poleRon's complex counter-polemic (in post of today, 6.11) to the New Formalist polemics of Steele & Schreiber, attacks the latter's oversimplifications of literary history and 20th-century practice. However, the elaborate model of prosody Ron builds & defends here (via Zukofsky et al.), combining language/music/speech/writing, etc. in different permutations, serves to obscure one basic point made by Schreiber:
"Phrasing in music works in relation to the beat, not as a substitute for it."
This is a legitimate criticism - offered perhaps most strongly (& originally) by Robert Frost - to the Poundian nostrum of "composition by musical phrase". The correlation of meter & phrase, or speech pattern, is not simply part of the toolbox of optional traditionalist techniques. It is a basic aspect of poetry, and as such, serves as a kind of grounding for creative experiments of all kinds. To deny or minimize this both rules out vast fields of poetic enterprise, past and future, and distorts the evidence of 20th-cent. literary history.
The synthesis of rhythm and phrasing is one element of the overall harmonics to which composition aspires. It can be found in some of the most memorable passages of Pound & Eliot (Annie Finch's "ghost of meter", for example in the contrast of pentameter lines with trochaic beat of parts of the Cantos, or the hidden metrical forms planted in Four Quartets). The same synthesis was worked out more thoroughly and paradigmatically, if not always successfully, by Hart Crane. Crane again and again trumps these distinctions between free & metrical verse, between modernist innovation and traditional forms. Wallace Stevens, too, in his own less emphatic way, melded pentameter & free verse.
Setting up the New Formalist agitators as straw men with which to thump Quietude & plump Post-Avant is itself a polemic which tends to box, pigeonhole & truncate contemporary understanding of technical possibility.
[p.s. ...& then, moreover, what would Yeats say?]
Showing posts with label criticism2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label criticism2. Show all posts
6.11.2004
3.17.2004
I've deleted previous negative comments. It's a mistake for me to disparage critical grids or ordering patterns, since I've done it plenty of times myself, and also since the massive amount of contemporary poetry makes this kind of mapping very understandable - though I do think there's a danger in reductive labels.
My own typical past tendencies in making judgements often involved an exaggerated desire to preserve or delineate some lost path of tradition, or the accomplishment & technical dazzle of former days. Reading in Wallace Stevens lately, and re-reading BJ Leggett's excellent book, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, is maybe providing me a somewhat altered perspective.
Stevens - as opposed to the entire Eliot/New Critical school, and as opposed to Harold Bloom (a critic obsessed in his own fashion with Stevens) - put strong & repeated emphasis on uniqueness, individual expression, originality, and multiplicity. He anticipated Bloom's position long before, and mocked the idea of anxiety of influence & continuity of Tradition (saying something to the effect that, if we're all compounded of other poets, and never distinctly ourselves, then why not simply have one poet - Hesiod would do well).
I think this notion of uniqueness & multiplicity may be the strongest antidote to binary team poetics such as the Silliman formation. These lines of Stevens encapsulate the attitude:
Sheer multiplicity, variety, oddity, distinctive originality - these are probably the most impressive qualities presented by American poetry in the last 100 years.
My own typical past tendencies in making judgements often involved an exaggerated desire to preserve or delineate some lost path of tradition, or the accomplishment & technical dazzle of former days. Reading in Wallace Stevens lately, and re-reading BJ Leggett's excellent book, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory, is maybe providing me a somewhat altered perspective.
Stevens - as opposed to the entire Eliot/New Critical school, and as opposed to Harold Bloom (a critic obsessed in his own fashion with Stevens) - put strong & repeated emphasis on uniqueness, individual expression, originality, and multiplicity. He anticipated Bloom's position long before, and mocked the idea of anxiety of influence & continuity of Tradition (saying something to the effect that, if we're all compounded of other poets, and never distinctly ourselves, then why not simply have one poet - Hesiod would do well).
I think this notion of uniqueness & multiplicity may be the strongest antidote to binary team poetics such as the Silliman formation. These lines of Stevens encapsulate the attitude:
And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.
Sheer multiplicity, variety, oddity, distinctive originality - these are probably the most impressive qualities presented by American poetry in the last 100 years.
1.22.2004
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.
9.11.2003
Josh Corey defends the notion that you can counter a critic's criticism by attacking their poetry.
That may be pamphleteering but it's not criticism.
That may be pamphleteering but it's not criticism.
9.09.2003
Jonathan Mayhew writes:
But we are all vehement! Henry Gould and Jean Hooligan as much as Jonathan Mayhem. It's called passion! If elegance could be measured it wouldn't be elegant any longer. If poetry were written in "normal" language it wouldn't be poetry at all. All this reminds me of some books my Grandpa had by Robert Hillyer, a guy who used to write a column for the Saturday Review or Saturday Evening Post. He would quote a poem by Cummings or Williams or Auden and sneer at it. Modern poetry was crap. Half the time he was right, but that just shows bad poetry will always be more plentiful than good. The poetry he advocated was worse than crap. That's why the badness of Houlihan's own poetry matters in this debate.
