Would like to clear out the cobwebs, the lumber here. (Often feel mildly rebuked by John Latta : ie. today's "the temptations of earnestness".)
*
"Critical faculty". Fair judgement. I'm not referring to people (individuals), but to an aspect of how we play at art & poetry.
We take a liking to a poem or an artwork. Then we recognize weaknesses, limitations - but we still like it. It's that initial response which forms the basis for mutuality & camaraderie among artists : we like the same things. & there's a (limited) objectivity about the process.
The point is that this is a critical activity, not a "creative" one. "Being poets together" is not a good enough reason to be together. But liking (some of) the same things - even if we disagree about some other things - this is a firm basis, at least in the art sphere.
*
The tumult of the years since 1907. The gale-force winds : modernization, technology, ideology, politics, war. & we've had so many explainers & culture-critics since then that we sometimes forget that art & poetry offer a continual opportunity to re-evaluate, re-organize, rethink everything.
This is the creative process itself, the source of originality. We forget how personal it is : it's a matter of the artist picking & choosing what's important - whether in subject-matter or style. The explainers love to identify trends & social determinations, while downplaying this essential matter of aesthetic choice.
*
There are the experimental conceptualists. For them poetry is a kind of discourse, a means of social role-playing or commentary. Then there are the poetry-krafftwerkers, the pedagogical creative writing technicians. For them poetry is a literary craft - a product one can learn to produce.
The former lean too far toward abstraction and concept; the latter lean too far toward the minutiae of literary-rhetorical technique.
Both concept & technique are obviously major elements of poetry, but to over-emphasize them is to smother the thing itself.
Let's say : poetry is an imaginative medium, a channel for particular forms of beauty-&-truth. It's a medium : an activity with archaic affiliations to both music and painting. Think of it as an ongoing stream, with certain qualities and aspects which have not changed since 500 BC or earlier.
I emphasize medium in order to try to differentiate my way of seeing things from both the kraftwerkers & the aesthetic ideologists. A complex artistic medium is not the same thing as the postmoderns' version of language as materialist silly putty. Nor is it the bread & butter of the industrial kraftwerkers : it is, rather, personal : suffused through & through with the artist's deeply conceptual allegiances and choices. This creative - pre-compositional - process of formulating such choices and allegiances is what gives birth to art which actually means something to us, moves us. An inner necessity.
(Osip Mandelstam, in his "Conversation about Dante", referred to this primordial process as the "poetic impulse". In fact Mandelstam asserted that the poetic process was a matter of entwining two different strands : the impulse and the verbal medium. This sounds simplistic only if one forgets Mandelstam's exalted, intuitive, philological sensitivity to the verbal-poetic medium - for him, a perennial, archaic, complex, autonomous activity/reality, suffused with cultural mana.)
Showing posts with label criticism4. Show all posts
Showing posts with label criticism4. Show all posts
4.19.2007
4.18.2007
For very detailed background on the Palio, see this book from the 70s : La Tierra in Piazza, by Alan Dundes and Alessandro Falassi (Univ. of California Press, 1975). Lots of good photos. Last chapter a sort of anthropological-psychological interpretation, fascinating.
Recently, Allen Bramhall & Gabriel Gudding both discuss (& condemn) agonism & rivalry in American poetryland. Meanwhile I'm using this horserace as a metaphor for it.
Dundes & Falassi analyze the palio as (in part) a male puberty rite, colored by the machismo of Mediterranean culture. Curious & ambiguous symbolisms in the city of the Virgin and the she-wolf (for example, the winning jockey & his clan drink wine and suck on pacifiers after the race). That's just one aspect of it.
I understand & to some extent agree with Allen & Gabriel. Poetry, obviously, is many things at once : an art form, a game, a vocation, a means, an end. Poetry can be (profoundly) a release from egoism and violence and stress and Keats's "irritable reaching after fact & reason".
