Poem is free verse

You're comparing the 'greats' to random contemporaries. It's false equivalence.

No it doesn't need 'poetic grounding', quite obviously. Whether you think it's shit or not is irrelevant to the actual merits of the work; it seems to me you're just not trained to appreciate certain forms or poetry. Contemporary art isn't for everyone, it's true, but I can't think of any non-pseud opinion as to why certain forms are superior to others.

Western art went through a period of 'deskilling' over the course of the 20th century, as in everything extraneous to the mechanisms of art that otherwise formed a barrier of entry to each medium eventually fell out of favour. And just as well, since there are so many highly literate and educated people now it's better (as in it makes more historical sense) that more people participate.

What? It engages with the history of poetry, not prose.

>Everything must be definite and separate!

Touch of the 'tism?

What's your point? Are you saying I don't get it? Look, the free-verse trend, and it is a trend because none of these poets dinstingush themselves artistically, is just garbage by people with absolutely no artistic skill. Of course nobody reads poetry anymore, new poetry is steaming shit. And don't even try to compare these black lesbian hack "poets" to Rimbaud or Eliot.

what does drumpf and white people have to do with literally anything. Are you psychotic?

Liberalism and pomo faggotry go hand in hand

What do you think I meant by 'deskilling'? Since you think having no 'skill' is something bad then it's clear you don't get it or even how art works.

Artistry isn't decided by craft. The mechanisms of art and artistic experience aren't dependent on craft. There's literally nothing that says it is.

>And don't even try to compare these black lesbian hack "poets" to Rimbaud or Eliot.

I'm not, you are, in your OP.

Maybe you should not hold your opinion in such high regard and maybe read a few more books before posting multiple threads about how you think contemporary poetry is shit.

i really appreciate both of these views and i think strong arguments can be made for both.

even though im sympathetic to the view that newer perspectives are and have been historically disenfranchised with mainstream art, i think there needs to be some semblance and recognition of the tradition from which someone is departing from. this comes up in overt and explicit denunciations of "white patriarchy", but more work could be appreciated by those on both sides if there was an obvious instance of knowledgable departure in form.

Contemporary isn't pomo. Pomo is a 20th century movement.

And no liberalism and pomo don't have a lot in common.

There probably already are works that bridge this gap. There's no reason to believe there aren't.

Ever heard the one about being so open-minded that your brain falls out? That's postmodernism.

>Artistry isn't decided by craft. The mechanisms of art and artistic experience aren't dependent on craft. There's literally nothing that says it is.
It really is. To be a great poet, an original poet, you need to read and learn from other poets, you need to be able to write, period. This "deskilling" is misleading, the modernist poetry required a huge amount of intelligence and skill. The form should reflect the poem, but most poets now don't know the first thing about form, I bet most of them would struggle to write a sonnet.

They actually have very similar attitudes.

Here's an example of a contemporary poem:

i’d rather have
an agogô for a heart
a djembe for a heart
gramophone for a heart
bison bone for a heart
dandelion spore for a heart
sweet cream butter for a heart
i’d rather have a
mason jar for a heart
an ashtray for a heart
a plate of liver for a heart
lawnmower for a heart
jezebel for a heart

instead of this flesh & blood which mars my sheets
instead of this archive that clogs my toilet
instead of this flea-bitten attic full of raccoons
instead of this envelope that arrives already open
instead of this light bulb that rattles on the inside
instead of this tv box that draws attention on trash day
instead of this wart that only responds to rain
instead of this colander that never catches the grit

i’d rather have
a heart born of the lust
between a sonnet & a blues song
a coleridge-wild weed hoochie coochie heart
a we real cool heart aboard the impossible spawn of slave ships
an undying, maroon eternally brown in the black hills heart
i’d rather
have a heart that beats
that beats
that beats
that beats
that beats

There are entire anthologies full of this type of shit. Does anyone here unironically think this is a good poem?

I think the problem is you haven't read enough poetry from the mid-late-20th century to see the development of poetry from your early modernists to now. Postmodernism isn't really something that is relevant to this discussion. Maybe if you read postmodern poetry you would know this but instead you're making an argument based on your own ignorance. You don't see it therefor it doesn't exist kind of thing.

>It really is.

Still, no.

>To be a great poet, an original poet, you need to read and learn from other poets

Says who?

> I bet most of them would struggle to write a sonnet.