But JM, I'm not against vehemence per se; only struck by it in this context. Houlihan's biting comments seem to stir not engagement but defensive vituperation. & no, the fact that Hillyer advocated crap poems does not justify quoting Houlihan's poems to deny her critical acumen. Houlihan does not present her poems as alternative models within her essays. The one poem (that I found, anyway) which she offered as exemplary, by Franz Wright, was pretty good, though I thought the final line spoiled it (snow like "millions of bees" : seems facile, a kind of well-worn flourish).
I agree that her criticism is satirical & negative, and does not really offer a "way forward" in terms of a new or exemplary poetics. But I find her closet-cleaning a breath of fresh air.
But we are all vehement! Henry Gould and Jean Hooligan as much as Jonathan Mayhem. It's called passion! If elegance could be measured it wouldn't be elegant any longer. If poetry were written in "normal" language it wouldn't be poetry at all. All this reminds me of some books my Grandpa had by Robert Hillyer, a guy who used to write a column for the Saturday Review or Saturday Evening Post. He would quote a poem by Cummings or Williams or Auden and sneer at it. Modern poetry was crap. Half the time he was right, but that just shows bad poetry will always be more plentiful than good. The poetry he advocated was worse than crap. That's why the badness of Houlihan's own poetry matters in this debate.
But JM, I'm not against vehemence per se; only struck by it in this context. Houlihan's biting comments seem to stir not engagement but defensive vituperation. & no, the fact that Hillyer advocated crap poems does not justify quoting Houlihan's poems to deny her critical acumen. Houlihan does not present her poems as alternative models within her essays. The one poem (that I found, anyway) which she offered as exemplary, by Franz Wright, was pretty good, though I thought the final line spoiled it (snow like "millions of bees" : seems facile, a kind of well-worn flourish).
I agree that her criticism is satirical & negative, and does not really offer a "way forward" in terms of a new or exemplary poetics. But I find her closet-cleaning a breath of fresh air.
With respect to previous post, see somewhat apropos comments on criticism by BK Stefans (9/8/03).
9.08.2003
The Joan Houlihan articles getting attention in blogland. Responding to Josh: I'm not sure what the comparison to Wm. Logan, or the quality of her own poems, has to do with the substance of her critiques. Too much defensive carping from the fishpond. That she chose some really bad poems from Fence was supported by the fact that she showed how the mediocre writing of those examples was echoed by the editors' own pronouncements defining their aesthetics.
9.04.2003
Witty & acerbic evaluations of contemporary poetry by Joan Houlihan. The whole series is worth reading.
8.27.2003
BK Stefans includes an interesting canonizing review of Robert Lowell's recent Collected. The following passage is characteristic:
"One can't help, reading through this massive, spellbinding volume, mourning some of what has been lost in American poetry since Partisan Review crowd was in the ascendant: an earnestness about writing (and rewriting) poetry in a bid for immortality (Berryman's narcissism may have killed any frank courting of this instinct), an intellectual aggressiveness that was more ethical than theoretic in nature (like Auden, Lowell's pacifist politics were often transparent, and he was a conscientious objector in WWII), an imagistic impulse that was best typified by Lowell's unerring sense of visual detail ("...octagonal red tiles, / sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; / a Rocky Mountain chaise lounge, / its legs, shellacked saplings." [162]) and an embodied, phantasmagoric sense of history and geography, highlighting that generation's greater chronological proximity to Pound and, before him, Robert Browning (and the Victorian habit of comparing one's "age" with a prior historical epoch, especially that of the Roman Empire). "
Berryman often came under attack from his own generation for "bad writing" (Louise Bogan probably the most salient example of this). Here Stefans juxtaposes Berryman & Lowell : Berryman's narcissism vs. Lowell's earnest bid for immortality through careful (re)writing.
What stands out for me anyway about that circle of "establishment" American male poets from mid-century is the enormous weight of stress & torment. The lyrical balance of some of Schwartz's poems contrasts with his miserable neurotic personal life. Berryman & Lowell's work is remarkable for its lack of repose.
I think Berryman actually captured the historical flavor of his times, through his manic self-obsessed disintegration & the schizoid undertone of "black talk", than Lowell did with all his earnest & Olympian historicism. America & the West are a racial-ideological construct on certain levels, and in Berryman we begin to hear the unsettling African undertone of that deeper seismic-historical resonance.
"One can't help, reading through this massive, spellbinding volume, mourning some of what has been lost in American poetry since Partisan Review crowd was in the ascendant: an earnestness about writing (and rewriting) poetry in a bid for immortality (Berryman's narcissism may have killed any frank courting of this instinct), an intellectual aggressiveness that was more ethical than theoretic in nature (like Auden, Lowell's pacifist politics were often transparent, and he was a conscientious objector in WWII), an imagistic impulse that was best typified by Lowell's unerring sense of visual detail ("...octagonal red tiles, / sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; / a Rocky Mountain chaise lounge, / its legs, shellacked saplings." [162]) and an embodied, phantasmagoric sense of history and geography, highlighting that generation's greater chronological proximity to Pound and, before him, Robert Browning (and the Victorian habit of comparing one's "age" with a prior historical epoch, especially that of the Roman Empire). "
Berryman often came under attack from his own generation for "bad writing" (Louise Bogan probably the most salient example of this). Here Stefans juxtaposes Berryman & Lowell : Berryman's narcissism vs. Lowell's earnest bid for immortality through careful (re)writing.
