Poetic Requirements

What are the ingredients for a poetic experience? As a minimum one
needs a text and a reader. Let's suppose (somewhat fancifully) that some
texts are intrinsically more poetic than others. Let's also suppose that
readers approach texts in various ways - they read a repair manual
differently to the way they read a self-proclaimed poem. These options
lead to the following possibilities. I've added examples of each scenerio
to make things clearer.

		Poetic Text?
		Yes	No
Poetic Reading?	Yes	"Do Not Go Gentle"	found poetry
	No	Pop lyrics?	repair manual

To increase the poetic effect of a text, you can make the text more poetic,
or you can make the reader adopt a more poetic approach. The latter option is
not to be underestimated - if you
make your text look like a poem, readers are more likely to treat it as such.
They may read into your poem things you didn't put there, but at least they'll
see more of what you meant them to see. The downside is that it
risks accusations of quackery if the text fails to match the expectations.

But of course there's more to it than having a text and a reader - the
2 need to get together under suitable conditions.
In Acumen 54 (Jan 2006) Judy Gahagan wrote "the once unique poetry habitat
is a threatened one", a metaphor which can be extended. When a species'
habitat shrinks, a few things are likely to happen

• populations become isolated - the performance poets, the
  academics, the comedians become isolated from each other and
  develop independently. Some
  species require large contiguous areas.


• evolutionary pressures change - species survival depends
  increasingly on its ability to copy with marginal situations and isolation


• artificial habitats are created - zoos help species
  survive, but also lead to cannibalism, inbreeding, loss of parental
  and eating skills, etc. Poetry magazines can have side-effects too.

Poets may be in control of their text, and have some control over
how the reader will approach the piece. It's rather harder to
affect the environmental conditions, but the effort maybe be worthwhile.
In the long run it may even be necessary.