Once a year or so, on a seasonal basis I suppose, Jonathan decides that Joseph Brodsky was an overrated poet. Jonathan doesn't know much Russian, as far as I know, nor much about Russian literary culture of the 60s-70s-80s-90s. But he feels qualified. In Russia, Brodsky is considered a major poet, an immoveable presence & influence.

There was always sort of a vague Brodsky-resentment in the American poetry puddle. I remember a long rambling put-down by Sam Hamill in APR, to which I responded with a letter. That must have been in the early 80s.

Nobody has ever claimed Brodsky's poetry in English (translated or otherwise) was great shakes. But he was not an American poet. He was something cosmopolitan & not easily cataloged, & disturbing to some in the little proffy-professional ego-puddle we call American poetry.

[By the way, I have been reading M. Blanchot lately, thanks to Jonathan. Blanchot had some very insightful things to say about poetry/prose, language/meaning, Mallarme, Proust, Simone Weil, lots of other French authors, Broch, etc. He's emits that special Paris odeur de "I am so profound & serious" - but, unlike some of the other theorists & critics, he keeps it beautifully concise.]

On poetic language/meaning (in the essay translated as "The Mystery of Literature") - or the old form/content chestnut - he seems to be saying that, in poetry, these two make an irreducible pair. In ordinary speech, the words disappear into the meaning; in poetry, there is this oscillation - each one of the pair trying to be all-in-all, yet each needing the other. Somewhere in that irreducible tango lies the special form of truth which poetry offers.

Reminds me of the question John Irwin asked himself in the book about Poe & Borges (Mystery to a Solution) - how do you write a mystery story that the reader will want to read a second or third time (even though the crime is "solved" at the end of the 1st reading)?

Poetic form (the words) traps meaning in a circle or a ring, which thus becomes a kind of fountain, ever-renewing, everlasting. I tried to express this in an old poem, the opening poem in Way Stations:

OCEAN STATE


 
Here the waters gather along the shore.
They meet the land breathing in foam,
and roll the sleepy pebbles and shells
back into long sand waves as before.

 
Our moon, casting her antique spells.
A motionless iris in the whale’s eye
of the sea, her unspeakable name
sinks to the bottom of lonely wells.

 
Her low whispers frame the deserted dome.
Her light covers the circus floor.
And she lifts, with one nocturnal sigh,
the heaving swells in a silver comb.

("Ocean State" is the motto of Rhode Island. Reminder : I was born on RI Statehood Day - 5.29.52 - a kind of circular number.)

Reading Maurice Blanchot on Mallarme, courtesy of Jonathan.

Distinction he makes between Valery & Mallarme. For the former, poetry is a vehicle of meditation, intellectual mastery; for the latter, purely an aesthetic object formed from words (words from which everything has been refined away, except for this aesthetic essence).

An aesthetic based in turn on the one characteristic of language which fascinates Mallarme : the way in which words replace, disperse - distance themselves, abstract themselves - from the real things they sometimes represent. In so doing, words present themselves in aesthetic form - as poems.

Maybe my shadow-boxing with Language Poetry over the years has been, in part, a battle with my own fascination with, my own bent toward, some such seductive doctrine. Solipsism, solitude, silence, music.

How different the doctine of the Chicago critics (not great poets themselves, admittedly - but going back to Coleridge, for one, anyway...). Here the aesthetic imprint of a poem is not so simply yoked to the words, the language medium, per se.

Just as Mandelstam juxtaposed the Ukrainian philologist Potebnia (with his notion of the "inner psychic image" of the word) to the Russian formalists (with their poetics based on a linguistics which analyzed the word into separate functions) - the Chicago School opposed the strictly linguistic poetics of the New Critics, with a kind of metalinguistic concept of the poem. That is, the poem can't be reduced to its linguistic medium : rather, the medium conveys an imaginative whole, a complex image (a single lyric, or an entire play, or an epic).

Still, Mallarme (and lurking behind him, Poe & Baudelaire) accomplished something permanent (he discovered a sort of antimatter) : everything after has to take it into account. How that gets done, in theory & practice, is the big question. Celan maybe took it to the limit. Every word refers to some train of thought & feeling - conceptual, experiential, personal. Yet the words are so encrypted in their own musical silence as to both invite & defy "meaning", interpretation. The defiance itself is rendered as (tragic) beauty.

So Celan sort of has it both ways. His defiance of meaning is not a literary game or an ideological program. It stems from a felt awareness of death, wrong, grief, hope, love - which are, in a sense, extra-poetic "referents". Or they are elements from the realm of fact & "journalism" which are both acknowledged & somehow won for poetry, absorbed.

I'm sure all this sounds awfully obvious to those who've spent more time with these poets & these issues.