the distinct end of poetry

V-WAKE

The distinct end of poetry is beauty.

& beauty is wholeness, radiance

& harmony, per Stephen Dedalus

– out of Aquinas (Aristotle too, maybe).

Beauty, rounding on itself… dimensional

& resonant.  Unlike the trodden

thoroughfare of explanation,

abstraction (utilitarian, impersonal)

& then Truth stands there, facing you –

smiling, breathing! – the mimesis

resolves at its moral crisis – the

peripeteia of heroine & hero flow through

& it’s all too real, this thunderstorm

in your heart – when Lear

& Cordelia meet again (in fear

& trembling) at the obliteration of all form

all kindly grace, all courtesy & charity

beneath tromping beast-breath

& mincing m’carnal serpent-teeth

– until you hear the tingle of the mercy-

bell (so slight, so bright, so still).  So

I would defend the poets’ cause;

manifest those subtle laws

(human & divine) by which they fulfill

their milky icons, walking through stone

as in an Easter season

at the Great Sabbath Even

when Mary goes to the tomb (afraid, alone)

                         *

& meets the shy gardener (Ever-Living One).

So I would elicit my own

testimony (prodigal son) – &

body forth a pregnant Henry maze, spun

from that seedy Emperor in mid-July

who loved Our American Cousin –

swan-diving into Frisco basin,

branding his heart with fiery Never-Die.

& under the aegis of that orthodox St. Maximus

I would retrace the delicate brushwork

Marsden Hartley (in his Moby Dick

memorial) marked 33 – sea-terminus

or Ocean-birth, Jonah or sepulcher…

black hole or vanishing point,

centering thin, small (paint-

brush) horsehair… your Jerusalem Chamber.

Everything resolving now, in the master play

when Prince Hal meets his father

– O recreant & fickle feather!

Arrogant betrayer!  This your day, boy –

clasp your virulent & blood-soaked crown!

For the rêve-songe in the river-

valley of our May-King quivers

in a V-wake – groans with a birth – your own!

When the Eagle of mute Joachim molts into Dove

& Mammon-prone America restores

Columbia – & when the sun soars

in the oak-bole, & Cordelia mimes… LOVE.

4.17.20

sounds vaguely French

MOSS-GREEN

Benjamin Latrobe – sounds vaguely French?

A British architect

tapped to repair, perfect

the Capitol (amid the stench

of swamp & burning).  Dogged by debt

& selective smear campaigns

sets off for New Orleans

to finish big water-works his late

son Henry had so blithely begun

(cut down by yellow fever

in September).  Ever-

green cypress can withstand the rain.

New Orleans doorways lead you back

in time (Edgar Degas

plein air sketches...

moss-green veneer, live-oak

with levee-wash).  Mississippi

spills relentlessly

into the blue & salty

Gulf.  Her sea-monstro be you & me,

O Jessie O.  L’architecture

de l’Amerique c’est plain

& simple, utilitarian –

only... we’d like to see that azure

Paradis, un jour.  Le bateau ivre

des pirates-frères, Lafitte...

en bas le bayou, sweet

Benjy.  Lisez ton ombreux livre.

6.24.19

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.

music of ordinary things

AERIE-FEAST

Music of ordinary things...

happiness at work,

when things go OK –

when the work is good, & skill brings

flowers to fruition; then at dusk

heading home, to family

& friends, where kids play

beneath a sturdy roof (hard task

fulfilled with courteous precision)...

plain telos of humanity,

pleroma of reality,

continuum of beauty’s diapason.

Grandfather’s house of rusty brick

along the River Road –

an engineer’s abode,

who loved an opera (Elvira’s cheek)...

One high lone raven corkscrews toward

the Pole.  This pillager

is Eli’s forager –

his black-hole fleece ties ragged

knots, makes nest for bread & wine.

Look how the prophet-priest

exalts his aerie-feast

where Time peals to a finish line,

B-flat – è FIAT... è finit.

Apollinaire smiles

in the wings – miles

overhead his plane lifts (azure, infinite).

9.28.16

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...

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...

I see I did indeed sort of mis-speak, in earlier post, linking art & understatement & nostalgia. I got sidelined, I didn't quite get it right.

It's not so much or only nostalgia - though of course that's there, in a lot of writing.

The link between art & understatement is something that stems from the ongoing relation (or dialectic-synthesis) between art & experience. By experience I mean what the Russians call byt : ordinary day-to-day life, those experiences we muddle through in various turns of anxiety, guile, ennui, fear, hope, courage, disillusionment, resignation, etc. etc.

& maybe the midwest has a certain distinctive style of shaping this relation, which emphasizes modesty & understatement (& maybe purposeful evasion).

& the point I was originally trying to make is this : the important thing is that direct unmediated ongoing living relationship between art and experience, beauty and the byt. The study & sale of same is a secondary sideline, a mass of distracting epiphenomena.

I'd hate to give the soggy impression or do the saggy impression of some neo-bowtie stuffed shirt pseudo-critic. Hey, no way. It ain't me. Please you gotta believe me!!!

