Two points of agreement with Kasey, from his post last night:
-
"[T]he category 'sonnet' designates a nominal kind rather than a natural kind." Otherwise it would still mean a "little song" and, presumably, be written only in Italian.
-
"[M]y definition of poetry includes the stipulation that it is something done chiefly with words, or at least with characters from something that can be used or recognized as a linguistic or quasi-linguistic code." If I were king of the world I'd add that poetry must be written in verse, by which I mean words organized in lines. Since Kasey says "includes," it's likely he also has some further stipulations, and, indeed, he mentions one which I'll discuss downstream. But we're neither one of us king of the world.
My position that the difference between "poem that is a sonnet" and "poem that is not a sonnet" is not like that between "words that are a poem" and "words that are not a poem" is based on evidence that poetry, unlike the sonnet, is a natural kind. Every culture about which we know anything makes a distinction between poetry/song and other kinds of speech. It's not a brightline either/or distinction and there are many ways in which the distinction is marked, but Nahuatl, !Kung, Chinese, English, and Finnish speakers can all recognize each other's poetry as poetry, even when it's post-modern avant garde. Poetry is part of our biological heritage as much as is smiling. Ron Padgett's piece is a poem, whether good or bad, because he meant it to be an expression of an inborn class of behaviors. Note well that I'm not claiming there is "a gene for poetry" anymore than there is a gene for language or for how tall you are. All three are nevertheless profoundly shaped by our genetic heritage in ways that a sonnet clearly isn't.
Kasey's interesting hypothetical of a painting of a poem does not at all affect my claim that poetry is a natural kind (though I could still be wrong). Just as a painting of a person is not the person but a representation of the person, such a painting remains a painting, and the poem which is its subject remains a poem. In his particular example—an image of a page from the 1609 quarto—this is readily apparent. No one would claim that the poem is the painter's poem because of its representation in the painting, or that Shakespeare could take any credit for the painting, or that reading the poem in the painting is seeing the painting as a painting, or that admiring the brushwork is a way of appreciating Shakespeare's wit.
There's a third, lesser point of agreement: Kasey's entirely right to point out that the penumbra of the sonnet is far greater than that of the double dactyl (though I know of a Fool who loves them), so it wasn't fair of me to imply that the situation of a sonnet on a page of double dactyl's was equivalent to that of a short non-sonnet lyric poem on a page of sonnets. And I'm glad that he's specified what he means by a "poetry-literate reader": such a person is "aware on a broad level that there are different kinds of poetic forms that people write in, and able to name some of them, though not necessarily able to give precise details beyond this."
But that person, says Kasey, would know that a sonnet has fourteen lines. Would a person who knows that much not be expected to "know" that a sonnet written in English rhymes? Or that it's written using something more or less mysterious called iambic something-or-other-anyway-it-has-rhythm? The people I know who have Kasey's specified level of knowledge (and no more) do know those things as well, and fairly often don't recognize as poetry unmetered or unrhymed texts. I work with highly educated people, many of them voracious readers who would certainly qualify as poetry-literate by the above standard, and in my experience their only response to poems by Jorie Graham or Ron Silliman or things like Padgett's "Nothing in that Drawer" is "That's supposed to be a poem?"
A little later he adds to his reader-specification: such a reader would know Padgett's piece "would be recognized as [a poem] by anyone who is familiar with the idea that poems are words arranged in such a way that you can see that the author means us to attend not only (or not even) to their 'meaning' in a standard referential context, but to their status as units of sound, image, and/or some logopoetic x factor." As it happens, this is very like part of what I meant when I wrote about markers of an inborn class of verbal behaviors almost universally recognizable as poetry/song. But that class of behaviors is always expressed and experienced by writers, speakers, singers, readers, and listeners with particular personal and cultural histories, and I think damned few of them would buy into that parenthesized "not even" without a little help from literary theory. As I mentioned above, my educated non-literary friends, in many fields, certainly recognize that "Nothing in that Drawer" is supposed to be a poem. They're just not as generous regarding intent as I am.
As Kasey points out, poetry is not science. But, when he suggests that a certain type of reader will see "fourteen" as a sonnet marker to such a degree that it amounts to evidence for the ready permeability of the category sonnet among the selected readers, he's suggesting a scientifically decidable hypothesis. He rightly comments, however, that
[e]ven if the number of people who use this criterion are in the statistical minority, if there are enough of them, and if their point of view is reasonably coherent and influential, they constitute a palpable school of thought that is neither more nor less valid than the dominant school of thought.
Poetry's not a democracy, either. He's right. It is, however, a conversation, and in some ways a marketplace. If the above means that the minority has no vested interest in understanding why its point of view is relegated to minority status, then such an attitude all but guarantees that the influence of that minority will remain confined to its dwindling membership.
6:49:05 PM 
|
|