Sweet music of speech; delightful play & laughter; intellectual bread & wine; wisdom, encouragement, equanimity; etc. etc.
But an artwork also brings into play the faculties of taste & critical judgement. (John Latta quotes Coleridge's description of his reading method as "sieve and winnow" - and shows how it's done.)
Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is all about coming to terms with contrary forces of ego and ambition, on the one hand, and the objectivity of the art itself on the other. "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."
Critical judgement acts (or should act) as the umpire - fair, disinterested, objective, above the fray. And every authentic poet is also such a judge - both of his or her own work and that of others. In fact this critical activity - as part of the whole creative process - is what makes for companionship, camaraderie & cooperation among fellow artists. It's not just that they are poets together - they are critics together.
When you have a fair referee - then you can have a horserace.
& no one can judge rightly without true love.
Recently, Allen Bramhall & Gabriel Gudding both discuss (& condemn) agonism & rivalry in American poetryland. Meanwhile I'm using this horserace as a metaphor for it.
Dundes & Falassi analyze the palio as (in part) a male puberty rite, colored by the machismo of Mediterranean culture. Curious & ambiguous symbolisms in the city of the Virgin and the she-wolf (for example, the winning jockey & his clan drink wine and suck on pacifiers after the race). That's just one aspect of it.
I understand & to some extent agree with Allen & Gabriel. Poetry, obviously, is many things at once : an art form, a game, a vocation, a means, an end. Poetry can be (profoundly) a release from egoism and violence and stress and Keats's "irritable reaching after fact & reason".
Sweet music of speech; delightful play & laughter; intellectual bread & wine; wisdom, encouragement, equanimity; etc. etc.
But an artwork also brings into play the faculties of taste & critical judgement. (John Latta quotes Coleridge's description of his reading method as "sieve and winnow" - and shows how it's done.)
Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is all about coming to terms with contrary forces of ego and ambition, on the one hand, and the objectivity of the art itself on the other. "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."
Critical judgement acts (or should act) as the umpire - fair, disinterested, objective, above the fray. And every authentic poet is also such a judge - both of his or her own work and that of others. In fact this critical activity - as part of the whole creative process - is what makes for companionship, camaraderie & cooperation among fellow artists. It's not just that they are poets together - they are critics together.
When you have a fair referee - then you can have a horserace.
& no one can judge rightly without true love.
10.24.2005
In order to improve on the Silliman Bi-Focal Theory of Contemporary Poetry, Robert Archambeau looks to an essay by David Kellogg.
Based on Robert's summary, however, I can't see how this is any improvement. The structure of the grid is the same, although Kellogg has added a dimension.
Poetry is assumed to be this product which flows out of culture in measurable quantities. You can establish fixed criteria for assigning individual pieces of the product to a grid : ie., "tradition" and "innovation" are already known & defined, "self" and "community" are items you can abstract without too much difficulty from any particular portion of the GNPP (Gross National Poetry Product). Voila : your poet is assigned a critical niche in the Standard Schema.
But what if the patterns of formative imitation which poets utilize are exactly the same - whether you're in either of the so-called camps? Innovators are imitating their 20th-century models; traditionalists are doing likewise. Both are claiming the mantle of tradition (the traditions of new & old, respectively). Add a further twist : what if the innovators claim to be new by going back to older models (epics, Native American songs, collective poetics, performance art, etc.) in order to be "new"? What if the models of the so-called traditionalists (rhymed iambic couplets, say) are of more recent provenance than those of the innovators (say, free-verse anaphoric lines)?
The fact of the matter is that originality is not informed by the artist's attitude toward stylistic change. In other words, there is no "new" model for imitation : every model - by virtue of being a model - is already traditional. Who is more traditional today than the poets who imitate the 20th-century avant garde?
