Young Writers Society

Context:
With the recent wrap-up of NaPoWriMo for this year, I was very intrigued to discover a poetry thread titled 'cheap cheap software' in my amble through the NaPo forum.

This thread was created by a forum spammer at the start of April, containing a post very on-theme with its poetry thread title, yet unconventional in its poetic style. All the same, it was deemed poetic enough to be given an encouraging comment before being deleted by @alliyah, a YWS moderator who deals with these things. Yet when this spam thread wasn't fully deleted because of the comment, alliyah decided to write a second set of secret NaPo poems within it, focusing on these questions:

What is poetry? What isn't poetry? How do we decide this? Should we see things differently?

I super encourage anyone to check out this cheap cheap software poetry thread, because it brings up some great musings and questions for this discussion c:

Can a spambot be a poet? Does poetry need to be constructed of words, or can it be as abstract as the shape of an ear, or an oil spill blocking off a main road?

(To start things off, the following is a think piece I wrote on this topic after first reading the posts in the 'cheap cheap software' NaPo thread mentioned above, mainly drawing on my knowledge on visual arts to discuss the ideas—feel free to bring up anything I've written here for discussion, or simply ignore it!)


*kind of going to use the word 'art' here referring to visual arts, with the suggestion that poetry is included

I had an irl discussion about this very thing only a few days ago after procrastinating heavily researching the differences between Dadaism, Surrealism, and Absurdism (as well as modern absurdist humour and whether that can be classified as an art movement). What is art? What isn't art? What logical rules and boxes have we invented to validate it as such, when creativity in essence is about expressing what is outside the logical, literal mind. When searching the definition of 'matter-of-fact,' synonyms for it are 'unimaginative; uncreative'—and yet this is ultimately the mindset we take when classifying art's place and characteristics within society. Rationality is needed to practically manage and order art in the world, but when it comes to definitions, logical analysis on its own seems far from reasonable ~

There are multiple cases throughout art history of certain types of (what we now fully accept as) visual art being invalidated because it was not accepted by art galleries and critics at the time, which brings to mind ideas of 1984 Orwellian censorship in a subtle but real sense. In various ancient societies and throughout the Middle Ages, art was pretty much exclusively created as political or religious propaganda because only those in rule or with power would enable and dictate it, and art continues to be created more broadly as propaganda, either consciously or unconsciously. When considered this way, what makes an artwork in an art gallery any more 'legit' than a meme posted anonymously on a social media platform, or an Egg image with a lot of 'likes'? Only those professional art critics who say so, and the primary values and ways of thinking of the current time, which are in constant reshaping. The existence of art galleries these days can feel obsolete when pondering the natural consumption of art and visual media today.

Here's a really interesting article I read on absurdist internet humour possibly being 'Neo-Dadaism' and what it says about the Millennial (but also Gen Z tbh) generation(s).

In line with spam poetry, I think the fact that the example below can be possible suggests not that most people don't have a clear sense of what 'is' and 'isn't' art, but rather that our established rules of art may not be keeping up with what our minds flexibly perceive:

Maybe it is our definitions that are at fault, for example:


This is perhaps the next frontier of our art (and poetry) rules, in which both 'human' and 'creative skill and imagination' are not defining factors. Something I've recently been pondering is the opinion of "my two-year-old could have painted that" or "I could have created that." The assumption is that creative skill is needed for creating art, and yet another possible perspective I've been appreciating (hehe) is that the fact that someone else could have easily created an artwork with their skillset does not mean they did create it; the qualities needed to create an artwork are not solely skillset, but also action. If someone could but chose and would choose not to create an artwork while someone (or something) else did, then they couldn't create that artwork in actuality, only potentially (with the chance of them changing their mind—unless you believe in determinism, in which case maybe they are never able).

When it comes to imagination, perhaps the only human imagination needed is not from the creator or the art (who/which may need no imagination or consciousness at all), but just the perceiver? Maybe art can exist without any human perception, or any type of perception at all—or maybe it becomes something else, then, something undefined yet still beautiful to wonder about.

Personally I like this definition of ‘poetry’ (the first bullet point) more, because it doesn’t imply that the poetry needs to be words on a page or created by a human:


And maybe this is where spam can sometimes dwell. I like to think that anything in life can be art—unintentional or intentional, created by a human or manifesting in reality through other means as something capable of beauty and/or emotional power—if it is perceived and felt as such. And there’s comfort and wonderment in that idea of living within a reality woven with creative and poetic potential, with the only boundary being our own perception and judgements.

