Hey Scott;
I said that because I think, in relations to all of us (or me, at least), you have the clearest sense of your aesthetic. It seems that the narrative conflict is greater in us (or me) than in you. I can rethink it now.

But from what you just said to Jessea (I happen to overhear), how then would you respond to a claim that poetry, because it's about something other than the daily needs, establishes hierarchy--that poetry is a hard thing to understand and therefore only the poets should be engaged in it? This is scarily exclusionary...

Or (now I am pretending to be you responding to me), one could argue that, by breaking sentences, authority is broken....ouwww....I used to be convinced by that. But I'm not too sure anymore.

In order to break something, one has to know the something first. In order to appreciate the art of broken pieces (or sentences), one has to know the whole. To say that broken sentences break hierarchy implies that hierarchy comes first.

Now, to arrive at the art of broken pieces, hierarchy has to be figured into the picture first, and then disgusted and abandoned. But the result is that hierarchy is always there because one has to go through it to arrive at its antithesis.

One could argue, though, that the aesthetic doesn't lie in the broken pieces. It's not antithesis but a thing by itself. But this seems to beg the question IF the initial response was to question the authority of sentence.


AND--if you are curious--why the heck I am blog-ative--I am working on a paper and am procrastinating endlessly. You know how that is...