Semi-following with delight the various trails of bloggies
John Latta
Robert Archambeau
Mark Scroggins.
Though I think Robert's carefully-grounded essay on the New Criticism nonetheless balances too much on the loaded-vague term "autonomy".
There is a science of criticism which attempts to root itself in strictly Aristotelian regard for the specificity of the material under review. This is something RS Crane & his Chicago School tried to follow (& I try to point out in my lil' essays). As distinct from questions of art-or-poetry's political-ethical import or relevance - which are indeed central - there is the question of critical method. An Aristotelian regard for the "quiddity" of the entity under evaluation does not necessarily lead to a-political and a-moral American-technocratic suprematism. In fact it can lead, paradoxically, to the recognition that a work of art can simultaneously reflect both ethical and aesthetic integrity and pith (cf. plays of... Shakespeare... or... poems of John Donne... or various others...).
It's this simultaneous clarity political punch & aesthetic elegance which is rather lacking in the products of much "post-pavane" Ameriqian poetical theory, I would say... perhaps because, as Mark Scroggins points out, they haven't actually read much poetry in the English language... or they haven't the literary zip & curiosity of Latta-day's Rexroth...
...maybe why I most oftenly find the vaunted poetical excerpts offered up by Mr. Silliman so basically boring... drab diction etc...
Showing posts with label Mark Scroggins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Scroggins. Show all posts
10.17.2006
8.08.2006
A few quick thoughts on Mark Scroggins' comments on the Breeze review:
It's true that matching up a book of poems with its antecedent influences & echoes is not enough, does not account for originality or the unique qualities of said book. It's not enough simply to "place" a book in "tradition".
However, a couple things occur to me : first, a review - even a thorough reading - can never express or replicate the "quiddity" of its subject. That's asking too much. The reviewer is not capable of transmitting seraphically the author's "own terms" - each of us works within our own frame of reference to some extent. And some freedom of response should be allowed to the reviewer, too - within limits of fairness & truth & accuracy, that is.
Second, it seems to me that one of the roles of the reviewer is to "introduce" the new work into the literary world which already exists : and a key part of doing that is to find reference points for the new within that world.
In the Breeze review, it seems to me, I noted differences as well as similarities between John Latta's book, and the general poetic trend from which in my view it emerged - the trend for which Stevens, for me anyway, is exemplary. You can argue with the idea of singling out Stevens. But then I think you'd have to deny several of the Stevens affinities in Latta's work which I pointed out.
It's true that matching up a book of poems with its antecedent influences & echoes is not enough, does not account for originality or the unique qualities of said book. It's not enough simply to "place" a book in "tradition".
However, a couple things occur to me : first, a review - even a thorough reading - can never express or replicate the "quiddity" of its subject. That's asking too much. The reviewer is not capable of transmitting seraphically the author's "own terms" - each of us works within our own frame of reference to some extent. And some freedom of response should be allowed to the reviewer, too - within limits of fairness & truth & accuracy, that is.
Second, it seems to me that one of the roles of the reviewer is to "introduce" the new work into the literary world which already exists : and a key part of doing that is to find reference points for the new within that world.
In the Breeze review, it seems to me, I noted differences as well as similarities between John Latta's book, and the general poetic trend from which in my view it emerged - the trend for which Stevens, for me anyway, is exemplary. You can argue with the idea of singling out Stevens. But then I think you'd have to deny several of the Stevens affinities in Latta's work which I pointed out.
8.07.2006
Mark Scroggins writes an interesting response to the review here.
My statement that Breeze was modeled "deliberately" on Harmonium appears to have been a case of "creative misreading", as they say. But I'd like to defend myself by saying that there's more to it than simply questions of lineage & influence, as Mark puts it.
"Modern" poets chose distinct approaches to the very central crux of self-consciousness, reflexivity, "art-for-art's-sake". The styles & attitudes of "engaged" or political poets, of epic-historical poets, of confessional poets, of traditionalists, etc. have differed quite a bit.
One of the things that interested me about Latta's book is that he seems to have extended a line from Stevens' general approach - but not in the same direction taken by the New York School, or that of other more florid or "elliptical" poets.
