David Hess back, with some intelligent, informed readings.

For me, though, there is an element of literary demagoguery, or journalistic opportunism, in the constant harping on catastrophe.

There is suffering, there is injustice, there is cultural dessication, there is, yes, moral catastophe. So look for solutions, answers - don't just sit there moaning & piling dust on your brow.

I suppose that's what they told Jeremiah, too.

David Hess has set up a handy Bramhall e-connector, so you can read for yourself.

Tim mischaracterizes what I said. There was nothing in there about triumphant barbarians, nor was my issue with "dominance" of a literary market or scene. I've never argued in favor of choosing the accessible mainstream over the avant-garde (Tim's reductive comments only more evidence of this boring binary at work).

Meanwhile, Jimby the Famous Monkey reinforces the chimp theory of socio-poetry. David Hess disses old ape Henry. Henry swats him down. Dave goes off to sulk in the jungle. Jimby yells boo.

Dave writes:

I don't really see any discussion or development going on, more like an endless string of tautologies that trip themselves up and then you have to start over again with the definitions.

You say you believe in a poetry beyond the ideological cliche or political position yet you constantly stress how your poetic beliefs stem from your centralist political beliefs and how Poetry should mirror those beliefs.

So what's up with that?

I've been at a music practice, hence the delay in responding to your question, Dave. I think what interests about literature, from Homer to Virgil to Dante to & so on, is that human choices & passions & speculations & dreams & guile & drama - all these things - trump the verbal systems that would contain them, be they religious, political, what have you.

Poetry only concentrates this effect & makes it more elegant and musical (as Dante is more musical than Joyce, despite his best efforts).

This is how poetry is beyond politics, at least in one of its dimensions.

I don't have "centralist" beliefs; I said that beneficial change comes to our earth from the center of humane values, & I said it was "central" only in the sense that it proceeds from life itself, that which survives & overcomes death & destruction - through its own wisdom, & through divine intervention (grace).

I think of poetry as a branch of this basic (yet mysteriously dual) life-force; a kinship recognizable in its freedom & unpredictable integrity.

I think that covers most of my supposed tautologies. But thank you for asking.

David Hess, one-man peanut gallery.

Quickdraw Dave likes to skip discussion, go straight to insults. Must be something cool about it. Is that how you get girl apes?

Mock on, Mickey.

I was thinking of you, David, in the context of the Stevens poem, "The American Sublime"(1935):

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

(Let this serve as your chihuahua for today.)

Everyone brings what light they have to this subject (the subject of the poetry blogs, that is). I have a problem with the bicameral criticism emanating from the so-called "avant". That is one of my big themes on hgpoetics. I've tried to look at it in different ways. What strikes me again & again is how often poetic "experiment" leads to obscurity & self-indulgence. & I attribute this tendency in large part to the teachers poets & critics who parlay the binary theory of US literary history. Ie. the theory that there is an inimical centrist mainstream which is both corrupt and cliched, and the only way to get around it is by Russian formalist-futurist "making strange" (a process which becomes mannered & cliched in its own ways).

Far better to read the tradition of poetry in English on its own terms, take as much from it as you can, and bend it to contemporary awareness & concerns. Far better to make no assumptions about your audience, but to conduct an inward critique of your own ethical and aesthetic motives (under which aegis you undertook to write poetry in the first place).

You mock, David, you mickey-mocker : but everything starts over with me.

Poetry is (& always was) the beginning of is.

I continually start over with what is basic and universal, in contrast to the complacent assumptions, the in-group distinctions, the tendentious binaries, the parochialism, the superficiality - all those distractions from the real thing. The aim should be the disinterested reader, not the insider networks.

David Hess having trouble with my definitions. When you spend a lot of time around video slot machines, after a while everything must be packaged in little discrete bytes. The Rabid Imagiste sees poetry & "quotes" in the same way : flashing pinball lights.

I've changed the name on the link for David Hess's blog to "Rabid Imagiste". But it will still get you there.

OK David, I will try to spell it out, since I'm not making myself clear. I will try to be concise & not repeat earlier bloggings too much.

You write, "No more speaking for us." By this I suppose you mean, making general statements about poetry. But making general statements is not inherently wrong; & I can't "speak for us" unless my general statements are accepted as true to some degree. It's perhaps unusual to make general statements; but a main element of my "poetics" is the claim that making poetry is a distinctive activity, distinctive from "writing", distinctive from prose, distinctive from other kinds of discourse. & I'm claiming that this distinctive activity is characteristic of poetry in general.

OK. The root distinction between poetry & other language usage is that poetry originates and remains inalienable from SONG. The core of poetry is the fusion of sound & sense, each of them given equal value (where as in prose, sound is made a transparent vehicle for sense. I'm speaking of the prose function & the poetic function : I'm not denying that some prose has poetic qualities & vice versa). This fusion of sound & sense stems from song itself.