I bet even the most accomplished poets of the past would struggle to write a sonnet. In any case, to think that creative writing students aren't exposed to different forms of poetry in class is a lie.

Only to you and others who don't know what they're talking about. The problem with liberalism is its inherent white supremacy and adherence to neo-liberal capitalism as the answer; it wants to make markets out of disenfranchised minorities. You won't find any advocacy like this in postmodern writers.

No I don't think it's good, but there was also a lot of bullshit that adhered strictly to blank verse couplets as well. For example, the shit I wrote in 5th grade for english class

Why is it bad? Do you not have the imaginary capacity to consider the difference between the objects listed?

>Says who?
Says every poet worth reading.
>I bet even the most accomplished poets of the past would struggle to write a sonnet. In any case, to think that creative writing students aren't exposed to different forms of poetry in class is a lie.
Nope.

You can't just hand wave everything by saying that its all, like, subjective, man. Just because it's art doesn't mean it's not complete garbage. Yes, you do need to understand the technical aspects I'd poetry to be able to write good poetry. You can't just write random bullshit with line breaks and expect people to take you seriously.
K
The problem is, there's a glut of this type of shit poetry and retards who think that this type of "free-verse" is a good idea.
Read it out loud. Does that sound like a good poem to you? It doesn't even express anything, it's just a bunch of cliches and ugly phrases. Nothing about it is beautiful.

>Says every poet worth reading.

Empty nonsense. Do you actually have an opinion or are you just associating with 'poets of worth' because you want to appear sophisticated?

>Nope.

They are exposed to different forms though.

>You can't just hand wave everything by saying that its all, like, subjective, man.

No one is doing that except you.

>Yes, you do need to understand the technical aspects I'd poetry to be able to write good poetry. You can't just write random bullshit with line breaks and expect people to take you seriously.

Subjective opinions.

>Does that sound like a good poem to you?

Yes. Its mechanics don't lie in meter or music but the effect of comparing two distinct realities; a technique common in early surrealism but still found in metaphors in pre-modern poetry. It's not hard to imagine how this is a poem and not prose with line-breaks. Like I said, you haven't been trained to appreciate it. It doesn't seem distinct to you but to people with experience in reading poetry it does.

> It doesn't even express anything, it's just a bunch of cliches and ugly phrases.

It clearly does express something, not that expression is the purpose of art. None of the lines are cliche. Ugliness is subjective.

Poetry doesn't have to be beautiful, not that one can't find beauty in anything if presented in a particular context. Conflation of beauty and art just tells me you don't have a good grasp on art history.

>Empty nonsense. Do you actually have an opinion or are you just associating with 'poets of worth' because you want to appear sophisticated?
How is that empty? You just want to throw away history and ignore every poet before you?
>They are exposed to different forms though.
Not well enough. Education in 2016 is a meme.
>No one is doing that except you.
Yeah, I haven't yet settled for aesthetic nihilism.
>Subjective opinions.
Do you have an argument or not?
>Yes. Its mechanics don't lie in meter or music but the effect of comparing two distinct realities; a technique common in early surrealism but still found in metaphors in pre-modern poetry. It's not hard to imagine how this is a poem and not prose with line-breaks. Like I said, you haven't been trained to appreciate it. It doesn't seem distinct to you but to people with experience in reading poetry it does.
Explain exactly what you like about that poem. Because it looks to me like bullshit.

>It clearly does express something, not that expression is the purpose of art. None of the lines are cliche. Ugliness is subjective.
>Poetry doesn't have to be beautiful, not that one can't find beauty in anything if presented in a particular context. Conflation of beauty and art just tells me you don't have a good grasp on art history.
Here it is. This is like something out of a dystopian novel. What in the actual fuck? People like you, who think that everything is subjectiveamd nothing matters and everything is good, are fuckinf ruining art. You can only spout these reductive meme-phrases in lieu of actually engaging with the art. I know, you're gonna lecture me on art history and subjectivity, yadda yadda, I've heard it all before. Is there any bad art by your view? You think everything is equal? Why should I accept ugliness and ignorance in poetry?

>You just want to throw away history and ignore every poet before you?

Your vague references to past poets make your argument less and less convincing every time it happens. Muh history, yes I get it.

>Not well enough.

What are you talking about? They're just not relevant forms now and not inherently superior. People still learn about them though.

