> I'm proposing that there is a single criterion for distinguishing poetry
> from prose, as there's a single criterion for distinguishing carpentry from
> masonry
Well, there isn't. Poetry isn't like that. It's a great sprawling
spindly rhizome of related practices; there isn't a single univocal
concept to which all of those practices conform, and trying to impose
one is silly and needlessly reductive. I'm all in favour of reductions
when they clarify, but this one seems to me to be simply obscurantist:
it gets in the way of being able to talk about a whole range of
putative poem-objects (the entirety of "free verse" for starters") in
appropriate terms. If you think that Pound's cantos are in any sense
prose, you have utterly failed to read them, and will continue to fail
to read them for as long as you cling to that misconception.
Sir, I salute your indefatigability, but you're talking ignorant bollocks.
Dominic
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