Persistence wins the day. Jonathan Mayhew has done it! & so he shall receive one of our many cuckoo Lulu publications. Congratulations, Mr. Mayhew!
"The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise." Final line of the second part of Crane's poem, "Voyages".
(As noted previously, I was reminded of this line only after groping through various images of "the seal" - punning on TR's childhood experience with a baby seal (the animal), with Hamlet's (father's) royal seal, etc. The recall of this line struck me so forcefully because the poem originated & is in part structured on a (calendrical, thematic) conjunction of Crane & Teddy Roosevelt. So coming on this line again, relatively late in the game, was a joy.)
Showing posts with label Mayhew. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mayhew. Show all posts
6.24.2006
6.23.2006
Jonathan Mayhew, one of my very fit though sweltering though very few readers, came all the way back from Spain to work on the Rest Note puzzler. & he's almost there. Anybody else want to catch this train? You have to name the poet, the poem, & the particular line.
Big clue : remember, this is a poem which began on April 26th, the day Teddy Roosevelt emerged alive from the Amazon jungle, & also the day Hart Crane disappeared into the Caribbean. And Teddy, in his memoirs, credits his lifelong interest in natural history to seeing a certain baby aquatic animal on the NYC fish market docks.
Big clue : remember, this is a poem which began on April 26th, the day Teddy Roosevelt emerged alive from the Amazon jungle, & also the day Hart Crane disappeared into the Caribbean. And Teddy, in his memoirs, credits his lifelong interest in natural history to seeing a certain baby aquatic animal on the NYC fish market docks.
3.27.2006
2.07.2006
Jonathan on the Brodsky thread.
The comparison O'Hara/Auden/Mayakovsky is fun, but I think their differences outweigh their similarities.
As regards the rest of Jonathan's comments : I am really tired of this kind of criticism by insinuation, based on very slim knowledge, and even less fellow-feeling, with the poet in question. What Ron might have thought about what Brodsky might have thought about Mayakovsky - what is the point of this? A little research in the Brodsky archives might turn up a totally different, and far more interesting and informed, perspective on Mayakovsky/Brodsky. But we'd rather settle for myth, rumor, insinuation, and the other ingredients for the potential cooking up of literary slander.
It's not enough that Brodsky was, in his own country, an almost dissident-by-default (Jewish, somewhat independent) under a dictatorship, and sent into exile; we have to make efforts to "place" him aesthetically and politically with these little filaments of meaningless genealogy (N.C. to SoQ etc.) and these animadversions of political incorrectness (Brodsky, let it be noted, arrived in the U.S., with his suitcase from China & his rudimentary English, in the fall of 1972 - a little late and a little disconnected from the moral responsibilities of the Vietnam War).
Here's a link to some basic biographical information.
The comparison O'Hara/Auden/Mayakovsky is fun, but I think their differences outweigh their similarities.
As regards the rest of Jonathan's comments : I am really tired of this kind of criticism by insinuation, based on very slim knowledge, and even less fellow-feeling, with the poet in question. What Ron might have thought about what Brodsky might have thought about Mayakovsky - what is the point of this? A little research in the Brodsky archives might turn up a totally different, and far more interesting and informed, perspective on Mayakovsky/Brodsky. But we'd rather settle for myth, rumor, insinuation, and the other ingredients for the potential cooking up of literary slander.
It's not enough that Brodsky was, in his own country, an almost dissident-by-default (Jewish, somewhat independent) under a dictatorship, and sent into exile; we have to make efforts to "place" him aesthetically and politically with these little filaments of meaningless genealogy (N.C. to SoQ etc.) and these animadversions of political incorrectness (Brodsky, let it be noted, arrived in the U.S., with his suitcase from China & his rudimentary English, in the fall of 1972 - a little late and a little disconnected from the moral responsibilities of the Vietnam War).
Here's a link to some basic biographical information.
11.30.2005
Woke up around 2 a.m. last night, was thinking about some comments in the Vico book (by Mazzotta), having to do with memory. Mazzotta writes something about the nature of memory, as the sign of a break or fracture between present & past. Memory registers the separation or distance between them.