I really feel like this counts as poetry and nothing despite grammar should be changed but it seems it doesn't fit as poetry. What do you guys think? Much Ado About Nothing (taking suggestions for a better title.)

The more you try to look for answers to this question by approaching it this way, the more and more you'll find yourself following a stream of questioning that ultimately sinks into an ocean of abstractions. Which is why I'll only share my opinion on the more tangible aspects of this discussion and limit myself to that.

As far as my take on this is concerned, I think there's value in the traditional definitions of poetry and art.

Yes, poetry and art do sometimes exist outside of these boxes we put them in. I think those boxes are important, though. Rules and standards are what what make artistic traditions endure and sustain themselves over time. It is also the very existence of rules and standards that allows us to bend them creatively to create new effects and genres.

Artistic expression must be rooted in something, or is bound to lose itself. This is why most avant garde forms of poetry and art don't endure and fail the test of time.

What constitutes art or poetry is something that people will always differ about. To me, good poetry and good art - whatever form it takes or doesn't take - is always rooted in, and draws from some timeless truth, phantasm or beauty that are universally and eternally recognizable intuitively, even if it defies standard or is created unintentionally, with out without an effort or skill to back it up.

I know this wasn't the sole discussion point of the topic you were trying to bring up, but I think it's a good frame of reference to start looking at this question from in a broader sense. So I hope this helps.

I think that poetry is very dependent on time. It depends on the events occurring in a period of time and the things people can relate to the most. It comes down to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.



Poetry is tied to incentives. When every human need is met, poetry tends to become more about things other than the self. Sometimes other objects are used as metaphors to represent a person's deprivations. According to me, poetry could be deprivation. If one were to analyze the period between 0 A.D and 2020, it is clear that the root of poetry is mostly some sort of deprivation.

I have to agree with @Arcticus, particularly on the point that the avant-garde stuff we see is the stuff that has not endured. Consider instead what has endured - it's the stuff that was somewhat structured, somewhat followed a form... If creative writing is a science, prose is chemistry and poetry is mathematics. In poetry, there is more weight behind each word, more strength in the whole less-is-more philosophy.

What people forget is that art is meant to make personal expression accessible to the general public. Typically, the more avant-garde you get, the less accessible your art becomes. This is how poetry - and art in general - has somehow developed the characteristic of being intimidating when that is not the original intent. I think people who try to pass as esoteric poets are hardly poets at all - most likely, they are arrogant cynics. (On this note, I would recommend people read the book Art & Fear.)

Not everything can be poetry. If you think that, you're probably trying too hard. Otherwise, I could say everything is elephants.

Great discussion topic Coffee! I'm going to argue for a broader definition of poetry for a couple reasons!

I think my working definition of poetry is that it is something that communicates meaning or emotion through linguistic or implied linguistic means.

Another definition I'm fond of is from Leonardo daVinci, "Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."

^ Just because that's a very broad definition of what is poetry, doesn't mean everything under that definition is good poetry though! Which is a whole different discussion. For me, my personal preference of poetry is something that communicates clear meaning and emotion I can relate to.

I don't think there's any need for poetry to be defined by any sort of "special skills" or "intention"- sometimes little things that preschoolers say are more 'poetic' unintentionally than anything I could purposely write, in part because their grasp on language is more imaginative than my concrete understanding. I also don't think poetry necessarily needs to use words, which is probably most controversial here, but there are good poems that are already word / image / number / sound / art hybrids that I think are just as validly "poetry" than something that's all words. In my definition I purposely put "implied linguistic meaning" as an option, because while I'm not sure a "hiccup" would be a poem (no implied linguistic meaning), a gasp, a humming sound, a fallen leaf, a censored stop-sign, or a broken window might! What people interpret as having "implied linguistic meaning" is relative though, so maybe for some people a rock or a hiccup could be a poem.

Why argue for such a broad definition of poetry?

