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1 October 2004. Not that it matters, but although I'm writing this after writing my 2 October entry, I am writing it 1 October. My subject is a new word, "poexty," formerly "poextry." "POE ex tee" and "POE ex tree." I came up with the first version a day or two ago as an attempt at a word meaning what airheads mean by poetry--i.e., anything anyone calls "poetry" that they like. This at New Poetry, in a discussion I didn't start but couldn't stay out of on the topic, "What Is Poetry?" The discussion didn't get very far but one person did agree with me that what we needed was a non-evaluative definition of poetry. Most of the others ignored me, continuing to offer worthlessly evalutative definitions of it, usually quoted from famous poets, like Dickinson's effusion about its being something that takes the top of your head off, or the like.
I coined it with serious intent, but immediately realized it sounded silly, so offered it jokingly. Later I thought that maybe if it got into use, its jokiness would wear off. I liked the idea of its being poetry with an x added, and wished "extry" didn't sound so dopey. It thought it vaguely suggested "ecstasy," which I liked. In fact, just now, wanting to make a better citizen of it, I decided to emphasize that facet, at the same time killing "extry."
I plan to use it as often as I can in the standard way Philistines use the word "poetry" in opposition to "verse": "it's poetry, but it isn't poexty." Then there's "pougtry, or "POE ug tree." I'm set against the use of "doggerel" to mean "bad poetry," for I consider it more to mean "unmetrical rhymed poetry."
I know neither of these will catch on, but there is definitely a need for the first of them, or a substitute for it. The word, "poetry," has two definitions, as it is, and that makes its use in serious discussions of the field to which it is central more difficult than they need be, and not rewardingly.
And now my latest exercise at Paint Shop, which I'm trying to get back to visiting regularly. It is based on a simple idea I stole from paloin biloid's use in a pwoermd in Ampersand Squared of an infinity symbol between a "gr" and a "w." I don't much like the result, but consider it a rushed first draft of something I expect to use as a term in a mathemaku, not as a self-contained poem.
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