Not long ago, Cameron Bass reposted my little Venn diagram of poetry, prose poetry & the concept of plotless prose under the heading of “why I don’t like to think about poetry too much.” Maybe he meant to write “too clearly” instead, but I don’t think so. He calls my own verbal noodling there “silly, pointless wonk-talk.” This is that old push-pull between folks who a “direct” relationship to poetry & language & those of us who’ve been around the block once or twice who know that the so-called direct relationship is a fool’s errand at best. It’s one reason why there is more than one kind of poetry in the world, so we should celebrate the antagonism even as it makes us cringe.

 

Happily, I’m not the only practitioner of what Cameron might think of as wonk-talk on the web these days. First, Geof Huth has a fine piece on Fibonacci & daily life, as viewed in the collaborations of Wendy Collins Sorin & Derek White. Meanwhile, Michael Hoerman is contemplating how language & reference transform into comprehension – warning to Cameron Bass, we have diagrams predicated on cognitive linguistics here. The irony is that Hoerman is trying to account for intuition & gestalt, aspects he groups under the term precognitive.