[Newspoetry] Re: Newspoetry Digest, Vol 2, Issue 1

[emerick at chorus.net]

Well, Kurtz takes my words at a different pitch -- because form is how 
we necessarily style words, into packets that have some character to 
them.  The learned social preferences of poets, as a community of 
style, is quite different than those of the learned social preferences 
of scientists.  It well might be that each community differentially 
evolves, against the context of those existing preferences, internal to 
one community, and, structurally (ie as form), external to any others --
 including and excluding being concurrent kinds of processes.

My different pitch, I had hoped to say, is that all such choice of 
forms, ab initio, are free -- or arbitrary.  One can not tell what is 
true by looking at a form, to see how its matters of content appear to 
us.  Form does not disclose what is true.  What is true, as a matter of 
logic, for instance, follows from suppositions about consistency: one 
can not reasonably agree to include, in the confines of a single 
logical form, both a proposition and its negation.

My pitch extends its difference, on the premise that form serves some 
uses, to science versus literature.  Most critically, science never 
accepts the idea that its suppositions are true, because of the way 
that they may happen to be stated, (with)in some form.  Rather, science 
insists on the external verifiability principle -- that what is 
external to a writing necessarily furnishes us with the criteria for 
deciding what is a true statement.  Consistency in science becomes that 
set of statements that one could not plausibly reject, on the basis of 
stating what one knows to be true, of the world.  Consequences, in 
science, have to be tested -- to see if they occur.

None of this happens, though, in literature (classically speaking).  
One can not say, of Odysseus, the figure, that it matters whether he 
"existed" as such, and, then, only as so described.  The generality 
that is possible in all writing has no natural limits.

Science chose its limits, in the very idea of understanding what is 
natural, as a sequence, explicable in terms of previous states of that 
same sequence.  Poetry chooses, as well, in contrast, to appreciate the 
natural -- in a way which aims more at human attachments (obsesssions, 
in the extreme) -- by exposing to us what could be the state of our 
expectations, as possibly against the way that things may merely happen 
to be.

Science writing, thus, really finds it unnecessary to exclaim "Aha!" 
even though every learner, in acquiring the preferences of his 
community, most likely constantly exclaims -- or else fails as a 
scientist.  By contrast, what Poetry may evoke is more of a soothing 
sound like "Aaahhh..." -- of contentment, or discontentment (as in 
"Aye, tear 'er tattered ensigns down, long 'ave they waved on 
high..."   When Poetry voices discontent, it implies or relies upon our 
knowing or assuming what is a proper content.

So, form really cuts no distinction between writings.  A scientific 
tract would be as true, or not, regardless of its form.  And, a Poem 
would be as good or bad, a thing of beauty or not, by how we happen to 
feel.  When we change, and we can, a Poem may thus become reviled and 
despised, or resurrected and revived.  But, science does not depend on 
the states of affairs in individuals, as to how they personally may 
regard their own attachments.  Unlike Poetry, Science only has a 
collective existence, as what would necessarily be common to all men.

Well, that's my pitch of philosophy (to steal from Cavell).

Don**2