just got back from Kent Johnson & K. Silem Mohammad reading, downtown. should have hung around to say hello to Kent, at least, but was feeling shy & unsociable. spoke to poet Karen Donovan there, & CD Wright, briefly (we talked about Angola prison, near New Orleans). shook hands with friendly Michael Gizzi.
enjoyed hearing them - maybe write more about it tomorrow.
Kent's poetry projects a lot of heart & emotion - but at a slant, in a game. His clear unaffected writing style is a good vehicle for the larger set of weird rhetorical fun & games. but people miss the heart part, perhaps.
sometimes he does understatement very effectively : other times he could use it more - like when he (unfortunately) hammed up the Jaime Saenz translation he read. that should have been done in understatement.
the broad strokes, the hammer-blows - say in the Abu Graibh poem - might be looked at as coming out of Hispanic rhetorical tradition he's familiar with, but we're not so used to. but it was appropriate to the situation (ie. the prisoner abuse)
Kent has a real inventiveness, a particular scene-setting talent, that blends so well with the directness, the simplicity of his sentences, his style. it makes for dramatic poetry. unusual in the arch atmosphere of post-avantism. he can write political poems.
(nevertheless the recurrent obsessional object - insider po-biz culture - is not really worth the excessive obsessiveness - tho it makes a nice target for satire sometimes, I guess)
I liked Kasey's "Forest Ranger" poem best, tho even in that the comic persona was a bit derivative. It was very funny though, I was laughing away.
Otherwise the poetry didn't interest me too much, the flarf in-your-face too baroque for my taste.
Showing posts with label Kasey Mohammad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kasey Mohammad. Show all posts
10.04.2005
8.04.2005
I guess there is something similar between my "tuning fork" & Kasey's idea of "gateway poets".
7.14.2005
Enjoying Kasey's (& Nada's) reflections on "what it means to me".
Poetry was not a big part of my childhood. Music, reading & public recitation were, however. There were a lot of school & church plays, speeches from American history to be memorized & recited, hymns & campfire songs & so on. I remember singing hymns & songs all through the long bus rides to summer Y camp. That's how they used to keep us occupied.
"Fair are the meadows,
fairer still the woodlands,
clothed in the beauteous[?] garb of Spring..."
I do remember having to memorize & recite "The Charge of the Light Brigade" for my 5th-grade English class.
Most of the pleasure of poetry in those days came from the silliness involved in class recitals - the many ways kids would find to obliterate the poems.
The NY School can be understood as an outgrowth of this phenomenon.
I think I learned to enjoy reading poetry later, by way of reading fiction. Fiction lights up the imaginative faculties - you learn to "see" the world in the book. & poems are little fictions.
Poetry was not a big part of my childhood. Music, reading & public recitation were, however. There were a lot of school & church plays, speeches from American history to be memorized & recited, hymns & campfire songs & so on. I remember singing hymns & songs all through the long bus rides to summer Y camp. That's how they used to keep us occupied.
"Fair are the meadows,
fairer still the woodlands,
clothed in the beauteous[?] garb of Spring..."
I do remember having to memorize & recite "The Charge of the Light Brigade" for my 5th-grade English class.
Most of the pleasure of poetry in those days came from the silliness involved in class recitals - the many ways kids would find to obliterate the poems.
The NY School can be understood as an outgrowth of this phenomenon.
I think I learned to enjoy reading poetry later, by way of reading fiction. Fiction lights up the imaginative faculties - you learn to "see" the world in the book. & poems are little fictions.
6.15.2005
... speaking of "reality breaking through" : the library just bought two issues of Play : A Journal of Plays. I saw some familiar names among supporters & contributors (Keith Waldrop, Kasey Mohammad...).
At home, I dug out a copy of my old play, Manzago! : a Farce in Reverse. A silly song-&-dance about Noriega, GHW Bush invasion of Panama. & it seemed to be about GWB & Iraq! I was more radical back then (1990).
I sent it to Play today.
At home, I dug out a copy of my old play, Manzago! : a Farce in Reverse. A silly song-&-dance about Noriega, GHW Bush invasion of Panama. & it seemed to be about GWB & Iraq! I was more radical back then (1990).
I sent it to Play today.
5.23.2005
Kasey on this question of "the perfect" in poetry (which I expatiated on here recently).
First of all, if you found the perfect poem, this would not necessarily preclude further interest. Not simply because there might be an enormous number of perfect poems out there, but also because perfection in a poem would prove to be inimitable : it would be a perfection of form & expression unlike any other.
Secondly, I think the search for perfection is implicit in the work of the critic. Eliot, in Four Quartets somewhere, quoting Mallarme, wrote of the poets' vocation as "to purify the words of the tribe". The exacting effort of discernment, differentiation & judgement undertaken by the critic is complementary to that vocation. Through the critic's investigation into what exactly it is (the poetry under consideration), all kinds of literary faults are examined & evaluated (dullness, superficiality, irrelevance, unoriginality, faulty diction, garrulity, bathos, parochialism, ignorance, pomposity, etc. etc.), so that, by comparison & analysis, the really excellent work of a place or a period stands out.
This is the technical side of criticism, which is just as essential as are the appreciative, imaginative, synthetic, "analogical" elements of readerly interest.
First of all, if you found the perfect poem, this would not necessarily preclude further interest. Not simply because there might be an enormous number of perfect poems out there, but also because perfection in a poem would prove to be inimitable : it would be a perfection of form & expression unlike any other.