[p.s. this statement needs refinement. Let me say this : actually, the original, inventive poet will pay very close attention to stylistic developments and what they might mean. But what makes for originality is not their capacity for consistency - ie. the consistent allegiance to whatever is considered the trend of the moment. Original poetry is invariably anomalous : it is original precisely because the poet does not "follow" any particular trend. Thus critical schemas which emphasize such trends, based on abstract invariables such as Kellogg proposes, inevitably distort the un-paraphrasable, empirically-complex literary reality.]
The issue of "self" & "community" is perhaps even more vexed, but I'm not going to get into that here.
I object to the abstract, generic quality of the grid approach to criticism. It's lazy thinking : pigeonholing, card filing. The uniqueness of interesting poetry swallows up every proposed schema : the talent of the great & gifted poet takes a certain essential aspect of poetry - its capacity for obliterating and transcending our habitual mental & philosophical categories - and multiplies it exponentially. Individual poets are always contradicting so-called trends & traditions : & then the new supposed traditions are established in their wake, by their imitators; & then, running a distant third, the critics come along with their cute little diagrams.
Even those poets who seem so middlebrow, mediocre, unable to escape the cliches and paradigms of their period styles - say, Longfellow, considered from the usual 20th-century perspective - if looked at closely and carefully, suddenly begin to reveal their inimitable qualities, their uniqueness. & then it's time for "reconsideration" : critics, prepare your outlines!!!!
Based on Robert's summary, however, I can't see how this is any improvement. The structure of the grid is the same, although Kellogg has added a dimension.
Poetry is assumed to be this product which flows out of culture in measurable quantities. You can establish fixed criteria for assigning individual pieces of the product to a grid : ie., "tradition" and "innovation" are already known & defined, "self" and "community" are items you can abstract without too much difficulty from any particular portion of the GNPP (Gross National Poetry Product). Voila : your poet is assigned a critical niche in the Standard Schema.
But what if the patterns of formative imitation which poets utilize are exactly the same - whether you're in either of the so-called camps? Innovators are imitating their 20th-century models; traditionalists are doing likewise. Both are claiming the mantle of tradition (the traditions of new & old, respectively). Add a further twist : what if the innovators claim to be new by going back to older models (epics, Native American songs, collective poetics, performance art, etc.) in order to be "new"? What if the models of the so-called traditionalists (rhymed iambic couplets, say) are of more recent provenance than those of the innovators (say, free-verse anaphoric lines)?
The fact of the matter is that originality is not informed by the artist's attitude toward stylistic change. In other words, there is no "new" model for imitation : every model - by virtue of being a model - is already traditional. Who is more traditional today than the poets who imitate the 20th-century avant garde?
[p.s. this statement needs refinement. Let me say this : actually, the original, inventive poet will pay very close attention to stylistic developments and what they might mean. But what makes for originality is not their capacity for consistency - ie. the consistent allegiance to whatever is considered the trend of the moment. Original poetry is invariably anomalous : it is original precisely because the poet does not "follow" any particular trend. Thus critical schemas which emphasize such trends, based on abstract invariables such as Kellogg proposes, inevitably distort the un-paraphrasable, empirically-complex literary reality.]
The issue of "self" & "community" is perhaps even more vexed, but I'm not going to get into that here.
I object to the abstract, generic quality of the grid approach to criticism. It's lazy thinking : pigeonholing, card filing. The uniqueness of interesting poetry swallows up every proposed schema : the talent of the great & gifted poet takes a certain essential aspect of poetry - its capacity for obliterating and transcending our habitual mental & philosophical categories - and multiplies it exponentially. Individual poets are always contradicting so-called trends & traditions : & then the new supposed traditions are established in their wake, by their imitators; & then, running a distant third, the critics come along with their cute little diagrams.
Even those poets who seem so middlebrow, mediocre, unable to escape the cliches and paradigms of their period styles - say, Longfellow, considered from the usual 20th-century perspective - if looked at closely and carefully, suddenly begin to reveal their inimitable qualities, their uniqueness. & then it's time for "reconsideration" : critics, prepare your outlines!!!!
