Writing a note in the comment box over at Josh Corey's blog got me putting 2 & 2 together.

My mother used to tell us bedtime stories (back in the 1950s) about a Tom Thumb character she called "Frisbee". Then, in the late 50s, my father, a lawyer, patented the first "Frisbee". Now I'm wondering if the two things are connected somehow.

My Dad brought home the protoype no-name frisbee one day - my brothers & I threw it around in the yard.

Perhaps this is all connected somehow with the pervasive occulted subtextual obsession - in my longish poems - with time travel, flying saucers, etc...

the Russians are coming!

*

& hey, this reminds me once again of one of my 1st published poems. (I know I've posted it before here.)

BEEP BEEP THE BABY'S UP

 
 
you can do anything you want.

 
the baby here is trying to decide

 
about growing up human.  he's rubbing

 
his double chin, he's a serious kid.

 
in a house on Arthur Street

 
a cap pistol is sitting on a desk

 
in the bedroom upstairs with the yellow

 
walls.  according to the kid here

 
it's supposedly waiting

 
for the little green men.

 
the sky gets closer

 
as it gets more blue,

 
and you can recall

 
the 4th of July

 
all the heat

 
and all those little flags

Josh Corey has been conducting an interesting improv on the differing time-effects in prose fiction & poetry. He suggests that good fiction involves an experience of "time-forgetting", whereas poetry always brings us up short with its focus on the fine grain of speech and language, the music of performance.

I've written some on this topic here at various times. What has struck me is that, while good storytelling does encourage us to lose ourselves in the story & forget time, nevertheless fiction tends to make time a theme of the story, so that the experience of reading it is double-edged : we lose ourselves (& time) in stories which describe the effects of time's power. The Odyssey and In Search of Lost Time are, I guess, the prime examples.

Poetry, on the other hand, does not simply intensify our experience of time : poetry changes the basic character of that experience. Prose may demolish our awareness of time; poetry seems to demolish time's very objectivity (as sequential, historical, impersonal phenomenon). Poetic time is a kind of performed Now, in which language spirals back reflexively on itself - and in the process, reshapes perception, knowledge, the sense of self and others.

I think it's worthwhile to emphasize these distinctions between the time-effects of prose fiction and poetry. And to repeat that the experience of a pleroma or a fulness of NOW (containing pasts and futures) - the recapturing and transmuting of past into present, chaos into order - is a theme of major narratives. Thus a notion of poetry is implicit or encrypted in the substance of fiction.

Josh stands up for weak poems against all comers.

As a perpetrator/survivor of the bruising listserve wars (Buffalo, Buffalo!) I can agree that online "critique" could get very warped. It probably shares the nervous testo-frenzy of internet behavior in general.

I also think that "micro" criticism could easily get very glib & superficial. Sometimes it takes many many readings (& side-research) to appreciate a poem.

Nevertheless, I think Josh is over-reacting. For one thing, it seems to me that Jeff Bahr is exaggerating the method in order to show how it works. But more importantly, I think this kind of analysis - hopefully offered in a sympathetic & generous manner - is very useful & necessary, if it comes from someone who knows what they're talking about.

How much bad writing gets high marks from supposed mentors - for certain strategic reasons, reasons which benefit the mentor, rather than the poet? (ie. trotting through a large percentage of mediocre & bad poems actually pays the bills for MFA teachers. & you don't want to make the students feel too bad; you don't want them to lose hope for their future niche in the industry, or even drop out of the program...)

But I don't want to turn this into a slam of CW teachers, not at all. As I say - if they know what they're doing, they're actually doing a service to literature.

"Poetry should be written fairly well." - Wm. Shakespeare

Josh responds, in part:

"Henry, I need some clarification here. Are you saying that "difficulty" in poetry stems simply from the fact that words don't mean what they say—that difficulty stems from the gap between form and content? Doesn't that apply, potentially to any utterance? Or are you arguing for the importance of the framing that happens off the page—the question of poetry as an institution (Mike would double-damn it as a homogenous institution)—and deeming inadequate any approach that doesn't either attack institutionality or expand its mandate?"

Form & content(!)... let's pass on that. The difficulty I'm referring to - the generative difficulty - is that people, not words, don't mean what they say. (Art complicates this further by offering a symbolic speech, the "factual" truth of which is irrelevant.) The fact that the gap in question (between persons & truth-speaking) does apply to any utterance, is actually what places ethical difficulty at the center of literature's social relevance.

