I have two new coinages for you today: alert the New York Times!  I guess I owe the pair to the essay by Marjorie Perloff and some of the responses to it in The Boston Review.  They got me thinking about what Perloff calls “conceptual poetry,” but which, in most cases I know of, is—by my definition of poetry, conceptual prose.  So, were they conceptual prose poems, in which case I would call them conceptual evocature, “evocature” being my name for prose whose aims are those of conventional poetry, a focus on images, psychological relationships, scenes (but not stories) or mixtures of two or all of these to evoke deep feelings.

That meant I had to find a name for conventional evocature, the prose poems everyone is familiar with.  At first I tried “intellectual evocature” for conceptual “poems,” “sub-intellectual evocature” for the other kind.  I was completely against the negativity of this, truly believing that neither sort of text was inferior to the other (or to what I considered poetry), but I found it extremely hard to come up with a better term.

My Roget was no help: the only antonym it gave for “intellect” was “insanity.”  Eventually, I settle on “lyrical,” a term I’ve long used for what most people in the field would agree is “lyrical poetry”—poetry whose focus is on images (especially metaphorically-employed), psychological relationships, etc., and no longer, it seems to me, on its melody, however primary that can be in some of our greatest poetry.  Result: a kind of prose concerned with feelings one can ascend to by solving a difficult mathematical problem or seeing suddenly the way two atoms work together chemically or how to win a knight in a game of chess called “intellectual evocature”; and a kind of prose concerned with feelings generated by the daffodils Wordsworth once wrote of or a love gained or lost or a red wheel/ barrow called “lyrical evocature.”

That prose that is both intellectual and lyrical should go without saying.  I believe that any such mixture will almost always be more one than the other, thus adhering to its definition as more lyrical than intellectual if called lyrical, and the reverse if called intellectual.  That none will ever be able to identify some specimens of mixed evocature as one or the other does not invalidate the definition since no definition that does not fail at its borders in some trivial way is possible.

My two terms did not remain permanent, though.  Before I’d used them without thinking when first writing about the two kinds of evocature, I’d already coined “lyricopoetic” and “cognitopoetic.”  Once I realized I’d put them aside, I was upset.  What a shame to have to give up such clever coinages!  Their replacements seemed better, though: unpretentious and fitting.

But I didn’t stick with them.  What changed my mind, besides my parental pride, was first the coldness of “intellectual” compared with “cognitopoetic.”  Not that the latter glowed with warmth, but “poetic” did seem to me significantly to counter the coldness of “cognito.”  I quickly realized, too, that it was a much more specifically appropriate adjective than “intellectual”—because of  that “poetic.”  It was clearly a good thing for a reader to think “poetry” when told of a kind of literary work called “evocature.”  The adjective would work much better, too, when applied to some art other than conceptual prose.  For instance, an asemic “poem” described as “cognitopoetic” should quickly turn an engagent’s thoughts to language (as the work itself, which might contain no words, might not); the same work called “intellectual” would be nowhere near as helpful in that way.  Ergo, I’m going with my coinages.  Not that anyone but I will use either set.

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