as a Chinese jar

Bangladeshi New Year festival, Eagan, MN

What does it mean to assert that the poem is an end in itself?  In this season of crowds and anxious change, the assertion is controversial, maybe counter-productive.

To say the poem is an end in itself is a way of saying that beauty is an end in itself.  Beauty is self-sufficient; the poem is self-sufficient.  The poem justifies itself, merely as poem.  Beauty is what it is.

But what is beautiful about a poem?  We have a sense of what is meant by a beautiful face, a beautiful act, a beautiful life... not by any means always the same thing.  What makes a beautiful poem?  What makes a poem beautiful?

There are infinite paths in and out of poetry; infinite occasions for the right, the perfect poem.  I've witnessed them, heard them, countless times, in countless places, over the last 50 years.  So what is their common denominator, with respect to the beautiful?  Beauty itself shows many faces, many dimensions - but the common form, the universal factor is this :

the poem is an end in itself.

The poem is its own fulfillment : a kind of pleroma of time & experience.  A breathing, living, perfect, indestructible entity.

An icon, in other words.  A representation of something metaphysical - the transcendence of time, death & change.  A heart-stopping stroke of lightning.  A stillness still moving, living, breathing (Eliot's "Chinese jar" in Four Quartets).

This is the perfection of the poem.  Every poem bears some trace of it.

But the really confusing, paradoxical thing is : the beautiful is everywhere.  Poetry draws its materials out of the most ordinary, impoverished, grotesque, pathetic, banal, & recalcitrant places & episodes in human experience.  The metaphysical diamond is made out of coal dust.  & moreover : the coal dust itself is beautiful (the haze over the grubby railroad tracks, the derelict abandoned bleak junkyards).

The beautiful poem is simply a gesture toward the beautiful poem of reality ("the Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst, but men do not see it", chants the Nazir-poet Jesus).

A gesture.  A geste.  An act in words.

The poetry I enjoy & admire is steeped in an awareness that these perfections and gestures are already complete & finished for us.  Their presence is tacit and unassuming, but it is there : the work of the poets who came before.

This is one of the dimensions of the early 20th-cent. Russian poetic tendency known as Acmeism : an acknowledgement and receptivity toward the past.  Not a groveling imitation, but a sense of kinship - as opposed to the Futurists, who advocated a rejection of the past as a basis for the future.

There are no revolutions in poetry, because the beautiful is inherently integral.  It is a whole, a wholeness.  This is not to deny the validity of other kinds of revolution (political, social, personal).  It's only to say that poetry (as opposed to prose) is (ultimately, somehow) in touch with something beyond change, something perennial.  Rhythm, harmony, music... the beautiful.

Good to keep in mind during wartime.

Dream song of reality

Just read Joshua Rothman's New Yorker profile of philosopher Daniel Dennett, his lifelong pursuit of a materialist, non-religious, un-mystical theory of consciousness.  Dennett steps out as a brilliant, original thinker, with an impressive science background (biology, mostly). And as an admirably enterprising DIY jack-of-all-trades.

I'm neither scientist nor philosopher.  But I have, like many another, puzzled over the question of "mind", this ancient (back to Epicurus, at least) divide between idealism and materialism.

Just a few off-the-cuff reactions to Rothman's Dennett.  He strikes me as a curious, searching person, whose stance toward nature is essentially that of an engineer.  He's interested in the mechanics of process - how things are done.  This is obviously necessary for science, an attentive approach which leads to discovery.  But it seems ironic that Dennett's view of consciousness - as a continuum, shared with other animals and living things - is not that different from the classic "chain of being" perspective of Aquinas (for one example).  That other animals exhibit a "sort of" consciousness (Dennett's term) - an evolutionary preview of the human mind - parallels the chain-of-being picture, only without the traditional hierarchical fence between "Man" & the rest.  For Dennett it's a flow.  & it seems he has focused passionately on explaining (theoretically) the how of it : how our sense of consciousness could arise from purely physical, evolutionary developments.

This is, I would say, the blind spot in Dennett's vision.  There are limits to the mechanical, analytical dissection of reality offered by biology.  Whatever conclusions he can draw from such analysis only serve to justify his prior conviction of the non-existence of an over-arching God, Spirit, or Mind - something which cannot be "proved" by such analysis anyway.

It seems to me that aesthetics & poetry, as well perhaps as some branches of philosophy, can offer a more valid perspective - because they are rooted in a sense of holism, a synthetic sense.

