& speaking of valentines & all that, it might be very good for me to write, for myself at least, some kind of account or analysis of the themes, aspects in my poetry, relating to love, gender, sexuality, & such like complexities.

So much of my poetry is "love poetry", more or less - I mean it is prompted (& structured) by some real or imagined feminine person or presence or quality. "Gendered." (the Beatrice Effect)

& I'm sure it would be possible to analyze all this as very, very, confused. Even the analysis would get confused.

If one tends to believe, as I do, that the (poetic) imagination is involved in creative cosmogony or theogony - I mean a sort of (relatively) ex nihilo world-shaping, starting everything over - one gets involved in challenging or revising traditional (often patriarchal or authoritarian) symbols or mythologies of such cosmogenesis.

& if this ambivalent impulse - I mean simultaneously to maintain & to challenge certain conceptualizations of reality & belief - gets fused with a romantic or emotional alignment of poetry & love - then feminism & cosmology & poetry (the "muse") become sort of indistinguishable...

& if, moreover, these impulses are aligned also with certain subconscious or psychological motivations (ie. childhood, Mom, the equilibrium & bouyancy of the body/ship in the womb) - a sort of Bachelardian emphasis - these trajectories are amplified even more.

The trouble with all this, I think - & with the neo-mythologizing of personal psychology (Jung, & Freud too) - is that it leaves both poetry and philosophy at a certain state of formation which, while very important - & maybe essential (especially for poets like me) - still leaves huge dimensions of discourse out of the picture.

What I'm referring to, I guess, is what you could call the "gender neutral" or universal aspects of social experience, morality, & justice. This gets complicated, because it seems to require holding two sometimes contrary aspects in balance at the same time. First of all, society as we know it, to varying degrees around the world, is certainly warped by gender inequalities and the oppression of women. But there are other, equally pervasive facets of global violence, injustice & disorder. & it seems that the path to sane and happy social life on earth involves pragmatic, common sense action - political, scientific, social - where gender equality is both insisted upon and taken for granted (so that the focus can be on the specific practical problem at hand). (This is not to suggest that gender equality and gender identity - or indistinguishability - are the same thing... although that, too, is part of the equation... All poets, I suppose, are androgynous in some way or another.)

I'm guess my cogitations are quite primitive & simplistic. But I'm thinking specifically about the sphere in which social issues become material for poetry. & what I'm thinking is that the cosmogonic-mythologic "feminism" represented in a lot of poetry - and a lot of my own poetry - can sometimes (not always) hobble its capacity to address public, civic issues & social phenomena in a certain ordinary, objective way. It's like being trapped in some Jungian, personal psychodrama; like some character in the Divina Commedia, unable to climb above a certain level & see things more clearly, & address them more impersonally.

What I'm trying to say, I think, is that there are vast regions of human activity and social action - and many dimensions of ethics and justice - wherein men & women can, and do, work (& play) together, without gender coming into it at all (except perhaps in fun). & poetry likewise should be capable of addressing these conditions & occasions in a witty, direct, impersonal & gender-neutral (or simply "gender-comic"!) manner.

All that being said, I'm sure I will continue to follow the very obscure, oblique & mysterious (& mysteriously feminine) impulses from which my poetry emerges. What would life be without sex? Vive la differance, & all that...

& I do think that the utopian or apocalyptic drive underlying religion & human history is powerfully, substantially "feminine" in ways we tend to elide or misunderstand. This is partly what aligned my own direction toward Crane & Joyce as opposed (at least on the surface) to Eliot's & Pound's seemingly more patriarchal attitudes. The happy dreams of Noah's Ark, or the spacy moon-ship of Jubilee, really are impelled, in some obscure subconscious way, by the affective womb-life & infancy of mother-&-child. Humanity - in taming & "civilizing" (& also endangering & ruining) the earth - is motivated by these profound & early impulses - the buoyancy effect, an infant equilibrium.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digging around for more background on the Chicago critics, came upon this excerpt from Richard Ohmann (1976).

I can't pretend to be much of a lit historian, but this essay seems to appear toward the beginning of another generation of radical critique, based on a Marxist interpretation of culture. Ohmann seems even-handed & careful about New Critics, interesting overview here of the mid-century theories about nature & purpose of poetry.

Have trouble accepting the underlying premise, however, which seems to be: that social injustices are systemic in nature; that we understand what that system does; that the intellectual classes, the bourgeoisie in general, create their own self-protective ideologies which blind them to reality, etc. etc. [Here we note the parochial bias against business, entrepreneurialism, individual & family enterprise - all those economic activities which structure much of past & present world social economy.]

I don't deny the pervasive & insidious presence of injustice & evil. Nor the forces of conformity & exploitation which structure & process the social reality we inhabit. But I question whether the appropriate interpretation of this reality is a purely econo-political one. That is I think of injustice and inequality - & the seemingly entrenched patterns of oppression which they assume - as symptoms, rather than causes.

Taken as causes, the logic leads to the denunciation of bourgeois property rights, capitalism, the rule of law, democratic institutions, private enterprise, and so on; it leads to the moral disenfranchisement of independent cultural activity (academia, art, literature) - its chastisement for complicity in the "system" (cf. Ohmann's analysis).