This seems fairly obvious, but it got me thinking about my poetry ("memory, mother of the muses"), and about memory and space.
It might have something to do with having lived my adult life half a continent away from where I grew up. My sense of memory is always connected with distance in space as well as time.
I think about Proust's (heroic & mock-heroic) rendering of memory. Not that I'm a Proust expert, but I have the idea that with Proust, the action of memory is a kind of bridging & retrieval, an absorption in a past state, which sort of blossoms on its own.
My own sense of memory's action feels more like a distancing : as if one were closing one's eyes & going up in a balloon, or gaining some kind of bird's eye view of oneself, from far away, in a landscape or vast context (of time/space).
This is all rather vague, & maybe I should try to work up an essay or something. But as these notions were occurring to me last night, I also thought of Jonathan's comment of 11/26 :
"So much of reading poetry--and writing it--is ruminative and fragmented. An anxious, frustrating searching through books and magazines. The attention flags. There is not that unitary 6-hour experience of reading a novel, or the novelist's feeling of writing through a certain portion of the narrative."
I'm not sure what he means by "ruminative" here. But I understand the sense of a kind of jumpy or fragmented response to short poems & etc.
& I'm hoping that my own poetry somewhat works against or counters that kind of experience. I mean that these books & sequences of mine aim for a more sustained impression - of vastness - space & memory.
The first (& one of the only) reviews my poetry has received, was in a Brown U. student newspaper, written by an undergrad about my 1st book, Stone. I don't have it in front of me (this was almost 30 yrs ago), but she started it out with something like : "Henry Gould takes his time. He waits until the poem is ready." What she meant, I think, was that I composed slowly & quietly; the poems are sort of calm, without flash, bells & whistles.
I still like those little comments very much, & I think they relate to what I've tried to do.
[p.s. Vico himself might demur from such an individualistic notion of memory. For him memory & history & anthropology are all combined somehow.]
This seems fairly obvious, but it got me thinking about my poetry ("memory, mother of the muses"), and about memory and space.
It might have something to do with having lived my adult life half a continent away from where I grew up. My sense of memory is always connected with distance in space as well as time.
I think about Proust's (heroic & mock-heroic) rendering of memory. Not that I'm a Proust expert, but I have the idea that with Proust, the action of memory is a kind of bridging & retrieval, an absorption in a past state, which sort of blossoms on its own.
My own sense of memory's action feels more like a distancing : as if one were closing one's eyes & going up in a balloon, or gaining some kind of bird's eye view of oneself, from far away, in a landscape or vast context (of time/space).
This is all rather vague, & maybe I should try to work up an essay or something. But as these notions were occurring to me last night, I also thought of Jonathan's comment of 11/26 :
"So much of reading poetry--and writing it--is ruminative and fragmented. An anxious, frustrating searching through books and magazines. The attention flags. There is not that unitary 6-hour experience of reading a novel, or the novelist's feeling of writing through a certain portion of the narrative."
I'm not sure what he means by "ruminative" here. But I understand the sense of a kind of jumpy or fragmented response to short poems & etc.
& I'm hoping that my own poetry somewhat works against or counters that kind of experience. I mean that these books & sequences of mine aim for a more sustained impression - of vastness - space & memory.
The first (& one of the only) reviews my poetry has received, was in a Brown U. student newspaper, written by an undergrad about my 1st book, Stone. I don't have it in front of me (this was almost 30 yrs ago), but she started it out with something like : "Henry Gould takes his time. He waits until the poem is ready." What she meant, I think, was that I composed slowly & quietly; the poems are sort of calm, without flash, bells & whistles.
I still like those little comments very much, & I think they relate to what I've tried to do.
[p.s. Vico himself might demur from such an individualistic notion of memory. For him memory & history & anthropology are all combined somehow.]
12.15.2003
Mike & Jonathan continue good dialogue on fiction/poetry and the relative merits of Yeats & Milton.
Seems to me that Mike's demurrals might apply more aptly to the whole late Romantic/Symbolist poetic ethos, of which Yeats is probably the best exemplar. That is, the supposed weaknesses he sees in Yeats are representative of a larger phenomenon.