The poet and the artist register the fabric of the dream.  The theologian (or philosopher of God) articulates the analogical/anagogical synthesis.  Materialist attempts to disprove the reality of Mind or Spirit lack the tools to achieve it, first of all - and, secondly, are probably asking the wrong question.

The question, maybe, is not how, but why.  Why does this immense spectacle of the universe exist at all?  "We are such things as dreams are made on..." - but why?

I've always found the theological answer the most satisfactory.  Why the wonder of the cosmos?  The truest answer : it's a gift.  Why human consciousness?  The truest answer is a kind of geometric/analogical one : human consciousness, which governs (imperfectly) life on our planet, demonstrates an analogy - a sort of geometric parallel - with the divine Mind that governs (ineffably) Reality as a whole.  And history is basically a spectacular drama, unfolding the destiny of that governing mind or spirit, working through humanity toward some kind (or kinds) of definitive expression - call it "Providence".

the sense of being right

Stray thoughts of a stray dog, this afternoon...   Have been reading the translation of Mandelstam, by Oleg Lekmanov, a sober, concise, and poignant biography.  Came upon this passage, quoting a letter (written to his wife in the spring of 1935) of Sergei Rudakov, a writer who spent some time with the Mandelstams during their exile in Voronezh.  Rudakov :

"I have never seen anything like this in my life... At a distance it is impossible to measure or relate.  I am standing before a working mechanism (perhaps even organism - it would be the same) of poetry.  I see the same thing as in myself, though in the hands of a genius, which will mean much more than it is possible to understand now.  There is no human anymore - there is Michelangelo...  For the sake of 4 lines, literally 400 are pronounced.  He does not see anything.  He does not remember that some of these lines belong to his earlier poems and repeats these lines again.  Then by eschewing the old lines he creates new poems." (Mandelstam, p. 144)

Anna Akhmatova's memoirs are then quoted, reflecting on the same period : "It is amazing that the sense of space, breadth, deep breathing appeared in Mandelstam's poetry in Voronezh, when he was not at all free."

There are several statements here worth pondering.  I just want to focus on what they triggered in my thoughts.  First is Rudakov's impression of the "biological organism" at work.  The sense I have here is of an artist who has ripened and sharpened his talent over a lifetime.  This is not a dilettante, but a kind of word-sculptor ("Michelangelo"), who is refining - in compositional "real time", so to speak - his own conception of Russian poetry as a totality, and his own individual idiom, purpose & sense of occasion - within the theatre of creation which is the making of the particular poem.

Secondly, these pages got me thinking about works of art & poetry as monuments, turning points, as benchmarks of cultural refinement.  As great expressive achievements : quintessential, incomparable.

This sort of window on poetry seems unfashionable these days.  We don't think of poems (or poets) as "rare" : in fact we go out of our way to encourage everyone to be a poet.  We don't understand this picture - a poet composing out loud, not writing anything down - reciting 400 lines in order to melt them down to four.  The whole idea is alien to us.

Poetry today is nothing if not transitive, direct, colloquial, and above all informal.  Every line is a throwaway line.  Every line is a "hook."  Even our current "experimental", formalist poets lay out their organizing principles very explicitly,  as if on a blueprint, or as a Powerpoint presentation.  We are meant to see & appreciate exactly how A leads to B.

Difficulty is conceptualized as "technical difficulty".  Poetry is evaluated by the sharpness or effectiveness of its rhetorical weapons.

This is not to deny that sharp, effective rhetoric has not always been a part of poetry.  But what's missing in art & poetry today (in large part, if not everywhere) is some kind of elusive spiritual dimension.  The strange epileptic seizures or fits of passionate composition which we behold in Mandelstam should be understood as the culmination of decades of committed labor at his craft; yet they must also be seen as Mandelstam's own conscious submission to the wave of inspiration.  He cannot fully control what he is making, because it is happening out of the improvisatory process itself; and yet it is guided by a kind of overall sense of wholeness or cultural mission - a critical sense - which shapes and informs his artistic "oracles".

Mandelstam refines 4 lines out of 400 lines because he senses he is not just writing "for himself" but is composing something which has objective meaning for the Russian people as a whole, and perhaps for humanity as a whole.  Poetry is not solely a private egotistical achievement, but is part of a vow, a "commission", to produce these integral, free-standing objects or monuments of harmonic song.  They belong to everyone, and he is somehow aware of this, and his awareness reinforces his effort to sing it exactly right.

