missing the point

Overheard at the Glenbow museum this weekend, in the Historical Artwork collection: [father to his preteen son] "You can see some of these paintings in books, they're very expensive."

the language art

"I think of poetry as the field of potential writing, as a supergenre that is striated by subgenres but is also hyperabsorptive—it can sop up an infinite range of linguistic styles and forms. It’s more interesting to me to think of the lyric poem (or pastoral poem, urban poem, found poem, disjunctive poem, epic poem, constraint poem) as a genre, in the most debased and self-conscious sense, like thrillers or detective fiction, than to think of poetry as an intrinsically high art form. Creating such debased genre poems—that’s fodder for whatever activity I’m involved in, but that activity operates within the supergenre, the pluriverses, of poetry, consciously reflecting poetry’s very long and dubious history. Poetry as a supergenre, rather than as a subgenre, can be understood, as David Antin likes to say, as the language art. It’s the verbal art, the research-and-development arm of language. Yet, despite its history, the possibility of poetry still remains a surprise, because, in a way, the fact of poetry as art remains unknown."

- Charles Bernstein