[Paul Lake]

Here's the link to my new essay (originally a talk at West Chester) called "Poetry in the Mother Tongue." It should be of particular interest to women poets--and formal women poets, at that, since I show an interesting link between women and meter.

http://www.cprw.com/Lake/tongue.htm

[Richard Wakefield]

Paul:
A rather simple-minded, reductive Aristotelian division of form and content seems to me to lie at the heart of much of post-modernism, and if my one reading of your essay is correct, we agree about that. So I was glad that you demonstrated how inextricable they are in a fine poem. Someone said once that the true artist is person who is condemned to be unable to distinguish form from content. I suspect that all of us, back in those primordial conditions so beloved of theorists are so condemned, even to the point of a kind of underlying synesthesia that melds our senses -- no, that rejects the artificial parsing of them.
Well, as you can see, your essay has inspired me well beyond my powers of expression.
Richard

[Paul Lake]

Thanks, Richard, for the perspicacious reply. I never did buy the form vs. content analysis of poetry.

[Janet Kenny]

Richard you wrote:
Someone said once that the true artist is person who is condemned to be unable to distinguish form from content.
Thank heavens somebody else said this. It's all that matters to me in any art "form". Form and content are indivisible.
Janet

PS
That doesn't exclude what we llike to call formal poetry. It is, for me, as normal to write or read metrically as it is to use grammar. That doesn't mean that I don't also appreciate or explore what we call free verse. Form and content adapt to circumstance.


LOOK AT THE NUMBER OF MY POSTS! WHO SAYS REGULARITY IS ARTIFICIAL?


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited February 06, 2004).]