A note to someone:
We may have to refine what “coherent” means in the context of conceptualizing lyric poetry.
A necessary condition of calling something a lyric poem is the intention to have written one. Just to restate it, my broad definition of a lyric poem is, any group of words coherent from first to last set in broken lines and intended as a lyric poem.
Where we come upon clumps of words set in broken lines that are coherent, the best we can do to classify them vis a vis poetry as found art, like a nice piece of driftwood would be or a naturally shaped stone we come across.
As for poetic coherence there must be some meaning moving from first word to last. A phone book as such has that not. It has no poetic coherence. And of course at best it’s a found thing, not a lyric poem due to lacking authorial intent.
Now if someone arranges the names and phone numbers in a way meant to let a line of meaning flow through them, then that coherence may be poetic.
But just to tear a page from a phone book and publish it in a book of “poems” would be like DuChamp’s urinal, the template, I think, for conceptual art, which is problematic as to whether it’s art.
One can argue both sides of that but look how far that, or publishing a phone book, is from my definition of a poem. To reach for such far fetched counter-examples suggests to me the unavailability of a better, more proximate, or to hand, argument.
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