Entry 543 — Another Back&Forth About What Poetry Is
I got embroiled in another discussion of what poetry is at New-Poetry yesterday. It started off being a discussion just about all agree was a silly statement at some website by Gabriel Gudding. He wants to abolish it–for fascism. I finally decided he was merely against the metrical line, which some people, who knows why, consider literature’s only real line. We eventually oozed into the subject of prose poetry. I repeated a lot of my standard unarguable but boring arguments. As usual, someone put in for poetry as undefinable, others for the difference between verse (bad, therefore not poetry) and poetry. My final post to what had become three or more threads (after someone had argued that it was ridiculous to require a poem to consist of lines) was this:
Why? What’s wrong with defining poetry objectively as having lines, prose, including “prose poems,” as not having lines? If a prose poem is a poem, what isn’t?(Actually, my own definition of poetry is slightly more complex than “having lines” because of things in some poems like internal li ne breaks, so I define poetry as language having flow-breaks—as I said many years ago here.)
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