Latta has a gene of the homespun philosopher & nature boy about him (like Stevens' verbal duelist in the anecdote - Frost!). (But I don't think I'll write my next review on How John Latta Sounds Like that Farmer from New Hampshire...)
My statement that Breeze was modeled "deliberately" on Harmonium appears to have been a case of "creative misreading", as they say. But I'd like to defend myself by saying that there's more to it than simply questions of lineage & influence, as Mark puts it.
"Modern" poets chose distinct approaches to the very central crux of self-consciousness, reflexivity, "art-for-art's-sake". The styles & attitudes of "engaged" or political poets, of epic-historical poets, of confessional poets, of traditionalists, etc. have differed quite a bit.
One of the things that interested me about Latta's book is that he seems to have extended a line from Stevens' general approach - but not in the same direction taken by the New York School, or that of other more florid or "elliptical" poets.
Latta has a gene of the homespun philosopher & nature boy about him (like Stevens' verbal duelist in the anecdote - Frost!). (But I don't think I'll write my next review on How John Latta Sounds Like that Farmer from New Hampshire...)
10.20.2005
very interesting article on poet/conservative thinker Peter Viereck in this week's New Yorker.
*
Mark Scroggins on the old-style divide. One aim of the mini-essays I've been writing is to underline the difference between opinion (personal likes/dislikes, lacking any apparent principle of judgement) and criticism (in which ethical & aesthetic principles are somewhat clarified).
*
Mark Scroggins on the old-style divide. One aim of the mini-essays I've been writing is to underline the difference between opinion (personal likes/dislikes, lacking any apparent principle of judgement) and criticism (in which ethical & aesthetic principles are somewhat clarified).
9.14.2005
Thanks so much, Mark - but if I'm back at all it's a very shaky back.
In my view the Sukenick book only seems lackluster because it is so workmanlike. He has no oversize thesis-axe to grind. He does paraphrases - which (understandably) many poets would consider the "murder-to-dissect" method.
I happen to need these paraphrases, because I am so dim, often miss the obvious. & by providing a rational structure to Stevens' meta-flora, Sukenick illuminates a terrain of composition which can be useful to other poets (me). I happen to need new themes, new somethings. My old approach seems to be finished.
In my view the Sukenick book only seems lackluster because it is so workmanlike. He has no oversize thesis-axe to grind. He does paraphrases - which (understandably) many poets would consider the "murder-to-dissect" method.
I happen to need these paraphrases, because I am so dim, often miss the obvious. & by providing a rational structure to Stevens' meta-flora, Sukenick illuminates a terrain of composition which can be useful to other poets (me). I happen to need new themes, new somethings. My old approach seems to be finished.
8.05.2005
Mark, with more give-back on the question of Crane et seq.
That it comes down to an unresolved divide between remnants of the Romantic and the new strictures of the Modern.
Wasn't it coming from Pound (with Stephen Crane, Whitman, Poe in the background, mocking, in their different ways, the enfeebled denatured exhalations of Victorian poetry) - the notion that poetry should be as exact and exacting as prose, as science? Wasn't this part of a general trend toward hardness & toughness & clear-eyed objectivity throughout 1st half of 20th cent.?
Scientific perception grounding the autonomy of the art object. Eliot's strictures : "the classic". (Stevens & Crane is a diffun't animal.)
Unable & unwilling to go too far into that huge issue. But again, it seems like Crane was working from a different basis. I think he was looking at Joyce's Ulysses as an objective correlative to the spiritual or intellectual substance - the quiddity - of Ireland & Dublin in the modern world.
The Bridge would do something similar for the aura and spiritual destiny of America. Once he found the accurate form - that is, the plot of his poem : a dawn epiphany leading through a sequence of dream-panels of American history, & through the hell-gate (Poe in the subway) to achieved affirmation (the final panel, which he actually wrote first) - once he had recognized this inner plot or structure, the specific materials fit into place. It seems important that he composed the last section first : this underlines how the methodology differs from that of Pound, WCW, Olson (stemming perhaps from The Prelude) - their long-poems-as-autobiographical-diaries, as Ulyssean nosti, as record of the poet's ongoing struggle with "the facts" & with him's artistic soul.
