Look, I'd agree that bad verse isn't poetry, whether or not it rhymes (a
bad sonnet, for instance, is still a sonnet, but it aint poetry). The
problem is your criteria. If simple markers like repetitive meter and end
rhyme did the trick much of what most cultures have considered poetry
wouldn't be. How about biblical, or alliterative, or Jubilate Agno, or late
Blake, or Whitman, or the poetry of dozens of cultures living and dead that
don't make a special deal out of rhyme?
Take a look at Nahum Tate's rhymed psalms some day, and tell me which is
poetry, Tate's or the King James (and the unrhymed, unmetered Hebrew
originals as well). Check out also the rhymed prose (traditionally
identified as such) of the Koran.
You could argue, for the sake of the establishment of an objective
taxonomy, that all who came before you were simply mistaken to the extent
that they disagree with you. Or you might wish to find a different set of
criteria. Or you might recognize that the frontier between verse and prose
can be very fuzzy, and that the danger of that uncertainty can be
productive. I don't think that I'm the only poet whose strategy is to
consciously test that frontier.
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>Think the point of a discussion group is to discuss issues that are
>pertinent to the participants. Why discuss anything? Why acknowledge
>differences or indifferences? Why not seek our fortune in silence? Keep to
>ourselves our private thoughts and shine no light?
>
>That prose in our century routinely often passes for poetry does not
>necessarily by itself alarm. However, the failure to identify the end result
>of a creative process which leads to specific properties of a literary form
>may lead to corruption elsewhere.
>
>A sort of misperception takes shape. A lack of alertness. A numbness in the
>pen. What was once poetry gives way to disintegrating forms. Are we to
>quietly assume that prose has suddenly acquired properties which it did not
>possess?
>
>What solution or enlightenment will the outcome of such an argument bear?
>
>Ernest Slyman
>HomePage
>www.geocities.com/soho/7514
>email: [log in to unmask]
>
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