Ah, I liked David's list too, not necessarily agreeing with all of it, but even then,
a sort of wry chuckle. But I think it should be noted that while poets may grant
poetry to mathematicians or computer experts or sociologists, that granting is
seldom extended from the other side. Poetry is an engagement with language,
but there are other engagements with language that are not necessarily poetry
or even grant it a limited existence, I know one physicist who is interested in
poetry but then he is married to a poet, and we all know how that goes, or as
this very same poet has said 'taking an interest in something is not the same as
being interested,"

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
>
>
>
>
>---- Original message ----
>>Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 19:27:15 -0800
>>From: Jim Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
>>Subject: Re: Coherent traditions
>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>>i don't see anything in your list that would turf out godel, turing, or
>>chomsky actually, david. even turing 'raged against the machine': the
>>machine that prosecuted him for being homosexual.
>>
>>i am told i take too many liberties with definitions of poetry. but then, so
>>does anyone who tries to push it, no?
>>
>>when i think of what the work of godel and turing--and their
contemporaries,
>>and those who have followed, such as chomsky--has wrought concerning
>what we
>>think we are, what we think thought is, how we write and communicate (the
>>computer), and epistemology (godel's 'undecidable propositions' and
>>'incompleteness' theorems, for instance)--and when i think of how crucial
>>language *as a subject* is to their ideas--as it is in information theory,
>>say--it seems to me that they have been engaged with language very
>>intensely, david, and with profound consequence for all the world.
>>
>>i think poetry should be capable of comprehending this sort of activity.
>>there should be no divide between poetry and what the most brilliant minds
>>of an era are devoted to with such intensity and consequence concerning
>>language.
>>
>>poetry should be able to range over all that is thinkable, over all emotion,
>>over the full range of human experience and thought and emotion.
>>
>>i seem to be at my best when i know i don't know what poetry is.
>>possibilities open up.
>>
>>by the way, a pity about the railway timetables. it makes for an adventure,
>>though.
>>
>>i enjoyed your list!
>>
>>ja
>>http://vispo.com
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: david.bircumshaw [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>>> Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 6:25 PM
>>> To: Jim Andrews; [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Re: Coherent traditions
>>>
>>>
>>> Jim wrote:
>>>
>>> >and some appreciation of the synthesis of number and language that
>>> has been going on the last seventy years in the work of poets
>>> such as Godel,
>>> Turing, and Chomsky. Poets in the sense that part of what we look for in
>>> poetry/poetics is intense engagement with language.<
>>>
>>> Jim, with all respect, this statement is absurd, apart from the
>>> last clause, in that the description of Godel, Turing and Chomsky as
>>> poets is as far away from any kind of reality it even beats a
>>> railway timetable. Of course they weren't poets. One could turn this
>>> kind of stuff on its head, if, for example, I were to claim,
>>> because I am a poet, I am therefore a nuclear physicist or an expert in
>>> inorganic chemistry I would be laughed out of court. And intense
>>> involvement with language, yes, they all have that, and are
>>> brilliant at it, but that does not make them poets, it's just
>>> part of the beginnings of it.
>>>
>>> Requirements include:
>>>
>>> a) A tendency to self-hypnosis.
>>>
>>> b) High irritability thresholds coupled with a desire to be dominated.
>>>
>>> c) A stubbed toe because the budgie dropped dead just as you were
>>> going to think that great thought.
>>>
>>> d) A fascination with the psyche, and the extremity and
>>> insecurity of our being here predicament.
>>>
>>> e) An ear.
>>>
>>> f) Lucid dreaming, and long conversations with hypnagogic images
>>> on sleepless nights.
>>>
>>> g) Superstition. Rationality.
>>>
>>> h) A belief in what doesn't exist, because someone has to.
>>>
>>> i) Sonnets playing on the ear like chamber music to the tunes of
>>> toilets flushing.
>>>
>>> j) Someone you love because you hate them:
>>>
>>> k) Like a tradition.
>>>
>>> l) A fondness for small things and a fear of philosophers.
>>>
>>> m) Fury at the Machine.
>>>
>>> n) What happened to someone you know nothing of in the waiting
>>> room at Bolton that long ago Sunday.
>>>
>>> o) A prairie toldus
>>>
>>> p) Trying not to mind about Q
>>>
>>> q) A love of Russia, for its open armed literature, and the long
>>> plains of its waiting.
>>>
>>> r) A deep suspicion of doctors, for their reliance on one sound,
>>> say it, and the pretences of expertise.
>>>
>>> s) Ambivalence about snakes. See DHL.
>>>
>>> t) Which is very soothing.
>>>
>>> u) Who is who we all are and never let us forget that.
>>>
>>> v) Sign of dysentery ridden English archers and what every poet
>>> needs to have the strength to hold up in fingers to the world.
>>>
>>> w) Waah, whoa, woe, who, what makes rhymes with coo.
>>>
>>> x) To mark the spot.
>>>
>>> y) Which we all ask ourselves.
>>>
>>> z) An alphabet. None of the above.
>>>
>>>
>>> All the Best
>>>
>>> Dave