10.20.2005
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.
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.
10.11.2005
What's an essay for? asks Jordan.
I'd like to write them in order to precipitate out some of the jumbled thoughts I have on these poetry/poetics conundra. & by putting them in more formal language, make them more accessible to those outside the day-to-day po-blog conversations.
For example, with regard to the string of rambling comments I made earlier here on the issue of poetry & its ideological/critical paraphrasement. It's possible the Andrew Ford book will provide me with a sort of background with which to come to terms with all that.
Ie., perhaps poetry's janus face - 1. self-standing art-form, craft; 2. social/civic performance, political occasion - can be re-interpreted, without favoring one side by dismissing the other. Perhaps its a more complicated, interesting symbiosis. That would be a topic to "essay".
I'd like to write them in order to precipitate out some of the jumbled thoughts I have on these poetry/poetics conundra. & by putting them in more formal language, make them more accessible to those outside the day-to-day po-blog conversations.
For example, with regard to the string of rambling comments I made earlier here on the issue of poetry & its ideological/critical paraphrasement. It's possible the Andrew Ford book will provide me with a sort of background with which to come to terms with all that.
Ie., perhaps poetry's janus face - 1. self-standing art-form, craft; 2. social/civic performance, political occasion - can be re-interpreted, without favoring one side by dismissing the other. Perhaps its a more complicated, interesting symbiosis. That would be a topic to "essay".
6.23.2005
Notes Toward & So On (7 : Interlude/Apologia)
I will keep this short, promise. #6, I know, was too long - left me feeling dulled, wondering what's the point.
So what is the point? The point is to reflect on the background of what is being presented as poetry. The background consists of dense, radiant, intricate poems. It also consists of the theory or theories of poetry with which people have tried to explain their understanding of it.
In this way, both the poet and the reader might gain some salutary distance from the ordinary noise & jostling of the literary herd. (I mean the place where books are skimmed & reviewed with quick but meaningless labels; where poetry is treated as a form of crowd control or lite entertainment; etc.)
& why take such a lonely and misanthropic and anti-social path?
Because it's not really that. It's the path of love of poems in all their depth, obscurity and radiance.
The background helps provide that. It helps one recognize characteristics of literary language which are overlooked or dismissed by current theoretical jargon-spinners. & so to make a place for something serious, outside the grounds of the po-biz carnival. The specific gravity of the poem & the life.
I will keep this short, promise. #6, I know, was too long - left me feeling dulled, wondering what's the point.
So what is the point? The point is to reflect on the background of what is being presented as poetry. The background consists of dense, radiant, intricate poems. It also consists of the theory or theories of poetry with which people have tried to explain their understanding of it.
In this way, both the poet and the reader might gain some salutary distance from the ordinary noise & jostling of the literary herd. (I mean the place where books are skimmed & reviewed with quick but meaningless labels; where poetry is treated as a form of crowd control or lite entertainment; etc.)
& why take such a lonely and misanthropic and anti-social path?
Because it's not really that. It's the path of love of poems in all their depth, obscurity and radiance.
The background helps provide that. It helps one recognize characteristics of literary language which are overlooked or dismissed by current theoretical jargon-spinners. & so to make a place for something serious, outside the grounds of the po-biz carnival. The specific gravity of the poem & the life.
6.22.2005
Notes Toward & So Forth (4)
Robert Archambeau (post of 6/20) presents a version of historically-grounded poetic language. The idea of poetry being infiltrated by, or overlapping with, the "speech-acts" of history, which never really disappear - this seems related to what I was trying to describe as a (Joycean-Cranean) sense of the symbol grounded in experience.
Though again I wouldn't want to encourage another dichotomy, this time between sentimental poetry (Archambeau/Matthias' "travelogue") and realistic history. The problem is one of finding an adequate, authentic speech, capable of both representation ("history") and resonance (intelligible, emotive).