>Yeah, I haven't yet settled for aesthetic nihilism.

You have, that is exactly what formalism is. The only meaning in the medium is its form.

>Do you have an argument or not?

I've already stated it but you just went back to talking about 'no you NEED to do this and this' without explaining why.

>Explain exactly what you like about that poem.

Interesting imagery generated through contrasts.

> People like you, who think that everything is subjectiveamd nothing matters and everything is good

I've never stated anything like this. There is good and bad art. Just the reasoning behind why you think some things are bad are misguided. It's not a lack of standards just a different set of standards.

>reductive meme-phrases in lieu of actually engaging with the art.

This is what you're doing to contemporary poetry. Quite literally. You don't have an argument or a reason why you believe certain things.

>Is there any bad art by your view? You think everything is equal? Why should I accept ugliness and ignorance in poetry?

Yes. Strange and meaningless question. Already explained.

How old are you?

>Why is this shit allowed?
Largely because the Symbolists, Modernists, and Beats paved the way.

Many of the poets that eschewed the use of certain poetic devices (e.g. rhyme) often raised up other ones to provide structure to their poetry (e.g. Whitman makes a lot of use of repetition and clever meter).

Because we see them as "moving beyond" or "intentionally breaking with" the traditional, we tend to respect what they did moreso than what happens in slam poetry. Free verse can come across as totally clueless and ignorant of any literary devices or literary past, which may be fine (or not) - probably depending on whether you agree with the politics that comes out of the spoken word stories/confessions/grievances.

But the trouble is that we can view free verse as a kind of liberation from *all* constraints. And thus, if anything is a poem... why should we bother to read poems, or learn anything about poems, before writing any? Why should we bother to practice poetic techniques and understand them until we know them so well that we are no longer subservient to them?

If there are no constraints on what a poem is, whatever words we write down can count as poetry. And that may be true, but maybe it also misses something crucial. Maybe we should also consider whether or not it is the mark of a lazy and untalented artist to "grow" what art is by creating something banal and calling it art - as compared with someone who wrestles with constraints and creates something inside the pressure cooker.

Not sure I understand why there is some faggot on Veeky Forums lately using formalist as a pejorative. Formalist approaches can expand the available tools/analyses/features/abstractions for other types of readings, and are about due to do so again using digital and computational methods.

If anything, in the long run a new formalist moment driven by the Digital Humanities may not even challenge the status quo... it could just as easily strengthen the appalling dominance of Theory in English Departments.

I hate this contemporary meme of listing great big sequences of objects that are picked up and then discarded every line

The language poets were a mistake

>Why is this shit allowed?
Jews.

>there are so many highly literate
Knowing how to read != Literacy
>educated people
lol, higher education is a meme and has been so for a long time.
>it's better that more people participate
No. Talent is rare and obscuring it in a literal sea of shit helps no one.

>Largely because the Symbolists, Modernists, and Beats paved the way.
All of them were extremely knowledgeable and educated in poetry, which is why they could experiment so effectively. Have you read Allen Ginsberg's lectures? The man was well-read and has a very deep understanding of poetry and poetics. The issue is people who take their examples and run with it without being inspired or intelligent enough to write good work. It doesn't help that higher education is shit easy and doesn't teach anyone anything.

1) It's shallow

2) It's ugly

3) It doesn't really say anything

4) It doesn't express anything legitimate

>unironically believing in the post Marcel Duchamp definition of art

Your definition and your idea of art is rooted in ideology.

Contemporary art likes to think itself as a very clever thing, but it's only a simulacrum. The jargon that surrounds contemporary art is generated by insecurity. Insecurity towards the natural sciences and their depth and rigor, insecurity towards technology which can replicate (but not create) any of our best achievments. So how do you save face? By creating genres and movements and styles that are so completely devoid of meaning and so incomprehensible to the non-experts, which is pretty much everyone, that they become entirely void of worth.

If you need to type out a 20+ pages essay to justify why your free verse poetry that follows no rules and that is essentially a bunch of random comparisons has value, or that it's art, that poem has no business existing in the first place.

Theory and words are cheap. When people like you do shit like that, you are using language as a rhetorical weapon to further hide from everything that goes against ''The Theory''.

A poem like that one isn't concerned with whether it's good or not, or if it has value or not, but only if it's interesting or not.

