1. Poetry is a way of remembering things.
2. Poetry is what it always was.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Jon Corelis
> Sent: 25 August 2007 18:11
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Poetry? What's that?
>
> "What is poetry?"
>
> To me, the question is not nearly so interesting as the fact that it's
> asked and that no one's surprised that it's asked.
>
> "What is music?" The question would only occur to a few cloistered
> aestheticians. It would never occur to most people, even most
> musicians and composers, to spend much time worrying about it. And if
> anyone does ask it, it usually doesn't really mean "What is music?"
> -- that is, what is its concrete definition, how does it differ from
> speech or noise -- but is shorthand for more general questions like
> "What does music mean? What is its role in life? What are the
> reasons it affects us?" Whereas the question "What is poetry?" is
> almost always a way of asking for the concrete definition -- "Exactly
> how is poetry different from things that aren't poetry?" "What are the
> criteria by which we call one thing poetry and something else not
> poetry?" -- which must precede those more general questions. In other
> words, "everyone knows" what music is, but nobody knows what poetry
> is.
>
> "What is cinema?" The question is famous, but only among a small
> coterie of theorists. The average movie goer would find it quite
> irrelevant, if not absurd, to try to define what a movie is.
>
> "What is art?" A question made much of in the art world, I suspect
> mostly because public attempts by artists to raise it are an effective
> way of getting media attention.
>
> "What is the significance that the question 'What is poetry?" is so
> often asked and never really answered?"
> --
> ===================================
>
> Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
>
> ===================================
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