Such poetry can throw our functional, ordinary notions of time & history out of whack. What seemed past becomes present : ie., suddenly relevant, personal; illuminated, illuminating, from a new perspective.
We know that this kind of critical talk exists on a level of abstraction, and we are constantly aware of poets all over the place experimenting with styles & themes in distinct ways. But remember, for the last 20 years or so, "critical discourse" about literature & poetry has been propounding that history & experience are always trumped by the inherent paradoxes, contradictions, limitations and lacunae of text, language, subjectivity. There has been an obsessional focus on the supposed solipsism of textuality, the closed circle of hermeneutics, etc. Unfortunately, solipsism sponsored by theory - while it may show superficial stylistic differences - is not that different in substance from other kinds of literary solipsism (the anecdotal, personal, confessional lyric, so derided by language poets et al.).
Robert Archambeau (post of 6/20) presents a version of historically-grounded poetic language. The idea of poetry being infiltrated by, or overlapping with, the "speech-acts" of history, which never really disappear - this seems related to what I was trying to describe as a (Joycean-Cranean) sense of the symbol grounded in experience.
Though again I wouldn't want to encourage another dichotomy, this time between sentimental poetry (Archambeau/Matthias' "travelogue") and realistic history. The problem is one of finding an adequate, authentic speech, capable of both representation ("history") and resonance (intelligible, emotive).
Such poetry can throw our functional, ordinary notions of time & history out of whack. What seemed past becomes present : ie., suddenly relevant, personal; illuminated, illuminating, from a new perspective.
We know that this kind of critical talk exists on a level of abstraction, and we are constantly aware of poets all over the place experimenting with styles & themes in distinct ways. But remember, for the last 20 years or so, "critical discourse" about literature & poetry has been propounding that history & experience are always trumped by the inherent paradoxes, contradictions, limitations and lacunae of text, language, subjectivity. There has been an obsessional focus on the supposed solipsism of textuality, the closed circle of hermeneutics, etc. Unfortunately, solipsism sponsored by theory - while it may show superficial stylistic differences - is not that different in substance from other kinds of literary solipsism (the anecdotal, personal, confessional lyric, so derided by language poets et al.).
5.23.2005
Read more of my Chicago School anthology over the weekend, plus some of Eliot's Sacred Wood. I have a long way to go.
How anachronistic! (Gosh, is TS Eliot a SoQ???) But if Christopher Hitchens' scathing review of the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (in yesterday's NYTRB) carries any weight... well, then there's room for some revaluation of all the revisionism.
How anachronistic! (Gosh, is TS Eliot a SoQ???) But if Christopher Hitchens' scathing review of the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (in yesterday's NYTRB) carries any weight... well, then there's room for some revaluation of all the revisionism.
5.20.2005
& why is poetry criticism & reviewing such thin gruel today? (If I'm wrong about that - if I'm just not reading the right journals - I wouldn't be surprised!!! Tell me what I'm missing, please.)
Does it have something to do with the "Age of Theory", as it's called? New instruments of critical thought were applied to literature, for the advancement of Theory itself, & basic issues in aesthetics were no longer of interest. The Chicago School got lost in the shuffle.
Believe me, I'm just speculating. Haven't really studied the intellectual history of all this. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
Does it have something to do with the "Age of Theory", as it's called? New instruments of critical thought were applied to literature, for the advancement of Theory itself, & basic issues in aesthetics were no longer of interest. The Chicago School got lost in the shuffle.
Believe me, I'm just speculating. Haven't really studied the intellectual history of all this. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
Reading a good essay by Richard McKeon, "Philosophic bases of art and criticism", in my Chicago School anthology, Critics & Criticism (publ. back in late 50s).
McKeon is comparing Plato, Kant, Tolstoy, Horace, Aristotle, Bacon on their approaches to poetry & criticism. Shows how the same basic problems recur, but that different emphases lead to opposing or contradictory usage of the same terms.
