Enjoyed today's lecture at the Hotel.
I keep thinking of the Middle Ages. Must be the time of year or something. I don't idealize the Middle Ages; I'm just vaguely, sleepily aware of some affinities.
Sienese painting as opposed to Florentine realism.
John writes about change & its dominion... I think about the force of time & seasons - as regulative, urging us back into a round. I think about peasants & farmers & Bruegel & my ancestors. The oxen of Saturn. Reading in Mazzotta's Dante book about the dual character of Saturn - its influence over the sort of dry leaden durability & materialism of workers in the earth, on the one hand, and its mystico-spiritual influence over theologians & poets, on the other (the "Age of Saturn", the Golden Age, the Edenic time of Adam & Eve the gardeners).
Showing posts with label John Latta2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Latta2. Show all posts
12.03.2004
11.10.2004
Some John's son has been reading (sub rosa, or sub orchida, I should say) Ben Jonson (which, come to think of it, means "son of John's son").
10.28.2004
I love the style at the smoky loge.
Still, I find myself harboring reservations (do you take reservations?).
Something is wrong with the sour & stale critiques of the previous century. The oppositions underlined by Adorno, ornamented by Rasula - the notion that writing (poetry) stands opposed to exchange, the merely political notion of "canon" as elitism and exclusion - something missing here. & what's missing leads inexorably to JL's closing fantasies of an autotelic/invisible victim-poetics (the writer above the filling station).
Sure, there are truths in all this... but I say something's missing, something's left out...
First of all, the exchange binary. Works of art, poems, are BOTH inalienable labor and forms of exchange. They are exchanges of aesthetic-intellectual values. Of beauty, if you will - which cannot be divorced from ethics (ie. there is something you could call "moral beauty" : the just equilibrium of a humane civilization, the life-force, manifested in liberation from various forms of oppression).
The sullen hopelessness of much 20th-cent. critique is, of course, based on a sense of outraged moral value; the irony, parody, and refusals of the artists often draw from, rhyme with, or contribute to, the general intellectual critique. The trouble is, without hope, critique because an end in itself, becomes autotelic : and it then reads art in the mirror of its own refusals. Thus Adorno simply juxtaposes art and (commodity) exchange. But if art is also exchange, then the modernist claim of pure autonomy is not strictly true : intellectual/aesthetic exchange runs parallel in some way to general economic exchange.
Rasula's strictures against Western "canon" build on the same set of alienation-formulas. But to reduce canonization to a sociological mechanism actually deforms the role of artists themselves. My readings in Russian lit history bring this home very clearly. The artists themselves nurture and create the canons, not some theoretical pyramid of hierarchical society. Read Wachtel's book, noted here earlier, and watch how 200 years of Russian poetic tradition draws consciously on its own "canonical" roots. Listen to Brodsky:
"When I left school, when my friends quit work or college and started in on poetics, the people we read - and we read a lot - we chose by instinct, by intuition. We had no feeling that we were continuing any sort of tradition, or that we had any mentors or spiritual fathers, or anything like that. We were, if not the black sheep of the family, then orphans. And it is a marvelous thing when an orphan begins to sing in his father's voice."
Later.
Still, I find myself harboring reservations (do you take reservations?).
Something is wrong with the sour & stale critiques of the previous century. The oppositions underlined by Adorno, ornamented by Rasula - the notion that writing (poetry) stands opposed to exchange, the merely political notion of "canon" as elitism and exclusion - something missing here. & what's missing leads inexorably to JL's closing fantasies of an autotelic/invisible victim-poetics (the writer above the filling station).
Sure, there are truths in all this... but I say something's missing, something's left out...
First of all, the exchange binary. Works of art, poems, are BOTH inalienable labor and forms of exchange. They are exchanges of aesthetic-intellectual values. Of beauty, if you will - which cannot be divorced from ethics (ie. there is something you could call "moral beauty" : the just equilibrium of a humane civilization, the life-force, manifested in liberation from various forms of oppression).
The sullen hopelessness of much 20th-cent. critique is, of course, based on a sense of outraged moral value; the irony, parody, and refusals of the artists often draw from, rhyme with, or contribute to, the general intellectual critique. The trouble is, without hope, critique because an end in itself, becomes autotelic : and it then reads art in the mirror of its own refusals. Thus Adorno simply juxtaposes art and (commodity) exchange. But if art is also exchange, then the modernist claim of pure autonomy is not strictly true : intellectual/aesthetic exchange runs parallel in some way to general economic exchange.
