I don't admire poets. I admire journalists. (I mean the humble ones.)

I suppose this explains "investigative poetics".

Notes Toward & So On (8)

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes Toward & So Forth (4)

Robert Archambeau (post of 6/20) presents a version of historically-grounded poetic language. The idea of poetry being infiltrated by, or overlapping with, the "speech-acts" of history, which never really disappear - this seems related to what I was trying to describe as a (Joycean-Cranean) sense of the symbol grounded in experience.

Though again I wouldn't want to encourage another dichotomy, this time between sentimental poetry (Archambeau/Matthias' "travelogue") and realistic history. The problem is one of finding an adequate, authentic speech, capable of both representation ("history") and resonance (intelligible, emotive).

Such poetry can throw our functional, ordinary notions of time & history out of whack. What seemed past becomes present : ie., suddenly relevant, personal; illuminated, illuminating, from a new perspective.

We know that this kind of critical talk exists on a level of abstraction, and we are constantly aware of poets all over the place experimenting with styles & themes in distinct ways. But remember, for the last 20 years or so, "critical discourse" about literature & poetry has been propounding that history & experience are always trumped by the inherent paradoxes, contradictions, limitations and lacunae of text, language, subjectivity. There has been an obsessional focus on the supposed solipsism of textuality, the closed circle of hermeneutics, etc. Unfortunately, solipsism sponsored by theory - while it may show superficial stylistic differences - is not that different in substance from other kinds of literary solipsism (the anecdotal, personal, confessional lyric, so derided by language poets et al.).

Think of a poetry of political diagnosis. Iliad, Odyssey, Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, the Russian novelists... they all explored what could be acknowledged as good & right & normative, in contrast to all that could not be so acknowledged. Joyce wrote somewhere about Ulysses, something like, "I have affirmed what I was able to affirm about the modern world" (probably haven't got that quite right, sorry).

But their world is not our world; we're confronted with our own present-day spectacle of words & actions, plans & conflicts, ideals & realities, to be comprehended by & for ourselves.

To delve like reporters (rather than opinionators) into the history, turmoil, chaos, sickness, confusion, obtuseness, misapprehension, insight, foresight, suffering, sacrifice, greed, treachery, pride, hatred, war, ignorance... the whole 9 yards. That would be a sort of political poetry.

The dissonance between what an American might see as hopeful & right, and what the woman &/or man on the street in Cairo or Beijing or Uganda or Bogota thinks and experiences; the difference between democracy & privilege, on the one hand, and poverty & the ideologies - the para-politics - of rage & revenge, on the other; the difference everywhere, including the US, between ideals of equality and freedom and the reality of hardship and pinched opportunities, between ideas and facts... there's plenty to write about, in the political sphere, if you can find a way into its reality.

KP's essay provoked in me a sort of nostalgia for the fascination I felt for the "investigative" poetics of Pound/WCW et al., about 15 years ago.

A rush of energy from the mere practice of collage/documentation - the inclusive "grab-bag" technique which allows the immediacy (or the illusion of immediacy) of events to break into the poem.

But to think that poets have some privileged insight into politics or history as a consequence of these techniques. . . or to think that such poetry grants a privileged insight to others. . . these claims are questionable.

I am put off by the easy contrast of "faith" (equated with fundamentalism) and "investigation", which is linked in the essay to a whiff of intellectual pride (as in the rhetorical exaggeration of the opening sentences, where KP says that these days simply being critically intellectual is an act of defiance; echoed in the ambiguous citation of paranoid conspiracy theories).

& it seems to me that there is an Achilles' heel in an approach which vaunts investigative journalism as the implied substance of poetry. In a sense, both faith & the purpose of poetry are useless & unproveable, in parallel ways; a poetics which devalues them becomes, in the end, only journalism.

Prevallet's essay doesn't go that far. But I'm raising questions, because I see parallels between the "post-avant" formulations of, say, Ron Silliman, and the politically-correct version of "rhizomatic" poetry/journalism proposed by KP. For both, poetic technique and political viewpoint are mutually-reinforcing. This may be all well and good for those who admire both the technique & the politics; but for skeptics, such simple equations often produce empty generalizations & blind spots.

