Showing posts with label form-structure2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label form-structure2. Show all posts
10.08.2003
9.08.2003
A few notes regarding the obscurities of previous post (& other excerpts like it), for anyone interested. July is 3rd penultimate vol. of long long poem Forth of July (4th vol. is brief coda, called Blackstone's Day-Book, published with Island Road). Poem in previous blog entry of today is from 2nd, final section of July, called "The Green Constellation".
"G.C." is kind of ecstatic conclusion to whole poem, following 1st part of July, titled "Upstream, Down", which is kind of an imaginary "journey into the interior", down & up the Ms., paralleling the center of previous vol. Grassblade Light (Grassblade is centered on source of Mississippi; July is centered on the Delta).
Anyway, "G.C." was composed in four equal parts (24 poems each), sort of balancing the 1st 4 chapters of the 1st book (Stubborn Grew). Though the 4 parts are printed consecutively (I-II-III-IV), they were written "across", ie. I wrote them in this order: I.1, II.1, III.1, IV.1, I.2, II.2, III.2... etc. (each poem is dated, so the reader can read it "across or down"). The idea was to create this big sort of echoing square, thinking in part of the effect of Russian bells (cacaphonous-harmonious). As you get toward the end (I.24 etc), 4 letters standing for 4 bell-tones become more pronounced : D, F-sharp, A, E - the simple door-chime tones - except I inverted them to spell "F-A-D-E". You can see that the previous poem is from the "D" section.
The spanish quote in this poem from from Vallejo's "Poemas Humanas". Among other things, the section threads together various motifs from earlier in the work, including the balance of Caesar/Cesar (Vallejo), Julius (Caesar)/Juliet/Jubilee etc, March 15th (Ides of March) and April 15th (Good Friday - death of Vallejo & Abraham Lincoln), e-mpire and e-quality (under the shadow of the "W" &/or the gold doubloon nailed to the mast at the center of the Pequod (in Moby-Dick), from Quito, Ecuador (e-quator). The "Forth of July" figures the emergence of a "jubilee-bee" or butterfly from the husk or cicada shell or military shield of Julius (empire) - basically a sort of magic letter-game. What was an orphic "Romeo" search for a ghostly "Juliet" in Grassblade Light becomes a kind of spiritual image of metamorphosis on a cultural level in July. All this was oddly & shamanistically "predicted" by the Hermes/Orpheus-figure of "Bluejay" in Stubborn Grew.
I'll post another poem from the "Green Constellation" section which points toward the Russian bell phenomena. Incidentally, the penultimate section of the sonnet sequence Island Road (1996) is titled "To the Green Constellation". (The "Green Constellation", among other things, was actually the brand name of simple Sears typewriter, lent to me by Francesca Tagliabue, on which many of my early poems were written.)
"G.C." is kind of ecstatic conclusion to whole poem, following 1st part of July, titled "Upstream, Down", which is kind of an imaginary "journey into the interior", down & up the Ms., paralleling the center of previous vol. Grassblade Light (Grassblade is centered on source of Mississippi; July is centered on the Delta).
Anyway, "G.C." was composed in four equal parts (24 poems each), sort of balancing the 1st 4 chapters of the 1st book (Stubborn Grew). Though the 4 parts are printed consecutively (I-II-III-IV), they were written "across", ie. I wrote them in this order: I.1, II.1, III.1, IV.1, I.2, II.2, III.2... etc. (each poem is dated, so the reader can read it "across or down"). The idea was to create this big sort of echoing square, thinking in part of the effect of Russian bells (cacaphonous-harmonious). As you get toward the end (I.24 etc), 4 letters standing for 4 bell-tones become more pronounced : D, F-sharp, A, E - the simple door-chime tones - except I inverted them to spell "F-A-D-E". You can see that the previous poem is from the "D" section.
The spanish quote in this poem from from Vallejo's "Poemas Humanas". Among other things, the section threads together various motifs from earlier in the work, including the balance of Caesar/Cesar (Vallejo), Julius (Caesar)/Juliet/Jubilee etc, March 15th (Ides of March) and April 15th (Good Friday - death of Vallejo & Abraham Lincoln), e-mpire and e-quality (under the shadow of the "W" &/or the gold doubloon nailed to the mast at the center of the Pequod (in Moby-Dick), from Quito, Ecuador (e-quator). The "Forth of July" figures the emergence of a "jubilee-bee" or butterfly from the husk or cicada shell or military shield of Julius (empire) - basically a sort of magic letter-game. What was an orphic "Romeo" search for a ghostly "Juliet" in Grassblade Light becomes a kind of spiritual image of metamorphosis on a cultural level in July. All this was oddly & shamanistically "predicted" by the Hermes/Orpheus-figure of "Bluejay" in Stubborn Grew.
I'll post another poem from the "Green Constellation" section which points toward the Russian bell phenomena. Incidentally, the penultimate section of the sonnet sequence Island Road (1996) is titled "To the Green Constellation". (The "Green Constellation", among other things, was actually the brand name of simple Sears typewriter, lent to me by Francesca Tagliabue, on which many of my early poems were written.)
8.13.2003
Kasey writes, interestingly :
What connotations, resonances, moods do the patterns evoke? We are veering, or threatening to veer, back to the realm of the referential and the conative (and maybe the emotive itself), but the added element here is something like a belief in, or a wish for, a kind of magic: for the transformation of mere phonemes and syllables into transcendental conveying devices, Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance. It is this romantic valuation that is anathema to the theory behind much Language Poetry, and that is still a beguiling beacon for James, with his New Brutalist’s heart pumping pure Keatsian nectar instead of blood.
So maybe when it is objected that Language Poetry is unemotional, what is really meant is that it forecloses the possibility of using emotions as a portal to a privileged perspective outside materiality. A poetics that wants to take issue with such a foreclosure, moreover, has its work cut out it for it (if it proposes to take issue in a public forum among which there are Language Poets and other materialists, at any rate). Or, coming at the same problem from another angle, how does the New Brutalism propose to answer the inevitable charges of escapism, mystification, naive romanticism, etc.? Or will it ignore these charges and their attending sociopolitical imperatives entirely, content to pursue a pastoral ideal of sweet mad hedonist piping in the polluted garden of contemporary life? The world watches and waits.
One question for Kasey : why must the emotive function, ravelled into the poetic as he describes, be necessarily otherworldly-Romantic? It seems to me that the poetic expression of emotion is often very this-worldly, situational : one of poetry's fantastic capabilities is to evoke a tense dramatic human situation through understatement, thus playing upon deeply mixed emotions (both the emotions deriving from the immediacy of a critical situation, as well as those deriving from an ironic or retrospective distance from those events).
It seems to me that foregrounding this opposition between idealist & materialist ideology is exactly the "argument" of Language poetry - an argument which elides these other potential capabilities & engagements.
What connotations, resonances, moods do the patterns evoke? We are veering, or threatening to veer, back to the realm of the referential and the conative (and maybe the emotive itself), but the added element here is something like a belief in, or a wish for, a kind of magic: for the transformation of mere phonemes and syllables into transcendental conveying devices, Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance. It is this romantic valuation that is anathema to the theory behind much Language Poetry, and that is still a beguiling beacon for James, with his New Brutalist’s heart pumping pure Keatsian nectar instead of blood.
So maybe when it is objected that Language Poetry is unemotional, what is really meant is that it forecloses the possibility of using emotions as a portal to a privileged perspective outside materiality. A poetics that wants to take issue with such a foreclosure, moreover, has its work cut out it for it (if it proposes to take issue in a public forum among which there are Language Poets and other materialists, at any rate). Or, coming at the same problem from another angle, how does the New Brutalism propose to answer the inevitable charges of escapism, mystification, naive romanticism, etc.? Or will it ignore these charges and their attending sociopolitical imperatives entirely, content to pursue a pastoral ideal of sweet mad hedonist piping in the polluted garden of contemporary life? The world watches and waits.
One question for Kasey : why must the emotive function, ravelled into the poetic as he describes, be necessarily otherworldly-Romantic? It seems to me that the poetic expression of emotion is often very this-worldly, situational : one of poetry's fantastic capabilities is to evoke a tense dramatic human situation through understatement, thus playing upon deeply mixed emotions (both the emotions deriving from the immediacy of a critical situation, as well as those deriving from an ironic or retrospective distance from those events).
It seems to me that foregrounding this opposition between idealist & materialist ideology is exactly the "argument" of Language poetry - an argument which elides these other potential capabilities & engagements.
6.04.2003
Nada on subjective formalism vs. mathematical. She's right to counterbalance the model-making head trips with a more centered "mimesis" (the "canons" of Leonardo & predecessors - squaring the circle on the human microcosm - were centered on genitals or navel). But math is everywhere. Nada herself did some division (Nada divided by Ron = Ada with remain d'Or). Gaze into your navel you'll see a very physical umbilical cord back to nautilus spiral seashell.
5.08.2003
from the Projo yesterday:
"A $14 brooch purchased three years ago at a Bristol antiques shop has turned out to contain a priceless purple pearl, according to Alan Golash, a Newport antiques dealer."
Purple pearls come from quahogs, a Rhode Island treat. But they are so rare. This one may have been found by Native Americans, who used quahog shells & pearls as wampum. A 10-mm. pearl is considered very, very large. This pearl is 14-mm. The new owner is calling it the Pearl of Venus (Ben Franklin visited Providence once, bringing his telescope, to observe the Transit of Venus. see Transit St. in Fox Point.)
Providence has always been a jewelry capital. The Projo photo shows an enormous purple globe set in an ivory brooch with gold trim and an interesting octagonal design, reminiscent of course of the prosodical structure of Grassblade Light.
"A $14 brooch purchased three years ago at a Bristol antiques shop has turned out to contain a priceless purple pearl, according to Alan Golash, a Newport antiques dealer."
Purple pearls come from quahogs, a Rhode Island treat. But they are so rare. This one may have been found by Native Americans, who used quahog shells & pearls as wampum. A 10-mm. pearl is considered very, very large. This pearl is 14-mm. The new owner is calling it the Pearl of Venus (Ben Franklin visited Providence once, bringing his telescope, to observe the Transit of Venus. see Transit St. in Fox Point.)
Providence has always been a jewelry capital. The Projo photo shows an enormous purple globe set in an ivory brooch with gold trim and an interesting octagonal design, reminiscent of course of the prosodical structure of Grassblade Light.
4.29.2003
Reading an interesting book about the mathematician Georg Cantor, of infinity & set theory fame. Proved that any point, numbered on a grid of any dimension (2, 3, 4, 5 dimensions...), can also be located on a line (1 dimension). Not sure why this was so shocking and revolutionary back in the 1880s, since a point is defined as dimensionless, hence you could locate infinite points anywhere. But I'm not a mathematician.
