I remember having to memorize and recite "The Second Coming" in high school and wondering what the hell the point was. Hearing Yeats recite "Innisfree" on ATC yesterday was a revelation- I'd never heard his actual voice or even known that he'd recorded any of his own poems, and it drove home what a graceless klutz I was way back when. Hirsch's notion that poetry requires the human body to give it proper instrumentation is a beautiful one, too. On a slightly related note, I still find myself idly reciting the first 18 lines of the Canterbury Tales prologue (another high school requirement) when I'm stressed out or doing something that requires focus. Something about the tidal sway of the cadences has a physiological effect on me- pulse slows, breathing evens out, hands steady on the requisite task. It's like reciting an incantation.
I firmly believe that poetry exists on a spectrum that goes approximately like: music -> songs -> lyrics -> rap -> spoken word/performance/"slam" poetry -> rhythmic poetry -> "page" poetry -> "shape" poetry (poetry written to make visual impressions) -> black-out poetry (take existing text and black out all the words except the poem) -> words with art/art with word arrangements -> [art of words maybe] -> art I should very much like to write about it sometime but I haven't been able to figure out where all the borders are yet. They overlap some of course. It's a lot of fun for me to think about.
Reminds me of the "what is art" conversation everybody kicked around a few weeks back. Still gnawing on that bone.
I prefer the word when over what in conversations like that. Maybe it is because I'm particularly interested in where the boundaries are from one sub-genre to the next, but I like to approach art and poetry asking when they became art and poetry. At what point does this arrangement of words coalesce into a greater whole? When did that panel of kleinblue become a piece of artwork - when did it cease to be a color chip? I guess the lazy way is to say "Art/poetry/whatever becomes such when it is named as such." "If the creator says it is art, then it is art." What is the intent behind the product, essentially? But I think there's more to it than that. I think that people accidentally write poems sometimes. A poem's just one word lined up after another but at some point - click, boom. It's no longer a strand of letters and sound. It's a poem. When?
Word. I like this approach because it kind of sidesteps the pitfalls of false dichotomy- art versus not art. By asking "when," you allow for a sort of spectrum leading from untouched object to managed art form without having to get lost in the weeds of exception. A focus on becoming ("when") rather than being ("what") also invokes this sense that art requires an act of sculpting rather than just arbitrary imposition of will. Feels alright to me.