As of today I am renouncing the terms avant-garde, post-avant, progressive, or experimental with reference to poetry, and taking a page from good old Minnesotan Ignatius Donnelly (who makes such a brilliant appearance, along with Thomas "Little Nappy" Dorr and magic-man Bluejay, in Stubborn Grew), I am going to refer to everyone somehow aligned with those terms as "Atlanteans" (also in the Hart Crane-ean sense, I guess).

Anyway, those Atlanteans who have been able to absorb, with some spoonful of composure, the tectonic shocks of the Houlihan squabble, may want to move on to a critique of a different kind - based on a cogent & sweeping argument about the nature of language in poetics : "The Enchanted Loom", by Paul Lake.

I think this is a very elegant and thought-provoking essay, perhaps groundbreaking for some poets. Groundbreaking in that Lake first of all uses contemporary science (chaos theory, artificial intelligence, cognition studies, etc.) as an Archimedean lever against both modern & postmodern orthodoxies regarding the nature of language. He quotes cleverly from Jonathan Swift in the process. Then he shows how these same scientific developments, by changing our understanding of order, meaning & information in nature, have correspondences with the process of literary composition and reception. (His holistic analysis chimes very cutely with the report circulating - which I mentioned here yesterday - about the findings of a British researcher, showing that our minds easily translate sarcbmeld wrdos, as lnog as the fsirt and lsat ltetres are in pclae - we read them holistically in a natural way.)

I think if poets can get past the attack on Language poetry (which, by reading it only as a manifestation of an outmoded philosophy of language & art, is only a partial reading), they might find Lake's ideas very useful for generating new models of writing, reading & teaching poetry (on the relation between text, fiction, and imagination - on "implicate" literary wholes & the relation between writing & reading - on how imaginative-fictional order is paralleled by different techniques in poetry).

I have a few reservations about the essay, after a first reading. First of all, how could anyone not like Tristram Shandy!! Secondly, I think the argument is faintly shaded by the potential for simply a new form of deterministic naturalism. The notion that small particular events are all implicated in larger, determining folds of meaning, could imply merely a new, more sophisticated Newtonian machine-universe. Furthermore, to argue that literature is the transmission between writer & reader of these information-wholes, and good literature refines these transfers, elides an elusive but fundamental element : the notion of incommunicability; that there are things or concepts or realities that are at the edge of or beyond speech & expression. In my view, this aspect is tied very profoundly with the adventure of poetry-making. In fact I might propose a kind of counter-complex to Lake's complex of wholism-information-communication; it would read something like uniqueness-incommensurability/infinity/freedom-silence.

Tristram Shandy's hilarious self-decomposition of the "book", the literary artifact, the embarassing "thingness" of people, novels & books all together, points, in my view, toward the inescapably imperfect and inescapably human fundament underlying all our theories & productions of "reality". But this fundament can be understood in a comic sense. I can only translate this into religious terms, which is my fumbling version of the incommunicable. As I tried to describe it in the interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket (which, by the way, shows all kinds of parallels with Lake's essay), it's for me an "incarnational" poetics, summarized perhaps best in Mandelstam's essay on how western art was set free by the historic event of Redemption (unfortunately I can't recall that essay's title; will try to find it). In Mandelstam's terms, Redemption released art into a realm of free play, without any shadow of determinism or responsibility to anything beyond itself. For me, this symbiosis, redemption/free play, says something about our "existential" experience as human beings. "Death on the cross" corresponds existentially with Everyman's consent to mortality : we suffer and die freely, in order to discover essential or ultimate freedom itself, in order to experience spiritual rebirth & "the freedom of the children of God".

Art as free play - freedom taken to its anarchic, human limit - is an essential aspect, an equal counterpart to the drive to share & communicate information. Tristram Shandy is a glorious representative of this case. & there are many 20th-century examples as well, which cannot easily be dismissed by a new scientific paradigm. But "thought is free", as well - and I think Lake shows very clearly that new perception can and should lead to new and much-needed artistic values in the 21st century.