Language Itself is Flexible
Language and grammar are made up, changing, and flexible. That doesn't mean that they're random or that any word can mean anything, but that there's not like an ultimate truth of what is appropriately called this or that. It is useful to have agreed upon meanings for things -> so like when I ask a British person for a cookie and they hand me a biscuit or vice versa that's challenging and frustrating, but it doesn't mean someone is wrong or right. @Lavvie brought up the example that we can't call "everything" an elephant, and I agree, not every word can mean everything, but it can mean more than one thing - > an elephant might be a grey African animal with a long nose, or it might be an adjective used to describe a huge house, or it might be a toddler's stuffed toy shaped roughly into the shape of an animal, or a mammoth. I think there is room for the definition of poetry to fall somewhere between "4 stanzas with a metaphor and a mix of capital and lowercase letters" and "everything".

Elitist Gate Keeping
Standards of "correct" grammar can be useful, but when taken as rigid rules for acceptability, have long been used to privilege people with education, wealth, and those who are culturally privileged in other ways. A good example of this in the United States, is that sometimes schools and industries have decided that Black Vernacular English is "incorrect" vs. "Standard American English" grammar conventions. If you believe that poetry is only valid when it uses the privileged grammatical conventions, or uses capital letters and end punctuation, you're using a made-up system already. Using grammar conventions can be useful, but I don't think it ought to be essential. I don't think it ought to be a hard and fast rule that a certain group of people gets to decide what types of writing/literature/art portray meaning and what doesn't.

In poetry, literature, and art the same thing does happen with gate-keeping by people who hold more cultural capital. (like in my American English course when we only read things written by deceased white men, subtly implying that the language and experiences of a 21st century young woman wouldn't be "appropriate" literary reflection). It's fine to have rules for poetic forms and ideas, or preferences for certain poetic conventions, but at the point where someone is saying something is not poetry that the author claims is poetry, I don't know who that is helping. Alternative forms of poetry like slam poetry, anti-poetry, visual-poetry aren't inherently less intellectual or meaningful because they use a different form. The Slam Poetry movement actually started as a democratic participatory art to combat academic poetry elitism that wasn't reflective of people's real experience or emotion. I really think that it's more useful to say that something is or isn't "poetic for me" -> rather than "this is/is not poetry" - maybe poetry is more of a relative spectrum of perception than a binary.

Accessibility
I would also argue that from an audience standpoint these forms of poetry that people often don't want to call poetry, are actually more accessible. People argue about whether or not Rupi Kaur's insta-poetry is really poetry, but her book was on the NYT #1 best-selling list, people would not have bought it if they found it inaccessible. Using image or prose hybrids, relevant political themes, subverting expectations, or using natural grammars and dialects in poetry are other ways it can become more accessible for people.

Historical Flexibility
I don't think it'd be controversial to say one of the persons with the most influence on conceptions of modern literature, and poetry, is William Shakespeare. With what I said above about gate-keeping I don't necessarily think we have to follow his example for everything, but I do think if we're going to let someone define what poetry is, this should be the guy. Well the thing is, Shakespeare was kind of a Revolutionary Poet. He didn't bother to limit his poetry to the grammatical rules of the day and literally changed the English Language with his writing by making up new words and phrases. "Shakespeare invented over 1,700 of our common words, changing nouns into verbs and verbs into adjectives, joining words together to produce words never heard before." source . There was also a standard of what an English sonnet was supposed to look like, and he just decided he was going to do his own form. Shakespeare himself was willing to look at the rules of poetry and language and treat them as flexible things to be developed and changed as needed, and I think he'd be all for creative uses of language and poetry in this day too. So if one is going to appeal to tradition - I think they have to acknowledge that poetry actually has a healthy tradition of influential poets who have specifically tried to break through the bounds of typical poetic conventions. I think part of the appeal of poetry has always been its relationship to order and disorder, that one can choose to obey or disobey the poetic conventions.

Personal
Again I think there are good arguments to be made on why antipoetry and different types of experimental poetry might in some cases be destructive or communicate meaning in less effective ways than conventional poetry, but for me that conversation starts with recognizing them as poetry and then maybe trying to figure out what their actual objective is. For some poets, the "point" of their poetry actually isn't to communicate clear meaning, to pay tribute to the history of poetry, or demonstrate any linguistic prowess; their intention might actually just be to annoy those who love convention and rules, or to challenge, inspire, shock, or even confuse.

Sorry this is so long! Feel free to disagree, that's just my two-cents.

