You saw a movie that was essentially a living wake and thought it fun? Awkward.

Seems to me that until we acknowledge that rock and roll lyrics ARE poetry there's no way we can take ourselves seriously.

Not just rock and roll lyrics, but Broadway, hip hop, teen pop, country-western, parodists and satirists (Tom Lehrer, Weird Al, Mad magazine's Frank Jacobs), children's ballads (Seuss & Co.), jingles (from Burma-Shave to I'd love to be an Oscar Meyer weiner), Hallmark cards . . .

I'm not saying it's all good poetry.

But of course you can hold fast to the distinction between verse and poetry and still take yourself seriously. Very seriously. Very, very seriously.

And you can take yourself very, very seriously and disdain popular versifying and write terrific poetry yourself.

The phrase "poetry's great tragedy" calls to mind the tragic poets -- Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare . . .

Doctor C., it seems to me that until The Rolling Stones turn Pound's Cantos into a rock opera, there's no way the Rolling Stones can take themselves seriously.

OK, here's my Keith Richards story.

I was in London for most of 1975, scrounging at odd under-the-table jobs, playing in a local band. I was 22 yrs old. Actually I had gone over there with my guitar and about $40. in order to apply for Mick Taylor's former job (eventually taken by Ron Wood). Somehow I found got Mick's phone number; he agreed to meet me in a bar; we talked about my prospects (not bloody likely), and he told me where they were rehearsing (Richmond, London suburb on the Thames).

I took the tube out there. I asked a local where the Stones lived. He pointed the way. I walked up there with my guitar. There was a big white spread-out low mansion, surrounded by a stone wall, with a little picket gate entrance with an intercom. I rang the bell. A woman's voice asked, "Who's there?" I said, "Johnny B. Goode." They let me in.

I was ushered into a spacious kitchen/lounge, where a young woman was cooking breakfast, and Carl Perkins was slouched on a couch, waiting to eat, I guess. I said I'd like to talk to Keith, & they said he'd be down in a minute. Carl & I talked mostly about UFOs (his brother had seen one in Arizona).

Then Keith came, down, looking VERY gray in the face, but lively - he kept bouncing on his toes while we talked (exercising?). We talked mostly about religion & poetry, actually. I urged him to read more in the Bible; he countered, I should read more William Blake.

When we finally got to talking about my possible prospects with the band (Carl was also applying for the job), Keith kindly said, in the traditional elliptical English way, "well.... we're going for a picnic shortly...." (in the meantime a big black limo had pulled up in front).

I hung around London for a few more months, & eventually came back to the US. Tried to focus a little less on music and a little more on poetry.

We forget that poetry had its origin in song. The Iliad and The Odyssey were sung (can you imagine memorizing those songs?). The Greek tragedies too were sung. So Rock, etc. (as correctly pointed out above) are much more originary in their poetry. Why should the Stones do Pound's Cantos? The Stones have achieved both popularity and critical acclaim. Pound only achieved the later. And, with the Cantos, only partially.

>I mean, if you want to see Keith Richards sweating, which I realized last night that I do...

I like the Rolling Stones, too, and maybe I'm just weird, but if there were a time-machine that could jump me back to Amherst on a hot summer's day, I'd readily skip the rock n' roll for the chance to espy a sweating Dickinson!

Kent

Doctor,

Okay, poetry has its origin in song. Scrambled eggs have their origin in chickens. So what? Well okay, maybe you're on to something. Yes, I'm beginning to see what you mean now--until we acknowledge that a grilled chicken sandwich is perfectly identical to a dish of scrambled eggs, there's no way we can take ourselves seriously.

I think the important question about Emily Dickinson is, if she played in the Rolling Stones, would she be Jagger, Richards, Wood or Watts?
Daisy

Unless you understand what poetry is, nobody should take you seriously as a poet -- least of all yourself. In the same way that if you can't draw a picture of something someone could clearly and obviously recognize, you're not an artist no matter how much paint you fling around, if you can't write a sonnet or some Sapphic verse, you're not a poet. Artists have to know the history of their art if they're ever going to be worth anything. Ezra Pound understood that. So has any poet that has ever lasted. Walt Whitman didn't write free verse because he couldn't write a sonnet (which seems to be the case with most "poets" these days), but rather he wrote in free verse because, having mastered the forms, he wanted to push poetry into new territory. As an artist, if you don't know where you came from, you are lost. The fact that poetry has its origin in song is vital to understanding poetry at all and thus to making poetry worth reading. In the same way, it's important to understand that your egg came from a chicken if your plan is to make more chickens. But your scrambled egg analogy is apt: it doesn't matter what animal an egg comes from if you're going to mess it up, break it down, and chew it up -- the end result is crap. I prefer chickens.

Troy says "Unless you understand what poetry is, nobody should take you seriously as a poet -- least of all yourself."

Whereas I say: I don't take seriously anyone who claims to understand what poetry is.

Daisy

I imagine that if Emily Dickinson were in the Rolling Stones, she'd have been Ian Stewart.

