hobo takes upward path

ITASCA SPRINGS

This deep translucent honeycomb,

this palimpsest of green

beside the bronze serpent

of midmost river, mother-stream.

Hobo must climb from his log-bed

of lassitude & diffidence.

He sees the circumference

of his enormous creaking sad

forsaken solitary double

ferris wheel – his rusted

rose or Island Road,

a lonely spark of conscience-trouble

(ancient Roger Williams port

for Puritan & exiled

Quaker, reconciled

by Narragansett welcome-heart).

He must un-knot his mumbling

& speak to the res publica.

Tender Mnemosyne

leans like a wispy cedar, trembling

against the scorpion-twister

of learned viciousness

& bland unconsciousness –

conceited treason like a blister-

burn, compound of avarice

& vanity – unreason

squawking each lesson

through megaphones of fraudulence

                  *

– corpse-flowers of corruption

breeding in rotten logs

of oligarchy – hogs

& coyotes preying on the children

of the designated sacrifice

(the under-underclass

under the overpass,

who pay for our convenience – twice).

The Minotaur of twisted love

contorts against grace,

O Hamlet Falcon-Ace –

his den of hate-mark drove the dove

out of her rightful nesting-place.

Her forum of good will –

Columbian windowsill

of human fellowship (Dante’s

& Aristotle’s animale

compagnevole) – sheds

reflective limestone beds

of ever-new Itasca springs (ey

yo) out of unfathomable depths

of Manitou-benevolence

(Ghost who in silence

walks beside you, sweet Princeps).

Ophelia, Horatio, Francesco,

Juliet... heart-Jonahs

surfacing from Okeanos –

anchored fresco-arc astride Frisco.

5.4.17

Willow River twilight

ANOTHER YULE

Civilization is a natural good.

Valleys are honeycombed

with anthills – tombed

with moral titans (Lincoln would

live up to his Memorial).

Government’s innate,

then – our pleasant fate

to be so compagnevole,

says Alighieri (after Harry

Woodpecker).  D.C.

marbled with majesty

will have a double Jubilee

this year – May 29th (the K

of Camelot’s birthday);

crowds cry hurray

up to the pint of vanishing

& glory glory hallelujah.

I love my country too.

But pride, you know,

leads oft to suicide – King Saul,

alas, fell on his sword, & Henry’s

Clover (sad antithesis

of photosynthesis) was

mortised into concave penury

(her veil of Isis hoovered out

of Iowa).  Her star

twirls like Ishtar

above a Willow River twilight

               *

where gold prairie meets the far

horizon (at the green

mountain, where shriven

penitents climb to the door).

Pride be the world’s blockade.

Banners of orange black

& green (by Jasper Jack)

are complementary, not made

for nought.  Pete? Smoky Pete’s

still lively, though John’s

jotting paper crayons

with encaustic slivers now.  Wheat’s

blonde for Brother Jim’s Great

Purple Hairstreak – what

a butterfly!  Yet

there’s no sketchy moral shortcut

to self-centered celebrations

for a nation, in this world

of woolly worms curled

into cottonwood canyon-

cocoons.  No idle soul-solace

– an oxymoron in

the China cookie tin.

True penitence proceeds apace,

slowly, like Frank’s old shaky mule

inching to San Francisco.

Sorrow made your child go

sailing.  Grief tacks up another Yule.

3.16.17

unfurling Providence

ANGE D’OR

Pythagoras & Aristotle

felt both stars & sun

move (by persuasion

of love) around the atlatl

of the Pole – slow sarabande

of heart’s desire (my soul

pines for your solo Yule

just so, trompette marine).  &

though we scoff now, Harry,

your wedding dance is just

a veiled illusion – dust

on cosmic rewind, arbitrary –

yet those ripples on the strand

projecting gracefully

sound waves of sea

through particles of sand

put me in mind of relativity,

so that behind this mesh

of silken crossweave rush

soft murmurs (hush little baby,

don’t you cry)...  & a kind face

beyond divisibility

windy invisibility

ghostly ellipse of human race

gathers in gravity & mass

like a cloud-pebble

or magnified Hubble-

infinitesimal, lifted by windlass

                 *

into a masque of morning glory

from the outer darkness

with a rose compass

to inward salience (galactic story

of grave milky equilibrium

outlasting mirror-war

of swollen Minotaur

to bind the wounds with honey-balm).

The Earth’s unfurling Providence.

Slow-forming pearl

beneath the gray whorl

of a clay-worn shell – immense

agate of Agape, threaded

with light gold fleece

around a centerpiece

of Paradise (salt bread

& wine out of a stone casket).

Indomitable almond

branch, a blooming wand

cut for a lilac shoot, whose trumpet-

vine leans like a flinty mule

against vain headwinds

to Pacific ends –

vast azure of a wingspan’s rule,

bright Gate of international

ange d’or (meek door

for lambs, forevermore).

