TED Community » Dinika Govender

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  A reply on Talk: Billy Collins: Everyday moments, caught in time

  Mar 25 2012: Dear Shaun,
  
  Thanks for the enlightening description of that Origin of Poetry. I beg to differ on your opposition to "child-like short-story telling" as a form of true poetry, and here's why:
  
  Based on your own description, it seems that if "necessity is the mother of invention", then the evolution of 'royal reporting' into something understandable to the masses was a necessary innovation if rulers were ever to connect with the illiterate, relatively immobile, disconnected ruled. I have a sneaky suspicion times have changed.
  
  Now at the risk of sounding horribly reductionist:
  To critique through fundamentalism (or puritanism) an art which is- according to its (your) reported origin- an art born from adaptability, creativity and resourcefulness is ultimately, hypocritical.
  
  Poetry was not born a static rhyme, and its history should by no means dictate a linear future.
  As societies continually regress,digress and progress, I, for one, certainly hope that Poetry grows more diverse, matures more complex, and sustains new Poetic life more intricately inspired than any two-term U.S. Poet Laureate himself might ever have imagined.
  
  This is merely my perspective- instigated and inspired by your own appreciation for the "original rhyme" over the interpretive, contemporary, short story. I thank you, and I challenge you to reconsider.
  
  Kind regards
  Dinika