Investigativeness in Stubborn Grew:

you could argue it's not there.

the poem relates quite a lot of local history. it moves from "lyric I" notations at the beginning, to a third-person fiction about "Henry & Bluejay", to a mock-epic disintegration of Poundian poetics (the latter half of the book narrating an epic journey over the space of about 10 blocks in Providence as taking place in the mind of the narrator at a coffee shop in Fox Point).

But the "investigative" or reportorial is wrapped in layers of the "literary" and shaped by a geometry of person-as-microcosm, stumbling & falling (from Wm Blackstone, the 1st settler, to Henry; from Christmas to Good Friday).

Layers of literary, like "Shakespeare's Head" (the building in Prov. where the history begins - but also Shakespeare's microcosmic globe, thematized in the 2nd chapter's trip to London - "I think he will carry this island home in his pocket & give it to his son for an apple"). Or like the Orpheus myth & Dante's Inferno retold through a NW Coast Indian journey-to-the-dead tale ("Bluejay"). Or the fact that the 2nd half of Stubborn is bracketed by parodies of Pound & Joyce respectively (in the Pound section, American & RI history are viewed through the lens of Ignatius Donnelly - populist politician, Shakespeare cryptographer, Atlantis theorist - Pound-Donnelly's "Atlantis" tying back into another literary frame for the poem's overall style, Hart Crane).

But few in the "post-avant" community seem interested in my literary strategies, or a perspective on history which colors it with fiction and local context, rather than with irony-via-juxtaposition, the prevalent collage technique. This technique is what I parodied in the Ig. Donnelly section of Stubborn - historico-political snippets & fragments, framed through the bifocals of a populist Shakespeare/Atlantis crackpot, set into rhymed quatrains.

"Investigative poetics" is attractive because one wants poets to take on, and be granted, the mantle of the histor : to step beyond personal narrative and begin to interpret and give meaning to social reality. Artifacts and documents glow with impersonal mana. Ezra Pound, Susan Howe, many others excavate the archives (or steal from current news bulletins) for sudden brightnesses of recovered actuality.

One of the dangers (Scylla, or Charibdis?) lurking in the detective-collagiste method is that while juggling the dry bones of others' reports, the poet may enervate their own capacity for direct description, original narration, reportage per se. I guess this is one reason why travel poetry and epic multicultural odysseys will never go out of style.

Another complication is that ordinary journalistic neutrality, objective reportage, is about as distant from poetry as any writing can be. Maybe this is one reason a postmodern rhizomatic "poetics of relation" seems appealing. Journalistic objectivity is reinforced by traditions in praxis which try in good faith to leave the work of interpretation strictly in the hands of the reader (after fulfilling the "who what why where when"). A poem on the other hand is from the outset an interpretation. But if the poet, with a comparable vow of idealistic good faith, can follow the path of rhizomatic errancy & self-dissorbtion into otherness, the result will be a new postmodern multivalent "objectivity" (or I should say "non-Subjectivity").

One can say, without getting Derridean about it, that history and texts are symbiotic, intertwined, because so much of human social and historical activity ("agency") is about acting out ideological conceptions, which had their origin in texts and verbal-rhetorical formulations. This is another reason for the appeal of "investigative poetics" : if the poet can just juggle & juxtapose the Poundian "nuggets" in the most exacting way, the reward for the reader will be a historico-literary epiphany : the poet will have succeeded in pre-digesting history itself and offering this golden gruel like a mother hen to the whole brood or tribe. Herein lies the mana of investigative-poetic bricolage.

Josh Corey made an excellent comeback to my flippid comments on "poetics of relation". I just haven't had time to think about it since.

"Investigative poetics" - fascinating dimension. Something deeply satisfying in the dream of combining roles of poet and historian/investigator. Pound's & Olson's & Dorn's charge.

A poet could spend a lifetime creating a style that combines these contrasting elements & impulses in a new way.