A while back I showed my grandma some of my poems

Her response was something like “At no point did I have any idea why one word followed another”

What is our answer when someone asks “I don’t get what I am supposed to be getting out of this”

To be a critic of what we might broadly and inadequately call experimental poetry I think you need to have an answer to that ready to go

Like “are you familiar with the concept of an acquired taste—this is what people who spend a life in poetry need to sustain them”

In the Theaetetus, refuting Protagoras / Man the Measure, Plato at one point ridicules the idea of majority assent being a measure of truthfulness

So also for experimental poetry, we certainly wouldn’t say this is good because it appeals to an innate aesthetic sense like Adele does

Instead we might say that e.g. a Dorn or Baraka poem is good because it is objectively so. It is good among the orders of poetry as such

Which is clearly a breakdown in our/my ability to communicate value beyond the choir

At the same time I am staunchly resistant to the idea of ascribing value to poetry by its conformation to a value system that is not entirely poetry’s own, e.g. inquiry...

...I don’t think poetry does what philosophy does but somehow more critically, and if it did I would not think that this was persuasive of poetry’s value

...or even beauty

I am playing with the idea that, when we say that a poem is good, what we really mean is that it is dense. Goodness, beauty, even inquiry, all just proxies for density

No further questions at this time

I just want so badly to build a bridge from density to James when he says stuff like https://twitter.com/bigprosody/status/1233294914047234048?s=21 https://twitter.com/BigProsody/status/1233294914047234048

And https://twitter.com/bigprosody/status/1220964911242596352?s=21 https://twitter.com/BigProsody/status/1220964911242596352

Density...gravity...something that redistributes, however faintly, bodies in space and time

A couple more notes on density, from an email yesterday morning to collaborator @fandangowu

What if when I say poetic form, and think about everything that goes into achieving it, and everything I like about it once achieved, the word form is doing hardly any work at all?

What if by poetic form I just mean density?

(The synergy with my avatar was lost on me, but it is lost on me no longer)

It is easier to be clear about simple things, but clarity is not a foil for density. Unclarity foils density, by limiting what the text can contain. Text can be denser by being clear

How to assimilate non-denotative forms of discourse to an all-in-one density metric? Is Thoreau denser because he’s funny? Is Emerson less dense than he otherwise would be because he’s never funny?

Anyway what is density? Perhaps philosophy is dense because it deals with generality. Generality covers more ground. By combining generalities, you fit a lot into a small area.

Combinations of generalities are both more general, because there are more of them, and more specific, because fewer things have both attributes. E.g red + wheelbarrow is more general than just red...

...but red wheelbarrow refers to a narrower range of objects than red does or than wheelbarrow does.

Poetry exploits this dynamic.

So [poet who has liked some of this thread] is dense in the same way as [philosopher], plus something else. That plus is the incorporation of narrowing into broadening. Poetry can be denser than philosophy

But not poetry as a trickster that subverts philosophy’s generality by reasserting particularity. Poetry as cartography of the interface between particularly and generality. Poetry conserves philosophy’s generality and adds to it

Not to achieve philosophy, inquiry, but to achieve the poem. For the work of density to matter to us “aesthetically”?? or simply poetically

And so what is the work of density, and how does one enter upon it?

This Bob Kaufman poem is dense and (citation needed) I believe he wrote it after not writing or speaking, complete silence, for a year (??)—maybe that’s the work of density