If you lived in America you wouldn't talk like that Tim. The price of
poetry has gone through the roof here. Since the war began in Iraq
things have really got rough; not only has the United States for a
long time simply been slurping supplies as if there were no tomorrow
but now that tomorrow is actually here there is no regulation,
rationing, or even common sense. It looks like this government is
prepared to drain poetry to the very last drop with no real thought as
to how to replace it. Right now we still have enough for daily needs
-- but at what a cost. I had a vat in my back yard for a long time,
for a completely rainy day, but it was stolen last March. We didn't
call it anything, on purpose. But it still went.
Mairead
On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 05:35:13 EST, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> An amusing list Rupert, but behind it I detect a common conceptual notion.
> This notion is that there is this thing called poetry that is, as it were,
> bound up with the human but only in the sense that it is the human that can
> disclose it, give it shape. In other words it is the idea that independent
> of history and usage 'poetry' still has an existence; therefore any usage of
> the term in relation to questions of definition is, theoretically, a
> speculation on the degree of agreement between the usage and the 'essence'.
> I expect there is a philosophical term for it.
>
> I find that this kind of thinking about such things as poetry, art, or
> whatever, is very often done by people who probably would not agree with the
> idea that poetry had some kind of independent essence, so why do they talk
> as if it did? If someone does actually believe that, because it fits the
> metaphysics that stems from their theism or because they recognise poetry as
> being a spiritual power within their mystical system, then OK , but I don't
> think that is what we have here.
>
> My idea of 'poetry' is simply descriptive, so the question of 'what is
> poetry?' or 'what is a poet?' is lightweight. From my point of view Jackson
> MacLow was a poet because much of what he did looked and sounded and behaved
> quite similarly to other things that i had witnessed being called 'poetry'.
> But this doesn't automatically confer any mark of quality - there are loads
> of things commonly called 'poetry' which have little or no quality. What
> something is called is not what counts, or shouldn't.
>
> Tim A.
>
>
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