This analysis of poetry is like declaring that the purpose of physics is to build perpetual motion machines and then saying we all dislike physics because it fails in this transcendent purpose.<p>The author trots out uncritically the entire corpus of Romantic twaddle, swathed in sufficient technical language that most poeple will feel too intimidated to challenge it. But twaddle it is.<p>The failure of poetry in the modern world is a result of the rejection of concrete experience as the foundational matter of poems. This has been accompanied by the abandonment of the physical rhythmicities of speech (including rhyme) as the basis of poetic structure.<p>There's nothing transcendent about good poetry. People are made out of meat, and we communicate by flapping peices of meat: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ</a><p>Poetry reflects our meat-based lives, the physicality of our meat. When we abandon that, when we abandon concrete, sensual experience for floating abstraction, as the Romantics did, or for purely internal emotional states as modern confessional free verse does, we abandon the very thing that makes poetry possible and necessary: meat.<p>Poetry is speech, specifically speech where the rhythmical structure dominates the gramatical structure. The rhythmical structure can be strong and overt (rap, Kipling, etc) or subtle (even the best confessional free verse manages this at times, or the L A N G U A G E poets at their most surreal, although I don't have any use for their political programme.) The rhythmical structure of speech comes from the way we form sounds with meat, and nothing else.<p>Nor does poetry have to be about anything out of the ordinary, although it certainly can be. Poetry is, amongst other things, the literature of moments. It's a way to capture and communicate a fleeting experience. Consider:<p><pre><code> young girls in blue shorts
street corner in summer rain
light changes, they run
</code></pre>
Way more memorable and evocative than "I saw some girls wearing blue shorts on the corner waiting for the light to change and they ran when it did 'cause there was a hard summer rain falling."<p>Poetry makes the mind work in useful ways, focusing on structure and meaning and meat. We are physical beings capable of abstract appreciation of the world. Poetry exists at the intersection, grounded in one, guided by the other.<p>What's to dislike?
I'm seeing some parallels to writing software here:<p>"you’re moved to write a poem because of some transcendent impulse... but as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. So the poem is always a record of failure. There’s an ‘undecidable conflict’ between the poet’s desire to make an alternative world and, as Grossman puts it, ‘resistance to alternative making inherent in the materials of which any world must be composed’"<p>Or, for that matter, the desire to transcend/reshape a current market we sometimes name as the entrepreneurial impulse. Though I think poetry is a much purer form.
I think a poet is like a sculptor that is always forced to sculpt using Lego.<p>Words are a coarse medium for expressing art as their look, sound and interaction with surrounding words defines their meaning. Stray too far outside of convention and people reading your poem won't understand it. I can understand this being frustrating.
Never have I read more love between the lines of such an intelligent, thorough, and obtuse criticism. Nowhere will you find more humanity than the impossibility of perfection, and what is poetry but the shared search for that humanity? Imperfect as it must be.
The worst aspect of most arts are critics. Programming included. All these pseudo-intellectual categories, analysis of sizes (forms) and styles, anthologies stuff like that.<p>BTW, for those who can read Russian, Nabokov's the Gift (Dar) is the best reading about poetry - how it is not a a mere classification of rhythms (I imagine hipster idiots, advocating well-typed pairs of words and type-checkers for poets) but an inner sudden insight from a pre-linguistic, non-verbal mind (which people call "heart") verbalized on the spot.<p>This is what programming is also (read On Lisp) - one express his own sudden insights by giving it a structure in terms of a programming language (and trying it till it is hot), which means it should be restricted as less as possible (this is fucking why Lisps or Smalltalk or Erlang feels so special).<p>Poetry is not the a mere form with some vague meaning, it is these sudden insights and some structure a poet gives to it. That is why we could enjoy Rumi without being able to read Persian.<p>We are excited when we found an unexpected, rare gem, a verbalization (an expression!) of what we felt ourselves, but still been unable to express (same experience with reading source code of the best (Norvig, rtm+PG, Sysoev, etc.)) The rate of gems to stuff is 20/80, so do not expect to much. Read arc.arc to understand what I mean.<p>Like it is with everything (at least with literature, music and programming), 95% of poetry is narcissistic or graphomanic crap, like blogs. That's why, perhaps, most of people are convinced that poetry is something which has a rithm in it.<p>Read Nabokov or Pamuk.