This is perhaps one interpretation of the retort Mandelstam offered, when asked by an apparatchik interviewer for his "definition of poetry."  Mandelstam simply replied : "the poet's sense of being right."

Where do we find this sense of mission in American poetry?  Where do we find a poet relinquishing the calculations of rhetorical guile, and submitting to a more profound source of inspiration?  Where do we find a poet refining & refining lines out of an obscure sense of enunciation, of oracular speech?

I'm not arguing such poetry is not out there in America now.  I just think perhaps it's a little hard to find, under the unceasing bombardment (from what Mandelstam called "the horde of scribblers") of easygoing, unctuous, smarmy, clever, cozening, glib, prosaic, tossed-off, complacent, shallow, and trivial so-called works which offer themselves to the public in the name of poetry.

Stay, Momentary Confusion

Taking off where I left off a few hours ago, to retrieve Sophie from school...

We were mumbling something about critical detachment, about memory.  "Tradition" in poetry.

Tradition : bit of a taboo expression, eh?  Reactionary, neo-conservative, T.S.-Eliotos antique odor there.

Of course 20th-cent. Modernists revolutionized the whole notion - backward & forward, left & right.  But that was already a long time ago.

When I think about poetic tradition, I see something essentially unavoidable, like "family".  But this tradition is very much not a symptom of some filial-Oedipal-patriarchal-economic sense of duty.  It is instead something organic, almost biological.

Watch how young poets struggle to launch collectives, find affinities, soul-mates, define themselves, test themselves against be-laureled paragons, aspire to famousness, & so on.  What doesn't so much interest me here are motivating ambitions & rivalries.  Rather the curious thing is the anxiety, the helplessness, of poets - confronted by the fact that poetry is this livid knot of incomprehensible, uncontrollable, inexplicable lumpish living somethung, which nobody know how to explain, correct, control, or abolish.  Is like the inheritance of some arcane glob of biological (living) what-not, handed down from generation unto generation - the voodoo box of elegant poison Grandpa bequeathed us, whose Grandpa left to him, & so on, with an unreadable curse scribbled on the lid : Take Good Care of Me, Never Abandon Me, or You Gonna Die.

What are all these MFA programs for, if not that?  What are all these mags about?  These awards, these citations, this enormous prestidigitation of prestige?  These quotations in stone?  These honored dead, these beloved unread classics?  Touchstones?  Operatic ecstasies?

The point of the sword is immediacy.  Poetry doesn't need explaining : it's like a powerful speech, it justifies itself in the persuasive dominance of its message.

All the talent of Madison Avenue is compacted here in this syllable of recorded charisma.

But actually, I don't believe all that.  It's like the poetic version of a simplified, bowdlerized, philistine "American Dream" : the past is pointless; everything of value is about me, here, now.  Poetry is the anti-tradition. (Here we get down to the marrow of the dumbed-down American myth.)

Great!  Cool!  Make America Drool Again!  Great Gatsby!

Sounds pretty psychological, actually.  Frazer, Sacred Wood & all.  Siege Perilous.  The double-bind of succession, father & son.  Elongate twilight of Freud's sacrificial totem, across the "grey matter" of poetry itself.  (So maybe it is a symptom, after all?)

The Great Game.

But you mentioned game... (unicorns?)... so let's reiterate : I had this hunch or notion this afternoon about "detachment".

If we think about what we love, about what's beautiful... it occurs to me that the beautiful is always overdetermined : is "meta", one way or another.  What's beautiful entails, and emanates from, reflection (in both the physical & the intellectual sense).

Memory suffuses the object with feeling, identification.  What we love involves reverberations, echoes (mnemonic stimulae).

So, curiously, detachment - the distancing, the psychic freedom from passionate, emotional absorption - allows memory to evoke beautiful response, because it is fused with the recognition of tragic reality (the actual distance of the past, the ineluctable remoteness of lost time).

The plangent feeling of the truth, the power of the documentary.  Classic-Romantic.  (Italian Neo-Realism?  & then - Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  Deserto Rosso.)

The hour draws on... my deep-seated hunches & haunches gettin' tired here, blog.  For Augustine (& for Nicolas Cusanus) time is purely psychological.  Bracketed by the soul.  Begins & ends there.  This is a liberating concept, on the one hand - & also an abyss.

But for Augustine (following Virgil) poetry (music) was the very strong magic of ordered time.  The enchantment of syllables, framing, architecturally grounding, the sacred ineffable Now (planted, as Joyce put it, on that very void).

Proust also, echoing Augustine.  Re-echoing the poets (in prose).

