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[Jenifer]

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God this shit is so good it's chilling. 

"Sit in my hand."
I'm ten.
I can't see him,
but I hear him breathing
in the dark.
It's after dinner playtime.
We're outside,
hidden by trees and shrubbery.
He calls it hide-and-seek,
but only my little sister seeks us
as we hide
and she can't find us,
as grandfather picks me up
and rubs his hands between my legs.
I only feel a vague stirring
at the edge of my consciousness.
I don't know what it is,
but I like it.
It gives me pleasure
that I can't identify.
It's not like eating candy,
but it's just as bad,
because I had to lie to grandmother
when she asked,
"What do you do out there?"
"Where?" I answered.
Then I said, "Oh, play hide-and-seek."
She looked hard at me,
then she said, "That was the last time.
I'm stopping that game."
So it ended and I forgot.
Ten years passed, thirtyfive,
when I began to reconstruct the past.
When I asked myself
why I was attracted to men who disgusted me
I traveled back through time
to the dark and heavy breathing part of my life
I thought was gone,
but it had only sunk from view
into the quicksand of my mind.
It was pulling me down
and there I found grandfather waiting,
his hand outstretched to lift me up,
naked and wet
where he rubbed me.
"I'll do anything for you," he whispered,
"but let you go."
And I cried, "Yes," then "No."
"I don't understand how you can do this to me.
I'm only ten years old,"
and he said, "That's old enough to know."

[Tobacco]

crybaby me a>
blah blah blub blub bla bla blub blub bla crybaby me ng:

quack?

[Jenifer]

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Well, you know how I feel about that question. Poetry is when a writer says it is.

Does it work for you?

[Tobacco]

crybaby me a>
crybaby me eare blub blub blub quack blah blub bla blub quack it blub. So it blub't blah as quack. bla blah crybaby me on bla blah to it is at bla bla bla bla blah quack it is blub, blah bla quack, crybaby me d by bla quack quack quack bla 'blah' crybaby me , bla blah bla be blub in blub as blub as in crybaby me g blah.

[blub]quack is blah a quack blah it is. [/blub]

quack. bla I blub a blah blah bla? I blub I bla.

[Jenifer]

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Hardly. Did I write a poem just now? I think I did.

It is if you say it is.

It may not work very well, or be well written, but if you say it is a poem it is.

What is the definition, then, of 'poem'?

[astronacht]

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poem (plural poems)
a literary piece written in verse
a piece of writing in the tradition of poetry, an instance of poetry
a piece of poetic writing, that is with an intensity or depth of expression or inspiration greater than is usual in prose

Funny how wiktionary can't define poem without referencing poetry.

[astronacht]

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By the way, I'm not being serious. About anything. Ever.

[Jenifer]

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smiling.

[TC]

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Poetry has to do with vocabulary just as prose has not.
So you see prose and poetry are not at all alike. They are completely different.
--Gertrude Stein

Stein argued that poetry was the act of naming something in a way in which it hasn't been previously named, and in the process taking something familiar and making it unfamiliar.  Prose doesn't do this.  It's one of the best definitions of poetry that I've ever heard.  For me, at least, it makes sense.  This is scary, because it's Stein and I always worry that I'm losing my sanity when she starts making sense. 

[Ġakbu]

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It's somewhat safer & more 'accurate' to say what poetry isn't - sort of apophatic - than to say what poetry is - like medieval theologians used to do about God, say what He isn't rather than what He is - the fact that there isn't a set definition for poetry doesn't make anything one want into poetry, I should think - conceptual art is very strong about this, it takes a pre-existing object and ascribes some kind of message to it and says that it's art - Tracy Emin, the one who made it with a used bed to a museum, when asked about what makes her 'art' art, said "it is art because I say it is". Sure, if one wants to believe that his/her pencil case suddenly is a work of art and he/she is an artist because of that - it is, however, I think, a bit like all the new age stuff, you dilute and dilute from the 'original' sources and what you get is something pathetic, like homeopathy.