I understand Mark's reservations about the hifalutin' & artificial diction of some passages in The Bridge. For me these serve merely to accent the visionary strangeness, the otherness, of the whole. There are other weaknesses which are probably much more damaging (sort of a faded 20s hyperbole, a kind of febrile gusto). But again, in the several re-readings I've given the poem, there was sheer enjoyment, stimulated by the shifting forms & voicings of the sequence of panels, the melodic force of the diction, the way the two threads of "plot" (the narrator's dream-day and the flow of American history) mingled & spread, like the river at the poem's center. The pleasure of aesthetic finish, the sense of rounded completion, is a powerful effect, which should not be discounted - and which is missing from the endless ongoingness of some of the other looooong poems.
That it comes down to an unresolved divide between remnants of the Romantic and the new strictures of the Modern.
Wasn't it coming from Pound (with Stephen Crane, Whitman, Poe in the background, mocking, in their different ways, the enfeebled denatured exhalations of Victorian poetry) - the notion that poetry should be as exact and exacting as prose, as science? Wasn't this part of a general trend toward hardness & toughness & clear-eyed objectivity throughout 1st half of 20th cent.?
Scientific perception grounding the autonomy of the art object. Eliot's strictures : "the classic". (Stevens & Crane is a diffun't animal.)
Unable & unwilling to go too far into that huge issue. But again, it seems like Crane was working from a different basis. I think he was looking at Joyce's Ulysses as an objective correlative to the spiritual or intellectual substance - the quiddity - of Ireland & Dublin in the modern world.
The Bridge would do something similar for the aura and spiritual destiny of America. Once he found the accurate form - that is, the plot of his poem : a dawn epiphany leading through a sequence of dream-panels of American history, & through the hell-gate (Poe in the subway) to achieved affirmation (the final panel, which he actually wrote first) - once he had recognized this inner plot or structure, the specific materials fit into place. It seems important that he composed the last section first : this underlines how the methodology differs from that of Pound, WCW, Olson (stemming perhaps from The Prelude) - their long-poems-as-autobiographical-diaries, as Ulyssean nosti, as record of the poet's ongoing struggle with "the facts" & with him's artistic soul.
I understand Mark's reservations about the hifalutin' & artificial diction of some passages in The Bridge. For me these serve merely to accent the visionary strangeness, the otherness, of the whole. There are other weaknesses which are probably much more damaging (sort of a faded 20s hyperbole, a kind of febrile gusto). But again, in the several re-readings I've given the poem, there was sheer enjoyment, stimulated by the shifting forms & voicings of the sequence of panels, the melodic force of the diction, the way the two threads of "plot" (the narrator's dream-day and the flow of American history) mingled & spread, like the river at the poem's center. The pleasure of aesthetic finish, the sense of rounded completion, is a powerful effect, which should not be discounted - and which is missing from the endless ongoingness of some of the other looooong poems.
...some interesting sidelines on the plongevity dialogue with Mark Scroggins, from Eric Selinger.
8.04.2005
Mark also makes some astute observations on Hart Crane (btw I'm 53, Mark - y'gads!).
Just got in to work, & want very much to respond carefully to this (want to give Crane his due), but will probably just go on off the top of my head as usual.
There are stretches of bombast & sentimentality in The Bridge. There are also lines & passages of overstuffed diction which are hard to pronounce, much less swallow.
Yet I think the poem succeeds as a distinct long poem despite its weaknesses. It succeeds as a sustained reading experience, as a lyrical plot, as a continuous reading pleasure - in ways that the efforts by Pound, WCW, Olson & Zukofsky do not.
What is the secret of difference here? It may have something to do with Crane's continued use of metrical lines - tetrameter[tks E.S.] & pentameter iambics. The metric offered a bass line, a foundation, for a very crucial extension of the lyric poem into the longer sequence, and the sequence into a sequence-of-sequences, to make up the whole.
What Crane's method does is stimulate a sort of "lyric objectivity". In Cantos, Paterson, "A", Maximus - by contrast - the poet is always in the foreground - maddeningly, ironically - despite the poet-histor's best efforts to import tons of supposedly objective, historical, documentary matter. (Zukofsky is probably a special case - ie. he worked his way out of this situation. But what laborious effort shows!)
