What a cussed vexed bone of contention is this eternal debate over tradition & innovation, Moderns & Antients... in these matters, I come across often enough as a ponderous prig, which is not what I want...

Where do I stand, then?

As I see it, the world itself is "poetry", in Wallace Stevens' general sense - and there are many kinds of expressions or reflections of same offered by all kinds of artists, visual, musical, performance, comic, prosaic, dramatic, etc. & etc... - all kinds of unique inventive amalgams of various arts...

- but as for me, I want to keep playing up an (optional) distinction between prose & poetry, because I have something "thematic" or topical invested in the notion of "the poetic Word" as a very high kind of exalted song-vision... - & exalted doesn't have to mean ponderous or serious or prim, just inspired & ecstatic...

- such things can never be programmatic - because when they do become so, they lose their inner rightness, become sentimental or exclusionary... & life's poetry is not programmable, it is not an acquisition of any kind....