But Is It Poetry?

Mike Snider has returned to his occasional argument against "art for art's sake" poetry. He quotes Samuel Johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." To which I responded:

What's the average amount you get paid per sonnet, Mike? Let's do a cost analysis per poem: there's the labor of writing & revising, which we might calculate at minimum wage (just as a starting point). Then there's the cost of envelopes & postage. And this is a cost spread out over the accepted and rejected poems. Not to mention the poems written & never submitted (for whatever reason).

Can you claim to break even in that analysis?

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I think there needs to be a corollary to that Johnson quote, that addresses the enjoyment factor.

As I understand his answer, Mike concedes the point that he wouldn't bother writing poetry if he didn't enjoy it. His point is that poetry might be more successful economically if poets made more of an effort to communicate with the "common man." That phrase "common man" may seem to put words in Mike's mouth, but he speaks of the need to make poems for cooks and engineers and housekeepers and carpenters, and so on.

For me, this once again raises the question of how one recognizes a poem. In other words, is a group of words a poem simply because I say so? Is there, as it were, an objective yard stick one may use in this discussion?

One measure might be sustainability over time. Shakespeare is literature, and poetry, because we still read his works. This will apply primarily to the plays and a handful of sonnets, of course.

The drawback to this method is that it gives us little help with modern writers.

So, another yardstick might be economic in the sense that someone was willing to pay for the poem. This is a measure, inferred, at least, from Mike's use of the Johnson quote. If a magazine is willing to pay for the material, it must be a poem.

The problem is, this would force us to accept as poetry work that we would otherwise reject as bunk. Ron Silliman is a writer Mike and I both like to use as an example of the worst of “Langpo,” yet he is a published poet, and has been paid for his work. One assumes that people have paid for his books.

I'm not sure that Mike would say that rhyme and/or meter are required for a work to be considered a poem. I don't know — maybe if he were king of the world, he would institute that restriction.

Personally, you want to call rearranged words from cooking directions poetry, that's your thing. I wouldn't like it, I wouldn't buy it. But no skin off my nose if you want to call a random collection of words poetry.

What about my writing in this space? How do I judge its success? Well, since comments are far and few between, I judge my success on number of visits and number of return visits. My regular visitors could probably be counted on two hands — according to Site Meter, I have 20 visitors per day, on average. In reviewing the stats from Site Meter, I perceive that many come from the same server (coxnet, frontiernet, etc). This doesn't mean it's the same person each time, but odds are reasonable.

So, that repeat business suggests to me that I am successfully communicating with that group of people. Perhaps not statistically meaningful, but good enough for me.