The advent of fiction signalled a split between poetry & prose. It's no accident that "Romanticism" referred originally to a return to medieval poetic romances which were analyzed, parodied, mourned & mocked in the greatest "modern" novel, Don Quixote.
Cervantes inaugurated the role of novel as analytical instrument, and with the progress of the social novel, marginalized poets began to see a parallel between the disenchantment of life brought on by science & industrialization and the dominance of "prosaic" values in literature. In a manner somewhat comparable to the development of abstraction in painting, poets began to emphasize their social role as avatars of pure imagination. The fact that, as Mike mentions, Milton had finally to choose between scriptural revelation and the book of nature for a "true" poetic representation of cosmic reality anticipates the Romantic attitude.
The core of the Romantic argument was, that prosaic, analytical description, whether in literature or science, actually fails as mimesis, is somehow untrue to the Real, because dull prose could never represent the ecstatic, mystical wholeness & beauty of Creation : only the inspired imagination could foster the images of innocence, sympathy, synthesis & unity, worthy of that ultimate reality.
Yeats' fascination with George Berkeley (the Irish idealist philosopher), and with the effect of imaginative symbols, are attributes of the "classic" Romantic stance. The Romantic poet registers a protest against the falsity of objective description : "we murder to dissect". This is fundamentally a religious attitude, which asserts the sacredness of reality against the profanation of (a scientific-Faustian) detached objectivity. & in my view this confrontation between poetic imagination and "objectivity", between prose & poetry, is not yet completely played out. Some of Wallace Stevens' gnomic aphorisms (about the "poetry of reality") still speak very tellingly to this issue.
Seems to me that Mike's demurrals might apply more aptly to the whole late Romantic/Symbolist poetic ethos, of which Yeats is probably the best exemplar. That is, the supposed weaknesses he sees in Yeats are representative of a larger phenomenon.
The advent of fiction signalled a split between poetry & prose. It's no accident that "Romanticism" referred originally to a return to medieval poetic romances which were analyzed, parodied, mourned & mocked in the greatest "modern" novel, Don Quixote.
Cervantes inaugurated the role of novel as analytical instrument, and with the progress of the social novel, marginalized poets began to see a parallel between the disenchantment of life brought on by science & industrialization and the dominance of "prosaic" values in literature. In a manner somewhat comparable to the development of abstraction in painting, poets began to emphasize their social role as avatars of pure imagination. The fact that, as Mike mentions, Milton had finally to choose between scriptural revelation and the book of nature for a "true" poetic representation of cosmic reality anticipates the Romantic attitude.
The core of the Romantic argument was, that prosaic, analytical description, whether in literature or science, actually fails as mimesis, is somehow untrue to the Real, because dull prose could never represent the ecstatic, mystical wholeness & beauty of Creation : only the inspired imagination could foster the images of innocence, sympathy, synthesis & unity, worthy of that ultimate reality.
Yeats' fascination with George Berkeley (the Irish idealist philosopher), and with the effect of imaginative symbols, are attributes of the "classic" Romantic stance. The Romantic poet registers a protest against the falsity of objective description : "we murder to dissect". This is fundamentally a religious attitude, which asserts the sacredness of reality against the profanation of (a scientific-Faustian) detached objectivity. & in my view this confrontation between poetic imagination and "objectivity", between prose & poetry, is not yet completely played out. Some of Wallace Stevens' gnomic aphorisms (about the "poetry of reality") still speak very tellingly to this issue.
I
LOCKE sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.
II
Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth.
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.
12.12.2003
Good blog day. See Bemsha & the Sonnetarium in debate. I like this from Yeats:
And I declare my faith:
I mock Plotinus' thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar paradise.
Jonathan yesterday, on "tolerance." & speaking of Beauty & Tolerance, the flap in Paris over Muslim veils in school will surely be one for the history books. Si francais! A thousand Mata Haris, au centre d'haute couture, using their coy Oriental veils as a wedge for political Islam!
Tolerance in governance, oh, it must be the key. A public space of universal equal rights requires, paradoxically, a generous hospitable attitude toward ethnic pride. Finding the balance between group interests and the interest of each & all : civilization - life itself - based on wisdom & mutual acceptance among "others".