Rasula's strictures against Western "canon" build on the same set of alienation-formulas. But to reduce canonization to a sociological mechanism actually deforms the role of artists themselves. My readings in Russian lit history bring this home very clearly. The artists themselves nurture and create the canons, not some theoretical pyramid of hierarchical society. Read Wachtel's book, noted here earlier, and watch how 200 years of Russian poetic tradition draws consciously on its own "canonical" roots. Listen to Brodsky:
"When I left school, when my friends quit work or college and started in on poetics, the people we read - and we read a lot - we chose by instinct, by intuition. We had no feeling that we were continuing any sort of tradition, or that we had any mentors or spiritual fathers, or anything like that. We were, if not the black sheep of the family, then orphans. And it is a marvelous thing when an orphan begins to sing in his father's voice."
Later.
10.23.2004
Wachtel's study of Russian verse, mentioned yesterday, makes it clear that even the Futurists, despite their brash gleeful revo-destroyo attitude, worked & re-worked their own craft basis, by means of response to powerful & popular works of the past (see his comments on Kruchenyk's re-do of Pushkin's ballad "The Black Shawl", in his language-game verse crime novel, The Brigand Vanka Kain and Sonka the Manicurist).
I'm feeling shrifted & shifted this morning. Thinking back to Hotel Point comments also noted yesterday (last paragraph of his Friday post).
No one can destroy poetry. But are we ruining it & spoiling it (or just missing it) by too much glib talk? The emphasis is on creating unique & exceptional alternative verbal spaces. Should it be, rather, on practice that tries to reach for the essential, the central, the paradigmatic (through careful engagement with tradition-as-craft)? Such does not necessarily have to be "serious" in a ponderous way (as poets like Kruchenyk show). But the power, the acoustic magnitude, of the communicative instruments of poetry - just as in music - depends on refinement, exactitude, and careful listening.
I'm feeling shrifted & shifted this morning. Thinking back to Hotel Point comments also noted yesterday (last paragraph of his Friday post).
No one can destroy poetry. But are we ruining it & spoiling it (or just missing it) by too much glib talk? The emphasis is on creating unique & exceptional alternative verbal spaces. Should it be, rather, on practice that tries to reach for the essential, the central, the paradigmatic (through careful engagement with tradition-as-craft)? Such does not necessarily have to be "serious" in a ponderous way (as poets like Kruchenyk show). But the power, the acoustic magnitude, of the communicative instruments of poetry - just as in music - depends on refinement, exactitude, and careful listening.
9.30.2004
Walking home from work last night, thinking of Jordan's comments on reading Raworth, did I have a minor epiphany, or just another wobble of opinion? But it did occur to me, that lambasting "langpo" for highlighting the signifier is a hopeless endeavor. Why? Because leaning on the signifier is so integral to all poetry; and, despite the wheedling mutilations of "Theory" which some "language poets" use to justify their mediocre verse, they, along with all poets, are just as wrapped up with, enamoured of, the youthful geste of the word-for-its-own-sake: the poet's most basic assertion of independence, which is to have fun with words, no matter how irrelevant & insignificant & socially-disengaged that activity may be, no matter what the consequences. So underlying their opportunist theorizing is a more basic & shared impulse toward (literary) freedom, liberation.
So that perhaps even the "highest", the most ambitious, profound, engaged, meaningful, relevant, knowing, great, etc., poetry is - at some hermetic & inaccessible level - grounded on fun - and if not, it rings tinny, ponderous, hypocritical, phony, etc.
*
Extra-nice & precise over at Hotel this morning. Still, I would say, there is a place for the "objective", for observation. All Proust's qualifiers & refinements (the inward experiential accuracy of impressionism) nevertheless require it. & without basic perception, the stylistic excesses fall just as bloatedly in the other direction.
So that perhaps even the "highest", the most ambitious, profound, engaged, meaningful, relevant, knowing, great, etc., poetry is - at some hermetic & inaccessible level - grounded on fun - and if not, it rings tinny, ponderous, hypocritical, phony, etc.
*
Extra-nice & precise over at Hotel this morning. Still, I would say, there is a place for the "objective", for observation. All Proust's qualifiers & refinements (the inward experiential accuracy of impressionism) nevertheless require it. & without basic perception, the stylistic excesses fall just as bloatedly in the other direction.