Well, as it turns out, postmodernism is no longer interesting, and it's on its deathbed.

Meme post.

Sometimes I forget that you faggots have no respect for Charles Bukowski

>Every other contemporary poet is some hack nigger or woman writing random bullshit with no regard for artistry.

There is, for me, at least one moment in my life where I have tasted / realized that the way a sequence of words has affected my train of thought has been invigorating

That was the moment where I transferred from a person who would like to be seen as the kind of person who digs poetry into the kind of guy who genuinely enjoys the way certain sentences tickle my brain. It was some line from Walden, actually, I forget which. It really felt like it was spiraling upwards towards some unreachable fact.

Form is inconsequential when it comes to something being good as it relates to the art of playing with words
There is nothing wrong with free verse. Don't even call it poetry, it seems you're caught up on labeling. Words strung together by an artistic person that either give you a feeling of beauty or don't. The way people the appreciation of poetry is nauseating and probably one of the prime reasons that it is basically a non-existent artform as far as the public is concerned

The point of contemporary poetry is that it is accessible not incomprehensible. There's no need to write 20+ pages to justify why something is 'interesting or not'. Your entire post contradicts itself. You are not a thinker.

>it's on its deathbed.

Postmodernism already passed. It's a 20th-century movement.

>accessible
Who cares? Its still shit.

>Your definition and your idea of art is rooted in ideology.

This is just plain wrong. I am interested in art of all styles, movements, periods. I'm not the one discriminating against a type I don't like because its values are different to my own and yet I am the one whose idea of art is rooted in ideology?

How is it shit when you were trying to prove it is shit by saying it's inaccessible? It's not, thus it can't be shit by the same metric.

Write your own formalist bullshit if you want to read good contemporary poetry.

why would we? why would anyone?

Free verse poetry is for talentless hacks who are so terrible they can't even rhyme.
>The way people the appreciation of poetry is nauseating and probably one of the prime reasons that it is basically a non-existent artform as far as the public is concerned
It's funny how poetry wasn't seen as the exclusive domain of homosexuals and poseurs until recently... it's almost as if the "plebs" like rhymes and appreciate the lyricism of metrically rigorous poetry.

Are you retarded? Are you just going to keep repeating that everything is subjective? Why are you using formalism as a boogeyman?

Just like plebs enjoy classical music and art, or it's at least useful in selling things to plebs who want to feel like they are a sophisticated consumer.

One of the few actually recognizable names in USA poetry.

>Postmodernism passed
>When the dominant and only viable theory in academia is deconstructionism or marxism
>kek

No, you don't understand, and what you say is false. There is nothing less accessible than contemporary poetry.

Take your average pleb. He reads some contemporary poetry, think it's cool, whatever. You show him poetry from the great masters of yore, he's impressed, and wonders why this kind of poetry is no longer being made. You now have to justify to the untrained why this kind of poetry is popular, or how it has worth. That is where the justification comes in. That is where the essay comes in. This applies to every contemporary art form btw.

''Artistry isn't decided by craft. The mechanisms of art and artistic experience aren't dependent on craft.''

How is this not ideology?

That's a different guy, you fucking retard.

I've said more than once that I don't think everything is subjective. There are objective qualities to contemporary art and you don't understand them.

You can respond to the point I made in that post if you want to. Is it inaccessible thus shit, or is it accessible thus shit?

How incredibly ugly. What happened to narrative? What happened to rhetoric? Fuck Pound for inventing the creed of poetry as a jumble of banal images.

It's not inacessible, it's just shit.

Iambic pentameter is hard, it's inacessible. But Shakespeare is still far more enjoyable to read than any of the modern trash eaters.

As an art movement postmodernism has passed. We're not talking about academia. Also Marx isn't postmodern.

>There is nothing less accessible than contemporary poetry.

It's too difficult for people to imagine their heart being certain, explicitly stated things?

>He reads some contemporary poetry, think it's cool, whatever.

Well that's the end of that then. It's accessible.

>How is this not ideology?

It's anti-ideology. As soon as you say 'art has to be a certain way' you are speaking ideologically. When you say it doesn't you are speaking against ideology.

>That's a different guy, you fucking retard.

I bet you felt really good after typing that.

So someone is telling me contemporary poetry is inaccessible thus shit, and someone else is telling me it's accessible thus shit.