(Plato, Kant & Tolstoy take a thematic approach, considering what poetry is in the context of basic issues such as truth, consciousness, nature; Aristotle, Bacon & Horace analyze poetry pragmatically, as a unique thing-in-itself, with respect to how the poet best achieves its unique purposes.)
This probably sounds very dry & abstract. But if the critic isn't aware of basic principles & methods, he or she simply reiterates the biases & blind spots of the past. The Chicago School provides a map for anybody who wants to attempt literary criticism with a general foundation in the fundamentals. & the only way to get beyond a terribly parochial and utilitarian (sub)critical milieu (the current state of poetry criticism in the US), would be to revisit the basic problems of approach.
McKeon is comparing Plato, Kant, Tolstoy, Horace, Aristotle, Bacon on their approaches to poetry & criticism. Shows how the same basic problems recur, but that different emphases lead to opposing or contradictory usage of the same terms.
(Plato, Kant & Tolstoy take a thematic approach, considering what poetry is in the context of basic issues such as truth, consciousness, nature; Aristotle, Bacon & Horace analyze poetry pragmatically, as a unique thing-in-itself, with respect to how the poet best achieves its unique purposes.)
This probably sounds very dry & abstract. But if the critic isn't aware of basic principles & methods, he or she simply reiterates the biases & blind spots of the past. The Chicago School provides a map for anybody who wants to attempt literary criticism with a general foundation in the fundamentals. & the only way to get beyond a terribly parochial and utilitarian (sub)critical milieu (the current state of poetry criticism in the US), would be to revisit the basic problems of approach.
5.19.2005
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.
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.
I like Gary Sullivan's idea of a blog devoted solely to poetry book reviews. Started me starting to start to think about what general principles might inform it. Seems like such would be useful, in this our modern whirl of lingos & community codes.
I might start with the Chicago Critics for some guidance. But their writings seem today like elaborate structures from the distant past, full of incomprehensible symbols : a top-heavy elephant, ponderous with erudition.
Or maybe it's just me. In fact it is just me.
The idea of going back to Aristotle & Coleridge et al. for basic principles. Is it even possible? I like the idea. Start with first principles because the first principle of poetry is its strangeness : we don't know what it is.
I'm just babbling this morning before getting down to work.
I might start with the Chicago Critics for some guidance. But their writings seem today like elaborate structures from the distant past, full of incomprehensible symbols : a top-heavy elephant, ponderous with erudition.
Or maybe it's just me. In fact it is just me.
The idea of going back to Aristotle & Coleridge et al. for basic principles. Is it even possible? I like the idea. Start with first principles because the first principle of poetry is its strangeness : we don't know what it is.
I'm just babbling this morning before getting down to work.
5.05.2005
Reginald Shepherd, in his emails to Josh Corey, made a forceful statement, judging from its effects : lots of bloggers commented - & even John Latta arose to defend Ron Silliman!
Are we all complete idiots, to be so fixated for so long on "poetry & politics"? Or has this been a real unresolved problem in contemporary poetry?
It would be hypocritical to stand for some kind of ivory-tower aesthetic purism. Everybody knows that style is suffused with, & motivated by, politics, at least in the broad "cultural" sense of the term (as in, "identity politics").
Underlying the American style & theory wars of the 20th century stands a deeper, Janus-like trend : the popularization of literature (poetry). Janus-like because it involves both the expansion and thinning-out of aesthetic literacy. Everyone writes poetry but nobody knows much about its history. It's not longer produced by the few and it's no longer read by the many!
Perhaps, then, the character of one's approach to tradition is the main catalyst for producing the affiliations with particular styles or literary groups. (This is an attempt at a literary, rather than political, interpretation of such phenomena.)
I'm with Shepherd, by the way. Ideology tends to shortcut literary criticism.
