The Janus-face of poetry. One one side, an art form, with its own raison d'etre and center of gravity. On the other, a social act, a form of participation in the general endeavor of living on earth.

One would think that both poets and critics, in their respective ways, would want to take this doubleness into account somehow.

Writing (and art) can present itself as a sort of Archimedean lever - a means of mirroring/distancing phenomena in order to examine and understand them. With some writers and writings, this can take the form of a moral accounting, an ethical judgement.

John Barr's essay in Poetry, in which he urged poets to get out of academia and root their poetry in life-experience, triggered a lot of criticism (not directed so much at this particular argument, but at his related call for a more popular, populist poetry). It is tempting to couch such exhortations in debonair or rugged iconolatry (Hemingway and all that) - but one could interpret his position as a subset of the broader notion of the Janus-face : that art and poetry stand on two legs (representation and reality, or experience). (Of course, the idea that two such legs exist at all has been the source of vast volumes of scholarly cogitation, debate, obfuscation, and artistic prestidigitation over the last 40 years - ie., aren't they really one leg? Or no leg at all?)

Meanwhile... all this reading & writing about Renaissance Siena has got me in an ut pictura poeiesis state of mind. So I am thinking of poetry, not just as a visual canvas, but as a civic mural in a public space, presenting a dual, dialectical, Janus-like substance.

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

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

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

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

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

Have been reading Lords of Limit, G. Hill book of essays.

Much focus on 16th- and 19th-century English poetry & philosophy. Held together throughout by the notion of writing as an engagement which is ineluctably rendered up to moral judgement. Poetry's grounding - its entanglement - in both words and experience - its human particularity - is its weakness & its strength. It is implicated in, as it informs, the moral reality of persons, times & nations.

Hill's manner is extremely ruminative, somewhat oblique. He'll take up a single moral paradox or literary-historical impasse, and slowly ravel into his progress these very acute & nuanced evaluations of the chorus of poets & thinkers who have weighed in on that particular issue over the span of a century or so.

It's as if there's an unspoken assertion serving as the pillar for the whole baroque architecture : the sense of poetry as a culture's necessary redemptive presence (because of that very rooted & particular moral implication in its speech & history). Not exactly in Stevens' sense ("poetry is the sanction of life"). Hill points out that Stevens was following in Arnold's footsteps, seeking to offer poetry as a substitute for religion. For Hill, it seems, the ultimate judgement & sanction lie elsewhere, outside literature - but literature, when it approaches the beautiful & the true, bears witness to that judgement - or bears the marks of it.

Addendum

I feel I haven't said anything very new or interesting in my lecture for today.

You wasted my time, Henry!

What underlies this impulse toward "the real" - whether it be history, or the symbol grounded in experience?

Isn't art a playground of indifferent materials, scribbled & folded & shaped into something utterly new - something totally & joyously irrelevant & free? & isn't that - exactly that - how it says the most profound & simple things about life (if it bothers to say anything at all)? Doesn't it refresh life so, with pure disinterested self-fulfillment? Isn't that its perfection?

Yes... but...

that's only half the story.

The other half is about saving the world. How? Through taking on the most terrible things, the most frightening things, the most "sublime" things - and domesticating them, humanizing them, making them intelligible. Why? Because somehow joy doesn't want to live in a ghetto, surrounded by misery. It doesn't want to close its eyes or clasp itself by the arms - it wants to open its eyes & arms & clasp you.

Hence those great grave messy emotional symbols - Beethoven (not only Mozart), Dostoevsky (not only Pushkin) - those plangent art works which fuse suffering & joy. Pushkin : "my sadness is luminous". Art in a minor key.

[Some would call this not sublime, but simply realistic (life is mortal, timebound, essentially divided - spirit & flesh). So the strange dance of the children goes on, happy & sad by turns.]

