Ah, but jazz musicians aren't craftsmen. They have no skill, no jazz
unions defining their trade </irony>. I think Dominic has spoken
perfect sense in all of this regard, and I like his history of forms.
I often think insecurity drives these conversations, as if being able
to spin the world on it's head wit a neat line wasn't enough. Why am I
different? What makes me speicial? A differentiator for the market as
if the market didn't already atomise us all already.
The current argument advanced by Marcus is so reductive, so binary,
so...male. A blunt razor to cut away all you non-poets out there -
yes, you, you know who you are with your prose poems and free verse,
go away. There are too many of you as it is.
Interestingly, carpenters don't really exist these days outside of
this fictitious construct. Carpenters have been replaced by odd-job
people, who work with plastics, metals, glasses - anything that fixes
a house. In these days of high-tech gubbins, pre-assemblies and
machine-saws, there's little call for hand-hewn timbers about the
house except if one might rise to the giddy heights of
bespoke-furniture.
Ah well. Back to Megatokyo.
Roger
On 8/3/05, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Well, you already have my answer. I think the question as stated is
> silly: you're confusing the absence of a single criterion for
> distinguishing poetry from non-poetry with the absence of any
> meaningful distinction in general. One might as well ask for a single
> criterion for defining jazz. I can describe all sorts of jazz to you,
> and relate them to each other, so the term isn't merely functioning as
> an "honorific"; but neither does it directly correlate to a single
> atomic attribute (swung rhythm, say, or improvisation, or use of
> chromatic chords...). Still, Django and Billie and Miles and Coltrane
> are jazz, and Arvo Part isn't, although Jan Garbarek could probably
> make Arvo Part sound like jazz (or jazz sound like Arvo Part) with a
> little effort.
>
> Dominic
>
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