So sighs your shell, antiphonal.

2.9.17

the angry clown is not your father

HEAVY THINGS

If we look once more at your Topsfield

Aquinas-map, Dante –

that earthy horn of plenty

floored by starry sarabande (sealed

fan of luminous phenomena)

the heavy things of Time

rehearse the Salem crime

with simple weight of rigid clay –

ice-cold, stone-cold, bereft of life.

The line sags from the bridge;

the daughter of a lost age

droops, off-balancing (soul-grief).

Quantum quirks of spooky action

powder another image

for displaced rage

into the time-funnel... dissatisfaction

with oneself provokes a personal despair.

We do not know who’s there.

Halloween is in the air;

brown leaves congeal to pumpkin hair,

the angry clown is not your father

anymore.  O Juliet,

the phony craven despot

crafted no safety net... look further.

A rippling of seashore memory

brings grey gulls to sleep.

The peacock’s eyes gaze deep

as Argo... hold her now, Hagia Sophie.

10.21.16

the love that draws the sun & the other galaxies

IRIS-TURTLE

The curve of the river twines the curve

of the path, they skip together

downstream.  Warm autumn weather

clears the mind a little (light mauve

asters nodding under cottonwoods).

The poem’s woven trace

catches the vif, the grace

of movement – Berkeley’s moods

in Paradise (Newport)... his eyes

commingling a million

threads beneath the sun

into a massive sky-warp of surprise –

Daphne’s comb or seaweed wave

of tears (the patient laurel

lifts gnarled arms from Hell

into the marrow of yawning grave).

The living mind, the raven-shadow

of Platonic iris-turtle... Venn

diagram or madrigal (ken

you my mosey-keening yet?) – below

the longing of the galaxies,

their milky sarabande –

a spectrum of star-sand,

poured from hand to hand.  He’s

just daydreaming of Marina now

(sea-daughter, blithe naiad

of Taurida) – be glad

you’ve followed his light-dancing prow.

9.30.16 

An alternative history of "innovation in poetry" in the last 100 yrs might focus on the displacement of meditation, and meditative poetry, by other forms of intellectual activity : prose or dramatic mimesis (novels, plays, film), music per se, and science. Thus the "radical changes" offered by Modernists and postmodernists alike might be seen as motivated primarily by "displacement anxiety", the urgent desire to maintain position - to keep up with the times.

Thus Ron Silliman's notion (on display again in his post of today) of "quietude", and a "School of Quietude", can be understood, ironically, as an unwitting acknowledgment of this state of affairs. "Quietude" as the return of the repressed.

Meditative poetry dramatizes an act of cognition or intellectual choice. It dramatizes or symbolizes an intellectual action. This kind of action is what remains after the forms of mimetic poetry (in Aristotle's sense - the imitation of a believable action and its moral & other consequences) have been divided up, shared out among other media and other arts, separated from poetry per se.

The frenetic activity around superficial aspects of style & form, the obsession with secondary techniques, the fascination with melodramatic poet-personae : these seem like symptoms of an art-practice which has lost its bearings, lost its position among the other modes of artistic representation.

Meditative poetry is only one branch of this art; but it's the remainder, the leftover of what used to be a much broader and more confident set of means available to poets who want to reflect experience and reality. R.S. Crane's book (mentioned here recently) - by way of a deep and exquisite review of Aristotle's method in the Poetics - offers some real avenues to explore, in new ways, old ways of making poetry.

The formal beauty of mimetic poetry is what pleases us : and this form involves the efficient and proportional synthesis of parts into whole, resulting in a moving image of experience we recognize as true in a new way. Crane shows that Aristotle points toward something more profound and essential at work here, than the old cliche about "delight & instruction". Pleasure and instruction are not poetry's final ends : they are by-products of humanity's interest in and admiration for the beautiful itself. And this formal beauty of a "true representation" is the practical aim of (mimetic) poetry. Its modes or means of achievement, specifically in dramatic poetry, in Aristotle, are 6 in number : primarily thought, character, and plot; secondarily diction, melody and spectacle. But we also find their analogues in mimetic kinds of poetry other than dramatic. Narrative poems; poetic dialogues; soliloquies or meditations; elegies, hymns or panegyrics on particular events or experiences; odes on specific topics or events - all these and many other types of poems exhibit mimetic aspects akin to those of dramatic poetry.

One of the key things Crane emphasizes is how the formal beauty of poetry is a synthesis of elements, of which the language or diction is only one, and not even the most important. Elder Olson also writes about this. To me this is an essential key to opening up a new way of reading and making poems today.