Tolerance in governance, oh, it must be the key. A public space of universal equal rights requires, paradoxically, a generous hospitable attitude toward ethnic pride. Finding the balance between group interests and the interest of each & all : civilization - life itself - based on wisdom & mutual acceptance among "others".
11.20.2003
Jonathan, re psychoanalytic theory & humanities : see 1st chapter of new book, Violence and Modernism : Ibsen, Joyce and Woolf, by William A. Johnsen. Discusses Frye, Rene Girard & 20th-cent. (unfinished) project of a total theory of literature. Interesting, to me anyway. He specifically discusses limitations of psychoanalytic theories, along with those of structuralism & post-s.
11.19.2003
Gee(w)z, I come back from dawdling on break in the bookstacks reading Rene Girard on mimetic rivalry. . . only to find myself parodied by Jonathan Mayhew. it's been a long day. Jonathan, you've been reading way too much Robert Lowell in your spare time. Plus, where are the doggerel rhymes? This am't parody, it's travesty. I'm shocked, shocked.
11.06.2003
Jonathan's cute comment is a mild & funny version of something I descibed yesterday as "malice constitutes the game of oppositions":
This got me thinking again about an idea I had several weeks ago: avant-garde eye for the mainstream poet: A team of four or five post-avant bloggers descend on the hapless straight man and start telling him to lose the blurb from Robert Pinsky, straighten out his similes. I think this could work. Any volunteers?
I've been talking about this phenomenon since the beginning of HGpoetics & long before; actually it's been my way of participating in the literary malice game.
"Oppositional poetics", built on a structural us/them division, is, in essence, a way of short-circuiting thought, a way of not talking about poetry, a way of avoiding substantial literary opportunities or challenges, a way of deleting reference to outsider audiences (outside the coterie) or general/anonymous audiences, a way of dumbing-down/negating literary history, a way of. . .
It's been the modus operandi of language-&-related school ("post-avant") polemics for years now. (It goes back before that to the hoopla around the New Americans, the debates about Paleface/Redskin, raw/cooked poetry; it goes back before that to the polemics of Moderns vs. Victorians, traditionalists vs. experimentalists, WC Williams vs. Eliot, & before that to Americans vs. British. . .) & I've been badmouthing it for years. It's been fun. Prof. Hinkel has even written a book about it : it's called The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As "The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey Into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey. . ."
This got me thinking again about an idea I had several weeks ago: avant-garde eye for the mainstream poet: A team of four or five post-avant bloggers descend on the hapless straight man and start telling him to lose the blurb from Robert Pinsky, straighten out his similes. I think this could work. Any volunteers?
I've been talking about this phenomenon since the beginning of HGpoetics & long before; actually it's been my way of participating in the literary malice game.
"Oppositional poetics", built on a structural us/them division, is, in essence, a way of short-circuiting thought, a way of not talking about poetry, a way of avoiding substantial literary opportunities or challenges, a way of deleting reference to outsider audiences (outside the coterie) or general/anonymous audiences, a way of dumbing-down/negating literary history, a way of. . .
It's been the modus operandi of language-&-related school ("post-avant") polemics for years now. (It goes back before that to the hoopla around the New Americans, the debates about Paleface/Redskin, raw/cooked poetry; it goes back before that to the polemics of Moderns vs. Victorians, traditionalists vs. experimentalists, WC Williams vs. Eliot, & before that to Americans vs. British. . .) & I've been badmouthing it for years. It's been fun. Prof. Hinkel has even written a book about it : it's called The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As "The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey Into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey. . ."
10.07.2003
Enjoying Jonathan's Homeric versions.
Something below from a poem in progress ("Dove Street"). My life seems to have simplified (or is it just my brain), & my "technique" seems to be growing more simple & bare.
Something below from a poem in progress ("Dove Street"). My life seems to have simplified (or is it just my brain), & my "technique" seems to be growing more simple & bare.
Sleepwalking labyrinthine Providence.
Orpheus in Hades, Odysseus on the wine-dark sea,
Penelope, Eurydice (at the vanishing-point
of their desire, at the end of the drawn-out tale).
My sister, my dove. . .
