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25 January 2005: A school system in an adjoining county is taking up brainwashing its elementary school pupils not to call each other names. It never occurs to these kinds of people that what is really needed is training in the ability to ignore name-calling. It is natural and healthy to give negative names to that which you don't like. I'm bringing this up now because I just got through another ridiculous bout with Marcus Bales at New-Poetry. He's the one who, among other things, defines "poetry" as "texts which are metrical." He believes there's nothing uncivil about his insulting my thinking and art so long as he does not call me a derogatory name. Cowards tend to prefer concealed insults to forthright ones. I'm the opposite. Hence, I've been applying the name, "verosopath" to him for some time. To describe him accurately much more than to insult him, although I do like the fact that he has been annoyed by my characterization of him. So much so, that he neglects no opportunity to assail me for calling people offensive names. According to him, that is my sole tactic as a disputant.
A "verosopath," by the way, is a truth-hater whose only aim in a discussion is to derail it--and trip up his opponent--as opposed to clarifying terms and getting as close to the truth as possible. Marcus did that in the recent exchange, in my view, by challenging me, in an argument about whether there can be progress in poetry, to demonstrate it by listing what makes my poetry better than Milton's.
Why is this verosopathic? Well, to begin with, he is clearly trying to put me on the spot rather than advance the discussion. He knows I'll look arrogant if I try to compare my poetry in any way with the great Milton's. He won't allow me simply to say what I and other burstnorm poets are doing that advances the art.
Let me quote just one part of our echange. I said, "The standard I use in rating my mathemaku, in brief and off the top of my head, if you'll allow that, is how intensely, unifiedly, fully and freshly it expresses some archetypal human emotional truth in the least number of words or the equivalent of words to form a work of beauty."
His response: "But how do you place that endeavor in relation to, say, Milton? You cannot claim that it is 'good' if you refuse to compare it to other
things that the culture agrees is 'good'. You cannot start de novo,
Bob, or you must start really de novo and invent your own language,
forswearing English altogether. Why are you speaking English, Bob?
Why are you using English words at all? Why are you using scientific
notation, Bob? Why not invent your own notation? You're not doing
anything new at all -- you're simply using the least effective and
affective notation to try to manipulate words as if they were numbers
-- and numbers are less effective and affective than words. You've
taken the worst from two systems and jammed them together and
produced something that impoverishes both."
Note the way he uses the verosopth's main tactic, which is to complicate the issue with a multitude of side-arguments (not to mention his attacks on me as thinker and poet, which he does not consider to be personal attacks). Of course, bringing Milton into it hugely complicates the issue by itself since I would have to reread him, then figure out how to compare his apples not to my pears but to my . . . sailboats. To try for a neutral comparison.
My simple response would be that, if successful, my lyrical poems are superior to Milton's because they do all the things his do plus a few mathematical and visual things that his do not do. In other words, they would do more than his do. That would be because of the progress the art of poetry has made since his time, not because I was a better poet than he. To put it as unarrogantly as I can, I would say that if Milton were alive today, the poems he composed would be better than the one's the previous Milton composed--assuming he were not a Marcus Bales unable to work in as many ways as I.
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