Notes Toward & So On (8)

I know I didn't do justice to JH Newman's thinking (in Grammar of Assent). But it seems to be a part of turn-of-20th-cent. general attention to distinction between what Newman calls "the notional" & "the real"; maybe similar to TE Hulme's distinction between abstract "counter-language" and "the image".

Newman focuses on how the mind works with perception and concepts. His "illative sense" is the mental faculty with which we synthesize (1)what we actually experience with (2)our understanding : with what we sense as the inner logic or meaning of that experience. Thus through the illative sense we experience/process what for Newman is "real". This he contrasts with notions, or abstractions which are part of some verbal structure which we have not yet apprehended (or processed with the "illative sense").


Warning! I've probably got this all wrong! It is likely I haven't properly processed these notions through my own illator yet!

Nevertheless I'm interested in how the symbolic language of poetry emerges from these imaginative-illative modelling processes. Because eventually I think Robert Archambeau's & Kristen Prevallet's documentary or contingent poetics might be confronted with some difficult & productive paradoxes involving the differences between poetry & history.

History, like science, can precipitate or solidify into forms of positivism. Somehow, because it's a written document, because it's historical evidence, it's more real. Its objectivity offers the poet an avenue of escape from solitude & solipsism; its communality - after all, that happened to us - seems to strengthen the poet's rhetorical position.

Setting aside the possibility that documents can be misinterpreted (there's a good book out there somewhere, author/title I can't remember, which goes into the young Pound's unintentional misreadings of Italian Ren. documents) - & setting aside the over-familiar issue of cultural-historical relativity - it seems to me that the crux of the problem comes down to this distinction of real & notional (maybe related to TS Eliot's distinction between "information" and "knowledge").

Fundamentally, poetry & history do different things with time. History works with chronological succession, showing how the train of human actions fit into the passage of "ordinary" time. & though the historian's narration may provide all kinds of panoramic, kaleidoscopic palimpsests, the end remains the same : an interpretive recounting of "things that happened".

What does poetry do with time & history? In poetry, history is "figured" within a primary aesthetic experience (the experience of the poem). Time itself - the (aesthetic) "now" of the poem - is absorbed, elaborated, intensified, translated into a new symbolic form - a counter-time. This is the remarkable effect of the imagination's - the "illative sense's" - modelling of its own experience.

& there is no general, abstract imagination. There are shared images, shared symbols, shared histories, shared facts - but there are only individual minds and individual art works (or works by the shared activity of individuals).

Aristotle's distinction between poetry & history comes to the same position from a different direction : poetry exceeds history via its capacity to represent "universals", whereas history deals in particular events. On the face of it this sounds like a position opposite to the one I am outlining. But this is not the case. Aristotle's poetry is capable of representing universals because, in poetry, concepts have been absorbed, shaped, synthesized into a logical architectonic - experienced as real (through the pathos/ethos/logos of identification - the "illative sense").

Thus, I think Robert or Kristen's future "contingent poetries" will face the same kind of critical/aesthetic evaluation as always : that is, have the verbal materials been transmuted by the imagination? Do we recognize & respond to the authentic imprint of original experience?

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.

Why poetry? I mean, why do we do this?

We take aesthetic pleasure in words, what language does?

That, and something else. With language we acknowledge, define, order, shape what we experience. This is a techne intimately fused with that which it represents. With poetic speech we "surround ourselves with domestic utensils, the warmth of the hearth" (Mandelstam's description of the poetics of Acmeism - "domestic hellenism". He was doing this in deliberate contrast to the more otherworldly & abstract qualities of Russian Symbolism).

The equilibrium of artifice - craft, techne - and nature is at the root of civilization.

So perhaps we can recognize a certain solemn (&/or playful) objectivity, disinterestedness, at work in poetry - a reflection or emanation of the poet's serious effort to follow & express truth - the poet's equivalent of the philosopher's or scientist's activity.

The image of "the city" in art (as I said, I'm reading about medieval Siena), representing an ideal of equilibrium between know-how & nature, individual & community. (And hidden within every image of the city is that of a garden.)

