5.21.2008

 

Methinks somebody could write something about connections between JH Prynne & Vallejo. When I read Prynne's scientistic jargon-jags it reminds me of late Vallejo.

posted by Henry Gould 2:30 PM

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I said it ALL better 10 yrs ago, talking to Kent Johnson in a Jacket.

Labels: Jacket magazine, Kent Johnson2

posted by Henry Gould 12:40 PM

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Reckon my insistence on the otherness of poetic language (see post of yesterday) takes me to the edge (or over) of lunacy, for some readers of this blog.

Certainly poets & poetry are also engaged with, and in complex processes of exchange with, the prose of life & what I was calling "ordinary" language, as well as with everything to which such language is addressed... (see, again, J. Latta's comments today on CD Wright's Poundian poetics of reportage...)

Yet when I tried to think about this briefly (on coffee break this morning) the image of a spiral came to mind... what was this? Double helix of poetry or something? (Now I suppose this really sounds wacko...)

No, I was seeing the spiral, I think, as an image of the root motivation or process of poetry-making... which in my view has its basis in song or harmony... & not in a self-enclosed or autotelic sense (cf. New Critics, Langpo...), but a sort of mystical sense, I guess. That is I think art reaches up to, or drills down to, some locus amoenus, some fundamental rightness, some Paradise, Jubilee - what Stevens meant when he wrote that "poetry is the sanction of life"... & for me anyway this deep harmonics actually shifts the nature of poetic language in the direction of its own telos, pleroma, end, fulfillment.

& I'm attracted to the Romantic notion (see Schlegel, Vico, et many al.) of poetry-making as a recapitulation of original human language-making; that language-creation was/is fundamentally a poetic process; & I am very intrigued by this corollary, that poetry-making actually turns or curls language-creation back on itself - the primal reflexive art-recursion - so as to repeal the structural alienation or distance established by the act of "pointing" or indication or measurement which underlies the making of the first human words. Maybe this is the spiral I was thinking of...

Labels: language, poetics5, Vico

posted by Henry Gould 11:06 AM

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5.20.2008

 

Fontegaia rolls on.

3

 
That other one, with the beard, the slouch hat
of tramps, the pathetic pipe - that needy old man,
wearing out his welcome among blessed suburbanites -
where he gone?  Southwest with the Soo Line, I bet.

 
Down to the turquoise desert, maybe - watching sunrise
light the razory edge of ye planet.  Doing the ghost
dance bit with the birdcage whistle of a limberlost
vacationer in these parts (passin' through, guys).

 
A pattern in the sand, like a sidewinder mandala.
No cameras, please.  An excuse for a man,
dug up somewhere (straight from the can,
I reckon).  Better move on, fella.

 
Whistle on through, like a Hiawatha
with fins - like a Frisbee hovercraft
over a couple of stereo kids (daft
in love, falls like Minnehaha).

 
Everybody's shadow lights out somewhere, Huck.
The spin doctors the wound but won't heal
the mortal - since it was a formidable
yearn to begin with (out of a garden walk).

 
So's the story, anyhow.  Hope to see her someday,
quoth King Solomon (speaking the dark cause
of him condition).  She'm the reason I chose
to chase them varmints over the hill, agreed Will A. 

 
Who your buddy, Poe?  Lasso-Man?  (Can't we all
get a lung?)  She'll be roping up your neck
as we speak, pard - Legal Aid, I mean - heck,
she's law, f'cryin' aloud.  Sheba's Blackstone, pal.

Labels: Fontegaia6

posted by Henry Gould 11:29 PM

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It's not unusual to think of poetry as the speech-expression of pure pleasure principle (see John Latta's fine detective work today, re: Joan Retallack's playful writing).

But I can't help thinking of metaphysical or ontological implications. Though I know many poets & artists are opposed to metaphysics on principle. Anti-metaphysics can be a principled stance.

[An aside : but often it strikes me rather as a kind of complacent flatland of self-pleasing epicureans & blind egos (I'm not referring to either Latta or Retallack here, for heaven's sakes!). The self subsists always in relation to something or someone else...]