Secondly, I think the search for perfection is implicit in the work of the critic. Eliot, in Four Quartets somewhere, quoting Mallarme, wrote of the poets' vocation as "to purify the words of the tribe". The exacting effort of discernment, differentiation & judgement undertaken by the critic is complementary to that vocation. Through the critic's investigation into what exactly it is (the poetry under consideration), all kinds of literary faults are examined & evaluated (dullness, superficiality, irrelevance, unoriginality, faulty diction, garrulity, bathos, parochialism, ignorance, pomposity, etc. etc.), so that, by comparison & analysis, the really excellent work of a place or a period stands out.
This is the technical side of criticism, which is just as essential as are the appreciative, imaginative, synthetic, "analogical" elements of readerly interest.
4.22.2004
Wasted some time in comment-box squabbles over at limetree. I guess I must come across as a querulous curmudgeon, trying to shut down healthy discussion.
Surprised myself sometimes, at the extremity of my animus against poetry/politics debates.
People think I'm being a-political or conservative, when I try to separate poetry from these theoretical or praxis-oriented discussions about literature & politics. But I don't believe that's really the case. I simply believe that poetry speaks most effectively to social & political concerns when it remains in its independent poetry sphere. Poetry-making has complex difficulties of its own, and the misguided attempts to water them down, through group efforts & theorizing, really get one no closer to either effective politics or authentic poetry.
Surprised myself sometimes, at the extremity of my animus against poetry/politics debates.
People think I'm being a-political or conservative, when I try to separate poetry from these theoretical or praxis-oriented discussions about literature & politics. But I don't believe that's really the case. I simply believe that poetry speaks most effectively to social & political concerns when it remains in its independent poetry sphere. Poetry-making has complex difficulties of its own, and the misguided attempts to water them down, through group efforts & theorizing, really get one no closer to either effective politics or authentic poetry.
3.12.2004
Kasey comments on a new anthology of 20th-century American poetics.
Ron Silliman's claim that the "us vs them", the postmod vs. premod, or, in his terms, Quietude vs Post-Avant, clash is a fact of (literary) history, does not tell us much about its actual importance. Teams of dogmatists & partisans, in the various realms of human foolishness, can often be found bickering about things for which neither side actually has a real affinity.
Aggressive literary partisans and polemicists obscure the fact that a living role for poetry in a culture (just as in the case of science or philosophy or religion or economics or politics) is bound up with a set of deep and substantial and sometimes deceptively simple questions, which every culture addresses in the process of historical change. Any good general literary history - of poetry in English, say - makes this crystal clear. Poets "represent" both general-cultural and individual responses to these questions.
The polemicists will stridently claim that it is precisely because of the seriousness with which they take these larger questions, that they are able to distinguish the good from the bad, the new from the old hat, etc. But poets themselves are usually not so aggressive : they are too busy grappling, in their poems, with the unanswered questions per se. & the partisans assiduously avoid the fact that good poetry, and its reading public, do not need their help in sorting these cultural questions into pat categorical pigeonholes & critical cliches.
Ron Silliman's claim that the "us vs them", the postmod vs. premod, or, in his terms, Quietude vs Post-Avant, clash is a fact of (literary) history, does not tell us much about its actual importance. Teams of dogmatists & partisans, in the various realms of human foolishness, can often be found bickering about things for which neither side actually has a real affinity.
Aggressive literary partisans and polemicists obscure the fact that a living role for poetry in a culture (just as in the case of science or philosophy or religion or economics or politics) is bound up with a set of deep and substantial and sometimes deceptively simple questions, which every culture addresses in the process of historical change. Any good general literary history - of poetry in English, say - makes this crystal clear. Poets "represent" both general-cultural and individual responses to these questions.
The polemicists will stridently claim that it is precisely because of the seriousness with which they take these larger questions, that they are able to distinguish the good from the bad, the new from the old hat, etc. But poets themselves are usually not so aggressive : they are too busy grappling, in their poems, with the unanswered questions per se. & the partisans assiduously avoid the fact that good poetry, and its reading public, do not need their help in sorting these cultural questions into pat categorical pigeonholes & critical cliches.
12.12.2003
Kasey writes about the dumbing-down of poetic syntax & thinning-out of tradition among contemporary poets.
In terms of getting a perspective on the contemporary scene, these phenomena (along with, I would add, the loss of "depiction" or mimesis among the post-avants, which I've been harping on here) seem more important than the supposed divide between mainstream/experimental or Quietude/quirkitude.
But I'm not proposing another critique based on badmouthing. Let's look for the poets who do rediscover & synthesize great "finds" from previous poetic eras.
It's not a matter of stylistics alone. It's recreating & reliving something perennial, having to do with the immediacy/presence/role of poetry in human experience (both individual & collective).
Am reading John Latta's & Dale Smith's engaging table-talk in conjunction with these pronunciamentos.
In terms of getting a perspective on the contemporary scene, these phenomena (along with, I would add, the loss of "depiction" or mimesis among the post-avants, which I've been harping on here) seem more important than the supposed divide between mainstream/experimental or Quietude/quirkitude.
But I'm not proposing another critique based on badmouthing. Let's look for the poets who do rediscover & synthesize great "finds" from previous poetic eras.
It's not a matter of stylistics alone. It's recreating & reliving something perennial, having to do with the immediacy/presence/role of poetry in human experience (both individual & collective).
Am reading John Latta's & Dale Smith's engaging table-talk in conjunction with these pronunciamentos.