The word bears the techne of a global equilibrium (Mandelstam also foresaw this). When he talked about the poem as "like unto an Egyptian bark of the dead, carrying everything necessary for life" - he was talking about the word-itself as a sort of Noah's ark.

The curious focus in the American long poem on the local, the city. The unavoidable and only shared "here & now" where any real equilibrium (political, cultural, natural) becomes possible.

Art is not for art's sake. Art, for Pete's sake, is a response to particulars of experience otherwise deflected, packaged, ignored, misunderstood. Inevitably runs up against inimical authorities, if there are any; inevitably outlives those conflicts; ineluctably represents crises of moral choice and vocation.

I'm getting this from Shattuck's book about Proust (who was, he says, often lumped, wrongly, with the purists).

If you're not an aesthete, does this mean you have to dumb down your rhetoric and vocabulary, write for someone other than yourself, become "accessible"? No; but by the same token, take care that your ornamentation, your felicities of style, are not merely designed to impress a coterie. They're not worth the trouble.

Responding to John Latta's notes on "ambiguous figures":

yes, the characteristic quality of poetry is its reflexivity (its way of being something rather than simply pointing to something); but the shortcoming of so much postmodern poetry is that it simply turns this into a dichotomy ("poetry must not be mimetic since it is reflexive, self-mirroring"). What happens then is it gets further and further from ordinary experience & feeling, accenting its function as intellectual game.

The real puzzle, it seems to me, is how poetry can be both mimetic & reflexive.

Jonathan weighs in on Joan Houlihan. I'm somewhat bemused by the vehemence of this & other negative takes. Again I see an unwillingness to address her main arguments (obscurity & bad writing among the "progressive", lazy resting-on-laurels among the established, et al.), along with a willingness to belittle her own poetry (which really is not a point against her essays), & to question, very tweedily, her "credentials".

All this vehemence makes me ask: is criticism actually possible with regard to contemporary poetry? Contemporary culture is most adept at creating complete autonomous worlds (poetry movements, football seasons, ghettos, SUV ads, music videos, computer games. . .). These pastimes are so pervasive and all-consuming that, in comparison, perhaps, a general notion of "good writing" seems inconceivably boring. "Progressive" poetry creates its own terms for production & consumption, which have a lot to do with an aura of performance & "liminality" & immediate experience, and little to do with "normal" or even traditionally or measurably elegant syntax or vocabulary.

JK asking about empiricism (reasoning from experience?).

What if observation & theory are actually the same thing. (As "nature" is a synonym of "artifice".) In both we see patterns & interpret them. & what if both are always "conjectural" (as in Nicholas Cusanus, or Karl Popper).

So maybe a poem is an observation-theory.

Say that again? A poem is. . .

"I work hard, I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn - so much the better. Art is difficult. Easy art is what you see at modern exhibitions of things and doodles." - Vladimir Nabokov

Once you acknowledge the presence of past poetry, you are at the beginning of a different road, where your own poetry starts to reflect the poems of the past, in echo & revision & reversal & expansion. What is permanent in experience is refracted through new lenses, a new time, new faith or new disillusionment. What is made permanent in poetry through re-invention begins to reflect, as in the dual lenses of a telescope, what is permanent in experience & nature. The perennial return of poetic themes becomes the shadow of the perennial concerns of life itself.

Maybe an answer to the excessive familiarity, and the familiar excess, of poetry, is this kind of metapoetry, oriented by echo & response to the distant foci of deep time.

Something I read somewhere : "Faced with an insoluble problem, make it bigger (enlarge the context)."

Let's forget about the roaring of contemporaries & cozening polemics. It's a musty closet. Let's do two things : read "the classics" and study where we are in the world (& beyond).

I imagine a limpid poetry of experience, which moves by gradual slight stages from description to synthesis and music, and back again. & by the same gradual slight stages from voice to persona and back again. a reserved poetry, which seeks fitness and the right moment & the right word rather than quantity and ambition.