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I don't agree with either of you here. To my mind anything in a known language can be paraphrased, but how successful such a paraphrase is is something else. A paraphrase is not an equivalence, it's either an attempt at equivalence or a play at equivalence. On 24 Jan 2018, at 12:05, David Lace wrote: > Jamie, can all poetry be paraphrased as you have said? Some would be very hard to paraphrase—all of Language poetry for example. Only mainstream poetry can be paraphrased, I suppose because it has a clear surface meaning. If a poem has no surface meaning (like one that is just made up of a more or less random collection of words that sound interesting—like much of what avantgarde poets do) then it would be impossible to paraphrase it. > > By the way, see this absurd analysis of a Prynne poem by John Kinsella designed to give the poem "depth". I thought it was a parody when I first saw it: > > http://jacketmagazine.com/06/pryn-kins.html > > > > > > ———————original message———————— > > Jamie McKendrick wrote: > > Try as one might there’s no getting away from meaning! Unless perhaps you’re Kurt Schwitters, but then you’ll be channelling cosmic babble from Ursa Major. > Poems generally want to play with meanings. Of course pigments and notes don’t (except perhaps to a synaesthetic) signify anything in themselves, and words do, so that’s also part, if you like, of the palette of language as medium. But then colours, notes, and words when combined in particular ways begin to signify differently, and make meanings as well as patterns. Poetry is often the most pattern-making of the verbal arts. Unlike painting and music, only poetry can be paraphrased (because it operates in the same medium) but the futility of paraphrasing any good poem helps us see it has an oblique or estranging or transforming attitude towards the received meanings and perhaps ideologies embedded in words. Pure or impure that’s one reason why it’s an art. > > (This isn’t an attempt at aesthetic philosophy, just a few notes.) > Jamie