Why do we call everything poetry?

[Joshua S.]

It seems to me that if you write anything that is not a short story, if it has weird line breaks, or weird design, we are to call it poetry? Grocery lists, chat room transcripts, etc, are categorized as some "experimental poetry."

I think this labeling does a disservice to poetry (free form and verse) as well as literature itself. It's time we start calling these new forms literature and giving tem room to grow and excite. What say you?

[[deleted user]]

To place poetry on a pedestal is to do it a disservice.

[[deleted user]]

In a moment is everything, that poetry captures. I have never been present to me.

[[deleted user]]

I must admit here that I am influenced here by the Bible in basically contradicting myself.

[Joshua S.]

Right, so Anthony. What do we call those things? Do we need classification in a broad sense?

[[deleted user]]

The poetic, the beautiful are not scientific definitions. Analysis kills the subjects. To rip the guts out of a thing, you really need some anger.

[Joshua S.]

To not analyze something, to conflate it with "the beautiful," to consider it godly, unascertainable, is to also rip its guts out. Or rather to happily repress the fact that it has guts, and mechanisms.

We are talking about literary forms, not the literature itself.

[[deleted user]]

Your forms have no shape.

[[deleted user]]

The novel or play is made to move towards poetic justice. The poem simply moves.

[[deleted user]]

Beauty is what we desire.

[[deleted user]]

The barrier between forms is a cloudy area. What is prose? What is poetry? What is truth? There are more rationalists today than ever before, even though rationalism essentially died in the early part of the Twentieth Century.