Marcus I actually feel this whole nominating something as poetry the other
way around entirely. I write but i don't think of what i am writing as
poetry. i don't mind at all if people don't take it as such. But when others
call it poetry, as has sometimes happened, then i don't mind that either.

For me it's just writing i am working on. Sure, it's informed by poetics and
i like to work in forms that set conversations with poets and poetry into
motion. But i really don't mind what people call it.

Including the obvious rebuttal.

But i do think that you are lumping people and positions together in an
unproductive way. Let's take your idea and shift it into music or even dance
or 'performance'.

Have you never watched something happening at a distance and appreicated it
as 'theatre' or 'choreography' or listened to something and thought of it as
music? Maybe you haven't.

Why, only two days ago you claimed to have found a poem in my prose about
Bill Griffiths. His little extract was not considered to be poetry by you -
yet i was appreciating it as such. Your found piece was considered to be
poetry by you. I had no trouble with accepting that what you extracted from
my prose could be considered a poem. Who is 'right' and who is 'wrong'? Are
you right? Am I wrong?

These things aren't the slightest like pots. It's not as if a poem has one
definite social function. It might have many but not just one.

Some people think Miles Davis made some great music and then lost it, others
draw inspiration from his later fusion work. For some (Phillip Larkin) Jazz
ended just before WWII, bebop wasn't jazz . . . etc.

Who makes these rules and polices the boundaries and why?

You can say something is not poetry, but if someone else asserts that it is
-  and i think you'll find some incredibly broad interpretations amongst
practitioners on this list  -  who is right?

One can perhaps employ definitions and criteria from other critics/writers
that one agrees with.

Where are we going with this? Is Jackson Pollock 'not painting'? Is that the
sort of place we're headed?

I'll warrant that there *might be a need for some other way of referring to
certain modes of writing which do not confrom to conventional notions of
poetry and which cannot either be termed prose.

What do we do, for example, with Kamau Brathwaite's sycorax screens?

seriously

love and love
cris