The Best Brownies

[miyako73]

To break the monotony of critiques and praises, maybe we can discuss, in a healthy fashion, what makes a piece of writing a poem. I, too, am bothered the way a crumpled paper considered a sculpture confuses me.

The Best Brownies

Preheat oven
to 350 degrees.
Grease and flour
a square mould.
In a large pan,
melt butter.
Remove from heat,
and stir in sugar,
eggs, and vanilla.
Beat in cocoa,
sifted flour, salt
and baking powder.
Spread batter
into the mould.
Bake until golden;
do not overcook.

[cogs]

i think it's meter and poetic devices, with emphasis on metaphor, simile, and parallel ideas. in art, i suppose you have to extract what's useful and of value.

[MorpheusSandman]

I still agree with Terry Eagleton and his simple definition of poetry that is literature where the writer rather than the publisher decides where the line breaks go. I'm much of the opinion now, though, that poetry as a label is pretty useless. Like most labels, it's an umbrella that covers a very wide-range of components that get lost and added to over time, so that some things that fall under the label don't resemble at all other objects that do fall under the label. It's hard to find many relevant connections between The Iliad and WCW's The Red Wheelbarrow, certainly not enough to make a single label useful in describing them.

I've learned a tremendous amount from Eliezer Yudkowsky's A Human's Guide to Words (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human%27s_Guide_to_Words), and he has one post where he discusses art (http://lesswrong.com/lw/o0/where_to_draw_the_boundary) specifically. The thing is, we sometimes forget that there is a reality out there that our words are supposed to connect meaningfully to. When you can say a word that refers to something in reality and another person has no idea what to expect when they encounter that something, then there's a good indication that the word has become almost useless. Say "I'm going to show you a poem" to someone and then ask them, before you show it, what they'd expect. Chances are you'll get a variety of answers. Compare that to "I'm going to show you a Ford F-150" to someone and then see what they'd expect.

As a rationalist, I've come to abide by the notion that absolute reductionism is the only way to really know what anything really is. Any label that exists to cover multiple things is ultimately going to have its failures to cover the grey areas between them. One more link from that sequence of posts I'll like you to is How and Algorithm Feels from the Inside, (http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/) but I really just want to quote this bit:
We know where Pluto is, and where it's going; we know Pluto's shape, and Pluto's mass—but is it a planet? And yes, there were people who said this was a fight over definitions—but even that is a Network 2 sort of perspective, because you're arguing about how the central unit ought to be wired up. If you were a mind constructed along the lines of Network 1, you wouldn't say "It depends on how you define 'planet'," you would just say, "Given that we know Pluto's orbit and shape and mass, there is no question left to ask." Or, rather, that's how it would feel—it would feel like there was no question left—if you were a mind constructed along the lines of Network 1.If you replace "Pluto" there with "poetry," and replace "shape, mass, location" there with "line breaks, rhymes, meter" etc. then it's pretty much the same thing. Once we've determined if a work of literature has or doesn't have line breaks, meter, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, simile, irony, etc. then asking whether or not it's poetry is nonsensical, because we already know everything there is to know about it. But the way our brains our wired it still frequently feels like there's a leftover question, like "poetry" is an actual thing floating out there in reality and we have to know whether something "is" or "isn't" that thing. But poetry isn't an actual thing. It's a label that covers many similar and dissimilar objects. So at some point it becomes nonsensical to ask "is it poetry" for the same reason it becomes nonsensical to ask "is Pluto a planet".