. . . but getting back to what I was saying, think of Grenier's "I hate speech" and the langpo that followed - think of the general turn toward "textuality" in poetics that began in the 70s and continued - think of these trends in the context I laid out, of an emphasis in 20th-cent. modernism on artifact over communication (the creation of the aesthetically-perfect, self-contained, hermetically-sealed cul-de-sac as a defense against the loss of traditional cultural authority & its forms of shared discourse). These trends were another iteration of the divided zeitgeist (love/knowledge, faith/science) which is perhaps now over. Perhaps the answer to Ron Silliman's well-known & repeated "what's next?" queries will have something to do with poets' reclaiming the communicative function : restoring the balance by means of theme & subject-matter & more direct speech.

The post-structuralist argument which plays into much contemporary poetry, ie. that there is no ground for rational discourse, so no possibility of a return to logos or shared terms, is, of course, also a rational argument, albeit one which contradicts itself in the assertion. . .

There was a poem in the New Yorker not long ago I found completely adequate, & now, dagnab it all, I can't remember her name exactly, can't find it. . . Linda Biehrl? Teaches at Univ of WA Seattle? The poem was called "1934". I read & reacted very strongly : Mandelshtamian.

It worked unlike the CK Williams poem by not over-reaching? I can understand Grenier's "I hate speech" - because it's so dang hard in poetry, at the border between rhetoric & art. The Biehrl[?] poem maintained aesthetic distance - very pronounced reserve - created an inner world, an architecture of sound, self-sufficient. Probably to write a "public poem" [occasional] is more difficult to do successfully.
Inner architecture lost to rhetoric.

"The poem lives through an inner image, that ringing mold of form which anticipates the written poem. There is not yet a single word, but the poem can already be heard. This is the sound of the inner image, this is the poet's ear touching it." [O.M., "Word & Culture", 1921]

Elena Glazov-Corrigan (Mandelshtam's Poetics) repeatedly emphasizes the duality in all Mandelshtam's statements on poetics: material/impulse, inner form/manifestation, etc. But the belief that the poetic Word turns on its own center of gravity, its own architecture, is never in doubt. To believe that such an autonomous activity nevertheless participates meaningfully in the world at large, is to believe that poetry neither denies nor succumbs to Necessity, but engages it on its own terms. This is a statement of faith in poetry's universality, its "categorical" presence.

APHORISMS

Wallace Stevens jotted down some notes about the equation poetry = life. Figure it out, Sore Bun.

I HATE SPEECH (Grenier) appears to come straight out of Derrida. What is a salience? A salience is an excrescence. A surplus, an extra. The extra special something in the way you dress that appeals to me. The text as surplus, divagation (Ashbery & Bernstein alike). Sparky light. Different.

I wish I could quote S.K. Heninger Jr.'s entire book (Proportion Poetical : the subtext of form in the English Renaissance). He's read them carefully (the philosophy, the philology). Today's NY TImes on the new science of Networks: look at Heninger. He shows the line of descent from the Renaissance: from the new scientific empiricism, through enlightenment deism, to Romantic ego-sublime, to Modern angst, to postmodern deconstruction. From Saussure through New Critics to Derrida. But he shows what they left out from Saussure: the local networks of meanings which limit the arbitrariness of differential signs. "Brown" is ONLY arbitrary (or differential - ie. according to Saussure, "brown" only means "what is not red, blue or the other colors") within the sub-class COLORS. & how Derrida tried to erase late Saussure on the consistent "human nature" (which assigns meaning to local categories or classes of things), by relegating it to an "absent trace" which is self-contradictory (by the same token the image of his own logical slippage).

Why is this important or anything?

I'm going to prove how the sub-networks of US poetry (Olsonian, NY Schoolian, langpo) WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT, are positive contributors to a more comprehensive theory of poetry which transcends the postmodern condition. Poetry = life, because Ashbery's evasion, Grenier's denial, Olson's psycho-mytho are built on a dialectical feint around Stevens's equation, which parallels the Renaissance/Modern/Postmodern dialectical feint around the ancient/medieval Logos of nature.

The lighthouse is not a mode of differance. The foghorn likewise. Simple indication of rocks nearby. "Human nature" establishes local pointers via speech.

I started this blog writing about the special symbiosis of sound + sense which is poetry. Dialectic of "musical form" (metrics, song) + meaning: a semiotics of sensual or mathematical form alternating with a semiotics of language. The harmonic coherences which arise from this doubleness set poetry apart from prose. THERE IS NO NEED FOR AN ADDITIONAL DISTINCTION (the differances, the evasions, the myths). These additional distinctions are built upon merely partial & polemical philosophical foundations.

Poetry is the sign of the inherent harmonic nature of reality (a Stevensian notion). Philosophical systems built upon denial (post-Renaissance) are only half of the dialectic, and as such they distort the embodiments of language, poetry's material.

Poetry is not a New Critical "material" built on an autonomous system of differences ("language"). Both language & poetry are human harmonic gestures toward either real things or real imaginary fables.

The sound of your singing bears

"Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were a part."