But it makes me think of poetics of Mandelstam & Joyce. Mandelstam describing poetry as an art whose humble exterior disguises a multidimensional reality of "terrifying density". Omry Ronen, in his book Approach to Mandelstam, took him at his word, and in a huge book analyzing just two poems, gives them an image of allusive INFINITY : each LINE bearing so much weight of fused & transmuted literary echoes & other references. Joyce does something similar in the prose of Ulysses & FW.
And of course verbal art in general is a process of compressing multidimensional reality into a near-dimensionless medium.
But it makes me think of poetics of Mandelstam & Joyce. Mandelstam describing poetry as an art whose humble exterior disguises a multidimensional reality of "terrifying density". Omry Ronen, in his book Approach to Mandelstam, took him at his word, and in a huge book analyzing just two poems, gives them an image of allusive INFINITY : each LINE bearing so much weight of fused & transmuted literary echoes & other references. Joyce does something similar in the prose of Ulysses & FW.
And of course verbal art in general is a process of compressing multidimensional reality into a near-dimensionless medium.
3.21.2003
Quick thoughts on Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time (thanks, Jordan), which I just started reading.
Kind of a neo-Bergsonian perspective. Consideration of modernist, postmodern aesthetics & design principles, by way of re-conception of Time (as a kind of living entity).
What if poets didn't immediately translate "the New" into "new writing styles"? What if they understood "the new" as an aspect - the nature of which we don't quite grasp - of time itself? Of course on the level of the obvious that is, obviously, the definition of "novelty". But for Kwinter that's merely obvious because we don't really understand time.
I would try to relate same to my notions of the connection between tradition & "nowness" (see blog entries for 1/28-1/31). The metaform of the poet is a unique correlation of Now. (Tradition = characteristic activity = poet making Now.)
Here's a quote from Kwinter:
"The so-called emergence and evolution of forms will no longer follow the classical eidetic pathway determined by the possible and the real. Rather, it will follow the dynamic and uncertain processes that characterize the schema that links a virtual component to an actual one. What is most important to understand here is that unlike the previous schema where the "possible" had no reality (before emerging), here the virtual, though it may yet have no actuality, is nonetheless already fully real. It exists, one might say, as a free difference or singularity, not yet combined with other differences into a complete ensemble or salient form. What this means is that the virtual does not have to be realized, but only actualized (activated and integrated); its adventure involves a developmental passage from one state to another. The virtual is gathered, selected - let us say incarnated - it passes from one moment-event (or complex) in order to emerge - differently, uniquely - within another. Indeed the actual does not resemble the virtual, as something preformed or preexisting itself. The relation of the virtual to the actual is not therefore one of resemblance but rather of difference, innovation, or creation (every complex, or moment-event, is new). Thus the following should be clear: realization (of a possible) and creation (through actualization-differentiation) are two intrinsically distinct and irreducible processes. The first programmatically reproduces what was already there, formed and given in advance; while the other invents through a continuous, positive and dynamic process of transmission, differentiation, and evolution.
"The crux lies here: Actualization occurs in time and with time, whereas realization, by limiting itself to the mere unfolding of what preexists, actually destroys and annihilates time." (pp.9-10)
[p.s. deepest apology for turgid head-trip on 1st day of SPRING]
This reminds me of a book by another Sanford, Sanford Budick:
Dividing Muse : images of sacred disjunction in Milton's Paradise Lost (which looks at Philo's concept of the Logos as a differentiating principle, & how Milton adapted that).
So in order to make "new" poetry - in relation to what has already been made - "tradition" - the poet might need to grasp a new notion of time & "nowness" itself. Rather than relying on simple contrast of old & worn-out versus shiny & brand-new.
Kind of a neo-Bergsonian perspective. Consideration of modernist, postmodern aesthetics & design principles, by way of re-conception of Time (as a kind of living entity).
What if poets didn't immediately translate "the New" into "new writing styles"? What if they understood "the new" as an aspect - the nature of which we don't quite grasp - of time itself? Of course on the level of the obvious that is, obviously, the definition of "novelty". But for Kwinter that's merely obvious because we don't really understand time.
I would try to relate same to my notions of the connection between tradition & "nowness" (see blog entries for 1/28-1/31). The metaform of the poet is a unique correlation of Now. (Tradition = characteristic activity = poet making Now.)
Here's a quote from Kwinter:
"The so-called emergence and evolution of forms will no longer follow the classical eidetic pathway determined by the possible and the real. Rather, it will follow the dynamic and uncertain processes that characterize the schema that links a virtual component to an actual one. What is most important to understand here is that unlike the previous schema where the "possible" had no reality (before emerging), here the virtual, though it may yet have no actuality, is nonetheless already fully real. It exists, one might say, as a free difference or singularity, not yet combined with other differences into a complete ensemble or salient form. What this means is that the virtual does not have to be realized, but only actualized (activated and integrated); its adventure involves a developmental passage from one state to another. The virtual is gathered, selected - let us say incarnated - it passes from one moment-event (or complex) in order to emerge - differently, uniquely - within another. Indeed the actual does not resemble the virtual, as something preformed or preexisting itself. The relation of the virtual to the actual is not therefore one of resemblance but rather of difference, innovation, or creation (every complex, or moment-event, is new). Thus the following should be clear: realization (of a possible) and creation (through actualization-differentiation) are two intrinsically distinct and irreducible processes. The first programmatically reproduces what was already there, formed and given in advance; while the other invents through a continuous, positive and dynamic process of transmission, differentiation, and evolution.
"The crux lies here: Actualization occurs in time and with time, whereas realization, by limiting itself to the mere unfolding of what preexists, actually destroys and annihilates time." (pp.9-10)
[p.s. deepest apology for turgid head-trip on 1st day of SPRING]
This reminds me of a book by another Sanford, Sanford Budick:
Dividing Muse : images of sacred disjunction in Milton's Paradise Lost (which looks at Philo's concept of the Logos as a differentiating principle, & how Milton adapted that).
So in order to make "new" poetry - in relation to what has already been made - "tradition" - the poet might need to grasp a new notion of time & "nowness" itself. Rather than relying on simple contrast of old & worn-out versus shiny & brand-new.
2.26.2003
Yes, & about that long poem (Stubborn Grew/The Rose - &/or Forth of July). I was looking out the library window this afternoon toward downtown Providence, trying to stay awake, thinking about the motivations which started back in the early 80s. Perhaps very big poems like the Divina Commedia really come from a similar impulse to the very brief poems, epigrams, Emily, Celan. The feeling that a prophet feels with words - Yeats' line, "speech after long silence". Facing the universe & trying to get it right this time, this once. Not so much an intellectual thing as an emotion, as when some serious music begins to take hold.
That was one aspect. Another motivation seems less exalted : a long poem allows you to dawdle, plan, cogitate, live with it - even when you're not ready to SPEAK that way. It's a way of getting old & set in your ways & unpoetic while remaining inside a POEMA (russian name for "long poem").
& the miracle was (at least from my biased experience) I got older & older & the poem(s) got younger. My early poems are older & creakier (I mean my early peoms from my SECOND phase. . . it gets complicated when you take a powder from poetry for almost 10 years).
The genre fascination, another aspect. There is a kind of hierarchy among the buildings. I mean the Bible & Dante are HUGE. . . & the American Long Poem (Pound/Crane/HD/Zuk/WCW/Olson et al.) bears a curious affinity to these ENCYCLOPEDIC works, these WORLD-CREATIONS. & this goes back to what I said above, about the motivation to say the absolute perfect thing, large or small. Pound: "who will lift the great acorn of light?" So it becomes a great game.
& it was a great game! Chess masters manuever within a nexus of thousands of moves. It began to feel that way, after I accepted the procedure I first caught from Mandelstam : the idea of a sequence of DRAFTS or variations on a theme. Many-in-one. It was a very simple idea which grows complexity. & it really worked for me. One thing you can see if you look for it in Forth of July is a progression from the opening chapter made up of very short distinct lyrics, to the next chapter in which the individual poems are linked more closely, to the next chapter in which they are linked less by narrative & more thematically, to the next chapter which pulls all of these together into an uber-narrative (Bluejay/Orpheus). . . to the 2nd half of the book which makes a larger, tighter amalgam in this vein, to the 2nd book (Grassblade Light) which crystallizes & formalizes the balance between whole & part, to the 3rd book (July), which subjects this crystal to SPEED & FLOW. . . There is a distinct progression from specificity & localness & narrative at the start of the poem to music & universality & indirection at the end. The narrative is there but it's part of a very elusive/allusive net toward the end, a sort of cabala of alphabetic characters & significant anniversaries. Under the sign of Orpheus & the shadow of William Blackstone & the light of "J" (Bluejay/Juliet/July/Jubilee/J). Overall the process of thematic variation or many-in-one begins to take on a life of its own as it unifies & draws taut its own materials even as it absorbs & swallows up an increasingly larger range of materials - the BLOB ! It must be this process itself which gives the sense of acceleration. Acceleration toward the past, the springtime, the Jubilee, the Eternal - a time machine. As I've already suggested in this blog somewhere, the notion of a time-warp or ark-machine or J-nave-ship is central to the "historical argument" of this long poem (one more of its motivations being to suggest something slightly different in the way of History than as provided by the other long-poem makers : not COMPLETELY different, but a variation (there are intimations of renovated time or life-renewal in Crane, Zukofsky, Pound, Olson. . . but I place the emphasis in my own way).
It will never be the Divina Commedia, which is the Mozart of poetry, the perfect crystal. But it is a kind of singing HG Sophia!
That was one aspect. Another motivation seems less exalted : a long poem allows you to dawdle, plan, cogitate, live with it - even when you're not ready to SPEAK that way. It's a way of getting old & set in your ways & unpoetic while remaining inside a POEMA (russian name for "long poem").
& the miracle was (at least from my biased experience) I got older & older & the poem(s) got younger. My early poems are older & creakier (I mean my early peoms from my SECOND phase. . . it gets complicated when you take a powder from poetry for almost 10 years).
The genre fascination, another aspect. There is a kind of hierarchy among the buildings. I mean the Bible & Dante are HUGE. . . & the American Long Poem (Pound/Crane/HD/Zuk/WCW/Olson et al.) bears a curious affinity to these ENCYCLOPEDIC works, these WORLD-CREATIONS. & this goes back to what I said above, about the motivation to say the absolute perfect thing, large or small. Pound: "who will lift the great acorn of light?" So it becomes a great game.
