A recent post in The Stone, a New York Times blog, has been sitting on my browser for a couple of weeks now, bugging me. I refer to “Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination” by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone, which uses a poeticized version of a Craigslist personal ad to advocate for what the authors dub “the poetic imagination”—an imagination they locate in the minds of readers, not poets. Lepore and Stone describe a number of features they find especially salient in the “lineated” version of the ad—though they miss a few, in my view—to argue that “a poem—and artistic language more generally—is open to whatever we find in it.”
Sigh.
Let us set aside, for the moment, the possibility that the authors are so steeped in William Carlos Williams that they fail to recognize the way in which the found poem on which they focus is indebted to one particular type of…