But what is music, what is song, what is the "fusion of sound & sense"? They are incomprehensible without a particular sense of time : that is, time in its immediacy, in its PRESENCE, in its now. In prose of all kinds we project our thoughts & responses into the otherness of a conceptual or fictional elsewhere. Even the poetic evocation of a reality, experienced in the "now" of our reading of a novel, is the experience of another time and place. Not so in poetry - even if these "prose" aspects are part of it (say in epic or narrative or even lyric reminiscence) : poetry is a recitation, a performance, which has an immediacy, an embodied presence lacking in other genres. Even as we read a poetic text from a long-dead poet, this immediacy is implied (it is a score for oral recitation).

Finally, what I'm saying is that this modal, generic quality, this distinctive effect of poetry, spills over into its techniques, themes, subject-matter, and colors all of them. Which brings me back to the general statement I started with : poetry-making has the effect of bringing time past and future into Now, into contemporaneity. & this in turn is an effect of its descent from song. Poetry embodies & incarnates Presence, insofar as we experience presence in verbal art (there are other ways to experience it, of course).

& I think these general qualities have consequences for more particular aspects of style, worldview, and so on. Because for me anyway, "presence" implies the presence of a person, of an individual. & this implication runs contrary to massive intellectual/artistic forces of the last few decades. Person, personality : critics elide them with an "ism" (individualism). But this elision loses. . . me. & as I tried to show in earlier post, Island Road exemplifies this whole process in a particular way. In Island Road, Shakespeare is now, dead Berryman's dead fictional "Henry" is now, again. It's a kind of literary resurrection into NOW. & this "presence" is a parodic, burlesque parable, "through a glass darkly", of the divine Imago, the Person, in the eternal Now.

Yet more dismissive comments from David Hess:

"No more Henry, no more of these explanations that mean not much.

"Poetry tries to present a special kind of immediacy, or contemporaneity, which
absorbs the past into the Now."

No more please, no more speaking for us.

Poetry as the "Special Kind." Then make it so."

David, I don't think you are interested, so why comment? If you want to know more about what I'm trying to describe, take a look at the posts from around 1/24 and previous, where I talk about the difference between prose fiction & poetry. How fictions thematize this Now, which poetry, on the other hand, performs or enacts (the classic example: Proust's enormous novel built around the re-absorption of a timeless forgotten moment into Now. Fiction memorializes the moment of poetry.)

My advice, David : just ignore me. This is what seems to work for the "Now" of most of the edgy avant-garde. p.s.: I'm not speaking for "us" - you're welcome to speak for yourself. I'm speaking for myself, to anyone interested.

David Hess, in a controversial mood, writ:
"I don't think what you said was that foolish but, like I said, these struggles for the
definition of poetry give me a belly-ache. Sometimes they are necessary, but more
often seem superfluous to any engagement with historical context -- what Josh is
partly interested in -- and the complexity of the art."

David, it wasn't exactly a definition I was looking for. I was trying to characterize the distinctive process or activity of making poetry, and how it synthesizes the pre-verbal & the verbal. Earlier back in Jan. or Feb. on this blog I wrote a lot more about this. My notion of "tradition" is bound up with the idea that poetry-making is a distinct activity which not only has not changed much, essentially, over the centuries - moreover, it's an activity with a special relationship to time itself : that is, poetry tries to present a special kind of immediacy, or contemporaneity, which absorbs the past into the Now. This aspect actually changes how you "define" Tradition : ie., if poetry-making is a special attachment to Nowness, as well as a somewhat perennial, unchanging, distinctive activity, then, in some sense, Tradition must be Now, or it's not Tradition, either.

David, OK, I'm laughing. . . but I'm probably much bigger than you so be careful around the Rock.

I recognize that, as you say, Josh is pretty much responsible for setting the words/imagination dichotomy in motion. But you wuz so busy beLITTLing me that you wuz unwilling to take an interest in the particular description of the imagination/words relation I was providing. Maybe there is a big foolishness in saying what "poetry is. . .", but how do my attempts differ from Stevens's, except in being too prolix (which I admit is a gigantic difference)? Stevens said "Poetry is a pheasant." That's good enough for me.

You wrote:
" Okay, since you seem to want to argue this point further, let's take a look at the
history of this edgy debate. Josh Corey was responding to a post in which I wrote:

"I've always admired this phrase from Stevens -- 'the morality of the right
sensation' -- with which he ended a talk on poetry. I don't think there's anything
by Stevens I've read that I didn't like, even when it bored me.

Any writer who honors the imagination, the sensuality of the mind and perception,
as much as him -- Wilde, Lorca, Williams, Benjamin, some Stein, Nietzsche, Jimi
Hendrix, to shout out some names -- has my undying devotion.

