& after you've read, digested & fully absorbed Aristotle, Coleridge, & the Chicago School... then relax, go over here, & see how it's done by a practical do-it-yourselfer. & do all this before the holidays really get underway. is that clear?

Have to get back to RS Crane's great book one of these days (Languages of Criticism & the Structure of Poetry). When he writes about differences between general critical approaches - between, on the one hand, a more inductive stance, taking the literary object in all its particularity & evaluating how it "works" or doesn't - and on the other, a more "abstract" approach, starting with a general paradigm or theme & seeing how a particular piece fits the paradigm - I say when he writes about this, I'm reminded of old Pigeonhole Ron over there, the great Prestidigitator of Group Theory, the great Master of Phlogiston, griping that one New Jerseyan (R.Pinsky) got to edit the selected poems of another New Jerseyan (WCW), denouncing this as a mixing of teams, a miscegenation of Quietude with Squealitude, etc. etc...

Give me indie-critical responses to particular poems any day, as over at Cosmopoetica. Give me Grand Fenwick any day, over that stinkin' pothole of resentful literary churls & squats, that post-avant pissant passel of noisy mishmashmongers, that querulous squaddle of noodling squib-nabobs...

Good dialogue here between two very articulate poets.

"New" or "progressive" just seem too vague.  Of course, if a poem is found to be imitative or derivative, it's immediately recognizable as 2nd-rate.  But much so-called progressive or experimental poetry is just as derivative as is much so-called traditionalist poetry.

The work of writing topical or relevant contemporary poetry is so difficult that the poet requires all the resources he or she can muster, and it doesn't matter if they come from yesterday or 500 B.C.  The old is new.

I wrote a lot about this early on on this blog. (stop what you're doing & read the archives straight through.  coffee can wait.)   I ruminated, then, that poetry exhibits a special relationship to Time and Now; it speaks a contemporaneity which overpowers, outwits or transcends clock-time as we know it; and much prose fiction thematizes, in retrospect, what poetry continually performs & enacts, Now.  Thus notions of progress in the arts, tied to progress in politics, are, with respect to poetry, on a certain level, anyway - redundant.

Chris Lott finds my excerpts & explanations utterly confusing. Understandable! I warned they were obscure & eccentric.

It's a Song of Myself, a counter-Cantos [cf. Bluejay on Poe & Pound, EP & EP]. & still ongoing.

from July (chapter "A Catenary Arc"):

         – some star – like the articulate
 ghost of my fathers and of yours, who
 could not speak in life, but in the owlish
 afterlife – Ba, Ka, Crow, Lamb... tracked

  
         upstream to Ethiopia, the truth of it –
 manuscripted messenger, papyrus
 Pappy or Osiris sire, Moses ripened
 in the wilderness).  Mountain oak-tree.

  
         Cedar.  Pitch-black tar (for
 mordant).  Bebi, General of the Asiatics.
 Quick-runner, wasp.  Pharaoh's taxi-
 driver. He Who Controls the Rat-

  
         God's Offspring.  Latecomer,
 fast-talker.  Journalist for Delta
 Crescent.  Walker of the tiled
 ink-paths, typesetter.  Market-

  
         rent-collector, solitaire, free-
 speaker.  Literal, exact, exacting
 horsetrading slavestealing tax-
 gathering figure of a reefer-

  
         man, fearful, a-feared.
 Goes down ghost-trails
 under live-oak lairs
 of rattlesnakes... adrift

  
         in jagged eddies of nude alphabets.
 Murmuring to himself, saliva-
 white, spume-frothing blanched
 avalanche easily frozen, baffled, back-

  
         stabbed – easily beloved, won-over.
 And adhesive through the crane bone
 into the gravity waves (nacreous
 mob of carnelian nouveaux

  
         baubles all around the funereal
 sunken canopy of maudit covenants,
 rumors, glittering knives –
 ressentiment scripted into feral runes).

  
         A crossroad of aluminum tubing in the swamp.
 Ping from outer space, deflecting the rays.
 Silence, alligators, flamingos.  Yarns
 and picayune lagniappe – pommes

          
         de terreurs – spooks and voodoo queens
 if you're scared of the dark – a muttering
 broom delta, the sowing of the tombs
 beneath the Gulf.  Steal, sneak

  
         away now, Jim – Julius is sound asleep.
 We're going down the inky path
 toward a kid wrapped up in llama
 tarp and catnap tape, tripwired – peels loose

  
         at midnight – watch!  While my ghosts
 of keen-mauled, kill-skinned, tree-masted
 River-Sixties gather steam upstream
 like a money-caulked coot of wood-

  
         crocodiles, bobbing at the dawn levee.
 Watch – there go the shadows of the swallows!
 Soon the sun arrives, lifting over the lousy
 prism-blocks (Angola, Ethiopia veiled, unveiled).


      
                                           11.22.99

Chris Lott asks some good questions.

Maybe blogging & internet communication will eventually, in dialectical fashion, underline the necessary formality (distance, imperfection, anonymity, reserve) of. . .

the book. That thing they make from trees.