As for perception of wholes. . . sometimes I think I get clearest ideas around 4 a.m., when I can't sleep.

Pondering this morning about the contention over styles of poetry, & the proposal for a debate, I thought Gabriel Gudding got it right (on his blog recently) to emphasize the importance of wonder & surprise. A debate format would probably result in fiats & pronunciamentos that the pronouncers have no right to make, a needless taking of sides. More subtle distinctions might be elicited through exploratory conversations. (ps Chris Lott says this better.)

Wonder & surprise, wholeness. From the vantage of 2003 it's possible to look at a numbered span of literary time, say 1950-2000, without a spirit of judgemental contention so much as attention to & appreciation for a vast poetry tundra, a unique efflorescence (maybe not really unique, but certainly unrepeatable); making possible a certain critical response - a distancing of our own - without reductive polemics. Ironically, Ron Silliman's blog is exemplary in presenting a sense of that vastness, side-by-side with the polemical maneuvering which doesn't do justice to the era.

Wonder & surprise. Besides all which above, when I think of poetry as a phenomenon at 4 a.m., its essence becomes only more strange, spectral & mysterious. I begin to sense it as a kind of mana, a word-flesh of a sort, passed from poet to poet, from ghost to ghost. The stylistic & technical discoveries & fireworks of individual poets I see as forms of deflection (or inflection?) - rocketing off the poetic black (w)holes of earlier poets. Thus the emphases of Olson or Niedecker or Ashbery or Lowell or Bishop or Berryman or you-name-um are a kind of verbal clothing, shrouding, hiding of something. . . and you begin to see the variations played by an Olson or an Ashbery or a Zukofsky as filigree overlaid on impulses recognizable in Eliot or Pound or Stevens, & themselves doing the same from previous eras. . .

the unique-intense intelligibility - the verbum ipse - expressed through the individual sensibility - a mana stretching back to the psalmist David, dancing & singing naked around the ark of the covenant, and before that to the shaman or woman muttering oracles beside a version of the pythian tripod.

The process of poetic making seems to involve the individual poet's attempt to find a form for that essential intelligibility; it must be intelligible to themselves & fit like the finest woven coccoon before it will be intelligible eventually to anyone else.