I think you
>would want me to.
>     Yes, but what about modern poetry. We don’t hunt anymore. We don’t 
>need
>magic anymore. We are human beings, we are in control. What is the poetry
>for us and for our time??
>         I like to believe that all of us or at least most of us write 
>poetry
>because we are called to do so. The call is siren and irresistible. We are
>called to protect, sustain and nurture this most ancient art. We are kin to
>the visual artist, the musician, the dancer, the novelist and no less than
>they. Some of you may shrink from such an idea of the art form being of the
>spirit but in your hearts I think you know well that it is. We are 
>guardians
>and acolytes.
>     Don’t we need that magic, that ability to evoke the spirit of an event
>or place or time then ? I think we do. I think we know it is there and that
>we search for it by all sorts of means. Religion, mathematics, science,
>philosophy, visual arts, music, literature all seem to me to be ways in
>which we seek to understand and order the experiences of this life. Order
>and, thence, control and explain them.
>      For me, poetry is my own personal means of making sense of something
>that science and philosophy, religion and knowledge, does not help me to
>understand. It is sure they enable me but often each of them restricts 
>their
>explanation to its own linguistic sphere, limits the depth of my
>understanding to its own language and idea scheme. Poetry releases me to
>explore the depths and inter-connections, allows me to integrate.  Poetry,
>for me, captures just as surely as the midnight dance round fires captured
>tomorrow’s food; it conjures just as surely as it conjured wonderment and
>faith long ago
>There is something beyond the ability of science and knowledge to explain.
>Indeed I think science chooses to ignore things it cannot explain or 
>measure
>or quantify.
>         There are moments, and I hope I share this with many of you, when
>all the elements of a time or place or event cohere as a single brilliant
>experience, an insight, an epiphany. It can be the profile of a particular
>landscape, a nuance of weather, a single sudden event, a state of mind of
>the observer, all these things, coinciding like, as some one said here,
>putting your fingers in a light socket. To be sensitive to that coherence,
>that gelling, that essence of a moment, is to live poetry. To capture it or
>attempt to capture it is to write poetry. To relive the moment at a time
>apart from the actual event and by proxy is to read or hear  poetry.
>So why is poetry then? It is there as a medium to invoke the deep magic and
>mystery of this confusion we call life.
>These are just some thoughts I share with you all and welcome your
>responses.


_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail