From: wprovinc@zeus.calpoly.edu (William E. Province)
Subject: Re: HELP NEEDED (Is poetry luxury?)
Organization: California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 00:40:56 GMT

sheilah@wam.umd.edu (Sheila Herndon) writes:
>In article <1992Nov09.180907.195278@zeus.calpoly.edu> wprovinc@zeus.calpoly.edu (William E. Province) writes:
>>        I write poetry for the same reason that I learned how to speak.
>
>	Why did you learn how to speak?

   For the purpose of communicating my needs and desires.  I have very
specific memories.  You see, I did not choose to speak until I was
four years old, but once I did learn, I could not be shut up!  It was
like a dam breaking loose, releasing water to a draught-ridden land.
Specifically, I remember my mother refusing to give me orange juice 
instead of water unless I did more than point at the refrigerator.

   <Sigh>  I feel that I owe more explanation, and I'm not certain
how to do this without boring people with the story of my early life.
If you feel that this explanation was incomplete, then I can e-mail
you some of these details (which are, actually, rather unique.)
However, in the meantime, you will just have to be content with
some vague generalities.

   Speaking is a necessary skill in our society; it performs the
necessary task of providing a medium of communication.  In our
society, poetry is not necessary for basic survival.  In other words,
poetry is unnecessary for the purpose of acquiring a glass of orange 
juice, and in all truth, will rarely land you a job that will get
a roof placed over your head.  Some form of art or at least an 
understanding or appreciation of beauty however, I think is necessary
for growth beyond a certain level.  Human beings have the odd 
tendency to look for meaning in the world, and to look for patterns.
When one of those patterns is found, it needs a medium of expression
to obtain significance.  Poetry forms one of those mediums.  I would
also argue that a search for patterns is an instictual need.  It
allows us to form languages, it allows us to think that there may
be meaning in our life.  (Perhaps one could argue that life has no
inherent meaning, but that would not stop a human being's urge to
search for it.)
>
>>        I listen to/read poetry for the same reason that I learned how
>>        to understand the spoken words of others.
>
>	same applies.
>

I am not so arrogant as to think that I am the only person who is
capable of finding patterns in the world.  I like seeing the patterns
that others discover as well.  Furthermore, communication would be
fairly dull if it was only communication with onself.  I would need
communication with other entities, and thus, I would have to understand
what they would say.  This applies equally to poetry and speech.


>They are also mixed up. learning to understand and learning to speak
>that is. In your opnion can you really, _learn to understand_?
>It is a neat statement. Think about it some more. I am.
>
   I used the phrase "learn to understand the spoken words of others"
rather loosely.  Perhaps, I really had no choice in the matter.
Perhaps, I was driven by an instinctual urge to understand the 
world around me.  However, if I was presented with a choice of
either understanding the english language or not understanding
the english language, I would now say that I would choose to 
understand.  This would mean that I would pay attention when 
people spoke, and that I would attempt to learn what the people
were saying.


>
>Once a math teacher asked me how I was so quick at solving one of
>the problems, and I told her that after I took geometry I learned
>how to think (this was back in high school) after - she told me one couldn't
>_learn_ how to think.

   I disagree with this, at least in the context of the discourse of
geometry.  In a larger context, this person might be right.  Learning
something requires thinking, thus if one had to "learn how to think",
you are left with the chicken-egg paradox.  (Which happened first :
Were you originally able to think and thus were able to learn, or did you 
have to learn how to think?  Thinking/Learning, which came first?)
That doesn't mean that the statement is wrong, for the two processes
of learning and thinking might be built one on top of the other,
acquiring more and more of each other as more learning/thinking is 
performed.  It still leaves some difficulties though.  

   Back to geometry.  The problem that I have with your teacher's
statement is that she did not address what you had meant, rather it
addressed the words that you used.  Somehow, after taking geometry,
you learned of certain patterns that exist in the world.  You learned
that it is indeed possible to learn new concepts by using methods
that you have used before.  What you had done was learned the pattern
of a particular form of learning.  Your instructor was addressing 
the larger context of "learning to think", which is probably not
really what you had meant.

   -- bill