A quick note on the quasi-review below

There are a number of interesting side arguments that I did not get into.

In response to e-mail, I specifically wanted to point out that I’m not very much interested in drawing a prose/poetry distinction. I don’t think it’s a very useful one, but if anyone wants to take it up as an intellectual challenge, please be my guest, and I’ll be happy to read your thoughts on the matter.

I also don’t mean to imply that one must write like Fanning to be a good poet. Or that classical poetics haven’t produced good poems and aren’t capable of producing more good poems. (These last few points should be obvious to careful readers of the post below.)

In terms of relative levels of quality or skill creating a divide between poems/nonpoems (which I freely admit I alluded to in the piece), that’s a bit trickier. A fourth grader scrawls out a poem about a boy she has a crush on – poem or not?  A mental patient orders their thoughts in lines – poem or not? English Lit. Sophmore pens an embarrassingly stiff and argumentative sonnet – poem or not?

Short answer: “Yes, poems, of course – why wouldn’t they be?” 

Long answer:  To look at another context, think about music or drawing/painting. If I yodel to myself in the shower, it’s “music” in one sense. If I draw something (could be a dog, could be a cow, but I was trying for a monkey) in my notebook margin, it’s again some sort of “visual art.”

But the existence of either of these does not mean there *aren’t* various systems of music (with rules and goals) and various systems of visual arts (with rules and goals). Nobody in their right mind is going to think my shower-yodeling and the lead tenor in an opera house are qualitatively the same thing. Nor is anybody going to look at those notebook pen doodlings of mine and think they’re great art.

So we get down to line drawing again. And when all the poets are pressed on the “is it poetry or not?” question, they all give relative responses, just like Coleridge’s “best words, best order.”

Even a casual student of Poetics in English could tell you that there have been a number of proposed definitions of poetry over the years- some more personal that others; for Frost poetry was "that which gets lost in translation," while for Stevens, poetry was his "necessary angel."  Emily Dickinson knew a poem "because it took the top of her head off," while Yeats knew a poem was finished because it "clicked shut like a box lid closing." Consulting a more stolid source, the various dictionaries, the Miram Webster/Funk and Wagnals types usually go for "a composition in verse," with "verse" further defined as "metrical writing." Yet, as we all know, all writing and speech, by default, is metrical.

Which brings us to the idea of definition by lowest common denominator- a thing all poems share which is not shared by any other form of writing. . .Damned if I can think of what this might be.

It's difficult to argue that poems should affect the audience in particular ways, primarily because that audience is made up of diverse individuals; provoking, memorable, affective poetry for a 9 year old may not (we hope) prove to be the same to a twenty-nine year old. Furthermore, these individual readers and listeners are in flux; persons, we hope, mature. Tastes change. Given the relative state of the audience, the best definition of poetry might be reflexive; that is, that any given piece, written in any given style, transcends prose and becomes poetry when it clears an internal "bar," when it successfully meets the challenges it accepts. Poems are, of themselves, their own definitions - there are as many definitions of poetry as there are poems.

But to cut back to the main question, only some of these poems are going to be at all interesting to the broad and contemporary American adult readership. And when I’m distinguishing Fanning’s poems as Poems, as opposed to flat kinda-poems, I do so with that reader/listenership in mind. When I wrote “Poetry,” I might just as well have written “good poetry,” “poetry that’s worth your time to speak and hear,” “poetry that you really must listen to,” or something like that.

And to those of you who responded, I urge you to write into the author of the very next musical review that you read.  In it, you should demand that because he hasn't proven that my shower yodeling isn't "music," that he has no business lauding whatever band she's writing about.  That would be, I think, a far better way to spend your time.