THE POET AND THE NAME

As everyone knows, we take language for granted. There's a reason for this. A lad carting a wheelbarrow doesn't want to stop & contemplate the invention, design, and special virtues of the wheelbarrow's wheel. In a world of struggle and necessity, we have to get on with things as efficiently as we can.

But life is more than work. As Welsh poet David Jones liked to point out, our aptitude for making non-utilitarian aesthetic objects (art) is what distinguishes the uniquely human from the generally animal. Poetry, too, is situated within that magic (playground) circle. And play itself grants access to otherwise disregarded elements of reality.

Goofing around with words, the poet stumbles upon a hidden treasure : language's native spring - the substance of naming itself. Who among the professional linguists and philologists has comprehended the intellectual wonder of Adamic naming?* When human mind, heart, lungs, throat and mouth first formed the intelligible signs for things? And gathering these signs and keeping them in mind, ordering them by imaginative precedent and law, began to articulate the grand, vast logical-rhetorical sea-going vessel of human speech?

What the poet does, in playing with words, is strike those original sparks of imaginative apprehension - the first (& prehistoric) Promethean fire. Thus the poet reiterates verbal representation with the pungent flavor, the sharp scent of that first encounter. This primal imaginative-intellective labor is what accounts for poetry's famous vividness; what Mallarme (and Eliot) meant when they spoke of their vocation as Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu (to render a purer sense to the words of the tribe).

Mankind the Word-Maker, the Playing Animal... one could go so far as to say that the poet, through free verbal play, recapitulates the human image - polishes it, in order to shine - a kind of microcosm of the human essence.

The poet must walk a tightrope between prosaic, utilitarian usage (which manacles naming under the sign of Necessity), and the arrogant artistic egoism and vanity which treats words as building material, as means not ends (splitting off words from their original naming function, and in doing so, deforming them).

*Giambattista Vico, for one.

- moved The Garden of the Forking Ideologies over to the essays...

INTEGRAL POETRY

I

One of the advantages for the rank amateur and dillettante is that there is no professional compulsion to keep up with the intellectual Joneses, or track contemporary trends assiduously out of a sense of duty. Instead one can go on whim down odd paths, and find valuable things in out-of-the-way places.

One such find for me is a slim book published in 1984 by Carol T. Christ, titled Victorian & Modern Poetics (Univ. of Chicago Press). The author grounds her comparison of these two literary periods in a consideration of some primary qualities of the preceding Romantic era, to which the Victorians and the Moderns responded, as she shows, in quite similar ways (despite the polemic effort of the Moderns to distance themselves from their immediate predecessors). Christ argues that the main problem for poets of both periods involved trying to find a way out of the cul-de-sac of Romantic subjectivity and solipsism - inevitable dark twin to the latter's firm commitment to individual consciousness, perception and experience. And the technical solutions the poets of both eras found show some remarkable similarities. The dramatic monologue, the mask or persona, the striking or picturesque image, and the scaffolding of myth or history : all these techniques were taken up by the Victorians, and then borrowed (and tweaked) by the Moderns. All were designed, more or less, "to separate the poet from the poem" : to restore some kind of impersonality and objectivity - a common ground on which to outgrow the purely individual and subjective.

Today we find ourselves situated on the other side of the Modern era, among the "postmoderns" : an era characterized by at least two sharp swings of the stylistic pendulum. Both can be understood as effects of the great vitality and power of the Modern era in poetry. The first, in the mid-1950s, was a sharp turn away from what had become a kind of dogmatic crystallization of Modernist precepts of impersonality, formal autonomy, and tradition (sponsored by the post-Eliot, New Critical poets). It was felt that by following these precepts to their logical conclusion, poetry had become lifeless : no longer in touch with the imperfections, the contingencies, the mixed weakness and strength which constitutes ordinary social life. Poetry's rarified air had lost the human touch and the personal voice. Robert Lowell's post-Life Studies career exhibits the familiar paradigm for this mid-century turn; and in their different ways, the Beats, the New York School, the Objectivists, and the followers of the Olson/Williams "local epic" approach, all took part in this sea-change, toward the inchoate, the provisional, the imperfect, the personal. It was the beginning of what we call the postmodern era, and its effects were visible not only in literature, but in visual art, music, architecture : a willingness to express the idiosyncratic, the peripheral, the eccentric; a dismissive attitude toward "finish" or traditional form; an emphasis on human experience over impersonal aesthetics.

