I am not so sure that one can talk of a poem as a system in more than the
general sense of a system as being:
"anything formed of parts placed together or adjusted into a regular or
connected whole".Larousse Dictionary p.1080.
>From what Christopher wrote in his extension of the discussion, I inferred
that "system" here meant something which had
a machine-like existence --a form of autonomism, and constituted a
reification. Caesuras are brakes? One can with very little energy and time
draw on the field of cybernetics and recalibrate everything in poetry to
accord with it, but this conversion or recalibration results in nothing but
a asymmetrical set of relations, Let us look at the reverse, suppose we
placed nuts and bolts within a packet of potato crisps --how would you
describe this in engineering terms? One could call it asymbiotic --but it is
really nonsense -- besides there are "communication" systems already in
existence, prosody, poetics, rhetoric which do describe in a preciser and
proper manner the relations within poetry. The use of systems from the
sciences only complicates and duplicates what already exists. I think the
attraction of other "systems" is that they seem to offer that tease of
intellectual clarity and truth --and furthermore provide the opportunity to
go off the beaten track into other domains of knowledge.
Yours
Stephen Pain
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