& it was a great game! Chess masters manuever within a nexus of thousands of moves. It began to feel that way, after I accepted the procedure I first caught from Mandelstam : the idea of a sequence of DRAFTS or variations on a theme. Many-in-one. It was a very simple idea which grows complexity. & it really worked for me. One thing you can see if you look for it in Forth of July is a progression from the opening chapter made up of very short distinct lyrics, to the next chapter in which the individual poems are linked more closely, to the next chapter in which they are linked less by narrative & more thematically, to the next chapter which pulls all of these together into an uber-narrative (Bluejay/Orpheus). . . to the 2nd half of the book which makes a larger, tighter amalgam in this vein, to the 2nd book (Grassblade Light) which crystallizes & formalizes the balance between whole & part, to the 3rd book (July), which subjects this crystal to SPEED & FLOW. . . There is a distinct progression from specificity & localness & narrative at the start of the poem to music & universality & indirection at the end. The narrative is there but it's part of a very elusive/allusive net toward the end, a sort of cabala of alphabetic characters & significant anniversaries. Under the sign of Orpheus & the shadow of William Blackstone & the light of "J" (Bluejay/Juliet/July/Jubilee/J). Overall the process of thematic variation or many-in-one begins to take on a life of its own as it unifies & draws taut its own materials even as it absorbs & swallows up an increasingly larger range of materials - the BLOB ! It must be this process itself which gives the sense of acceleration. Acceleration toward the past, the springtime, the Jubilee, the Eternal - a time machine. As I've already suggested in this blog somewhere, the notion of a time-warp or ark-machine or J-nave-ship is central to the "historical argument" of this long poem (one more of its motivations being to suggest something slightly different in the way of History than as provided by the other long-poem makers : not COMPLETELY different, but a variation (there are intimations of renovated time or life-renewal in Crane, Zukofsky, Pound, Olson. . . but I place the emphasis in my own way).
It will never be the Divina Commedia, which is the Mozart of poetry, the perfect crystal. But it is a kind of singing HG Sophia!
2.05.2003
The poet Gabriel Gudding emailed me about my book Stubborn Grew, & I replied with some info on its design. I emailed back to say that the story formed a "W": a sort of double W, in that while following the protagonists (Henry & Bluejay) on a geographical zigzag W across a hillside in Providence (mapping a W), the structural or numerical design formed a textual "W" : that is, the center of Book 2 (the asterisk on p. 137) forms the apex of the center of a narrative-numerical W (zigzagging from optimism/pessimism, happy/sad, etc. - the "nadir" of the 1st descending (tragic, pessimistic) stroke of the W on p. 133, written on 4/4/98 (anniversary of MLK assassination: "44" Chinese number of death) - from which nadir it begins to ascent toward the apex (p, 137) & then descend again. . .
But what is this "W"? Is it a burning Bush? (see section 5 on p. 49, written in Feb. 1998). I wrote to Gabriel about how the narrative follows "Henry's" search for a lost black CAT (Pushkin) kidnapped on Halloween, into a CATabasis (journey to the Underworld) with Blue J. The "W" is many things: for example, it's the reflection in moonlight of a heavenly "M" inscribed on the landscape (Dante's M of the eagle of Justice, Mandelstam's M). Combine an M & a W and you get a pair of cat's eyes. A "W" is also the outline of a CATamaran (combining 2 V's: Venus, Virgo: becoming a constellation: Cassiopeia, with its Ethiopian (Pushkinian, Bluejayan, MLK) themes.
& Cassiopeia/Ethiopia/Blue J/MLK-Melchior leads back to the Ark of the Covenant, or the ship-shape of a CATamaran.
The "W" inscribed on the landscape in Stubborn casts a shadow in the structure of the larger poem. That is, see pp. 137, the center of Bk 2 of Stubborn: the last words are: "Thy will." This unfinished sentence is only completed in the 3rd book of sequels (July), in a symmetrical mirror-image at the center of its 1st section, the last words of which are: "Be done." These nodes form the nadirs of the larger "W" design of the entire poem. The exact numerical center is found at the center of Book 2 (Grassblade Light), in a single isolated line (referring to a star).
These mappings are summarized in Book 4, the shorter "coda" to the entire poem ("Blackstone's Day-Book", found in the vols. Island Road & The Rose). They circle around many motifs, including MLK, Ethiopia, the Ark, the ship. . . Melville's American-prophetic underside. Here is a sample of what I'm getting at (from Blackstone's Day-Book, toward the very end of the long poem):
IV.1
We are coming to the end of Henry
Navigator's long voyage, Elena -
circling around an elephant ear (Abul
Abaz, or Barnum's Jumbo) - see
how everything grows simpler,
more harsh, more true. Still
the well is always there (and will
be) - like the man standing here
beside it in the dark courtyard
(strange blooming out-of-season
almond branch). A stone,
a star, a well. A cup of water
from a rainbarrel (or Tartar
wine). A circling dragon-boat
or scrap of origami writ
folded to float so lightly. . . there.
You fold Andromeda into a W,
a mountain range back into M.
You cup them in your palm
to make a diamond, or double-
diamond - cat's eyes, Pushkinian.
Delicate Blue Morpho wings
woven with microscopic strings
of quipu thread (gentian-
gentle, violet and red). A knit
crossroad, then - red, white -
streams into Cassiopeia's
mother-night (at last).
5.22.2000
The focus on the catamaran-ark is a focus on Jubilee (Bluejay-inversion), or the coming of justice & redemption & the kingdom of heaven. The angelic reality requires a vessel of some kind (shelter or modus operandi, womb or Grail). I realize this sounds a bit wacky & obscure.
But what is this "W"? Is it a burning Bush? (see section 5 on p. 49, written in Feb. 1998). I wrote to Gabriel about how the narrative follows "Henry's" search for a lost black CAT (Pushkin) kidnapped on Halloween, into a CATabasis (journey to the Underworld) with Blue J. The "W" is many things: for example, it's the reflection in moonlight of a heavenly "M" inscribed on the landscape (Dante's M of the eagle of Justice, Mandelstam's M). Combine an M & a W and you get a pair of cat's eyes. A "W" is also the outline of a CATamaran (combining 2 V's: Venus, Virgo: becoming a constellation: Cassiopeia, with its Ethiopian (Pushkinian, Bluejayan, MLK) themes.
& Cassiopeia/Ethiopia/Blue J/MLK-Melchior leads back to the Ark of the Covenant, or the ship-shape of a CATamaran.
The "W" inscribed on the landscape in Stubborn casts a shadow in the structure of the larger poem. That is, see pp. 137, the center of Bk 2 of Stubborn: the last words are: "Thy will." This unfinished sentence is only completed in the 3rd book of sequels (July), in a symmetrical mirror-image at the center of its 1st section, the last words of which are: "Be done." These nodes form the nadirs of the larger "W" design of the entire poem. The exact numerical center is found at the center of Book 2 (Grassblade Light), in a single isolated line (referring to a star).
These mappings are summarized in Book 4, the shorter "coda" to the entire poem ("Blackstone's Day-Book", found in the vols. Island Road & The Rose). They circle around many motifs, including MLK, Ethiopia, the Ark, the ship. . . Melville's American-prophetic underside. Here is a sample of what I'm getting at (from Blackstone's Day-Book, toward the very end of the long poem):
IV.1
We are coming to the end of Henry
Navigator's long voyage, Elena -
circling around an elephant ear (Abul
Abaz, or Barnum's Jumbo) - see
how everything grows simpler,
more harsh, more true. Still
the well is always there (and will
be) - like the man standing here
beside it in the dark courtyard
(strange blooming out-of-season
almond branch). A stone,
a star, a well. A cup of water
from a rainbarrel (or Tartar
wine). A circling dragon-boat
or scrap of origami writ
folded to float so lightly. . . there.
You fold Andromeda into a W,
a mountain range back into M.
You cup them in your palm
to make a diamond, or double-
diamond - cat's eyes, Pushkinian.
Delicate Blue Morpho wings
woven with microscopic strings
of quipu thread (gentian-
gentle, violet and red). A knit
crossroad, then - red, white -
streams into Cassiopeia's
mother-night (at last).
5.22.2000
The focus on the catamaran-ark is a focus on Jubilee (Bluejay-inversion), or the coming of justice & redemption & the kingdom of heaven. The angelic reality requires a vessel of some kind (shelter or modus operandi, womb or Grail). I realize this sounds a bit wacky & obscure.
1.30.2003
Mandelstam in one of his essays talks about poetry as the crossing of two strands: the verbal material & the impulse. Or sound & sense, to simplify. (Elena Corrigan's interesting book "Mandelshtam's Poetics" goes in depth into this concept.)
Achieved or received lyric forms add a third level, since these forms create signals of their own, another semiotic dimension. S.K. Heninger (in "Proportion Poetical") describes how the early sonnet form was designed as a replica or microcosm of cosmic creation (the 7 days in 14 lines). The coils of the sestina supply an undertone or overtone to the verbal statements.
So these received forms can act as invitations to send complex messages. For the most part, though, in late 20th-cent. US poetry, the invitation has been turned down. The motivations have been varied. For one thing, the modernist practices of Pound, Marianne Moore, WC Williams, ee cummings extended technical innovation far beyond the limits of these medieval and Renaissance forms. The populist impulse of free verse gave them an outmoded image. And the multiple alienations and "makings-strange" of postmodernist poetry made illegal, so to speak, the communicative contract of the traditional forms; they represented a fallacious, naive harmony, just as did the uncomplicated egocentrism of "mainstream" free verse.
In the 80s & 90s I was on a different track. As described earlier in this blog, I was in the process of absorbing & integrating a religious/Hebraic/incarnational worldview with making poetry; in the effort Mandelstam & Acmeism were serving as models & guides. At the same time I was getting interested in the long poem, as a way of formulating some kind of comprehensive vision/message. For me the problems were not the one posed by postmodernist anti-metaphysics or the stylistic differentiations & alienations of the New Americans. For me the problems were simpler, in a way: the means toward the conceptualization & articulation of a message which energized me. Direction, not indirection, was the aim.
So for a while, before I could manage long poems, or as a way of taking a break from that issue, I played with some of the received lyric forms. What I liked to do was "cross" them with other strands. So for example in a series of sort of autobiographical poems called "Midwest Elegies", I interwove allusions to early anglo-saxon forms. I was crossing my personal origins with the origins of poetry in English. I wrote a dream-vision ("Grain Elevator": see archive for Jan. 9); I put down a subtext of a.-s. laments & elegies into some of my own; & I wrote this little poem, crossing Hart Crane with a particular a.-s. riddle, along with the Song of Songs:
RUSTY EXIT RAMP
How many spears, frozen in phalanxes,
how many iron hills circled the fathers'
hope - chained waters of enmity,
cars harnessed for a pathway through the sea -
when, with a jesting wave, philosophies
of unsettled pyramids the fluted palm
of your promise whispers toward autumn
beneath twin-risen towers, O City of Cities!
