... & what do I mean, exactly, when I align poetry and horse-race?

- thinking less about contemporary po-biz, more about Pindar and Dante.

Pegasus stamps ground in Greece, sets off 9 Muses' Pierian Spring. What's that about?

The cicada-sound of poetry displays an animal otherness. It is a tradition unto itself. This uncanniness, this "call of the fife", is propelled by a powerful motive distinct from our ordinary utilitarian pragmatic fill-in-the-blanks provisional necessitous usage.

Such functional usage differs diametrically from that of the bower-bird (poet) who must be able to grasp the potential aesthetic value hidden in the cheapest bit of driftwood (drift words). It's an innate capability.

Poetry is the horse. We're just the jockeys.

The muse (fed by Pegasus) possesses the poet : the poet sings.

I'm for literary democracy, I believe poesie springs up everywhere; as Edwin Honig wrote, it's "a buzzing in the air". At the same time, however, I believe in the literary absolute, ie. the Tradition of Pegasus the Centaur.

A nation's or culture's literature is ultimately judged by its faithfulness, not to various socological parameters or editorial juggling, but to the literary absolute.

That's the start & finish line of the only race in town.

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : criticism (label : subject/criticism).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

Acmeism, academy, affinities, American culture, American poetry, Aristotle, classic, classicism, Coleridge, commentary, disinterestedness, holism, investigative poetics, Modernism, postmodernism, Russian poetry, style, wholeness...

Back from north woods, near Canadian border. Phoebe saw Bigfoot-like bear on hind legs, running. The rest of us heard it. We went the other way.

Have been back since Monday, swamped with office work.

By the perfect in poetry, I don't mean the slick, the mandarin, the pretentious, the complacent, the facile, the superficial, the remote, the archaicizing, the dull, the pedantic, the amateurish, the slack, the obfuscatory, the fake, the bathetic, the saccharine, the pontificatory, the self-righteous, the imitative, the sloppy, the portentous, the glib, the ingratiating, the garrulous, the drab, the mediocre, the demagogic, the ponderous, the vulgar (nor the "dead" either, pace Jordan).

The cultural authority of poetry (as with other art forms) depends on some original synthesis of:

- intellectual penetration (knowledge)
- empathy, humane engagement (feeling)
- beauty, style, precision (art)
- moral insight (ethics)

(their synthesis : evidence of genius, inspiration, Muse)

A critic should evaluate all these elements, and how they combine. The whole equals the poem's specific gravity - a judgement regarding its cultural value.

It might be easier to understand what I was trying to get at yesterday, with my rubrics about poetry's transcendental perfection, if we think of such a characteristic as analogous to what music is & does.

I don't want to think of music "inhabiting" poetry, translating it into an unknown beautiful dream-speech (symbolism). I want to think of the harmony of poetry as sui generis, as applying its own peculiar powers & methods; but that the beauty expressed in painting & music is evidence of analogous forms of harmony.

I think of poetry's harmony as global, manifest in all languages. Global, yet strict. Something different from Ron Silliman's or Josh Corey's "post-avant community".

The strictness I'm talking about has to do with beauty's inherent qualities, which, in poetry, encompass the objects of both sense & intellect, and have to comprehend all the human & natural constructions which make up tradition - going back to the origins of language on the one hand, and the origins of the universe on the other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading about social structure of city of Aleppo in 18th century.

Society is... omigod. Society is collective survival by... omigod. In society, in general, what is the status of the literary person? What is the status of the religious mystic or the prophet? What is status, and honor, and prestige, and wealth, and power? Omigod.

Life's continuity... wisdom... smarts... family... luck... talent, skill... charity & love... independence, integrity... omigod. It's all over my head. But you know, this is one of the things that interests me : the direct "confrontation" of poet (or writer, generally) & society-at-large.

The egalitarian otherness of "creation" & "creator" - and the social drive for power, status, dominion, survival (the devil & all his works? not exactly. there's such a thing as good will & loving empathy. Humanity is the animale compagnevole).

Literary subcultures are miniature societies. They don't really address the issue. Only literature itself, in its raw state... maybe the substance of literature is that confrontation.

Anastasios, asking me to respond to a news article about shifting Bush Administration positions on the nature & extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons program.

Before the war, I defended it, here on the blog & on poetry lists; I let my forensic instincts have their way. One motive for doing that was my sense that poets were opposing the war in a knee-jerk manner, a reflexive anti-government attitude which had little to do with the actuality before us. This reactive attitude degrades the role of poetry too. Of course there are lots of roles for poetry. There are always the new new brutalists & the advocates of toy poetry, finding ever-new ways to celebrate poetry-as-subculture & cottage industry.

I'm not against this, don't get me wrong. It's just that walking around Providence last night in the spooky moist spring haze, with all the cherry trees & magnolias & azaleas flowering, thinking about my crumblous, desiccated "career" in poetry, I felt the ever-recurrent determination that a poet must try to speak to public questions, face the pressure of the time & articulate it in the poetry & the essays. The models that came to mind were Auden & Brodsky. I know so well how alien this & these models sound to the nuvo-bohos of the bloggy set.