It's not as though some poets of this generation aren't exploring and practicing different aspects of these modes, at a very high level. I think what Crane's and Olson's approach can do, among other things, is to help make clearer what sorts of contemporary poems and styles have some weight, force, and elegance, and what kinds seem to be merely examples of stylistic solipsism, narcissism, and superficiality. They do this by giving more importance to character (ethos), narrative (plot), and subject-matter, than they do to diction and melody. Not that these last are not important, or can be discounted from the beautiful whole which is the ultimate aim : but the center of gravity is shifted. The poem is a tensile "complex" toward which these secondary elements contribute.

Poetry : speech made beautiful.

But then, how do you define "beauty"?

Umberto Eco on Joyce on Aquinas on Aristotle...

Eco sheds clear light on an oscillation between Symbolism/Modernism, Symbolism/Acmeism, Plato/Aristotle, idealism/materialism... the halves of these binaries overlap.

More later, hopefully. Must get coffee.

*

J. Latta quoting Kundera today. Want to read that book, too. Though Kundera seems to have developed a fiction vs. poetry polemic. He condescends to the poets. A worthy antagonist, I guess.

*

My post of yesterday, on the duplex perplexity of it all (verbal toy or compelling vision?) is what got me asking myself about Beauty.

Joyce (see Eco link, above) follows the general materialist trend of the 20th century, when he tweaks Aquinas' 3rd of the three aspects of Beauty (integritas, consonantia (proportion), claritas) - claritas - toward the radiant actuality of the thing-in-itself. The artist's "epiphany" is a recognition of this unique and particular radiance - the essence of the thing itself - its quiddity.

Joyce's attitude paralleled the Russian Acmeist revolt against Symbolism (at the same period - around 1910 - roughly, birth of Modernism). The Acmeists aimed to praise and celebrate this world (not the cloudy otherworld of the Symbolists) - mirrored in the autotelic craftsmanship of the Modernist art-work.

I think if we took Aquinas' triform definition as a starting-point today, we might bend it slightly differently.

Poetry : speech made beautiful.

Beautiful : and beauty is a kind of end-in-itself. The existence of a work of art is justified by its beauty.

But what is beauty? Joyce's equation relating to the 3rd aspect (clarity = radiance = object's quiddity) - perhaps, for us, falls slightly short.

Today we might relate claritas to intelligibility.

Radiance is not merely self-contained in the object, autotelic, self-generated. Claritas (as well as integritas or wholeness and consonantia or proportion) interpenetrates, transcends its own borders, surpasses itself. The harmony of these aspects is both 1) reflected in the perceiving mind, and 2) echoed & magnified in general experience or reality as a whole. Thus the object is radiant with its own quiddity, but only in the context of universal wholeness or integrity.

This is a shift I guess slightly away from Aristotelian analytics toward Platonic synthesis. But both Aristotle and Aquinas can show a continuum or relation (which Modernism downplayed) between the object's quiddity and universality. Eco's comments (see link above) point the way.

In Aristotle, art understood as craft shows a duplex beauty. An axe can be both 1) beautiful to look at, and 2) beautiful or fitting in fulfilling its purpose, its end (telos). The axe is designed so as to chop wood beautifully. The ship is beautiful in fulfillment of its practical purpose - it sails well.

As Eco notes, for the ancients and the medievals, humankind's existence was understood as having a spiritual purpose or telos. Inasmuch as art serves that end, it is beautiful in Aristotle's second sense. Beauty, Goodness and Truth coalesce in that spiritual telos. Here is where Plato unites with Aristotle.

The radiance of intelligibility is a measure of an art work's integration with universal human purposes. Truth, vision, wisdom... this is the range toward which art can rise, by way of claritas-intelligibility.

Can you see where I'm tending with this?

I'm going back to the issues raised yesterday, with reference to Virgil and the mystery of the poet. The "audacity" of the poet is a spiritual audacity : the willingness to stand at the border between "Iron Age" and "Golden Age". Between humanity's universal purposes, and more short-term (seemingly practical) aims and desires.

In this sense the poet is only a more acute representation of the writer in general or the artist in general, just as the writer or artist is only a "signifier" for Everyman and Everywoman, for humanity in general. That is, the contradictions at the heart of human experience - between now and forever, earth and heaven, self and other, universal and particular - are signified - emblematized - by the artist.

It's this inward contradiction which accounts for the "outsiderness" of the artist - again, perhaps most acutely represented by the poet. In the context of practical America, consider the unique (& very personal, very idiosyncratic) estrangements at the core of the lives of Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Bishop... etc. et al.

Because the oscillation between Iron and Gold, earth and heaven, body and soul has both psychological and political - personal and social - ramifications.