8.13.2003
Kasey writes, interestingly :
What connotations, resonances, moods do the patterns evoke? We are veering, or threatening to veer, back to the realm of the referential and the conative (and maybe the emotive itself), but the added element here is something like a belief in, or a wish for, a kind of magic: for the transformation of mere phonemes and syllables into transcendental conveying devices, Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance. It is this romantic valuation that is anathema to the theory behind much Language Poetry, and that is still a beguiling beacon for James, with his New Brutalist’s heart pumping pure Keatsian nectar instead of blood.
So maybe when it is objected that Language Poetry is unemotional, what is really meant is that it forecloses the possibility of using emotions as a portal to a privileged perspective outside materiality. A poetics that wants to take issue with such a foreclosure, moreover, has its work cut out it for it (if it proposes to take issue in a public forum among which there are Language Poets and other materialists, at any rate). Or, coming at the same problem from another angle, how does the New Brutalism propose to answer the inevitable charges of escapism, mystification, naive romanticism, etc.? Or will it ignore these charges and their attending sociopolitical imperatives entirely, content to pursue a pastoral ideal of sweet mad hedonist piping in the polluted garden of contemporary life? The world watches and waits.
One question for Kasey : why must the emotive function, ravelled into the poetic as he describes, be necessarily otherworldly-Romantic? It seems to me that the poetic expression of emotion is often very this-worldly, situational : one of poetry's fantastic capabilities is to evoke a tense dramatic human situation through understatement, thus playing upon deeply mixed emotions (both the emotions deriving from the immediacy of a critical situation, as well as those deriving from an ironic or retrospective distance from those events).
It seems to me that foregrounding this opposition between idealist & materialist ideology is exactly the "argument" of Language poetry - an argument which elides these other potential capabilities & engagements.
What connotations, resonances, moods do the patterns evoke? We are veering, or threatening to veer, back to the realm of the referential and the conative (and maybe the emotive itself), but the added element here is something like a belief in, or a wish for, a kind of magic: for the transformation of mere phonemes and syllables into transcendental conveying devices, Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance. It is this romantic valuation that is anathema to the theory behind much Language Poetry, and that is still a beguiling beacon for James, with his New Brutalist’s heart pumping pure Keatsian nectar instead of blood.
So maybe when it is objected that Language Poetry is unemotional, what is really meant is that it forecloses the possibility of using emotions as a portal to a privileged perspective outside materiality. A poetics that wants to take issue with such a foreclosure, moreover, has its work cut out it for it (if it proposes to take issue in a public forum among which there are Language Poets and other materialists, at any rate). Or, coming at the same problem from another angle, how does the New Brutalism propose to answer the inevitable charges of escapism, mystification, naive romanticism, etc.? Or will it ignore these charges and their attending sociopolitical imperatives entirely, content to pursue a pastoral ideal of sweet mad hedonist piping in the polluted garden of contemporary life? The world watches and waits.
One question for Kasey : why must the emotive function, ravelled into the poetic as he describes, be necessarily otherworldly-Romantic? It seems to me that the poetic expression of emotion is often very this-worldly, situational : one of poetry's fantastic capabilities is to evoke a tense dramatic human situation through understatement, thus playing upon deeply mixed emotions (both the emotions deriving from the immediacy of a critical situation, as well as those deriving from an ironic or retrospective distance from those events).
It seems to me that foregrounding this opposition between idealist & materialist ideology is exactly the "argument" of Language poetry - an argument which elides these other potential capabilities & engagements.
8.02.2003
Kasey quotes Mukarovsky's On Poetic Language, an excellent book.
Mukarovsky admits a duality between artifact & communication, but leans toward the self-referential pole (he is also writing this at the height of the modernist era).
I wrote earlier this week that if the poem doesn't work as art, its sociopolitical "communications" are meaningless.
Nevertheless I am leaning & pushing in these blogpolemics toward the communicative pole.
Because, I guess, I believe in "universals", or some ground of truth (thinking of Chas. Peirce here). & for me a corollary of universals is that if they exist, they must exist in some kind of dialectic or duality with partial truths, differentiation of languages, etc. The problem of the many & the one.
How does this relate to poetics? Well, if you accept the notion of universality, then there is a problem with the purely self-referential, the autonomous artifact. Because everything exists in context & relation to general, universal truth. You cannot avoid communication, even if the emphasis may reside in pure aesthetic effects. (Of course, postmodernism already made this critique of modernism, but on behalf of a relativity so complete, so aleatory, it makes communication a moot issue. Postmodernism exploded the self-enclosed artifact & left smaller artifacts bobbling & wandering through "mass culture".)
& frankly I think it's intriguing to consider the hypothesis that there is a motivating situation underlying the supposed divide between "mainstream" & "experimental" (as we know them now, that is in their contemporary versions) : the situation in which the collapse of shared universal narratives pressures art to build these self-referential models, sort of compensatory utopias.
Mukarovsky admits a duality between artifact & communication, but leans toward the self-referential pole (he is also writing this at the height of the modernist era).
I wrote earlier this week that if the poem doesn't work as art, its sociopolitical "communications" are meaningless.
Nevertheless I am leaning & pushing in these blogpolemics toward the communicative pole.
Because, I guess, I believe in "universals", or some ground of truth (thinking of Chas. Peirce here). & for me a corollary of universals is that if they exist, they must exist in some kind of dialectic or duality with partial truths, differentiation of languages, etc. The problem of the many & the one.
How does this relate to poetics? Well, if you accept the notion of universality, then there is a problem with the purely self-referential, the autonomous artifact. Because everything exists in context & relation to general, universal truth. You cannot avoid communication, even if the emphasis may reside in pure aesthetic effects. (Of course, postmodernism already made this critique of modernism, but on behalf of a relativity so complete, so aleatory, it makes communication a moot issue. Postmodernism exploded the self-enclosed artifact & left smaller artifacts bobbling & wandering through "mass culture".)