~shamelessly double-posting to also add~

I think it might be interesting to return also to the question that @AvantCoffee posed at the beginning, which wasn't "what isn't poetry" but "what is poetry?" or what can be poetry - maybe for some folks poems need multiple words, at least one metaphor or image, a title, capital letters, and horizontal parallel lines. But even with these typical allocations there is likely something you've read that has pushed your definition of what poetry can be.

Here's some YWS poems that I'm glad to have read and that have personally pushed my own definition of poetry:

@Carina's Visual Poem which is about this very subject: they tell me that writing is a form of art founded on rules

@zaminami's poem here (it's partly in binary!)

@Demeter's haiku for the shipwrecked & @Que's Rebecca (both use Morse Code!)

@IamI's number poem:
^0

@Fortis' the moon is no replacement for a brother (multi-directional poem) AND THIS masterpiece (which I spent no joke 20 minutes trying to find since fort has a lot of good stuff! it's posted as an article, but it's very poetic.) The Rings of Saturn

And a good amount of the ever-creative @CaptainJack's poems here which take the form of prayers, recipes, graphs, charts, colors and everything in between.

Curious if anyone else has poems (YWS or off-site) they'd add to this list!

Poetry is when you throw up your soul in word form, so I guess the real question is if bots have souls.






... and if modern art is really art, but that may just open a whole other can of worms (though if we turn it around in the form of earlier mentioned absurdist humor...)

@alliyah Ok, wow. Your reply is so comprehensive and balanced I feel like looking for flaws in it till I find one, lol.

I think you've covered everything, and I agree for the most part. I do think, however, that not anything and everything goes. There are some fringe varieties of poetry that do not convey meaning at all but are based simply based on shock value.

Also, my appeal to tradition does recognize that even tradition has had, and will continue to have its beneficial innovations from time to time. I think that's perfectly fine, but none of the poets you mentioned went against the definition of poetry in and as of itself - only some of its conventions. Shakespeare tweaked language, created his own words and forms, but he retained the essentials of how we've always understood poetry to be: words, language, emotion, soul (as @Meshugenah put so simply, lol).

Therefore, I do think poetry is a broad art from. In fact, poetically speaking, even music is the 'poetry' of vibrational patterns. But in the taxonomical sense, poetry must have words and meaning in it. I wouldn't consider space sounds as poetry. I love them. They're deep music. They're amazing. But not poetry, if you know what I mean.

Every art form has a definition, and the purpose of the definition is not to constrain the art form, or narrow it down, but to roughly mark it out from other things it's close to but different from. Definitions vary, but all widely accepted definitions will agree over a subset of principles, and I think those principles are what we should use in trying to arrive at a broader understanding of poetry, while at the same time retaining its distinctness.

Arc, would you agree that perceiving meaning from something is somewhat relative though? For instance my favorite artist is Mark Rothko - he does color-blocks. A lot of people see that and go, "well that is just paint slop, no meaning, no point, no art" - I see it and am deeply moved by the absence of concrete depictions, where the emptiness of objects highlights the presence of color and forces the viewer to see the painting as somewhat of a mirror of emotion rather than a photo which forces external observation. I think the same thing happens in poetry where some people just can't access meaning from some versions of linguistic material. That's why I would be more apt to say, "that poem portrayed linguistic meaning to me, so was more poetic" rather than "I perceived meaning, so I get to decide that this object is or isn't a poem".

You could definitely make a case that if a poem only portrays meaning to a couple people, it's not a very good poem, but the truth is that sometimes poems that use lots of words actually portray meaning very poorly. To me a leaf that's turned from green to orange portrays clearer meaning than a poem made of words that use contradicting metaphors.

Good point on traditional poets rarely deviating from at the very least using words in their poetry. -> I may have to do more poetry exploration to find some poets that don't. I know @CaptainJack has at least one poem that has no words in it; just "implied words" through the use of colors and graph boxes. I have created a few different pieces that utilize unreadable words that I would consider poems - but probably wouldn't fit your definition.

Here's one of my faves that I have labeled in my art thread as an "object poem"



Also sorry if any of this sounded argumentative - I really think people can define what is "poetic" to them however they'd please, I just like talking about poetry.