"I had come to hear that great things might be true. This I was told on the Christopher Street ferry. Marvelous gestures had to be made and Humboldt made them. He told me that poets ought to figure out how to get around pragmatic America. He poured it on for me that day. And there I was, having raptures, gotten up as a Fuller Brush salesman in a smothering wool suit, a hand-me down from Julius. The pants were big in the waist and the shirt ballooned out, for my brother Julius had a fat chest. I wiped my sweat with a handkerchief stitched with a J."
- Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

*

p.s. of course the 20th-cent. Moderns illustrated their own forms of "spirituality". There's a spiritual-scientific aspect to the artist's personal renunciation in pursuit of the "objective correlative" or the Joycean epiphany. Yeats's "profane perfection of Mankind".

see Daniel Green's comments on literary formalism, in his posts of Dec. 12 and 13.

The aesthetic sense : free intellectual capability to absorb information (facts, ideas, arguments, opinions, sensations), and then to encompass same within a sense of form, order, beauty. A formal (and holistic) response to beauty in works of art.

I might have more to say about "form" after I finish this interesting book on Dante by Christian Moev. He describes the subtleties of Aristotle's central concepts - ie. the relation between form (as the substantial reality of things in the hierarchy of nature or "chain of being") and the intellect (the free power of the soul to apprehend real things).

(This sounds awfully vague, I know.)

When you know the form of something, you grasp its identity. Matter, strictly speaking, doesn't exist : it's the potentiality of form. & form fulfills potentiality in acts of creative intellect (the Prime Mover for Nature; the human intellect for art).

But what is it to say that something has (primarily) an aesthetic form? Maybe Aristotle would say something like this : an aesthetic form is an object structured in such a way as to reflect the sense of beauty which resides in the (complementary) inner form of the soul.

"Jane" has some current thoughts related to this stuff.

Poetry certainly provides food for thought. What a criticism along the lines I'm mulling over here would do, though, is investigate & evaluate the poem as food-source rather than meal : the poem as many-sided living something. As evocative, resonant art-action-work.

Aristotle, according to RS Crane et al. anyway, offers some neglected tools for doing that. Neglected in part because of the critical assumptions (blinders) he outlines in the chapter I just quoted.

Here is a long quote from one of the summary-transition paragraphs of RS Crane's book. I think even without the examples & evidence he offers, you can see how the kind of a priori -theoretical "discourse-application" method he describes, sounds very familiar to us. This relates very much, I think, to what A. Mlinko was getting at, with regard to the problem of reading poems as extrapolated "arguments".

On the other hand, Aristotle's notion of [& method of investigating] an intrinsic, special structure & form of poetry, as "imitation" rather than as verbal discourse, holds, as I have been saying, some serious potential for the reception & interpretation of present-day poetry.

RS Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (U. Toronto Press, 1953), pp. 88-89:

"It is thus correct to say of these other critics, as not of Aristotle, that poetry exists for them primarily in a "verbal universe." And this fact has consequences of the greatest importance with respect both to the principles on which their criticism is based and to the method by which these principles are discovered and applied. The principles of poetics, for Aristotle, we have seen to be principles peculiar to the art of poetry, as the distinctive art of "making" or "imitating" human actions and other experiences in words, or to one or another of the various poetic species; they are identical with the necessary and sufficient internal causes, or principles of construction, that must operate in the writing of a given poem if it is to be a beautiful whole of the particular form desired; they vary accordingly from species to species; and they can be discovered only by reasoning a posteriori from the inductively known nature of any given kind of existing poems to the conditions of artistic success or failure in poems of that sort. For the critics in the second tradition, on the other hand, the principles of poetic criticism are necessarily specifications of principles operative throughout the field of writing as a whole. The basic principles of poetry are therefore identical with the principles basic to all varieties of verbal composition; and of these the most basic, as Quintilian long ago remarked, are the two elements without which purposive speech of any kind could not exist - res and verba, things and language, a subject and the words in which it is expressed, a content and a verbal form; after which the next most important, in any discourse that goes beyond a single utterance, is arrangement. If poetry is to be studied in terms of its character as discourse, in a context of other modes of verbal statement, these are indeed the primary elements to which the critic must refer and upon which he must build - as the modern critics I have quoted clearly do - in his efforts to say what poetry is as a special mode of speech, to discriminate its possible kinds, or to determine the standards upon which it is to be judged.
"They are, it will be noted, the elements which Aristotle distinguished for rhetoric rather than for poetics, and hence, as principles of poetry, they are essentially reductive, in the sense that, unlike the distinction of object, means, manner, and "power", which applies only to imitative poems, they tend to assimilate the structure of poetry to the structure of any discourse, however "unpoetic", in which we can discriminate aspects of content, language, and arrangement. It is necessary therefore to look for other principles through which the meanings of these basic terms (and especially of the first two) can be so specified as to give us a distinctive subject-matter for the criticism of poetry; and this is what the definitions of poetry I have quoted and the many others like them in this tradition are designed to do. They are based on the assumption that poetry has no intrinsic nature such as can be known sufficiently by an induction of the conditions essential to the production of poems as special kinds of wholes but is something that participates, with a difference, in the nature of discourse in general, or rather what is taken, hypothetically, as the characteristic of discourse in general which appears to illuminate most satisfactorily for the critic the problems and values of poetry. This characteristic once selected, the next step is the determination of appropriate differentiae; and from the hypothesis thus formed the critic can then derive, by dialectical necessity... all the more particular terms he needs for the discussion of poetry and poems."