& frankly I think it's intriguing to consider the hypothesis that there is a motivating situation underlying the supposed divide between "mainstream" & "experimental" (as we know them now, that is in their contemporary versions) : the situation in which the collapse of shared universal narratives pressures art to build these self-referential models, sort of compensatory utopias.
7.23.2003
Kasey wonders what I mean by this centrality. In the obit for the Canadian writer Carol Shields last week, she was quoted as saying that one of her themes was something that she became more aware of with time : the amount of goodness in people & the world. I spoke about it as a basic, almost subliminal social contract; you could just as well call it the "tree of life".
In other words, life itself is the center; without it we shrivel up & fade away. Life is the source of humane values; human beings put them into force by their thoughts & actions. Its centrality is not an ideal construct but a consequence of its absolute necessity.
Poetry is a natural force, a virtu, stemming from this same source. Its verbal actualization could be called Logos (as it was by Philo).
In other words, life itself is the center; without it we shrivel up & fade away. Life is the source of humane values; human beings put them into force by their thoughts & actions. Its centrality is not an ideal construct but a consequence of its absolute necessity.
Poetry is a natural force, a virtu, stemming from this same source. Its verbal actualization could be called Logos (as it was by Philo).
7.22.2003
Kasey weighs in.
Kasey, I think individualism is also a side issue here. The poetic process is perennial because it is a response to the basic human experience shared by everyone.
You ask for an example of the "historical narrative of literary progress" : the dominant one for the 20th century is what I described in previous post. The avant-garde literary project is a subset of an ideology. It is this ideological narrative which short-circuits the necessary (though not sufficient!) subjectivity of the poetic process.
Kasey, I think individualism is also a side issue here. The poetic process is perennial because it is a response to the basic human experience shared by everyone.
You ask for an example of the "historical narrative of literary progress" : the dominant one for the 20th century is what I described in previous post. The avant-garde literary project is a subset of an ideology. It is this ideological narrative which short-circuits the necessary (though not sufficient!) subjectivity of the poetic process.
7.07.2003
Now the new binary is quietude & negativity, per Kasey & Josh.
This I suppose is an elaboration of Ron's basic position.
There is a "way things are" which is a socio-political system, and which is not "the way things should be". This is the given, the self-evident, the axiom, with which the poet aligns him or herself BEFORE making poetry. Then the poetry evolves as illustration. & there are neat clubs to join.
On this blog I've been voicing a critique, from various angles, of what I call "oppositional poetics", since January 3, 2003. I'm glad to hear it's now become a collegial dialog.
This I suppose is an elaboration of Ron's basic position.
There is a "way things are" which is a socio-political system, and which is not "the way things should be". This is the given, the self-evident, the axiom, with which the poet aligns him or herself BEFORE making poetry. Then the poetry evolves as illustration. & there are neat clubs to join.
On this blog I've been voicing a critique, from various angles, of what I call "oppositional poetics", since January 3, 2003. I'm glad to hear it's now become a collegial dialog.
7.03.2003
Kasey weighs in on the Silliman/Lowell/Quietude debate.
Kasey, if I'm understanding correctly, accepts the "quiet/avant" formula. Style is political; the avant/quiet split is an effect of very different cultural goals (laureate charisma vs. active dissent) and therefore, real, and therefore, indeed "there is no third way" (the "elliptics" taken to be the typical & futile attempt at combining incompatibles).
If this sounds confusing, it's not Kasey's fault, please go to Kasey's site.
It seems to me that what we have here is an example of a thought which is very prevalent in "avant" spheres. There is a Manichean split between the establishment (political, artistic, social etc) and the activist dissenting margin (political, artistic, social etc). Poetry is a subset of this split. The implications of this ideological approach to poetics are probably quite extensive, y'know. I can't get into it right now.
Happy 4th ever'body. My Grandma Florence Gould would have been 103 tomorrow.
Kasey, if I'm understanding correctly, accepts the "quiet/avant" formula. Style is political; the avant/quiet split is an effect of very different cultural goals (laureate charisma vs. active dissent) and therefore, real, and therefore, indeed "there is no third way" (the "elliptics" taken to be the typical & futile attempt at combining incompatibles).
If this sounds confusing, it's not Kasey's fault, please go to Kasey's site.
It seems to me that what we have here is an example of a thought which is very prevalent in "avant" spheres. There is a Manichean split between the establishment (political, artistic, social etc) and the activist dissenting margin (political, artistic, social etc). Poetry is a subset of this split. The implications of this ideological approach to poetics are probably quite extensive, y'know. I can't get into it right now.
Happy 4th ever'body. My Grandma Florence Gould would have been 103 tomorrow.
5.30.2003
Responding to A. Alcalay's quote under Kasey's limetree :
Allan Bloom writes in Closing of the American Mind: a person can become an American in one day.
Allan Bloom writes in Closing of the American Mind: a person can become an American in one day.
