What is a poem?

bogusagain said:

I suspect if poets considered their audience, rather than luxuriating in the warm bath of their shrinking esoteric world, smug in the knowledge that what they write is so much better than what the great unwashed like to read, the best wordsmiths would dominate the sales. 12, your point reminds me of a British poet Don Paterson (I think) who seemed to suggest if your poetry sales hit double figures, you must be selling out to the dumb masses. It is as though if you want to be considered a good poet, no one but the inner sanctum of academia and a few intellectual groupies must want to read you.

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yep, that's me, 'cept I seem to thumbing my nose at both of the ends, and at myself inbetween

God! It took me two hours to read all your opinions. I don’t follow threads very often, but this seems interesting and entertaining. I kind of agree with all of them (even with bogusagain) on various points.
I only give my opinion to Tsotha's original question.
To me poetry is a human effort to make the particular a little more general, and that is always a political act.
All art is political by been indifferent to politics or involved with it, and by whatever social stance the artist adopts towards society.
Witticisms like Oscar Wild's that "All art is quite useless" are just witticisms.

Single example:
Brecht's art is politically positive.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's art is politically negative.
Brecht's art is authentic and original and it teaches society new things.
Webber's art is pathetic, unoriginal and gives nothing new to the society (not even light entertainment).
They both contain clear social messages, progressive in Brecht's case and reactionary in Webber's case.
Webber's art is commercially successful. Brecht's not so anymore.
Times have changed for art. It would seem that the more reactionary you are the more you succeed.

All this may sound as dogma. So it is. Who's is not?

bogusagain said:

A gallery owner I once knew said an artist is only an artist when s/he is prepared to allow the public to piss on his/her work. I'd go along with that. You don't need to sell one work at all to allow the public to piss on it but you do have to have the backbone to allow the public to pass judgement on it.

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My freshman comp professor in college, Dr. Kenny, told us during an exercise in journal keeping that just writing on a regular basis was part of the point of what we were doing. Someone asked if this was how most writers got their start, and he acknowledged that it was common, but not necessarily true, for many. The main thing that gets a person started as a writer is being willing to edit and shape and work on the rough material that you manage to get down and out of your head.

Another person commented that editing was how you turned simple writing into Art. (You could hear the capitalization of the word in their voice.)

Dr. Kenny had smiled and said, "No, Art comes from the interaction of what you write with other people. You could have the most brilliant poem, story, essay, novel...whatever...but if no one besides you ever sees/hears/reads it, it is not Art."

pelegrino said:

God! It took me two hours to read all your opinions. I don’t follow threads very often, but this seems interesting and entertaining. I kind of agree with all of them (even with bogusagain) on various points.
I only give my opinion to Tsotha's original question.
To me poetry is a human effort to make the particular a little more general, and that is always a political act.
All art is political by been indifferent to politics or involved with it, and by whatever social stance the artist adopts towards society.
Witticisms like Oscar Wild's that "All art is quite useless" are just witticisms.

Single example:
Brecht's art is politically positive.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's art is politically negative.
Brecht's art is authentic and original and it teaches society new things.
Webber's art is pathetic, unoriginal and gives nothing new to the society (not even light entertainment).
They both contain clear social messages, progressive in Brecht's case and reactionary in Webber's case.
Webber's art is commercially successful. Brecht's not so anymore.
Times have changed for art. It would seem that the more reactionary you are the more you succeed.

All this may sound as dogma. So it is. Who's is not?

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I've seen a bumper sticker that I rather like, which says: "My karma just ran over your dogma."

I don't know if Victor Hugo had a patron but he wrote the incredible story of redemption through love, Les Miserables. And now between the book, the musical and the movies, millions of lives have been touched with that message. And the book, musicals, movies have made a lot of money, very little of which I'm guessing, is helping the poor in Paris--or anywhere else. So does that mean Victor Hugo was a great artist or not? Who knows? I'd rather just appreciate the art...or try to create some.

Fair enough. If the message of the book is redemption through love, then that is a positive message whether it reached millions of people or not, and I consider Hugo a great artist with a positive social message. Now, having read the book and evaluated it as a work of art, the films and musicals that followed are simple arrangements to me, trying to capitalize on Hugo's original creation, and they leave me unimpressed, all the more so, as the millions they made don’t help poor people anywhere.

Remec said:

My freshman comp professor in college, Dr. Kenny, told us during an exercise in journal keeping that just writing on a regular basis was part of the point of what we were doing. Someone asked if this was how most writers got their start, and he acknowledged that it was common, but not necessarily true, for many. The main thing that gets a person started as a writer is being willing to edit and shape and work on the rough material that you manage to get down and out of your head.

Another person commented that editing was how you turned simple writing into Art. (You could hear the capitalization of the word in their voice.)

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Reminds me of personal experience I had before I ever entertained the idea of writing poetry and lyrics.

Twenty-something years ago, I used to have a dream journal. The problem I grappled with was recalling so many vivid dreams that writing them all down consumed way too much time.

Then one night I dreamt I was watching a wrestling match in which the announcer mentioned the name Jeffrey Bates as the author of a book.

A few days later, I went to the bookstore and discovered there was a Writing With Precision by a Jefferson Bates. It had to be special ordered, not an item that was in stock and thus was not a title and author I would have subcoconsciously absorbed while browsing the bookstore at an earlier date.

It essentially was a guide on how to write anything using less words to convey the same amount of relevant information. Bates even did work for the government in trimming the fat out of documents, saving wasted taxpayer money by decreasing the overall amount of paperwork involved.

The end result was that I began writing down my dreams in such a condensed format that it was complete gibberish to anyone else. A bizarre form of poetry that only made sense to me, a springboard meant to catapult me into a full blown recollections.

When I was struggling with writing long fiction and needed a method of honing my writing skills, poetry and lyrics became the obvious choice. It was merely creating extremely edited versions of some of the stories I already had in my head.

bogusagain said:

he was a 100% insider who understood the fashions and styles of his day.

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just bonein up, I think I'm 900,000 years behind
http://reallifeiselsewhere.blogspot.com/2012/09/sublimate-unconscious-affair-of-fashion.html
poetry? I think I saw eecummings on the blog
other than that thought it may be vaguely interesting