What stands out for me anyway about that circle of "establishment" American male poets from mid-century is the enormous weight of stress & torment. The lyrical balance of some of Schwartz's poems contrasts with his miserable neurotic personal life. Berryman & Lowell's work is remarkable for its lack of repose.
I think Berryman actually captured the historical flavor of his times, through his manic self-obsessed disintegration & the schizoid undertone of "black talk", than Lowell did with all his earnest & Olympian historicism. America & the West are a racial-ideological construct on certain levels, and in Berryman we begin to hear the unsettling African undertone of that deeper seismic-historical resonance.
6.13.2003
Once again, Ron Silliman is elaborating his binary scheme of US poetics history, what might be called the "team schema" of literature, which is actually pretty traditional in its own right, going back to the battles between Establishment & Radical poets of mid-century, and back before that to the Modernists & the Georgians, and back before that to the experimenters (Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins) & the rest of the Victorians. . . where would criticism be without these teams, these Quietudes & these Carpitudes? It makes you wonder whether American culture has actually produced ANY fully-developed poets in the last few generations, since the distinction of a fully-formed artist is to absorb & transcend such cliches & group phenomena. Where would Ron's radical Carpitude poets be without a Quietude to diss? Let's face it, 99% of experimental post-avant carpitude poetry is utterly forgettable mediocre braying (same percentage goes for Quietude ranks). & if that's the case, why the obsession with these camps? What critical value do we have in endlessly underlining the magical divide between Rads & Straights, decade after decade, if 99% of the work in both camps is crap? Aren't we just using dung beetle technology to build two huge a-symmetrical mounds of crap? Upon which Ron will sit (the Carpitude pile, to the left) & dish out his extravagant encomia (O brilliant, Mike Magee! just to cite one recent example [not that I have anything against Magee's parodic riffs on Emily Dickinson. My beef is with Silliman's critical scale of values, which transmutes the clever into the pathbreaking, etc.]. . .)
6.06.2003
Tim & David are talking about the definitions of "social poet".
Responding to Tim : 20th cent. lit is more than modernist anti-mass culture struggles. Think of Nabokov or Thos. Mann. Beneath the idea that there is no synthesizing of elite & mass culture is the assumption that there is no viable or culturally normative middle class.
It might be better to focus on the characteristics of poetry per se rather than trying to identify character traits or allegiances of individual poets. Because poetry-making is inherently social, and at the same time, social issues are irrelevant. How so? Because poetry-making is like other kinds of art-making : it involves a "primitive", childish kind of fetishization of objects. The poem for the poet is a fetishized object, a container for impulses of love & fascination. This is true regardless of the poet's social background, cultural assumptions, political ideals, intellectual allegiances, etc. So in a way poetry-making is a hobby, an obsession, a meeting-ground, A PLAY SPACE, where social categories lose their seriousness to some degree. & in this very un-seriousness resides its most important social function.
Responding to Tim : 20th cent. lit is more than modernist anti-mass culture struggles. Think of Nabokov or Thos. Mann. Beneath the idea that there is no synthesizing of elite & mass culture is the assumption that there is no viable or culturally normative middle class.
It might be better to focus on the characteristics of poetry per se rather than trying to identify character traits or allegiances of individual poets. Because poetry-making is inherently social, and at the same time, social issues are irrelevant. How so? Because poetry-making is like other kinds of art-making : it involves a "primitive", childish kind of fetishization of objects. The poem for the poet is a fetishized object, a container for impulses of love & fascination. This is true regardless of the poet's social background, cultural assumptions, political ideals, intellectual allegiances, etc. So in a way poetry-making is a hobby, an obsession, a meeting-ground, A PLAY SPACE, where social categories lose their seriousness to some degree. & in this very un-seriousness resides its most important social function.
5.22.2003
Not fair to blame poets for the sad state of education, culture, politics. . .
& a lot of it isn't even sad.
Critical pincers.
writing poems
criticism
fame : 2 sides of the brain & a side of hash with croutons. A canna Makitcohere, chef.
Poem : indefensible heavy breathing. Quite an achievement in its own realm but easily dismissed.
Heavy breathing + acute hearing.
Patience & fortitude.
Careful with those pincers on onionskin graph paper.
Fair to be aware of the heavy angels on watch overhead : the angels of education, culture, politics. . . Miltonic sibillance on granite. . . Brodsky with a hawk on his wrist.
& a lot of it isn't even sad.
Critical pincers.
writing poems
criticism
fame : 2 sides of the brain & a side of hash with croutons. A canna Makitcohere, chef.
Poem : indefensible heavy breathing. Quite an achievement in its own realm but easily dismissed.
Heavy breathing + acute hearing.
Patience & fortitude.
Careful with those pincers on onionskin graph paper.
Fair to be aware of the heavy angels on watch overhead : the angels of education, culture, politics. . . Miltonic sibillance on granite. . . Brodsky with a hawk on his wrist.
3.17.2003
Just a thought in response to Gabriel ("Conchology") Gudding's long essay "From Petit to Langpo", which appears on his blog (& in an earlier version? in Flashpoint magazine).