Pound, if you listen to his recordings, really aimed for the ancient-Yeatsian vatic chant. But oddly I think Crane is more successful at melding antiquity & modernity, by sticking closer to the orotund pentameter of Shakespeare & Marlowe. (He practiced this beforehand, very effectively, in "For the Marriage of Faustus & Helen".) This vatic manner bore fruit - because, astonishingly, the little frisson of beautifully-made small lyric poems was extended & expanded into an epic-odic manner, the grand & ecstatic singing of many sections of The Bridge.
Finally, there is humor in Crane - but it's subversive & veiled. See Paul Giles, Hart Crane : the contexts of The Bridge on his multivalent puns. Other essential studies:
Lee Edelman, Transmemberment of Song
and especially : Werner Berthoff, Hart Crane, a re-introduction
Crane's letters to Yvor Winters (before Winters repudiated him) are terrific technical shop talk.
But perhaps Mark & others remain unmoved for reasons other than technical & musical. Mark mentions something about the authoritarianism implicit in Crane's mode of Platonic idealism. I don't see it. What I see instead is a certain vulnerability in Crane's faith in the capability of poetic vision to offer a finished image of Eden or Paradise. The stock-in-trade of Pound, Olson & WCW is to invite the reader into the poet's unfinished struggle with the unfinished project of world-renewal. (Zukofsky, again, is a different case.) One participates in the poet's heroic though necessarily incomplete agon.
Crane's whole approach is different. He offers the image of the Brooklyn Bridge as a kind of analogical token or icon - the "Ever-Presence", the earthly, human gateway into paradisal reality. The equilibrium of the poem depends from (I should say "suspends" from), & partakes in, this glimpsed sphere of perfection. The bridge was the summa of the whole effort of American 20th-cent. writing, epitomized by Waldo Frank's paeans to Our America, etc.
It may be this Platonic-national idealism - the substance of Crane's argument, which rhymes with his notion of aesthetic beauty - that postmodern readers find hard to accept.
Just got in to work, & want very much to respond carefully to this (want to give Crane his due), but will probably just go on off the top of my head as usual.
There are stretches of bombast & sentimentality in The Bridge. There are also lines & passages of overstuffed diction which are hard to pronounce, much less swallow.
Yet I think the poem succeeds as a distinct long poem despite its weaknesses. It succeeds as a sustained reading experience, as a lyrical plot, as a continuous reading pleasure - in ways that the efforts by Pound, WCW, Olson & Zukofsky do not.
What is the secret of difference here? It may have something to do with Crane's continued use of metrical lines - tetrameter[tks E.S.] & pentameter iambics. The metric offered a bass line, a foundation, for a very crucial extension of the lyric poem into the longer sequence, and the sequence into a sequence-of-sequences, to make up the whole.
What Crane's method does is stimulate a sort of "lyric objectivity". In Cantos, Paterson, "A", Maximus - by contrast - the poet is always in the foreground - maddeningly, ironically - despite the poet-histor's best efforts to import tons of supposedly objective, historical, documentary matter. (Zukofsky is probably a special case - ie. he worked his way out of this situation. But what laborious effort shows!)
Pound, if you listen to his recordings, really aimed for the ancient-Yeatsian vatic chant. But oddly I think Crane is more successful at melding antiquity & modernity, by sticking closer to the orotund pentameter of Shakespeare & Marlowe. (He practiced this beforehand, very effectively, in "For the Marriage of Faustus & Helen".) This vatic manner bore fruit - because, astonishingly, the little frisson of beautifully-made small lyric poems was extended & expanded into an epic-odic manner, the grand & ecstatic singing of many sections of The Bridge.
Finally, there is humor in Crane - but it's subversive & veiled. See Paul Giles, Hart Crane : the contexts of The Bridge on his multivalent puns. Other essential studies:
Lee Edelman, Transmemberment of Song
and especially : Werner Berthoff, Hart Crane, a re-introduction
Crane's letters to Yvor Winters (before Winters repudiated him) are terrific technical shop talk.
But perhaps Mark & others remain unmoved for reasons other than technical & musical. Mark mentions something about the authoritarianism implicit in Crane's mode of Platonic idealism. I don't see it. What I see instead is a certain vulnerability in Crane's faith in the capability of poetic vision to offer a finished image of Eden or Paradise. The stock-in-trade of Pound, Olson & WCW is to invite the reader into the poet's unfinished struggle with the unfinished project of world-renewal. (Zukofsky, again, is a different case.) One participates in the poet's heroic though necessarily incomplete agon.