This is a poem about Crane & New York; it's also about the displacement of hatred & despair by some kind of metaphysical/poetic intervention. It has a strange sound to me after 9/11.
To reiterate: at the time I was interested in "crossing" the lyric received forms with opposing material. By sending a fairly direct, simple message, via the traditional over-determined envelope of received forms, I was really doing the opposite of the encrypted, hermetic, disjunctive approaches of the contemporary postmodernist poets. For example, I wrote the following sestina in the mid-80s, when mass homelessness was still a shocking anomaly, before we had become so inured to & complicit with this social evil. I wanted to cross a very sophisticated literary form with a very unsophisticated message. The closing stanza, however, can be interpreted in several different ways.
DOWNTOWN SESTINA
Downtown is gleaming, a nest of glass
scant refuge for the homeless and the poor
who trudge along under looming towers
hungry, frazzled, begging small change
and subject to the better sort of people
whose eyes reflect the glitter of the city
And so many circles animate the city
captured in the high gloss of the glass
what's taken for the playground of the people
erases every doorstep of the poor
in sprawling ellipses of loose change
under the stolid mystery of these towers
Under the bright conundrum of these towers
these measuring rods allotting every city
gyroscopes adjusting every change
by whirling speculation in the glass
the downward spirals of the ornery poor
set stirring turbid shadows in the people
And shuttling promotions of the people
forecast by divination in the towers
(who's growing rich and who remaining poor)
start dancing fevers in the chattering city
and snarl the artist in her broken glass
frail craft undone by overmastering change
When fortune is the favored end of change
suburbia the limbo of the people
and tender conscience faints before the glass
rocketing skyward in pretentious towers:
to serve the sleek imaginary city
or swell the sullen rancor of the poor
Meanwhile the rhetoricians of the poor
in campus pockets rummaging for change
inscribe the true authoritative city
and mint sterling mementos of the people
studies wherein the mind serenely towers
over safe specimens tacked up under glass
So let's raise a glass to the dizzy city -
a toast to towers, and all red-faced people!
And drink for a change among the homespun poor.
3.16.86
Again, after 9/11, the poem has a strange feel.
Achieved or received lyric forms add a third level, since these forms create signals of their own, another semiotic dimension. S.K. Heninger (in "Proportion Poetical") describes how the early sonnet form was designed as a replica or microcosm of cosmic creation (the 7 days in 14 lines). The coils of the sestina supply an undertone or overtone to the verbal statements.
So these received forms can act as invitations to send complex messages. For the most part, though, in late 20th-cent. US poetry, the invitation has been turned down. The motivations have been varied. For one thing, the modernist practices of Pound, Marianne Moore, WC Williams, ee cummings extended technical innovation far beyond the limits of these medieval and Renaissance forms. The populist impulse of free verse gave them an outmoded image. And the multiple alienations and "makings-strange" of postmodernist poetry made illegal, so to speak, the communicative contract of the traditional forms; they represented a fallacious, naive harmony, just as did the uncomplicated egocentrism of "mainstream" free verse.
In the 80s & 90s I was on a different track. As described earlier in this blog, I was in the process of absorbing & integrating a religious/Hebraic/incarnational worldview with making poetry; in the effort Mandelstam & Acmeism were serving as models & guides. At the same time I was getting interested in the long poem, as a way of formulating some kind of comprehensive vision/message. For me the problems were not the one posed by postmodernist anti-metaphysics or the stylistic differentiations & alienations of the New Americans. For me the problems were simpler, in a way: the means toward the conceptualization & articulation of a message which energized me. Direction, not indirection, was the aim.
So for a while, before I could manage long poems, or as a way of taking a break from that issue, I played with some of the received lyric forms. What I liked to do was "cross" them with other strands. So for example in a series of sort of autobiographical poems called "Midwest Elegies", I interwove allusions to early anglo-saxon forms. I was crossing my personal origins with the origins of poetry in English. I wrote a dream-vision ("Grain Elevator": see archive for Jan. 9); I put down a subtext of a.-s. laments & elegies into some of my own; & I wrote this little poem, crossing Hart Crane with a particular a.-s. riddle, along with the Song of Songs:
RUSTY EXIT RAMP
How many spears, frozen in phalanxes,
how many iron hills circled the fathers'
hope - chained waters of enmity,
cars harnessed for a pathway through the sea -
when, with a jesting wave, philosophies
of unsettled pyramids the fluted palm
of your promise whispers toward autumn
beneath twin-risen towers, O City of Cities!
This is a poem about Crane & New York; it's also about the displacement of hatred & despair by some kind of metaphysical/poetic intervention. It has a strange sound to me after 9/11.
To reiterate: at the time I was interested in "crossing" the lyric received forms with opposing material. By sending a fairly direct, simple message, via the traditional over-determined envelope of received forms, I was really doing the opposite of the encrypted, hermetic, disjunctive approaches of the contemporary postmodernist poets. For example, I wrote the following sestina in the mid-80s, when mass homelessness was still a shocking anomaly, before we had become so inured to & complicit with this social evil. I wanted to cross a very sophisticated literary form with a very unsophisticated message. The closing stanza, however, can be interpreted in several different ways.
DOWNTOWN SESTINA
Downtown is gleaming, a nest of glass
scant refuge for the homeless and the poor
who trudge along under looming towers
hungry, frazzled, begging small change
and subject to the better sort of people
whose eyes reflect the glitter of the city
And so many circles animate the city
captured in the high gloss of the glass
what's taken for the playground of the people
erases every doorstep of the poor
in sprawling ellipses of loose change
under the stolid mystery of these towers
Under the bright conundrum of these towers
these measuring rods allotting every city
gyroscopes adjusting every change
by whirling speculation in the glass
the downward spirals of the ornery poor
set stirring turbid shadows in the people
And shuttling promotions of the people
forecast by divination in the towers
(who's growing rich and who remaining poor)
start dancing fevers in the chattering city
and snarl the artist in her broken glass
frail craft undone by overmastering change
When fortune is the favored end of change
suburbia the limbo of the people
and tender conscience faints before the glass
rocketing skyward in pretentious towers:
to serve the sleek imaginary city
or swell the sullen rancor of the poor
Meanwhile the rhetoricians of the poor
in campus pockets rummaging for change
inscribe the true authoritative city
and mint sterling mementos of the people
studies wherein the mind serenely towers
over safe specimens tacked up under glass
So let's raise a glass to the dizzy city -
a toast to towers, and all red-faced people!
And drink for a change among the homespun poor.
3.16.86
Again, after 9/11, the poem has a strange feel.
1.28.2003
So I will try to address again these two points & answer Socky at the same time; I have the feeling that if I can carefully define the idea of "metaform" it might deal with both issues.
Originally I proposed this notion of metaform as a critique of New Formalism - against the assumption that "forms" are all there is. But my point refers really to any emphasis on technique in isolation, whether by the formalism of traditionalists or the anti-formal formalism of innovators.
Form is the building design. Metaform is the actual building, in the open air, in its environment. Moshe Safdie on a hilltop seeing his 10 or 15 structures scattered around Jerusalem.
But poetry persists in a different kind of environment, differently social, conceptual, performative. Its atmosphere includes the intellectual & cultural context, the surrounding climate of its time. Thus for example part of the "metaform" of Wordsworth includes the climate he helped instigate - a new focus on "ordinary speech", folk music & balladry, "romance" in the medieval sense, and, most importantly, a spiritual doubt & questing around the foundations of received religion & 18th-century Enlightenment received ideas.
However, if we left it there, we would not be talking about poetry, but about the "form" of social & intellectual history in general. As I tried to point out earlier in this blog with reference to Mandelstam: metaform, in the context of poetry, has to do with a process of internalizing & creative re-making - the transmutation of cultural metaform into the inimitable aesthetic form of a new poetry.
We could think of metaform in terms of a process of a poet's development. It could be seen as a kind of oscillation or circle: first, the beginning poet practices & becomes practiced at received forms (in the technical sense of form - free verse, sonnet, etc.). After gaining a certain confidence, she or he applies this talent & newfound technique - seeks to engage with the culture at large through creating interesting, relevant works & offering them to the public. This is indeed a period of trial, as any poet knows who looks back at rejected poems of a long time ago or just yesterday: all those poems that fall short, either from lack of energy or shape, or from trying too hard to "sound like" poetry - and ending up sounding inauthentic: it's not really THEM speaking, it's an unconfident imitator of something already done before. If the poet persists, however - and through luck or effort or destiny discovers originality - the process of interiorizing the cultural metaform(s) of her time & place begins: the inimitable poems are made which exhibit an aesthetic, intellectual & human integrity. Often the late poems, at the end of this struggle, are the most beautiful. Occasionally the Rimbaud will arise whose originality short-circuits the whole process. But this originality is the cultural metaform, reflected in & transmuted into poetry.
OK, how does this relate to the 2nd issue - the assertion that "oppositional" poetics exists in a sort of dialectical or symbiotic relation to a larger tradition?
American ingenuity, starting with Whitman, Dickinson & Poe, valorized originally by Emerson & Thoreau, set in motion a certain cultural landscape or metaform. American poetry would be absolutely original, experimental & new in relation to the poetries of old. This idea was not developed in isolation, but in the context of more traditional poetics of Longfellow, Tennyson & others - it instigated a creative tension. It exploded into view with the Modernists of the first 2 decades of the 20th century. However, it was (fortunately) never "resolved". Both Eliot & Pound, for example, but primarily Eliot, revealed a Janus-faced approach to innovation, and as time went on, the traditionalist Eliot came to the fore - pressing the notion of a single European Christian culture and a poetics aligned with the Renaissance & Dante. Eliot had tremendous influence on the critical & pedagogical developments represented by New Criticism & the southern poets, Ransom, Tate & others. Their influence, in turn, was so strong that when Lowell broke with them in the 50s and began writing confessional free verse, it seemed to mark a sea-change in American poetry. But that was only the beginning. The 50s & 60s brought on a multifaceted expansion/revolt in US poetry activity. The revolt was aimed against both cultural and aesthetic norms. "Aesthetic norms" - when crystallized in prescriptive or traditionalist poetics & pedagogy - seemed like an oxymoron, when the essence of lyric poetry seemed to involve spontaneity, openness, a rejection of social controls, and dream-work or surrealism.
So, by the 1970s and 80s, the US had produced a smorgasbord of different approaches to poetry-making, along with an academic "creative writing" industry. At this late date, in this conflicted environment, how can one possibly suggest that there is a "tradition-at-large"?