The essay shows how democratic pedagogical principles like "everybody can write" could lead to "everybody has an inner poet waiting to get out" and "poetry is the lyrical record of personal experiences". With such truisms you can see how opposition might grow, from modernists ("poetry is the extinction of personality", "make it new", "a poem is a machine made of words") to New Critics ("a poem is an autotelic self-enclosed object"). One can see how the wave could swing back from New Critical rules to the ragged edges of biography & personality (the Confessionals, the Beats). Or how the NY School might opt out stylishly (while borrowing) from both.
It's ironic that Creative Writing schools would focus on the "craft" of empowering, squeezing out & purveying personal experience, rather than on the art of poetry itself. But I suspect Gabriel's history is a little one-sided : you could probably find offhand quotes from his same set of late 20th-cent. poets on the pedagogy of poetry, which emphasize (instead) the impersonal "craft" aspects. (I'm just guessing, though, not making a case here.)
The issue of solipsism or individualism in art cuts deeper than pedagogy & the professionalization of poetry. As I've been saying in various places on this blog, the nature, the ontological status, of the human person is a deepening mystery; how that mystery gets radiated through the modes of story & poetics creates what we call genres. (hey, who do I think I am, Northrop Frye?)
The essay shows how democratic pedagogical principles like "everybody can write" could lead to "everybody has an inner poet waiting to get out" and "poetry is the lyrical record of personal experiences". With such truisms you can see how opposition might grow, from modernists ("poetry is the extinction of personality", "make it new", "a poem is a machine made of words") to New Critics ("a poem is an autotelic self-enclosed object"). One can see how the wave could swing back from New Critical rules to the ragged edges of biography & personality (the Confessionals, the Beats). Or how the NY School might opt out stylishly (while borrowing) from both.
It's ironic that Creative Writing schools would focus on the "craft" of empowering, squeezing out & purveying personal experience, rather than on the art of poetry itself. But I suspect Gabriel's history is a little one-sided : you could probably find offhand quotes from his same set of late 20th-cent. poets on the pedagogy of poetry, which emphasize (instead) the impersonal "craft" aspects. (I'm just guessing, though, not making a case here.)
The issue of solipsism or individualism in art cuts deeper than pedagogy & the professionalization of poetry. As I've been saying in various places on this blog, the nature, the ontological status, of the human person is a deepening mystery; how that mystery gets radiated through the modes of story & poetics creates what we call genres. (hey, who do I think I am, Northrop Frye?)
3.14.2003
Boy, Ron Silliman tries to cover a lot of polemical-poetical turf in his post of today (March 14). I don't have time to write a dissertation : I may be on strike in a couple hours, God forbid. Just a few angelically odd responses.
The situation of the anti-war reading in Amherst, so overdetermined ! Here is an event where poetry is already being put to immediate political tasks. Ron questions the wisdom of excluding a poem which because of its obscurity or "difficulty" came across as irrelevant to the purpose of the reading. So Ron is saying that the excluders, by being political in a local sense, were being a-political (allied to the "school of quietude") in a larger sense.
In order to ratify avant-garde radical credentials, as I pointed out in the early days of this blog, an oppositional, us vs. them scenario must always be invoked.
I may be on strike in a few hours so I must keep this brief.
Ron makes his stand on the "difficulty" front. There are conformist anti-intellectual forces which constantly dumb down & standardize & gentilify. This is a hoary a-g argument, actually, easily applicable to all times & places.
What Ron et al. always evade is the fact that there are strictly aesthetic values &/or techniques, which may certainly involve complex highly-difficult feats of compositional synthesis, but which may energetically reach out to the reader with a conceptually clear & articulate & transparent & engaging surface : "deceptively simple", or layered with depth. & by the same token, obscurity & difficulty are not ALWAYS the ticket to aesthetic value or authenticity. Ron wants always to romanticize the odd & the marginal, & in doing so he presents his own stereotypical notion of the audience : that great American audience open to any old kind of quirkiness from "Leaving the Atocha Station" to Jerry Rubin to Seinfeld blah blah blah. Somehow critical distinctions & aesthetic values get blurred when you start blending all the arts with culture in general. The particular values getting blurred here have little to do with the binary politicized polemic of the oppositional school of poetics. The poetry of description, cognition, articulation, communication, & rhetoric need not highlight its elliptical or markedly marginal status - confirming the stereotype of the postmodern "artist" - in order to be effective as poetry.
ARS EST CELARE ARTEM
[art is to hide art]
I remember carrying on these same arguments on the Buff List years ago, with the same people. The outsiders also have their "outside". You Are Here.
The situation of the anti-war reading in Amherst, so overdetermined ! Here is an event where poetry is already being put to immediate political tasks. Ron questions the wisdom of excluding a poem which because of its obscurity or "difficulty" came across as irrelevant to the purpose of the reading. So Ron is saying that the excluders, by being political in a local sense, were being a-political (allied to the "school of quietude") in a larger sense.
In order to ratify avant-garde radical credentials, as I pointed out in the early days of this blog, an oppositional, us vs. them scenario must always be invoked.
I may be on strike in a few hours so I must keep this brief.
Ron makes his stand on the "difficulty" front. There are conformist anti-intellectual forces which constantly dumb down & standardize & gentilify. This is a hoary a-g argument, actually, easily applicable to all times & places.
