Trying to follow & enjoying the conversation on varieties of pleasurable reading experience, started by Josh Corey & et al. Nota :

There's probably something like "inherent difficulty", which gets around Robt. Archambeau's relativizing the notion. Understanding a difficult text has to involve more than just learning the lingo - no matter how arcane (socially, pedagogically) the lingo may be. Difficulty is not just an aspect of verbal encryption - a puzzle to be worked out - nor is it, on the other hand, just an aspect of textual ambiguity, undecideability.

I'd say "inherent difficulty" is present in any literary work which tries to represent/interpret the unknown, the mysterious, and the real - all of these together. What we think of as cheap thrills, escapist novels, easy reading - the pleasure we take in them - and the reason we think of them this way - is that they have little or no originality. There is no apprehension of anything really new - no exploration. They are "generic" - they fulfill generic expectations - there is no break in the seamless machinery of entertainment, because the author is not confronting anything mysterious. There is no "mystery" in these mysteries.

Silliman & many others would like to analyze this difference in goals by way of differences on the level of diction, syntax, etc. But the use of different styles and literary idioms doesn't guarantee the "inherent difficulty" I'm getting at. In fact we are familiar with the phenomenon of supposedly "difficult" texts which simply mimic and parrot the received or prestigious exempla for "difficulty". In fact we see so much of this, that many of us have to turn to cheap thrills fiction just to escape the hypocrisy of it all.

Where do writers like Jane Austen, Malcolm Lowry, Shakespeare, Nabokov, fit here? Nabokov is someone who tried to bridge the popular read and the extreme-cryptic-arcane. Lowry's Under the Volcano is layered like an onion. (is there pleasure by way of onions?)

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...

See Robert Archambeau remarks on poetry criticism. I agree, I agree, I agree. But what do you think of William Logan? Doesn't he fulfill, to some extent, Bob's demand for a positively negative criticism (or is he too sarcastic for you)? Some of the recent reviewing in Poetry seems fairly even-handed too.

There ought to be much more of same. Criticism is an art in its own right. The old binary models of the (American) 20th century no longer correspond to reality. Not that big new abstract models should be rushed forward.

Sharp criticism raises the literary stakes : it brings forward the complexity of rival styles and theories. It can be a school for writers.

Responding in part to Robert A.'s interesting post on public/private manners & mannerisms:

Here's a passage from an essay that TS Eliot published in The Egoist in 1919 (& never republished):

"This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with a passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person...
...We may not be great lovers, but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love... We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition."

- this is quoted in Langdon Hammer's Hart Crane & Allen Tate, as part of his history of Crane/Tate/Eliot's ambiguous-subliminal erotic psychologies. Crane responded (as a gay man) to this early Eliot; Tate, on the other hand, to the reserved, impersonal, authoritative Eliot of "Tradition and the Individual Talent".

I post this to point to the contrast between this, on the one hand, and the informal, relaxed familiarity of the NY School approach (which RA describes). Poet-friendships, there, are not surrounded by an aura of ambiguity, romance & taboo.

This "demotic" attitude seems connected with the general relaxation (or vulgarization) of sexual mores : the taboos have broken down.

The idea that private name-dropping in poems, etc., impinges on the boundaries of traditional public speech is true in more ways than one.

I think it's possible to send private, personal messages & public messages - separately - in one and the same poem. The overuse of obviously private messages seems kind of slack, in a way. But it may also be a realistic acknowledgement of the limits of a poet's reach & impact. & it reflects, back to us, the quality of our own private lives.

Eliot's passage above, by the way, seems like a script for my own comically-representative experience (I mean Mandelstam's impact, & the "Shakespeare episode"). Shakespeare's ambiguously erotic & narcissistic sonnets literally knocked the wind out of me - & threw me back into the Biblical fold.

Oddly, Eliot here seems sane & healthy to me. He's talking about love, not "eros" or sex (hence his phrase, "we may not be great lovers" - funny). Love may involve passionate erotic energies, but it's not only that. Contemporary mores often simply reduce love to eros.

Very interesting post over here today.

Robert's approach seems to parallel what Langdon Hammer does (in Hart Crane & Allen Tate) with respect to an earlier generation. I mean he looks at the relation between a poet's ambition to address (or create) a certain social class of reader, a social group with certain habits & assumptions - and the effects of this ambition on style, subjects, philosophical attitudes.

Wondering on coffee break about why I react this way to the grid method of criticism.

Seems important to decide what is the purpose of your device. Critics love to qualify & compare different writers (& baseball players), but the project of appreciating, reviewing, or evaluating a particular poem, book, or poet should, it seems to me, try to develop a complete or holistic critical response (as far as possible). This inevitably involves responding to unique & peculiar qualities (originality), the sum of which (the oeuvre itself) cannot, without extreme abstraction & caricature, be reduced to a point on a grid.

