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11 July 2005: The other day at New-Poetry, David Baker wrote: "Certainly poems don't exist by themselves, but rather within the complex matrices of culture, and readerly attention, and social pressure, and yes, politics. But poems do exist as poems and not as advertisements, or sermons, or planks in a candidate's platform." I agree, but quote it not because I agree but because it drew a fresh attack on me from Marcus Bales that I thought particularly funny.
Here's what Marcus said: "But he's wrong. Poems have been reinterpreted by people like Grumman precisely to be advertisements or sermons or planks in their platforms. That's part of why Grumman's work is merely prose, as is so
much of what is claimed to be poetry today. Why prose writers want to
be known as poets is a matter of advertising, of PR, or product
placement: poetry even today has a cachet prose doesn't have, since in
daily life we all, with M Jourdain, speak in prose."
I just love the idea of my mathemaku as prose. No one else has ever accused it of being that before! A lesser amusement is the way his idea that my poems refute David Baker because they are advertisements conflicts with his immediate assertion that my poems are not poems because they are advertisements.
What I find most interesting about Marcus's opinion of me, though, is his refusal to grant me a sincere desire for intelligent nomenclature. He can't allow me to be intellectually at fault only; I must be morally at fault, too. I call my works poems not because it makes sense to me to call them poems rather than prose or some third thing that is neither poetry nor prose, but for the "cachet" calling it poetry will give me. (Which is the only reason Marcus can come up with for someone's wanting to call non-metrical texts poetry.) I can't follow the rest of what he says above, for I'm not sure just how I could be making poems to advertise my kind of poetry; sure, my interpretation of my poems and similar poems by others, could be taken as advertisements for my kind of poetry. In part are, although I claim they are disinterested at the core. A basic flaw in his attack, assuming he wants to make an intelligible case against me, is his not presenting examples of my poems-as-advertisements, with an explanation of their workings.
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