[Terese Coe]

"Maybe the poet intends to create a whole new, unique state of consciousness that never existed before the poem existed."

An example of such a poem would help, Rose. I'm not sure that's possible, but would like to be persuaded.

[winter]

You probably all know this one, but anyway:

A Definition of Poetry

It is a sharply discharged whistle,
It is a cracking of squeezed ice-blocks,
It is night frosting leaves,
It is a duel of two nightingales.

(from Boris Pasternak's Definition of Poetry, 1917, translated by Edwin Morgan).

I find the consciousness idea interesting but needlessly limiting if one were to say of it - "this defines all poetry".

I don't think we need to define poetry. Writing it and reading it is more than enough. But thanks for the attempt Terese. The thread is quite interesting.

[Charles Cameron]

Hi, Terese:

Originally posted by Terese Coe:
What piqued my curiosity most (and I find it odd Cameron does not mention the Geshe's name or book, if there is a book: I'd like to see what else the latter wrote about "poetry") was the concept of poem as transmission of consciousness, and only Alicia commented on that at all.

The geshe was simply a Tibetan scholar with literary interests who happened to give a talk at the Ashland, Oregon, Tobetan Buddhist center one day when I was there, and that statement of his stuck in my mind. This was probably twenty-five years ago, and I wrote the piece about ten years later -- still long before my two years in a think tank -- and no longer remember his name. I'm not even sure how exact the quote was or is.

For what it's worth, I believe the view expressed in that quote is a fair approximation to the basic theory behind Indian poetry (and the arts more generally), and that anyone interested in knowing more about the topic would do well to read Abhinavagupta or someone writing about his poetics.

[Robert J. Clawson]

I like to call it the song of the peculiar.

Ommm.

[Mike Todd]

Terese—

in response to your original post, I'm a little uneasy with the word science. As Joseph noted, art would be more appropriate: poetry is all about synthesis. It speaks in implications, and these spiral outward (and inward) and upward—as they must in order to touch the whole. Science is all to do with analysis: it does its best to avoid implications; it wants things neat and bounded, all in rows in boxes and the boxes labelled.

[R. Nemo Hill]

My turn, Mark.

Even if we measure the footsteps of the goddess, note their frequency and average length, we are still far from the secret of her instantaneous grace.
(Paul Valery)


...a disclosing that lets us see what conceals itself, but lets us see it not by seeking to wrest that which is concealed out of its concealedness, but only by guarding the concealed in self-concealment.
(Martin Heidegger)


We make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.
(W.B. Yeats)


Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself--a voice answering a voice.
(Virginia Woolf)


The essential poem at the center of things,
The arias that spiritual fiddlings make,
Have gorged the cast-iron of our lives with good
And the cast-iron of our works. But it is, dear sirs,
A difficult apperception, this gorging good,
Fetched by such slick-eyed nymphs, this essential gold,
This fortune's finding, disposed and re-disposed
By such such slight genii in such pale air.
(Wallace Stevens)


Contrary to opinions in the Twentieth Century, for him a poem was not a linguistic structure whose meaning originates in, and is inseparable from, the structure, but rather the by-product of a spiritual attainment which must precede a poet's struggle with the insufficiency of language.
(Czeslaw Milosz)


...poetry cannot be defined as being either the subject or the form of the compostion; poetry is a state of mind or soul--un etat d'ame the Symbolists were to call it later--and this state of mind or soul will find its own inevitable expression.
(Enid Starkie)


A poem must be inexhaustible, like a human being or a good proverb.
(Novalis)


Of the nature of poetry itself, Orlando only gathered that it was harder to sell than prose, and though the lines were shorter they took longer to write.
(Virginia Woolf)

Nemo



[This message has been edited by R. Nemo Hill (edited February 05, 2008).]

[Mike Slippkauskas]

Not a definition and there may be troubling elements even here. Pessoa of the manifold heteronyms can never be trusted as giving his own opinion. But I love it anyway.

Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet translated by Richard Zenith:

The downfall of classical ideals made all men potential artists, and therefore bad artists. When art depended on solid construction and the careful observance of rules, few could attempt to be artists, and a fair number of these were quite good. But when art, instead of being understood as creation, became merely an expression of feelings, then anyone could be an artist, because everyone has feelings.

best,
Slipp

[Rick Mullin]

I'm going to spend more time with this, but I must immediately shout that the word "science" in Terese's initially-posted definition is a real clunker. Obviously.

RM

[Terese Coe]

Charles,

Thanks for your post, in particular this:

"This was probably twenty-five years ago, and I wrote the piece about ten years later -- still long before my two years in a think tank -- and no longer remember his name. I'm not even sure how exact the quote was or is."


In any case, here are some 17th Century perceptions of science which still hold true:

"Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another."

Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

"Science [is] knowledge of the truth of propositions, and how things are called."

Human Nature, Thomas Hobbes

[This may be my last post on the subject, as the thread was begun over two years ago...]



[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited February 23, 2008).]

[Charles Cameron]

Terese:

Thank you for your courtesy.

It's interesting to stumble across this thread after more than a decade away. Most if not all of you don't seem to like my poetry or my prose, and I feel particular affection and dismay at seeing them labeled "turgid".

Tastes differ -- as indeed do decades. Kathleen Raine when I was much younger wrote me that my poems were like little pieces by Paul Klee -- later she reconsidered, and said I was no true poet but an amateur who should be encouraged, because ptracticing one of the arts was good for people...

FWIW, it's my observation that American poetry since Pound has leaned towards the Anglo-Saxon part of the English language, while my own preference is towards the Latinate -- less earthy, more metaphysical.

As to the word "science" -- it was the Geshe's word, or maybe his translator's -- and I think he intended it in the earlier sense, pre-Hobbesian, which means something more like philosophy than what we understand by the word today.

I'm a living archaism, I suppose.