Crane's whole approach is different. He offers the image of the Brooklyn Bridge as a kind of analogical token or icon - the "Ever-Presence", the earthly, human gateway into paradisal reality. The equilibrium of the poem depends from (I should say "suspends" from), & partakes in, this glimpsed sphere of perfection. The bridge was the summa of the whole effort of American 20th-cent. writing, epitomized by Waldo Frank's paeans to Our America, etc.
It may be this Platonic-national idealism - the substance of Crane's argument, which rhymes with his notion of aesthetic beauty - that postmodern readers find hard to accept.
Mark Scroggins, so much better acquainted with Zukofsky's poetry than I am, responds.
Zukofsky's turn, as Mark describes it, will probably (hopefully) be understood & appreciated more in future.
Odd juxtaposition, for me, between these poet issues, & the essay by Louis Menand on Edmund Wilson in NYorker this week. Menand describes with what brilliance & acumen Wilson understood & loved the Big Moderns like Joyce & Proust - & yet felt they had taken a wrong turn, into aesthetic narcissism, art for art's sake.
Raises a lot of questions which I can't formulate right now.
Zukofsky's turn, as Mark describes it, will probably (hopefully) be understood & appreciated more in future.
Odd juxtaposition, for me, between these poet issues, & the essay by Louis Menand on Edmund Wilson in NYorker this week. Menand describes with what brilliance & acumen Wilson understood & loved the Big Moderns like Joyce & Proust - & yet felt they had taken a wrong turn, into aesthetic narcissism, art for art's sake.
Raises a lot of questions which I can't formulate right now.
8.03.2005
& why was Crane so completely different? Well, for one thing, he started from Joyce. Anti-Pound, anti-Eliot, almost as much as Stevens was. His Bridge is a pun-soaked "day in the life".
Zuk set himself up as Pound's dialectical flipside (Pound/Zuk, not Olson/Zuk is the real antinomy). But the Mallarmean extremism is not that different from Pound's aesthetic liminality. Wanting to be like Shakespeare : but being a sweet Shakespeare in a kind of muted Joseph Cornell music-box.
Paterson : too much the willed effort? A rush job. Didn't soak the guitar wood long enough. Plays on the surface - drab, prosaic.
Zuk set himself up as Pound's dialectical flipside (Pound/Zuk, not Olson/Zuk is the real antinomy). But the Mallarmean extremism is not that different from Pound's aesthetic liminality. Wanting to be like Shakespeare : but being a sweet Shakespeare in a kind of muted Joseph Cornell music-box.
Paterson : too much the willed effort? A rush job. Didn't soak the guitar wood long enough. Plays on the surface - drab, prosaic.
Mark Scroggins more on polonggevity.
Obviously I'm more caught up in the megalomania of it than some.
That modulated-defensive note from LZ which Mark quotes : understandable, but not an explanation for the phenomenon. There are a lot of interesting technical problems with the 20th-cent. long poem. If the ambition & the desire outruns the supporting framework (plot, thematic development, argument, stylistic variation, etc.) the poem becomes a kind of sponge.
Trouble is, sponges are endearing. Walt Whitman wrote a sponge. There is a tremendous pressure to integrate & unify the process into a life-work.
Some lazy heat-wave thoughts: vertical/horizontal = height/breadth = refinement/capaciousness = Zuk/Olson = Dante/Shakespeare...
Pound's mania linked to Dante's altitude, the view of experience as an embattled uphill climb, the exile's sense that the world-economy is skewed & inimical.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, speaks from a dramaturgically-realized inner equilibrium (rooted in poetic number). Order is the norm : tragedy & comedy are interrogations of social anomaly - disturbances of an ultimate calm. The fact that he was part of an authorized royal-aristocratic theatrical pageant meant that his ironies are always couched in, moderated by, a conservative assent to traditional order.
