good comment today by Jack Kimball re these issues. I agree, though it may not seem like it. At least I agree if one is willing to think of the Bible, the Constitution, Shakespeare, Keats, Pushkin, Poe, etc. also - along with Dickinson and Whitman - as "folk art".

Authentic "fine art" is sophisticated art which has kept its roots in reality, experience, feeling, truth. Like authentic folk art.

For Pantaloons, it's a real class act.

Jack's is kind of a funnier version of the familiar Silliman line.

We live in a Darwin jungle, & there's no place for quietude unless you're rich & sleek.

Spend every day on the counter-culture merry-go-round, & be a happy horse.

Jack actually read the review.

Agreed.

Though I still feel the "blame the mainstream" game is zero-sum all the way. A game for losers (us'ns).

Orr points toward self-effacing precision (in Bishop) as opposed to personality (as in Lowell, Berryman), and I think he means it's that quality which she has instilled, in her self-effacing way, in the good poetry of later generations. This has nothing to do with who or who doesn't get into the New Yorker (& that's one of the more boring topics in our wee world of posies & poseurs).

Jack Kimball notes amazing fact of new publication of some poems by Samuel Greenberg, very obscure New York poet, who died in 1917, at age 23, of TB, and whose work influenced Hart Crane (Crane actually stole some of his lines in the poem "Emblems of Conduct").

I have a copy of an early edition of Greenberg's poems. Once, back in the 70s, I was walking down Hope St (here in Prov.), wearing a pair of paint-spattered jeans (I had just been painting my apartment). An elderly gent, in passing, suddenly said : "A painter, I presume?" I said, "well, no, I'm a poet." He asked, "Who's your favorite poet?" Just for fun, I said "Samuel Greenberg." The fellow did a double-take. He turned out to be another Jack - Jack Birss, retired Cornell(?) english prof, rare book collector, Hart Crane aficionado (I noticed years later that he had donated a small privately-printed vol. of a couple of Crane's letters to the Brown library.) Birss knew all about Samuel Greenberg. We were both struck by the coincidence.

Jack Kimball has his own lit-industry schtick going. Clearly aspires to write for Newt Gingrich's mag, Manlyfesto. I'd take him down too, wipe the mat with him just like I do with Silliman, except, if I did that, he might make fun of me. What a world we live in today. That's why they founded Grand Fenwick, you know.

I guess Jack Kimball was criticizing me (in his post of Fri. 8/6). I could be wrong. It's hard to tell sometimes where he's directing his barbs.

My ruminations are often belabored, for sure. But I don't think it's impossible to understand what I'm saying. The point about poetic mimesis:

If you believe, or at least accept the possibility, that nature, the universe, reflects some kind of spiritual order, some creative beauty, signs of consciousness - the means or meaning or purpose of which may be far beyond our comprehension - yet nevertheless it seems there - then, among the many possible means of its representation (its mimesis) - scientific discourse, prose argument, etc. - poetry might exhibit some special capabilities. Why? Because its means are "number", vivid (vitalist) imagery, and metaphor. What you might call a structural analogy could be in effect, which relates the beauty-in-itself of poetic language to the beauty-in-itself of creation. ("Number, weight, and measure" - cf. Augustine's classic defense of sacred music - his definition of which included poetry).

The vitalism of poetry is one of its throwback qualities - G. Vico has a lot to say about this. A world ruled by spiritual forces is certainly archaic and unscientific, and a religious perspective for today would have to take this into account (cf. Keith Ward's books, Religion and Revelation and Religion and Creation). One of the big contemporary problems is the way sacred scriptures which are essentially poetic in nature are fronted with doctrinaire, literalist polemics - the new superstition.

Responding to JK (of today, 8/7) :

it seems like there is a basic difference between:
1) this text means [. . .] to me
and
2) in this text, the author is communicating [. . .].

A text will trigger all kinds of thoughts & insights in a reader; but this is a little different activity from that of trying to "hear" exactly what the author is communicating.

It's possible that Gary's "mis"-translation is actually an effort to convey more exactly what the poet is saying in the original. I suppose there are as many ways to do this as there are languages (or more).

JK asking about empiricism (reasoning from experience?).

What if observation & theory are actually the same thing. (As "nature" is a synonym of "artifice".) In both we see patterns & interpret them. & what if both are always "conjectural" (as in Nicholas Cusanus, or Karl Popper).

So maybe a poem is an observation-theory.

Say that again? A poem is. . .

"I work hard, I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn - so much the better. Art is difficult. Easy art is what you see at modern exhibitions of things and doodles." - Vladimir Nabokov

Fluttering about Flaublog. Reminds me of little lame Pantaloon-man's query/comment about whether there is something substantial in the connection between the work & the life in considering poetry - whether poets "teach" by exemplary life, not only in their works (at least I think that was what JK was pondering at the time).

Steve "owes me $15" Evans is right that the sociability of blogging tends against the solitude needed for some kinds of thinking & writing. Didn't "Shirley Bean" leave off blogging for just that reason? ON T'OTHER HAND, blogging cain't be rudduced to critical expository pose.

Seems to me more like a curious wallow in the realities of office downtime communication, an interstice which allows for expanded creative acting-up or self-presentation. Thus the pleasant VARIETY of blahgpo acts. Which to my thinkin' circles around again to JK's question. Jordan, by the way, sounds almost Sillimanesque in his defense of blogging as political (see "tense/unheeded" comments of yesterday). But is poetry political? Damn straight - so's the Pope.

I tend to agree that the poetry & the poet are inseparable. This doesn't mean we have to delve with vulgar curiosity into the biographical mulch. I think all I'm saying is that the "public informality" of blogging reinforces the presence of poet In Persona qua poet. Words are darn pow'rful, as my Uncle Ned used to say on the porch. Many authors have a curiously impersonal approach to writing - even poets. For them literature is a form of channeling - the results vary depending on talent & scruples. Blogging in an interesting way combines power (of language) & informality (diaries, letters, conversation). In that combination lies the odd feeling of personal presence & immediacy which blogging provides.

I realize I'm rambling. I think whut I'ma tryin to say is that deep down I have a hunch that poetry is NOT channeling - either of accepted power-hegemonic social discourses (cultural or subcultural), or of exemplary classic models. & why not ?? because deep down the person & the word are indistinguishable. The vocation of the writer transmutes or fuses person & word. The poet stands with her or his word to the end of time & none other's - the rest is echo chamber, channeling, feedback, follow the signs please. & the informal immediacy of blogging perhaps reinforces that impression. It gets back to what I was theorizing way back in Jan or Feb about poetry versus prose as illustrated by poetic NOWNESS vs prose MIMESIS.

Either that, or blogging is just another kind of ego tripping. That too. Shorter Wanted Posters Wanted, Shorty.