Lawrence Upton wrote:
> Many things, refrigerators, electric / gas cookers for instance, cannot be
> made unless one knows a whole set of things, many or most of which can be
> learned as rules: if you do x then y happens
> poetry isnt like that
> the poetry came first
> and it evolved without there being such rules
> The rules came later based both on observation of what poets did *and on
> assumptions about the relationship of english to latin etc etc

I think this is not merely wrong but flat wrong. The poetry did not come 
first; the language and language rules to make ordinary information 
communication possible came first -- and poetry grew out of use, hard 
use, and misuse of the language and the rules. Poetry is metrical 
language; lacking meter, language cannot be poetry. It may be powerful, 
it may be art, it may be a lot of other things, too, but it cannot be poetry. 
The whole point of poetry is the meter, and without it what you've got is 
prose. 

Lawrence Upton wrote:
> It isnt 100 per cent wrong of course. It's a bit shaky. It's at least as
> shaky as "a pinch of salt" or "cook until brown"
> It requires judgement i.e. something outside of the system
> It is therefore a useful tool at certain times

That judgment is required is certain; but what we judge is whether it's 
good or bad or mediocre -- whether the combination of ordinary 
language and usage rules, combined with how the chosen meter 
interacts with those rules, produces stuff we come back to again and 
again because it is compelling, and significant or important.  What poets 
use to write good poetry is good judgment; what they use to write bad 
poetry is bad judgment.

> A while ago, I walked with a man who eschewed my use of Ordnance Survey map,
> saying that he could see his way quite well and would only refer to a
> compass. I use the map and *carry a compass in case I get confused in a way
> that a compass will help.

This analogy is interesting but, I'd argue, confused.  The interesting 
difference is not between using a map and a compass, or neither, or 
both; the interesting difference is between one kind of walking and 
another. But even within the terms of the analogy you present, it seems 
to me that the compass-user's position is closer to the poet's than the 
map-user's. Isn't the point of poetry to set off in a direction and get lost, 
and then make your way back, so you can compare the known with the 
unknown? Isn't the point of prose to quarter the ground according to the 
map, and compare the map to the terrain?

> For what it's worth, my main tool for writing is my ear - my inner ear if I
> must, but I best like to chant my poem.

Here I agree -- but it seems to me that this is more compass-like than 
map-like.

> The beat counting can be complex because while I start initially on the
> crude assumption of stress / unstress, I modify that as I go along
> It's the difference between looking at a shelf to see if it looks straight
> though one has a spirit level.... It's like looking at the sell by date *and
> sniffing the food itself

Here, again, I agree -- but here, again, this seems more like using the 
compass, the lesser amount of information, rather than the map, the 
greater amount of information.

> What matters most is what is being said. I do NOT mean the abstractable
> prose statement of what the poem "means" which so many crave, but what is
> going on at that point in the poem

Even accepting that you do not mean the prose statement of meaning, I 
think it's wrong that what matters most in poetry is what is being said. 
That's what matters most in prose. In prose one may fumble around for 
quite a while before one gets one's profound insight across, but 
fumbling around in poetry is just what makes poetry bad. 

But the other problem with your take on it is that you seem to be 
asserting that it can't be poetry if the "what's said" isn't important or 
significant -- or something; if it's not a what worth saying, perhaps? At 
any rate, if "what's said" is what makes something poetry, then isn't a lot 
of stuff poetry that we don't ordinarily need poets to write or say? Isn't a 
sincere "I love you" or "I hate you", or a bomb on a plane, actually 
poetry if "what's said" is "what matters most"? Isn't an inarticulate cry of 
fear or love more poetry, in that sense, than anything any poet has ever 
written? By that standard how has any written/constructed thing ever 
been poetry at all? How can we reasonably say anyone who isn't all 
about living in the moment and expressing only in-the-moment feelings 
and thoughts, a poet? There can be no revision, no thought, no art to 
such a poetry -- it must be artless, naïve, purely reactive and purely 
expressive. It cannot be art, because art is necessarily and inescapably 
artificial, a matter of artifice, very much the opposite of the artless, the 
naïve, the purely reactive or expressive.

> to establish rules for what constitutes a good line and a bad line
> mechanically is putting too much faith in the very shaky rule<

Here again I agree -- but I distinguish not between a good line and a 
bad line when I distinguish between poetry and prose, but between a 
line of poetry and a line of prose. Whether it's good or bad has nothing 
to do with whether it is in meter or not. Meter is not dispositive. It makes 
demands on the writer or performer. Meter by itself confers no virtue, 
though of course it may reveal a lot of vice. When you get it right meter 
elevates what is said to significance and importance in context; when 
you get it wrong meter makes what is said seem trivial or stupid. You 
can make profound insights seem trivial and stupid by using meter 
badly; you can make banal commonplaces seem significant and 
important using meter. 

Of course, you can also do the same in prose. Neither prose nor poetry 
is a guarantee that one will achieve, or not achieve, significance or 
importance for what you are trying to say.

In short, the distinction between prose and poetry is not what is said but 
how it is said. 

Marcus