What I meaneth to suggesteth, ladies & goons, is that :

1. despite the fact that good art always transcends simple categories & critical abstractions & nostrums & such : even if & as it hews most faithfully to the generic requirements of certain traditional forms;

2. and despite the fact that our unprofessional off-the-cuff impressionistic personal insights & comments are of far greater practical & humane & spiritual value, generally, & usually, than systematic critical werke, generally;

3. nevertheless, there is a place for calling things by their right names, according to an open & explicit set of premises & postulates, designed by the professional critic, to establish differentiae of judgement : because such creative critical labor has its own proper sphere & center of gravity; & because, paradoxically, establishing such differentiae can help us to see, sometimes, how individual works & artists are part of larger ongoing communal projects & traditions.

Thus indie-crit, as I useta call it, is one way to comprehend (through one critic's sense of taste within a partially-perceived scale of universal aesthetic & ethical values) the equality & kinship of something we sense as the Beautiful - across vast variations of style & cultural background.

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?).

So a critic (of a few centuries back, probably) would describe my (or anybody's) list of "seraphic" poets - the makers of transcendentally perfect poems - as those in whom the genius of Nature shows forth. (& this would agree with the idea of art as imitation of nature.) Beautiful poems have something inimitable & preternatural about them : the genius that makes artificial things which are almost as complex & amazing as the works of nature itself. & yet they are nature, too.

(Bacon, by the way, seems to have an interesting idea that the value of "historical poems" (epics, history plays, etc.) lies in the fact that they show events & people as better than they are in ordinary life - as more transparent or knowable, more worthy of imitation. In a sense this is the role played now by the movies.)

To say the beautiful is strict, absolute, universal, objective, rooted in nature... is only half of the equation. The beautiful is also surprising, original, unaccountable, challenging, recalcitrant, sometimes awful, terrible, tremendous.

The beautiful is a balance between creative power & the inherent proportions of nature. A proportion of proportions.

Even the poems that reject or deny harmony can't escape its presence, lurking in the background.

It's easy to define the beautiful. Much harder to find & defend it. That's the critic's job : to apprehend beauty where it wasn't noticed before.

It might be easier to understand what I was trying to get at yesterday, with my rubrics about poetry's transcendental perfection, if we think of such a characteristic as analogous to what music is & does.

I don't want to think of music "inhabiting" poetry, translating it into an unknown beautiful dream-speech (symbolism). I want to think of the harmony of poetry as sui generis, as applying its own peculiar powers & methods; but that the beauty expressed in painting & music is evidence of analogous forms of harmony.

I think of poetry's harmony as global, manifest in all languages. Global, yet strict. Something different from Ron Silliman's or Josh Corey's "post-avant community".

The strictness I'm talking about has to do with beauty's inherent qualities, which, in poetry, encompass the objects of both sense & intellect, and have to comprehend all the human & natural constructions which make up tradition - going back to the origins of language on the one hand, and the origins of the universe on the other.

The "rubrics" posted yesterday probably stem from one underlying principle : Beauty is the substance/structure of poetry. A corollary of this is the notion Jonathan Mayhew was talking about recently : Taste is an impersonal response to an objective reality (beauty).

The strict measures of beauty - not political polemics & allegiances - are what drive the merchants of the "poetry market" from the temple.

One could just as well say that Taste is a personal response to a subjective reality, if one were Kant, I guess (I'm not very well-grounded in philosophy). (Maybe this is what Jordan was getting at in his comment to Jonathan the other day.) But I'm not Kant, and I'm going to assume, with Charles Peirce (I guess), that we apprehend, imperfectly, the real objective existence of certain things, which we name with universal terms (ie. universally applicable).

& now I'm way over my head.

& that beauty - when it confronts & represents all that life & the world can throw - when it rises to the theme - may be fierce, stern, austere, complex, profound, ironic, uncompromising... magnanimous, comprehensive, compassionate... moving...

Poetry. OK, we were explaining it, right.

Seems to me I've been explicating it hereabouts at great leennngggth for many a year now! Heavens, yes.

Two things come to mind when I think the p word (no, besides that thing!...):

1. Poetry is... uh... simply put, an exploitation of the innate music of language. Thus, the grand & middling poets of all times & eras with whom we is acquainted, are thems that are fluent in a particklar manner of transmuting the regular matters of language inta something beautiful.

2. & it follows, then (if they are beautiful), that poems are, as I've enunciated at other times & places, in some sense, complete, finished, satisfying, whole, integral... and, strictly in this here aesthetic sense at least, or from this here aesthetic angle, ends in themselves. In other words: the innate music of language - the music in particular, that is - finds its telos, or end, in poems.

But here we's approaching a mystery: what (in the world) is Beautiful?

Keats already answered that one, Hank!! TRUTH is Beauty! BEAUTY is TRUTH! an' he got that off some old greek clay mug!

It follows, that, in this tired old ugly world, this stupid unjust crazy old world, this sleeping half-dead ignorant old world, this weak blind mortal fleshly old world, this hungry starving & confused old world, the appearance of beautiful truthful beauty-truth will be a vital stupendous transfiguring event. An event the borders & substance of which we do not comprehend. An event for which Poetry simply is a symbolic representation or trial balloon improvisation.