The frame supports the picture (Rothko colors dream into infinity).  The beautiful an echo, a reflection.  Sketch, abstract, icon, exemplum, imago - of the immaculate supra-beautiful.

So where does this leave poetry?  Tradition?

Sounds very Symboliste.  But remember : poetry is this intractable breathing spiritual animal - a stubborn problem, a dilemma - a sort of spiritual refugee, a crisis (like Roma in Roma).

Nobody can work it out in advance.  But I do believe it might be possible to re-think poetry (with a capital P) somewhat as the pre-Revolutionary, post-Revolutionary Russian Acmeists did (Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam).  With a sort of Cusanian (conjunctio oppositorum) passionate detachment, or critical engagement.

The paradigmatic or characteristic quality of contemporary cultural reality is immediacy.  All the Faustian technological forces are concentrated on disseminating the charismatic (marketable) product.  Of course there's a large element of risk involved, but this is of the essence of productive enterprise.  Success is the by-word; our future well-being depends on the happy financial outcome.

By the way, I'm not against free markets, or anti-capitalist.  I just believe there exists a scale of values which must mediate the struggle for economic domination, on behalf of equality, liberty, human rights, the common good, the safety net, the peaceable kingdom.  There are things more important than luxury, status, charisma and sway.  There is freedom.  There is equality.  There is justice.

Poetry inhabits this realm of universal spiritual values (see: Mandelstam on Chaadev, Rome, moral freedom).  And by grappling with the chaotic force-fields of articulate speech, it establishes a free space for what the Acmeists termed "the Word as such".

This sounds like a very hi-falutin' bequest.  But it's not, really.  I'm looking at the tradition of the beautiful as a manifestation of the detachment of elegiac (yet strangely hopeful) realism.  Of Blake's metaphysical "innocence and experience".

Social media is bursting with constant, relentless, monotonal cultural aggression, masquerading as sophistication.  The little screen is inundated with seductive, screaming roadsigns.  King Blurb is Trumpet for a Day.

Poetry, on the other hand, resonates with inherent doubleness.  It is not what you think, it is not what you feel.  It is not even what you read.  It is another kind of sign, pointing toward your beating heart.

Listen to it, keeping time... like John Donne's bell.  It tolls for thee.

Henry Bard has second thoughts

The ghost of Edgar Allan Poe troubled my sleep, and I awoke feeling reservations about the gaudy bardic proclamations of previous post.  Perhaps there are two deep currents in 20th and 21st-century poetry : 1) the urge toward engagement, fellowship, judgement, passionate witness; and 2) the urge toward imperturbable detachment, disinterested objectivity, the autonomous perfection of the art work.  You could say Whitman is representative of the first impulse, and Poe of the second.  David Jones across the Atlantic, another great modern exemplar of the long poem, wrote some wonderful essays in defense of the absolute freedom of the artist - as artist - from social/political requirements.  Art has a moral purpose, and forwards human freedom and dignity, simply by fulfilling itself, by working out its own quest toward integral beauty, in free association with the manual arts, applied technology and useful crafts.

It seems clear to me that I have wavered through my writing life between these two poles, between Whitman and Poe.  It's why my favorite American "bard" has always been, not Ezra Pound, but Hart Crane.  Crane's Bridge is a national paean to American culture : yet the poem is so dense and "overdetermined" with pure poetic resonance that it is always more than whatever abstract or paraphrase is applied to it.  The Bridge is multidimensional and recursive, self-referential : you could say the poem radiates the free-standing beauty of an achieved work of art, an "end-in-itself".

Also the serene formulae of the early-modern poetic movement of Russian Acmeism gave me examples of possible integrations of these two poles (call them the aesthetic and the political, or the communal and the individual...).  Gumilev and Mandelstam found a mediation between revolutionary Futurism and reactionary or detached Symbolism : by making poetic works of integral, pure and free art, by following, revising and fulfilling artistic traditions they had inherited, the Acmeists produced an art of and for the people.  "The Word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of flesh and bread : suffering" (Mandelstam, from the essay "Word and Culture").

Yin & yang, systole, diastole... the poet goes out singing, and comes back again - to work late, & in secret, at the smithy of the integral poem.