Don--I hereby challenge you to name one thing you *don't* know about something. I didn't even know there was an Ian Stewart. Ha, I bet you even read Provencal! Daisy

"I don't take seriously anyone who claims to understand what poetry is.

Daisy"

hear hear!

now, what I want to see is Kent Johnson sweat.

So you're on here talking about something that you can't know anything about? Sounds like someone needs to cut back on the postmodernist epistemology. You should at least have read a sufficient amount of what has been identified as poetry -- both past and present -- to have created some sort of concept, even if you can't create a scientifically acceptable definition of poetry (which is what you seem to be thinking is being required -- my epistemology is not so narrow). How else will you be able to tell the difference between poetry and prose? I've read poetic prose and read prose broken up into lines. If you can't sing it or dance to it, it's probably not poetry. A lot of prose has been mistakenly called poetry -- but if we call everything poetry, then poetry indeed has no meaning or definition.

Troy,

Congratulations on your broad epistemology, but may I point out that not understanding what something is, and not knowing anything about it, are not necessarily the same thing? That is to say, I can conceive of a situation where someone may know a lot about something, and still not understand what it is.

I seconded Daisy's quip, but I do take people seriously whether they claim to understand what poetry is or not. But I'll argue -- and I'd be happy to argue with you; your definition is eminently arguable -- when people define social practices in ways that exclude the behavior of lots of people who believe themselves to be engaging with that social practice. And since definitions -- by definition -- exclude, not understanding "what poetry is" seems to me completely reasonable and humane. You say that "A lot of prose has been mistakenly called poetry." Good luck persuading people of that.

My feeling about definitions is: I doubt that anybody can conceive of a definition of poetry that is at once flexible enough to include every example of it, and specific enough to exclude verbal happenings that do not belong under the rubric "poetry," Who is to decide what belongs? I'll leave that up to whoever made the verbal happening happen.

So, whoops, I've stumbled onto a definition. Poetry is a verbal happening that its maker makes with a consciousness that she or he is taking part in the tradition and/or practice of poetry. Wait -- that would exclude lots of what we now consider poetry; traditional Native American song texts, for example.

Poetry is a verbal happening that its maker makes or its auditor hears or reads with a consciousness that the verbal happening is taking part in the tradition and/or practice of poetry.

Not very descriptive. And if Daisy can no longer take me seriously, I'll be OK with that.

Speaking of Emily Dickinson, I've always thought that her definition of poetry was Champion of the World:

"I know Poetry when I feel the top of my head coming off, and the built-up sweat shoots out like spray from a blowhole."

Kent

Kent--
Moby Dickinson?
Daisy

John,

Now we're actually getting somewhere. The issue of definitions goes back to Socrates (and likely before). Remember that Socrates was always asking experts to define the thing they were expert in. Every time he would do so, he would find them giving him examples of, say, justice or piety or love, but they could never define the thing itself, which Plato developed into a theory that such Ideas or Forms were external to the world, which was just a poor set of shadows of the real. Nietzsche observed that we create ideas or concepts by looking at a set of unidentical similar objects and subtracting away the dissimilarities. Wittgenstein observed that this results in objects being able to be conceived and reconceived due to "family resemblances." A shoe is not a hammer, but it can be used as a hammer, so when you reconceive of a shoe as a hammer, you are saying it has a family resemblance to hammers.

All of this is to say that if we are trying to come up with the Platonic Form of poetry, we will never succeed, since such a form does not exist. However, we should be able to look at a sufficient number of poems and be able to work out their family resemblances. Along those lines, your definition is a good start. Can we add to it? Subtract from it? Your use of tradition as a criteria (and I think one should have that as a criteria in the arts) suggests that we should put quite a bit of weight on past "verbal happenings." If we look at poetry around the world, such works have repeated structures (whether rhythm, rhymes, parallelism, etc.) and are broken up into lines that take optimally 3 seconds to speak -- not coincidentally, our short term memory works best in 3 second chunks. These are typical, but are they necessary?

Let's also return to the issue of song and poetry. There is no question that poetry began as song -- but there is equally no question that there was a bifurcation, resulting in the two traveling down somewhat different (though periodically intersecting) paths. Where does one draw the line? Many poems can be sung -- does that make them songs? I have sung my daughter's Dr. Seuss books to her (had to throw some variety in, since I read her the same books every single day), but I don't think Dr. Seuss intended his books to be sung. I suppose we could look at songs as "low art" vs. the "high art" of poetry -- especially modernist and postmodernist poetry, which is read (and sometimes enjoyed) almost exclusively by overeducated people like me -- but I don't like such distinctions, as it creates an unnecessary bifurcation in the art. A great work of art is one where anyone can enjoy it, but the more you know, the more you appreciate the work, one where repeated readings/viewings/listenings result in your coming to understand the work more and more. Perhaps by reconsidering song as poetry and consciously including it in the tradition, we will come to a better understanding of what poetry is, and become better poets ourselves.

>"Moby Dickinson"?

