Another bit from the comment stream over at Harriet. This one sent to Christian Bok's recent entry ("Late Past the Post").

"R.S. Crane's re-presentation of Aristotle argues that the 20th-cent. critical focus on poem-as-linguistic-discourse is misplaced. Christian Bok's emphasis, on the poem as linguistic research and language game, seems to be an example of that focus carried to a logical conclusion.

I am suggesting, to the contrary, that the language of the poem is always the shadow or carapace of a larger, unspoken (because literally unspeakable) aesthetic form or impression - something like the conceptual/affective impression harbored by people returning home from the theater. We receive a similar impression, an image of completeness, from lyric poems, albeit on a smaller scale. The lasting effect of the work of art is not simply the experimental result of the language per se, but is an effect of this unspoken gesture - toward or away from meaning, toward or away from feeling, toward or away from the reader in person.

It seems to me that poetic language, curiously, makes an inward turn toward this state of muteness or mime (mimesis), toward the inexplicable - and this turning itself is what radiates poetry's uncanny magnetism."

My thoughts on the basic motives & purposes of poetry after the movements of the 20th century can be juxtaposed with these interesting remarks at Boston Comment. As Kent Johnson & Stephen Burt in particular pointed out, the demand to innovate originates, not entirely but to some degree, in a political stance. One could say that literary innovation and difference, as we have come to know them, have two roots: first in what I described before as the attempt to catch up with contemporary historical change, and secondly in the notion that literary "experimentalism" (as opposed to simple experiment) marks the boundary of political opposition to mainstream institutions or allegiances.

If one accepts the notion of the poetic word as harmonizing a duplex form of time & reality, then the first motive for innovation noted above has to be revised. I'm not sure how such a poetics applies to any specific political stance.

This is what I was arguing with the Buffalo crowd about, for a few years there, in the late 90s.

Not "tradition" vs. "experiment", or "rhyme & meter" vs. "new sentence" : but about unity vs. deflection.

I was thinking of you, David, in the context of the Stevens poem, "The American Sublime"(1935):

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

(Let this serve as your chihuahua for today.)

Everyone brings what light they have to this subject (the subject of the poetry blogs, that is). I have a problem with the bicameral criticism emanating from the so-called "avant". That is one of my big themes on hgpoetics. I've tried to look at it in different ways. What strikes me again & again is how often poetic "experiment" leads to obscurity & self-indulgence. & I attribute this tendency in large part to the teachers poets & critics who parlay the binary theory of US literary history. Ie. the theory that there is an inimical centrist mainstream which is both corrupt and cliched, and the only way to get around it is by Russian formalist-futurist "making strange" (a process which becomes mannered & cliched in its own ways).

Far better to read the tradition of poetry in English on its own terms, take as much from it as you can, and bend it to contemporary awareness & concerns. Far better to make no assumptions about your audience, but to conduct an inward critique of your own ethical and aesthetic motives (under which aegis you undertook to write poetry in the first place).