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4 July 2005: As those who know me are aware, every few years I change at least one term in my taxonomy of poetry. Last night, I changed a handful, hoping to make my taxonomy a shade more accessible. In the process, I changed part of the taxonomy itself--because of the change in terms. A taxonomy to fit its terms rather than the reverse! Actually, that's not unusual for me: sometimes the terms take the lead, sometimes the categories.
My initial change came about because of my long-lasting attempt to find a pair of related terms to represent conventional poetry and what I'd been calling "burstnorm poetry." My still-tentative solution: "Vernacular Poetry" and "Meta-Vernacular Poetry." Yes, the use of "vernacular" to describe something as different from normal speech as formal poetry, is straining it, but formal poetry is certainly "vernacular" compared to, say, visual poetry.
This caused athe change in my taxonomy: whereas what I'd been calling "idiological poetry" burst the norms of (a) narrative logic (jump-cut poetry) or (b) descriptive logic (surrealistic poetry), it was not "beyond the vernacular." So I now categorize it as vernacular poetry--with "formal poetry" and "freeverse poetry." Much as it disturbs me, I have accepted the standard terms for these last two categories. I had been calling them "songmode poetry" and "plaintext poetry," respectively. (No, changing these two terms doesn't really disturb me. Hard as it may be for some to believe, I have always preferred conventional terms to new ones, so long as they make some sense.
I've anglo-saxonized my name for "idiological poetry" to "burstlogic poetry." (I gotta keep "burst" somewhere in my taxonomy!) It can be composed either in meter, with or without rhyme, or ametrically, which is why I made it a separate category. I consider its jumps in narrative or bizarre linkages more prominently to represent what it is than whether it is formal verse or not.
I've also accepted "language poetry" as the name for the kind of meta-vernacular poetry" I called "Xenolinguistic Poetry" for a long time--but I think I've been doing that for a while, now. Anyway, language poetry and pluraesthetic poetry are now the only major subcategories of meta-vernacular poetry in my taxonomy.
I hope "vernacular poetry" and "meta-vernacular poetry" will seem neutral terms to most people. There will undoubtedly be people offended by them, though--and, of course, the majority of academics will ignore them because of their bias toward and/or ignorance of meta-vernacular poetry. If they mention it at all, it will be to descry making equal in importance to vernacular poetry. But I've no more done that than someone dividing the U.S. population into law-abiding citizens and criminals is making them equal in importance. I've divided where it seems reasonable to. Not that I don't consider meta-vernacular poetry as important as vernacular poetry. . . . Or soon to be so.
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