Socrates: Well, Hankovitch, once again you seem to be running sorta fast & furious. Liable to leave people behind with all your airy abstractions. Lemme see if I can help you outa this mess.

Henry: Please do, Socky. I was over at Jordan Davis' blog, where he was talking about Kenneth K. saying "we were the last to create a world", & the heavy burden of all the prescriptive baggage of being handed an ambition for Unity, & how perhaps writing about what's in front of you, the limits make it authentic as "world"... anyway he said it better in his own inimitable way, & I thought he was responding to some things on this blog & over at Anastasios', and then I noticed I had inadvertently gone into the archive & was reading stuff he had written 3 months ago, late October. . .

Socrates: You ARE confused. Somehow, methinks, we have to speak more simply & clearly about these matters. Poetry is for others, not for just endlessly recycling our own aquaculture.

Henry: I guess.

Socrates: Well, let me see if I read you right. You say there's something called para-form. Well, let's call it meta-form for now, it's more Greek to me. & it sounds like a word for the design or tendency of a poet's overall style, as opposed to "form" in an abstract, generic or strictly technical sense. Is that right?

Henry: well, I guess so.

Socrates: OK, & it seems you are arguing that "form" isn't too important, doesn't even make much sense, without this surround, this metacontext - where the poet's style fuses with the sense of nature, beauty, time, truth, as these are evolving in the culture she or he's in. & some poets, like you said Yeats, Goethe, Ashbery even maybe, Mandelstam in "Flint Ode", Bleguin Sansterre - these poets are conscious of that unitary meta-context, that surround - & their response to it gives their work a kind of coherence or address. That's the meta-form.

Henry: Well, I didn't say that, but maybe it's a nice follow-up. Maybe a poet's deepest impulse, their drive, is to respond holistically to the whole dilemma or wheeling variety around them - & that holism or unitary drive produces. . . coherences, stylistic & thematic saliences.

Socrates: Whew! "saliences" - is that Greek?

Henry: let me get back to you on that. btw, who's Bleguin Sansterre?

Socrates: I'lll call you on the cell about that. Later. In the meantime, you came along with another blast of verbiage today, about MUSIC vs PAINTING & poetry vs prose fiction. . . what the heck was that all about?

Henry: Duh. . .

Socrates: All right, I'll cover it for you. I am Socrates, after all.

Henry: I am Socrates. I am a Man. Therefore. . .

Socrates: Oh shut that door. As I was saying, you was trying to differentiate in a very sushpect way, poetry & the poet from prose & the novelist. The poet, according to Hen, is the representative, the visible sign of Song. Whereas, in prose fiction, the word is a transparent vehicle for a fable - a visualization, a painted scene - in poetry, the musicality inherent in the microstructure of language EMBODIES (sings) its meaning, its referent. It's the difference between the eye & the ear, perhaps.

Henry: I guess that's pretty close to what i was trying to say. [snuffle] Excuse me, I have to blow my nose.

Socrates: So Hen, you are asserting this difference or opposition between poetry & fiction, & the role of the poet & the role of the prose writer. & you were suggesting that just as meta-form rules over microform (& all the USA turf divisions & polemics that involves), so too the musical imperative, the song imperative of poetry rules over the more local turbulence of styles & techniques; because poets in all their variety are still more alike to one another (as & when they make poetry) than they are like (in their methods) those making prose.

Henry: I would also just point out the interesting comments on Anastasios' list about nature poetry - Hopkins & Niedecker & Bunting; & how he connects Hopkins' concept of the unity of natural forms ("inscape") with the "aural analogue", or the onomatopeia of poetic language. We may be seeing sort of a related set of concepts here, related to my notes about metaform (as you call it) & the pursuit of a holistic response to the surroundings (natural, cultural), by way of the inherent musicality. Also curious what Jonathan Mayhew had to say recently about Niedecker & "lightness", the lack of baggage - seems like sort of another name for clarity - the ability to express in such a way that we feel an instant, natural kinship or joyful apprehension - is this a giddiness?

Socrates: None a your bidness. You're attemptin yr usual transumptive warp-wraparound, & getting vaguer by the min. It creates a bland unity, ends up as a blockade.

Henry: Well, maybe not, Socky, maybe not. Listen to this quotation from Plutarch, commentating on you, Socky, yourself: "Fiction, being a verbal fabrication, very readily follows a roundabout route, and turns aside from the painful to what is more pleasant. . . For not metre nor figure of speech nor loftiness of diction nor aptness of metaphor nor unity of composition has so much allurement and charm, as a clever interweaving of fabulous narrative."

Socrates: Somethin the Publishing Industry has been aware of fer some time.

Henry: Think back to what I said earlier about Mandelstam's "Flint Ode" - how, as Omry Ronen has described, the poem's theme is a meditation on the nature of poetry (it is an Ode, after all). And the PLOT of that story is one that distinguishes the poet, somewhat prophet-like, from the "sleepy" fictions of the mass culture-mind. It's a sort of many-sided individuation process - not for the sake of that individual so much - but through the poetry the culture-mind itself comes to consciousness. Now imbricate that with Plutarch's contrast of traditional poetic form with the pleasures of fiction. The poet, as opposed to the fictioneer, because of an ineluctable vow to the inherent quality of verbal song, is the bearer of what truth there is, in song.

Socrates: But Hen!!!!!! How is this relevant to the newsletters of the poetry clubs of TODAY!!!!! They want to prove themselves!! They want to be poets today & tomorrow! They want to grow in their art! They want to live in their art! They want to make themselves at home in their art! As somebody told you once, "Don't tell us what to do!!!"

Henry: My two or three meta-imperatives here are not prescriptive, Socky. They are really not. In fact I was thinking today that it would be bestest for me & perhaps bestest for us all to stop thinking in the old ways of the USA around here about this stuff. It's not a coffee clatch for the Hatfields & McCoys. We might think toward the larger world & wider publics & ordinary unknown readers. We might think of Poetry as a vast vague meta-imperative which we are free to explore. The tools are basic & primal: 1. the song in words (the poetic imperative); 2. the beautiful & mysterious holistic inscape they encapsulate (the imperative of metaform); 3. the Mandelstamian-Celanian truth imperative (which finds differing modes of expression in poetry & fiction) (Celan's "Walk in the Mountains" story is a meditation on these issues).

Socrates: But Hen, how can something so imperative not be prescriptive?

Henry: Imperative is the wrong word, maybe. I'm talking about the conceptual/creative order that shapes the overall character of poetry. Song, metaformal beauty, and the individuating-epiphanic process of truth's undertone - the sound of the pedal - emerging beneath fable & sleep. These are the larger constellations that overshadow our more parochial concerns.

Socrates: Can I have some of that cookie?