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Even if we accept your claim that you can't draw hard boundaries (I actually strongly disagree), you can still draw boundaries. Words have meanings even if thos

Even if we accept your claim that you can't draw hard boundaries (I actually strongly disagree), you can still draw boundaries. Words have meanings even if those meanings are a bit fuzzy. I don't care about the names of logical fallacies but your argument is fallacious: we can't draw a hard boundary, therefore anything qualifies. There are lots of things that clearly are not poems. Mona Lisa is not a poem. GCC is not a poem. Wikipedia is not a poem. There are also lots of things that clearly are poems. My claim is not that when you draw a hard boundary these things are technically not poems because they sit just outside the line, but that if you have any sort of boundary at all then they aren't even close. You say quite rightly that there are sets of characteristics that a label may imply. You don't need all of them, or any particular one, but you need something. Nothing about these "poems" is poetic. They have nothing in common with poetry. And no "evokes feeling" is not a characteristic of poetry, it is a characteristic of art generally. They might be art, but many written things exist that are not art, like short stories and novels. If I wrote a 70000 word novel and called it a poem, I would obviously be trolling, but by your logic there is no reason it couldn't be. That's just stupid. >It is a poem because I deign it to be so, Because to you deign it to be what? What do you deign it to be? You can't just say poem, I am asking you what you mean when you say the word poem. Circular answers will not be accepted.

nickelpro 2y ago
I would accept that medium can be well defined. We can say an oil painting is not a macaroni sculpture with a high degree of certainty. Within the medium though, no I don't think you can make such defining lines in genre, in categories of artistic composition. I would say "evokes feeling" is absolutely a characteristic of a poem. Slam poetry is often characterized by the performance, the visceral experience, more than anything about rhythm, rhyming, or meter. Epics [1] are one of the oldest forms of poetry. A 70000 word narrative can not only be a poem, such works are some of the oldest artistic expressions in human history. > Because to you deign it to be what? A poem. And my friends understand what I mean when I say that. That you don't understand is hardly my concern, like I said I find this amusing, convincing you is not a goal of mine. The purpose of such categories, their only value, is to be understood by the communities which use them. Whether David Bowie's 1980 album Scary Monsters is art rock or post-punk has no real bearing on the album itself, no value beyond being understood by those discussing it. We can take this one step further, and say that the community of milesrouts rejects such labels and has a different understanding of these words, a different set of values they choose to express, and this too is a valuable thing to recognize. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_poetry
- milesrout 2y ago
  >A poem. Which is what? You cannot define a poem as "a poem" any more than you can define a dog as "a dog" or any other category just as itself. >And my friends understand what I mean when I say that. That you don't understand is hardly my concern, like I said I find this amusing, convincing you is not a goal of mine. The Emperor's subjects understood what he meant too, when he was talking about his new outfit. >The purpose of such categories, their only value, is to be understood by the communities which use them. And the community as a whole is not serviced by people like you pretending that you have the authority to define every category of things in the English language as meaningless. >Whether David Bowie's 1980 album Scary Monsters is art rock or post-punk has no real bearing on the album itself, no value beyond being understood by those discussing it. Once again you miss the point spectacularly. I specifically said "My claim is not that when you draw a hard boundary these things are technically not poems because they sit just outside the line, but that if you have any sort of boundary at all then they aren't even close." We are not talking about things that are right on the boundary of what constitutes poetry. They are as close to poetry as a cup of tea is to a glass of milk. "What exactly is tea anyway, it is all subjective, everything is in the eye of the beholder, how can you draw genre boundaries in the medium of liquids, what even is tea anyway?" Total rubbish, and just the same argument you are making. Epic poetry has specific aspects that make it poetry. It is not ambiguous or difficult to call it poetry. It is clearly poetry. A breathless and stupid rant about politics is not poetry. The fact you claim that a random HN comment could be a Haiku if the author said it was one, and tried to justify that by the fact that the mora and syllable concepts differ a bit between English and Japanese, shows how completely addled your thinking is. You have followed a stupid ideology so far into the extremes that any sensible person would understand that they have proved their assumptions false by contradiction and gone back to reexamine where they went wrong. You are the sort of person to say "okay, a/b is both in most reduced form and not, at the same time, how wondefully avant garde!"

nickelpro 2y ago

I would accept that medium can be well defined. We can say an oil painting is not a macaroni sculpture with a high degree of certainty. Within the medium though, no I don't think you can make such defining lines in genre, in categories of artistic composition. I would say "evokes feeling" is absolutely a characteristic of a poem. Slam poetry is often characterized by the performance, the visceral experience, more than anything about rhythm, rhyming, or meter. Epics [1] are one of the oldest forms of poetry. A 70000 word narrative can not only be a poem, such works are some of the oldest artistic expressions in human history. > Because to you deign it to be what? A poem. And my friends understand what I mean when I say that. That you don't understand is hardly my concern, like I said I find this amusing, convincing you is not a goal of mine. The purpose of such categories, their only value, is to be understood by the communities which use them. Whether David Bowie's 1980 album Scary Monsters is art rock or post-punk has no real bearing on the album itself, no value beyond being understood by those discussing it. We can take this one step further, and say that the community of milesrouts rejects such labels and has a different understanding of these words, a different set of values they choose to express, and this too is a valuable thing to recognize. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_poetry

milesrout 2y ago
>A poem. Which is what? You cannot define a poem as "a poem" any more than you can define a dog as "a dog" or any other category just as itself. >And my friends understand what I mean when I say that. That you don't understand is hardly my concern, like I said I find this amusing, convincing you is not a goal of mine. The Emperor's subjects understood what he meant too, when he was talking about his new outfit. >The purpose of such categories, their only value, is to be understood by the communities which use them. And the community as a whole is not serviced by people like you pretending that you have the authority to define every category of things in the English language as meaningless. >Whether David Bowie's 1980 album Scary Monsters is art rock or post-punk has no real bearing on the album itself, no value beyond being understood by those discussing it. Once again you miss the point spectacularly. I specifically said "My claim is not that when you draw a hard boundary these things are technically not poems because they sit just outside the line, but that if you have any sort of boundary at all then they aren't even close." We are not talking about things that are right on the boundary of what constitutes poetry. They are as close to poetry as a cup of tea is to a glass of milk. "What exactly is tea anyway, it is all subjective, everything is in the eye of the beholder, how can you draw genre boundaries in the medium of liquids, what even is tea anyway?" Total rubbish, and just the same argument you are making. Epic poetry has specific aspects that make it poetry. It is not ambiguous or difficult to call it poetry. It is clearly poetry. A breathless and stupid rant about politics is not poetry. The fact you claim that a random HN comment could be a Haiku if the author said it was one, and tried to justify that by the fact that the mora and syllable concepts differ a bit between English and Japanese, shows how completely addled your thinking is. You have followed a stupid ideology so far into the extremes that any sensible person would understand that they have proved their assumptions false by contradiction and gone back to reexamine where they went wrong. You are the sort of person to say "okay, a/b is both in most reduced form and not, at the same time, how wondefully avant garde!"