some of my remarks from the Wikipedia:
--What makes something poetry?

aside from the inescapable timebound (faddish) criteria, these two seem to be permanent:

1. "yugen", or mysterious beauty; i.e. resonance with the subconscious. (in the 18c.--often called the least poetical time for english-- this was not expected nor sought.)

2. "calliditas", or concise aptness. some--a very few--good poets lack this (Whitman, Jeffers) but there will always be those who refuse them the first rank for this reason.

i would also add: "melopoeia" or phonetic coherence (for some time now, in eclipse); "phanopoeia" or visual imagery; & "logopoeia" or conceptual originality (these are Pound's coinages).

"poignancy" belongs in here somewhere, but since every age draws the line between pathos & bathos differently, i can only suggest that poetry must be about the human feelings & situations which are thought to be worth exploring at that time. nowadays bad childhoods & famous artists appear frequently, while epics on the founding of political dynasties would be a very hard sell.

having one of these excellences is sufficient; but having many of them is still better.
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On this page is a sound file of one of my Lojban poems, read by Dr Jorge Llambias of Buenos Aires.

A new speculation on Salam Pax.

About ten years before the New York School "invented" Abstract Art, there was a school called CoBrA in Europe (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam). I went to a show by one of them, Karel Appel, & i have never seen such exuberant & powerful painting. If Elephant Art belongs to any movement, it surely is this one...

A page of many links to "Outsider Art". (I remember when only psychologists & a few oddball artists like Dubuffet were into this; now, it's probably the closest modern art has to a mainstream taste. The good thing is, there's some wonderful coffeetable books out there now. The bad thing is, the old stupid accusation about abstract expressionism--that they painted that way to disguise the fact that they couldn't draw--is now a lot truer about contemporary artists growing up in a context where this sort of thing is valorized.)