Friday, January 07, 2011

It's like pornography ...

... we can't define it, but we know it when we see it: Spaar on Poetry: The Hide-and-Seek Muse. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

2 comments:

  1. With no offense intended towards anyone, it's hard not to view this attitude as a cop-out, ESPECIALLY when coming from a teacher of English. LOL I've got a whole shelf of books in my library dedicated to nothing but this.

    There are plenty of useful definitions of poetry, whole books of them in fact. The best to teach poetry that I've run into is to give a few various kinds of examples, then set up a writing session with a few guidelines.

    Maybe it's hard to define poetry like on can define an engineering diagram or a mathematical lemma—but that's sort of the point. Poetry isn't engineering, OR prose for that matter.

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  2. I think we're on the same page, Art. Maybe poetry can't be "defined," but it can sure be demonstrated pretty easily, as you indicate. I don't think it needs to be defined, anymore than "God" does. Both are best experienced.

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