2.04.2003
Jonathan, Kasey & Mike have been talking about meter & rhythm. Recommend an interesting study:
The Strict Metrical Tradition, by David Keppel-Jones. The author attributes the amazing success of iambic pentameter to just a few technical innovations: basically, by maintaining a strict syllable count (with the exception of feminine endings & elided syllables), and combining that with 3 "radical variations" (as opposed to the simple substitution of a weak for a strong syllable (pyrrhic) or the substitution of a strong for a weak (spondee)) - these being, first, the inversion of an iambic foot (/~ instead of ~/) - but used in specific, controlled places in the line - and the 2nd and 3rd what he terms the "minor ionic" & the "second epitrite" respectively. These two are measured in sections of 4 syllables: ~~// (minor ionic) and /~// (2nd epitrite) - and are also located in specific places on the line (usually at the beginnings of lines). Most of the book is taken up in explaining the rhythmic implications of these innovations & a detailed historical survey running from Spenser & Sidney to the Victorians.
One of the general lessons to be drawn from this kind of study is the symbiosis between "strict order" & "radical variation" - the variations are effective because we are, necessarily due to the meter, attuned to very slight stress emphases.
The Strict Metrical Tradition, by David Keppel-Jones. The author attributes the amazing success of iambic pentameter to just a few technical innovations: basically, by maintaining a strict syllable count (with the exception of feminine endings & elided syllables), and combining that with 3 "radical variations" (as opposed to the simple substitution of a weak for a strong syllable (pyrrhic) or the substitution of a strong for a weak (spondee)) - these being, first, the inversion of an iambic foot (/~ instead of ~/) - but used in specific, controlled places in the line - and the 2nd and 3rd what he terms the "minor ionic" & the "second epitrite" respectively. These two are measured in sections of 4 syllables: ~~// (minor ionic) and /~// (2nd epitrite) - and are also located in specific places on the line (usually at the beginnings of lines). Most of the book is taken up in explaining the rhythmic implications of these innovations & a detailed historical survey running from Spenser & Sidney to the Victorians.
One of the general lessons to be drawn from this kind of study is the symbiosis between "strict order" & "radical variation" - the variations are effective because we are, necessarily due to the meter, attuned to very slight stress emphases.
1.22.2003
The recent NY Times feature on Anthony Hecht produced an interesting confluence of responses (see these blogs: Lime Tree, Ineluctable Maps, Mike Snider's, and the discussion on form & avant-garde on the Poetryetc. list).
Hecht's question, "what makes it a poem?" - as he sits hieratically in his white-columned library in Washington DC with the mausoleum-like inscription from one of his own funereal poems written in gold around the walls - comes like the sphinx or the voice from the crypt, asking the style question that no one has been able to answer for the last 50 years or so. "I thought of a butterfly. . ."
For the New American Poets & their inheritors, the question to some degree has already been answered. Poetry has been ineluctably democratized. See Ron Silliman's blog entry for today: the exciting question is not "what makes it a poem?", but, "How will the irrevocable advance made by the New Americans grow and diversify?" This is a rather sanguine, untroubled outlook - avoiding the issue I raised earlier on this blog, that the various "oppositional" styles in US poetry tend toward fracture and balkanization, because they are predicated on denying the existence of a central, major tradition in poetry in English. Stevens: "How to confront the mickey mockers. . . What wine does one drink, what bread does one eat?" (I don't have the book handy - hope I have those lines correct.)
I don't have the answer to any of these questions. But this morning my thoughts are ambling toward a recognition that each poet's work, each poet's poetics, represents a way of apprehending and responding to the world. Often the surface tensions & trumpetings of group developments seem to provide the fascination, the critical handle on "progress in the arts"; but maybe we could look at these matters through a slightly different lens. Say, for example, we took what we consider the elements of style & form & various poetry traditions, and instead of looking at them in some sort of comparative, historical context, looked more closely at how individual poets were able to apply particular formal elements to achieve their own individual ends.
Thus, instead of looking at Hecht, just for one example, as a role-model or exemplar of a particular style-force in poetics - what if we examined very specific formal approaches & techniques used by poets like Hecht, and then looked at how they were used by other, very different poets, poets who do not represent the para-political aspects of New Formalism. I think we would find that there are poets out there who would fall into the "progressive, experimental" pigeonholes, who are nevertheless able to apply traditional techniques (rhyme, meter, stanzas, modal forms, allusion/imitation, and so on). The nonce forms developed by "experimentalists" might not be to the taste of the nostalgic conservatives like Hecht, yet the actual techniques used by both may not be that far apart.
Kasey Mohammad emphasizes how Hecht's biases seem to stem from an inability to imagine or respond, in poetry, outside the traditional & sanctioned forms of old. It's an "archival" approach. Yet I think we have to recognize our own limits in turn. The old geezers have a background in metrics & oral presentation, coming in large part from poets like Yeats & Hardy, through Auden, Merrill et al., which if they could respond to the world-view, might teach the younger generation a number of things about the unity of relations between style, rhetoric, subject-matter, and presentation. Somewhere in that unity of effect, it seems to me, lies the direction of the central, major tradition - not the much-maligned "mainstream" - which the representatives of oppositional poetics too often complacently dismiss.
Ultimately, the arena of the new lies paradoxically with the individual - the individual poet's ability to synthesize many impulses, techniques and verbal capacities, to correlate them all in the service of a worldview and an inimitable expressive force.
Hecht's question, "what makes it a poem?" - as he sits hieratically in his white-columned library in Washington DC with the mausoleum-like inscription from one of his own funereal poems written in gold around the walls - comes like the sphinx or the voice from the crypt, asking the style question that no one has been able to answer for the last 50 years or so. "I thought of a butterfly. . ."
