Notes Toward & So On (8)

I know I didn't do justice to JH Newman's thinking (in Grammar of Assent). But it seems to be a part of turn-of-20th-cent. general attention to distinction between what Newman calls "the notional" & "the real"; maybe similar to TE Hulme's distinction between abstract "counter-language" and "the image".

Newman focuses on how the mind works with perception and concepts. His "illative sense" is the mental faculty with which we synthesize (1)what we actually experience with (2)our understanding : with what we sense as the inner logic or meaning of that experience. Thus through the illative sense we experience/process what for Newman is "real". This he contrasts with notions, or abstractions which are part of some verbal structure which we have not yet apprehended (or processed with the "illative sense").


Warning! I've probably got this all wrong! It is likely I haven't properly processed these notions through my own illator yet!

Nevertheless I'm interested in how the symbolic language of poetry emerges from these imaginative-illative modelling processes. Because eventually I think Robert Archambeau's & Kristen Prevallet's documentary or contingent poetics might be confronted with some difficult & productive paradoxes involving the differences between poetry & history.

History, like science, can precipitate or solidify into forms of positivism. Somehow, because it's a written document, because it's historical evidence, it's more real. Its objectivity offers the poet an avenue of escape from solitude & solipsism; its communality - after all, that happened to us - seems to strengthen the poet's rhetorical position.

Setting aside the possibility that documents can be misinterpreted (there's a good book out there somewhere, author/title I can't remember, which goes into the young Pound's unintentional misreadings of Italian Ren. documents) - & setting aside the over-familiar issue of cultural-historical relativity - it seems to me that the crux of the problem comes down to this distinction of real & notional (maybe related to TS Eliot's distinction between "information" and "knowledge").

Fundamentally, poetry & history do different things with time. History works with chronological succession, showing how the train of human actions fit into the passage of "ordinary" time. & though the historian's narration may provide all kinds of panoramic, kaleidoscopic palimpsests, the end remains the same : an interpretive recounting of "things that happened".

What does poetry do with time & history? In poetry, history is "figured" within a primary aesthetic experience (the experience of the poem). Time itself - the (aesthetic) "now" of the poem - is absorbed, elaborated, intensified, translated into a new symbolic form - a counter-time. This is the remarkable effect of the imagination's - the "illative sense's" - modelling of its own experience.

& there is no general, abstract imagination. There are shared images, shared symbols, shared histories, shared facts - but there are only individual minds and individual art works (or works by the shared activity of individuals).

Aristotle's distinction between poetry & history comes to the same position from a different direction : poetry exceeds history via its capacity to represent "universals", whereas history deals in particular events. On the face of it this sounds like a position opposite to the one I am outlining. But this is not the case. Aristotle's poetry is capable of representing universals because, in poetry, concepts have been absorbed, shaped, synthesized into a logical architectonic - experienced as real (through the pathos/ethos/logos of identification - the "illative sense").

Thus, I think Robert or Kristen's future "contingent poetries" will face the same kind of critical/aesthetic evaluation as always : that is, have the verbal materials been transmuted by the imagination? Do we recognize & respond to the authentic imprint of original experience?

Notes Toward & So On (3)

& so on we go... as remarked in previous, on first glance talking about "image" & "symbol" seems rather anachronistic. The forthright Josh Corey, responding to these notes, suggested there might be something less than socially-engaged in such focus. He admits to an early interest in the image, which has shifted over to "melopeia" & "logopeia".

On could argue, however, that after the disjunctions of postmodernism, a project to reinvigorate the poetic symbol might be a worthwhile effort. Pound's distinction of phano-, melo-, and logopoeia, furthermore, can be seen as a typical 20th-century reductive dissection. The resonant image/symbol presupposes a synthesis of sound, vision and meaning. Taking a cue from Coleridge, Eliot, & many others, we can say that poetry's basic, characteristic mode is one which fuses the sensuous image with intelligible meaning by means of compelling sound.

I don't quite understand the assertion that such a focus would be somehow a-social or disengaged. I also admire Kristen Prevallet's explorations of "documentary poetics"; poetry can absorb and turn to good effect all kinds of reportage and political-historical material. I have no particular how-to lessons - at least not right now - on the various technical aspects of shaping a poetic image. All I will say at this point is that I'm interested in the notion of aesthetic-logical unity or wholeness of presentation. (There was a book review in Sunday's NYTBR of a book titled - I think - A Different Physics, on trends toward investigating synthetic or holistic phenomena, rather than always taking apart the engine - murdering to dissect.)

I think Josh's reservations - perhaps related to John Latta's comment yesterday about the "earnest burden'd academosphere" - has to do with a fear of critical distancing from the new, post NY School, post-Langpo group-scene poetry environment. Archimedes said that with a lever on the moon, he could move the earth. Poets are justly nervous about critical levers & leverage in general (it's so often misguided, stifling, & wrong-headed).

But perhaps we need some critical distance from the society poetry of today - & I mean society poetry on every brow-level, and in every scene setting. Writing itself is a lever, a tool for distancing, for questioning social assumptions. Perhaps a focus on the effective, resonant, parabolic symbol would enable some poets to identify their proper sphere, synthesizing both social engagement and aesthetic commitment (autonomy). If we begin to approach poems with disinterested critical method - as a resonant artifacts which speak to us as meaningful wholes - we might discover how poems can engage the larger problems of the world, and pass beyond those familiar barriers, which so often render it marginal, minor & ineffectual.

Recently, the so-called "post-avant" generations have been grouped either as leaning toward the NY School, or the Language Poets : toward talky, self-deprecating, slangy "presence", charm, joie-de-vivre, authenticity, on the one hand, or toward politically-saturated, engaged, ironic, intellectual, aesthetically-revolutionary, experimental, on the other.

I would suggest that the very phenomena of social grouping by way of such vague generic qualities represents a critical blind spot : a fogginess about the symbolic, representative, intelligible-emotive powers and processes of poetic language itself, and about the means and ends of poems as distinct aesthetic wholes.

KP's essay provoked in me a sort of nostalgia for the fascination I felt for the "investigative" poetics of Pound/WCW et al., about 15 years ago.

A rush of energy from the mere practice of collage/documentation - the inclusive "grab-bag" technique which allows the immediacy (or the illusion of immediacy) of events to break into the poem.

But to think that poets have some privileged insight into politics or history as a consequence of these techniques. . . or to think that such poetry grants a privileged insight to others. . . these claims are questionable.

I am put off by the easy contrast of "faith" (equated with fundamentalism) and "investigation", which is linked in the essay to a whiff of intellectual pride (as in the rhetorical exaggeration of the opening sentences, where KP says that these days simply being critically intellectual is an act of defiance; echoed in the ambiguous citation of paranoid conspiracy theories).

& it seems to me that there is an Achilles' heel in an approach which vaunts investigative journalism as the implied substance of poetry. In a sense, both faith & the purpose of poetry are useless & unproveable, in parallel ways; a poetics which devalues them becomes, in the end, only journalism.

Prevallet's essay doesn't go that far. But I'm raising questions, because I see parallels between the "post-avant" formulations of, say, Ron Silliman, and the politically-correct version of "rhizomatic" poetry/journalism proposed by KP. For both, poetic technique and political viewpoint are mutually-reinforcing. This may be all well and good for those who admire both the technique & the politics; but for skeptics, such simple equations often produce empty generalizations & blind spots.

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?