Crane & Olson. But a different C & O.

(As I've noted before here someplace...) I was reading a monograph on Aristotle when I started Stubborn Grew.
Helped me add sort of an introductory echo effect (talking, in the poem, about what the poem was going to do).

Looked again (on coffee break) into RS Crane, Languages of criticism and the structure of poetry (U. Toronto, 1953). This is the real deal, esp. the third essay ("The languages of contemporary criticism").

Seriously, this will change your way of seeing things.

If I have time to quote some passages, I will.

Aristotle saw things differently.

Crane shows how the standard method of 20th-cent. criticism was so pervasive, you couldn't se that there were other approaches.

The standard method assumed "poetry" is one big thing, a kind of discourse, and you defined "it" by differentiating it from other kinds of discourse (but all these kinds are still cousins : all "discourse", "language-usage").

Aristotle saw these very unique & specific activities which people did which came to be called "poetry". Tragic, comic, epic were sharply differentiated from one another, & from other genres. They weren't "modes of discourse" : they were forms of an art of imitation.

Then he investigates their structure & shape, to discover how they create that specific power & beauty he calls "imitation".

I'm really not succeeding here in transmitting Crane's very valuable insights.

The "art of imitation" (in dramatic/epic poetry) is structured, not with discourse, but upon the armature of plot.

[I know I'm repeating some things I tried to describe a few months ago. I'm just going back in that direction.]

Sorry for the long-windedness yesterday. Looks now like a hodge-podge proto-essay, which somebody else will write if I don't get crackin'.

& the "list of paradigms" is not very gripping, much less complete. I'm going back to RS Crane's book Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry.

As I was taking my shower this morning, was thinking that the real focus of interest for me here, what woke me up at 3 a.m. the other day, was this :

By going back to Aristotle, the Chicago people found a way to re-frame a formalist criticism (ie. one that focused on what & how the poem does what it does - as opposed to thematic or other kinds of readings). Instead of reifying the poem in isolation - a la New Criticism - this framework creates a holistic sense of poetic form : not only text, but performance; not only an internally-balanced aesthetic object of beauty, but a dramatic shape, which has specific techniques for creating particular rhetorical effects and evoking particular responses in its audience (emotional, interpretive).

Not only text, but living expression - an offshoot of the living poet & his or her dramatis personae. (Goes back to places in this blog's archive where I thought about the difference between prose fiction & poetry.)

This is not really new : Horace developed a practical criticism which analyzed the poem's rhetoric. But Aristotle seems more fully-rounded : he can distinguish these rhetorical effects, yet in symbiosis with the analysis of the poem as a formal shape, a kind of verbal sculpture.

What I'm thinking is that a framework which includes both text & performance - both objective shape, and its effects, its resonance - could be generated as kind of a general platform for developing a new critical vocabulary to apply to contemporary work.

When you look less to the model of New Critical "close reading" of the internal texture of the diction, and more to the meanings and effects projected in the dramatic action which is the poem, you might find a more capacious fit between meaning & expression, style & its effects.

With some such framework, you might be able to talk about the seemingly odd & baroque expressive techniques of contemporary poets, in a way which shows their affinities, differences, inheritances from past poetries.

& it might give poets more confidence in the motivations which impel them to offer their artistic activities as some kind of contribution to society at large. If poems are art works - not texts to be "processed" into their ideological paraphrases; not exercises in some dys-Platonic scriptorium, but forms which absorb text, in order to unite writing with dramatic presence - we might have a new sense of the symbiotic relationship between style & theme, between diction & Aristotle's trio of powers (ethos, pathos, logos).

Notes Toward & So On (8)

I know I didn't do justice to JH Newman's thinking (in Grammar of Assent). But it seems to be a part of turn-of-20th-cent. general attention to distinction between what Newman calls "the notional" & "the real"; maybe similar to TE Hulme's distinction between abstract "counter-language" and "the image".

Newman focuses on how the mind works with perception and concepts. His "illative sense" is the mental faculty with which we synthesize (1)what we actually experience with (2)our understanding : with what we sense as the inner logic or meaning of that experience. Thus through the illative sense we experience/process what for Newman is "real". This he contrasts with notions, or abstractions which are part of some verbal structure which we have not yet apprehended (or processed with the "illative sense").