What I mean to say is that over the last few days I've been pondering along a parallel track to Retallack's comment, quoted at the end of Latta's post today. But maybe I'm thinking of it more abstractly or something. Poetry is distinct from other kinds of writing & language use in that it foregrounds & dramatizes (in & out of "performance") a living breathing speaker - even when there seems no rational reason to do so; in this way it (poetry) seems often to stumble over its own "feet", while ordinary language goes about its functional & impersonal business of declaring useful & necessary things.

& what exactly is happening here, in a linguistic sense? It seems to me that the pleasure of poetry pushes back against language's inherent alienation from that which it indicates. Poetry tries to close the ring of the space separating "horse" from actual horse. Paradoxically, it can only do this through a sort of playful embrace of solipsism and tautology. By focusing not so much on the real horse, but rather on its own imaginary song-horse, the poem, counter-intuitively, gives the horse itself a vivid sort of virtual reality. Thus poetry goes along singing its contrasting counter-melody, against all normal denotative indicative descriptive functional language-use.

The tendency in postmodern poetry has been to celebrate and revel in this contrast between poetic & ordinary speech. I think where I am leaning is toward the idea that all poetry - plain or obscure - whether the poets are conscious of it or not - all poetry is radically different from ordinary usage. This distinction gives evidence of poetry's link with archaic modes of intuition, prophecy and soothsaying, as well as ancient forms of praise & celebration.

It is possible, actually, to conceive of poetry's tautological ring-around-the-rosy as manifesting a form of knowledge-by-analogy, as in visual art - not by analysis or definition, but by modelling and implication...

(the end point being, perhaps, dramatic poetry : where theater & reality, play & history, come into intense engagement...)

Labels: Joan Retallack, John Latta3, poetics5, postmodernism2, tautology

posted by Henry Gould 12:10 PM

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5.19.2008

 

Improv Fontegaia, winding down.

2

 
I keep returning to the same old memory -
you, pointing to those evening panoramas.
Icons of what pleased you, always. 
Remembering the Emperor, his toy city

 
offered to those almond eyes... trim reciprocity.
Song circles thus, thirstily, around its own joy.
A taut tautology, twirled tight, suspended...
(highway for hovering Frisbee dit-da-ditty-

 
datta data-hum).  Only a neurotic project?
Overshot bridge to nowhere?  Sunburst
heart like expunged orangutan, immersed
in his analysis (decomposing rancid intellect)...

 
and will it always be so?  Furtive raven
scrapes surface of the road, Poe
weaves zig-zag after... pines solo
tremolo for Whitman... weeps later on

 
for Poe... I don't think so.  Raven slices air
southwest, like a blind spot in the sun belt
of Orion, southwest... where fire felt around
wings of a Phoenix proscenium - the choir

 
belted out Messiah.  In the continuum
song circuits around its immeasurable flame
as gull-be-dove, wheeling high... terrific frame
of golden lyre, Apollo-harbinger (incalculable sum) -

 
old hobo-love burns there, over the stream.
It never ends.  It is longing-equilibrium's long
home's Big Rock Candy Mountain... simple strum
of a suspended 7th (33 light-yrs from yr sunbeam).

Labels: Fontegaia6

posted by Henry Gould 9:56 PM

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5.17.2008

 

Beginning final chapter of Fontegaia.

1

 
The heavy-laden lilac leans and sways
toward the light blue-yellow wall; the May day
glories in its brilliance; old Hobo will have his say.
These words, like sand that slips between my fingers

 
... those first words formed, those infant sounds
measuring the distance between lips and breast...
the welling O... orotund as gentle eyes that rest
on me, grant my whole body rest... so time rounds

 
home, rounds out of mind.  So the muttering
of Everyman circles its secret sun - the word
like a primitive hunter, blinded by its own weird
mirroring (til General Davey sets Gem in a sling).

 
Homesick Eddy wanders empty Providence.  Then
a green light stops him in his tracks.  Some ghost
of springs long-gone (a-spiralling)... he hears a host
in sandy Frisco (bit by his own heart's shady evidence).

