I think it is rather sad that many apparently subscribe to this view of
'experiment'.  It may be the increasingly UScentric world we live in?  I'm
not sure about the etymology involved here but from a scientist's
perspective an 'experiment' is primarily tinkering or playing or trying out
an idea and I would guess that aside from people educated in the US, this is
clear.

Some of the problem may stem from Skinner's excesses which were motivated
primarily out of a political effort to garner funds but even then many
psychologists disavowed his excesses.

I might be indluging in a little "talking at the boundaries'
http://www.eou.edu/~mshadle/paper1/antin.html
but I think some actual reading of Antin, for example, on this issue will
make the point clearer: experimentation is primarily a method which as a
method is pretty analogous to poetics as a method.

tom bell

Michael Snider wrote:
  >
> Experiment is more problematic, as it borrows from the language of
> science, implying an objective, systematic, asymptotic approach to
> something very like truth, or at least to what works best. There are
> several problems with this.  First, objective truth and effectiveness
> have very little to do with art. Even when I argue that using
> traditional meters means I don't have to teach my readers how to hear
> the rhythms of my poems, I don't mean that therefore the poems were
> more effective--effective at what? conveying my emotional state?
> telling a story? making money? What is the purpose of art, that some
> particular form may better fulfill that purpose? It just means that I
> have less work to do at some levels and more at others and that I have
> chosen where I want to put my effort, and that I hope I have made a
> good choice for me in terms of letting the tradition do some of the
> work where I am weak so that I can use my strengths. To what end?
> Making poems that satisfy me and that, as far as I can tell, are a
> source of pleasure and an occasional kick in the ass for those who read
> or hear them. It's not such a grand thing.
>
> I didn't make that choice by way of experiment.  None of us do
> experiments.  None of us makes a hypothesis that a particular affect
> can best be produced in an audience in manner A rather than in manner
> B, tries to think of all the contingent variables that may affect the
> production of that affect, designs a protocol which controls for each
> of those variables so that any result we see will be solely the
> consequence of using manner A or B, repeats that effort many times and
> applies statistical analysis to determine whether the differences we
> see are beyond expected chance variations, submits the work to peer
> review, waits for duplication of the results by other poets, refines
> the hypothesis or the protocol in light of the results from experiment
> and the work of other poets, tentatively accepts the hypothesis as
> either confirmed or rejected, and then goes on to examine the effect of
> manner C.
>
> "What if I do it this way?" does not constitute an experiment. We play
> around. We find what we like to do. We find the areas where we feel we
> have talent. What we mean by experiment is more like tinkering.
>
> There's nothing wrong with tinkering--it's absolutely necessary at
> every level in making art--but when we call it an experiment, even
> those of us who distrust the scientific enterprise (I'm not one) are
> too often seduced into thinking we're working on some more than
> personal frontier, that in some fashion we're helping the art to
> progress.  I'm not saying that any particular person here has made that
> claim--but why else does "experimental poetry" always come up in
> discussions of the avant garde? Why are both terms nearly always used
> as honorifics if not because we tend to think of the new as in and of
> itself good?
>
> Why haven't we learned that it ain't necessarily so?