thanks Biloxi; more to respond to! :)

"Now, this is a sad truth. Most people are artistically illiterate and
don't care to be. Most peoplel fail to recognise good art. They follow
their taste, and their taste is artistically illitearte. You don't
need such people telling you what they think; their advice is bad.
They're the type that buy all those trash popular cultures items.
Poetry is sure to be like any other human interest; lots of uneducated
tastes, lots of craft junkies, and very, very few artists."

as far as I can tell, this is all fallacy. you want to separate taste
& art; that would seem to be fine, since the realm of difficulty is
then only in deciding whether something is good or bad art, not
whether it's art in the first place. but when you assert that most
people are 'artistically illiterate', you're also asserting that
there's such a thing as 'artistic literacy', or a way in which to
discern & appreciate not only what _is_ art, but also what is _good_
art.
but taste (I prefer to call it opinion) is also present in discerning
something as art/good art; a cow sawed in half displayed in a glass
case. is it art? is it clever? is it pretentious? there is no one
answer to these questions. you seem to see art with a capital 'A', as
something immutable & definite; but this, in my view, is a way of
seeing art that puts down its very principles of freedom & challenge.
if art could be defined in a paragraph, there would be no point
whatsoever in producing any more of it. the reason people go on
creating art is that they, to themselves, _can_ describe it 'in a
paragraph'; but the fact that their description differs from the
descriptions of others is the core reason why they keep on
perpetrating it. it's like a beautiful act of defiance, an argument
like refracting light. these are dramatic terms, & even I personally
can't claim to be conscious of them as principles all the time; that's
the very point. to learn the principles, then to never need to recall
them again.

the conception that art can be objectively observed & defined is a
very naïve one, to me; one that doesn't grasp the fact that the
eternity in art & the Art in art comes from the very fact that it
_can't_ be clearly identified. it isn't meant to be! it reminds me
very much of the concept of Tao: if it can be neatly asserted as being
'Like This or That', it isn't art. all we have is our senses & our
capacity for abstract thought; the faculties of each in every human
being are different. this doesn't mean that exhibit A is art & exhibit
B is not.

actually, I wrote an essay on this very subject in my senior year of
high school. I came to the conclusion, as I recall, that art is
defined mostly by purpose: if something is created on purpose to be
art, it can almost certainly be called art. but this is all very dry &
I hate to talk drily; it sounds like so much bullshit at the end of
the day. :p

to wrap up my comment on your paragraph cited above, Biloxi; I
disagree that art is the territory of the mind of the educatee, or
even the mind of the artist. "taide kuuluu kaikille" : art belongs to
everyone. I will admit that I dislike the popularism that expression
can be seen to imply. but it isn't that art cannot be popular, it's
that art cannot be thought of as popular. millions of people have read
& admired & thought about the work of writers such as Proust, Joyce,
Calvino, Faulkner, García-Márquez &c.: that doesn't make them
'Popular', items of popularism.
I know there are people who are not inclined towards enjoying art;
I've met & spoken to many. they may not have the patience, the
motivation, the readiness for it; but they all have the capacity for
it. referring to these people with derogatory terms serves only the
ego of the person who utters them; to place himself higher than them,
more Human than them.

"And we've already established that you could read about the basics of
art in a week or so, but it could take you a lifetime to master if
ever at all. You know what you need, you don't need anyone to tell you
what it is after a little, it just, by its nature, takes a long time
to get there. And that's a long time of practice. And that's mindful,
meditative practice."

this is a princpiple I ascribe to, definitely; with some exceptions.
I don't believe that the 'basics' can be grasped in a week.
art/literary history, - theory, canon are within the reach of study &
memory, but they are not basics, they are trivia. the 'basics', as in
the tools & the contexts through which are created works of 'art',
constantly change as a writer progresses. the reason it takes a long
time to get there is that one _never_ necessarily 'gets there'. one
might be content with what they are doing, & may feel good about the
scope of his tools; I do, & Patrick does. now I don't know about P,
but I expect my tools to multiply & change shapes/sizes/functions, &
my contexts to open more & more contexts. but I don't intend to
meditate on any of this; meditation of that sort is dry & academic,
it's something scholars do to attain definitions. I intend to just do
what I think I do best, & what I want to do best, while gathering
points of view along the way either to put them to use or, after
thought, discard.

here's the part I do ascribe to: after learning _a set_ of basics, or
a number of sets (in other words, after establishing oneself in some
context(s) where one feels comfortable & spacious), the techniques &
the approaches & the tricks become automatic. they switch onto
autopilot. all that happens after that is that the autopilot program
is updated, now & again, with new technology. that's one analogy.
another writer, whose talent & realism I appreciate, put it like this:

"My daughter is about to turn 16 and for the past several months my
wife and I have been teaching her how to drive. At some point, as we
were tooling around the neighborhood, I realized my daughter was
handling the wheel in an odd way when she turned the car. I thought,
"There's something odd about that," but I couldn't sort out what it
was until I got behind the wheel. She was executing the turn well
enough but when she had completed the turn and was straightening the
car out, she was physically turning the wheel back. That might be the
proper procedure for truck driving, but not for a Mazda 626. Properly
aligned wheels want to be pointing straight and will get that way on
their own without the driver's assistance - you just release your grip
on the wheel until the vehicle is pointing straight again then you
re-assume control.

Is it weird that little driving factoid didn't cross my mind when
previously explaining to her how to drive? Not really. I've been
driving for 23 years. I stopped having to think about it long ago. I
just drive.

Writing poetry is the same way. There is a lot to learn, and learn you
must. Why? So you can forget it and write. The more you do it, the
more you learn about it, the longer you work at it, the less you have
to think about it. It becomes instinct."


KS