Are we all complete idiots, to be so fixated for so long on "poetry & politics"? Or has this been a real unresolved problem in contemporary poetry?
It would be hypocritical to stand for some kind of ivory-tower aesthetic purism. Everybody knows that style is suffused with, & motivated by, politics, at least in the broad "cultural" sense of the term (as in, "identity politics").
Underlying the American style & theory wars of the 20th century stands a deeper, Janus-like trend : the popularization of literature (poetry). Janus-like because it involves both the expansion and thinning-out of aesthetic literacy. Everyone writes poetry but nobody knows much about its history. It's not longer produced by the few and it's no longer read by the many!
Perhaps, then, the character of one's approach to tradition is the main catalyst for producing the affiliations with particular styles or literary groups. (This is an attempt at a literary, rather than political, interpretation of such phenomena.)
I'm with Shepherd, by the way. Ideology tends to shortcut literary criticism.
1.31.2005
Daniel Green criticizes one of my posts here. I'll have to think a little more about this, but off-the-cuff it seems to me he's confusing the descriptive with the prescriptive.
I don't mean to say that poets have to be popular or "ethical" in the sense described. The point was that, as I see it, the grand highway to an expanded readership - whatever mode of art or communication one starts with - involves an engagement with people's actual problems - be they practical or intellectual/philosophical. And that engagement is an ethical act, an act of empathy - above and beyond the technical matters of literary craft.
There can be and have been great literary artists whose work is not easily accessible - Celan, for example. But why are they considered great? Not simply because they employ an arcane or original style, but because by means of (and sometimes in spite of) their unusual or difficult style, they address profound human problems. Celan himself underlined this many times, emphasizing his special concern with the truth, insisting that he was not "hermetic", that his aim was to communicate, etc.
Daniel's comments about the (poetically) uneducated masses strike me as slightly supercilious or complacent. Moreover I don't think he's considered carefully the meaning of the distinction I tried to make (in various posts re the Chicago critics) between the craft of the verbal texture per se, and the craft of making empathetic imaginative constructs.
I don't mean to say that poets have to be popular or "ethical" in the sense described. The point was that, as I see it, the grand highway to an expanded readership - whatever mode of art or communication one starts with - involves an engagement with people's actual problems - be they practical or intellectual/philosophical. And that engagement is an ethical act, an act of empathy - above and beyond the technical matters of literary craft.
There can be and have been great literary artists whose work is not easily accessible - Celan, for example. But why are they considered great? Not simply because they employ an arcane or original style, but because by means of (and sometimes in spite of) their unusual or difficult style, they address profound human problems. Celan himself underlined this many times, emphasizing his special concern with the truth, insisting that he was not "hermetic", that his aim was to communicate, etc.
Daniel's comments about the (poetically) uneducated masses strike me as slightly supercilious or complacent. Moreover I don't think he's considered carefully the meaning of the distinction I tried to make (in various posts re the Chicago critics) between the craft of the verbal texture per se, and the craft of making empathetic imaginative constructs.
1.18.2005
reading more Elder Olson, one of the Chicago critics (On Value Judgements in the Arts, and Other Essays). recommended, if you can get ahold of it.
He analyses Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium" (fine); writes about Moore, Stevens, Bogan, Wylie, others of that era; tries to delimit boundaries of what a "lyric poem" is (great essay)... in so doing, extends some of Aristotle's approaches in the Poetics (beyond tragic/dramatic poetry).
In the Yeats essay, he looks for the principle, in a particular lyric poem, which plays a role analogous to that of plot in a drama. & finds it.
He analyses Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium" (fine); writes about Moore, Stevens, Bogan, Wylie, others of that era; tries to delimit boundaries of what a "lyric poem" is (great essay)... in so doing, extends some of Aristotle's approaches in the Poetics (beyond tragic/dramatic poetry).
In the Yeats essay, he looks for the principle, in a particular lyric poem, which plays a role analogous to that of plot in a drama. & finds it.
