First the last sentence: my post is more about how I read the poem than about the what the poem did. I've experienced time and again that the same words can be read differently. — Dawnstorm
I intended my comment to be complimentary, even if my characterization of your post was inaccurate. I found it very helpful. — T Clark
I find the question interesting, actually. I feel like formal aspects of poems are a type of meaning, too (the main anchor of nonsense verse like the first stanza of Jabberwocky, for example). There's a back and forth, and in poetry, where the importance of those formal aspects is institutionally raised, the word meaning and sound meaning give rise to each other in a chicken-egg relationship, only more chaotic. — Dawnstorm
We engage differently with a text if we think it's a shopping list than if we think it's a poem. (I've heard of a teacher providing a shopping list as an example of a poem, encouraging analysis. It's not something I've come up with. I wish I still had the reference, but it's just something I heard in a course a long time ago.) — Dawnstorm
Something I am wondering about, from your article and others across the interwebs, is the moral dimension of poetry being emphasized. — Moliere
But I wonder about poetry's supposed moral educational propensities — Moliere
(I've heard of a teacher providing a shopping list as an example of a poem, encouraging analysis. It's not something I've come up with. I wish I still had the reference, but it's just something I heard in a course a long time ago.) — Dawnstorm
I was walking more slowly now
in the presence of the compassion
the dead were extending to a comrade,
plus I was in no hurry to return
to the kitchen, where I would have to tell you
all about Terry and the bananas and the bread. — mcdoodle
On the flip side of a shopping list. This is by Billy Collins. — mcdoodle
heh, fair enough. It may just be the wrong question, really. It's not that things cannot be poems, but rather, if it isn't one it's a sort of challenge for the poet to turn it into one. So there's no point in delimiting the category, given it's a creative category and will expand as poets continue. — Moliere
Forgive a bit of self-indulgence, but here is my shopping list poem: — T Clark
Have you seen the meme - Shakespeare Quote of the Day: "An SSL error has occurred and a secure connection to the server cannot be made." — Cuthbert
Bagels
Cream Cheese
cleaning rags — Moliere
I think there may be a fear here in that we don't want to limit poetry, too. — Moliere
Take for example Roman Jakobson's Functions of Language. — Dawnstorm
Basically morphemes make words make phrases make clauses, and after that you get into text analysis and leave the realm of syntax. A phrase can be composes of words and other phrases and even clauses. For example, one way to count phrases, could be the follwoing: "the red apple":
1. Determiner Phrase: "the red apple"
2. Noun phrase: "red apple"
3. a) adjective phrase: "red"
3. b) noun phrase: "apple". — Dawnstorm
If you think of the poetic function of language as a subtype of "fun with pattern recognition" (alongside seeing bunnies in clouds and such), that might even have contributed to the creation of language in the first place. Shared social grunt-play. Would make sense to me.
A scene from the anime Yuyushiki that may or may not demonstrate what I mean (depending on how much sense I make): — Dawnstorm
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