Warning! I've probably got this all wrong! It is likely I haven't properly processed these notions through my own illator yet!

Nevertheless I'm interested in how the symbolic language of poetry emerges from these imaginative-illative modelling processes. Because eventually I think Robert Archambeau's & Kristen Prevallet's documentary or contingent poetics might be confronted with some difficult & productive paradoxes involving the differences between poetry & history.

History, like science, can precipitate or solidify into forms of positivism. Somehow, because it's a written document, because it's historical evidence, it's more real. Its objectivity offers the poet an avenue of escape from solitude & solipsism; its communality - after all, that happened to us - seems to strengthen the poet's rhetorical position.

Setting aside the possibility that documents can be misinterpreted (there's a good book out there somewhere, author/title I can't remember, which goes into the young Pound's unintentional misreadings of Italian Ren. documents) - & setting aside the over-familiar issue of cultural-historical relativity - it seems to me that the crux of the problem comes down to this distinction of real & notional (maybe related to TS Eliot's distinction between "information" and "knowledge").

Fundamentally, poetry & history do different things with time. History works with chronological succession, showing how the train of human actions fit into the passage of "ordinary" time. & though the historian's narration may provide all kinds of panoramic, kaleidoscopic palimpsests, the end remains the same : an interpretive recounting of "things that happened".

What does poetry do with time & history? In poetry, history is "figured" within a primary aesthetic experience (the experience of the poem). Time itself - the (aesthetic) "now" of the poem - is absorbed, elaborated, intensified, translated into a new symbolic form - a counter-time. This is the remarkable effect of the imagination's - the "illative sense's" - modelling of its own experience.

& there is no general, abstract imagination. There are shared images, shared symbols, shared histories, shared facts - but there are only individual minds and individual art works (or works by the shared activity of individuals).

Aristotle's distinction between poetry & history comes to the same position from a different direction : poetry exceeds history via its capacity to represent "universals", whereas history deals in particular events. On the face of it this sounds like a position opposite to the one I am outlining. But this is not the case. Aristotle's poetry is capable of representing universals because, in poetry, concepts have been absorbed, shaped, synthesized into a logical architectonic - experienced as real (through the pathos/ethos/logos of identification - the "illative sense").

Thus, I think Robert or Kristen's future "contingent poetries" will face the same kind of critical/aesthetic evaluation as always : that is, have the verbal materials been transmuted by the imagination? Do we recognize & respond to the authentic imprint of original experience?

A few of the curious consequences of RS Crane's Aristotelian-inductive approach (ie. a kind of scientific-investigative process : you take poems one at a time, you ask questions of them having to do with what the poet was trying to achieve, and what kind of guiding or formative impulse shapes the work; you proceed by the method of "multiple hypotheses", weighing different possibilities rather than following some abstract, a priori schema or theory about what poetry in general "is"):

1. On the business of "form & content" in poetry (remember that?): the form turns out to be the complex poetic representation as a whole; the matter is the verbal material (like clay in pottery) out of which the form is developed. This is the reverse of the usual arrangement (whereby "form" is the language, "content" is the subject-matter).

2. The method shows a kind of impersonality which is bracing. Although no evidence can be ruled out when analyzing a poem, the method doesn't begin with the biography or literary development of the poet. Questions are asked of individual poems : is this an "imitative" or "didactic" work? If the former, what is being represented by the speaker? Is the lyric an emotional response to a situation? Or a decision or exortation to action (ie. Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress")? Or a meditation on a serious issue called forth by a situation (Gray's "Elegy")? From a variety of directions, the critic tries to get at what the impulse or motive for the poem is - what kind of impression or effect is the poet driving at?

Imagine a critical reading of contemporary poems which came at them in this way, using various analytical tools (genre, mode, literary history, creative impulse) to triangulate the measure of beauty or effectiveness of the work.

This seems so different from what we usually get in a critical article or review : a combination of taste and impressionism, which, because it lacks method and consistency, usually falls back on a stock of "in-house" references and vocabulary; ie., the reviewer, the poet & the reader must share a closed circle of acceptable discourse and knowledge to even make primitive sense of the values to which the critic refers. The reviewer leads in with a resume of the poet's background or past performance, or the "school" to which he/she belongs; perhaps a brief polemic about the parlous state of literary affairs and the salutary difference this poet makes; then a few hyperbolic remarks on the high points of the book under review, a few gentle hints or words to the wise about weaker examples; and that's it. Or perhaps we get a "close reading" of one of the poems in the book : we learn that both the poet & the reviewer have a veritably seraphic deep & special knowledge of some kind, or a genius for subtle triple-entendres, or a mastery of some arcane metrical technique - and this is offered by way of a general aesthetic assessment of the book. It's a wonderful amalgam of sophistry and pseudo-pedantry, which, at least in comparison with Crane's methodical approach, never gets close to particular poems at all.

