At 02:56 PM 22/03/02 -0500, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>In my opinion, Mr. Lake has provided some of the most acute analysis on the
>degeneracy of contemporary poetry and its causes.

Elegantly written but... it seems profoundly misguided to make
arguments along the lines that one artistic form is absolutely or
even generally superior to another.  If it moves it moves you,
if it doesn't it doesn't; the argument from form may be helpful
in understanding the why of it, but telling people what *should*
move them just feels pretentious and high-handed.  I am reminded
of my parents, back in the 60s, telling me that popular music
was all trash because eminent musicologists said so.  I shut
up but thought of Galileo's muttered "and still they move".

Not to mention that, as with many attempts to find parallels
between art and science, the arguments from science are
technically illiterate (yes, apparently you can drop the names
of Fibonacci and Mandelbrot and still not understand what
"linear" really means).  Yes, the study of emergent phenomena
is interesting, and human intelligence is one of the most striking
examples, but human intelligence occasionally emits free verse, and
free verse occasionally moves me.  On this basis I should
apologize for my degeneracy?  If I like sonnets too does that
grant absolution?  Could I be given a dispensation to like
free verse (and Ornette Coleman and James Joyce) on alternate
Wednesdays? -Tim