Conceptualism... blah two

It's fun to think about poetry, which presents a lot of mysteries, conundrums.  It's fun to talk about it.  But making it is something else.  The activity of making poems resists theoretical frames & boxes.  Take, for example, the postmodern thesis that the lyric Subject is an illusion, a mirage of false consciousness driven by repressed class-historical-material forces, or by a mis-perception of the de-centered insubstantiality of the Real.  Yet, au contraire, what the actual labor of making poems reveals to the maker, is that the poem is the outcome of a personal struggle with an unaccountable something or someone other than the "lyric I".  And the very process of dialectical making - this struggle - tends to carve both poet and "other" into high relief - to bring on a greater intensity of conscious presence or being.  The process itself becomes primary : a process which involves the shedding or transformation of abstract preconceptions of every kind.

Poetry is conceptual by the very nature of its medium, language - so the phrase "conceptual poetry" is redundant.   But the "concepts" in poetry are secondary.  The primary power of poetry resides in names : the originary soundings of enunciation, evocation, expression.  The words, that is, the beginning and end of the poem, do not "represent" things : they establish things.   The dualisms of mind and body, thought and action, spirit and matter are transmuted within a sort of explanatory harmonics : earth is (figuratively speaking) transported to heaven.  Prose and poetry, innocence and experience, are not divided, but implicated with each other, woven together in unbreakable knots.

There are a lot of anti-poetic forces at work within American Poetryland.  There have been for a while.  Groups with agendas to promote at the expense of actual poetry.  But poetry is a stubborn, resistant, ineradicable thicket of laborious making.  It will not be undone by superficial theoretical make-overs.  Notions like the "obsolescent lyric Subject" are glib reductions from a much more complex actuality.  Strong poetry actually builds on the "I" of the solitary lyric - branches out from this seed into more expansive forms - dialogue, satire, narrative, epic, drama...  The whole ancient "wheel of Virgil" (eclogue/georgic/epic) still awaits contemporary fulfillments.

I wonder if there's not something overly passive in Paul Fry's concept of the "ostensive" moment as the defining characteristic of lyric poetry. I'm not done with the book yet, & I know he has a chapter specifically addressing "negative theology" and quietism in relation to his concept - so I'm probably jumping the gun.) It's as if the political/controversial stakes have become so intense and byzantine in theoretical-historicist literary crit, that eventually some such notion had to be found just to let off the pressure (without becoming, heaven forbid, "a-political"!).

Guess I would tend to think of humankind as naturally, genetically, political - in the sense of creating adaptive orders of social life on earth; and that the a-human or pre-human ("ostensive") reality of non-referential stasis, or "mere being", will always be subject to human adaptation (even if its source, its paradoxical/cthonic power, is non-human).

In my view, the charming stasis or equilibrium of lyric poetry stems from the same root as pastoral - a "peaceable kingdom" hidden within the present & representing a (future) better state of things on earth. It may indeed be a mingling of the human and the non-human, or the human and "nature"; but I wouldn't equate such a state with non-meaning, or some transcendence of, or vacation from, meaning itself. This is too reductive. This state ("quietude?"), along with everything else, will not evade interpretation. Everything is interpretable.

I think one of Fry's main points is that lyric poetry humbles the pride of intellect (interpretation) - restores the balance of actuality and our names for it. I would agree with this (though he might not agree with my spin on his position...). But one can imagine a humbled intellect still active, still interpreting,, still "figuring out" that ultimate global Day of rest.

(& actually, Fry's passage on Virgil's bees (in the Georgics) presents such an image of "active rest". Maybe there's more on this in the chapters I haven't got to yet.)

Reading Paul Fry, A Defense of Poetry (1995). Out of or after the Yale School of literary Theory. Kind of fascinating - like trying to decipher foreign language.

Out of Geoffrey Hartman, Derrida, De Man, etc. - but on his own track. He seems to have invented a new interpretive tool or explanation for poetry called the "ostensive" - I'll have to check the etymology of that. The idea in a nutshell - as far as I can see blurredly for the moment - is that Criticism (Theory + Historicism) has deconstructed any "essential" reality of or function for literature - that is, it's all a kind of epiphenomena, really indistinguishable from other epiphenomena, predetermined by socio-historical forces at large. But Fry complicates this (it is a "defense" of poetry) with a new idea : that poetry - lyric poetry in particular - is actually a release from meaning, reference of any kind. It's a sort of tautological non-human substrate (sentient or non-sentient, I'm not sure yet - just started reading the book) - it is what it is, so to speak, and in so doing lets reality "be" what it is, whatever that is... He leans a lot on Wordsworth, Keats & other Romantics ("a slumber did my spirit steal..."; "music of no tone"; etc).

Much of this intellectual milieu - the arcane & ponderous philosophical assumptions & assertions about writing, history, reality etc. - I find pretty doubtful & unappealing. Have made a lot of fun of "Theory" over the years. But Fry's idea ("ostension") sparks my interest... that is I recognize certain affinities with, or new ways of reading, my own poetry themes & adventures.

I guess I'm behind the times, as usual - the book was published 12 yrs ago...

Snarls, conundrums:

There is no "avant-garde project".

Talking is inimical to poetry. Poetry is made by mute stutterers trying to use the right words. Talk is glib.

Blogs are a form of talking.

Poetry in English maybe has a future, but that future will come from solitary hard labor.

The lyric is pure individualism, confronting the social, the universal, the not-me.

The lyric is the recognition(s) of subjective experience.

Literary politicking is a branch of the will-to-power.

Nobody knows when or how the lyric might speak for the many and thus become part of tradition. This is a mystery.

The lyric is the accidental acknowledging and praising what is permanent in experience.

The lyric attempts to approach the permanent by acknowledging its accidental, temporal, ephemeral aspect.

The permanent is a drowsy garden.