3.iii.08 A link to further discussion of poetry

I found that my considerations of poetry started to overwhelm this blog, so I created a new blog dedicated to poetry. At the moment, I am mostly considering the basic problem, "What is poetry?" and looking particularly at the relationship between poetry as a whole and the special class of lyrics as poetry.

My reflections on poetry are not entirely systematic, and in part are grounded in some earlier essays on poetic form. One of the basic premises of my non-scholarly writing (say, short stories, novels, and poetry) over the past twenty years or so has been to avoid "technical" or "jargon" language; this is a premise which has proved hard to maintain. Some of the tension of everyday language (in which, for example, "scaffold" or "telephone" might be perfectly acceptable) and the artificially-patrolled language of poetry (aiming to be "more natural than nature" or at any rate "more English than English") is illustrated in the posts on this blog.

So, if you are interested in some of the ways that poetry can come about and are not afraid of sometimes obscure discussion of language, follow this link: http:/words-are-the-matter.blogspot.com.