9.26.2003
Jonathan has a very different take on "Enchanted Loom". But if the Atlanteans are still struggling with the shade of Richard Wilbur, you have to ask what year they're in. I don't buy all the left/right brain biz either; but the point of Lake's article was not to give a balanced assessment of the true meaning of Derrida or a compassionate study of Stein's poetics. It was to argue for a different paradigm for composition and reading, stemming from new discoveries & theories (or are you going to dismiss all that, too?) about language. I also don't buy the determinism implied by a "science" model, but that doesn't mean I'm ready to cancel out all of the descriptions (of the nature of reading & writing) it provides.
4.24.2003
Jonathan writes:
"We can't say we are getting to what the Greeks were really about: we can only
substitute another representation of Greekness for one we see as outmoded or
stereotypical."
But see Peter Murphy's essay cited below. Ionian polis/poiesis architecture, stemming from Hippodamus and others:
1) designed new city spaces (colonies) which allowed mingling of heterogeneous populations of strangers, because they were based on the universal "justice", or mathematical proportions, of the cosmos - creating the artifice of civilized life;
2) followed nature (phusis) not by simple imitation but by creative estrangement - the "truthful lie" - the lie that reveals both its genealogy & its dependence on something more fundamental than genealogy (these same cosmic proportions). The example here is civic architecture, in which marble pillars & other architectural forms are meant to resemble, without copying exactly, the elements of the simple wooden hut or original dwelling.
Basically Murphy argues that all the nationalistic & historicist neo-Classical revivals of the 19th century missed the point, both by asserting the tribe or nation as opposed to the civic & cosmopolitan, and by thinking that appropriating Greek style was a "historical" process, when the Greeks themselves showed that the Classical is an imitation of nature itself on a more basic level, the image of universal proportion evoked from opposing forces. The essay explores how the loss of "polis"-design has consequences for political formations (when politics devolves from free participation & creative collaboration into various forms of patronage & anomie ).
Anyway, the implications of the essay are that it MIGHT be possible, in a way, to get at what the Greeks were really about - because they were getting at aspects of civilization & civic life which are truly universal (in a sort of "physical", scientific, "urban planning" sense).
Jonathan's comment is, on the one hand, true in the Greek sense (of producing a "truthful lie" for a different historical era); on the other hand, if we produce a "truthful lie" based on universal creative design in nature, we ARE getting at what the Greeks were really about. Both and.
"We can't say we are getting to what the Greeks were really about: we can only
substitute another representation of Greekness for one we see as outmoded or
stereotypical."
But see Peter Murphy's essay cited below. Ionian polis/poiesis architecture, stemming from Hippodamus and others:
1) designed new city spaces (colonies) which allowed mingling of heterogeneous populations of strangers, because they were based on the universal "justice", or mathematical proportions, of the cosmos - creating the artifice of civilized life;
2) followed nature (phusis) not by simple imitation but by creative estrangement - the "truthful lie" - the lie that reveals both its genealogy & its dependence on something more fundamental than genealogy (these same cosmic proportions). The example here is civic architecture, in which marble pillars & other architectural forms are meant to resemble, without copying exactly, the elements of the simple wooden hut or original dwelling.
Basically Murphy argues that all the nationalistic & historicist neo-Classical revivals of the 19th century missed the point, both by asserting the tribe or nation as opposed to the civic & cosmopolitan, and by thinking that appropriating Greek style was a "historical" process, when the Greeks themselves showed that the Classical is an imitation of nature itself on a more basic level, the image of universal proportion evoked from opposing forces. The essay explores how the loss of "polis"-design has consequences for political formations (when politics devolves from free participation & creative collaboration into various forms of patronage & anomie ).
Anyway, the implications of the essay are that it MIGHT be possible, in a way, to get at what the Greeks were really about - because they were getting at aspects of civilization & civic life which are truly universal (in a sort of "physical", scientific, "urban planning" sense).
Jonathan's comment is, on the one hand, true in the Greek sense (of producing a "truthful lie" for a different historical era); on the other hand, if we produce a "truthful lie" based on universal creative design in nature, we ARE getting at what the Greeks were really about. Both and.