But you know, you get people published on Poetry magazine who have a poem with just the word google in it repeated in as many variations as possible. The idea of poetry that people have is from the impressions they have or might have had of seeing a poem or various poems on the printed page. I'd say the one you have here is a poem without any sense of a poem except the one fact that it's not written in a paragraph. Ms. Ai, it seems, died one day after my birthday this year; I wonder how many generations her poetry is going to end up fulfilling, amongst other things, the key idea being how many generations. I'm sure there were more Ais in previous centuries...wonder why that is that we've no knowledge of such individuals. Probably tyranny; or the plague.

[Ġakbu]

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something familiar and making it unfamiliar.

Prose has done that many times, she's wrong. Defamiliarization it's called. Even something like Gulliver's travels, it's forcing people to view a normal human being from the perspective of the little guys, that's called defamiliarization.

I really do rather think that the main difference between poetry and prose is language. Something which is structurally prose can be breathtakingly more poetic than a poem with a structure of a poem - we still call one prose and the other a poem - but whilst one only achieves the effect in terms of structure, the other achieves it in terms of language, and I'm not talking about intentional prose-poetry. The best prose writers always got out poetry out of their writing, because it has an abstract aesthetic, metaphoric sheen to it. But speaking of metaphor, I'd say that metaphor is something which is rather important to poetry, since we are talking about vertical rather than horizontal language, varying in intensity and usage of course.

[TC]

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Prose has done that many times, she's wrong. Defamiliarization it's called. Even something like Gulliver's travels, it's forcing people to view a normal human being from the perspective of the little guys, that's called defamiliarization.

This isn't what Stein is talking about.  There is a difference between showing the reader a new perspective and forcing the reader to create a new name for something.  What Swift shows the reader about human nature in Gulliver's Travels is something that is already familiar to the reader. He uses the story to emphasize something the reader needs to see, something that he feels needs to be addressed among the people of Great Britain and Ireland during his time.  He used satire and storytelling to bring attention to England's unfair treatment of the Irish.  He wasn't renaming British imperialism so much as calling attention to it in a new way. 

Stein calls upon the poet to take the subject of the poem back to the point before it was named and give it a new identity by renaming it (preferably with verbs and adverbs rather than nouns).  She talks about the power of naming things and about how there is nothing left in everyday existence that hasn't been named.  The job of the poet is to redefine the world and create new names.  There are a few prose writers who do manage to do this, but one could argue that they are writing prosaic poetry more so than pure prose.

[Ġakbu]

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is something that is already familiar to the reader

...which he then makes unfamiliar. I was referring to the part where you said something familiar and making it unfamiliar, and modernism and post-modernism revels in that sort of thing, from Brecht to Conan Doyle, it's all there. On that point, I don't think that poetry has or even should have the sole distinction of making things unfamiliar in that manner.

But on the other point which you've made, about what Stein said, then yes, I'd say there's a great deal of truth in the - redefine the world and create new - phrase. I'd say that over the past couple of decades at least, the distinction between what poetry should be and what prose should be has gotten more blurred and blurred, as with most things, so if I were to take say, 1960's onwards, I'm not sure that I would say that there are more poets than prose writers who have done the 'should part' of poetry - if you take the entirety of literature, or even just go back two hundred years or so, then yes, I'd definitely agree. Mallarme I think, made the distinction between prose and poetry as solely to do with the language used, though I wouldn't go that far myself, I basically agree. There is something awfully interesting about writers who were simultaneously excellent poets and prose-writers, like Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence, and in the case of Thomas Hardy at least (having read much more of his prose and poetry than I have of Lawrence's prose and poetry), I can say that Hardy generates more poetic depth in segments of his novels than in many of his poems; of course, that's being partial, but I only mean that as an observation, rather than as a 'rule' to apply to other writers or readers.

[redperil]

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The poet makes love to the words, whist the prose writer watches on taking notes.
- Arthur 'over-simplified' Bollockface

[Ġakbu]

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Vortex versus voyeur then Mr.Lally? & btw, the Mediterranean sun is swelling like a Mediterranean watermelon, the sunny seeds are like little prose ingots, but very caustic. Caustic voyeurs. Does any of that make sense? I've been to a philosophical exam, voyeur's a nice word really. Damned be the French.