I wish critics these days would read and engage with criticism of the past instead of some talentless hacks just typing shit they feel without any knowledge of the form.

>not realizing that during his time Shakespeare was a modern trash eater
you played yourself.

Completely agree. I have not read Ginsberg's lectures (have read other writings of his) but am not surprised. Those poets were generally reacting to something that they understood very well.

Their imitators can mostly only see the (romanticised) reaction toward old rules and traditions. Because of the cultural and economic imperatives of Progress, identifying and understanding those old rules and traditions is not seen as important. What is important is the capacity for production that they free up. And so the bar is lowered...

>As soon as you say 'art has to be a certain way' you are speaking ideologically. When you say it doesn't you are speaking against ideology.
I understand your predicament, you think it's a question of freedom. It's not, it's a question of nomenclature. You're perfectly at liberty to write in free verse. I am equally free to inform you that your work is trash in my eyes, to point out that mostly everyone agrees with me, and that poetry throughout the almost entirety of its existence has been the way I define it, contrary to your liking.

Yeah, it gets out of hand.

How am I supposed to enjoy something that looks like the scrawling of an 8-year old?

I thought sophistication was something that belonged to the patrician.

I'm not the other guy, but I can understand him. Let me make this clear to you.

1. Contemporary poetry is technically very easy. It requires no skill.
2. In this sense, it's acessible.
3. Contemporary poetry is ugly, aesthetic garbage.
4. In this sense, it's "inacessible", in the sense that no one wants to read it.

Did I make that explanation acessible enough for you?

>how am I supposed to enjoy abstract expressionism?

>mostly everyone agrees with me,
>believing this

There are different kinds of inaccessibilities.

Classical music is hard of access because it's difficult. Think of trying to get to the top of a mountain.

Contemporary poetry is hard of access because it's trash, so to justify its worth compared to superior forms of poetry you have to hide behind theory and obscurantist jargon. Think someone asking you to climb a set of stairs that receives new steps everytime you put your foot forward.

>implying marx isn't one of the most cited author in 100% of postmodernist texts
>implying I said marxism was postmodern

It's accessible only as long as it exists within an hierarchy where it's relegated at the bottom of the totem pole of forms of poetry by everyone that has a brain.

Saying art can be anything is also a form of ideology, you idiot. You can't escape ideology.

>scrawling of an 8-year-old

Yeah, it tells me that contemporary poetry sucks ass.

I don't disagree that it has been the way you define it, it's just not that way now and it doesn't need to be. Like I said, I'm not saying 'everything is subjective' or that 'contemporary poetry is better than poetry of the past'. I've never come close to even implying such a view, and I think maybe it's your inability to read and accurately process information that is a sort of barrier to your enjoyment of contemporary poetry.

Yes, but the feeling of being sophisticated (rather than actually being sophisticated) is what attracts plebs to older forms of art.

>inaccessible because it's trash

I am afraid you two geniuses of our generation do not fully understand something as simple as the difference between accessible and enjoyable.

or worse
maybe lyrical abstraction

I appreciate your semantics, but I find it hard to appreciate countering a straw man with another ad hominid.

People do want to read it though.

So I suppose to be a patrician is to wright what plebs enjoy, considering their outward attraction to sophistication.

Not all classical music is difficult.

> hide behind theory and obscurantist jargon.

Not at all. It's rather straight-forward.

>>implying I said marxism was postmodern
You said postmodernism hasn't passed because Marx is still cited. But honestly you've said so much other ahistorical and baseless shit I don't have trouble believing you would think Marx is postmodern.

>Saying art can be anything

Never said anything of the sort.

I see you can only comprehend of an opposing point-of-view through your ideological lens. Pay attention to what I'm saying, not what you think I am saying. Attack the argument, not the man.

You may leave the thread.

Well plebs also like pleb shit. When plebs write they're don't become patrician.

In order to appreciate something, and especially something like a form of poetry, you need a certain training. This is obvious. However...

Show anyone one of Rafael's painting. They think it's beautiful, but only because it looks beautiful. Explain to them the depth of the techniques he uses, his mastery of x and y, the meaning of the painting and so on, they will think it's even more beautiful.

Now take your average postmodernist painting. Almost anyone that takes a look at it will think it's trash, or at least inferior to the other painting, and they will understand everything about the painting itself immediately (it's a square, or random splashes of colors, or something of that nature). Now, in order to make them appreciate it, you have to shower them in theory and jargon which they will not understand, and which doesn't actually make sense.