 
Beyond earthquake and fire, the approaching clip-clop
of apocalypse - the unspeakable plague of his tabloid
taboo has turned him (pearl-lined, clammy) inside-
out (twin magnetized Ligeia-orbs, under eclipse).

 
And hobo-poet stumbles, blind, his mother-wit
now branded on his brow.  It wells from swollen
veins beneath the crust - cheap sour wine
gone vinegar, an infinite discomfort

 
roiling, rustling across his tongue - the fatal crown.
Touch of hot iron sears the whole mouth now.
So near, that solar flare - where a lone crow
(raving, pivoting southwest) tastes his renown.

Labels: Fontegaia6

posted by Henry Gould 5:20 PM

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5.16.2008

 

You can do these google searches on HG Poetics & come up with some strings of ideas... but I don't think they go back through the entire blog... or maybe they're limited by number of entries.

Anyway, looking these posts over I recognize my combination of garrulity & vagueness. Must try to communicate more deliberately with my compeers, somehow... write some essays & reviews... I spend most of my time chasing my strange muse, composing...

The emphasis in these particular posts on gesture and embodiment... on the difference between poetry & prose... does this align me with Olson & the Projectivists?

Not really. For a couple reasons, I think. On the conceptual level : I see Olson's attitude as (to a degree) akin to Pound's, & with certain strains of primitivism or romanticism - in that he idealizes pre- or ir-rational Nature at the expense of discursive reasoning - & thus sets up poetry in radical opposition to the utlitarian-technological rationality of Control, which is the great bogeyman of 20th-cent. modernism & postmodernism.

Superficially, this actually sounds like a lot of things I've said myself over the years (say, in interview with Kent Johnson at Jacket, & on this blog) - ie. when I promote poetry as a special kind of visionary discourse, providing uncanny "answers" (while science & philosophy ask questions) etc. etc.

But I would want to differentiate my attitude from this Olsonian (& maybe Prynnean?) point of view. I see no historical-epistemological "break", as Olson does, with the advent of Platonic rationality. Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility", a somewhat similar concept, is not as extreme, but there is the same promotion of perception and feeling at the expense of abstract reasoning, which of course you also find in Pound's imagism & parataxis. Or, perhaps it's more correct to say, Eliot's ideal for poetry is a poetry in which feeling is infused with wit & reason - but the end point is primarily a sensible artifact (an aesthetic object), not a new kind of understanding.

I would rather align myself with the spirit of Nicolas of Cusa. The intellect is inventive, constructive, creative and playful in itself. Artistic making is as much a form of intellectual exploration (logos) as it is sensitive expression (pathos).

In fact I would suggest there is a specific pathos of the intellect. The artists of the Siena frescos were depicting an ideal city as a practical matter - the frescoes floated above the meeting rooms of the city hall, didactic reminders of the state's foundational values. And this intellectual-constructive effort - to contain and mirror actual, historical & political existence - this practice of modelling - is an act of measurement which is impossible without a certain degree of alienation. The maker must stand aside from both the world and the work itself in order to create something adequately objective & true. This "standing-aside" puts the maker (or the intellectual generally) in a potentially marginal & abject position - the outsider. ("The prophet is not without honor - except in his own country, & among his own people," says Jesus in the Gospels.)

The maker is the uncanny double, the other self, the blind spot in the mirror. The art work is, possibly, a true representation of an objective world - but it is also the trace of the maker's silhouette or fingerprint.

Olson - & much 20th-cent. art & poetry - idealizes the vital energy of the world outside, beneath the human, the rational. My own desire would be to show how creative intellect sits crowned at the center of reality - as the core of civilization. Despite all the fearsome, destructive, world-threatening perversions it undergoes for the sake of greed, arrogance, ignorance & war. I would identify true intellect with the humility of the estranged outsider or servant, the victim of brutality & persecution.

