In my hurry to get ready to perform at the the Lucipo Hootenanny last Saturday, I carelessly overlooked a careless bait-and-switch from Kasey Mohhammad. I'd argued (here, last paragraph before the note) that one would unlikely to be reminded of a sonnet by Ron Padgett's "Nothing in that Drawer" or Kasey's "Fourteen" without the influence of post-modern literary theory, and Kasey replied that one didn't need post-modern literary theory to be "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" — to which, with some reservations, I agreed. I still do, but it doesn't reply to my claim, and it muddies the division between us: he says "it is next to impossible for any poetry-literate reader to see a fourteen-line poem and not think 'sonnet,'" and I say the population for which that may be true is vanishingly small, especially using his own definition of a "poetry-literate reader" (here, paragraph 8).
Now I need to go check out the new blogs Kasey mentions today.
6:55:33 PM
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