What makes contemporary art inaccessible is the underlying necessary theorizing to justify its existence in the face of the past masterpieces.

If it's reads like shit, looks like shit, and sounds like shit, it's still shit.

If it's put into a category where everything is shit, and it appears to be shit, it's still shit.

Likewise, it it's shit, but is categorized as something other, it's still shit.

Thus,
>scrawling of an 8-year-old

Yours,
-Still shit

I suppose, then, it would be equally valid to say the patricians also enjoy classical music and art, given that the sophisticated are likewise attracted to sophistication.

''Not all classical music is difficult''

You're being disingenuous.

''Not at all. It's rather straight-forward''

Surely you jest? Or have you not been paying attention?

''You said postmodernism hasn't passed because Marx is still cited. But honestly you've said so much other ahistorical and baseless shit I don't have trouble believing you would think Marx is postmodern.''

If you think postmodernism didn't come about thanks to the work of Marx and Freud, who were heavily quoted/cited by people like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, you're just plain wrong. Postmodernism is an heavily left-leaning thing, and Marx is one of the favorites of its thinkers.

''Saying art can be anything''

You are implying it. How about you define art?

Here he goes again, misapplying the term 'postmodern'. Squares (Malevich?) and random splashes of colours (Pollock?) are distinctly modern. Find me any piece of information that states otherwise. I will find you thousands that support my view.

And if you think people can't (or don't) appreciate the composition of a Pollock, for example, you are very much mistaken.

> necessary theorizing to justify its existence

Untrue. Contemporary poetry is immediate. It doesn't need an explanation as to why it's different to modernist poetry or Romantic poetry.

Do you want to know why people don't write in the old styles these days? They're kitsch.

Just because art can be anything doesn't give it free reign.
Art can still be shit.
And shit art is bad.

"Art is heavily subjective, there is no way to objectively judge art."

Well, touche. But I know something about art too.

It can pretty damn well be subjectively bad just like everything else.

Thus, prose with line breaks can still be bad, and it tends to be; at least, that's my subjective opinion.

>inb4 objectivity is a spook

>You're being disingenuous.

No. You mustn't be familiar with 19th-century classical if you think it's difficult. Your entire argument is made up of vague allusions to history so I wouldn't be surprised if you view classical music as one unchanging block in much the same way you view poetry.

>Or have you not been paying attention?

Nothing left to add. It's straight-forward and immediate. You don't need any theory to think of a heart being a flea-filled attic or whatever.

>You are implying it.

I'm explicitly stating otherwise, multiple times. How many more times do I have to say "no I don't think everything is subjective" before you learn how to fucking read? And again, your demonstrated inability to read and understand words that are immediately in your face and as plain as day is probably why you have such a hard time with contemporary poetry.

>How about you define art?

Why would I want to do that?

Hey guys! I know everyone here is intent on dividing themselves into warring factions and arguing semantics meaninglessly, but I cam eup with a better idea! How about we all post some poetry we enjoy, from any time period, historical or contemporary, and then we exalt its merits? That way, instead of empty arguments and contextless accusations, we can try to support our own subjective arguments, instead of stupidly trying to shoot down others' subjective arguments. Wouldn't that be much more logical and fun?

:D

Here's a poem I like. More precisely, I enjoy the strange non-metric rhymes and rather silly dialect, the strange syntactic inversions and mixture of elegance and prosaic language, making it sound both familiar and surrealy foreign. I think it's a great merging of modern and classic poetic styles. It's Dream Song 77 by John Berryman -

Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world
& shaved & swung his barbells, duded Henry up
and p.a.'d poor thousands of persons on topics of grand
moment to Henry, ah to those less & none.
Wif a book of his in either hand
he is stript down to move on.

—Come away, Mr. Bones.

—Henry is tired of the winter,
& haircuts, & a squeamish comfy ruin-prone proud national
mind, & Spring (in the city so called).
Henry likes Fall.
Hé would be prepared to líve in a world of Fáll
for ever, impenitent Henry.
But the snows and summers grieve & dream;

thése fierce & airy occupations, and love,
raved away so many of Henry's years
it is a wonder that, with in each hand
one of his own mad books and all,
ancient fires for eyes, his head full
& his heart full, he's making ready to move on.

