Direction

As a high school student in the United States, I was taught that a good way to begin an essay is with a definition; by providing a definition, I was told that I would have something concrete or rather “definite” on which to base my argument.

When writing an essay about a poem, I might have gone to dictionary.com, looked up the definition of “poetry,” and copypasted the first definition listed—“the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts”— at the beginning of my paper. This method worked very well for my four years of secondary education, but its versatility and even veracity came into question early in my university career.

In my first college class on poetry, the teacher wrote the word “poetry” on the board and asked us to shout out things that a poem must have. The class began shouting out ideas—a moral, words, a word, letters, an author—. Once the board was covered in requirements, the teacher went through and showed us one by one poems that did not fulfill each of our requirements.

There was found poetry, spoken poetry, sound poetry, poetry written by computer programming, and my favorite poem of all—“aaple.” “Aaple” had once stirred up all sorts of controversy when Congressman William Scherle decided it was not a word or a poem and thus government money should not be used to provide grants to “poets,” like the 750 dollar grant provided to “aaple”’s author Aram Saroyam by the National Endowment for the Arts (Mikolowski). Quickly I realized that definitions were not as definite as I once thought. Things that considered themselves poetry, things that were worthwhile would have been excluded by the definition I once had.

So for this project we are starting with the general idea of bettering conversation and little concept of what we mean by "better" or "conversation" online. At least we know dictionary.com doesn't have a definite answer?