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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 fa

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. 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. 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. There's nothing transcendent about good poetry. People are made out of meat, and we communicate by flapping peices of meat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ 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. 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. 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: young girls in blue shorts street corner in summer rain light changes, they run 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." 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. What's to dislike?

walljm 11y ago
like For me, its always been about Rhythm and Contrast, which, if you think about it, is the foundation of all art. Poetry, and prose, in a different way, use rhythm and contrast to draw attention to things, to make words mean more than their surface implies. its an endowment of depth. I love that you pointed out that poetry is the "literature of moments". I never liked really long poems, as the rigid structures often get in the way of the narrative, preferring short verses that capture a moment or feeling.
innguest 11y ago
You're absolutely right. Those are the right reasons to like Poetry. Which is why I tell people that the stuff that the "Poetry Society of America" has been plastering NYC subways with is not poetry (none of them care about any of the beautiful traits of a Poem that you enumerated). (Chase Twichell, Jim Moore, Seamus Heaney, Tracy K. Smith, see them here: http://web.mta.info/mta/aft/poetry/poetry.html http://web.mta.info/mta/aft/poetry/poetry.html)
- matthewowen 11y ago
  Is this a joke? Your position is that Seamus Heaney's work (etc) isn't poetry? And that's because you don't think there's rhythm and melody to what he writes? I find that very disheartening.
atmosx 11y ago
I believe poetry is the highest level of expression, using words. It's the purest and most powerful form of writing. Now talking about poetry and programming (object oriented programming), here's a nice pun: [...] What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. [...]
murbard2 11y ago
Poetry is hugely successful in the modern world, it just happens to be set to music most of the time.
- JadeNB 11y ago
  Do you have any examples of genuine poetry—as opposed simply to lyrics using poetic structures, like rhythm and rhyme—in music? (Or would you take issue with the distinction that I draw, and declare that lyrics with poetic structures are poetry?) The closest that I can think of are Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, but both of them stand out mainly by being much closer to poets than their peers, rather than seeming to me to be authentic poets themselves: trying to read their lyrics without the music usually robs them of their sense of poetry (for me, anyway).
  - existencebox 11y ago
    AesopRock. Some of his more involved songs read as much as poetry as anything I've encountered in the past. (ZZZ top provides a good example and is a personal favorite for me.) But what do you describe as "genuine poetry"? Some sort of meter usage, some form of writing, structure? I think that creates an artificial divide, and prefer instead to just see many forms of storytelling through organized words, a continuum of various implementations of poetry/prose.
    - Nadya 11y ago
      Zero Dark Thirty is a good example of what I would consider poetry by Aesop. http://genius.com/Aesop-rock-zero-dark-thirty-lyrics http://genius.com/Aesop-rock-zero-dark-thirty-lyrics
    - JadeNB 11y ago
      > But what do you describe as "genuine poetry"? Some sort of meter usage, some form of writing, structure? I don't have a good definition, just an "I know it when I see it" sort of thing. > I think that creates an artificial divide, and prefer instead to just see many forms of storytelling through organized words, a continuum of various implementations of poetry/prose. I think that I would agree with the point that I thought tjradcliffe (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9707954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9707954) was making upthread. Informally, a 'genuine' poem to me is a way of communicating a story, an experience, or an emotion in a way that would be less effective if translated into prose. I don't know if this sort of definition by opposition is worthwhile; and, in fact, as I state it this way, I wonder if maybe I am arguing against my original position that not much music is poetry.
igravious 11y ago
> But twaddle it is. That's a bit harsh, don't you think? > 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. In "Ranking Contemporary American Poems"[1] Michael Dalvean uses natural language processing and rudimentary machine learning to prise apart the language poets use. What he finds is that professional poets tend to (among other techniques) use more concrete language than amateur poets. This is because imagery relies on concrete imagery to effectively evoke emotion. And it the emotive force that moves us. So, no, poets (proper ones) haven't, as you say, rejected concrete experience. In fact, it is one of the things that distinguishes them from rank amateurs. Secondly, what has been abandoned is not "the physical rhythmicities of speech" (metric verse?) but rigid form. That is the achievement of contemporary verse -- free-form verse or projective verse[2] or whatever you want to call it. Consider, in the same light, the flight from representation in the visual arts that swung through impressionism and rattled past abstract expressionism. Poetry followed suit, at a slower pace. It is not twaddle, it is experimentation (pardon the clumsy word) with form and it has its own "bitter logic" in its progression as Mr. Lerner explains. Really, where poetry intersects computation is the current frontier -- Lerner does not even allude to this. There you'll find, perhaps, your meat. [1] http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/6 http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/6 [2] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-creeley http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-creeley ("Olson and Creeley together developed the concept of “projective verse,” a kind of poetry that abandoned traditional forms in favor of a freely constructed verse that took shape as the process of composing it was underway.")
- tjradcliffe 11y ago
  I said "Romantic twaddle", not "modernist experimentation". As indicated in what I wrote, I find a number of aspects of modernism interesting and worthwhile, for much the reasons you cite. Also, I wrote about concrete experience and you've replied by talking about concrete language. Weird. Good modern poetry has much to recommend it, but there is also a vast amount of unstructured garbage. Unfortunately anyone who complains about the latter is assumed to hate the former even if he explicilty states--as I did--that there is much value in it. For example, someone chimed in agreeing with me and then dissed Seamus Heaney. Err... But the Romantic theory of poetry is twaddle, and it does represent a detour that has taken almost 200 years to recover from. We're slowly getting there. The relative value of "rigid form" (I'm not sure why "rigid" is required... it certainly isn't a characteristic of any good formal poetry at any time) is something that non-technical people have trouble understanding (you see, I'm doing the same thing you did: assuming I know something about you, and then condescending to explain things to you on the basis of that baseless assumption... irritating, isn't it?) There is a proverb that every engineer knows: "Form is liberating." We've actually got more in common in our views than you're apparently willing to acknowledge, and have instead chosen to project onto me some fairly weird ideas rather than engaging the words I've actually written. "O no! Someone is misunderstanding me on the 'Net!" is about as useful a call to action as "someone is wrong on the 'Net" but you're clearly not an idiot, so I couldn't help but be tempted to put things right. Now all I need to do is figure out how to buy you a virtual beer with bitcoin... this sort of argument is always much better with beer.
ruricolist 11y ago
You aren't by any chance Yvor Winters?
- tjradcliffe 11y ago
  I'm much less dead, and have numerous other important differences, but I can see why you might see similarities.