During the same period, of course, there was an effort through translation & anthology-making to expand the vistas of tradition & possible models. But their is a difference between translating or anthologizing on the one hand, and creating a new poem or work of poetry on the other. The cultural metaform - whatever shapes & boundaries it may exhibit - must be interiorized and recapitulated in new aesthetic forms & works. In the Middle Ages, poetic mastery was represented in the model of the "wheel of Virgil": the poet's movement from lyric contingency, to didactic purpose (the Georgics), to epic vision - in the process producing a world-image or culture-image - a reflection of the culture as an entirety.
Lyric contingency (or receptivity, openness), didactic conscience or purpose, epic or religious vision - these impulses perhaps underlie the application of the whole variety of technical approaches, specific forms & genres, etc. The US context or heritage is marked by a conjunction of extremes: the extremity of Emerson, Whitman & Dickinson's revolt against British norms; the extremity of Eliot's reassertion of traditionalism. Extremity lends itself to "scene-making": young poets are influenced by the notion that a particular technical approach, idiom, or cultural attitude is a momentous commitment. In a sense, it is: but the decision to follow a particular model is only the beginning of the process of making original poetry - the process leading from form to metaform & on to new form which I outlined above. This is a fact which is often lost to view.
If we take into consideration something like the underlying impulses behind the Virgilian wheel - and add to it a consideration of the developmental process (form/metaform/originality) - we may begin to recognize the outlines of a "tradition-at-large": the character of poetic making as experienced at all times & places. This perennial character might serve to set the US experience of extremes in a new context. Within this context, perhaps we can approach what's been done and is being done - as readers and critics - with an eye not only toward the influence of idioms & scene-makers, but toward how individual poets have interiorized & re-presented both the materials of poetry per se, and the "metaforms" of the surrounding culture. Keeping the underlying impulses in mind, we might be more ready to recognize new lyric poetry, new didactic poetry - and eventually the challenges of poetic & social vision implied by epic.
Originally I proposed this notion of metaform as a critique of New Formalism - against the assumption that "forms" are all there is. But my point refers really to any emphasis on technique in isolation, whether by the formalism of traditionalists or the anti-formal formalism of innovators.
Form is the building design. Metaform is the actual building, in the open air, in its environment. Moshe Safdie on a hilltop seeing his 10 or 15 structures scattered around Jerusalem.
But poetry persists in a different kind of environment, differently social, conceptual, performative. Its atmosphere includes the intellectual & cultural context, the surrounding climate of its time. Thus for example part of the "metaform" of Wordsworth includes the climate he helped instigate - a new focus on "ordinary speech", folk music & balladry, "romance" in the medieval sense, and, most importantly, a spiritual doubt & questing around the foundations of received religion & 18th-century Enlightenment received ideas.
However, if we left it there, we would not be talking about poetry, but about the "form" of social & intellectual history in general. As I tried to point out earlier in this blog with reference to Mandelstam: metaform, in the context of poetry, has to do with a process of internalizing & creative re-making - the transmutation of cultural metaform into the inimitable aesthetic form of a new poetry.
We could think of metaform in terms of a process of a poet's development. It could be seen as a kind of oscillation or circle: first, the beginning poet practices & becomes practiced at received forms (in the technical sense of form - free verse, sonnet, etc.). After gaining a certain confidence, she or he applies this talent & newfound technique - seeks to engage with the culture at large through creating interesting, relevant works & offering them to the public. This is indeed a period of trial, as any poet knows who looks back at rejected poems of a long time ago or just yesterday: all those poems that fall short, either from lack of energy or shape, or from trying too hard to "sound like" poetry - and ending up sounding inauthentic: it's not really THEM speaking, it's an unconfident imitator of something already done before. If the poet persists, however - and through luck or effort or destiny discovers originality - the process of interiorizing the cultural metaform(s) of her time & place begins: the inimitable poems are made which exhibit an aesthetic, intellectual & human integrity. Often the late poems, at the end of this struggle, are the most beautiful. Occasionally the Rimbaud will arise whose originality short-circuits the whole process. But this originality is the cultural metaform, reflected in & transmuted into poetry.
OK, how does this relate to the 2nd issue - the assertion that "oppositional" poetics exists in a sort of dialectical or symbiotic relation to a larger tradition?
American ingenuity, starting with Whitman, Dickinson & Poe, valorized originally by Emerson & Thoreau, set in motion a certain cultural landscape or metaform. American poetry would be absolutely original, experimental & new in relation to the poetries of old. This idea was not developed in isolation, but in the context of more traditional poetics of Longfellow, Tennyson & others - it instigated a creative tension. It exploded into view with the Modernists of the first 2 decades of the 20th century. However, it was (fortunately) never "resolved". Both Eliot & Pound, for example, but primarily Eliot, revealed a Janus-faced approach to innovation, and as time went on, the traditionalist Eliot came to the fore - pressing the notion of a single European Christian culture and a poetics aligned with the Renaissance & Dante. Eliot had tremendous influence on the critical & pedagogical developments represented by New Criticism & the southern poets, Ransom, Tate & others. Their influence, in turn, was so strong that when Lowell broke with them in the 50s and began writing confessional free verse, it seemed to mark a sea-change in American poetry. But that was only the beginning. The 50s & 60s brought on a multifaceted expansion/revolt in US poetry activity. The revolt was aimed against both cultural and aesthetic norms. "Aesthetic norms" - when crystallized in prescriptive or traditionalist poetics & pedagogy - seemed like an oxymoron, when the essence of lyric poetry seemed to involve spontaneity, openness, a rejection of social controls, and dream-work or surrealism.
So, by the 1970s and 80s, the US had produced a smorgasbord of different approaches to poetry-making, along with an academic "creative writing" industry. At this late date, in this conflicted environment, how can one possibly suggest that there is a "tradition-at-large"?
During the same period, of course, there was an effort through translation & anthology-making to expand the vistas of tradition & possible models. But their is a difference between translating or anthologizing on the one hand, and creating a new poem or work of poetry on the other. The cultural metaform - whatever shapes & boundaries it may exhibit - must be interiorized and recapitulated in new aesthetic forms & works. In the Middle Ages, poetic mastery was represented in the model of the "wheel of Virgil": the poet's movement from lyric contingency, to didactic purpose (the Georgics), to epic vision - in the process producing a world-image or culture-image - a reflection of the culture as an entirety.
Lyric contingency (or receptivity, openness), didactic conscience or purpose, epic or religious vision - these impulses perhaps underlie the application of the whole variety of technical approaches, specific forms & genres, etc. The US context or heritage is marked by a conjunction of extremes: the extremity of Emerson, Whitman & Dickinson's revolt against British norms; the extremity of Eliot's reassertion of traditionalism. Extremity lends itself to "scene-making": young poets are influenced by the notion that a particular technical approach, idiom, or cultural attitude is a momentous commitment. In a sense, it is: but the decision to follow a particular model is only the beginning of the process of making original poetry - the process leading from form to metaform & on to new form which I outlined above. This is a fact which is often lost to view.
If we take into consideration something like the underlying impulses behind the Virgilian wheel - and add to it a consideration of the developmental process (form/metaform/originality) - we may begin to recognize the outlines of a "tradition-at-large": the character of poetic making as experienced at all times & places. This perennial character might serve to set the US experience of extremes in a new context. Within this context, perhaps we can approach what's been done and is being done - as readers and critics - with an eye not only toward the influence of idioms & scene-makers, but toward how individual poets have interiorized & re-presented both the materials of poetry per se, and the "metaforms" of the surrounding culture. Keeping the underlying impulses in mind, we might be more ready to recognize new lyric poetry, new didactic poetry - and eventually the challenges of poetic & social vision implied by epic.
I have been doing this blog for almost a month. Looking back, often embarrassed by the incoherence & obscurity of some of my pronouncements on poetics (especially in the last few days).
Current emanations from some of the blogs listed to your left point up the ambivalence, ambiguity, controversy at the borderline of poetry & politics, poems & "scenes".
Two things that have recurred in my comments: 1. search for a way of thinking about "form" (form & "metaform", etc.); 2. the assertion that "oppositional" poetics has to be seen in relation to a sometimes invisible tradition-at-large.
Am I making this up? I can hear Socrates or some other interlocutor immediately challenge me : "To the contrary, sir: Tradition is a construct - its definition will vary depending on the motivations of interested groups & individuals. Tradition is the embattled prize of divisive culture(s). So your version of T-at-large is likewise an interest-driven imaginary construct, no more valid than any other."
I have to go for the moment but maybe can figure this out later.
Current emanations from some of the blogs listed to your left point up the ambivalence, ambiguity, controversy at the borderline of poetry & politics, poems & "scenes".
Two things that have recurred in my comments: 1. search for a way of thinking about "form" (form & "metaform", etc.); 2. the assertion that "oppositional" poetics has to be seen in relation to a sometimes invisible tradition-at-large.
Am I making this up? I can hear Socrates or some other interlocutor immediately challenge me : "To the contrary, sir: Tradition is a construct - its definition will vary depending on the motivations of interested groups & individuals. Tradition is the embattled prize of divisive culture(s). So your version of T-at-large is likewise an interest-driven imaginary construct, no more valid than any other."
I have to go for the moment but maybe can figure this out later.
1.25.2003
APHORISMS
Wallace Stevens jotted down some notes about the equation poetry = life. Figure it out, Sore Bun.
I HATE SPEECH (Grenier) appears to come straight out of Derrida. What is a salience? A salience is an excrescence. A surplus, an extra. The extra special something in the way you dress that appeals to me. The text as surplus, divagation (Ashbery & Bernstein alike). Sparky light. Different.
I wish I could quote S.K. Heninger Jr.'s entire book (Proportion Poetical : the subtext of form in the English Renaissance). He's read them carefully (the philosophy, the philology). Today's NY TImes on the new science of Networks: look at Heninger. He shows the line of descent from the Renaissance: from the new scientific empiricism, through enlightenment deism, to Romantic ego-sublime, to Modern angst, to postmodern deconstruction. From Saussure through New Critics to Derrida. But he shows what they left out from Saussure: the local networks of meanings which limit the arbitrariness of differential signs. "Brown" is ONLY arbitrary (or differential - ie. according to Saussure, "brown" only means "what is not red, blue or the other colors") within the sub-class COLORS. & how Derrida tried to erase late Saussure on the consistent "human nature" (which assigns meaning to local categories or classes of things), by relegating it to an "absent trace" which is self-contradictory (by the same token the image of his own logical slippage).
Why is this important or anything?
I'm going to prove how the sub-networks of US poetry (Olsonian, NY Schoolian, langpo) WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT, are positive contributors to a more comprehensive theory of poetry which transcends the postmodern condition. Poetry = life, because Ashbery's evasion, Grenier's denial, Olson's psycho-mytho are built on a dialectical feint around Stevens's equation, which parallels the Renaissance/Modern/Postmodern dialectical feint around the ancient/medieval Logos of nature.