Ironically, this sharp pendulum-swing prepared the ground for its own reversal, back in the other direction. This happened roughly a generation later, in the 1970s and 80s. The personal, anecdotal lyric began to seem stale and contrived - to exhibit all the the old solipsism and what might be called "generic" individualism which had shadowed the Romantic movement from the beginning. Furthermore, the new intellectual forces of "identity politics" and postmodern critical theory both worked to dissolve, as in an acid solution, the narrated individual of the previous generation. The new style emphasized "textuality" and semantic/syntactical distortions. The self and its stories were either thrown out altogether, or subjected to a kind of lexical filter, a phase distortion, resulting in newly impersonal, autotelic documents. The poem was an object, existing independently from its maker and subsisting upon its own internal, verbal logic. The poet's business was not personal expression, but a kind of political challenge to coercive modes of social speech. This "impersonal" manner was exhibited in its (polemically) pure form in Language Poetry, but the latter shared similar postmodernisms with poets of the New York School, post-Objectivist, and other trends.

After a while, these pendulum swings start to resemble rotations of a merry-go-round. The autotelic remoteness of the "language school" and related styles mimics the "rigor" of the New Critical manner, as well as (in a funhouse mirror) the self-enclosed solipsism of the Confessionals. Aside from positing a general (very postmodern) End of History, how can we interpret these shiftings in a way that might help us get off the merry-go-round?

Let's recall the linchpin of Carol Christ's presentation : the motive for experiment for both the Victorians and the Moderns was the impasse of Romantic individualism and subjectivity. But Romanticism itself didn't arise from nowhere : it subsists in a continuum of developments and repetitions much like the later periods. That is, Romanticism is rooted both in Medieval poetics and in Renaissance individualism; both the Renaissance and the Medieval eras were, in turn, rooted in the Ancients. And if we look again at the general pattern of intellectual eras, we see that Romantic subjectivity was in part a reaction against the generalizations and laws - the objectivity - of Enlightenment Neo-Classicism, which was, in turn, a reaction against the baroque and eccentric excesses of Renaissance individualism. Our contemporary American paradigm shifts are reflected in these earlier oscillations. We can draw a simple tripartite graph of this history, as follows :

Ancient - Medieval - Renaissance
Baroque - Neoclassical - Romantic
Victorian - Modern - Postmodern

Examining this series, we notice not only a dialectic of mutuality and reversal, but several of the names of eras have a provisional or dependent quality : "neo", "middle", "post"... "ancient", of course, is the twin of "modern", "baroque" the challenge to "classical", etc. We note, also, a progressive foreshortening in the timespans of each era, as we approach the present, so that the recent oscillations in American poetry seem to be only the latest, briefest examples of a phenomenon of chronological perspective - an angle of acceleration.

From these observations, we can propose a couple of preliminary hypotheses : first, that the next mini-pendulum swing will probably be a return in the direction of the personal and the subjective; second, that the progressive periodic foreshortening suggests the approach of a time when we will be able to transcend this entire polarity. The Ancients resolved the difficulty by means of separate modes (epic, lyric, dramatic); the Moderns by means of particular techniques (masks, myths, histories). Both of these were partial "solutions" to the conundrum of subjectivity - that human mystery, or mystery of humanism, which came to the fore during the Renaissance and Romantic eras, and was most systematically sidelined during the Neo-Classical and Modern eras.

With this general scheme and my two hypotheses as preliminaries, I would like to outline something I'm calling integral poetry. By this I mean something more than a simple synonym for "good poetry", and something less than a polemic for a particular manner or technique. Rather, my term, as I will define it, offers a basic context (by way of the traditional revolutionary method - the return to first principles) for the appreciation of the new poetry on its way.

