第一片大白菜：
from
http://forum.deviantart.com/galleries/writers/1278087/
这个定义没有认为诗的技术成分Patterned speech是必要的。
zt of zt:
In 'The Lyric Principle' (Poetry Review, vol.97:2-3, 2007) Don Paterson attempts to define what poetry is. He says a lot of things. A lot of them are very interesting things. I can elaborate on them if you like; alternatively I might create threads on them later, or you could even buy the journal, but for now....
in the article he says this of poetry:
That it is "the one art form where its memory and its acquisition are one and the same thing... if you can remember a poem, you possess it wholly: to remember a poem is the poem."
and, because of this, poetry tends to utilise, even to "valorise", "strategies and devices which make it more memorable".
By this he means, as he goes on to explain, that, as poetry's original use as an art form was its memorableness (think about ballads which told stories and news, and the importance of an oral tradition in times when most people were illiterate); the language of poetry, therefore, and the modes of speech we find in poetry that we tend to label poetic techniques (rhyme, metre, alliteration, metaphor, simile, and the rest of the check-list) are "poetic" because they are aids to memorability.
He further categorises these techniques into three realms of effectiveness:
Brief speech: poems tend to contract to the fewest possible words to convey whatever it is the poet is attempting to convey; it is an art form dense in both structure and meaning.
Patterned speech: this includes all the methods of making poetry aurally pleasing, but that we now often question the poetic value of, now poetry is more commonly a non-oral art form: ie. rhyme, metre, repetition, alliteration, assonance, etc.
Original speech: this includes the imagery, figurative language, and juxtaposed words/ideas, which are more striking and stand out more in a reader's mind/memory the more original they are; and it is chiefly by virtue of originality of speech that we commonly value poetry today.
Furthermore, he also stresses the importance of recognising that each of these factors are interrelated and interdependent. The pressure of brevity demands originality, and so on.
So. How far do you think this definition of poetry holds? Does it sound like a pretty good idea of what poetry is, or a stupid one? What are its flaws?