What Ron et al. always evade is the fact that there are strictly aesthetic values &/or techniques, which may certainly involve complex highly-difficult feats of compositional synthesis, but which may energetically reach out to the reader with a conceptually clear & articulate & transparent & engaging surface : "deceptively simple", or layered with depth. & by the same token, obscurity & difficulty are not ALWAYS the ticket to aesthetic value or authenticity. Ron wants always to romanticize the odd & the marginal, & in doing so he presents his own stereotypical notion of the audience : that great American audience open to any old kind of quirkiness from "Leaving the Atocha Station" to Jerry Rubin to Seinfeld blah blah blah. Somehow critical distinctions & aesthetic values get blurred when you start blending all the arts with culture in general. The particular values getting blurred here have little to do with the binary politicized polemic of the oppositional school of poetics. The poetry of description, cognition, articulation, communication, & rhetoric need not highlight its elliptical or markedly marginal status - confirming the stereotype of the postmodern "artist" - in order to be effective as poetry.
ARS EST CELARE ARTEM
[art is to hide art]
I remember carrying on these same arguments on the Buff List years ago, with the same people. The outsiders also have their "outside". You Are Here.
3.11.2003
No, Ron Silliman, you cannot purvey Great New Poetry to me every three days. I don't buy your economy of millions of Great Poets kept down by a conspiracy of mainstream schools of quietude. I don't care if it's impossible to read everything being published. A critic can have standards even if the view is restricted.
There is something to be said for running the gauntlet of mainstream publication : it enforces necessary solitude & purpose.
The standard may be something finicky & whimsical on the surface. But it will allow the poet time to win the critic over despite the strictest judgement.
Even if poetry is blooming everywhere, I still want the critic to find it rare, profound, substantial, absolutely convincing. I want the critic to be tough to win over, knowledgeable, sensible, responsive.
I want poetry to go & hide somewhere, in some old abandoned shack in Hungary maybe, to get away from all these glib, pretentious poets.
This gets back to Jordan's comment about the "yucky" feeling of doing reviews.
There is something to be said for running the gauntlet of mainstream publication : it enforces necessary solitude & purpose.
The standard may be something finicky & whimsical on the surface. But it will allow the poet time to win the critic over despite the strictest judgement.
Even if poetry is blooming everywhere, I still want the critic to find it rare, profound, substantial, absolutely convincing. I want the critic to be tough to win over, knowledgeable, sensible, responsive.
I want poetry to go & hide somewhere, in some old abandoned shack in Hungary maybe, to get away from all these glib, pretentious poets.
This gets back to Jordan's comment about the "yucky" feeling of doing reviews.
3.10.2003
David Hess blogs nimbly among the concepts, & creates some critical synergy out of comments by Ron, Nada, Jack Kimball, et al. He writes:
"O'Hara's poems always seemed very contemplative to me even though they were
full of what you might call 'action'. It strikes me how (taboo word acoming)
accessible they are despite their range of cultural knowledge/materials. Pound
reassured the reader that they needn't know Greek or Italian to understand his
poetry as he himself believed he didn't need to know Chinese to understand its
ideograms. But since he positions himself as a bestower of culture -- culture as a
repository of knowledge that can just be passed around like a hot potato, like
money really -- one must know it.
In O'Hara expressiveness and contemplativeness are not mutually exclusive.
Thinking is not equated with knowing. You do not need to have heard which
symphony he's talking about to "get it." Poets of knowledge, Eliot and Pound, and
poets of being, O'Hara or Oppen or Reznikoff or Celan. I believe the language
poets, to make a sweeping generalization, never knew which kind they wanted to
become. To be systematizers or anti-systematizers -- the dilemma is at the core
of the question of the avant-garde."
Let's take this dichotomy between knowledge/being, system/anti-system, & think about it for a minute. A poem is basically a set of gestures, speech acts, words, united in some kind of aesthetic system (or form of beauty). Because the system is not always obvious to us doesn't mean it isn't there. (sounds like a quote from Zap Comics) But our perception or response to anything is a response to system or organization or pattern.
O'Hara's presentation of fact & knowledge may seem more accessible than Pound's, precisely because he doesn't have Pound's Olympian-didactic angle of approach. But this doesn't make his poetry less of a "system of knowledge" : it's just less overt. Proust has a system : but his work may be the most successful modernist evocation of "being" of all. These aesthetic systems are just different from discursive or philosophical or scientific systems : their consistency is one of style, leading to wholeness or complexity of presentation.
The crack-up & revolutions & wars of the turn of the 20th century brought an end to many a narrative form. This break-up provided an opportunity for poets: modernist & postmodernist technique provided a lever for poetry to challenge the hegemony of prose fiction. & who emerged as the avatar of poetic knowledge? The uber-systematizer : Dante. Dante's "scaffolding" lies behind Pound's grab-bag and behind Eliot's Christian poetics (the poetics of religious transcendence providing another convenient lever of cultural authority against the fiction writers). Both Joyce & Pound balanced Homer against Dante, recapitulating the conceptual movement of the Renaissance in general : all this recapitulation a sign of the end of the age which began with the Renaissance.