II

These are some definitions of "integral" which I would recognize as functions of the evaluation of new poetry. Stemming from the latin adjective integer - "whole, entire" - an integer (in English) is either, in mathematics, a natural number, or, more generally, a "whole entity". The adjective integral, then, is defined as (among other things) "essential to completeness", or "composed of integral parts" (ie., integrated). Integral poetry, then, is in some sense complete, or whole - because it is an integration of essential parts (themselves "integers" - ie. integral, whole).

This wholeness is, basically, the integration of two integrities : subjective and objective. Integration requires synthesis, rather than those excisions or rejections evident in the periodic (and polemical) oscillations we have described. In other words, we will renounce neither end of the polarity, but find a way to unite the two. We can do this by way of an analysis of each.

First, then, what do we mean by "subjective integrity" in relation to poetry? But in our times, what term has been more "problematized "(in tandem with the relativizing of all terms) than subjectivity? To begin with, I would simply state as axiomatic that subjectivity and personhood are fundamental values or qualities of experience, which are reflected in fundamental characteristics of poetry. In this context, however (and perhaps in every context), the personal itself is inherently relational in nature. The personal is a paradoxical both/and : both unique and inter-personal. This important corollary allows us, for the time being, to set aside all the sharp disputes over the status of social and individual identity, which seemed so important for the American literature during the previous two decades. If the personal is a function of both uniqueness and relationship, then the expressive arts have a basis - in the personal itself - for transitive social interaction and mutuality. There is an element of equality or kinship with others, in everything we call individual and personal.

Consequently, the art work - the poetic "object" - is always shaded, qualified, surrounded, suffused, in its objectivity, by the subjective and the personal. This, as we know, is the familiar centerpiece of the Renaissance and Romantic eras. Shakespeare (after Chaucer) inwove inimitable individuals within the fabric of his verse. Wordsworth and Keats, in turn, transported the scale of moral and emotional types into interior dramas of psyche and personality. But we do not have to return inevitably to the usual opposition of subjective and objective, of epic impersonality and lyric "I". If the personal is in a certain respect the interpersonal, then even dramatic poetry - traditionally the most "impersonal" and social of poetic modes - is also shaded or qualified by the subjective. Aristotle's analysis (in the Poetics) of the interest or appeal of dramatic poetry describes three paths by which this interest flows : ethos, pathos, and logos. These are the avenues of subjective response and audience reception, respectively moral, sensible (via empathy), and intellectual. In ancient times they were understood in a framework far less individualistic than they are today; yet even the anti-personal, collectivist attitude of Brechtian "epic" theater relies on a foundation of subjective response.

A poetry of "subjective integrity", then, would integrate, and reflect, aspects of personal engagement or response. The personal inhabits and shades the art work; the art work presents a provisional synthesis of human invention and personality.

What do I mean, on the other hand, by "objective integrity"? Here I am thinking of the poem not as personal testament or social experience but as aesthetic object. Integral, remember, is defined as "essential to completeness". Let us say that a poem exhibits "objective integrity" if, and only if, it is beautiful. Beauty is the substance of aesthetic value. In Aquinas's presentation, the integral elements of beauty are : consonantia (proportion), claritas (clarity, brilliance), and integritas (wholeness).

Again : for Aquinas, integrity (wholeness) is one of the integral qualities of beauty. But if we're going to follow Aquinas with regard to our definition of beauty (which thus requires wholeness), then we cannot achieve integrity in our definition of "integral poetry", unless we can synthesize its objective aspect (beauty) with its subjective (inter-personal) aspect. Thus our logic runs into a kind of Chinese finger-puzzle. Aquinas's objective wholeness requires the integration of an aspect which is not in itself objective.

