A genealogy of poetry

As a verbal artifact, a poem draws upon a number of nonverbal structures in the brain. Even before the emergence of language, certain behaviors had to have been in place, e.g. an increased capacity to bind perceptual data and process them as single events (episodes) and the ability to reproduce perceived actions (mimesis). These two evolutionary phases, according to Merlin Donald, preceded language, but to allow for the emergence of that specific activity we know as poetry, two other behaviors must also have evolved -play and tool-making. Play supplied episodes with frames and as-if intentionality, while tool-making skills enhanced mimesis by crafting artifacts that were saved and reused. Palaeopoetics, which I would define as the study of cognitive skills preadaptive to verbal poiesis, is a project that examines play, episodic awareness, mimesis, and tool-making as forming the common foundation upon which all the myriad varieties of oral and written poetry have been built.

2024

Talking about poetry, Oripeloye (2017:41) noted that 'all the definitions point to peculiar features of poetry such as content, form and effects that are recognized in particular poems when they are read". The fact is that "while reading any poem, the reader learns about events and reflects on them, and he/she is able to draw certain conclusions which become part of his/her experience about life". Oripeloye also lists the functions of poetry, but he does not comment on the functions he has listed into his book. This article comments on the functions of poetry that I found useful and adds two more other functions. The umbrella term covering poetry as a literary genre is art and art itself is part of culture. "Culture is a complex set which includes arts, education, technology, traditions, customs, beliefs, the way people of a given society talk, dress, their eating habits, their mind-set…" and that can be improved by education (Ngwaba, 2017:8).

2006

1. Three other elements of poetry are rhyme scheme, meter (ie. regularrhythm) and word sounds (like alliteration). These are sometimes collectively called sound play because they take advantage of the performative, spoken nature of poetry. Rhyme is the repetition of similar sounds. Poetry has perhaps always lay in some men's hearts. Perhaps, as seen from some of the evidence we have discovered in our times, even primitive man held close to him the origins of poetry. He had, for example, the pristine sky above him filled at night with such marvelous stars, such supernumerary lanterns and sparkling bits of sky, all suspended by who knew what, right in the middle of the overwhelming darkness and space of the night-yes, right in the middle of that stunning vacuum and depth which seemed to go out deeper and deeper and forever. These sensational ideas and thoughts perhaps ran through the inexpert mind of the primordial being hundreds of thousands of years ago, when man was not even man yet, and when man was just on the evolutionary machinery and path of becoming what he has been since about ten or twenty thousand years ago. These were surely the wonderments which captivated his mind and attention when outdoors at night. They must have been truly marvelous sights to look at in those times. Things have changed since then, and yet if we just take time when we are away from the city, or maybe even when we are in our own back yard, if we just look above us in total

De Revisor (Dutch LIterary Magazine)

A perspective on poetry traditions in the world

Ibercampus , 2021

Some notes on the definition of poetry, taking into account not just the formal features of poetic genres, but also the social and artistic contexts in which poetry is written, read, circulated, invoked or used. Keywords: Poetry, Literary theory, Discourse analysis, Criticism, Poetics

"2d. Sophocles wanted a true language in which things were ontologically nominal. This is true in fiction and history. Fiction meaning poetry. Poetry meaning history. History meaning the future state of having been. This is the job of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans." In Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms (2009), quoted above, in Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius (2010), in Kenneth Goldsmith’s introduction to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) and in many other instances, Gertrude Stein is claimed as the modernist progenitor for conceptual poetry, and her work is cited as an originating example of conceptual writing. This paper will consider the cogency of this reading of Stein’s work and engage critically with the notion of origin upon which such claims are founded. The paper asks two questions. First: in which ways can Stein be considered as a progenitor for conceptual poetry? Second: in proposing such a genealogy for itself, what history of modernism is conceptual poetry writing? In order to explore these questions, the paper examines Kim Rosenfield’s 2008 book re: evolution and Gertrude Stein’s 1926 unpublished text ‘Natural Phenomena.’ Both texts provide a reworking of the Darwinian progressive model, reimagining notions of origin, genealogy and evolution. These texts, I would suggest, coincide in a number of related ways: in their resistance to a comprehensive taxonomy, in their emphasis on the multiplicity of strains, and in their rejection of an authoritative position from which to rewrite the past. The paper argues that both these texts therefore postulate the impossibility of an authentic recuperation of origins, and that, in those conditions, tracing a genealogy becomes an act of composition. The paper further argues that modernism’s concern over its genealogy, fossilized in the high modernist canon, is regenerated in conceptual poetry’s creative rewriting of literary history.

Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology (AJCN). № 7-8 Autumn 2012 / 2014. , 2016

This study reconsiders the standard generic opposition between narrative and non-narrative poetry. Genre is conceived, in line with recent Russian scholarship, in analogy with the gene in biology, so that no matter what transformations and dislocations traditional genres might undergo over time, their structures, like organisms, do not fundamentally change but only mutate. What sets poetry off from prose is that the structures of the former are “noticeably measured and rhythmical.” Yet, poetry’s “fine-textured counterpoint of verse, syntax and narrative,” which takes the form of segmentivity, gapping and measurement/ countermeasurement at various textual levels (McHale), carries over, in Comuzzi’s proposal, to prose. Narrative texts, she argues, construct metric patterns and countermeasurements to these patterns through the various planes of point of view inscribed in the supra-phrasal units of narrative composition identified by Boris Uspenskij. Comuzzi completes her contribution to transgeneric narratology with a penetrating analysis of a corpus of lyric poems in which narrative scenarios, however discreet, are indissociable from the counterpoint of meter and rhythm. (From John Pier's Forword to the Journal issue)

Text, 2021