walljm 11y ago

like For me, its always been about Rhythm and Contrast, which, if you think about it, is the foundation of all art. Poetry, and prose, in a different way, use rhythm and contrast to draw attention to things, to make words mean more than their surface implies. its an endowment of depth. I love that you pointed out that poetry is the "literature of moments". I never liked really long poems, as the rigid structures often get in the way of the narrative, preferring short verses that capture a moment or feeling.

innguest 11y ago

You're absolutely right. Those are the right reasons to like Poetry. Which is why I tell people that the stuff that the "Poetry Society of America" has been plastering NYC subways with is not poetry (none of them care about any of the beautiful traits of a Poem that you enumerated). (Chase Twichell, Jim Moore, Seamus Heaney, Tracy K. Smith, see them here: http://web.mta.info/mta/aft/poetry/poetry.html http://web.mta.info/mta/aft/poetry/poetry.html)

matthewowen 11y ago
Is this a joke? Your position is that Seamus Heaney's work (etc) isn't poetry? And that's because you don't think there's rhythm and melody to what he writes? I find that very disheartening.

atmosx 11y ago

I believe poetry is the highest level of expression, using words. It's the purest and most powerful form of writing. Now talking about poetry and programming (object oriented programming), here's a nice pun: [...] What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. [...]

murbard2 11y ago

Poetry is hugely successful in the modern world, it just happens to be set to music most of the time.