3.13.2003
Have to disagree with Jonathan on two points:
1) No, he's not getting dumber (that was just a Borgesian take-off on Ron Padgett): he's getting smarter & more scintillant as he blogs along.
2) No, my comments do not provide an example of Heriberto's point. One person's "ideological projection" is another person's empirical observation. Sure, there's continuity between the child you & me & the adult you & me; but there's a difference too. As Jordan pointed out, the difference is dependence (economic, social, psychological). It's a relationship which changes the terms of its balance as the child becomes the independent adult (& perhaps a parent in turn).
If I view this through a theological kaleidoscope, this does not mean its basis in empirical reality is cancelled out. The child/parent relation is there : it's not an ideological projection (though my theological corollary, on the other hand, might be).
Heriberto saying there's no such thing as childhood strikes me as a kind of sophism (nominalism?).
1) No, he's not getting dumber (that was just a Borgesian take-off on Ron Padgett): he's getting smarter & more scintillant as he blogs along.
2) No, my comments do not provide an example of Heriberto's point. One person's "ideological projection" is another person's empirical observation. Sure, there's continuity between the child you & me & the adult you & me; but there's a difference too. As Jordan pointed out, the difference is dependence (economic, social, psychological). It's a relationship which changes the terms of its balance as the child becomes the independent adult (& perhaps a parent in turn).
If I view this through a theological kaleidoscope, this does not mean its basis in empirical reality is cancelled out. The child/parent relation is there : it's not an ideological projection (though my theological corollary, on the other hand, might be).
Heriberto saying there's no such thing as childhood strikes me as a kind of sophism (nominalism?).
3.12.2003
Today will try to record some thoughts on poetics, my poetics, hgpoetics, which came on coffee break on Thayer St. this morning; drawing on some threads from nearby bloggers, without being too prolix I hope. Inchoate ideas. Because I may be on strike (I hope not) in a day or so, & blogging may not be so easy after that.
David Hess is asking for a definition of "post-avant", an adjective applied by Ron Silliman. Interpreting Ron's perspective (hypothetically): he's referring to contemporary young poets coming after the Language Poetry phenomenon. He thinks perhaps of langpo as an American terminus (language/writing brought to a certain limit) for avant-garde literary energies of the 20th century. After the terminus, that energy has waned & new demands, new cultural forces & imperatives, have yet to crystallize.
Jordan & Jonathan meanwhile, wrote a little this week about childhood - what it means. Which reminds me of what I wrote on this blog in various places about the status of the Person in poetics; and the comment I made yesterday about Frank O'Hara's tongue-in-cheek manifesto on "Personism" (in the context of various worldview-scaffoldings which help undergird modernist poetics & technique).
I know this DOES sound prolix & rambling; please bear with me.
In an essay in Mudlark, I wrote about how the Byzantine-Christian anthropology of humankind as imago Dei underlies Western art & the poetics of Mandelstam. We are talking about ultimate worldviews or scaffoldings. I would like to consider childhood as a theological category. How so? The child - as opposed to the adult - persists in a particular relation to the parent. Consider the child/parent relation as a symbol of the human person's relation to God. Consider it before dismissing it : think of it as an image of an image, a fractal corollary.
God as parent : how ridiculous! But only if taken literally. And about God we can take nothing literally.
The poetics of the modernist & postmodern 20th century can be regarded as a culmination of the Renaissance concept of Man. The Renaissance concept placed the human intellect at the center. The Medieval concept (stemming from Byzantium), on the other hand, developed a trinitarian anthropology : body, soul, spirit. The soul is like the somatic mirror of the body in another dimension (eternity). The spirit is like the intellectual light which unites body & soul in insight & discernment.
These three, of course, correspond to the divine Trinity : Father, Son, Spirit.
The character of any poetics of the Person would be determined by its underlying anthropology. How do we know & respond to experience through this particular lens?
Consider Charles Olson's Jungian "Maximus" projection as a counter-weight/imitation of Yeats & Pound's sense of the history-transcendent uber-Self (at the vortex of the decks of cards playing out the personae of both A Vision and The Cantos). (Kenneth Warren in his magazine House Organ has mused on this extensively.)