R.S. Crane is the greatest. I love this book. Get it back in print!

The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, U. Toronto Press, 1953

(Not least in that he led me to 1770s poem by Sir John Henry Moore, called The Duke of Benevento - a riot)

What Crane does among other things in this book is debunk, in a wonderfully ironic tone, most of the criticism of the last 3000 years or so, focusing however on 2 strands of 20th-cent. criticism : New Critics, and "myth criticism" (the method of discovering hidden themes, symbols, layers of meaning, which explain how Henry IV or Hamlet are really recreations of archaic myth or the Jungian racial subconscious). He shows that both trends are reductive in different directions, and by the end of this book you'll see a lot of affinities between standard modern lit crit and medieval pedantry (pseudo-science, pseudo-theology).

His argument is that what these critical approaches miss is the substance of poetry-making itself. What poets are about is the fashioning of "concrete wholes" (poems); what this process involves is the shaping of a form, which coalesces around a dynamic, creative idea. Poets & artists recognize this process : they experience the inability to write or compose anything, until this shaping idea, this ruling spark, manifests itself - the catalyst, which triggers the coalescence of the whole thing. Crane talks about it as happening with the writing of critical articles as well.

He describes the Poetics of Aristotle, almost alone in the history of criticism, as focused on the how of the poetic process itself: laying out a kind of layering of "default mechanisms". It's not a simple symbiosis of "form & content": form dominates & suffuses everything, uniting the material into an imaginative whole - in the same way that wood becomes different built things, or clay is shaped into various forms, so language is shaped to the organizing concept - the "plot" in dramatic & narrative poetry, the "argument" in many other modes. These layers of "default" (this is my own terminology, not Crane's) - in other words, Crane, via Aristotle, describes how the verbal texture, the language itself, becomes the "material" of the "thought", the thought in turn is the "material" of the characters, the characters in turn are the material of the plot - kind of an overlapping or layered spiral of formal energy. (You could find analogues in the design of kinds of poetry other than dramatic : diction/concept/speaker/argument, etc.)

When you start considering individual poems from this approach, as particular formal inventions worked out from a unique set of "plot" instigations, shaped into a unitary, irreducible aesthetic entity - you really are looking at poems differently from those approaches which involve cataloging the poem's meanings based on an analysis of the vocabulary (usually, as Crane shows, applied with some simple set of oppositions - the famous New Critical "tension"), or installing the poem in a preconceived set of anthropological, psychological or mythological theories.

For Crane, the matter hinges, as I've remarked earlier (yesterday), on whether the critic looks at poems as simply a special type of language use, or, on the other hand, poems are conceived as conceptual objects, formal events, the apperception and appreciation of which involves language to the same extent that we take an interest in the "clay" itself in pottery or sculpture.

This book came out in 1953. Much happened in poetry & criticism in the 2nd half of the century (Crane died in 1967). One way to look at the new movements of that time in American poetry (Lowell's Life Studies & confessionalism, "Deep Image" etc., NY School, Objective-Projectivism, Beats, etc.) as reactions against the pedantic, reductive methodologies promoted by New Criticism ("shape a beautiful object using formal diction & traditional technique which is self-contained and autonomous based on a skillful balance of opposing tensions"). But, as Crane shows, the overwhelming trend of literary criticism, since the Alexandrians and Horace, has been against the Aristotelian approach, & has favored philological and rhetorical analyses of the poem as a species of language, rather than, with Aristotle, as a type of art, an organic form, the mystery of the making of which can only be studied inductively, a posteriori. So that one can see, for example, that the Language poets' dialectical appropriation of Russian Formalist and New Critical philology, or the structuralist & post-structuralist resolution of literature into language codes and defunct language codes, respectively - that these "new" movements actually retain and repeat the ancient categorical biases : poetry is "decoded" as a rhetorical or linguistic phenomenon, and then recruited into whatever agenda the critic pursues.

Let's have a new approach, which focuses on the poem as conceptual whole, the product of a creative process - often a mimetic or dramatizing process - which involves forming an integral, beautiful representation, a unitary effect : irreducible to mere linguistic coding or critical appropriation. This is a theory for artists and poets, rather than for critics, philosophers & rhetoricians.

RS Crane (Languages of Crit. & the Structure of Poetry), again, emphasizes how Aristotle's Poetics differs in approach from most contemporary crit., even that which uses Aristotelian terminology.

