I'd simply say here, Marcus, that you are making a distinction, but
it's between 'verse' & 'prose':
On 2-Aug-05, at 10:27 AM, Marcus Bales wrote:
>
> 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
I don't think it's necessarily an honorific, but a way of talking about
a way of using/playing with/ collaborating with language> Here I'm with
Stephen too.
Doug
Douglas Barbour
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I give up these words easily, they are easy
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and sky, say, as perfect a mismatch as any
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