Lawrence Upton wrote:
> Well maybe I didnt express myself very well, Marcus; but I think my
> meaning was clear; and it wasnt what you imply<
I know how that goes; Mark Weiss just tried to make me out to be a
Grummanite, one of the "progress in poetry" crowd, and that's certainly
not the case!
Lawrence Upton wrote:
> Initially I was concerned by what I considered to be a metrical
> misreading of
> are not real things, but merely human
> and then soon I was pretty cross about someone being told THIS
> NEEDS TO BE FIXED when what they might have said is this needs
> to be fixed if you accept that my rule set is correct and my analysis is
> correct and you ought to know that many mistrust it
Well, of course, we're all adults with a good deal of experience in getting
and giving criticism, aren't we? Isn't "if you accept my rule and my
analysis and not everyone does" implicit in any criticism in the context of
this, and similar, discussion lists?
Lawrence Upton wrote:
> The point I was making or trying to make in
> "_the poetry came first and it evolved without there being such rules The rules came later based both on observation of what poets did *and on
> assumptions about the relationship of english to latin etc etc_"
> is that these scansion "rules" are constructs, approximations. Theyre
> different to principles described by rules / laws that make kitchen
> appliances work and different to what we are actually doing when we
> write by ear<
Ok, that I can certainly agree with. But further, it seems to me, poetry
itself is a construct, an approximation, and language is another one. We
cannot actually convey our experience whole to another person; all we
can do is use the rules, within the rules, by stretching the rules, by
breaking them, to try to evoke something approximating our experience
in others who have a sympathetic or, better, an empathetic engagement
with our attempts.
Lawrence Upton wrote:
> Poetry came before any rules describing it. Let's not mix that up
> without whatever principles are actually operating.<
No, I disagree. I think that the rules are what make poetry poetry, just as
the rules are what make baseball baseball. There may have been a ball-
and-stick-and-running activity before there was baseball, but what
makes baseball baseball is the rules, not the ball, not the stick, not the
running, not even the intent to play a game. Poetry is a game, an
artificial construct made by people, not a natural thing, like rain or wind
or fire (A way out here they've got a name/ For rain and wind and fire. /
The rain is rain, the wind is wind/ And they call the fire fire) that we
discover; it's a thing we invented.
Lawrence Upton wrote:
> Of course language has its operating "rules". That's something else.
> And I defer to that - hence my appeal to the ear. Because trying to
> express those rules we make them too simple; a good ear is the best
> writing tool.<
I agree that a good ear is the best writing tool -- but a good ear comes
from some marginally greater talent for language than the norm,
combined necessarily with a lot of practice listening, thinking, playing,
working, and talking in that language. The talent without the work
doesn't produce a good ear; the work without the talent doesn't do it,
either -- not that it's likely that anyone without the talent would do the
work, because what for?
Lawrence Upton wrote:
> I think it is more useful - and less likely historically to leave egg on the
> face - to turn aside from poetry we find offensive in supposed rule
> breaking than in declaring it to be not poetry; but it's up to you. I just
> have nothing to say to that kind of talk. To me it's a waste of breath<
Ah, but I hope I don't do that. I want to distinguish poetry from prose by
looking at whether what we have before us is metered language or not.
If metered, then poetry; if not, not. I want to get away from the notion
that poetry is an honorific. I hold that poetry is rhetoric, a way of using
language, and is not in and of itself anything good or bad or even worth
doing. What makes it good or bad or worth doing is how well it's done
and whether the combination of sense and sensibility produce
something significant or important.
Lawrence Upton wrote:
> I think that the idea that prose is prose because it doesnt have meter
> and if it did have meter it would be poetry is not to be relied upon.
> (Perhaps we could repeat those experiments where they weighed
> people before and after they were dead to see if the soul had fled -
> "yes, same number of words but lighter, can't have any meter in it") I
> suppose that one could think of prose being writing where you dont
> bother about such things; but it wouldnt be very good prose. But the
> prose / poetry divide is not one that interests me<
But it's really impossible to talk about poetry without having some pretty
good idea of how and why it differs from prose, isn't it? It seems to me,
again, here, that you're using "poetry" as an honorific, and not as a
description of a kind of writing. You're saying that "poetry" is that stuff
which is good that arises from either verse or prose or anything else --
or maybe you're not. I confess it's not clear to me what you ARE saying.
Marcus
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