Very good, yes, I agree with all that
The last conclusion brought me up with a jolt; but I can't fault it...
I had a peculiar letter shortly before the last general election. It was from a poet and craftsperson - some such descriiption. He did gardens and wrote poetry and god knows what. He was standing for parliament as the - i may have it wrong - english poetry party.
He sent me a three page letter which really did seem to have been hand-written, which argued his case going back to OE for his theory of metrics, which he expounded as he sent various heresies to the stake.
I remember little of it now beyond the sure and certain knowledge of punishment herafter, but wrote to him at some length challenging some of his assertions and conclusions; and received no answer. I never knew why he wrote to me, if he didnt want to answer. I wasnt in a position to vote for him.
I remember some of his argument about the state of things was that The Poetry Society declined or didn't decline to help... Maybe because I had once been on the council I would care... I can't even remember whether their response had been positive or negative
I was interested in him caring so much - panic at the idea that somewhich which wasnt to his ear / eye poetry might be deemed poetry
Thanks for what seems (pending receipt of other responses!) a very clear set of reasoned statements. Mind you, washing machines are now THERE for me, in much the same way that Everest was for mountaineers. I have exhibuted the packing instructions for one as a poem, but that's covered implicitly in yours re the instruction leaflet. I wonder if anyone is familiar with the reading of a drapery advertisement as poetry in Themerson's "Wooff Wooff or Who killed Richard Wagner?".
I once saw a refrigerator with THIS MACHINE CHILLS FOOD STUFFS on it, which seemed the beginning of an artistic appropriation...
L
-----Original Message-----
From: Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, August 03, 2005 4:30 PM
Subject: Re: Cummings
Art forms change over time; poetry has done that too. A work of art is
identifiable as poetry if it follows the same rules as something
already acknowledged to be poetry, but also - and this is one of the
ways in which change happens - if it breaks some of the rules but
maintains a resemblance in other respects to what went before.
Even if things were simple to start out with, and I'm not sure that
they were in the case of poetry, after a long history of that kind of
change what you end up with is a broad family of related things that
can be called poetry. This family will be a rather odd shape - there
will be no simple set of fundamental rules that applies to everything
in it, and yet everything in it will be related in some way to some
other thing in the same family. What's more, the family of forms and
procedures that make up poetry today does not exhaust the total range
of entities that could conceivably be called poetry tomorrow.
But the definition of poetry isn't altogether subjective, or
honorific, or arbitrary. It's still possible to look at a washing
machine manual and say, with a reasonable degree of certainty, "that
isn't poetry" (although the description of the energy-saving features
on page 31 may have some poetic qualities). It's certainly possible to
look at instances of free verse and say "that is poetry", and to trace
the family resemblance back through previous poetries until you arrive
at something that is not free verse, but is also poetry. That makes it
sound a bit like a sort of apostolic succession, which isn't quite
right - the roots branch out into a manifold, rather than tracing back
to a single pure source - but I would say that there is no poetry
without a genealogy of some sort.
Dominic
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