Marcus Bales wrote:
> > Now, it seems to me, what you and others are saying is that in English
> > there either is, or there ought to be, no such distinction between poetry
> > and prose because you hold, if I understand you correctly, that anything
> > is poetry that anyone says is poetry, on the grounds that poetry is an
> > honorific, not a category of writing. Poetry might arise from washing
> > machine instructions or even from a random collection of words.
> > But my position is that poetry is not an honorific; it's not a way to
> > describe that fine excess that shimmers at the top of the best writing of
> > any kind. Poetry is simply metered language, while prose is unmetered
> > language.
Joanna Boulter wrote:
> If I venture the term 'lineation' into the discussion at this point, let it
> not be thought that I espouse the 'poetry is chopped-up prose' -- er, school
> of thought. Yet even if you don't have a metrically-structured line, you can
> still have a structured poem, even with washing machine instructions, if you
> place your line-breaks carefully, so as to throw the important words into
> relief. I tried it once with the gardening column in the paper, and it
> worked a treat -- I have seen metrical stuff that I'd have been less happy
> to call poetry.
But the notion of lineation requires a definition of "line" that can be
applied with few exceptions. How do you distinguish a line of an address
from a line of a poem, for example, or a line of dialog, or a pickup line?
As for more or less happy to call something a poem, well, calling
something a poem or not because you're happy with it or not,
irrespective of whether it has meter or not, or lines or not, or anything
else or not, is merely using the term "poetry" as an honorific, isn't it?
It seems as if nearly everyone who's replied on this list really thinks of
"poetry" as an honorific -- not as a category of writing identifiable by a
set of characteristics that distinguishes it from some other category of
writing, but as "the good stuff". I challenge that notion. I think that
holding poetry to be "the good stuff" is like saying that baseball is only
that game played by the major league teams. No one else really plays
baseball -- they play some game with rules and balls and bases and
bats, and it looks like baseball, but it's not, really, because it's not
MAJOR LEAGUE. What a silly notion that is, eh?
And what a silly notion it is to hold that poetry is "the good stuff".
Marcus
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