Pound, Eliot - two great toy-grabbers ("fighting in the captain's tower" - over their toys). & thus between them establishing the tone of Professional Seriousness in modern poetry... Stevens, Crane at the other end of the toy-grabbing scale - different characters - the one too disinterested, the other too bohemian (which comes to the same thing, just about). WC Williams maybe around the midpoint on this toy-grab scale...

The grabbing-of-the-toys, of course, is the betrayal of art, the self-betrayal of the artist - since (according to Schopenhauer, Simone Weil, et al.) art is the release from, the suspension of, acquisitive desire... Yet this betrayal is forgiveable, due to art's doubleness : both desirable object & the (contemplative) quenching of desire...

Magazines, anthologies being essentially toy collections... Pound & Harriet Monroe (according to Peter O'Leary's recent article) instigated the diffident Zukofsky to grab for the toys (by way of branding them : mine, ours)... thus we have "Objectivism" : which is an aesthetics of the poem as perfect toy ("object", "rested totality", etc.)... & so the Langpos & the Conceptuals, in turn, learned from this model how to brand & grab...

I reflected on these things a little bit in an old poem called "My Byzantium" (in Way Stations). Here's an excerpt :

2

 
I wanted the toy bird,
I wanted to be the bird,
I wanted to sing like him,
I wanted to turn my back and
return to the womb -

 
the apple of her eye,
the only one, the pure one.
And after the long siren wail
and the freeway lotus
comes nostalgia's
D.O.A.

 
In the beginning
I wanted Jamie Freeman's agate,
the one he found in the dirt, glinting
like the color of light in earth caverns, threaded
with spirals, like a map.  Envy
burned - until I conceived
a ruse: he could play with my fire
truck in exchange.  I relished
his innocence, I gloated over my prize,
I despised myself.

 
He could never pronounce his "Ys" - yellow
was "lello".  We laughed.  We called him
mudpie - he was a molder of clay,
always caked in black dirt.

Berryman hit the nail (about poetry, & Henry) : His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.

Monday, always a good time to backtrack. I can't "prove" a poetics. Moreover, there will always be an oscillation between the "out there" & the "made thing", even if you can idealize Reality with a capital R as inherently singable. Somehow the poetics has to include the completely useless.

In a way that's what I started with on this blog, when I wrote about the babble of the SOUND of poetry, as reflexive, turned back on itself - the source, perhaps, of Plato's suspicion. I think, though, that my general tendency in these polemics is to protest against the self-reflexive as a system: what I've seen in postmodern poetry as a denial of the relationship between the poem & an "out there", or, a similar position, the attitude that reality is always more chaotic & meaningless than the artificial structures, the imaginary worlds, of art.

I guess I feel in sympathy with the general attitude of the Objectivists & neo-objectivists (Anastasios pointed out to me in a backchannel their affinities with the Russian Acmeists): the view that poetry is in relationship with an actual "out there" which can't be dismissed as either meaningless, chaotic, or simply presented as the stasis of cliche. It's a relationship in which both art & reality signal & gesture toward one another, and poetry exhibits an innate harmoniousness that it discovers in both. Such "realism" is, for me, one of the avenues connecting present-day poetry to all the poetries of the past; acknowledging the simple, direct & mimetic in speech and representation, without insisting on some prescriptive, necessary or a priori version of them. & if we go from there to these interesting ideas from Anastasios about nature in poetry, the "aural analogue" (or the beautiful sound & its analogy in "inscape"), maybe we can see how, in a preliminary sketchy way, such a perspective begins to show the outlines of a consistent poetics (& by that I mean not a technique but an understanding of what poetry is & can be). Moshe Safdie again, on architecture & the natural/cultural landscape (see recent NYorker article).

OK enough of these wearisome abstractions. . . it is Monday after all. . .