For the New American Poets & their inheritors, the question to some degree has already been answered. Poetry has been ineluctably democratized. See Ron Silliman's blog entry for today: the exciting question is not "what makes it a poem?", but, "How will the irrevocable advance made by the New Americans grow and diversify?" This is a rather sanguine, untroubled outlook - avoiding the issue I raised earlier on this blog, that the various "oppositional" styles in US poetry tend toward fracture and balkanization, because they are predicated on denying the existence of a central, major tradition in poetry in English. Stevens: "How to confront the mickey mockers. . . What wine does one drink, what bread does one eat?" (I don't have the book handy - hope I have those lines correct.)
I don't have the answer to any of these questions. But this morning my thoughts are ambling toward a recognition that each poet's work, each poet's poetics, represents a way of apprehending and responding to the world. Often the surface tensions & trumpetings of group developments seem to provide the fascination, the critical handle on "progress in the arts"; but maybe we could look at these matters through a slightly different lens. Say, for example, we took what we consider the elements of style & form & various poetry traditions, and instead of looking at them in some sort of comparative, historical context, looked more closely at how individual poets were able to apply particular formal elements to achieve their own individual ends.
Thus, instead of looking at Hecht, just for one example, as a role-model or exemplar of a particular style-force in poetics - what if we examined very specific formal approaches & techniques used by poets like Hecht, and then looked at how they were used by other, very different poets, poets who do not represent the para-political aspects of New Formalism. I think we would find that there are poets out there who would fall into the "progressive, experimental" pigeonholes, who are nevertheless able to apply traditional techniques (rhyme, meter, stanzas, modal forms, allusion/imitation, and so on). The nonce forms developed by "experimentalists" might not be to the taste of the nostalgic conservatives like Hecht, yet the actual techniques used by both may not be that far apart.
Kasey Mohammad emphasizes how Hecht's biases seem to stem from an inability to imagine or respond, in poetry, outside the traditional & sanctioned forms of old. It's an "archival" approach. Yet I think we have to recognize our own limits in turn. The old geezers have a background in metrics & oral presentation, coming in large part from poets like Yeats & Hardy, through Auden, Merrill et al., which if they could respond to the world-view, might teach the younger generation a number of things about the unity of relations between style, rhetoric, subject-matter, and presentation. Somewhere in that unity of effect, it seems to me, lies the direction of the central, major tradition - not the much-maligned "mainstream" - which the representatives of oppositional poetics too often complacently dismiss.
Ultimately, the arena of the new lies paradoxically with the individual - the individual poet's ability to synthesize many impulses, techniques and verbal capacities, to correlate them all in the service of a worldview and an inimitable expressive force.
1.15.2003
Arriving at work this morning I look at the poetry blogs, & see Kasey Mohammad's has this:
"In order to live completely with poetry, one must gradually learn to meet it as an Other. It comes to one on its terms, which one is powerless to negotiate. If one does negotiate these terms, the results may be skillful, amusing, beautiful, intricate, ad nauseam, but they will not be recognized by the poet, in her secret self-confessions, as poetry."
I was thinking about something like this walking in today (down Morris Ave, along Hope St - which runs between the posh prep school on one side & the "struggling" public Hope High on the other), as I was wondering what to say here this morning. . .
They say an artist shouldn't talk too much about their own work, but none of the hoary maxims seem to apply anyway when no one else talks about it either! So I'll try to say a little more about my long poem. Earlier on this blog I said something about poetry or art in general as a search for wholeness. I don't really buy the various doctrinal psychological &/or religious explanations that have been offered for this, but in my experience anyway something along those lines does seem to be the case. What seems least dubious to me, anyway, is a general philosophical notion of the Good or God as a goodness containing all things, and this is what we hunger for as an integral aspect of our nature, beneath particular satisfactions desires & consolations. A contemplative goal.
Anyway, how does this relate to Stubborn Grew & following? One way to approach this is to ask, who is this guy Bluejay?
Bluejay is a character in the narrative of Stubborn Grew. He epitomizes the marginal, the outcast, the rejected, and the powerful. He's a ghost &/or a man; he's African- or Native American or Cajun. He's Hermes to Henry's Orpheus or Virgil to Henry's Dante : at one point he retells (briefly) one of the "Bluejay" complex of tales from NW Coast tribes which are Orphic in nature (journeys to retrieve the living from the dead). (Bluejay is a trickster figure similar to Coyote on the NW Pacific Coast.)
In the process of "guiding" Henry, Bluejay serves to re-order the signals of epic. He plants an otherness there which parallels the imaginative "shape" of the world the epic represents (the culture & landscape of North America).
In a sense, Bluejay opens a door, leading down to more primal imaginative shapes or world-picturings. Wholeness (in the form of a mandala, for example) describes a way, pictures a way. The door Bluejay opens for Henry-narrator allows him to magnify what began simply as a note or an occasional poem in the first section of Stubborn Grew. I had written a memorial poem for my maternal uncle, James Ravlin, and followed it with one for his daughter Juliet, who committed suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge on her father's birthday. When I wrote these sections I had not yet realized that the writing of this long poem was on a certain level integrating the Orpheus story with my own mourning for an adored cousin, and that the first sequel to Stubborn (Grassblade Light - described earlier here as an 8-sided formal structure) would take shape as a kind of healing mandala directed toward the suicides (Juliet; John Berryman - who died within sight of my grandparent's - Uncle Jim's parent's - house on the Mississippi; and Hart Crane). The mandala is also designed or ornamented as an Ojibwa midewe ceremony. The Ojibwa, living in the regions around the source of the Mississippi, developed this syncretic medicine ritual, incorporating songs & music, in the 18th-19th century. I adapted it in similar syncretic fashion to the form of the long poem.