1.11.2005
I suppose my shadow-box with Mr. Silliman is also motivated by a sense of symmetry. His approach appears to me as one of the crystallizations or focal points of a general period style; and because I am (nearly, I guess) of the same generation, there seems to be a fairly clear parting of the ways.
We share an admiration for the modern poets of the early 20th century; we share an indifference toward much of the free-verse 1st-person anecdotal lyric poetry of the American 70s. But where the language poets - and related trends toward overt textuality in postmodernism - built a movement on the complete rejection of "the lyrical subject" - I move in another direction.
If it were up to me, I would rescue rather than reject the "lyric I", by drawing on the resources of tradition in a broader sense than that offered by the 20th-cent. avant-garde.
As I have argued in discussing the Chicago Critics here recently, poetry is not simply text. It is not even a mode of language, merely. As I understand it, poetry, and narrative, and drama find their mutual root in human action. The modes of literature branch from their resemblance, their re-enactment, their intellectual and aesthetic re-shaping, of thought-&-action.
Here is where a poetic style accomplishes its syntheses : people, voices, represented in very particular, recognizable landscapes and events. How different this perspective from that offered by the tortured "texts" and mannered "discourses" we know so well! Lyrics in which "speakers" address us in all strangeness - yet grounded, believable, in some sense - dramatic.
I think of an art which finds a way to harmonize with & interpret the context & conditions of the world(s) within which it exists : so that you can see & feel & recognize experiences which the language evokes.
(& one doesn't need , as far as literary-genre theoretics goes, the metaphysical overlay which is nevertheless a fundamental part of my own understanding of this : the framework which understands life and reality as theatrical in an ultimate sense. "This mighty stage", as Yeats put it. What was the interplay of gods & heroes in archaic times, transposed into the barn-floor fundament of the manger-Incarnation. Mandelstam's "deep grain-bins of faith". All the world's a stage for this Imago Dei and imitatio Christi.)
We share an admiration for the modern poets of the early 20th century; we share an indifference toward much of the free-verse 1st-person anecdotal lyric poetry of the American 70s. But where the language poets - and related trends toward overt textuality in postmodernism - built a movement on the complete rejection of "the lyrical subject" - I move in another direction.
If it were up to me, I would rescue rather than reject the "lyric I", by drawing on the resources of tradition in a broader sense than that offered by the 20th-cent. avant-garde.
As I have argued in discussing the Chicago Critics here recently, poetry is not simply text. It is not even a mode of language, merely. As I understand it, poetry, and narrative, and drama find their mutual root in human action. The modes of literature branch from their resemblance, their re-enactment, their intellectual and aesthetic re-shaping, of thought-&-action.
Here is where a poetic style accomplishes its syntheses : people, voices, represented in very particular, recognizable landscapes and events. How different this perspective from that offered by the tortured "texts" and mannered "discourses" we know so well! Lyrics in which "speakers" address us in all strangeness - yet grounded, believable, in some sense - dramatic.
I think of an art which finds a way to harmonize with & interpret the context & conditions of the world(s) within which it exists : so that you can see & feel & recognize experiences which the language evokes.
(& one doesn't need , as far as literary-genre theoretics goes, the metaphysical overlay which is nevertheless a fundamental part of my own understanding of this : the framework which understands life and reality as theatrical in an ultimate sense. "This mighty stage", as Yeats put it. What was the interplay of gods & heroes in archaic times, transposed into the barn-floor fundament of the manger-Incarnation. Mandelstam's "deep grain-bins of faith". All the world's a stage for this Imago Dei and imitatio Christi.)
1.10.2005
Common sense & biting satire, if not much magnanimity, from Joan Houlihan. Sorry to hear that the straightforward logic of critical judgement - ie., how can you edit a Best Of if you don't believe in "bestness", and reject any measures of quality? - makes some people feel bad.
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