OK, Daisy, like it or not, you are now in my Select Company of ideal readers.

Kent

Troy,

Are you not concerned that by appending "Ph.D" to your name, you ensure that no one will every take you seriously about anything & that everyone recognizes immediately that you know nothing? Have you any idea how many people with doctorates frequent this & similar websites? Have you ever known anyone else so pretentious, so self-important, so completely dazzled by his own imagined intellectual sheen -- so sadly & transparently insecure about his own intellectual gifts, in short -- that he felt it necessary to advertise his education in a manner usually reserved for authors of self-help manuals & diet regimens?

mr

I will not be ashamed of my accomplishments. Nor will I apologize for them. All you have done here is expose your own feelings of self-worth, when the only thing that should be at issue here is the discussion of the topic at hand. A brilliant idea by someone still in high school is still a brilliant idea, and an idiotic idea by a Ph.D. is still an idiotic idea. What should be judged are the comments made. People only make these kinds of personal attacks when they have nothing of real value to contribute.

Michael,

Just a couple questions regarding your comments to Troy Camplin...

Have you ever noticed how common it is for poets, be they mainstream or avant, to prominently announce their Institutional affiliations? In their bios?

Such and such is a Ph.D. candidate at such and such? Or He received his MFA from such and such? Or She is Assistant Professor of English at this or that?

If it is so terrible for Troy Camplin (whose ideas on the nature of poetry are unattractive to me, but so what) to put "Ph.D." after his name, why is it so natural (I assume you think it is, judging from your bio there at Google for La Petite Zinne?) for poets to publicize their academic cojones in Author bios?

Just thinking out loud here, trapped in the filaments of ideology no less than thou,

Kent

Hi Kent,

It's true that my author bios always say that I'm a PhD candidate at the U. of Chicago. I'm writing an omnibus review for Poetry right now (it will be finished soon, Don), & I assume I'll put it in my bio there too. Partly that's because I have to put something there, & I hate the default solipsism of the faux-witticisms that so many opt for. But also because that's a space specifically dedicated to capsule biography. It's a biographical note on contributors, so as a contributor I tend to provide a biographical note. Now, that doesn't mean I have to mention my institutional affiliation, but it is at least quite common for poets to list their academic credentials there. The practice of appending the degree after one's name, on the other hand, is conventionally viewed as pretentious & eschewed as such by doctors of philosophy. Convention in these instances seems to me founded on good sense & tact. Seriously: how many people who hold Ph.D's do you know who sign their names with those initials -- in blog comment streams no less!! Is it higher than zero? I know dozens of people who have doctorates, & each one of them would find the practice laughable. Which it is. I don't mean to be a bully, though. Let whoever sign their name however they want to. But "criteria" is plural, no matter how many degrees you have.

Best,
mr

My questions at this point are:
Are comments sections as much fun as rock and roll?
Are there such things as lead and backup singers in blog comments sections?
Nominations for the Mick Jagger of the Harriet comments?
And has anyone written a poem called "Comments" based on the language, mores and manners of said section?
Alternatively, shouldn't there be a bar band called "The Comments Section"? Which could be known, for short, as The C Section.
Daisy

Dude, as long as I can be Ronnie Wood . . .

Best band names of May 2008:

The Comments Section
The Velveeta Underground
Hippos With Rabies

Both Robert Bridges and W.H. Auden talked about poetry by saying "let's talk about verse rather than poetry." And thereby showed their circumspect wisdom.

And the good doctor needs to read the Ion and the Meno more carefully, or at least read some Seth Benardete.

One of the best band names of late was my son's "Oedipus and the Motherfuckers."

They are now called RSTLNE.

Zappaesque... Attracting some buzz right now on the underground Chicago scene. Here's their website (the bad grammar is on purpose, I assure you):

http://www.rstlne.net/

Kent

I'd like to start a band called Railroadhead. Or Motörhand.

Harriet & the Comments Stream?

Looks to me like Michael Robbins (future Ph.D.) has done what he really set out to do: derail any and all discussion of poetry. It's a pernicious form of censorship that allows you to avoid being accused of such. Just distract people with irrelevancies, and you don't have to defend your positions or make any sort of real argument. Too bad. I find such discussions to be fruitful.

I do find it funny that he has quite conservatively defended convention, as though that were an argument for anything. The argument-from-tradition fallacy rears its head yet again. If others want to be ashamed of their achievements, let them. Such false modesty isn't for me. I love being a Ph.D. Convention can rot.

Finally someone gets it! My goal is always & everywhere to derail any & all discussions of poetry! Down with discussions of poetry!!

On a lighter note, I am proud at last to have imposed a pernicious form of censorship. I am finally the commisar I have always dreamed of being. Next stop the Secret Police! Wherever discussions of poetry take place, I will be there, suggesting silly band names, then censoring everybody.

Kent and Daisy,

Moby Dickinson!!?? Isn't her description more like standing in a mosh pit?

Emily

P.S. Michael R. asked me to delete his last comment so I did. A rare request--so please no one make a habit of it or we'll never sleep.