9.10.2004
Latta-day Proust.
What a mighty vast meme was early 20th-cent. "memory"! The cork-lined French chap made a Mots-Valeurian personal epic out of it.
Out of Baudelaire, Bergson, Nietzsche - "eternal return". The Future is possibility; the Past is fixed; but the Present of writing, through reflection and reiteration, turns the Past once more toward possibility - a spectral revivimummifictation.
Memory functioning like a time-analogy for the spatialization - the multidimensionality - enacted by words on a page (blossoming into imaginative vision & empathy). Bergson's "fan of phenomena" (cf. Mandelstam) enacted (paradigmatically) as the reader opening a book.
Crane's Bridge thusly miniaturized Joyce's Ulysses technique. "America" as a cinematic sleight, an entire history dreamt in a single night in Manhattan.
Eliot's elegant epitome for the whole thing, at the opening of Four Quartets :
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
(But : see Keith Ward's book, Religion and Creation, for a discerning reconsideration of the whole traditional Platonic eternal "block time" changelessness perspective.)
What a mighty vast meme was early 20th-cent. "memory"! The cork-lined French chap made a Mots-Valeurian personal epic out of it.
Out of Baudelaire, Bergson, Nietzsche - "eternal return". The Future is possibility; the Past is fixed; but the Present of writing, through reflection and reiteration, turns the Past once more toward possibility - a spectral revivimummifictation.
Memory functioning like a time-analogy for the spatialization - the multidimensionality - enacted by words on a page (blossoming into imaginative vision & empathy). Bergson's "fan of phenomena" (cf. Mandelstam) enacted (paradigmatically) as the reader opening a book.
Crane's Bridge thusly miniaturized Joyce's Ulysses technique. "America" as a cinematic sleight, an entire history dreamt in a single night in Manhattan.
Eliot's elegant epitome for the whole thing, at the opening of Four Quartets :
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
(But : see Keith Ward's book, Religion and Creation, for a discerning reconsideration of the whole traditional Platonic eternal "block time" changelessness perspective.)
7.19.2004
He's back at the Hotel.
Latta on Loons.
The loon is the poet of that gloomy solitary different (sometimes beautifully bright & clear) landscape (north woods).
I've entered loon call contests in Ely, MN & Minneapolis. With no more success than the poetry contests, aw shucks.
Latta on Loons.
The loon is the poet of that gloomy solitary different (sometimes beautifully bright & clear) landscape (north woods).
I've entered loon call contests in Ely, MN & Minneapolis. With no more success than the poetry contests, aw shucks.
6.07.2004
I get the feeling that JL, in his post of today over at the Hotel, via Gerrit Lansing quote, exaggerates the contemporary sway of traditionalist poetics. Why? Whitman & "innovation" won that battle a long time ago. Is it like the pebble in his shoe or the nagging return of the repressed? I mean the possibility that "traditionalist" techniques might represent opportunities denied. Denied by partisanship & polemics. The lingering residue of defensiveness from style battles long over. Red & blue state poetics.
5.26.2004
So we pass through 2 decades of "postmodern" poetry (see JL's continuing reflections). & then comes along Franz Wright, carrying around some of the traditional charismatic baggage of the poet-figure (lost son of famous lost poet, confessional survivor, with psychic limp) we were supposed to have left behind. A sort of diminished echo effect of the "traditional office".
Yet maybe diminished is not the right word. His poems are quite effective; you can hear that same sound of rueful emotional directness, the strong feeling and simplicity (I identify this with the midwest) in some of his father's poetry.
Yet maybe diminished is not the right word. His poems are quite effective; you can hear that same sound of rueful emotional directness, the strong feeling and simplicity (I identify this with the midwest) in some of his father's poetry.
5.10.2004
JL again, on Harvey Shapiro's review at the time of publication of the (Donald Allen) New American Poets anthology:
He calls particular attention to the poets of the New York School, noting James Schuyler’s insistence on “the connection between the New Poetry and the ideas behind abstract-expressionist art”: the canvas / page as a space “in which to act,” the painting / poem as (he is quoting from Harold Rosenberg’s essay “The American Action Painters”) an “act inseparable from the biography of the artist.”
