On Friday, May 28, 2021 at 5:48:31 PM UTC-4, Terry Stomp wrote:
On Friday, May 21, 2021 at 1:52:33 PM UTC-3, George J. Dance wrote:
I was adding a new poem onto PPB just now ("Nocturnal Reveries" by Anne Finch), so I went to the policy page on adding poems to secure the template. In the process, I discovered this poem I wrote just to use as an example.
But now I'm thinking that I might put it into my next print book, and I'm interested in feedback on it.
A Poem
This is a poem.
It is not a great poem
Or even a good poem.
All that it is
Is just a poem.
- George J. Dance, 2012
good and funny G.D.
Thanks. That's the main intent.
There's a serious undertone, though. There's been an ongoing debate on Usenet over the definition of a poem. One place area of disagreement is between those who advocate a purely descriptive definition- a poem something written in a certain form - and
those who want a somewhat normative definition: a poem has to do something, and it has to be good enough to do that, or it isn't a poem at all.
I do agree that a poem should do something, and it should be good enough, but that's not a matter of definition. On that, I'm all for the descriptive definition. There are good poems, and bad poems; they're all poems, and the people writing them are all
to that degree poets.
I could have written that all as a prose manifesto; some would have read it, and of them, those who already agreed would have agreed, and those who didn't wouldn't. I don't often get my mind changed from prose manifestos. So I wrote it as a poem, the way
I think that a poem would work: rather than tell the reader any of that, I wanted to communicate the epiphany; give him the situation, and let him think those thoughts for himself.
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