poetry is to rhetoric as painting is to the travel section.

GG argues that it is rhetoric which propels the significant articulation of feeling & conscience, ie. that rhetoric is motivated by an ethical demand.

& if poetry is distinguished from rhetoric, then it shuts itself off from the ethical/moral challenges of the present time.

My sense, rather, is that there is an unspoken ethos and a natural law - which is expressed in different & distinguishable ways - through poetry on the one hand, and through rhetoric (or discourse) on the other.

Gabriel Gudding is going around saying that I'm among those who still argue that poetry is not rhetoric.

Poetry is not rhetoric.

Poetry & rhetoric are 2 distinct forms of something called "eloquence".

Rhetoric employs words so as to fabricate the verbal equivalent of the hammer in the velvet glove.

Poetry, on the other hand, deploys language like a resonator.

What is a resonator, you ask? You ask? You ask? You ask...

coffee break thoughts:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric : poetry stems from an elusive necessity, which is inherent to, and resolves itself within, the articulation of the poem itself. But that's not all : the poem's language displays the effects of this necessity with a kind of self-reflexive awareness.

Rhetoric applies language toward particular persuasive purposes. The language itself is of value only insofar as it advances those persuasions. This is a form of necessity external to the work of art.

Many well-meaning poets are writing rhetorical texts, unaware that their golden speech contains no inner necessity.

Have been reading Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow. Very appropriate to the local weather. & watched a beautiful Turkish film, set in Istanbul : "Distant", directed by N.B. Ceylan.

Would like to get back to my essays, which hobby was sort of interrupted by the New Orleans adventure & the Lulu campaign.

In a comment posted over at Kasey's blog, I wrote something like "if only we could distinguish between works of art and intellectual games, between poetry & rhetoric." I see now that these essays made a start in that direction. Sometime I hope to elaborate & apply some of these precepts to reviews.

Reading matter of rabid Bush moron:
Dante, Poet of the Desert, by Giuseppe Mazzotta. I come back to this author's books every few years, one of my favorites. Much about rhetoric & history & theology & what Dante does with them.

Perhaps the red/blue state phenomenon, the right/left, the rep/dem drama, is the result of the difference between rhetoric (the intellectuals) and history (the business class). David Brooks, the middle-of-my-road-anyway pundit for NY Times, wrote an op-ed along these lines a while back.

In the first half of Stubborn Grew, the flow of actual (local) history is narrated by a fictional character (actually, a ghost). In the 2nd half, the obverse is the case. The fictionalized (failed) process of writing an epic/history poem is framed by, inset within, the "documentary"/confessional image of an actual individual (the author).

the rhetoric of "songs" (innocence, experience...). faux simplicitie. faux folks. (then again, Wyatt & Campion can teach you things about meter, music. . .)

On the other hand, one can admire & love the strange elegiac feeling of "Swamp Formalism", and imagine Lisa Jarnot actually responding with rueful self-disgust to the "poetic" improvisatory talent (like her own, the unacknowledged legislator) of Rumsfeld-in-action (at the news conferences). (I think the feeling is similar in "Land of Lincoln"; maybe I'm fooling myself.)

What bothers me is the dumbing-down of speech into a special idiom. All poetry is a special idiom, but if it's too obvious, you show your hand - ie. it becomes rhetoric. (Ron Silliman's pretentious syllable-counting only underlines - unintentionally - the artificiality, the mannerism, of the technique.) Incantantory, neo-romantic, poetical. . . & overly rhetorical. (Gabe Gudding - who believes that poetry is rhetoric - would disagree.)

I've never been too interested in Kent Johnson's obsession, the problematic nature of authorship. But reading through the latter part of his interview in Vert makes me wonder if there's a connection between his idee fixe & the version of negative capability[?] I wrote about earlier here - the idea that the emotional ground of a poem is where both author & audience connect, and that this emotional area is outside the author's control. (On some level, is every poem written by Anonymous, then? That's stretching it. But neither is "identity" in a simple identifiable state at the moment of composition.)

This might also have some relation to the notion of sincerity which Kent also discusses. Edwin Honig was always concerned with distinguishing between the authentic poem and rhetoric : he would often slash away at whole stanzas of others' poems, saying "you don't need this, it's just rhetoric". Perhaps what he was getting at was the difference between authentic emotion in poetry & the rhetorical manipulation of a phantom emotion. (Honig also once proposed an anthology made up entirely of poems by Anonymous. Not incidentally is he one of the leading Pessoa scholars.)

Joe Duemer responding to my grumpy snarls, as if they were aimed at him. Joe, I never think of you in relation to "easy rhetoric". You create dialogue through articulate thoughtfulness, a philosophical approach.