JadeNB 11y ago
Do you have any examples of genuine poetry—as opposed simply to lyrics using poetic structures, like rhythm and rhyme—in music? (Or would you take issue with the distinction that I draw, and declare that lyrics with poetic structures are poetry?) The closest that I can think of are Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, but both of them stand out mainly by being much closer to poets than their peers, rather than seeming to me to be authentic poets themselves: trying to read their lyrics without the music usually robs them of their sense of poetry (for me, anyway).
- existencebox 11y ago
  AesopRock. Some of his more involved songs read as much as poetry as anything I've encountered in the past. (ZZZ top provides a good example and is a personal favorite for me.) But what do you describe as "genuine poetry"? Some sort of meter usage, some form of writing, structure? I think that creates an artificial divide, and prefer instead to just see many forms of storytelling through organized words, a continuum of various implementations of poetry/prose.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    Zero Dark Thirty is a good example of what I would consider poetry by Aesop. http://genius.com/Aesop-rock-zero-dark-thirty-lyrics http://genius.com/Aesop-rock-zero-dark-thirty-lyrics
  - JadeNB 11y ago
    > But what do you describe as "genuine poetry"? Some sort of meter usage, some form of writing, structure? I don't have a good definition, just an "I know it when I see it" sort of thing. > I think that creates an artificial divide, and prefer instead to just see many forms of storytelling through organized words, a continuum of various implementations of poetry/prose. I think that I would agree with the point that I thought tjradcliffe (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9707954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9707954) was making upthread. Informally, a 'genuine' poem to me is a way of communicating a story, an experience, or an emotion in a way that would be less effective if translated into prose. I don't know if this sort of definition by opposition is worthwhile; and, in fact, as I state it this way, I wonder if maybe I am arguing against my original position that not much music is poetry.

igravious 11y ago

> But twaddle it is. That's a bit harsh, don't you think? > 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. In "Ranking Contemporary American Poems"[1] Michael Dalvean uses natural language processing and rudimentary machine learning to prise apart the language poets use. What he finds is that professional poets tend to (among other techniques) use more concrete language than amateur poets. This is because imagery relies on concrete imagery to effectively evoke emotion. And it the emotive force that moves us. So, no, poets (proper ones) haven't, as you say, rejected concrete experience. In fact, it is one of the things that distinguishes them from rank amateurs. Secondly, what has been abandoned is not "the physical rhythmicities of speech" (metric verse?) but rigid form. That is the achievement of contemporary verse -- free-form verse or projective verse[2] or whatever you want to call it. Consider, in the same light, the flight from representation in the visual arts that swung through impressionism and rattled past abstract expressionism. Poetry followed suit, at a slower pace. It is not twaddle, it is experimentation (pardon the clumsy word) with form and it has its own "bitter logic" in its progression as Mr. Lerner explains. Really, where poetry intersects computation is the current frontier -- Lerner does not even allude to this. There you'll find, perhaps, your meat. [1] http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/6 http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/6 [2] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-creeley http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-creeley ("Olson and Creeley together developed the concept of “projective verse,” a kind of poetry that abandoned traditional forms in favor of a freely constructed verse that took shape as the process of composing it was underway.")

tjradcliffe 11y ago
I said "Romantic twaddle", not "modernist experimentation". As indicated in what I wrote, I find a number of aspects of modernism interesting and worthwhile, for much the reasons you cite. Also, I wrote about concrete experience and you've replied by talking about concrete language. Weird. Good modern poetry has much to recommend it, but there is also a vast amount of unstructured garbage. Unfortunately anyone who complains about the latter is assumed to hate the former even if he explicilty states--as I did--that there is much value in it. For example, someone chimed in agreeing with me and then dissed Seamus Heaney. Err... But the Romantic theory of poetry is twaddle, and it does represent a detour that has taken almost 200 years to recover from. We're slowly getting there. The relative value of "rigid form" (I'm not sure why "rigid" is required... it certainly isn't a characteristic of any good formal poetry at any time) is something that non-technical people have trouble understanding (you see, I'm doing the same thing you did: assuming I know something about you, and then condescending to explain things to you on the basis of that baseless assumption... irritating, isn't it?) There is a proverb that every engineer knows: "Form is liberating." We've actually got more in common in our views than you're apparently willing to acknowledge, and have instead chosen to project onto me some fairly weird ideas rather than engaging the words I've actually written. "O no! Someone is misunderstanding me on the 'Net!" is about as useful a call to action as "someone is wrong on the 'Net" but you're clearly not an idiot, so I couldn't help but be tempted to put things right. Now all I need to do is figure out how to buy you a virtual beer with bitcoin... this sort of argument is always much better with beer.

ruricolist 11y ago

You aren't by any chance Yvor Winters?

tjradcliffe 11y ago
I'm much less dead, and have numerous other important differences, but I can see why you might see similarities.