With this sketch of literary history, look again at Hess's concluding sentence. Postmodernism is often juxtaposed with modernism as anti-system against system. Both make claims to represent the future (the avant-garde) - the whole spectrum, from Eliot to Dada. But maybe the real issue is, what follows from the scaffoldings erected in the early 20th-century in response to the opportunity offered by chaos (the end of 19th-century/Renaissance/Enlightenment narrative certainties)? because the scaffoldings were only the overt systems. Joyce himself showed this with Finnegans Wake - here he out-systemed his own systems, & showed that chaos & system were the same thing.
The power of aesthetic effect of any particular work of art is limited & variable - that is, it depends on the power of apprehension by the audience, as well as on the author's own discernment & ability to build complexity into those same limitations (the "implicate universe" of David Bohm). Thus it may take decades, or centuries even, for the implications of an aesthetic system to work their effects, their magic. (As an example, Mandelstam emphasized the future-oriented quality of Dante's poem.) These centuries may develop new constellations of perception & value, so that, for example, O'Hara's cute notion of "Personism" may not be so simple after all : it may be appreciated as an element of an aesthetic system, a worldview, a metaform.
The New doesn't go away : only time-bound versions of the new, scaffoldings & fashionable systematizations, get old. The perpetual death of the "avant-garde" is simply the continual obsolescence of literary fashions which were flimsy surface phenomena to begin with. There is no simple dichotomy of knowledge & being : only genuine, original aesthetic systems (of perception, of expression) vs. hack work & rhetorical sleights-of-hand.
Perhaps the "new" system of critical valuation to be applied to the "post-avant" generation will depend from somewhere between Bakhtin & Mandelstam. It will apprehend the dialogic appropriation of prior poetries, the overlay of thought, feeling, and expression borrowed from previous poets, for the aesthetic necessities of a new person & a new time. It will respond to the individuality of this new voice, rather than hurry to place it within some group regime or political stance. It will measure the range, originality, pitch, loudness, & specific gravity of the individual voice on its own terms, before applying simplistic comparisons.
"O'Hara's poems always seemed very contemplative to me even though they were
full of what you might call 'action'. It strikes me how (taboo word acoming)
accessible they are despite their range of cultural knowledge/materials. Pound
reassured the reader that they needn't know Greek or Italian to understand his
poetry as he himself believed he didn't need to know Chinese to understand its
ideograms. But since he positions himself as a bestower of culture -- culture as a
repository of knowledge that can just be passed around like a hot potato, like
money really -- one must know it.
In O'Hara expressiveness and contemplativeness are not mutually exclusive.
Thinking is not equated with knowing. You do not need to have heard which
symphony he's talking about to "get it." Poets of knowledge, Eliot and Pound, and
poets of being, O'Hara or Oppen or Reznikoff or Celan. I believe the language
poets, to make a sweeping generalization, never knew which kind they wanted to
become. To be systematizers or anti-systematizers -- the dilemma is at the core
of the question of the avant-garde."
Let's take this dichotomy between knowledge/being, system/anti-system, & think about it for a minute. A poem is basically a set of gestures, speech acts, words, united in some kind of aesthetic system (or form of beauty). Because the system is not always obvious to us doesn't mean it isn't there. (sounds like a quote from Zap Comics) But our perception or response to anything is a response to system or organization or pattern.
O'Hara's presentation of fact & knowledge may seem more accessible than Pound's, precisely because he doesn't have Pound's Olympian-didactic angle of approach. But this doesn't make his poetry less of a "system of knowledge" : it's just less overt. Proust has a system : but his work may be the most successful modernist evocation of "being" of all. These aesthetic systems are just different from discursive or philosophical or scientific systems : their consistency is one of style, leading to wholeness or complexity of presentation.
The crack-up & revolutions & wars of the turn of the 20th century brought an end to many a narrative form. This break-up provided an opportunity for poets: modernist & postmodernist technique provided a lever for poetry to challenge the hegemony of prose fiction. & who emerged as the avatar of poetic knowledge? The uber-systematizer : Dante. Dante's "scaffolding" lies behind Pound's grab-bag and behind Eliot's Christian poetics (the poetics of religious transcendence providing another convenient lever of cultural authority against the fiction writers). Both Joyce & Pound balanced Homer against Dante, recapitulating the conceptual movement of the Renaissance in general : all this recapitulation a sign of the end of the age which began with the Renaissance.
With this sketch of literary history, look again at Hess's concluding sentence. Postmodernism is often juxtaposed with modernism as anti-system against system. Both make claims to represent the future (the avant-garde) - the whole spectrum, from Eliot to Dada. But maybe the real issue is, what follows from the scaffoldings erected in the early 20th-century in response to the opportunity offered by chaos (the end of 19th-century/Renaissance/Enlightenment narrative certainties)? because the scaffoldings were only the overt systems. Joyce himself showed this with Finnegans Wake - here he out-systemed his own systems, & showed that chaos & system were the same thing.
The power of aesthetic effect of any particular work of art is limited & variable - that is, it depends on the power of apprehension by the audience, as well as on the author's own discernment & ability to build complexity into those same limitations (the "implicate universe" of David Bohm). Thus it may take decades, or centuries even, for the implications of an aesthetic system to work their effects, their magic. (As an example, Mandelstam emphasized the future-oriented quality of Dante's poem.) These centuries may develop new constellations of perception & value, so that, for example, O'Hara's cute notion of "Personism" may not be so simple after all : it may be appreciated as an element of an aesthetic system, a worldview, a metaform.