In Winters, Ransom, Empson, Brooks & Warren, et al., the difference is clear right at the beginning, with their various opening definitions of poetry. As Crane shows, these critics define poetry as a branch of discourse. Aristotle defines tragic & epic poetry as a branch of artistic imitation. The poem is an "artificial whole" or "imitation". The imaginative wholeness of the poem evokes, by analogy, the wholeness of a particular action (beginning, middle, end). Aristotle doesn't try to define all poetry; he focuses on examples of a particular kind. Within this kind, the poem is a kind of imaginative simulacrum (mimesis) of an action. This is its substance ("plot is the soul of the poem"); language is the medium (there are other kinds of imitations - visual, musical - which use different media).

The relations between this particular kind of poetry (imitative : tragic/dramatic, epic) and other kinds (didactic, lyric) are not dealt with by Aristotle. But a criticism which takes as its subject the poem as aesthetic whole, rather than the poem as form of discourse, or merely verbal structure, is a criticism which is marking out a different approach to poetry as a whole. The notion of the poem as some form of relation or balance - in Aristotle's terms, a mean between extremes - a balance, that is, between logos & mythos, between medium and theme, between discourse and subject - a relation aiming at a fusion, an aesthetic wholeness, a complete impression, a fruition or fulness (Aristotle's proper "magnitude")... - this whole idea raises new perspectives, new plateaus, for critical reception of various kinds of poetry.

I could quote RS Crane all day (Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry). In one passage, he talks about how, with Aristotle anyway, it's useless to consider "pleasure" in the abstract, as an "end" or purpose of poetry. Pleasure is always conjoined with particular forms of activity, and is characterized by them. Then, in a paragraph, he telescopes the historical development of mimetic poetry, from basic human pleasure in imitations & mimicry, to the moral distinction between imitation of things admired ("better people") and things satirized ("worse peope"), to the practice of a Homer, in which a complete, integral form has been found to subsume many forms of imitation:

"...finally to have eventuated, with Homer, in self-contained works of art the final cause of which is beauty rather than either the general pleasurableness or the moral utility of imitations... It is indeed a final end in two important senses - in the sense that it is an end peculiar to the poetic art rather than one imitative poetry shares with other arts or activities, and also in the sense that it subsumes the other ends of pleasing and instructing, and goes beyond them. For it is distinctive of poetry such as Homer's that it utilizes the pleasure we all take in imitation and rhythm, and the vivid interest we have in other human beings and especially in the moral issues in which they can be involved, in order to make objects which we can continue to appreciate, after our first curiosity is satisfied, for the sake of their intrinsic rightness and beauty. This therefore is where poetic theory, in its normative aspect, in general must begin..." (pp. 64-65)

Good background article on the Chicago School.

Most of them seem more interested in fiction than poetry, but not all (I want to look for the study by one of the "3rd generation" Chicagoans, Adena Rosmarin (Power of Genre, on 19th-20th cent. poetry). Implications of their general approach might be worth exploring. RS Crane in the book I'm reading (Languages of Crit. & Structure of Poetry) writes about how Aristotle's Poetics is not about the social or political aspects of the subject, but is an investigation of how "good poems" (in the mimetic mode - tragedy, epic) get written.

On a side note, I've mentioned here before how the opening of Stubborn Grew - which, by the way, appears to be out-of-print now at Spuyten Duyvil - was generated in part by the Poetics. I was reading a study on it, which argued that the Poetics "does what it says" in a sort of para-poetic way. This gave me the idea that a long poem could open with sketches exploring the concept of writing a long poem, of telling stories. Gives it sort of an echo effect, a reflexivity.

"Ain't it a little late in the day," you ask, "to bother with criticizing the "'New' Critics?"

First of all, you shouldn't use "ain't" unless you need a rhyme for plaint. Secondly, this here Chicago School, it seems to me, clears the ground, enlightens the region, establishes some first principles, or reminds one of existing principles for which you don't need to re-invent the refrigerator magnet.

Relevant it is indeed to such contemporary issues in this wee corner of Blogistan such as:
1. how the heck can I ever read all them poetry books?
2. how can I get around that current can of ards which asserts that poets today ain't got no theory?
3. how can I get beyond this plague of simplistic labels, pigeonholes, clubs & sandwiches?
4. what is a literary critical method anyway?
5. can I be a critic too?
6. what is the relation between poetry & reading public? is it really a closed system or "guild"?

What RS Crane, for one, emphasizes, is that both Aristotle & Coleridge established grounds for evaluation on several bases, & in so doing, allowed for a criticism which resists reduction to some totalizing analogy or reductive principle (ie. Empson : poetry = linguistic ambiguity; New Formalists : poetry = traditional metrics; Language School : poetry = denatured diction). So there's a lot of poetry out there. Say you find something that grabs you, and you want to read it with certain practical purposes in mind, like mapping its territory or explicating its virtues. With some of the knowledge provided by the Chicago critics, you can begin to develop your own means & methods of evaluation & appreciation - on a vastly different, & independent, philosophic &/or aesthetic basis.