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."

Formalism some more. Another angle on "para-form" (& I recommend in the regard a book by S. K. Heninger titled "Proportion Poetical").

The polemical fracturings between supposed formalists & supposed innovators disguise the fact that both fall together on one side of a deeper fissure - between poets & prose fiction writers. I know that even to admit the difference is highly controversial. But - & the Heninger book is very helpful here - the divide goes back to Plato vs. Aristotle on the nature of poetry. Is the poet, per Aristotle, primarily a maker of fictional imitations of a real or idealized reality - ie. primarily allied to PAINTING - so that verse & metrics are incidental? Or is the poet, ala Plato, the inspired (drunken) vessel of divine fury, possessed by a dithyrhamb, primarily allied to MUSIC? Does the poet require & insist on music in order to be able to invent the appropriate mimesis of the ideal harmony of the spheres? Or is versification less important than realistic description & plot?

The debate since Pound & modernism has intensified, with the different crosscurrents very obvious in Pound: he needed free verse both in order to be properly "musical" AND in order to include a more accurate representation of "contemporary reality". But the musicality of Symbolism was to some degree predicated on a rejection of prose, everyday speech, "journalism"; while on the other hand the metrical traditionalism of someone like Frost served as a kind of grid or framework to HIGHLIGHT or intensify "ordinary speech", the Wordsworthian poet speaking the language of everyperson - and so avoiding the symbolist distancing effect.

But as I say underlying this internal debate, it seems to me, is what makes formalist & anti-formalist close kin : their allegiance to poetry as opposed to prose. Poet means "maker"; fiction means "made thing" - yet the poet is signed by a vow to primitive SONG, while the novelist is devoted to "ut pictura" through the rhetorical drone or equilibrium of prose description - a very different endeavor.

This poetic allegiance to the immediacy & presence of song can be seen to have consequences for the poet's role in culture, on the one hand (the implications for "para-form"), and consequences for the poet's technical development (the implications for form: how does the poet balance the "music" & the "painting"?)