The New doesn't go away : only time-bound versions of the new, scaffoldings & fashionable systematizations, get old. The perpetual death of the "avant-garde" is simply the continual obsolescence of literary fashions which were flimsy surface phenomena to begin with. There is no simple dichotomy of knowledge & being : only genuine, original aesthetic systems (of perception, of expression) vs. hack work & rhetorical sleights-of-hand.
Perhaps the "new" system of critical valuation to be applied to the "post-avant" generation will depend from somewhere between Bakhtin & Mandelstam. It will apprehend the dialogic appropriation of prior poetries, the overlay of thought, feeling, and expression borrowed from previous poets, for the aesthetic necessities of a new person & a new time. It will respond to the individuality of this new voice, rather than hurry to place it within some group regime or political stance. It will measure the range, originality, pitch, loudness, & specific gravity of the individual voice on its own terms, before applying simplistic comparisons.
2.28.2003
Playing doubles with Joe & Jordan:
Frames are games. Critical games with little round counters & a checkerboard. The yucky feeling of reviews, yes, most of the time; because the reviewer (me) is thinking "this is an easy assignment". The words are anybody's, without much commitment or authenticity.
But let's suppose somebody who can respond with feeling & intelligence & new insight. So criticism might be possible in that case. & if the frames are inadequate, can they be made to work more adequately? In reference to Joe's comments about globalism & war & all : is it legitimate to propose general ideas about how poetry in general responds meaningfully to the world in crises? I really don't know the answer to this.
I sent an email to a list recently complaining about the inadequacy of a CK Williams poem at the back page of this week's New Yorker. Inadequate to me, anyway. So why? I sensed a combination of complacency, vagueness, & cheap tricks ("fire" as a metaphor for general sense of doom & blame the gummint).
I remember with fear & trembling long harangues & debates on Buff List & SubSubpoetics over "general rules" (frames); that puts me in trepidation. But I'm tempted again to look for a way of asking for something of poetry - something between Ron's alternative dialect dialectic, & the typical sleight-of-hand of professional poets represented by the CK Williams poem. Authenticity? Complex engagement? Patience? Unwillingness to rhetorize a reality? What is this called in poetics?
Just blabbing, as usual, ever & anon. Maybe it has something to do with looking for poetry as opposed to the verbalized "positioning" of writers on different spots on the political scale. To focus on the resources of poetry so intensely that it begins to speak to ALL sides, without equivocation. Another idealized frame-up?
More leaven from Henry the blabbing fair-see.
My father, in his mid-70s, still plays poker with his friends from high school. The game-player. A lawyer, it was all about winning games. Now that he's retired, it's games all the time. Up & Down the River with my daughter. I remember the eternal Sunday afternoons, too quiet, us kids at loose ends, Mom & Dad & Aunt Martha & Grandma playing bridge, so quietly. Chuckling now & then. The Mississippi River down in its canyon across the street.
Frames are games. Critical games with little round counters & a checkerboard. The yucky feeling of reviews, yes, most of the time; because the reviewer (me) is thinking "this is an easy assignment". The words are anybody's, without much commitment or authenticity.
But let's suppose somebody who can respond with feeling & intelligence & new insight. So criticism might be possible in that case. & if the frames are inadequate, can they be made to work more adequately? In reference to Joe's comments about globalism & war & all : is it legitimate to propose general ideas about how poetry in general responds meaningfully to the world in crises? I really don't know the answer to this.
I sent an email to a list recently complaining about the inadequacy of a CK Williams poem at the back page of this week's New Yorker. Inadequate to me, anyway. So why? I sensed a combination of complacency, vagueness, & cheap tricks ("fire" as a metaphor for general sense of doom & blame the gummint).
I remember with fear & trembling long harangues & debates on Buff List & SubSubpoetics over "general rules" (frames); that puts me in trepidation. But I'm tempted again to look for a way of asking for something of poetry - something between Ron's alternative dialect dialectic, & the typical sleight-of-hand of professional poets represented by the CK Williams poem. Authenticity? Complex engagement? Patience? Unwillingness to rhetorize a reality? What is this called in poetics?
Just blabbing, as usual, ever & anon. Maybe it has something to do with looking for poetry as opposed to the verbalized "positioning" of writers on different spots on the political scale. To focus on the resources of poetry so intensely that it begins to speak to ALL sides, without equivocation. Another idealized frame-up?
More leaven from Henry the blabbing fair-see.
My father, in his mid-70s, still plays poker with his friends from high school. The game-player. A lawyer, it was all about winning games. Now that he's retired, it's games all the time. Up & Down the River with my daughter. I remember the eternal Sunday afternoons, too quiet, us kids at loose ends, Mom & Dad & Aunt Martha & Grandma playing bridge, so quietly. Chuckling now & then. The Mississippi River down in its canyon across the street.
1.25.2003
APHORISMS
Wallace Stevens jotted down some notes about the equation poetry = life. Figure it out, Sore Bun.