I would not, as you do here, Josh, simply align "the framing that happens off the page" with "the question of poetry as an institution". Dilemmas of personal and social ethics do not have simple institutional correlates. Rather, humanity is confronted with social, political, environmental, personal, psychological, experiential and philosophical riddles and dilemmas of such depth and complexity, as to result in ethical demands for which many people around the world sacrifice their personal well-being and their very lives. It is this experiential context which limits the general interest in poetry, to those relatively rare works which grapple with these demands in a substantial way.

Following interesting chit-chat among Josh, Jordan & Mike.

I have some trouble with both Josh's & Mike's formulations. Josh makes "difficulty" sound easy. Just another of those sophisticated pleasures we arty intellectuals share, part of the general joie de vivre. It's a sunny perspective.

Mike faults poets for not recognizing the coterie problem, the extent of the challenge involved in finding a way for poetry to "break in" to the awareness of the ordinary reader of fiction & non-fiction.

I guess my reservation about both arguments hinges on the nature of difficulty. Basically I think it's kind of a "boundary problem", a question of the framework. That is, the kind of difficulty we think we have in mind - the sort of problematic that grips the reader in an unshakeable wrestling hold, from which they will never get free - this level of difficulty is, fundamentally, not a literary question. That is, it is not something that can be finessed by aesthetics or rhetoric. In fact, it stems from the core of a difficulty with words & word-mongering itself: that words & deeds are not always the same thing; that life & literature are incommensurate; that promises and vows can be emptied of content, become vehicles of illusion, vanity, hypocrisy & deceit.

From this perspective, literary relevance, impact &/or difficulty is more of an ethical rather than a technical-aesthetic issue; it remains difficult even for the most sophisticated & talented writer, since it reaches into human commitments rooted beyond the literary "making" itself.

The art which most compels a readership seems often to emerge from a seemingly insoluble impasse or crisis or dilemma - a dilemma which, through the talent of the poet, results in a representation which has meaning for both the poet and for "society". It may stimulate a radical re-working of literary style & subject-matter. We are talking about a phenomenon which does not follow either from exhortations to the literary community to "work harder at it" (ala Mike), or from mere literary sophistication (ala Josh), which takes pleasure in arcane works, but shuns the ethical implications or demands that words sometimes entail.

here's a nice verbal nod to that pre-verbal gesture, the schticky prestidigitation of the musical hand (swiped from here):

His handpalm lifted, his handshell cupped, his handsign pointed, his handheart mated, his handaxe risen, his handleaf fallen. Helpsome hand that holemost heals! What is het holy! It gested. (Finnegans Wake)

Josh mentions Jonathan Ivry's paper on "Zukofsky's Quincunx". I hope Ivry noted the classic literary source on this subject, Sir Thos. Browne's essay The Garden of Cyrus.

Terrific, fascinating posts on the Zukofsky conference from Josh Corey. Thank you, Josh.

Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza. . . the effort to confront & describe the nature of God per se within the context of the definition of world & nature.

Theologian Keith Ward, as I mentioned a week or so ago, has been a great help to me lately in this area (three books: Religion and Relevation, Religion and Creation, Religion and Community).

At Josh Corey's suggestion, re-read Kristen Prevallet's essay on "investigative poetics".

Progress is happening toward italian bilingual publication of "history poem" In RI. KP published part of it in Apex of the M years ago.

Boston had no case against Miantonomi, so
 they released him to Uncas; shortly thereafter,
             while leading him
  
         down a path, one of Uncas' men drove
 a hatchet into Miantonomi's skull.

  
It's dark out now.  But the lights are on again.
 Narragansett Electric at work on the lines,
             or the generator.

  
         For me to narrate?  Delving in
 hell for the details?

Josh responds to my late comments on his latest.

Stevens drew some of his material for Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction from a book by Charles Mauron called Aesthetics and Psychology (Leggett covers this in the book I mentioned earlier). I find his/their attitude on these matters pretty persuasive.

It's not that social forces, history, politics etc. must be kept out of poetry, or can be. It's that all these things are part of the world of action, and that the aesthetic impulse or feeling which inspires poetry emanates from another place, the world of contemplation : a pause in reality and its demands, a Sabbath-day in which we simply contemplate without striving to change or be changed. The originality and freedom of poetry, its synthetic power to evoke and present reality in a new light, depend ultimately on this capacity to see & feel & invent without a social demand of any kind; an originary, independent, early impulse. Aesthetic response, creative vision. & then the listener or reader sees & shares it with the artist.