The lighthouse is not a mode of differance. The foghorn likewise. Simple indication of rocks nearby. "Human nature" establishes local pointers via speech.
I started this blog writing about the special symbiosis of sound + sense which is poetry. Dialectic of "musical form" (metrics, song) + meaning: a semiotics of sensual or mathematical form alternating with a semiotics of language. The harmonic coherences which arise from this doubleness set poetry apart from prose. THERE IS NO NEED FOR AN ADDITIONAL DISTINCTION (the differances, the evasions, the myths). These additional distinctions are built upon merely partial & polemical philosophical foundations.
Poetry is the sign of the inherent harmonic nature of reality (a Stevensian notion). Philosophical systems built upon denial (post-Renaissance) are only half of the dialectic, and as such they distort the embodiments of language, poetry's material.
Poetry is not a New Critical "material" built on an autonomous system of differences ("language"). Both language & poetry are human harmonic gestures toward either real things or real imaginary fables.
The sound of your singing bears
"Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were a part."
Wallace Stevens jotted down some notes about the equation poetry = life. Figure it out, Sore Bun.
I HATE SPEECH (Grenier) appears to come straight out of Derrida. What is a salience? A salience is an excrescence. A surplus, an extra. The extra special something in the way you dress that appeals to me. The text as surplus, divagation (Ashbery & Bernstein alike). Sparky light. Different.
I wish I could quote S.K. Heninger Jr.'s entire book (Proportion Poetical : the subtext of form in the English Renaissance). He's read them carefully (the philosophy, the philology). Today's NY TImes on the new science of Networks: look at Heninger. He shows the line of descent from the Renaissance: from the new scientific empiricism, through enlightenment deism, to Romantic ego-sublime, to Modern angst, to postmodern deconstruction. From Saussure through New Critics to Derrida. But he shows what they left out from Saussure: the local networks of meanings which limit the arbitrariness of differential signs. "Brown" is ONLY arbitrary (or differential - ie. according to Saussure, "brown" only means "what is not red, blue or the other colors") within the sub-class COLORS. & how Derrida tried to erase late Saussure on the consistent "human nature" (which assigns meaning to local categories or classes of things), by relegating it to an "absent trace" which is self-contradictory (by the same token the image of his own logical slippage).
Why is this important or anything?
I'm going to prove how the sub-networks of US poetry (Olsonian, NY Schoolian, langpo) WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT, are positive contributors to a more comprehensive theory of poetry which transcends the postmodern condition. Poetry = life, because Ashbery's evasion, Grenier's denial, Olson's psycho-mytho are built on a dialectical feint around Stevens's equation, which parallels the Renaissance/Modern/Postmodern dialectical feint around the ancient/medieval Logos of nature.
The lighthouse is not a mode of differance. The foghorn likewise. Simple indication of rocks nearby. "Human nature" establishes local pointers via speech.
I started this blog writing about the special symbiosis of sound + sense which is poetry. Dialectic of "musical form" (metrics, song) + meaning: a semiotics of sensual or mathematical form alternating with a semiotics of language. The harmonic coherences which arise from this doubleness set poetry apart from prose. THERE IS NO NEED FOR AN ADDITIONAL DISTINCTION (the differances, the evasions, the myths). These additional distinctions are built upon merely partial & polemical philosophical foundations.
Poetry is the sign of the inherent harmonic nature of reality (a Stevensian notion). Philosophical systems built upon denial (post-Renaissance) are only half of the dialectic, and as such they distort the embodiments of language, poetry's material.
Poetry is not a New Critical "material" built on an autonomous system of differences ("language"). Both language & poetry are human harmonic gestures toward either real things or real imaginary fables.
The sound of your singing bears
"Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were a part."
1.23.2003
Socrates: Hen, you AWFUL good at glurping out them shimmery concept-bubbles which unfortunately tend to pop before they drop. This gander about "para-form" fits the genre to a T. Sound sushpicioushly like a dead end again.
Henry: Well, I know, Socky. The special temptation to verbalize from the preconscious cortex afflicts us daily.
Socrates: the question I have for you is, ain't "conceptual" form been done about 30 yrs ago, with a lot of boring art anyway?
Henry: Likely so. But maybe the deal with poetry is somewhat different, since the verbal & the conceptual are such close cousins. & often poetic expression tries to put into words the pre- or nonverbal aesthetic/conceptual apprehensions which are also represented in music & painting.
Socrates: And?
Henry: Well, in the essay on Form which I put into this blog a couple weeks ago (Jan 6), and in the interview in Jacket with Kent Johnson, I was trying to get at this idea a little more. The Form essay draws on Rifatterre's study of poetics, which emphasizes the close relation between aesthetic form in poetry (poetics), and semeiosis. The poem is a signal of wavering or variant meaning(s) - not hermetic, but not disclosed in a fixed form either. I would like to build on that notion of the poem as an allusive object of multivalent meaning (simultaneously self- and other-referential, self-sufficient & symbiotic), by adding to it the meta-role of the poet in culture & history. The role I have in mind is a figure (one among others) for the role of the artist in general.
Socrates: & ?
Henry: Think of Yeats, for example. Engelberg's great monograph on him, "Vast Design", brings out the depth and variousness of Yeats' interactions with other arts, particularly painting & drama, and theorizes a "European" concept of all-round culture (he compares Yeats with Goethe in this respect). (Hey, OK, think of Ashbery too if you want.) A unity of being toward which Yeats yearned.
Socrates: Et?
Henry: Et in consequendum heh-heh. The formalities of what US poets have come to think of as formalism languish like chunks of grid-architecture tossed by the side of the highway if they are not integrated into some more natural/traditional sense of aesthetic form - beauty, if you will. In this respect maybe I'm close to the perspective of the US/Israeli architect Moshe Safdie (featured in a recent NYorker article). Beauty that is "functional" in a cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual way all at once. & in a social sense this is perhaps the "unity of effect" for which the utterances of the poet correlate local formalisms informalisms & semiotic signals. The telos of technique. Para-form.
Henry: Well, I know, Socky. The special temptation to verbalize from the preconscious cortex afflicts us daily.
Socrates: the question I have for you is, ain't "conceptual" form been done about 30 yrs ago, with a lot of boring art anyway?
Henry: Likely so. But maybe the deal with poetry is somewhat different, since the verbal & the conceptual are such close cousins. & often poetic expression tries to put into words the pre- or nonverbal aesthetic/conceptual apprehensions which are also represented in music & painting.
Socrates: And?
Henry: Well, in the essay on Form which I put into this blog a couple weeks ago (Jan 6), and in the interview in Jacket with Kent Johnson, I was trying to get at this idea a little more. The Form essay draws on Rifatterre's study of poetics, which emphasizes the close relation between aesthetic form in poetry (poetics), and semeiosis. The poem is a signal of wavering or variant meaning(s) - not hermetic, but not disclosed in a fixed form either. I would like to build on that notion of the poem as an allusive object of multivalent meaning (simultaneously self- and other-referential, self-sufficient & symbiotic), by adding to it the meta-role of the poet in culture & history. The role I have in mind is a figure (one among others) for the role of the artist in general.
Socrates: & ?
Henry: Think of Yeats, for example. Engelberg's great monograph on him, "Vast Design", brings out the depth and variousness of Yeats' interactions with other arts, particularly painting & drama, and theorizes a "European" concept of all-round culture (he compares Yeats with Goethe in this respect). (Hey, OK, think of Ashbery too if you want.) A unity of being toward which Yeats yearned.
Socrates: Et?
Henry: Et in consequendum heh-heh. The formalities of what US poets have come to think of as formalism languish like chunks of grid-architecture tossed by the side of the highway if they are not integrated into some more natural/traditional sense of aesthetic form - beauty, if you will. In this respect maybe I'm close to the perspective of the US/Israeli architect Moshe Safdie (featured in a recent NYorker article). Beauty that is "functional" in a cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual way all at once. & in a social sense this is perhaps the "unity of effect" for which the utterances of the poet correlate local formalisms informalisms & semiotic signals. The telos of technique. Para-form.
Formalism. For a while I tried to run through all the forms in Lewis Turco's Book of Forms. But I've come to believe that the unique & particular worldview of the individual poet - as it interacts with the "cultural thinking" of the society as a mass - and as translated into aesthetic choices - creates a sort of para-form or conceptual armature within the poet's oeuvre. Maybe I can try to explore that further at some point. Omry Ronen argues that this parallel between the poet's role and the "sleepy" social group-mind is a major theme of Mandelstam's "Flint Ode" (see Ronen's book Approach to Mandelstam).
Anyway, here's one of my formal efforts. My wife & I bought a print, produced by a special technique of wiping the ink-covered plate (I forget the name for this). At the time we met the artist, Sylvia Petrie. Eventually I wrote the following poem, & sent her a copy. She wrote back to tell me that the image was not actually from nature, but from an etching in an old edition of "Piers Plowman". The poem uses a Portuguese form called the "glose" which I think is interesting in its own right.
ON AN UNTITLED PRINT
for Sylvia Petrie
The work is finished in the dark.
The world's invisible, unknown.
A night of snowfall leaves its mark.
It will remain, when we are gone.
Inside the silver picture frame
frozen winter night has come.
An image like a negative.
Black ink feathered off, by hand,
imprints a landscape (winter gloom).
The traces of your handiwork
are what gives light - the glowing land
flows down (from hills to scattered sand)
in random touches. . . flick and fleck.
The work is finished in the dark.
This labor scatters into day
like Monday mornings - who can say
what these wayward shapes contrive?
Triangular, amid uncertainties,
one tiny house (snowbound, lonely)
gleams (nestled, shrunken)
between the looming cedar trees
and those unclear interstices
which could be universe - or none.
The world's invisible, unknown.
The picture hangs against a wall
where afternoon light sometimes falls,
and sometimes (strangely) time will give
instead of take. . . and I can see
what you were doing, after all.
Through curving space, look
back. . . into reclusive memory.
This house, this hill, this endless sea
were yours. Engravèd. Cold and stark.
A night of snowfall leaves its mark.
We grow away from home forever.
Epitaphs for each survivor
elevate the long perspective.
Parallels we harvested
return. As in a childhood fever
everything we once disowned
(what seemed frivolous, detested
chaos) now coheres. Nested
on a hillside, sloping down. . .
it will remain, when we are gone.
3.23.97
Anyway, here's one of my formal efforts. My wife & I bought a print, produced by a special technique of wiping the ink-covered plate (I forget the name for this). At the time we met the artist, Sylvia Petrie. Eventually I wrote the following poem, & sent her a copy. She wrote back to tell me that the image was not actually from nature, but from an etching in an old edition of "Piers Plowman". The poem uses a Portuguese form called the "glose" which I think is interesting in its own right.
