[MD] Fwd: ACLA 2016: "Poetry as Practice, Practice as Poetry"

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[John]
Second, poetry is different from painting, music and sculpting in that it requires a higher-order brain to comprehend.

[Arlo]
First, are you suggesting that "painting, music and sculpting" does not require a higher-order brain to comprehend? Does this suggest that, say, a cat can comprehend Beethoven's Ninth? But you are completely wrong here, John, all of these are semiotic systems, whether markings on a page or brushstrokes on a canvas or sound waves in the air or vocal utterances on a stage. Poetry is one form of high-quality endeavor, and like other forms of high-quality endeavor it can leverage opportunities for dynamic emergence. 

Perhaps you can criticize this seminar for focusing specifically on poetics (over other forms of artistic semiosis), but 

[John]
Anybody can hear music, or see a painting or feel a sculpture, and have a good sense of what they are - empirically speaking.

[Arlo]
Well "anybody" seems to refer to humans, so I'd imagine what you mean here are humans without higher-order brains (possible due to traumatic injury?). It's true, iconographic semiosis can appear, on some levels, to be more trans-cultural, but this is mostly illusion, a projection of your cultural assumptions onto a artifact with no regard for the intentions or meaning ascribed to it from within its own culture. But indeed, as we move from iconographic semiosis towards more symbolic semiosis (e.g. from a 'picture of a building' to the word "BUILDING"), the argument is that the MEANING has greater potential for complexity. By your argument, then, poetics is a more advanced, and thus better 'meaning bearer', than painting or music. And, as such, poetics SHOULD be the something that better represents the intricate aesthetic practice of human experience.

[John]
But poetry depends upon linguistic and cultural interpretations that can be different for different listeners.

[Arlo]
I dare you to make your way to the heart of Australia, sit with an Aboriginal tribe, listen to one of them play the didgeridoo, and tell me you this form of semiosis requires no 'linguistic and cultural interpretation' for you to understand its meaning. But, certainly, all semiosis rests on a foundation of interpretation, there is never some 'pure' transmission of meaning that occurs without enconding-interpretation. It's just that the more shared the socio-cultural context, the more common are the interpretations. 

[Arlo previously]
Or... we could call Hollywood's output "cinema" and have a separate dialogue about the way the art of cinema (like any "art", including "poetry") can introduce dynamic elements into static dialogues.

[John]
that sounds like a better way of putting it and a better discussion to have.  I definitely agree that cinema with its use of music, image and words can have a more powerful affect than even the best poetry. 

[Arlo]
Maybe, at times, but cinema has a measure of temporal engagement that may be less emphatic in other forms of semiosis. While one can (and I have) stood in front a painting for hours, the 'effect' of cinema can build off hour long engagements that an image may, in isolation, appear to lack. Of course, literature parallels cinema in this regard, a good book can engage a reader for days, if not hours, or even longer. One poem in isolation may not lend itself to this as readily.

But, I think you've must have had a very impoverished exposure to poetry over the years, John, as I can think of several poems that, in a few short lines, altered the way I see the world, changed the way I look at things, and in the end made me a better person. 

[John]
All poetry is practice.  Not all practice is poetic.

[Arlo]
I don't think this call for abstracts would disagree. Indeed, I think the point was to reframe the dialogue (in parallel to the reframing in ZMM) to get people to 'see' that practice is not divorced from poetics, to reflect Pirsig's term, that practice is aesthetic. 

[John]
I'm more concerned that you're wasting YOUR time, Arlo. 

[Arlo]
Yes, many days I read the MD and think the same thing. Which is one reason I spend my time now mostly in other discourse communities. But, from time to time, I guess I fall prey to that old naivety.