This may be another partial explanation for my marginal presence on the contemporary scene.  I've been too busy working at the forge.  My massive unread poems are an effort, in part, to bring the American long-poem enterprise to some kind of artistic, integral fulfillment, on the model of Crane's Bridge and Osip Mandelstam's life-work.  Island Road, Stubborn Grew, Forth of July, Lanthanum, Ravenna Diagram...  It would be somewhat ironic if someday critical reception picks up on the idea that the American national epic has been fulfilled by a contribution from Soviet Russia.  But don't call Putin or Trump : Mandelstam and Gumilev speak from a completely other Russia, the Russia of Pushkin, Chaadev, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova.  The spiritually-free Russian psyche, so radiant with balletic grace and deep chords of solemn harmony.

Gateway Arch Monument, St. Louis

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : criticism (label : subject/criticism).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

Acmeism, academy, affinities, American culture, American poetry, Aristotle, classic, classicism, Coleridge, commentary, disinterestedness, holism, investigative poetics, Modernism, postmodernism, Russian poetry, style, wholeness...

My prof & proto-prof blog friends are almost done grading papers, & now they have time to tell us about the ethics of poetic pleasure, and the pleasure of poetic ethics, and so on etc... I'd like to agree with Eric Selinger's clear distinction between morality and aesthetics - it clears away so much sophistry - & yet I have doubts about an epistemology(?) which makes of "pleasure" a distinct and separate entity, something we can analyze for ever & ever with complaisance & delight...

walk in fear of abstractions...

Poetry is a (pleasant) conjunction of contradictions. A fulfillment of a particular poet's very personal, subconscious need (perhaps very specific, private); yet also a dispassionate, disinterested, aesthetically-resolved end in itself. I guess in that self-determining end lies its power of fulfillment. It's that unique, autonomous aesthetic quality (um, let's call it "beauty") which makes poetry so desirable as a means to other ends (ethical, intellectual, ideological, political, utilitarian, etc...).

Dante considered the Divina Commedia a didactic poem with a moral lesson. But we recognize that its power as lesson depends on its integrity as art work. On the other hand, perhaps this recognition reveals the limits of our worldview. As long as we keep searching for Ethics in Aesthetics, we remain merely aesthetes. (Ethy ain't here, people. She lef Athy bout 6 yr ago f'nother fella, move to DEtroit.)

From an ethical standpoint, art is merely a means to an end (the good life, the justified life, the right action at the right time, the heroic exemplars of truth & virtue... the edification of humanity).

From an aesthetic standpoint, ethics (in the abstract) is merely an occasion for comedy (and tragedy) : since the power of experience - the mimesis of particulars - gives art an overwhelming advantage over any other form of discourse.

Deal with it...

Quieter than usual here in the library today. Raining outside.

I'm going to NYC tomorrow for a day or so. Hope to attend Segue reading at Bowery Poetry Club on Sat. (Meredith & Peter Quartermain)

*

We know about beauty in nature & art, somewhat. Shape, colors, sounds, proportion, elegance, truth, & so on.

A beautiful thing is in proportion to itself. It has limits - it has form, shape. Even though the prevalent approach, recently, has been to emphasize extensions, fragments, extras, border-crossings.

Poetry is the art of words. Strangely drawing a boundary around words (these usually useful packets of transmitted info). & so fostering a zone of magnetism, gravity, weight...

Melville was perhaps the last, maybe the only, American writer to work with genres the way ancient and renaissance writers did. Along with grammar and style, there were generic patterns and modes which demanded adaptation and fulfillment. The Confidence-Man is a tour-de-force of such generic techniques & parodies. Moby-Dick is a serious epic.

Once artistic literature was seen under the aegis of something called "the wheel of Virgil". Virgil set the pattern for authors : first lyric & elegiac short poems; then georgic/didactic discursive modes; then epic, the attempt to represent a cosmos, an encyclopedic totality.

Running the gauntlet of these difficult, high-mandarin disciplines, the poet approached "authority" - a role through which a social community (a nation, a people) found its values mirrored in literary art.

Dramatic poetry offered a different, sometimes rival path (the debate over the authority of Homeric epic vs. tragedy is very old).

Writing & poetry no longer seem to have much of this magic aura (at least in our part of the world). Maybe this is a good thing. But sometimes contemporary poets seem rather lost without these old trails.

Poetry is still "different", different from ordinary speech behavior - but not in the same ways. Reading & writing seem to have sort of blurred into the vast, vague category of "talk".

The old disciplines perhaps assisted writers in finding a certain useful remoteness from the ordinary day-to-day. Contemplative, productive space in which to articulate those deep connections, which they notice on the underside of every leaf.

(Now I'm reminded of Mark Scroggins' comments on differing British & American approaches to the "formalities" of art and ordinary speech.)