If, on the other hand, the critic's purpose is to evaluate or characterize general trends or period styles, then I guess a grid of opposing qualities might be useful. A grid presents a certain facade of objectivity or impersonality; the critic is offering judgements, the authority of which is not based on supposedly subjective rhetorical qualities (the style of the critical discourse), but on a sort of "scientific" literary GPS system.

But a grid has a certain freeze-frame fixity to it, which seems to pose problems for its accuracy or applicability, when you think of the diverse & distinctive powers & talents of different poets. As I stated in an earlier response to the method, it seems that interesting poets transcend or overcome the faults of "period styles" from any quarter of any grid - so that the GPS system no longer applies - they are off the map.

[Nevertheless, I do also recognize that there is some creative fun involved in devising these diagrams...]

Robert A's latest grid over at Samizdat is more interesting (to "the me") than previous schemata. Hinsley's essay sounds good too : I like the idea of revamping the application of the term "doggerel".

However, I think you have to take schemes of general trends, or bracketing of kinds of poetry or qualities of same, with a big grain of salt. Do we really need or want to evaluate poetry, in comparative terms, based solely on specs derived from an ethical-philosophical measure of the status of the self?

How do we determine the mixture of literary guile involved in a poetics of the non-self (say, in various versions of Language- and & other postmodern poetries), which is, nevertheless, an act of assertion rather than one of empathy with an Other? How do we evaluate - except on a case-by-case basis - the ambiguous admixtures of narcissism and detachment, sentiment and irony, which emerge from the practice of writing?

It's possible that a grid of such contraries could help a critic orient him/herself toward a more decisive ethical or critical judgement. But I'm afraid the more likely result is a practice of pigeonholing individual writers; snap judgements; labelling; the formation of spurious & unnecessary lumpings-together : unique poets into handy groups.

Why do we keep circling back, repeatedly over the decades, to these formulae about "the self"? This is a conundrum. Does it have something to do with the difficulty of apprehending and judging sincerity and emotional authenticity through the detached medium of a text? Isn't this the problem with reading in general? Isn't this why authentic poetry exhibits an awareness of emotional/ethical/epistemological complexity, through a comparable rhetorical complexity?

[p.s. even "complexity" has its complexities. A style which comes across as blunt, simple, direct, idiomatic - even vulgar - may be propelled by a very complex and ironic literary strategy. Yesterday's complexity may not be today's.]

Following Robert Archambeau's "modernity is disinterest" thread. Sceptical about the distinction between Western & Middle Eastern (Islamic) thinking. The idea of some kind of M-E unitary or indivisible mentality sounds suspiciously like earlier Western imaginings of the "noble savage". The Other is always greener on the other side of the fence.

The divisions & splits between (ethical) self and (social) role seem inherent to moral dilemmas of every kind, in every culture. One could just as easily talk about the traditionalist-tribal fathers who kill their own daughters in order to maintain archaic Arab "honor" codes. One can imagine quite a psychic split there between self & social role.

Mazzotta's book on Vico, which I've mentioned previously here, is focused on Vico's challenge to modernity (in the shape of Descartes, Bacon, Machiavelli, Hobbes). The argument of The New Science (to oversimplify) is that poetry, as imaginative (re)making, presents an image of world-renewal, based on wonder & creativity, which is at odds with the disenchanted, utilitarian, and arrogant realpolitik/scientism presented by those avatars of Modern "disinterest" & detachment. At odds with them - but aligned with Dante (Mazzotta's other hero).

Likeable post from Robert Archambeau today, via John Peck, on Pound's & Olson's differing syntax. Daniel Albright (in Quantum Poetics) also covers the way ol' Ez would sideline the subject of his sentences & promote the verb (in a letter to someone, EP re-did the opening of the Gospel of John as "In the beginning was the Verb"). (Mandelstam wrote once that he'd like to live in the "future perfect conditional case" [hope I've got that right]. Probably means something completely different in Russian.)

I practice the harmonica walking to work these days. Learning from Sonny Terry again : less is more. You focus on the tiny shifts here & there. This is what such attention to the texture of a poet's diction does - leads to new possibilities, new pleasures too.

[huh. synchronicity. Hotel man wrote about harmonica-playing today too.]

Notes Toward & So Forth (4)

Robert Archambeau (post of 6/20) presents a version of historically-grounded poetic language. The idea of poetry being infiltrated by, or overlapping with, the "speech-acts" of history, which never really disappear - this seems related to what I was trying to describe as a (Joycean-Cranean) sense of the symbol grounded in experience.

Though again I wouldn't want to encourage another dichotomy, this time between sentimental poetry (Archambeau/Matthias' "travelogue") and realistic history. The problem is one of finding an adequate, authentic speech, capable of both representation ("history") and resonance (intelligible, emotive).