The second way I would differentiate myself from Projectivism & much postmodern poetry is on the level of style & form. I've written about poetry as personal, embodied, performative, theatrical - as achieving its complete form only in performance, in the response-context of its cultural milieu. But unlike the Projectivists - & the Language Poets - I don't see the expressive form of contemporary poetry as situated in an agonistic rivalry with "traditional" poetry. Rather, I believe we have never left the precincts of archaic rhythm. Poetry now & always presents a kind of holistic song-mirror - the aesthetic work as musical-imaginative re-casting of experience - on behalf, I repeat, of a constructive concept or intelligibility. The aesthetic form, the formal finish, of the achieved poem, makes a statement about Being as fulness & completion. The poet's vocation is thus a kind of voyaging toward the return of the Same. If too many short-cuts are taken, the work will not move us - it will seem facile, superficial, cold (since we are still all of us struggling on the way). But the postmodern rejection of order & purpose, in toto, simply surrenders too much - misses (rejects) the intelligible order, the substance of reality.

By these comments however I would not want to be simply lumped with the anti-moderns & formal traditionalists. As I've tried to argue previously in various places, my notion of form is not really focused on the surface elements of style, but rather on poetry's underlying dramatic plot.

Labels: Charles Olson2, form-structure4, intellect, poetics4, projectivism, Prynne

posted by Henry Gould 2:00 PM

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5.15.2008

 

Have started paying a little more attention to the terrific British criticism in Jacket, by the likes of James Keery, Andrew Duncan, Steve Clark et al. My thundering ignorance. & the feeling that I'm stepping into a nest of quite poisonous serpent-varmints. Sense in these writers an almost-incurable English angst, with compensatory vehemence... or is it just that they don't share my odious American (or just plain Henry) complacency?

posted by Henry Gould 3:16 PM

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Strange things can happen in libraries. I was thinking on my lunchbreak about the Hitchcock film "Vertigo", which seems to surface now & then in my writing. I come back from lunch, & someone has left some very expensive library items on my desk - old onionskin typewritten screenplays from the 1940s, for "Notorious" and "Spellbound", by "Angus McPhail" (a Hitchcock nom-de-plume). Makes me feel a little dizzy.

posted by Henry Gould 1:46 PM

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5.12.2008

 

Now available, a new version of Rest Note (includes latest chapter, #4).

posted by Henry Gould 3:06 PM

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What is a saint? A saint is a hobo, grabbed by the scruff & assigned a spiritual job to do. What is a poet? Part of the scribbler cadre of this bunch.

Hart Crane on hobos (in The Bridge) : "humpty-dumpty clods"... "they touch something like a key, perhaps". Aside from the probable homosexual joke there, he's also talking about the hobos' nostalgia or connectedness with Mother Earth.

Herodotus recounts the blunt advice of an advisor to Persian king Cyrus, about how to subdue a certain tribe - tell the fathers to become shopkeepers, & the sons to learn the flute & the harp, rather than war - you will make them all effeminate & easy to control. So aggression is gendered down through the centuries.

But poet & saint cannot be subjugated so easily... they have a connection with the original Gardener (Adam), by way of guilt-ridden Cain (the farmer) & guileless Abel (the shepherd). Farmer, gardener... their quiet productive labor in the earth, far from the hot winds of vain cities... the peacemaker, the good shepherd... Milton's muse...

The hobo-poet-saint is not exactly an epicurean Bohemian, a Beat... but there is some affinity in their common desire to negate the harsh & violent labors of the Iron Age... they share the same alienation, but the hobo-saint turns that diffidence into a motivated spiritual labor of another kind... like that of the gardener...

The hobo-poet-saint feels a certain distaste for the profession of letters, since there all the Iron Age labor & vanity enters in again, by the back door... his Arcadia is an evening (after work) of literary "amateurs", slouched in some cafe... nobody pays them for their perfect freedom...

but the hobo-poet-saint must pursue those games with a fiery devotion... blind Miltons all, Chaucers, Shakespeares, chanting the Garden of Eden coming back... the Jubilee... & how to get there... an isolato-farmer's wisdom...

A Nation gets the poets it deserves... some nations turn it all dutifully into trade & busy-ness...

posted by Henry Gould 1:59 PM

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