9-3-08 Week One Orientation

This is my first journal entry. I hope it's what it should be.
In our last class we read our erasure poems and discussed whether they qualify as “art” or a “game”. I had performed an erasure on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and the poem I created was a story of rape. It was interesting to me that the other students who did erasures on Incidents also had poems about sexuality, although in the other poems the speaker had an active role.
The discussion in class centered on whether the poems could be counted as art and it, of course, expanded to the question “what qualities make any poetry/prose art? Originality or skill within in a set of rules?”. The question is difficult and classic and the dialogue in class was a nice philosophical exploration.