> 1.      The words “art” “artifice” and “artificial” may share the
> same root but they’re different words, at least they are in my dictionaries!
> They’re each words that have been coined to be used in different word-games,
> games which have subtle differences in rules. ... the differences soon become
> the topic of discussion and disagreement.<

Just so -- as they have here.

My point remains that poetry is art, artifice, AND artificial, and must be,
even though they are three different words. The very fact that someone calls an
utterance or a presentation "poetry" demands a very different sort of attention
from the reader that calling it "journalism" or "journal-entry" or just
plain "prose" would demand -- and no one who purports to write poetry can get
away from or around this fundamental fact.

Further, what sounds "natural" in one decade sounds "dated" in another. There
is no poetry I know of that sounds "natural" in all times and in all places.
It's hard work, difficult artifice, artful, and profoundly artificial, to make
a poem sound "natural", and all that work, artifice, and art is for naught as
the language changes and dates our utterances. You can't get around that,
either; it's the nature (ho ho) of language, and it's "natural" to change
language to sound "natural" to the newer ear, which makes the prior utterance
sound, well, "artificial".

It's preposterous to plead plaintively that the "natural" language, the un-
artful, the un-artificed, the un-artificial, that any speaker employs, by
virtue of its being natural, is art. If that's art in language, then what's not
art in language?

>(It’s mixing things up, for instance, to say someone who’s a canny artist in
> more than one genre is therefore “artful”! The words processed from the
> historic-root word “art” aren’t always interchangeable because they bring
> their independent histories with them). I think that’s what’s happened here.<

Part of the joy of being an educated person, part of the joy of language games,
part of the joy of poetry, is mixing up and unmixing such usages in order to
offer and receive a sense of the complexity of the issues at hand. To plead, on
the other hand, for absolute naturalness, unartful in the sense of being
without art, natural in the sense of being without artfulness; for the use of
the word "artificial" to mean always and only "bad", allows for no sense of or
use of the notion of "artificial" to be the useful other side of the "natural"
coin. It pleads for the naturalness of "human nature", as if such vicious
brutality as that illustrated by uncivilized "human nature" were a virtue.

I pointed out several times that uses of the words "artificial" to mean "bad"
and of "natural" to mean "good", were limiting -- that poetry must be
artificial before it can be natural or it's not poetry at all, it's merely
blurt. I react to the notion of "blurt is art" in the same way I react to those
so-called comedians who start their bits with "True story ...": I say "How
about you tell us something *you made up* that's *funny*, instead?"

How about telling me something you've artfully and artificially *made up*
that's illustrates or illuminates something significant, or important, or both,
about our shared human condition, instead of something you "just blurt out"?

Marcus