These developments in the sequels to Stubborn Grew came as complete surprises to me. As I wrote earlier here on the blog, they were like the "rose" emerging out of the ashes of Stubborn. They were elaborations or flowerings of the orphic imbalance or disequilibrium - the love-relation as something lost or lacking. They parallel the "Russian" element in a different key. Each development - each new book in the long poem - strengthened or instigated what followed it. So that the 3rd large book of the poem - called "July" - incorporated all these elements in a textual vortex dominated by speed. "July" is a kind of symbolic manifestation of the poem as end-in-itself - the telos ("Forth of July" - the whole poem - is the coming-forth of "July") - as simultaneously analogous to the manifestation of the land, the continent, the nation (centered on the Mississippi River) - and leading, paradoxically, into a "Green Constellation" of deeper, more submerged levels of meaning & motivation.
These deeper levels - explored in the second part of "July" ("Green Constellation"), and in the gnomic coda to the entire poem (Book 4 - "Blackstone's Day-Book") related to the orphic journey in terms of both heaven & hell. On the "heavenly" level, the journey of Henry-narrator & Bluejay - from the Lenten un-building of Stubborn, to the Juliet-Beatrice-midewe medicine dance of Grassblade Light, to the continental instauration of July, leads toward a new manifestation of "J" - as Beatrice-figure, but also as Jerusalem & Jubilee. Jubilee is an image of world-renewal by means of divine justice or equilibrium. On the "hell" level, the closing parts of the poem intimate new sources and compulsions for the Lenten shriving "supervised" by Blackstone from the beginning. The poem in this way circles back on itself.
These notes, I suppose, appear garbled & arbitrary on the one hand, and overly-neat and -planned on the other, as well as irrelevant to anyone who hasn't read the poem. But the "plan" as described here is only an abstract. I haven't spoken about many other aspects, including perhaps the most important: the compositional process on the micro level of words & lines & stanzas. The "abba" quatrain provides a different matrix for approaching the whole experience & its possible meanings.
"In order to live completely with poetry, one must gradually learn to meet it as an Other. It comes to one on its terms, which one is powerless to negotiate. If one does negotiate these terms, the results may be skillful, amusing, beautiful, intricate, ad nauseam, but they will not be recognized by the poet, in her secret self-confessions, as poetry."
I was thinking about something like this walking in today (down Morris Ave, along Hope St - which runs between the posh prep school on one side & the "struggling" public Hope High on the other), as I was wondering what to say here this morning. . .
They say an artist shouldn't talk too much about their own work, but none of the hoary maxims seem to apply anyway when no one else talks about it either! So I'll try to say a little more about my long poem. Earlier on this blog I said something about poetry or art in general as a search for wholeness. I don't really buy the various doctrinal psychological &/or religious explanations that have been offered for this, but in my experience anyway something along those lines does seem to be the case. What seems least dubious to me, anyway, is a general philosophical notion of the Good or God as a goodness containing all things, and this is what we hunger for as an integral aspect of our nature, beneath particular satisfactions desires & consolations. A contemplative goal.
Anyway, how does this relate to Stubborn Grew & following? One way to approach this is to ask, who is this guy Bluejay?
Bluejay is a character in the narrative of Stubborn Grew. He epitomizes the marginal, the outcast, the rejected, and the powerful. He's a ghost &/or a man; he's African- or Native American or Cajun. He's Hermes to Henry's Orpheus or Virgil to Henry's Dante : at one point he retells (briefly) one of the "Bluejay" complex of tales from NW Coast tribes which are Orphic in nature (journeys to retrieve the living from the dead). (Bluejay is a trickster figure similar to Coyote on the NW Pacific Coast.)
In the process of "guiding" Henry, Bluejay serves to re-order the signals of epic. He plants an otherness there which parallels the imaginative "shape" of the world the epic represents (the culture & landscape of North America).
In a sense, Bluejay opens a door, leading down to more primal imaginative shapes or world-picturings. Wholeness (in the form of a mandala, for example) describes a way, pictures a way. The door Bluejay opens for Henry-narrator allows him to magnify what began simply as a note or an occasional poem in the first section of Stubborn Grew. I had written a memorial poem for my maternal uncle, James Ravlin, and followed it with one for his daughter Juliet, who committed suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge on her father's birthday. When I wrote these sections I had not yet realized that the writing of this long poem was on a certain level integrating the Orpheus story with my own mourning for an adored cousin, and that the first sequel to Stubborn (Grassblade Light - described earlier here as an 8-sided formal structure) would take shape as a kind of healing mandala directed toward the suicides (Juliet; John Berryman - who died within sight of my grandparent's - Uncle Jim's parent's - house on the Mississippi; and Hart Crane). The mandala is also designed or ornamented as an Ojibwa midewe ceremony. The Ojibwa, living in the regions around the source of the Mississippi, developed this syncretic medicine ritual, incorporating songs & music, in the 18th-19th century. I adapted it in similar syncretic fashion to the form of the long poem.
These developments in the sequels to Stubborn Grew came as complete surprises to me. As I wrote earlier here on the blog, they were like the "rose" emerging out of the ashes of Stubborn. They were elaborations or flowerings of the orphic imbalance or disequilibrium - the love-relation as something lost or lacking. They parallel the "Russian" element in a different key. Each development - each new book in the long poem - strengthened or instigated what followed it. So that the 3rd large book of the poem - called "July" - incorporated all these elements in a textual vortex dominated by speed. "July" is a kind of symbolic manifestation of the poem as end-in-itself - the telos ("Forth of July" - the whole poem - is the coming-forth of "July") - as simultaneously analogous to the manifestation of the land, the continent, the nation (centered on the Mississippi River) - and leading, paradoxically, into a "Green Constellation" of deeper, more submerged levels of meaning & motivation.
