Marcus Bales wrote:
> > Poetry is like a 100 metre race in one way: both are artificially
> > conceived, a narrowing down of a set of rules out of a broader human
> > experience. We say the record-holder of the 100 metre race is "the
> > world's fastest human", for example, as though the only running ever
> > done was done at the 100 metre distance. Also, still similarly, poets and
> > their advocates make a similar claim about poetry, though, don't they --
> > that poetry is the best use of language or the highest art, that the title
> > "poet" and the description "poetry" are honorific.
> >
> > It seems to me that it is the combination of the claim that "poet" and
> > "poetry" are both an honorific with the claim that there is no way to tell
> > the difference between "poet" and "non-poet" or "poetry" and "prose"
> > that lead directly to the sporting competitiveness you deplore. So long
> > as anyone can play and there are no rules, what do you expect? As for
> > whether any given behavior is cheating when there are no rules, well,
> > come on! If there are no rules, there is no cheating.

Alison Croggon wrote:
> It's the terms, and the assumptions behind the terms, which bother me: the
> idea that "broader human experience" is predicated on a "set of rules" which
> is then "narrowed down" in poetry. Poetry, like all art, is an
> aestheticisation of experience and thought, imagined or real, and to
> aestheticise is to break rules as much as make them (one exists in the
> other).<

This is interesting because it seems to be a restatement of what I've
said while disagreeing with what I've said.

When one aestheticizes experience or thought then one necessarily
narrows them down from the whole of experience or thought.
Aestheticized experience is less than whole experience, whether that
experience is real or imagined -- it cannot be otherwise. Further, to
aesthetisize the experience is to create rules ipso facto -- again, it
cannot be otherwise. There is no aesthetics without rules: one must at
the very least distinguish between the aesthetic experience and das
ding an sich, and making that distinction is making a rule.

So, it seems to me, there are the rules of the broader human experience
on the one hand, and the rules of aestheticization of that experience, on
the other, at a minimum. The aestheticization is not the experience; it is
necessarily less than the experience. What art seeks to do is to engage
the audience's broader human experience with the aestheticization the
artist presents to evoke individual reactions to the piece of art that,
though narrower than, though less than, though predicated on rules
different than, the broader human experience itself, allows the audience
to participate, intellectually and emotionally, almost as if they had had
the broader human experience itself.

Alison Croggon wrote:
> Each poem has its own rules, which may or may not relate to
> generally accepted conventions of what a poem might be.<

This seems to me like saying "Each screwdriver has its own use, which
may or may not relate to generally accepted conventions of what a
screwdriver might be". It is certain that a screwdriver can be used as a
pry, as a weapon, as decoration, as a symbol, and so forth, it is equally
certain that those uses of a screwdriver are secondary and tertiary; that
a screwdriver is made to drive screws, whatever else it does. In the
same way, a piece of art is made to evoke the illusion of experience in
an audience. I hold that what distinguishes a poem from other pieces of
art is that it is metered language. I hold that one may evoke the illusion
of experience in an audience artfully in poetry or prose, on the page or
on the stage, and lots of other ways, that one may be an artist in many
media, but that in order to be a poet, in order to write poems, one must
use metered language to do the job, for the same reason we distinguish
a mason from a carpenter: not to disparage one or the other, but to
distinguish the materials and the tools with which they work. It is a
useful distinction, not a moral one.

Alison Croggon wrote:
> Whether any given
> reader accepts or enjoys those rules is entirely up for grabs.<

I think this is mistaken because it assumes that the artist is clueless
about the audience -- as if the piece of art might have been made to
appeal to an insect or a tree or a candle or a car instead of a human
being, whatever um er ah thing the art might wander aimlessly in front
of, because the artist doesn't know enough about human beings to make
a presentation that appeals to human beings in a way that persuades
those human beings to accept and enjoy the rules by which the art is
made. It is the collaboration between the artist and audience to accept
and enjoy the rules of art, of aestheticization of experience, that creates
the experience of art. Art without audience is blurt.

Alison Croggon wrote:
> ... Courage is after all a large part of writing, of
> making any art.<

There are lots of kinds of courage. It takes a different kind of courage to
be a single mother of two than to be a soldier in a war, and a different
kind of courage to wrestle with the conventions than to deny them. It is
not enough to say that courage is required; of course it's required -- but
what's also required is some acknowledgment that courage comes in
many flavors, so that you don't fall into the Grumman Trap of believing
that there is only one kind of good or valid art, and that's the kind that no
one has ever done before.

Alison Croggon wrote:
> It is not that distinctions and discriminations are not to
> be made; it is that simplistic divisions falsify the whole process of
> writing and reading. I think that's the truth of it: any attempt to make
> rigid distinctions only evades the real question, the real dilemma.

To me it appears that saying such things as "Whether any given reader
accepts or enjoys those rules is entirely up for grabs" is a denial that
there are any distinctions or discriminations to be made. I find it frankly
unbelievable that you can say such a thing and still hold that there are
any distinctions worth making. What distinction would you suggest is
worth making if it is true that "whether any given reader accepts or
enjoys those rules is entirely up for grabs"? That's the necessary
abandonment of the audience to its own devices for the sake of the
solipsism of the blurtist.

> And prose - good prose, at least - depends quite as much on crafting of
> rhythm as any poem.

Rhythm is not meter. I agree that prose has rhythm and good prose has
artfully crafted rhythm. Prose is art. Poetry is art. I am not trying to say
that only this or only that is art. I'm trying to distinguish poetry from
porose as I'd distinguish masonry from carpentry -- not to disparage one
or to elevate the other; not to call one art and the other non-art; but to
point out that they work with some different tools in different materials.
Some of the tools are the same: tape measures and units of measure
and the idea of a building and the notion of craftsmanship and hands
and muscles and brains.

The notion that we must call all masons "carpenters", or that any
carpenter who wanted to be a mason is a mason because she claims to
be a mason is simply ridiculous. Language is a set of tools. Poetry is a
selection from those tools to do one kind of job; prose is a different
selection from those tools to do a different kind of job. The notion that
anyone is anything they claim to be just because they claim to be it is a
denial of art, a denial of aestheicization, a denial of everything it is to be
an accomplished human being of any dimension.

Are you a good man, Allison? Am I a good woman? Would claiming we
were make us one or the other?

Marcus