So, you will say, isn't that what we are doing? No, it is not. I guess I would go back to early days of this blog where I was writing about "metaform". I think poets have to find ways to synthesize & correlate & enunciate a coherent & capacious RESPONSE to the issues facing the world. I like the way Joe Duemer seems to be aware of this, though we disagree on the politics a lot. But a POETRY-response is not yelling on the internet or protesting in the streets or even pamphleteering, even though these things also have their inherent poetry!!!

What comes to mind for me again anyway is also this notion of the "literary absolute". Have been thinking lately that maybe it's analogous to Georg Cantor's & Godel's notion of infinity & the "continuum problem" & the "incompleteness axiom" (if I've got that right). There are these different levels of mathematical reality, and some levels are incommensurate - sort of unapproachable - using the tools inside particular "ordinary" systems of math. So I think of the literary absolute as this poetic capability - a synthetic articulation - which is incommensurate with both the ordinary levels of talent & desire to write, and with the coordinates of the literary industry & all its subcultures. Another aspect of "Pushkinism"?? Is this a flanking chess move?? But do we perhaps NEED some such concept (literary absolute) if we want to maintain a "normative" literary-civilizational culture? Do we want to maintain such a thing? Do Americans even understand or accept the notion of "normative", sustainable culture or civilization? Sustainable would have to include self-critical, dedicated to an ethical absolute (not the same as the literary absolute, but maybe analogous).

An aside : took home from the library Elena Shvarts' 2-vol collected poems, published in Petersburg. Old-fashioned 19th-cent. heft of the volumes. Looking at her lines with their hieratic Cyrillic, their bold but firm syntax, dashes & periods. Oddly, the poem I opened the book to was titled "Poetica : More Geometrico" ("more" - sea? death? method?). Mathematical literary absolute a kind of authoritative articulation of Person-in-Civilization, an image at the root of liberal education. . . AND beneath this the notion of absolute devotion/vocation to THIS line, THIS phrase, THIS text & no other : the finality of writing : inescapable, uncanny aspect of the literary absolute (see Emily Dickinson). Mandelstam [paraphrasing] : "reading the poem we enter into & share the poet's death". Poetry is serious, serious fun. Frost : "a game with mortal stakes".

Anastasios must be thinking I'm evading his question. WAS THIS WAR JUSTIFIED? I don't know. . . it seems too early to base such a judgement on the current results of WMD search. I feel like my mother, who told me she wanted to keep her mouth shut (hard for her) at the neighborhood coffee get-togethers, because she felt so oddly unconflicted & optimistic about the war in Iraq, & this was very out of step with Minneapolis opinion (not I suppose with Dallas opinion though).

Henry's Two-Step Program for Escaping the Cardboard Box of Poepastry Clubhouse:

1. Literary Absolute
2. Metaform

Henry's Explanation of Two-Step Program:

I've been reading Donna Tartt's novel The Little Friend. She worked on it ten years & created a world.

I wrote about "metaform" on this blog around 1/23-1/24 or so. Instead of talking to each other so much like a pack of barhound weasels, why not think about the aspects of world & society, the different languages or discourses, which a poet is able to reflect intelligently & curiously in their work? What real or imagined wholenesses of a world are they able to bring to bear & bring to music? That, along with perfect pitch, seems like a useful measure of value, if you have to even think about it. As far as the valueless - making lists of what you don't like - how anal can you get?

This is a little lecture to the younger set. After this I'm not talking to you. I'm interested in the unknown reader, not you louts. Behold Donna Tartt, & be afraid. She might turn her cool & creepy & cultured & satirical measuring rod on you someday.

But that's not all I meant by the literary absolute. Sorry folks, being incoherent this morning. "Literary absolute" was a phrase I used in some poetry list conversation - what the truly obsessed & dedicated poet or writer aims for. Left out of the circus antics. Or perhaps infiltrating & overwhelming the circus with a tremendous talent.

The debate over "Creep" poets continues. David Hess makes some interesting comments today (3/5), connecting the whole thing with decadent aesthetics, and pointing out some distinctions between communities, economies, markets, and artists.

What I mean by the "literary absolute" refers to the autonomous quality of imaginative & artistic activity, the very thing that makes it possible for artists to be anti-social members of a community. I'm not saying art is only or totally autonomous; it's just one of its real & contradictory aspects.

Funny how several bloggers orbiting around this discussion are in the process of reflecting on artistic community, or a particular community. But every one comes to such a discussion with a different set of values & priorities & goals. Isn't the safest (not necessarily the best) approach to idealize the perennial activity of poetry-making and art-making in general, rather than try to define (& authorize & polemicize) specific political opinions or lifestyles or artistic styles? Even if theories & schools arise in dialectical opposition to one another, don't they appeal to a perennial unstated standard (even if they define that standard as the New or the Future)? Aren't we all cicadas in a squirrel-town? & isn't it best to factor in that universal aspect? or is that just taken for granted because it's a truism? Where is Socrates when I need him?

Lots of people hang out to yak in the bistros but there are only a few hard workers among them.

I guess I'm reiterating my earlier statements about the global tradition or universal-perennial poetic activity. & talking to myself again.

Beware the circus barkers of poetics.

It's useful to the circus barkers to present poetry as a state of continual permanent upheaval revolution orgasm thrill ride. It's useful to import from philosophy notions which question the ontology of the individual, and broadcast them over the literary field, trumpeting collaboration, downplaying the distinctive. It's useful to bellow "We Are Family!" and blur aesthetic values.

Without a sense of the literary absolute, the game is not worth playing.