I would resolve this, paradoxically, by a reminder that beauty, as anatomized by Aquinas, is not necessarily pleasing, ie. merely pleasant (ingratiating, entertaining). The "charm" of beauty, which leads us on, may be severe, sublime, tragic. It may be critical and purgative; in fact, according to Aristotle, the deep interest which poetry holds for us consists in its power to balance and purge the passions. Here we arrive again at the crux of the problem which divided the postmoderns from the moderns, the Confessionals from the New Critics, the Language Poets from the Confessionals. Life is not a work of art or a beautiful poem. On the other hand, life without art is less than human. Still, art separated from life is empty, vain, dead. These are the contraries on which the epochs of literary style waver back and forth.

But when we recognize that the beautiful work of art is not exactly the same thing as the pleasing, the sentimental, or the comforting diversion - that the pleasure it provides may be rigorous, severe, critical, purgative, ethically scrupulous - then we can understand how subjective, personal experience (at the root of our interest in and response to art) might fuse and reside together with objective beauty. We can recognize how the postmodern dismissal of great and perfect modernist works - on behalf of the fragmentary, the abject, the middlebrow, even the ugly - was itself part of the struggle to find, in Stevens' words, "what will suffice" (and, moreover, what suffices in strictly aesthetic terms). Yet on the other hand, if we are willing to accept the notion of the personal as integral to the art work, we can see that the attempt to divest poetry of the subjective, the individual, the experiential - on behalf of (ethically) depersonalized formalisms - was also an example of an oscillation to the extreme, since the result was only to establish a new form of dissociation (into two halves) of one whole.

Thus an integral poetry requires the integration of these two fundamental categories of human experience. An integral poetry is suffused with the personal, the subjective, and the individual. The register of its integrity is the degree to which, in its characterizations and symbols, it deepens and complicates our sense of "identity" as ethical beings. Paradoxically, the subjective integrity of an integral poem will depend in part on the (subjective) qualification of its aesthetic objectivity - and vice versa. An integral poem is the record of a unique consciousness and personality; it reflects, simultaneously, the impersonal (sometimes severe and painful) justice of objective beauty.

Thus, in the integrity of the poem, the polarities of stylistic change, once in balance, become the irreducible values of its design.

Good essay by Brian Phillips in current Poetry on "taste" & contemporary anxieties in poetry world... concludes without definitive "conclusions", an invitation to new ideas. Very worthwhile reading.

Would like to respond somehow, & am looking over essays around Chicago School, quietude, ethos etc. for guidance.

The language poets and affiliates thought they could jettison the myth of the lyric self & romantic subjectivity & so on by objectifying "language" as a "material" phenomenon. In doing so they had to narrow down the theory of poetry, exclude all those epiphenomena we ascribe to accurate description, definition, feeling, evocation, symbolism, plot, meaning, etc., and just leave poetry a sort of stripped-down protest against the supposed domination of the signified. Some of the langpos aimed for pure versions of this procedure; their postmodern affiliates used those methods to "torque" (their term) their "language" in eye-catching contemporary fashion.

In my view the "language poetry" concept should be clearly rejected, as a cramping limitation on what poetry actually is and can be. I've tried to do just this, over the years... The essays over here around the Chicago Critics try to present a broader concept, which is formalist in a quasi-Aristotelian sense : the poem is an achieved intellectual-affective form, which is not restricted to its verbal texture - because texture is not the sum or limit of what poetic language does. Instead, language is a transitive element - a form of transportation - which may lead to both referential meanings and to aesthetic (intransitive) equilibrium.

Moreover, poetry is ineluctably personal. (I would go so far as to say that reality itself is ineluctably personal, but that's a somewhat different debate.) We will never return to those archaic times when art was the anonymous social expression of collective myth. But art is not only personal : rather it represents a synthesis of subjective and objective, personal and social. The modes, forms & genres of poetry are past signs (& not always relevant to the present) of the complex struggle to discover or create such syntheses.

The locus of interest in poetry is that very tightrope between these poles : it is precisely this wavering dialectic which opens the line of connection between poet and reader.

I suppose I'm behind the times, being anachronistic, by harping on the langpos and the postmods at this late date. Younger poets have "moved beyond" that bygone era of language poetry's flourishing. But how have they moved beyond? In the direction of new dialects or mannerisms, new sub-schools and urban collectives, new identity-affiliations? I'm suggesting they could move in the direction of a more capacious theoretical understanding of the art's possibilities.

