I think I'll start with an element I call the "repeneme." It is any repeated sound, including the dah DUM dah DUM of a rhythm. All art has repeating elements since all art is, at base, repeitition and variation, and all verbal expression has repenemes--but poetry traditionally has emphasized them significantly more than any other mode of verbal expression has. They would include alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme, parallellism.

A problem immediately arises here: the fact that not all texts that most people consider to be poetry emphasize repenemes. My solution: to back up into a larger generality than repeneme--which I am naming here for the first time: the "poetreme." By this I mean some fully or partially verbal device which has significantly more prominence in poetry than it does in any other mode of verbal expression. So, my over-all statement on the question of why poetry exists is now: "poetry exists because it can, through the use of poetremes, provide certain worthwhile human experiences at a higher level of emotional intensity than anything else can.

That's it for today. I want to take this Very Slowly.

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