Why I find the continual emphasis on language, the politics of language,
narrow-minded."

I do not see any definitions in that post, except the one implied by Stevens'
words*. From this Josh extrapolates that I believe that all poetry -- and notice
that I mention not only a few writers who mostly wrote prose but also a musician
-- comes from the imagination. I don't know where it comes from and maybe, like
Jennifer Moxley, don't care or would rather not know. I am merely stating my love
for poets and artists of a certain type -- not a definition of what poetry is or isn't.
Hence my anger over Josh's practice of "talking past," in this case, me, as he likes
to put it.

Notice also, please, the 'for us'. Last year of living for us, whoever that may be. It
will be many people. As usual.

Laugh, Henry, or I will hunt you down in the caverns of the Rockefeller and the
Hay and calmly kill you.

* These words I heard on a cassette I have of Stevens reading (can't find it right
now), in either '54 or '55 right before his death -- reading his poems and speaking
on his belief in poetry. I don't recall him staking any universalizing claims for what
poetry is or is made of in order to counter other claims. 'A morality of the right
sensation' accurately evokes his own style. Stevens produced pages of aphoristic
and essayistic definitions of poetry. It's clear that poetics, as an activity, was for
him also a work of imagination and not reducible to any discourse."
posted by David at 3:53 PM

David the Ess writes:

"Just laughing, not putting you down, my man. Anyone who attempts to define
poetry once and for all makes me laugh. Okay, with Josh I got pissed when I
should've laughed.

Thank you, you say many intelligent things. I'm sure something has been resolved
-- did I really make a dichotomy on your floor, I'm sorry (wagging tail) -- but I'd
rather laugh, for as Gabe and Mysterious Author Man reminded us a few days ago
this is the last year of living for us."

OK, perhaps I was being ponderous, as per. But you & Josh were also in the definition business, all over your own floor. So I hope you can laugh at yourself too, while you clean up.

Why is this the last year of living? Edgy is boring, there's too much everywhere. Calm, serene, confident - wouldn't that be nice.

I knew I was taking a chance getting into a conversation with put-down prince David Hess. But what else is there to do, now that Jordan's out of town.

Go ahead and act dismissive, shmaht boy. You & Josh were verbalizing on an old & probably illusory dichotomy; what I posted is the resolution, simple as it may be.

I don't know what's wrong with your media player, Dave - sorry you can't hear. It's not wicked or dangerous; just Clint Eastwood trying to read something characteristic, & some old music.

Responding to David & Josh : is poetry "words" or "imagination"? I think people get caught in such debates because poetry is a unique amalgam, a fusion, a monstrous birth.

First of all, poetry begins, not as words, but as "speech". Speech, language, as Wilhelm von Humboldt argued back in the 19th century, is made of sentence-streams, not individual words. It's essentially MOTIVATED, impulsive - motivated by sense-experience, visions, desires-impulses which are pre-verbal or meta-verbal.

But in the process of becoming poetry, this speech-impulse does indeed become ALL WORDS : poetry has a fundamental ordering or aesthetic motor which rounds out or includes or shapes all these impulses into a coherent, finished work of art. The finished product, like Keats' urn or Eliot's chinese vase, is a magical verbal container for the initial impulse(s). Maybe it could be conceived as a kind of energy-transfer packet.

The langpos mocked the "uncritical" speech-motivation of mainstream poetics, with their technique of isolating the verbal texture from any clear motivation. But this scrambling was obviously symbiotic/parasitical with that which it criticized; elliptical langpo was folded, doubled over "straight" poetics. Moreover, langpo's impulse to discourse was just as "motivated" as the ordinary poetic impulse - though it was an impulse of reaction or negation or separation or alienation or distinction : it's just that the speech-impulse was programmatically scrambled.

In my view individual words themselves are bundles of potential motivation, potential energy. The imagination is a kind of binding capability, inherent in the mind - creating vision, order, coherence, awareness, clarity, observation, etc. When the receptive faculties of the imagination are motivated to respond, to articulate, to give back - then we have the poetic impulse.

Mandelstam, in his theoretical writings, talked about poetry as the intertwining of two strands : the verbal material and the impulse. I think a poetics ought to keep both in mind, & recognize how the impulse creates verbal coherences or contained "light", in the finished work. Ultimately this dual sense of poetry, it seems to me anyway, has more relevance for the social-political role of poetry in a culture at large, than a dialectical spin on the verbal material alone (as in langpo).

Language poetry shouldn't be singled out in isolation, though. There's a much broader stream running from Pound through Williams & the Objectivists & others which tries to avoid the "lyric subject" through inclusion of chance items, found objects, documentary material, reportage. Elizabeth Willis's essay on Lorine Niedecker (linked here a few days ago) deals interestingly with this.