If taken as symptoms, the entrenched injustices and inequalities of various nations & societies may have very different systemic shapes & developments; there may be no simple "answer" (Marxist, socialist, nationalist, ethnic, religious, etc.) which provides utopian solutions to the underlying causes : ie. the greed, selfishness, bigotry, aggression, malice, hatred, cowardice, fraudulence, intellectual/moral blindness of human beings, persons, individuals.

Understood this way, we might recognize the ethical value which sometimes accompanies (& enhances) those independent (semi-guilty) aesthetic pleasures & enjoyments (of various degrees of intellectual insight & innocence) which we give & take - in the midst of social corruption, injustice & cruelty. It's a value contained in the moral representation of realities for which we have no simple, abstract, systemic solution, no bureaucratic assignment of moral duties. This is a value in addition to the natural & inherent values offered by beauty in general.

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 think I understand the "non-difficulty" role of poetry as Jordan outlines. I wouldn't want to be a gatekeeper, oh no, not me! I recognize ptry-fr-its-wn-ske.

The formula which I was addressing, though, was "difficulty". If you are going to talk about this particular noun with respect to poetry, I think it has, as I said, less to do with technique than with ethics.

Jordan's "proxy" notion seems a little thrown, if you ask me. Almost a Horatian approach (its function is to succeed in expressing its audience's wishes & desires for it). I guess I'm more aware of the poet working to formulate his or her own dilemmas & puzzles ("out of the quarrel with ourselves..."). It becomes accessible, because both poet & reader recognize that our dilemmas are shared. & if someone is pleased/edified in the process - well, that's literary history in the making.

The literary pleasure principle is tempered somewhat by the fact that civilization, which sustains it, is itself sustained (in ways both great and small) by vows, labor, and self-sacrifice.

This is a good thing for literature, in the long run. "Time silvers the plow, and the poet's voice." (O. Mandelshtam)

Josh responds, in part:

"Henry, I need some clarification here. Are you saying that "difficulty" in poetry stems simply from the fact that words don't mean what they say—that difficulty stems from the gap between form and content? Doesn't that apply, potentially to any utterance? Or are you arguing for the importance of the framing that happens off the page—the question of poetry as an institution (Mike would double-damn it as a homogenous institution)—and deeming inadequate any approach that doesn't either attack institutionality or expand its mandate?"

Form & content(!)... let's pass on that. The difficulty I'm referring to - the generative difficulty - is that people, not words, don't mean what they say. (Art complicates this further by offering a symbolic speech, the "factual" truth of which is irrelevant.) The fact that the gap in question (between persons & truth-speaking) does apply to any utterance, is actually what places ethical difficulty at the center of literature's social relevance.

I would not, as you do here, Josh, simply align "the framing that happens off the page" with "the question of poetry as an institution". Dilemmas of personal and social ethics do not have simple institutional correlates. Rather, humanity is confronted with social, political, environmental, personal, psychological, experiential and philosophical riddles and dilemmas of such depth and complexity, as to result in ethical demands for which many people around the world sacrifice their personal well-being and their very lives. It is this experiential context which limits the general interest in poetry, to those relatively rare works which grapple with these demands in a substantial way.

Following interesting chit-chat among Josh, Jordan & Mike.

I have some trouble with both Josh's & Mike's formulations. Josh makes "difficulty" sound easy. Just another of those sophisticated pleasures we arty intellectuals share, part of the general joie de vivre. It's a sunny perspective.

Mike faults poets for not recognizing the coterie problem, the extent of the challenge involved in finding a way for poetry to "break in" to the awareness of the ordinary reader of fiction & non-fiction.

I guess my reservation about both arguments hinges on the nature of difficulty. Basically I think it's kind of a "boundary problem", a question of the framework. That is, the kind of difficulty we think we have in mind - the sort of problematic that grips the reader in an unshakeable wrestling hold, from which they will never get free - this level of difficulty is, fundamentally, not a literary question. That is, it is not something that can be finessed by aesthetics or rhetoric. In fact, it stems from the core of a difficulty with words & word-mongering itself: that words & deeds are not always the same thing; that life & literature are incommensurate; that promises and vows can be emptied of content, become vehicles of illusion, vanity, hypocrisy & deceit.

From this perspective, literary relevance, impact &/or difficulty is more of an ethical rather than a technical-aesthetic issue; it remains difficult even for the most sophisticated & talented writer, since it reaches into human commitments rooted beyond the literary "making" itself.

The art which most compels a readership seems often to emerge from a seemingly insoluble impasse or crisis or dilemma - a dilemma which, through the talent of the poet, results in a representation which has meaning for both the poet and for "society". It may stimulate a radical re-working of literary style & subject-matter. We are talking about a phenomenon which does not follow either from exhortations to the literary community to "work harder at it" (ala Mike), or from mere literary sophistication (ala Josh), which takes pleasure in arcane works, but shuns the ethical implications or demands that words sometimes entail.

. . ."History", as we know it, being a procession of illusory short-cuts which prove to be characteristic sins (& thus delays on Dante's road). Characteristic of the 20th century : the notion that since morality is merely an illusion, it could be made to serve (servant of force in the realm of action, & of innovation in the realm of ideas). Its trinity : Lenin, Stalin, Hitler.

Characteristic of the 21st century (so far) : my physical & economic well-being is the earthly paradise; as long as I behave myself, I don't need to worry about those other people. (Maybe this is every century.)