(- you could consider my poetry a special branch, an offshoot of that direction. see, for example, sections from Dove Street in the archives for 2.20 & 2.21.04)
He calls particular attention to the poets of the New York School, noting James Schuyler’s insistence on “the connection between the New Poetry and the ideas behind abstract-expressionist art”: the canvas / page as a space “in which to act,” the painting / poem as (he is quoting from Harold Rosenberg’s essay “The American Action Painters”) an “act inseparable from the biography of the artist.”
(- you could consider my poetry a special branch, an offshoot of that direction. see, for example, sections from Dove Street in the archives for 2.20 & 2.21.04)
I keep enjoying John Latta's historical reflections on recent American poetry. Great details & documentation.
At the end of today's post he puts this:
"Late nights with Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46. Which bursts into lyricism, bravely defying its own somber bitterness: “I was coming back home to Lowell. It was November, it was cold, it was woodsmoke, it was swift waters in the wink of silver glare with its rose headband out yander where Eve Star (some call it Venus, some call it Lucifer) stoppered up her drooling propensities and tried to contain itself in one delimited throb of boiling light.”
And you know Kerouac just stepped out of himself and time for a moment there. (As he admits, chagrin’d, new paragraph: “Ah poetic.” Why the American propensity to thwart that outburst, to mistrust it?"
Seems that Kerouac's writing here, & his own reaction to it, contain the tendencies of both the "New Americans" and their New Critic critics. Americans tend to be Protestant Rebels, which means they are iconoclastic - image-rejecting - while at the same time rebelling vociferously (emotionally, imagistically, self-centeredly) against their culture's puritanical strictures. A stance with inherent contradictions.
At the end of today's post he puts this:
"Late nights with Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46. Which bursts into lyricism, bravely defying its own somber bitterness: “I was coming back home to Lowell. It was November, it was cold, it was woodsmoke, it was swift waters in the wink of silver glare with its rose headband out yander where Eve Star (some call it Venus, some call it Lucifer) stoppered up her drooling propensities and tried to contain itself in one delimited throb of boiling light.”
And you know Kerouac just stepped out of himself and time for a moment there. (As he admits, chagrin’d, new paragraph: “Ah poetic.” Why the American propensity to thwart that outburst, to mistrust it?"
Seems that Kerouac's writing here, & his own reaction to it, contain the tendencies of both the "New Americans" and their New Critic critics. Americans tend to be Protestant Rebels, which means they are iconoclastic - image-rejecting - while at the same time rebelling vociferously (emotionally, imagistically, self-centeredly) against their culture's puritanical strictures. A stance with inherent contradictions.
5.04.2004
Responding to John Latta's notes on "ambiguous figures":
yes, the characteristic quality of poetry is its reflexivity (its way of being something rather than simply pointing to something); but the shortcoming of so much postmodern poetry is that it simply turns this into a dichotomy ("poetry must not be mimetic since it is reflexive, self-mirroring"). What happens then is it gets further and further from ordinary experience & feeling, accenting its function as intellectual game.
The real puzzle, it seems to me, is how poetry can be both mimetic & reflexive.
yes, the characteristic quality of poetry is its reflexivity (its way of being something rather than simply pointing to something); but the shortcoming of so much postmodern poetry is that it simply turns this into a dichotomy ("poetry must not be mimetic since it is reflexive, self-mirroring"). What happens then is it gets further and further from ordinary experience & feeling, accenting its function as intellectual game.
The real puzzle, it seems to me, is how poetry can be both mimetic & reflexive.
4.27.2004
Interesting notes (as usual) over at Hotel Point. I had been thinking vaguely somewhere in the same general area this morning.
That is, about how poetry is an art of modulated speech flow. Something like learning to play the flute or another instrument. There's a level of diction, meter, rhyme, etc., just as there's a level of technique with the instrument. Then there's another level combining fitness & invention, which is maybe somewhat similar to composition. (I know what I'm talking about, having studied piano from age 6.)
(Obviously these are not new ideas - just basic ideas.)
Maybe it's the notions of fitness (these days, anyway) that vary more than any of the other factors (from poet to poet).
That is, about how poetry is an art of modulated speech flow. Something like learning to play the flute or another instrument. There's a level of diction, meter, rhyme, etc., just as there's a level of technique with the instrument. Then there's another level combining fitness & invention, which is maybe somewhat similar to composition. (I know what I'm talking about, having studied piano from age 6.)