These deeper levels - explored in the second part of "July" ("Green Constellation"), and in the gnomic coda to the entire poem (Book 4 - "Blackstone's Day-Book") related to the orphic journey in terms of both heaven & hell. On the "heavenly" level, the journey of Henry-narrator & Bluejay - from the Lenten un-building of Stubborn, to the Juliet-Beatrice-midewe medicine dance of Grassblade Light, to the continental instauration of July, leads toward a new manifestation of "J" - as Beatrice-figure, but also as Jerusalem & Jubilee. Jubilee is an image of world-renewal by means of divine justice or equilibrium. On the "hell" level, the closing parts of the poem intimate new sources and compulsions for the Lenten shriving "supervised" by Blackstone from the beginning. The poem in this way circles back on itself.
These notes, I suppose, appear garbled & arbitrary on the one hand, and overly-neat and -planned on the other, as well as irrelevant to anyone who hasn't read the poem. But the "plan" as described here is only an abstract. I haven't spoken about many other aspects, including perhaps the most important: the compositional process on the micro level of words & lines & stanzas. The "abba" quatrain provides a different matrix for approaching the whole experience & its possible meanings.
1.03.2003
From an email to K. Silem Mohammad, whose blog carries some interesting discussion on the concept of poetic "ear":
I've been following the "ear" discussion, & have a few comments.
Often I find myself agreeing with Jeffrey Jullich, though the value of empirical studies (of versification, sound, etc) depends on how you integrate them into some more holistic response. Statistical analyses are pretty similar (a Bell curve) no matter what the topic; unless you combine your data on cloud grayness over Detroit with other factors, you won't know much about the weather. In the case of poetry this does tend to circularity, since a given work's "virtues" inhere in such a symbiotic way as to challenge or defy analysis.
Where I agree with him completely is on this notion of a more inclusive critical vocabulary (the "Quintillian tropes"). It seems to me that the focus on "ear" might be motivated by a search for a means of critical measure within a set of poetic idioms which is already too narrow (post-Language writing) - (ie. referring to J's comment that you could insert lines from various post-lang poems somewhat at random). Here it seems like a literary-historical perspective of some kind is absolutely necessary - but I guess it depends on what you are trying to do. I don't feel the same loyalty to the contemporary alternative poetic idioms that many share in this neighborhood of interest.
If I were to sketch out a literary-historical paradigm, I would see the development in the US of oppositional idioms as both style-forming and community-building. There are 2 layers of opposition : one, sort of superficial, opposes contemporary "mainstream verse culture". The other, more profound opposition, is to the notion of a central or universal (or western) Tradition, a paradigm constructed mainly by Eliot and instituted rather programmatically by the New Critical generation (Tate, Ransom, et al.). This 2nd divide is quite fixed in the US, like the 2 main political parties. The counter-idea to Eliot is that the real American tradition is Emersonian, original, individualistic, even eccentric. The achievements of Whitman, Dickinson, and some of the Moderns are given in evidence of this counter-tradition.
In my view it is precisely this double-layered oppositional stance which undergirds the idiomatic communities (NY School, Language Poetry, Projectivist, Beat, etc.). The strength & vitality of idiomatically-differentiated styles comes at a price : the denial of even a modified version of Eliot's notion of a broad tradition. And it is that denial which contributes most to the lack of a more complex set of critical tools such as Jeffrey noted.
I've been following the "ear" discussion, & have a few comments.
Often I find myself agreeing with Jeffrey Jullich, though the value of empirical studies (of versification, sound, etc) depends on how you integrate them into some more holistic response. Statistical analyses are pretty similar (a Bell curve) no matter what the topic; unless you combine your data on cloud grayness over Detroit with other factors, you won't know much about the weather. In the case of poetry this does tend to circularity, since a given work's "virtues" inhere in such a symbiotic way as to challenge or defy analysis.
Where I agree with him completely is on this notion of a more inclusive critical vocabulary (the "Quintillian tropes"). It seems to me that the focus on "ear" might be motivated by a search for a means of critical measure within a set of poetic idioms which is already too narrow (post-Language writing) - (ie. referring to J's comment that you could insert lines from various post-lang poems somewhat at random). Here it seems like a literary-historical perspective of some kind is absolutely necessary - but I guess it depends on what you are trying to do. I don't feel the same loyalty to the contemporary alternative poetic idioms that many share in this neighborhood of interest.
If I were to sketch out a literary-historical paradigm, I would see the development in the US of oppositional idioms as both style-forming and community-building. There are 2 layers of opposition : one, sort of superficial, opposes contemporary "mainstream verse culture". The other, more profound opposition, is to the notion of a central or universal (or western) Tradition, a paradigm constructed mainly by Eliot and instituted rather programmatically by the New Critical generation (Tate, Ransom, et al.). This 2nd divide is quite fixed in the US, like the 2 main political parties. The counter-idea to Eliot is that the real American tradition is Emersonian, original, individualistic, even eccentric. The achievements of Whitman, Dickinson, and some of the Moderns are given in evidence of this counter-tradition.
In my view it is precisely this double-layered oppositional stance which undergirds the idiomatic communities (NY School, Language Poetry, Projectivist, Beat, etc.). The strength & vitality of idiomatically-differentiated styles comes at a price : the denial of even a modified version of Eliot's notion of a broad tradition. And it is that denial which contributes most to the lack of a more complex set of critical tools such as Jeffrey noted.
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