Re: Poetique

On Wednesday, December 31, 2003, at 09:48 PM, Costentin Cornomorus wrote:

> --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
[snip]

>> But before designing a conlang specifically for
>> use in poetry, one
>> surely has to be clear what poetry actually is
>> and is not - and that is not a trivial matter.
>
> Has anyone ever tried such a heraklean labour?
I don't know - tho I suspect some have attempted some
sort of definition.

> And I don't mean something like "Poetry - I knows
> it when I sees it"!
absolutely!

> Just skimming through the examples I snipped
> (Germanic alliterative, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit,
> Arabic) -- I'm sure each culture has numerous
> possible poetic forms, and some more than others.
> Is there anything that unifies them all beyond "a
> means of communication"?
Yes - poesis   :)
===================================================================
On Thursday, January 1, 2004, at 02:12 PM, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
[snip]

> "A means of communication with some rules of form that are different from
> everyday usage of the language (usually stricter, and often - but not
> necessarily always, based on rhythmic features of the language), in order
> to convery meaning (whatever kind of meaning, if only an aesthetical
> meaning) not only through the meaning of the message but through its form"
> .
Yep - that's a handy start to a definition of poesis. I like particularly
the last part..
"not only through the meaning of the message but through the form".

The poet creates her/his art by giving _form_ to the message.  To my mind,
  creating a
conlang specifically for poetry is producing cards whereby people can
paint by numbers.
The _creative art_ is thereby destroyed.

> Basically, while prose is interested only in conveying a message through
> the meaning of the words it uses, poetry also tries to convey something
> through another medium than just what the message means. And of course,
> to achieve that there are plenty of ways to achieve it, which can have to
> do with rhythmic rules, but also other rules of form.
Of course - and true artists will discover all sorts of ways of creating
form.

> And of course, like everything is never all-white or all-black, the
> frontier between prose and poetry is not a strict one :)) .
Indeed - the borderline is fuzzy.  But then, so often are borderlines
between countries.
No one doubts that Paris is French & Berlin is German; but Strasb(o)urg
has changed hands
over the years.  Culturally, it's in that fuzzy borderland, tho
politicians keep redrawing
the lines.

The various computing books on the shelf before me are certainly prose.
Vergil's Aeneid is
certainly poetry.

Ray
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