Are you trying to say people are not making these kinds of paintings anymore? Pollock is extremely late modernism.

Contemporary art is immediate, and inferior. To justify its existence, you need jargon. It thus becomes not accessible. Do you not understand this?

>kitsch

That's not a valid reason.

I'm obviously using classical as a general term to talk of stuff going from praetorius or older to very modern stuff. That should be obvious.

I quite frankly don't believe you.

If you say art is not in fact everything, and that it is in fact only certain things, then it has a definition for you. What is it?

Barely anyone paints anymore. Even rarer still is anything resembling abstract expressionism. People tend to like the immediacy of photography more than abstraction since the art world is so dependent on its market these days. Anything purposely inaccessible won't sell. Without sales you are unknown.

Contemporary poetry is much the same; its expression is obvious and refers to explicit experience that may resonate with others. Do we have poetic greats these days? We may only find out after the next generation of poetry passes when we can draw upon our contemporary poets as a sort of precedent. You don't need theory to explain the immediacy of contemporary poetry since it speaks for itself. Your narrative is not going to stick no matter how many times you repeat it at me.

>That's not a valid reason.

It is. People think rhyming or certain forms are like unnecessary gimmicks because the idea these days is that poetry is expression. I don't think art is generally definable as expression but it seems to be the thing that drives artistic creation since maybe the Romantic period.

> from praetorius or older to very modern stuff.

Then you should know that it is not a homogeneous block with the same forms and levels of accessibility throughout.

>What is it?

This is only answerable by looking at the entire history of art i.e. not discounting contemporary art. I'm not giving you a definition because it's irrelevant to my point and it would take too long to answer.

The Parnassien certainly thought differently.

How can you claim to properly express what you mean without a serious mastery of the language and its devices? How can you express something that is not shallow without resorting to the time honored techniques of the past, without rhyming or forms?What's the point of expressing something if it is so shallow that it become self-evident? You might as well stay shut.

Whitman's great. I was pleasantly surprised at how good free verse poetry can be

>tfw formalist
>tfw also woke af

If you don't define art, then calling something "art" is meaningless. If I told you that a poem was art and I told you the same poem was ajdjduxndic, without defining these terms, the terms are equally useless and meaningless.

OP got spanked

this thread is unintentionally funny because several commenters have referred to "contemporary poetry" when they were thinking of styles that haven't been relevant or widely practiced in at least a couple decades.

Gdfh

ITT: Scrublords struggle with the concept of subjective value

See also;
'Stop liking what I don't like'

you are a true brainlet

Subjectivity eschews any form of discussion.

>I think thing A is better than thing B because of these reasons
>Comparing things is impossible because everyone's opinions are equally valid

Where do we go from there?

Artistry is craft.

Go fuck yourself.

>Some poets have considered free verse restrictive in its own way. In 1922 Robert Bridges voiced his reservations in the essay 'Humdrum and Harum-Scarum.' Robert Frost later remarked that writing free verse was like "playing tennis without a net." William Carlos Williams said "being an art form, verse cannot be free in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principles".[7] Yvor Winters, the poet/critic said "the free verse that is really verse, the best that is, of W.C. Williams, H. D., Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound is the antithesis of free"[8]

No it isn't.

So every art history essay is meaningless because they didn't define what 'art' was in the first paragraph?

If they're trying to argue that something (movement, work, etc.) should be considered art, and doesn't at least implicitly define art (i.e. The statement "This painting should be considered art because it makes me feel strong emotions." defines art implicitly as "something that makes me feel strong emotions."), then their argument is meaningless.

If they're trying to argue that a piece of art is part of a movement without defining the movement explicitly or implicitly, then their argument is meaningless.

If they're discussing possible interpretations of a piece of art, then whether or not a piece is art doesn't matter to the argument presented in the essay.

If they're talking about the historical impacts of art and art movements, then the artistic merit of the art or movements is completely irrelevant to its effects on the history of the world.

If the definition of something is common knowledge and the author is going off of that, then it's fine, but it may lead to confusion.

In this thread, several people are trying to determine whether contemporary poetry should be considered art. To do so, we need to define art. There appears to be some confusion of what constitutes art. The only way to move forward with the discussion is to come to a consensus of what constitutes art.

The main ideas about what makes art that I've seen in this thread are either a historical basis or something along the lines of how it sounds.