Josh Corey defends the notion that you can counter a critic's criticism by attacking their poetry.

That may be pamphleteering but it's not criticism.

Josh Corey responds (on 8/28) to my Theorie of Faculties Poetickal.

Josh, I think the idea of choosing a favorite tendency (pleasure-principled, or reflective/establishment, or irascible/engaged) is probably an illusion. Not because there is no free choice, but because tendencies are like symptoms (in a society of infinite & vast solipsism). Symptoms are sub-cultural, sub-aesthetic.

I think of the visionary or contemplative as an active process, not a mechanical reflection of "things as they are" (whatever that is). A work of finding relations & connections across varied & separate ranges of things & experiences. The visionary makes sense of history & contemporary reality through this process.

Whereas the "irascible" or engage tendency moves immediately from the "answer" to the persuasion; the answer is sort of assumed (an unjust state of things, for example). The visionary shows the state of things in their complexity.

On the plane back from Minnesota (seated amidst a beery wisecracking post-Labor Day Fife & Drum Band from Boston, going home), re-reading Carl Schorske's cultural history, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Hofmannsthal, poet & playwright, brooding over the relation of artist to society. A paradox : the moment the artist (the poet) arrogates the role of creating, rather than illustrating or ornamenting, culture, he or she becomes irrelevant.

More interesting comments from Josh Corey, relating to very general approaches to style. Raising a question about whether there is a "symbolist" aesthetics (Baudelaire, Eliot, Lowell), which accepts (is built on) the conceptual framing (allegorical?) of perception, as opposed to a more free-form, "pure perception" aesthetics stemming from Pound & Olson. I'm paraphrasing here.

His remarks seem a least tangentially related to distinctions I've made recently (& periodically) between very general "acmeist" vs. "futurist" poetics : the notion that poetry is in part a reflection/recurrence of the past - the Otherness of the past being recognized & reconciled in a re-making of the Same (ie. Stevens'

"the ever-never-changing Same,
appearance of Again, the diva-dame"

or something like that) - which could encourage a Crane, for example, to re-make rather than throw out the pentameter -

or perhaps these differences reflect an older, more basic distinction, between the beautiful & the sublime?

But I wouldn't like to promote yet another simplistic binary. Seems pleasant, though, to take these paths into matters of style rather than literary politics. Quietude/Negativity is not symbolist/imagist is not beautiful/sublime is not the cooked/raw is not New Critical/Confessional is not mainstream/oppositional. . .

the critic would evaluate the poem or poetics as a many-sided complex/simple within the circus of contemporary verbalizationzzzzzzzzzzz. . .

Back to Josh Corey's remarks on "poetics of relation" etc.

Glissant's ideas, as summarized by K. Prevallet, have been in the air generally for quite a some time, no? - the notion of errancy as a path into connection & otherness, the de-centered openness to marginalized voices and perspectives, the emphasis on the "rhizomatic" as opposed to the "rooted", the centralized, the hegemonic. . .

In fact it seems pretty obvious that experimental poetics of many flavors have invested themselves in the general postmodern trend of these concepts, no?

Maybe the hinge factor here is the "relation" between this cluster of ideas on the on hand, and the idea of the poet as reporter and investigator and documentarian, on the other. There is something interesting here which connects the notion of repertorial independence & objectivity with the sidelining of the poet's own self-presentation & ego; an appealing idea, but booby-trapped - since "objectivity" invests the narrator-histor with simply a transmogrified Authority, the centrality of the scriptor having simply shed one skin & donned another.

Poetry, objectivity, Ouroboros. . .

more later maybe.

Josh Corey made an excellent comeback to my flippid comments on "poetics of relation". I just haven't had time to think about it since.

"Investigative poetics" - fascinating dimension. Something deeply satisfying in the dream of combining roles of poet and historian/investigator. Pound's & Olson's & Dorn's charge.

A poet could spend a lifetime creating a style that combines these contrasting elements & impulses in a new way.

Josh Corey on "relational poetics". I haven't read the Fence issue, but I ask this :

Isn't this a time-honored crutch for good old bad writing : to turn "social relevance" into a theme or a technique or an ideal ??? It's a "branding" method.

The "others" are always subjective in a fallible way. "We" are relevant & "social" in an original, critical way.

But I guess I should read what he's talking about. This is starting to sound like I'm carping !!!

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.

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.

Very interesting comments on pastoral & utopia by Josh Corey here.