Dovina21 Nov 2004

Again, you have rambled on and on in hopeful appearance of reasonableness and have failed. Your attempts at relating my poem and my comments to logical arguments lose on the very grounds you claim as necessary bases for evaluation of poems. You say, “This poem is trying to be a philosophy/math poem” and that I’ve “filled it up with philosophy gobble which you don't get. When we held you to the standards you set for it by doing so, you said ‘oh no, it isn't a philosophy poem, it's felt life.’” As usual, you have said that I said something which I did not. But I agree that the poem presents an appearance of relating philosophy, as it applies to word definitions, to felt life. You have carried on about the precise meaning of “opposite,” claiming that “hate” is not the opposite of “love,” and using mathematical analogies to prove your point. Of course, hate is the opposite of love in the minds of most people, even logical-minded ones like me. You, of course, would not understand if I were to say that I wish we could change the counting system to the base 9 because then the dawn of the 28th century would probably fall within my lifetime, just twenty years from next New Years Day. It’s something your three years in math has not prepared you for, any more than your floundering language abuse has prepared you to criticize poetry. I do appreciate your (notice I have used the word correctly here, not as you so often do when you mean you’re) baseball story because it reminds me of the way you define poetry.