There are various ways of thinking about what is beautiful in poems.

It's possible that in our present climate we fail to recognize the role of understatement, evocation.

A self-effacing description evokes a scene, creates atmosphere.

(The kind of sensorium we sometimes associate with autumn.)

Words that fade into an imaginative impression : say an experience in which a setting - a particular place or time - seems to combine with a state of feeling, or with a particular situation, or state of mind.

Words perhaps share with music (to a degree, anyway) a certain capacity to vanish behind (or dissolve before) the state of mind they evoke.

Something elusive about this. There may be a name for it...

... and there's another, harder, higher way to think about this "sphere of art."

It's when you consider that aforementioned need as a kind of ethical command. A mysterious moral absolute.

This, to me, is what distinguishes "professional writers" from those who think writing means being part of some kind of special, challenged "community". Certainly, writers are part of the commonweal, and speak for it, and to it; but this implies that the speaking is not simply an end in itself. Goodby forever, poetry clubs & committees.

The "commerce" of art & writing is not a quantifiable mass or entity; it's a spiritual or moral quality. It's a demand on the writer - a force of conscience - impelling him or her to address, and condemn, some moral danger, challenge, extremity, debasement : or, on the other hand, it's an undeniable impulse to praise and celebrate some good thing in life & reality.

These moral acts of conscience are what separate and individuate - utterly, indubitably - because they are the substance of the work, its motive - each piece of writing, and each writer's specific "job of work", inspiration, calling. & this element of the whole business is what makes me cast my famously sceptical eye on literary group activities. It's not that I consider myself more correct or moral or effective - I do not, in any way; it's that I'm pointing out an aspect which I recognize & believe exists in the larger phenomenon of writing as a whole.

REST NOTE : AN EXPLANICATION (1)

Because it's a quiet day at the library (students gone). Because it's not easy to read (this poem). Because only 12 people a month visit this blog any more - most of them from Mars (because I've lost interest in febrile wrangling?).

Why am I writing this poem, which is so recalcitrant? The sameness of structure & syntax - the vagueness of reference...

Well, I'm just getting into it, myself. But with every step I have to try to increase the resistance.

Who are these people - Lazarus, Hobo, Edith, Teddy Roosevelt? Figures, I guess, representing renewal. Renewal in a sort of all-encompassing sense. Renewal as a concept.

Art, well, it seems to be self-reflexive, if that's the right term. Folds back on itself, renews & extends itself through echo-effects. Implication.

So a poetry will try to renew itself by writing about renewal. Lazarus will sing himself out of the grave. With help.

This basic image (Lazarus) is meant to represent aspects of reality in general. "Lazarus", in a sense, puts a person - a particular image of the person - near the center of one's imaginative image of (cosmic) order.

& philosophical consequences result from that ordering choice. What they are I am only beginning to be able to articulate & defend.

*

Besides - does the poem so far really exhibit sameness, etc.? Well, maybe so... I seem to have a taste, a habit, an appetite, for the sound of it - at least for my own way of sounding. Maybe no one else hears it that way.

But, as mentioned, I want to make things difficult for myself, to find the resistance (which is related to reflexivity). So the aim would be to move toward a betterment of style. In some ways the serial mode helps allow for that possibility, along with many more negative outcomes (logorrhea, graphomania...). ("...he that of repetition is most master.")

That's part of the aim, & part of the difficulty. As one can tell from the nervous blur of the openings of Rest Note, I'm anxious about it. I've had too many false starts, & too much resistance (in myself & my life) toward writing anything at all.

OK, now I've probably gone & jinxed myself.

I meant "moral substance" in previous post in a vague sense. What I'm thinking of, I guess, are artistic or aesthetic approaches which do not intentionally close off moral-ethical ramifications, or meanings in general. Such intentional hermeticism has always been an option for poets and schools of poetry, to one degree or another. A defensive maneuver. You can see it in the so-called "decadent" aesthetes of the 19th-century fin de siecle; in some versions of Imagism; in New Critical valorizations of the autonomous "aesthetic object"; in aspects of the NY School; in latter sections of The Maximus Poems; in Language Poetry & other postmodernisms.

You can see it also, in a way, in the bourgeois-boho, fashionable epicureanism which Robert Archambeau recently analysed. What he describes is certainly not hermeticism : but it's a set of cultural codes which restrict artistic implications to a very narrow range.