In the book Stanza My Stone, a study of Wally Stevens, a conception of Wally's conception of poetry tended somewhat, very roughly, in this direction. The poetry of poetry & the poetry of life were 2 different but somehow analogous things.

...thus, note carefully what Crane is saying here : the ultimate criterion of poetic value is its lastingness, the perennial quality of its beauty and interest.

If true, this should make us revise our notions of literary tradition and development. Not to say that there are not productive advances in literary forms, or that the canon is a fixed collection of past classics. (As Crane points out, Aristotle might have found King Lear a more complex & interesting example of tragic poetry than Oedipus.)

It is to say, however, that beauty is the criterion, which subsumes both pleasure & instruction. The criterion is not merely formal or aesthetic in an exclusionary sense - it's probable that ethical, moral & political values will inform our notion of the beautiful. But poetry also has its own scale of inherent expressive values - originality, elegance, rightness, clarity, eloquence, etc. - which make up the beauty of the work as a whole.

If beauty is the criterion, the critic will have to shun polemics and special pleading of every kind. Claims of novelty, "experiment", marginality, "progressiveness", political relevance, etc., are all partial claims, which - if not related to the final cause and the ultimate criterion (lasting beauty) - actually fall outside the realm of critical judgement.

With these things in mind, maybe readers can begin to distinguish for themselves between general "poetry business" (promotional activities of the entrepreneurial or socio-political kinds), and genuine criticism.

I could quote RS Crane all day (Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry). In one passage, he talks about how, with Aristotle anyway, it's useless to consider "pleasure" in the abstract, as an "end" or purpose of poetry. Pleasure is always conjoined with particular forms of activity, and is characterized by them. Then, in a paragraph, he telescopes the historical development of mimetic poetry, from basic human pleasure in imitations & mimicry, to the moral distinction between imitation of things admired ("better people") and things satirized ("worse peope"), to the practice of a Homer, in which a complete, integral form has been found to subsume many forms of imitation:

"...finally to have eventuated, with Homer, in self-contained works of art the final cause of which is beauty rather than either the general pleasurableness or the moral utility of imitations... It is indeed a final end in two important senses - in the sense that it is an end peculiar to the poetic art rather than one imitative poetry shares with other arts or activities, and also in the sense that it subsumes the other ends of pleasing and instructing, and goes beyond them. For it is distinctive of poetry such as Homer's that it utilizes the pleasure we all take in imitation and rhythm, and the vivid interest we have in other human beings and especially in the moral issues in which they can be involved, in order to make objects which we can continue to appreciate, after our first curiosity is satisfied, for the sake of their intrinsic rightness and beauty. This therefore is where poetic theory, in its normative aspect, in general must begin..." (pp. 64-65)

Seems that among the Chicago School notions I've been following, the one that interests me the most is this concept of the poem as an artificial-imitative construct. RS Crane makes it clear that Aristotle, anyway, is being very specific in the Poetics - is not talking about all kinds of poetry. And "imitation" does not equal "realism" - does not mean an attempt to "faithfully reflect" a stable external reality. Mimesis in poetry is a verbal artifice or autonomous creation, reflecting the poet's inner concept of an action (the plot) and its consequences & implications. Part of the interest (pleasure, etc.) derived from such a production does involve our ability to identify & understand the action, and the characters involved - thus it requires an element of verisimilitude (the characters are either "better than us" (epic, tragedy), "worse than us" (comedy), etc.). But there is no simple equation of experience and the art work; the poem is a selection & recreation of events - real or imagined - in a completely artificial medium.

We might be able to extrapolate, from the ways an audience absorbs & responds to a dramatic poem or an epic poem, to the action(s) or purposes of poems in general. This seems to be what's happening when Elder Olson or RS Crane talk about how the diction & verbal texture are only one element - and perhaps not the most important one - of a poem's structure. They refer to Coleridge's criticism - the way he balances considerations of verbal effects with the nature of the poem's argument, theme, "thought" - the images & concepts evoked by the words. Like Aristotle, Coleridge thinks about poems as imaginative wholes or unities - this unity as being perhaps the foremost structural element, the formal resolution, of its overall beauty, radiance, claritas. Here the notion of fitness or decorum comes into play: the verbal texture in each of the poem's parts must relate fittingly to the subject-matter & contribute to the total effect. (Coleridge distinguished poetry from prose as having pleasure, rather than truth, as its end, and as being beautiful, not only as a whole, but independently in each of its parts.)

A "didactic" poem does not imitate an action. But mimesis plays a role in all poetry, lurking in the imaginative indications, implications, inferences, suggestions of every figure & trope.

So if we start thinking about poems as imaginative/conceptual/mimetic wholes - representing & imitating actions and "mental actions" (choices: decisions about things) - then, it seems to me, this opens up new ways to read. & I mean read whatever little book of poetry you have in front of you.

Walking through bookstore on errand for library, pass the poetry shelf, see Beowulf.  Recall that poetry is sort of distillation/projection of one's experience of beauty.  Recurrent memory:  high school, leaning barefoot on back porch reading anthology of French poets.   Luxe, calme et volupte.

Distillation, charter, code.