11-26-2012, 05:57 AM
Society is deeply flawed? Thank god someone pointed that out, we've all been writing about how pretty kittens are. And yes, pursuit of ANYTHING purely for pleasure, to the exclusion of all else, is hedonism. I don't care how you justify it and I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with a bit of self-gratification now and then, but just knowing isn't learning. I can have students regurgitate facts all day long, but that doesn't mean they've been taught a damn thing.
So yes, society is flawed -- what are you doing about that? The point is application of knowledge -- helping others to contextualise it and mesh it with what they already know to produce a new understanding. We can do that with poetry, but only if the poetry is packaged in such a way that people can use their prior knowledge to access these new ideas, and only if the new ideas allow people to engage their higher order processes rather than simply telling them what to think.
Incidentally, I don't recall anyone specifically targetting your poetry. Any arguments have been against your philosophy on what constitutes poetry -- and since philosophy is largely a personal thing, I think that's fair. My own philosophies are in a state of flux for the most part, though I have strong ideas about the importance of audience in particular -- and additionally, I don't believe poetry should simply be about "dealing with reality", it should be about altering that reality for the better, for more than one person.
So yes, society is flawed -- what are you doing about that? The point is application of knowledge -- helping others to contextualise it and mesh it with what they already know to produce a new understanding. We can do that with poetry, but only if the poetry is packaged in such a way that people can use their prior knowledge to access these new ideas, and only if the new ideas allow people to engage their higher order processes rather than simply telling them what to think.
Incidentally, I don't recall anyone specifically targetting your poetry. Any arguments have been against your philosophy on what constitutes poetry -- and since philosophy is largely a personal thing, I think that's fair. My own philosophies are in a state of flux for the most part, though I have strong ideas about the importance of audience in particular -- and additionally, I don't believe poetry should simply be about "dealing with reality", it should be about altering that reality for the better, for more than one person.
It could be worse