Pound's attitude stemmed from a decisive technical problem or contradiction. His classicism/archaism, Nietzschean/pagan power-worship was applied as a literary weapon to chastise & excoriate failed (European) civilization. But the role of the Nietzschean avenger-prophet was deracinating : it uprooted Pound from his own American background. He was unable to draw on or benefit from the liberal-democratic alternative to the wasteland of decadent & war-ravaged Europe. So he ended up as zoo exhibit in Pisan cage & Washington nuthouse : fighting a war with the new democratic power which had already rendered his authoritarian allegiances irrelevant.
But then, where does that leave the "long poem"?
Olson, Zuk & WCW came up with their alternatives. Crane had already done something completely different.
We have to look long & carefully at the underlying conceptual choices, literary allegiances & attitudes of these different American writers (& others!), to even begin to consider how the "long poem" or the culture-epic could be re-designed.
Mandelstam toward the end of his life began to formulate notions of poetic practice as "journey" and "kinship" (see Mandelshtam's Poetics by Elena Corrigan). The Dante that emerges from his "Conversation About Dante" is a very different practitioner and a different personality from the Dante of Pound & Eliot. Dante emerges, not surprisingly, as a kind of Ital-Ren. Mandelstam : a wandering, uncertain bird-man, a Chaplinesque-ecstatic Acmeist-Futurist.
The shadow of the poet (Pound's shadow, Olson's Maximus, Wordsworth's ego) is identified with the filtering mask. The mask shades and patterns the experiential universe. Whose world do we inhabit now? The world of the mask of Mandelstam's Dante?
The shape of future poems might depend on some such thing.
Obviously I'm more caught up in the megalomania of it than some.
That modulated-defensive note from LZ which Mark quotes : understandable, but not an explanation for the phenomenon. There are a lot of interesting technical problems with the 20th-cent. long poem. If the ambition & the desire outruns the supporting framework (plot, thematic development, argument, stylistic variation, etc.) the poem becomes a kind of sponge.
Trouble is, sponges are endearing. Walt Whitman wrote a sponge. There is a tremendous pressure to integrate & unify the process into a life-work.
Some lazy heat-wave thoughts: vertical/horizontal = height/breadth = refinement/capaciousness = Zuk/Olson = Dante/Shakespeare...
Pound's mania linked to Dante's altitude, the view of experience as an embattled uphill climb, the exile's sense that the world-economy is skewed & inimical.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, speaks from a dramaturgically-realized inner equilibrium (rooted in poetic number). Order is the norm : tragedy & comedy are interrogations of social anomaly - disturbances of an ultimate calm. The fact that he was part of an authorized royal-aristocratic theatrical pageant meant that his ironies are always couched in, moderated by, a conservative assent to traditional order.
Pound's attitude stemmed from a decisive technical problem or contradiction. His classicism/archaism, Nietzschean/pagan power-worship was applied as a literary weapon to chastise & excoriate failed (European) civilization. But the role of the Nietzschean avenger-prophet was deracinating : it uprooted Pound from his own American background. He was unable to draw on or benefit from the liberal-democratic alternative to the wasteland of decadent & war-ravaged Europe. So he ended up as zoo exhibit in Pisan cage & Washington nuthouse : fighting a war with the new democratic power which had already rendered his authoritarian allegiances irrelevant.
But then, where does that leave the "long poem"?
Olson, Zuk & WCW came up with their alternatives. Crane had already done something completely different.
We have to look long & carefully at the underlying conceptual choices, literary allegiances & attitudes of these different American writers (& others!), to even begin to consider how the "long poem" or the culture-epic could be re-designed.
Mandelstam toward the end of his life began to formulate notions of poetic practice as "journey" and "kinship" (see Mandelshtam's Poetics by Elena Corrigan). The Dante that emerges from his "Conversation About Dante" is a very different practitioner and a different personality from the Dante of Pound & Eliot. Dante emerges, not surprisingly, as a kind of Ital-Ren. Mandelstam : a wandering, uncertain bird-man, a Chaplinesque-ecstatic Acmeist-Futurist.
The shadow of the poet (Pound's shadow, Olson's Maximus, Wordsworth's ego) is identified with the filtering mask. The mask shades and patterns the experiential universe. Whose world do we inhabit now? The world of the mask of Mandelstam's Dante?
The shape of future poems might depend on some such thing.
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