(Obviously these are not new ideas - just basic ideas.)
Maybe it's the notions of fitness (these days, anyway) that vary more than any of the other factors (from poet to poet).
4.20.2004
3.10.2004
John Latta at the Hotel on Abstract Expressionists, Zukofsky's object-at-rest. I just finished reading N. Cusanus's Compendium, so offer his simple four-foldity :
point / line / plane / solid object
letter / syllable / word / sentence
(& more obscurely : Capability / Equality / Unity / Similarity - which I suppose could be figured as:
Power = point/letter
Equality = line/syllable
Unity = surface/word
Representation = object/sentence
Cusanus writes : any shape - a line, a circle, a sphere - is an image formed of equality.
point / line / plane / solid object
letter / syllable / word / sentence
(& more obscurely : Capability / Equality / Unity / Similarity - which I suppose could be figured as:
Power = point/letter
Equality = line/syllable
Unity = surface/word
Representation = object/sentence
Cusanus writes : any shape - a line, a circle, a sphere - is an image formed of equality.
2.12.2004
See John Latta's circumspections & link to Dale Smith's reviews for what's happening now.
In both Jarnot & Foust, minimalism seems to enhance "embodiment."
I have my own peculiar take on the "incarnational" nature of poetry.
The figure in the landscape. The hero in the not-so-sacred wood. The word in the woodwork. The curse at the crossroad. Woden hanging from the world-ash-tree.
In both Jarnot & Foust, minimalism seems to enhance "embodiment."
I have my own peculiar take on the "incarnational" nature of poetry.
The figure in the landscape. The hero in the not-so-sacred wood. The word in the woodwork. The curse at the crossroad. Woden hanging from the world-ash-tree.
1.30.2004
Doctus Johannes Latta-day Latta (Dukeh duh Donuts?) hath prethenteth somewhat of a praeliminamalarial Anatomie of the multitudinous incarnadinatusi de Awahnt-Gardes, herein [in re "Japery"].
Rara quidem, et si monstra sint, nos movere solent. - Nicolaus Cusanus
Rara quidem, et si monstra sint, nos movere solent. - Nicolaus Cusanus
1.27.2004
John Latta's earthbound empiricism a healthy thing. But America has always been closer to Pascal than to Montaigne.
Remember flying home from college in early 70s after nervous breakdown, singing the mealtime hymn "Praise God from whom all blessings flow. . .", with my poor long-suffering father in the seat beside me. A woman came up after we landed & said "Thank you so much - I was nervous about flying too."
& flying back to Providence a few days later with a pistol & ammunition hidden in my suitcase (it went into the Providence River).
Desperate for God the Father. Jesus Freaks.
Remember flying home from college in early 70s after nervous breakdown, singing the mealtime hymn "Praise God from whom all blessings flow. . .", with my poor long-suffering father in the seat beside me. A woman came up after we landed & said "Thank you so much - I was nervous about flying too."
& flying back to Providence a few days later with a pistol & ammunition hidden in my suitcase (it went into the Providence River).
Desperate for God the Father. Jesus Freaks.
10.22.2003
If, as John Latta suggested yesterday, writing under a pseudonym or fictive persona sometimes enables free (or freer) expression, then it seems possible that feeling & emotion in poetry might sometimes take authentic form through a "heteronym".
If, in addition, we grant that all language is an artificial construct, a kind of shorthand "dress-up" for an irreducible reality, then, paradoxically, the "truest" expression - what corresponds to the situation most closely - might be such a "fiction of a fiction".
Halloween is coming, oh boy (put on costume; get candy). Curious how a masking ritual precedes the feast-day celebrating community as a symbolic whole (All Souls, All Saints Day).
If, in addition, we grant that all language is an artificial construct, a kind of shorthand "dress-up" for an irreducible reality, then, paradoxically, the "truest" expression - what corresponds to the situation most closely - might be such a "fiction of a fiction".
Halloween is coming, oh boy (put on costume; get candy). Curious how a masking ritual precedes the feast-day celebrating community as a symbolic whole (All Souls, All Saints Day).
10.15.2003
John Latta has been nominated for the prestigious Outside Award, for "originality, intelligence, and sheer guts". The award is granted annually to poets who somehow manage to step away from their computers and actually "go outside" of their habitats, into the "outdoors". There is no cash award; however, winners receive a used parka from the Outside Building Foundation.
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