Of course, theory generally (as John Latta's recent quotes from Larkin & O'Hara testify) can be considered inimical to poets and what they do. It is usually irrelevant to the working-out of a poet's life and gift. All I would suggest is that a theory which emphasizes personality, feeling, concreteness, accurate description, formal integrity, and at least the possibility of substantial, verifiable meaning - such a theory would be congruent with the actual practice of those two poets, and perhaps future poets too.

A mini-essay for the 1st day of spring : 3-D Poetics.

...as I try to figure out where I'm going with this Siena poem, I keep thinking of the fact that most of the famous long poems - whether verse dramas or narratives - are stories (or groups of stories). & since Don Quixote at least, poetry has faced a big rival in the novel.

Long narrative poems continued to be written through the 19th century. Thomas Hardy was maybe the last of that line, with his King Arthur verse novels (though there have always been a few verse epics & novels here & there - Archibald MacLeish wrote one, I think; Stephen Vincent Benet...). Frost wrote little verse short stories, and others imitated him.

In an essay over yonder I wrote about the theories of some of the Chicago Critics - in which they offer a sense of "form and content" almost diametrically opposed to the received 20th-cent. notions. With them, the verbal surface (the diction, style, figuration, verbal texture etc.) is, paradoxically, the content (the material out of which the poem is made). A poem's form is the complex intellectual-emotive gesture or shape which emerges from the combination of theme (argument) and plot. In this sense, an achieved poem's form is unique and inimitable.

What I'm thinking (tentatively) of doing with this Siena obsession is constructing a sort of altarpiece. Sienese pre-Renaissance art is well-known for multiple narrative perspectives. They will have a set of small pictures showing vignettes from a saint's life - or even cartoon-like action sequences, showing different stages in a single dramatic event. These little pictures will surround the large group image (Madonna & Child often involved); then there will be another whole set of images on the reverse side of the altar.

So the idea is to present a mosaic of lots of different small insights or perspectives, leading toward a larger, enfolding set of themes or design. What that design is I am not at liberty to expatiate on at this time.

The difficulty here is that this kind of long poem seems to lack narrative drive. Or it takes a heck of a long time to get the momentum going in that direction. This is an example of a problem with current poetry generally. It's like an art form which has had its top layer taken off (& shunted over to fiction). What poetry is left with is primarily anecdotes. Diaristic, essayistic responses to actual events in the real world. The similarity between much contemporary poetry and private journal-keeping - or journalism per se - is perhaps something poets tend to avoid thinking about. What myth-making and fiction used to do, was establish an imaginary surround - within which the elaborate thematic and allusive powers of the poet could flourish & play. I don't want to suggest that contemporary poets lack the wit and imagination to re-work the real world in very playful and effective ways... in fact, the opposite may be the case. Necessity is the mammy of invention : in the desert of the (un-fictional) real, poets have to play even harder.

What "Siena" might do for me (I fervently hope) is offer sort of a parallel, indirect version of that "imaginary surround" which a straightforward narrative plot provides for fiction.

Essay in progress over here : "How to Read a Long Poem" (responding, in part, to Reginald Shepherd's recent post on the subject).

A new essay over here : My Quietude.

I guess this remains the Manifesto of Quietude.

I should just try to apply some of the general propositions in my earlier (much unread) essays over there.

I know my crabby essay posted over there last week has some problems. I know. I know.

Poetry is not as messed up as I pictured it. Nor is a dismissive shrug the right attitude to take toward partisan politics. Nor is everyone going to understand society through a lense of vice, virtue and penitence.

I know, I know. But it's been a while since the po-blogworldlings listened to me, anyway. There's something wild & liberating about rejection.

New proto-essay over here called The Value of Quietude and the Need for Roots.

I really like Graham Foust's brief essay-excerpt on a Wallace Stevens poem in Fascicle. This way of reading seems to me to be what it's all about. Rewarding exploration.

Back to my cave now.