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12 August 2005: At New-Poetry a while ago, Mike Snyder posted an answer to the question of why we have poetry that I thought dumb. He repeated it a week or so later, so I have to assume he genuinely considers it a good answer. "Poetry exists," he said, "because we're language-using animals who love story, rhythm, and pattern." My problem with this? It overlooks Manywhere-at-Once, which--in my view--only poetry can take a person to, with maximum pleasure. It also overlooks rhyme and the other forms of melodation which I think can make even metaphorless poetry serve a significant function significantly more effectively than any other form of verbal expression can. As for story, rhythm and pattern, well, prose can certainly take care of story as well as poetry (better, I'd say, myself), and if you want rhythm, how about drums? Pattern is something all the arts provide. In short, we don't need poetry for any of the three things Mike mentions.
After reflecting on Mike's answer, I came up with a preliminary answer of my own, which I more or less mentioned in my recent essay on the classification of mathemaku. It exists, I thought, because it can provide us with fundeceptual pleasure more effectively than any other human composition can. That is, it can provide us with maximally pleasurable sensory and/or visceral and/or kinesthetical imagery. Oddly, I thought at the time that this was a very general concept of poetry I could propose as an ultimate ground statement for dealing with why poetry exists that just about everyone could agree with. Differences of opinion would come at later stages of specifying what poetry exclusively does: specifying exactly which fundaceptual pleasures it is responsible for supplying, mainly.
After more thought, I realized that some poetry is principally concerned with what I call anthroceptual concerns (i.e., people-related concerns), which I don't consider covered in my "ground statement." Just adding this to my statement seemed to me to clog it too much. Also, I remembered that many people consider poetry, and art, not concerned with just pleasure of some sort (as I do) but with any expression of emotion, negative or positive. If I wanted some final generalization about what poetry does for human beings that a great majority of people would accept, I would have to back up. I did: poetry exists because it is more effective at expressing certain things worth expressing than any other form of expression.
Wait. I believe I can do better than that: poetry exists because it can provide certain worthwhile human experiences at a higher level of emotional intensity than anything else can. Right now, that stands as my ground statement as to why poetry exists. I hope to ascend out of it to greater specificity in later entries here. First, however, it undoubtedly needs amplification. I plan to tackle that in tomorrow's entry.
On 15 August, someone wrote me that my statement that "poetry exists because it can provide certain worthwhile human experiences at a higher level of emotional intensity than anything else can," is "true for all the fine arts." I wholly agree. Probably my statement could be improved to "art exists because it can provide certain worthwhile human experiences at a higher level of emotional intensity than anything else can; poetry exists because it is an art." Note: I don't use the term, "fine arts." For me, there is art and "utilitry," which would include such crafts as pottery and cooking.
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