ON AN UNTITLED PRINT
for Sylvia Petrie
The work is finished in the dark.
The world's invisible, unknown.
A night of snowfall leaves its mark.
It will remain, when we are gone.
Inside the silver picture frame
frozen winter night has come.
An image like a negative.
Black ink feathered off, by hand,
imprints a landscape (winter gloom).
The traces of your handiwork
are what gives light - the glowing land
flows down (from hills to scattered sand)
in random touches. . . flick and fleck.
The work is finished in the dark.
This labor scatters into day
like Monday mornings - who can say
what these wayward shapes contrive?
Triangular, amid uncertainties,
one tiny house (snowbound, lonely)
gleams (nestled, shrunken)
between the looming cedar trees
and those unclear interstices
which could be universe - or none.
The world's invisible, unknown.
The picture hangs against a wall
where afternoon light sometimes falls,
and sometimes (strangely) time will give
instead of take. . . and I can see
what you were doing, after all.
Through curving space, look
back. . . into reclusive memory.
This house, this hill, this endless sea
were yours. Engravèd. Cold and stark.
A night of snowfall leaves its mark.
We grow away from home forever.
Epitaphs for each survivor
elevate the long perspective.
Parallels we harvested
return. As in a childhood fever
everything we once disowned
(what seemed frivolous, detested
chaos) now coheres. Nested
on a hillside, sloping down. . .
it will remain, when we are gone.
3.23.97
1.16.2003
Blackstone was born on March 5th. He was buried on May 28th. Blackstone serves as the genius loci or presiding spirit, Henry's Lenten "shriver" (Blackstone was an Anglican minister); this is "Blackstone's Law". Book 3, "July", ends on March 5th. Book 4, "Blackstone's Day-Book", ends on May 28. The basic unit of Book 2, "Grassblade Light", is the poem of 7 stanzas, or 28 lines. The basic unit of "July" is the poem of 28 stanzas. 28 is a "moon-number": silvery, reflective, hermetic. The structure of Forth of July is built on 28 and 29.
Both Anna Akhmatova & Joseph Stalin died on March 5th.
Both Anna Akhmatova & Joseph Stalin died on March 5th.
The "occasional" aspect of this poem can be sketched out as follows: it was written on Nov. 22, the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. It is also the birthday of former longtime RI Senator Claiborne Pell. Pell lives in Newport, where JFK & Jackie Onassis were married. There is a "memorial" aspect built into Forth of July as a whole, around the numbers 28 & 29. The poem closes in various points on Good Friday, in particular April 15, the day of the year both Lincoln and Cesar Vallejo died. There are many more instances of this sort of calendrical design, a few of which I have already mentioned here: such as 5.28, the saint's day of Guillem de Gellone, & the day William Blackstone was buried - this being the day before 5.29, JFK's (& Henry-narrator's) birthday. The central poem of the entire book is titled "Ghost Dance", the implication being that the poem sort of scripts a re-birth or resurrection of all the ghosts it memorializes. Probably the most direct version of this is the carnivalizing of the name "Henry", which plays on the idea of John Berryman's "Henry" redivivus (Berryman, as I have mentioned, died within sight of my grandparent's home on River Road, along the Mississippi). (See this poem from the sonnet sequence Island Road.) All this play around ghosts, names, iconic figures from history, birthdays & dying days & saints days, is a way of presenting a carnivalesque image of Incarnation.
1.13.2003
I want to write a little more about the longo pome which took up so many years of my life (Stubborn Grew & its sequels).
In the early 90s rhyming became easy through a lot of practice. Should rhyming be easy? Probably not, but as any musician knows, momentum is important, & in my poetry it was compositional momentum which rhyming & repetitive stanza forms helped along. I was also very interested in Alastair Fowler's studies of numerical & ring structures in Renaissance poetry, & using these techniques became another way to keep momentum. These techniques give the poet permission to take a deep breath & really EXPAND the poem.
However, in my trial runs in the early 90s ("Spring Quartet") I discovered I'd written long stretches in which the techniques took over, leaving me with a sort of facile, tinny, superficial rhetoric. The same thing sometimes happened in shorter poems where I used a special form (pantoum, sestina, etc.) - but they were good practice.
When I came back to these methods in the later 90s I tried to be both more careful & less subservient to the techniques. But again, what triggered "Stubborn Grew", what really gave me entry, were Mandelstam's late poems (Moscow Notebooks, Voronezh Notebooks especially). Two things in particular appealed to me. First was the notion of drafts & sequences - short lyrics which were also parts of a larger set. That gave me the idea I could write "chapters" of a long poem based on this idea. The second, and more important, was something M. accomplished under duress, in the Voronezh poems. It was a conjunction of opposites he achieves in those brief, notational lyrics. In a word, they combine finality with contingency. On one hand they are brief, contingent, composed under conditions of extreme stress and suffering: they radiate the intense feeling of being "on the road". Yet on the other hand they PAUSE: the poems are contemplative moments of stasis and awareness. Actually the title of my book of short poems, "Way Stations", typifies this conjunction.
What this manner I found in the Voronezh poems gave me, was a means of starting out with "Stubborn". Rather than over-planning or calculating, I let the short poems come as they would, keeping in mind the general threads of where I was going. So the first "chapter" of the poem leads into the narrative by means of this sort of glancing notation. & I was really amazed, much later, to see how those early note-poems prefigured the larger structures & themes of the poem as a whole.
What also happened later was that the note form became formalized or stylized. By the time I was writing the first sequel to Stubborn ("Grassblade Light"), I was able to combine the same sort of aleatory approach to the individual units, with a much more articulated & formal set of ring-structures. "Grassblade" is a set of seven panel-chapters; each chapter laid out around a central section; the fourth (central) chapter is a double chapter (so in a numerical sense there are actually 8 sections). Each individual poem has 28 lines (7 rhymed quatrains). Each chapter has 28 poems with a central section (making 29). There are variations & planned "breaks" in this symmetry. & there are thematic elements & calendar dates (of composition) which relate to this symmetry (the design was actually modelled on an octagonal castle in southern Italy built by Emperor Frederick II. Sounds kind of silly but there it is). The 3rd sequel - "July" - revises this kind of patterning & takes it further. The final sequel - "Blackstone's Day-Book" - a brief coda, finished on anniversary of the day William Blackstone (Anglican hermit-pioneer-exile-scholar-preacher, who settled in RI before Roger Williams) died: 5.28.2000. Also the saint's day of an ancestor of mine, Guillem de Gellone, one of Charlemagne's generals turned monk - celebrated in the French chansons de geste (the Chansons de Guillaume d'Orange) (sounds kind of silly but there it is).
In the early 90s rhyming became easy through a lot of practice. Should rhyming be easy? Probably not, but as any musician knows, momentum is important, & in my poetry it was compositional momentum which rhyming & repetitive stanza forms helped along. I was also very interested in Alastair Fowler's studies of numerical & ring structures in Renaissance poetry, & using these techniques became another way to keep momentum. These techniques give the poet permission to take a deep breath & really EXPAND the poem.
However, in my trial runs in the early 90s ("Spring Quartet") I discovered I'd written long stretches in which the techniques took over, leaving me with a sort of facile, tinny, superficial rhetoric. The same thing sometimes happened in shorter poems where I used a special form (pantoum, sestina, etc.) - but they were good practice.
When I came back to these methods in the later 90s I tried to be both more careful & less subservient to the techniques. But again, what triggered "Stubborn Grew", what really gave me entry, were Mandelstam's late poems (Moscow Notebooks, Voronezh Notebooks especially). Two things in particular appealed to me. First was the notion of drafts & sequences - short lyrics which were also parts of a larger set. That gave me the idea I could write "chapters" of a long poem based on this idea. The second, and more important, was something M. accomplished under duress, in the Voronezh poems. It was a conjunction of opposites he achieves in those brief, notational lyrics. In a word, they combine finality with contingency. On one hand they are brief, contingent, composed under conditions of extreme stress and suffering: they radiate the intense feeling of being "on the road". Yet on the other hand they PAUSE: the poems are contemplative moments of stasis and awareness. Actually the title of my book of short poems, "Way Stations", typifies this conjunction.
What this manner I found in the Voronezh poems gave me, was a means of starting out with "Stubborn". Rather than over-planning or calculating, I let the short poems come as they would, keeping in mind the general threads of where I was going. So the first "chapter" of the poem leads into the narrative by means of this sort of glancing notation. & I was really amazed, much later, to see how those early note-poems prefigured the larger structures & themes of the poem as a whole.
What also happened later was that the note form became formalized or stylized. By the time I was writing the first sequel to Stubborn ("Grassblade Light"), I was able to combine the same sort of aleatory approach to the individual units, with a much more articulated & formal set of ring-structures. "Grassblade" is a set of seven panel-chapters; each chapter laid out around a central section; the fourth (central) chapter is a double chapter (so in a numerical sense there are actually 8 sections). Each individual poem has 28 lines (7 rhymed quatrains). Each chapter has 28 poems with a central section (making 29). There are variations & planned "breaks" in this symmetry. & there are thematic elements & calendar dates (of composition) which relate to this symmetry (the design was actually modelled on an octagonal castle in southern Italy built by Emperor Frederick II. Sounds kind of silly but there it is). The 3rd sequel - "July" - revises this kind of patterning & takes it further. The final sequel - "Blackstone's Day-Book" - a brief coda, finished on anniversary of the day William Blackstone (Anglican hermit-pioneer-exile-scholar-preacher, who settled in RI before Roger Williams) died: 5.28.2000. Also the saint's day of an ancestor of mine, Guillem de Gellone, one of Charlemagne's generals turned monk - celebrated in the French chansons de geste (the Chansons de Guillaume d'Orange) (sounds kind of silly but there it is).
1.11.2003
Second thought about epic judgements of previous day. Pound's "failing" method still let in more texture of reality, its violence & alienation, the feel of a speechless powerless person, anonymous. In the interstices between his arrogance & bigotry. In this Olson was history repeating itself with even less (more) success, perhaps.
Still. . . what does form provide? The mistake of the 20th cent. poets was to think that it is functional, in an obvious way. What form provides is distance. Form humbles the poet, or should.
Too many poets trust words & themselves too much - the blather & overreaching comes across as complacency, shallow. Words, words, words. Form provides distance & silence. The song does more with what it doesn't say. We are moved by the mortality & closure of the song, its limits. It's finished. We identify deeply with that.
*
One of my favorite writers is Alfred Schwaid, whom I would never have discovered on my own: he sent some stories to Nedge. I published everything he sent. He writes very short stories. They remind me of Kafka & Beckett but are also completely unique. His only collection, that I know of, is a chapbook called "Everything Else is Everything Else", published in Austin Texas in 1994 by Experimental Chapbook Press.
