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user-inactivated  ·  3571 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 2nd Bi-Weekly Give Me a Quote from Something You've Been Reading Lately

This is very interesting. lil are you following this thread?

    Because language poetry is often non-compositional, like jumbled up newspaper articles or phrases thrown together by rolling a die, many academics and poets regard it with disdain. They view it as anti-art, and not as poetry at all.

This is my knee-jerk reaction. I'm watching that video and ... I mean if I needed something to make fun of people who get degrees in poetry ... it would be mean, low-hanging fruit. So one side of me is like, come on. The other side is in the "just about everything is art" camp, or that everything's subjective and down to interpretation.

I was reading an interview with a writer once, I think it might have been Gabriel Garcia Marquez but that's probably wrong, where he said that as a youth he started writing poetry -- but he stuck to rhymed poetry because everything else felt like cheating. Most of the time when I write poetry I feel that way, even if I shouldn't. So if skipping out on a rhyme feels like cheating, banging on a table is probably grand larceny. Kid A is one of my favorite albums, but I'm not sure how much the lyrics add.