I HATE SPEECH (Grenier) appears to come straight out of Derrida. What is a salience? A salience is an excrescence. A surplus, an extra. The extra special something in the way you dress that appeals to me. The text as surplus, divagation (Ashbery & Bernstein alike). Sparky light. Different.
I wish I could quote S.K. Heninger Jr.'s entire book (Proportion Poetical : the subtext of form in the English Renaissance). He's read them carefully (the philosophy, the philology). Today's NY TImes on the new science of Networks: look at Heninger. He shows the line of descent from the Renaissance: from the new scientific empiricism, through enlightenment deism, to Romantic ego-sublime, to Modern angst, to postmodern deconstruction. From Saussure through New Critics to Derrida. But he shows what they left out from Saussure: the local networks of meanings which limit the arbitrariness of differential signs. "Brown" is ONLY arbitrary (or differential - ie. according to Saussure, "brown" only means "what is not red, blue or the other colors") within the sub-class COLORS. & how Derrida tried to erase late Saussure on the consistent "human nature" (which assigns meaning to local categories or classes of things), by relegating it to an "absent trace" which is self-contradictory (by the same token the image of his own logical slippage).
Why is this important or anything?
I'm going to prove how the sub-networks of US poetry (Olsonian, NY Schoolian, langpo) WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT, are positive contributors to a more comprehensive theory of poetry which transcends the postmodern condition. Poetry = life, because Ashbery's evasion, Grenier's denial, Olson's psycho-mytho are built on a dialectical feint around Stevens's equation, which parallels the Renaissance/Modern/Postmodern dialectical feint around the ancient/medieval Logos of nature.
The lighthouse is not a mode of differance. The foghorn likewise. Simple indication of rocks nearby. "Human nature" establishes local pointers via speech.
I started this blog writing about the special symbiosis of sound + sense which is poetry. Dialectic of "musical form" (metrics, song) + meaning: a semiotics of sensual or mathematical form alternating with a semiotics of language. The harmonic coherences which arise from this doubleness set poetry apart from prose. THERE IS NO NEED FOR AN ADDITIONAL DISTINCTION (the differances, the evasions, the myths). These additional distinctions are built upon merely partial & polemical philosophical foundations.
Poetry is the sign of the inherent harmonic nature of reality (a Stevensian notion). Philosophical systems built upon denial (post-Renaissance) are only half of the dialectic, and as such they distort the embodiments of language, poetry's material.
Poetry is not a New Critical "material" built on an autonomous system of differences ("language"). Both language & poetry are human harmonic gestures toward either real things or real imaginary fables.
The sound of your singing bears
"Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were a part."
Wallace Stevens jotted down some notes about the equation poetry = life. Figure it out, Sore Bun.
I HATE SPEECH (Grenier) appears to come straight out of Derrida. What is a salience? A salience is an excrescence. A surplus, an extra. The extra special something in the way you dress that appeals to me. The text as surplus, divagation (Ashbery & Bernstein alike). Sparky light. Different.
I wish I could quote S.K. Heninger Jr.'s entire book (Proportion Poetical : the subtext of form in the English Renaissance). He's read them carefully (the philosophy, the philology). Today's NY TImes on the new science of Networks: look at Heninger. He shows the line of descent from the Renaissance: from the new scientific empiricism, through enlightenment deism, to Romantic ego-sublime, to Modern angst, to postmodern deconstruction. From Saussure through New Critics to Derrida. But he shows what they left out from Saussure: the local networks of meanings which limit the arbitrariness of differential signs. "Brown" is ONLY arbitrary (or differential - ie. according to Saussure, "brown" only means "what is not red, blue or the other colors") within the sub-class COLORS. & how Derrida tried to erase late Saussure on the consistent "human nature" (which assigns meaning to local categories or classes of things), by relegating it to an "absent trace" which is self-contradictory (by the same token the image of his own logical slippage).
Why is this important or anything?
I'm going to prove how the sub-networks of US poetry (Olsonian, NY Schoolian, langpo) WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT, are positive contributors to a more comprehensive theory of poetry which transcends the postmodern condition. Poetry = life, because Ashbery's evasion, Grenier's denial, Olson's psycho-mytho are built on a dialectical feint around Stevens's equation, which parallels the Renaissance/Modern/Postmodern dialectical feint around the ancient/medieval Logos of nature.
The lighthouse is not a mode of differance. The foghorn likewise. Simple indication of rocks nearby. "Human nature" establishes local pointers via speech.
I started this blog writing about the special symbiosis of sound + sense which is poetry. Dialectic of "musical form" (metrics, song) + meaning: a semiotics of sensual or mathematical form alternating with a semiotics of language. The harmonic coherences which arise from this doubleness set poetry apart from prose. THERE IS NO NEED FOR AN ADDITIONAL DISTINCTION (the differances, the evasions, the myths). These additional distinctions are built upon merely partial & polemical philosophical foundations.
Poetry is the sign of the inherent harmonic nature of reality (a Stevensian notion). Philosophical systems built upon denial (post-Renaissance) are only half of the dialectic, and as such they distort the embodiments of language, poetry's material.
Poetry is not a New Critical "material" built on an autonomous system of differences ("language"). Both language & poetry are human harmonic gestures toward either real things or real imaginary fables.
The sound of your singing bears
"Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were a part."
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