I look upon Jung & Olson as fascinating, searching. . . heresiarchs. Gnostics of poetry. Look instead at THIS Maximus (from Byzantium) :
Thunberg, Lars
Microcosm and mediator : the theological anthropology of Maximus the Confessor
Chicago: Open Court, 1995
(I call them heresiarchs in no dogmatic sense! Only in the sense of Nicholas Cusanus and his doctrine of "Learned Ignorance". These metaphorical-theological-conceptual scaffoldings are metaphors for religious & spiritual insights - experience at the borders where words fail & vision goes dark.)
A post-avant poetics of the Person would interpret our experience of time, the earth, the universe, science & art, good & evil, mortality, love & knowledge through a post-Renaissance lens. Such a lens would offer no prescriptions for technical developments in art : but it might change the way we perceive the role of art in the life of the person, and by extension, the role of the poet in the life of the culture. Such things have stylistic & literary-generic repercussions.
David Hess is asking for a definition of "post-avant", an adjective applied by Ron Silliman. Interpreting Ron's perspective (hypothetically): he's referring to contemporary young poets coming after the Language Poetry phenomenon. He thinks perhaps of langpo as an American terminus (language/writing brought to a certain limit) for avant-garde literary energies of the 20th century. After the terminus, that energy has waned & new demands, new cultural forces & imperatives, have yet to crystallize.
Jordan & Jonathan meanwhile, wrote a little this week about childhood - what it means. Which reminds me of what I wrote on this blog in various places about the status of the Person in poetics; and the comment I made yesterday about Frank O'Hara's tongue-in-cheek manifesto on "Personism" (in the context of various worldview-scaffoldings which help undergird modernist poetics & technique).
I know this DOES sound prolix & rambling; please bear with me.
In an essay in Mudlark, I wrote about how the Byzantine-Christian anthropology of humankind as imago Dei underlies Western art & the poetics of Mandelstam. We are talking about ultimate worldviews or scaffoldings. I would like to consider childhood as a theological category. How so? The child - as opposed to the adult - persists in a particular relation to the parent. Consider the child/parent relation as a symbol of the human person's relation to God. Consider it before dismissing it : think of it as an image of an image, a fractal corollary.
God as parent : how ridiculous! But only if taken literally. And about God we can take nothing literally.
The poetics of the modernist & postmodern 20th century can be regarded as a culmination of the Renaissance concept of Man. The Renaissance concept placed the human intellect at the center. The Medieval concept (stemming from Byzantium), on the other hand, developed a trinitarian anthropology : body, soul, spirit. The soul is like the somatic mirror of the body in another dimension (eternity). The spirit is like the intellectual light which unites body & soul in insight & discernment.
These three, of course, correspond to the divine Trinity : Father, Son, Spirit.
The character of any poetics of the Person would be determined by its underlying anthropology. How do we know & respond to experience through this particular lens?
Consider Charles Olson's Jungian "Maximus" projection as a counter-weight/imitation of Yeats & Pound's sense of the history-transcendent uber-Self (at the vortex of the decks of cards playing out the personae of both A Vision and The Cantos). (Kenneth Warren in his magazine House Organ has mused on this extensively.)
I look upon Jung & Olson as fascinating, searching. . . heresiarchs. Gnostics of poetry. Look instead at THIS Maximus (from Byzantium) :
Thunberg, Lars
Microcosm and mediator : the theological anthropology of Maximus the Confessor
Chicago: Open Court, 1995
(I call them heresiarchs in no dogmatic sense! Only in the sense of Nicholas Cusanus and his doctrine of "Learned Ignorance". These metaphorical-theological-conceptual scaffoldings are metaphors for religious & spiritual insights - experience at the borders where words fail & vision goes dark.)
A post-avant poetics of the Person would interpret our experience of time, the earth, the universe, science & art, good & evil, mortality, love & knowledge through a post-Renaissance lens. Such a lens would offer no prescriptions for technical developments in art : but it might change the way we perceive the role of art in the life of the person, and by extension, the role of the poet in the life of the culture. Such things have stylistic & literary-generic repercussions.
2.11.2003
Just another quick response to Jonathan. He writes:
"There is no set of cultural references presumed to be shared by all educated readers.
