Hi
I've cut in some comments below.
>
>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.
I was just visiting www.ubu.com and noticed they have a new section on
'conceptual writing'. The electronic poetry centre at http://epc.buffalo.edu
has Poetry Plastique, which was an exhibition of visual texts, as one of its
featured sites. There's works in both of these that will test people's
definitions of poetry, particularly where the 'words' become material. But
like cris I find myself less and less worried about whether something is a
poem or not (maybe he never was). Instead these works seem to open up a
series of useful questions about how to use the space of the page, whether
to use a page at all, how a poem might look, whether text works might be
site specific, how i can use digital technologies and so on.
Poetry, or writing, has always been, for me, about opening out, and not
closing down, possibilities. I'd never think I couldn't do something because
it doesn't fit some category such as poetry. I suppose i must have point of
resistance somewhere if pushed, but I'm more interested in exploring the
still unexplored potential of what I haven't done than marking out a
boundary.
>
>These things aren't the slightest like pots.
And as Paul Green's lipogrammatic text (written without using the letter
'e') sugests, a pot is a poet without the 'e'.
>Who makes these rules and polices the boundaries and why?
To go bakc to a previous discussion there are people in arts councils, in
academies, in positions of some importance in the creative and cultural
industries who would assert that these boundaries exist and would be
ocncerned about transgression. Even many fairly 'liberal' ones amongs them
would see works outside the usual dfinitions of those categories as
eccentric oddities, and that can include works which simply don't capitalise
or use punctuation or use the 'slash and the ampersand' as one critic said
(somewhat late in the day). It depends on the context of what I'm doing. If
i want someone to give me money, although I've been spectacularly
unsuccessful this year, or validate my work by giving me a qualification,
then i suppose you have to take a squint at it from their perspective.
>What do we do, for example, with Kamau Brathwaite's sycorax screens?
>
Where can I see those?
Ian
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