I am not trying to criticize these defensive aspects of poetic practice just for the sake of being negative. I have practiced them in many ways in my own writing. Rather I'm trying to make room for the recognition of other possibilities, other avenues - the kind of thing that Langdon Hammer attributes to Hart Crane's project (which was over-compensatory & extreme in its own way). I mean the approaches akin to what is referred to as (or used to be called) "seriousness", "the grand style", epic, heroic poetry.

There is a dimension in poetry which Ron, for all his genealogical & antiquarian research, knowledge, & passion, just does not get. & I know my own b-b-b-b-log is tedious with Ron-demurrals. Nevertheless I want to say it, just like I want to say, as an aside, that Louis Menand (in his essay in this week's New Yorker on the sociology of literature & prize-giving) does not get it, on a certain level.

What's wrong with Menand's very familiar thesis? The age-old mistake of the fore-brained philosophical proseur : to confuse the woman's dress & make-up with her physical beauty. Menand pretends to reduce art to power, commerce & good old ordinary human venality (how enlightened, how sophisticated, how worldly-wise, how regular-guy!). He forgets that the retail of literary commerce is rooted in the wholesale of aesthetic beauty; that the insane ego-trips, kultur-trips, money-trips & power-trips, which distort every human social interaction, don't actually touch or influence the formal elements of beauty (which are untouchable because formal - because rooted in nature) - elements that both the craft-work and the inspired genius of art are bound to emulate & reiterate.

& what do I want to say, again, about Ronville Sillimanville? What is it he doesn't get?

Ron reduces poetic history to a squabble between competing "schools". Essentially, this is a rationalization : a reduction of something which is more accurately, if more vaguely, termed "tradition".

Poetic tradition is ecumenical and welcoming : that is, membership is open to individuals from nowhere, everywhere. Yet once in the door, tradition is extremely demanding.

How so? Well, you cannot become part of the tradition by joining a school or a trend. In order to become part of the one great global tradition of poetry, you have to make poems. And poems are made with inspired poetic genius, gift, talent : because without these powers, the attainment of the particular order & beauty which inheres in poems is impossible.

Poetic beauty is so dense with articulate sensible conceptual order - like the synthesis of a coherent dream, raised to the nth degree - that its accomplishment is not available to the human will.

The literary theorizing which subjects poets & poems to the discourse of schoolish rivalries is similar to the Marxist narrow-mindedness which channels human industry & commerce into its particular video fantasy-battle between Good & Evil. That is, the model is inadequate to the complexity of the truth.

The poet is dedicated to the service of beauty; his or her productions bear witness to that dedication. This is not a board game to be judged by tyro-hobbyists.

Here's a paragraph from the conclusion of Olson's "An Outline of Poetic Theory":

"Thus far we have proceeded on the supposition that the imitative poetic arts have as their ends certain pleasures, produced through their play upon our emotions. Certainly, these are ends of art and such as any consideration of art must embrace; but to suppose that art has no further effect and that it may have no further ends relative to these is vastly to underestimate the powers of art. It exercises, for example, a compelling influence upon human action - individual, social, or political - for among the causes of the misdirection of human action are the failure to conceive vividly and the failure to conceive apart from self-interest; and these are failures which art above all other things is potent to avert, since it vivifies, and since in art we must view man on his merits and not in relation to our private interests. It is not that art teaches by precept, as older generations thought, not that it moves to action; but clearly it inculcates moral attitudes; it determines our feelings toward characters of a certain kind for no other reason than that they are such characters. The ethical function of art, therefore, is never in opposition to the purely artistic end; on the contrary, it is best achieved when the artistic end is best accomplished, for it is only a further consequence of the powers of art. The same is true of any political or social ends of art, provided that the state be a good state or the society a moral society. To reflect on these things is to realize the importance and value of art, which, excellent in itself, becomes ever more excellent as we view it in ever more general relations."

another interesting background find in my digging around the Chicago School.

The trouble with this argument is that the aesthetic is simply evaporated or absorbed by the ethical.

Sure, criticism should investigate & evaluate the ethical aspect of works of art - no doubt about that! But a work of art sheds light on moral issues by means which are aesthetic. Our response, & its purpose, are an indivisible synthesis of the two (aesthetics & ethics). Yet, by the same token, the aesthetic criteria of beauty are not measurable using ethical categories (wouldn't 'Arrystotle agree?).

everyone is too literalist, serious, ponderous, explicit, competitive.

art is not sports. we run too fast & slow for sports - the umpires get befuddled.

I want to go back to my reading habits of, say, age 14-18.