Still. . . what does form provide? The mistake of the 20th cent. poets was to think that it is functional, in an obvious way. What form provides is distance. Form humbles the poet, or should.
Too many poets trust words & themselves too much - the blather & overreaching comes across as complacency, shallow. Words, words, words. Form provides distance & silence. The song does more with what it doesn't say. We are moved by the mortality & closure of the song, its limits. It's finished. We identify deeply with that.
*
One of my favorite writers is Alfred Schwaid, whom I would never have discovered on my own: he sent some stories to Nedge. I published everything he sent. He writes very short stories. They remind me of Kafka & Beckett but are also completely unique. His only collection, that I know of, is a chapbook called "Everything Else is Everything Else", published in Austin Texas in 1994 by Experimental Chapbook Press.
1.06.2003
an old unpublished essay !!
What is Form in Poetry ?
"Form". The word does what it says. Faring forth from its opening "f" and curling around the double fortification of lips and teeth until sealed by its moated "m". Form does what it says. Form is that which does what it says.
Form is shape and pattern. At its simplest, form is iteration: repetition, rhyme, and the variations (reiterations) offered by the opportunities of echo. Shape emerges from iteration: fractal, stochastic, and flexible. Shape and pattern respond to every demand: form is nothing but infinite flexibility and responsiveness. The great works of music grow from a single bar of melody into huge, variegated mountains of sound, carrying all the emotional, thematic, and generic weight in the universe.
Traditionally, there have been two broad attitudes toward form. The romantic attitude and the classical attitude correspond to what might be called a structural (or biological) and a logical (or mathematical) approach, respectively. The romantic understands form as a natural growth, a structural necessity, like an unusual shell curling around a single muscle of Spirit. The classicist or neo-classicist understands form as generic perfection: a simultaneous harking-back and making-new. The Classics are considered perfect models, shards of a Golden Age toward which the classicist aspires to return, by recreating a design equal to and worthy of its predecessors (and progenitors). I call this a "logical" approach because error is eliminated by the standard set by the notion of perfection. Thus to create, or recreate, a classical work is a task requiring objectivity above all.
These attitudes persist to the present day. Poets who aspire to innovation repeat the neo-Romantic dictum that "form is only an extension of content". Poets who respect the logic of form insist on contemporary versions of traditional models for rhyme, meter, and stanzaic design. Rather than falling into two simple camps, however, poets engage in all manner of cross-breeding: innovative poets invent new formal constraints which have their own strict logic; traditional poets incorporate popular lingo and newsworthy subject-matter.
These two traditional attitudes to form, so often contrasted with each other, share a common underlying trait: they are impersonal. Underlying the Romantic position is a biological concept of form: the poem grows organically from the seed of inspiration into a full-blown flower. Beneath the Classical position lies the relentless logic of perfection: the poem aspires to the condition of its models.
If we think of form in terms of semantics, or semiotics - as a kind of signal - we come closer to the personal impulse which motivates form and formal choice. Consider the most basic signal: the dot-dash-dot underlying both the telegraph and the computer. Think of a form - say the sonnet, or the epic poem - as only half of this basic signal: as a dot, or a dash. This is the conceptual status of the formal model as it awaits fulfillment in the poet's composition, which still lies ahead, not yet carried out. The poet is very well aware that his or her concept of "the sonnet" or "the epic" is incomplete, personalized, inchoate, based on partial hearing and permeated with subjectivity, shaded by personal motives. She hears only half the signal. The work undertaken is a process of generating another half-signal, to create a semiotic or communicative equilibrium - to send a message, to fill an imaginary conch with sound.
Thus, the impulse underlying form is neither structural nor mathematical, biological nor logical. It is semiotic, semantic. It is an impulse to communicate with someone. The sonnet and the epic can be considered sub-genres of the personal letter, the epistle.
Michael Riffaterre, in Semiotics of Poetry(1), configures poetry as a semantic game: the seamless unity of the poem is organized around a hidden message, called the "hypogram" (always a prior text, or even a single word). The poem is double-talk: a dream-work, fabricating a false empirical or representational "meaning" which nevertheless points toward its hidden parabolic significance. From his conclusion:
This seesawing from one sign value to the other, this alternating
appearance and disappearance of significance. . . is a kind of
semiotic circularity characterizing the practice of signification
known as poetry. In the reader's mind it means a continual
recommencing, an indecisiveness resolved one moment and lost
the next with each reliving of revealed significance, and this it is
that makes the poem endlessly rereadable and fascinating.(2)
With regard to the internal semiotic form of poetry, its esoteric significance so to speak, Riffaterre's analysis is apt and precise. But if the completed shape of a poem is only a periphrasis - however harmonious and holistic - then the ur-form underlying every poem is the riddle. It certainly may be true that every poem harbors a riddle, a semantic mystery to be puzzled out by the reader. But what about its exoteric character? Beethoven's Eroica or late quartets may indeed be expansions of a single melodic phrase, just as poems may be periphrases of a single ur-word; but the emotional impact comes not from the structure or logic of the form itself. It's not the riddle that moves us: the riddle acts like suspense in a dramatic plot. It's a necessary structural feature, a vehicle for emphasis. What moves us is the way the structural, formal features reach toward and into us, freighted with a communication.
The fact that a message is hidden may increase the power of its impact; but a message may also be hidden in plain sight. This is the role of the large, generic, traditional forms of art and poetry: to hide their message in plain sight. The poet writes a new sonnet or a new epic poem not simply in order to compete with or complete again a perfect model, nor to fulfill some inherent formal and organic necessity of either spirit or content: the poet recreates these forms in order to send a message to someone: a signal, full of wind and rain - full of sound and fury (signifying something).
1 Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, Indiana Univ. Press, 1978
2 ibid., p. 166
What is Form in Poetry ?
"Form". The word does what it says. Faring forth from its opening "f" and curling around the double fortification of lips and teeth until sealed by its moated "m". Form does what it says. Form is that which does what it says.
Form is shape and pattern. At its simplest, form is iteration: repetition, rhyme, and the variations (reiterations) offered by the opportunities of echo. Shape emerges from iteration: fractal, stochastic, and flexible. Shape and pattern respond to every demand: form is nothing but infinite flexibility and responsiveness. The great works of music grow from a single bar of melody into huge, variegated mountains of sound, carrying all the emotional, thematic, and generic weight in the universe.
Traditionally, there have been two broad attitudes toward form. The romantic attitude and the classical attitude correspond to what might be called a structural (or biological) and a logical (or mathematical) approach, respectively. The romantic understands form as a natural growth, a structural necessity, like an unusual shell curling around a single muscle of Spirit. The classicist or neo-classicist understands form as generic perfection: a simultaneous harking-back and making-new. The Classics are considered perfect models, shards of a Golden Age toward which the classicist aspires to return, by recreating a design equal to and worthy of its predecessors (and progenitors). I call this a "logical" approach because error is eliminated by the standard set by the notion of perfection. Thus to create, or recreate, a classical work is a task requiring objectivity above all.
These attitudes persist to the present day. Poets who aspire to innovation repeat the neo-Romantic dictum that "form is only an extension of content". Poets who respect the logic of form insist on contemporary versions of traditional models for rhyme, meter, and stanzaic design. Rather than falling into two simple camps, however, poets engage in all manner of cross-breeding: innovative poets invent new formal constraints which have their own strict logic; traditional poets incorporate popular lingo and newsworthy subject-matter.
These two traditional attitudes to form, so often contrasted with each other, share a common underlying trait: they are impersonal. Underlying the Romantic position is a biological concept of form: the poem grows organically from the seed of inspiration into a full-blown flower. Beneath the Classical position lies the relentless logic of perfection: the poem aspires to the condition of its models.
If we think of form in terms of semantics, or semiotics - as a kind of signal - we come closer to the personal impulse which motivates form and formal choice. Consider the most basic signal: the dot-dash-dot underlying both the telegraph and the computer. Think of a form - say the sonnet, or the epic poem - as only half of this basic signal: as a dot, or a dash. This is the conceptual status of the formal model as it awaits fulfillment in the poet's composition, which still lies ahead, not yet carried out. The poet is very well aware that his or her concept of "the sonnet" or "the epic" is incomplete, personalized, inchoate, based on partial hearing and permeated with subjectivity, shaded by personal motives. She hears only half the signal. The work undertaken is a process of generating another half-signal, to create a semiotic or communicative equilibrium - to send a message, to fill an imaginary conch with sound.
Thus, the impulse underlying form is neither structural nor mathematical, biological nor logical. It is semiotic, semantic. It is an impulse to communicate with someone. The sonnet and the epic can be considered sub-genres of the personal letter, the epistle.
Michael Riffaterre, in Semiotics of Poetry(1), configures poetry as a semantic game: the seamless unity of the poem is organized around a hidden message, called the "hypogram" (always a prior text, or even a single word). The poem is double-talk: a dream-work, fabricating a false empirical or representational "meaning" which nevertheless points toward its hidden parabolic significance. From his conclusion:
This seesawing from one sign value to the other, this alternating
appearance and disappearance of significance. . . is a kind of
semiotic circularity characterizing the practice of signification
known as poetry. In the reader's mind it means a continual
recommencing, an indecisiveness resolved one moment and lost
the next with each reliving of revealed significance, and this it is
that makes the poem endlessly rereadable and fascinating.(2)
With regard to the internal semiotic form of poetry, its esoteric significance so to speak, Riffaterre's analysis is apt and precise. But if the completed shape of a poem is only a periphrasis - however harmonious and holistic - then the ur-form underlying every poem is the riddle. It certainly may be true that every poem harbors a riddle, a semantic mystery to be puzzled out by the reader. But what about its exoteric character? Beethoven's Eroica or late quartets may indeed be expansions of a single melodic phrase, just as poems may be periphrases of a single ur-word; but the emotional impact comes not from the structure or logic of the form itself. It's not the riddle that moves us: the riddle acts like suspense in a dramatic plot. It's a necessary structural feature, a vehicle for emphasis. What moves us is the way the structural, formal features reach toward and into us, freighted with a communication.
The fact that a message is hidden may increase the power of its impact; but a message may also be hidden in plain sight. This is the role of the large, generic, traditional forms of art and poetry: to hide their message in plain sight. The poet writes a new sonnet or a new epic poem not simply in order to compete with or complete again a perfect model, nor to fulfill some inherent formal and organic necessity of either spirit or content: the poet recreates these forms in order to send a message to someone: a signal, full of wind and rain - full of sound and fury (signifying something).
1 Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, Indiana Univ. Press, 1978
2 ibid., p. 166
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