Hmm, my brain is completely fried, but I remember this thread from two years ago and hey, I never got around to reading it, so why not give it a quick skim now?

Here are just some random thoughts on some proposed definitions that have been said. Nothing really to do with my opinion, just trying to develop these ideas a bit based on things I've been reading:

@alliyah

I think my working definition of poetry is that it is something that communicates meaning or emotion through linguistic or implied linguistic means.

I thought it was interesting that you specified 'linguistic' and also 'implied linguistic'! I myself am not always sure that poetry needs to be language. For example, these audio concrete poetry are arguably not language to me, as is the case with some kinds of Dadaist poems that don't form individual words but are composed of simple sounds like zzzzz or shhshhhsh. Would these count as 'implied linguistic' for you, because even though no words are said in their usual contexts of grammatical function (for instance, zzzzhshshshssszzzz as a sequence doesn't have nouns, verbs, though it might arguable have a certain 'order' or 'pattern' there) they do resemble language in that they're all made of sounds produced with the mouth.


@Arcticus

Rules and standards are what what make artistic traditions endure and sustain themselves over time. It is also the very existence of rules and standards that allows us to bend them creatively to create new effects and genres.

Artistic expression must be rooted in something, or is bound to lose itself. This is why most avant garde forms of poetry and art don't endure and fail the test of time.

So if I'm parsing this correctly, you're saying that poetry is 'things that either adhere to or deviate from a set of rules and standards for "poetry", which all have to exist relative to these rules and standards in some way'? Some cases I think might support this is that okay, Dadaism was an avant-garde school. They wrote poems by trying to avoid having meaning in any of them. (Their aim was to show the arbitrariness of the relationship between sound and sense :https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/dada/word-play/) However, Dadaism couldn't exist if it had not been for previous standards for poetry, which are for example 'poetry has to convey a message/ meaning to the reader through the use of language'. I think the point is a lot stronger if you treat avant-garde schools the same as traditional schools, all of them being groups of rules and standards for poetry.

Because one way to look at it is that arguably, 'avant-garde' poets make up new rules and standards for themselves all the time. Not all of these survive - some do get scrapped - but if they influence even one future poet who goes on to keep their ideas in mind when writing (whether or not they follow the avant-garde rules or break their rules), does that mean they "failed to stand the test of time"? Does this survival test have a kind of 'quantity threshhold' so we say that 'because thousands of schools now study Shakespeare as a model for poetry and take inspo from him, Shakespeare's rules and standards have survived -- but only a handful of people remember H.D., so hers haven't'?

If we don't look at it this way and instead say that 'okay, so both Shakespeare's set of rules and H.D.'s set of rules survived'. Then we return to the idea that 'artistic expression must be rooted in something'. Then doesn't that also apply to avant-garde movements as well? And then if there are infinite possible avant-garde movements, there are also infinite possible sets of rules that might be invented in the future for art. And just so long as you make your poetry relative to one of these infinite sets of rules, well . . . you've created poetry. Which seems to be a much broader sense than what we might have expected here.

Of course, I can think of limitations to what I've said above:
Just one off the top of my head for now: Maybe there aren't infinite possible avant garde movements. Maybe avant-garde movements are limited by the number of poets that can possibly exist, and maybe that is finite - who knows? Or that the number of rules one can create for poetry is finite (pretty plausible! lots of movements have had overlapping rules).

Haha, just a fun little ramble of thought, no idea if this makes sense


And now in case people are looking for my opinion as to what poetry is, well. I tend to perceive poetry as somewhere between being 'deviation' and 'arrangement'.

Deviation, not from rules of poetry (though they might very well also be!), but from the rules of prose. Because I think what sometimes makes something unrecognisable as poetry can be that it behaves too much like prose. It's not 'special', there's no 'aha' moment. Prose poems, unlike prose paragraphs, are full of aha moments. They play with language, and do weird things. Shakespeare's poems are poems to me because they play with language. Without 'play' and deviation, well, that's a diary entry or a short story.

Arrangement is another potential element. I know I tend to think of music as being 'arrangement'. But poetry is a lot like music, so I think that applies here. When I perceive words I can arrange to create an impression, an effect or a meaning, and it doesn't match-up with my mental scripts for how prose works, then I think I'm perceiving poetry. (And hence I do think spam-bots can write poems Of course I do, I am a spam bot myself)