Eliot's notes to the Waste Land already posit the end of a common Victorian culture of
reading. Pound takes this a step further. So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that
there is a common, mainstream Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril."
But if I think of "tradition" specific to poetry, I don't think of the set of cultural references. I think of poetry as a characteristic, unique activity. & I think there are traits of poetry-making which are pretty timeless & global. "Poetry is avant-garde because it doesn't change much." (quoting himself) & I try as many have before me to get at that peculiar activity in some places on this blog ("metaform", "event", etc).
The healthy thing about Eliot's awareness of tradition - whether we agree or not with the specific qualities he chooses to emphasize - is that it counters the parochial, polemical mirror-world of oppositional poetics, where claims & counter-claims for value or importance are always made in the context of opposing some OTHER poet or poem or style. . .
"There is no set of cultural references presumed to be shared by all educated readers.
Eliot's notes to the Waste Land already posit the end of a common Victorian culture of
reading. Pound takes this a step further. So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that
there is a common, mainstream Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril."
But if I think of "tradition" specific to poetry, I don't think of the set of cultural references. I think of poetry as a characteristic, unique activity. & I think there are traits of poetry-making which are pretty timeless & global. "Poetry is avant-garde because it doesn't change much." (quoting himself) & I try as many have before me to get at that peculiar activity in some places on this blog ("metaform", "event", etc).
The healthy thing about Eliot's awareness of tradition - whether we agree or not with the specific qualities he chooses to emphasize - is that it counters the parochial, polemical mirror-world of oppositional poetics, where claims & counter-claims for value or importance are always made in the context of opposing some OTHER poet or poem or style. . .
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.
1.29.2003
Some helpful "rants" from Jonathan today on formalism. I like what he says about Pound's metronome. "The sequence of the musical phrase" would mean a rhythm & tempo not dominated by the fixity of the metronome.
But a more sophisticated use of traditional form & metrics must be represented by poets outside the camps of "early" New Formalism! I just don't know where they are.
& O critics, O reviewers: show me the wheels within wheels!!
The Wheel of (Virgilian) Form: how the innate primal perennial poetic IMPULSE emerges as lyric receptivity; didactic forthright argument; epic vision.
The Wheel of Metaform: how the impulse circles around, from ephebic formal imitation, to mature absorption of experience, to the recapitulation of these experiential metaforms in original, inward form.
"Sounds really German to me, von Heinrich", quoth Socrates.
Well, Socky, I'm looking for a paradigm. I'm weary of the promos for pomo innovative elliptics; I'm weary of threadbare surfing attention to traditional means. Bring your reviews to the table & we will evaluate them in Russian translation.
But a more sophisticated use of traditional form & metrics must be represented by poets outside the camps of "early" New Formalism! I just don't know where they are.
& O critics, O reviewers: show me the wheels within wheels!!
The Wheel of (Virgilian) Form: how the innate primal perennial poetic IMPULSE emerges as lyric receptivity; didactic forthright argument; epic vision.
The Wheel of Metaform: how the impulse circles around, from ephebic formal imitation, to mature absorption of experience, to the recapitulation of these experiential metaforms in original, inward form.
"Sounds really German to me, von Heinrich", quoth Socrates.
Well, Socky, I'm looking for a paradigm. I'm weary of the promos for pomo innovative elliptics; I'm weary of threadbare surfing attention to traditional means. Bring your reviews to the table & we will evaluate them in Russian translation.
1.20.2003
Jonathan Mayhew on jazz.
Favorite trumpeters:
Chet Baker
Booker Little
Miles Davis
Tom Harrell
certain pieces of music put me regularly in a hypnotic trance, sort of sinking into chair.
My funny Valentine (Baker version) & another ballad he does
Beethoven quartet op. 132, 3rd movement
Wanda Landowska playing Mozart piano solos
some of Bach's little piano works for kids
Favorite trumpeters:
Chet Baker
Booker Little
Miles Davis
Tom Harrell
certain pieces of music put me regularly in a hypnotic trance, sort of sinking into chair.
My funny Valentine (Baker version) & another ballad he does
Beethoven quartet op. 132, 3rd movement
Wanda Landowska playing Mozart piano solos
some of Bach's little piano works for kids
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