David Hess, in a controversial mood, writ:
"I don't think what you said was that foolish but, like I said, these struggles for the
definition of poetry give me a belly-ache. Sometimes they are necessary, but more
often seem superfluous to any engagement with historical context -- what Josh is
partly interested in -- and the complexity of the art."

David, it wasn't exactly a definition I was looking for. I was trying to characterize the distinctive process or activity of making poetry, and how it synthesizes the pre-verbal & the verbal. Earlier back in Jan. or Feb. on this blog I wrote a lot more about this. My notion of "tradition" is bound up with the idea that poetry-making is a distinct activity which not only has not changed much, essentially, over the centuries - moreover, it's an activity with a special relationship to time itself : that is, poetry tries to present a special kind of immediacy, or contemporaneity, which absorbs the past into the Now. This aspect actually changes how you "define" Tradition : ie., if poetry-making is a special attachment to Nowness, as well as a somewhat perennial, unchanging, distinctive activity, then, in some sense, Tradition must be Now, or it's not Tradition, either.