Such poetry can throw our functional, ordinary notions of time & history out of whack. What seemed past becomes present : ie., suddenly relevant, personal; illuminated, illuminating, from a new perspective.

We know that this kind of critical talk exists on a level of abstraction, and we are constantly aware of poets all over the place experimenting with styles & themes in distinct ways. But remember, for the last 20 years or so, "critical discourse" about literature & poetry has been propounding that history & experience are always trumped by the inherent paradoxes, contradictions, limitations and lacunae of text, language, subjectivity. There has been an obsessional focus on the supposed solipsism of textuality, the closed circle of hermeneutics, etc. Unfortunately, solipsism sponsored by theory - while it may show superficial stylistic differences - is not that different in substance from other kinds of literary solipsism (the anecdotal, personal, confessional lyric, so derided by language poets et al.).

Robert Archambeau, Josh Corey et al. have been musing about a new "post-indeterminacy" era, & what might herald it.

I remember when my own feeling for poetry revived & got redirected, reading the brilliant/elusive imagery in Mandelstam.

So I wonder if a new poetic style might have something to do with a focus on the wholeness, vividness & multivalence of symbol & imagery.

"There is a current and exceedingly stupid doctrine that symbol evokes emotion, and exact prose states reality. Nothing could be further from the truth : exact prose abstracts from reality, symbol presents it. And for that very reason, symbols have some of the many-sidedness of wild nature."

and:

'We write in symbol when we wish our words to present, rather than analyse or prove, their subject-matter... Symbol endeavors, as it were, to be that of which it speaks, and imitates reality by the multiplicity of its significance."

- Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images (1949)

[note : he wrote, not indeterminacy, but multiplicity of its significance. Again, something to do with the work of metaphor.]

John Latta has his own take, today, on Samizdat #10 over at Hotel Pt.

Issue #10 of Robert Archambeau's magazine Samizdat arrived today, always welcome. In it he has one of his "thematic reviews" titled "The New Modernists", covering books & anthologies such as Manifesto : a Century of -isms (ed. Mary Ann Caws), 21st-Century Modernism, by Marjorie Perloff, & poetry by Kruchenykh, Moxley, Salerno, Strickland & others.

Archambeau's general point, in simplified summary, is that literary Modernism never died (contra Postmodernism) and that an array of good poets carry on its methods of innovation & renovation. In his discussion of Moxley, he notes how her allusive style, her attachment to Hart Crane, her melding of Romanticism & the avant-garde, and other characteristics underline a poetics in which all time (in art, at least) is simultaneous - which Archambeau calls a "profoundly modernist idea".

This last is true: but I don't think he takes it far enough. There are a number of ironies inherent to the whole modernism/postmodernism question. Literary modernism could be described as poetry's attempt to catch up - technically, thematically - with the social/scientific realities of the 20th century, with the speed of the zeitgeist. It was, as they say, a "modernizing" effort. It was an heroic & dazzling endeavor. But now it is also "historical". In a sense, poetry has caught up - and the "modernizing" effort, as it fades into historical memory, now becomes oddly dated itself. This is one of the insights of postmodernism, the motto of which might be, "OK, now what?" Because postmodernism provides no answer to its own question, it abides in this limbo or symbiotic dependency on its predecessor. Thus to suggest a proper title for advanced poets of today to be "the new Modernists" - as Archambeau wants to do - adds another layer to this Zeno's paradox of labels, since clearly a new modernist has still not quite "caught up" with the zeitgeist, is still engaged or identified to some extent with the heroic laboriousness of an era which is now past.

It may be a modernist critical cliche that "all time is simultaneous", but, as time goes by, such articles of faith sound more and more like just that, articles of faith. And we know that in poetry, or art in general, faith is not enough : we need the "proof" provided by aesthetic rightness, the "certainty" of the achieved art work. The question for contemporary poets may not be the postmodernist one ("What next?"), but rather - "if time is simultaneous - How so?" Is there some aspect of spirit or self which measures/transcends time? Is there some aesthetic equilibrium (beauty?) which really (or only metaphorically?) supercedes or triumphs over clock time? How, exactly, is this revealed in poetry?

My own sense is that what will be really "new" in the near future is not a new modernism, in which innovative technique is foregrounded as a gesture toward the modernizing value of invention. The "new" poetry will explore and reveal the meanings & values - on many different levels, both thematic & technical - of "literary time", as something characteristic & distinct from clock time. When this contemporary work comes into its own it will be a new era, distinct from both modern & postmodern. I don't have a name for it.

Our mini-mini-essay is dedicated to Gravity Probe B, launched today (cf. para-sestina posted here last week, "A Waiting Game").