Friday, September 26, 2008

What is poetry?

Ezra Pound said: Literature is language charged to the uttermost with meaning.
If so: Poetry is langauge charged to the uttermost with significance. - Koshy.
Poetry is prayer. - Samuel Beckett.
Phanopoeia
Melopoeia
Logopoeia
That is poetry. Plagiarized from the Grecians via Pound.
Amen.

8 comments:

Roshan said...

poetry is everything you want it to be, or nothing at all.

Marshwiggle23 said...

that is , as usual, true, but too vague, and so of no use ultimately.

Roshan said...

its a little vague...but i think its immensely useful in the sense that poetry isnt something that can be defined concretely...its not like science or baseball...its importance lies in how it is perceived...also poetry is something that people can live without...and then its nothing to them...but if you do give it importance it becomes not only what you gave it importance for but everything else too...much more..in fact it starts becoming everything...

Marshwiggle23 said...

dear roshan, i think it's not so much about definition but definitiveness - picasso said somewhere that if two painters meet they don't speak about how they paint everything , nothing etc., - although what they paint is what's most important for them ultimately they don't discuss that so much but rather they discuss the minutae of their art - things like brushes , paints etc., - in the same way i think poets discuss aliiteration and imagery and onomatopoeia and lots
of other things which ultimately help them create poetry rather than these huge words - specifics and surface are what cocern me at present - i'm thrilled when you use "dried swamps...dark in the day" and "greenliness" and "smoky roads" because they are what i call use of melopoeia, logopoeia and phanopoeia and layer your lines to culminate inot what is poetry as oppoesed to what is not poetry - they lead to what pound would perhaps call phantastikon - and it is not an imaginary thnig but can be spoken of ....

Marshwiggle23 said...

thing, not thnig...

Marshwiggle23 said...

concern, opposed, into etc... damn typos - excuse

Roshan said...

and yet...that is the thing that makes something poetic- the way these minutae are layered...it is absolutely possible to create a string of words and arrange them non-poetically- as we can see around us all the time- the idea or ideas in the mind of the poet however non- articulated they may be to the poet himself/herself leads to the ultimate manifestation of the poetry- not their mastery of the tools...so i would say the reason painters don't discuss the paintings themselves is because they can't discuss it and not because they don't want to...in the same way poets discuss the tools because they can...hence when poetry has to be defined it's most wholesome definition will be something that communicates the idea of that idea which which leads to the poetry...of course then the definition will be vague...

Marshwiggle23 said...

yeah true if we could discuss the poetry itself there would be no need to write it