I want to shuffle off the coils of anxiety & trouble, toil & stress. back to when reading & daydreaming were one.

art is not sports, but it's sort of a game - how to express things... pleasing, penetrating...

what I write is not me; furthermore, it's only an approximation. (see Nicholas of Cusa on that)

an equilibrium (the inner Law) lies behind good literature. implicit rightness. le mot juste.

a portion of sanity & civilization. salted with spiritual rigor (the steep).

don't jade your appetite with excess. don't tyrannize your own climate.

don't harp on what you like, because then I won't like it. Just leave the book lying around : maybe I'll pick it up.

Addendum

I feel I haven't said anything very new or interesting in my lecture for today.

You wasted my time, Henry!

What underlies this impulse toward "the real" - whether it be history, or the symbol grounded in experience?

Isn't art a playground of indifferent materials, scribbled & folded & shaped into something utterly new - something totally & joyously irrelevant & free? & isn't that - exactly that - how it says the most profound & simple things about life (if it bothers to say anything at all)? Doesn't it refresh life so, with pure disinterested self-fulfillment? Isn't that its perfection?

Yes... but...

that's only half the story.

The other half is about saving the world. How? Through taking on the most terrible things, the most frightening things, the most "sublime" things - and domesticating them, humanizing them, making them intelligible. Why? Because somehow joy doesn't want to live in a ghetto, surrounded by misery. It doesn't want to close its eyes or clasp itself by the arms - it wants to open its eyes & arms & clasp you.

Hence those great grave messy emotional symbols - Beethoven (not only Mozart), Dostoevsky (not only Pushkin) - those plangent art works which fuse suffering & joy. Pushkin : "my sadness is luminous". Art in a minor key.

[Some would call this not sublime, but simply realistic (life is mortal, timebound, essentially divided - spirit & flesh). So the strange dance of the children goes on, happy & sad by turns.]

The irreducible fact of taste - a corollary of the irreducible fact of art itself - presents literary criticism with its lease on an independent, autonomous field of inquiry : distinct from other forms of allegiance or intellectual endeavor.

Today Jonathan clarifies some of the distinctions between taste (an aesthetic response to an aesthetic object) and judgement (appreciation, &/or critique, which combines both taste & a set of standards). Judgements will differ because standards differ. Taste informs judgement - judgement refines taste.

Reading Maurice Blanchot on Mallarme, courtesy of Jonathan.

Distinction he makes between Valery & Mallarme. For the former, poetry is a vehicle of meditation, intellectual mastery; for the latter, purely an aesthetic object formed from words (words from which everything has been refined away, except for this aesthetic essence).

An aesthetic based in turn on the one characteristic of language which fascinates Mallarme : the way in which words replace, disperse - distance themselves, abstract themselves - from the real things they sometimes represent. In so doing, words present themselves in aesthetic form - as poems.

Maybe my shadow-boxing with Language Poetry over the years has been, in part, a battle with my own fascination with, my own bent toward, some such seductive doctrine. Solipsism, solitude, silence, music.

How different the doctine of the Chicago critics (not great poets themselves, admittedly - but going back to Coleridge, for one, anyway...). Here the aesthetic imprint of a poem is not so simply yoked to the words, the language medium, per se.

Just as Mandelstam juxtaposed the Ukrainian philologist Potebnia (with his notion of the "inner psychic image" of the word) to the Russian formalists (with their poetics based on a linguistics which analyzed the word into separate functions) - the Chicago School opposed the strictly linguistic poetics of the New Critics, with a kind of metalinguistic concept of the poem. That is, the poem can't be reduced to its linguistic medium : rather, the medium conveys an imaginative whole, a complex image (a single lyric, or an entire play, or an epic).

Still, Mallarme (and lurking behind him, Poe & Baudelaire) accomplished something permanent (he discovered a sort of antimatter) : everything after has to take it into account. How that gets done, in theory & practice, is the big question. Celan maybe took it to the limit. Every word refers to some train of thought & feeling - conceptual, experiential, personal. Yet the words are so encrypted in their own musical silence as to both invite & defy "meaning", interpretation. The defiance itself is rendered as (tragic) beauty.

So Celan sort of has it both ways. His defiance of meaning is not a literary game or an ideological program. It stems from a felt awareness of death, wrong, grief, hope, love - which are, in a sense, extra-poetic "referents". Or they are elements from the realm of fact & "journalism" which are both acknowledged & somehow won for poetry, absorbed.

I'm sure all this sounds awfully obvious to those who've spent more time with these poets & these issues.