A few heretical thoughts about poetry

Am reading a scholarly tome titled Reading Dante : the pursuit of meaning, by Jesper Hede (Lexington Bks, 2007).  He's following in the steps of another little-known Dante scholar I like, named T.K. Seung (Fragile Leaves of the Sybil).  Seung's book is a profound contextual study of the Divine Comedy; Hede builds on Seung's insights, and finds most of previous commentary on the great poem to be greatly flawed.  For Hede (and Seung) the Divine Comedy is an organic whole, and that wholeness is rooted in Dante's message - his "argument", in Milton's sense - the fundamental writerly purpose of the poem, the morse code Dante aims to impart : a message which suffuses and sheds light on each and every element of the poem, large and small.

This appeals to me, and not only because of its explanatory power.  It rings true for me personally, when I consider my own situation, my own compositional problems and dilemmas.  I feel that I have written and write long poems, not just because I'm an obsessive masochist, or a megalomaniac, or in order to compete with the other long poem writers... I write them because the form seems congenial to the enunciation of a certain, particular message (my message, to you).

And yet this attitude seems heretical today : it goes against several reigning dogmas of poetry.  Here's a short list :

1. Poetry is essentially a work of art; thus its ethical (or other) messages are not so much extraneous, as marginal to its main purpose - which is to please us with an aesthetic effect.

2. Anyone who pretends to be in control of a literary message is hopelessly deluded by false consciousness, essentialism, individualism, egocentrism and logocentrism.  Language is an untraceable phase-shift, inherently absent and de-centered.

3. Authorial intention is all well and good, but the final meaning of any work of art is determined by the historical circumstances which engendered it in the first place.  Thus the poet's well-meaning attempt to tell us something is really doomed to failure, a temporary, Pyrrhic victory at best.

4. Any poet who tries to browbeat me with a "message" is going to lose me right off the bat.  I have only contempt for a poem which has "designs" on me (this from Keats, no less!).

5. Contemporary poetry is primarily a generic phenomenon.  We are relentlessly reminded of this every day by the critical theorists of the avant-garde (Conceptualism : "Poetry is..." etc.), by the academic community ("Modernism represents the coalescence of Poetry with Nietzschean-post-structural blah-blah of Late Capitalist blah-blah..."), by the MFA programs ("Where do you want to take your poetry?  How do you want to sharpen up your style?"), and, finally, by the entire multifarious publishing/arts-advocacy world, absolutely replete to busting open with social media promotions for the lovable wondrousness of "poetry" in toto, for the magnetic poetry scene per se, for poets as charismatic exemplars of the cool, the hot, the hip... and with trendentious, pop-critical comparisons (blurbs) about this or that poet's status in relation to "poetry" in general, etc.

Here I just want to make a few complaints about #5 above.  What if the Dante scholars are right?  What if the greatest single poem ever written is determined, in every aspect of its form, by a specific message?  And if the Divine Comedy is such a phenomenon as they suggest, then what about all the lesser poems trailing before and after?  Would there not be some smidgen of Dante's poetics detectable in all these other poems, or at least some of them?

And if that is actually the case, then I think we have to consider this possibility : that the most important quality of a poem is that which makes it absolutely distinct from every other poem.  If the poet's message shapes its form, its design, its aesthetic effects, then, we must admit, poetry in a "generic" sense becomes a little less central to the whole enterprise.  If the transmission of a message is the guiding, leading motive for the poet's entire effort, then wouldn't the intepretation and reception of this message take precedence over the celebration of its aesthetic effects and qualities?

Might it not be better to focus on what this poet is trying to tell me, rather than on how this poet fits into a certain aesthetic pantheon or academic celebrity hall or community club of "poetry lovers"?  (After all, he or she might have an important message for me : so important, in fact, that my fingers tremble... my whole being shivers... & I'm unable even to press the "like" button on Facebook!)

I don't really have an answer to these rhetorical questions : I ask them because, perhaps, they raise interesting problems.  One way out, I suppose would be the Wallace Stevens solution : the message of poetry is poetry itself.  A tautology here becomes the occasion for gorgeous meditations on poetic sense and nonsense, the beauty and the terror.  Stevens is possibly the greatest 20th-cent. American poet.  But he doesn't have an "argument" to make, outside of poetry itself, the way Dante does.  And despite the fact that Dante does retain such an "extraneous" argument... he makes poetry.  He makes great poetry.

Is it possible that all of us - teachers, publishers, poetry activists, all - have somehow skewed the whole scene, by foregrounding our generic "ideas about the thing", rather than hewing closely to the distinct, inimitable "thing itself"?

*

p.s. Contra McLuhan, then, it's not "the medium is the message" : rather, the message shapes the medium.  Does this mean I subscribe to the blunt maxim of Charles Olson & Robert Creeley, that "form is never more than an extension of content"?  No (despite the fact that, in the current hothouse climate, I appreciate the spiritual, unpretentious anti-poetry of the heirs of Projectivism - still alive in the pages of Kenneth Warren's underground zine, House Organ).  Olson's dictum projects a Modernist-Brutalist ambience, like some blank institutional architecture of the '60s.  As I see it, the message - the "content" of poetry - proceeds from an area in which the emotional, the perceptual, and the rational are fused together - harmonized - at an extremely high temperature.  This amalgam is only adequately represented in a "form" which is equally subtle, crystalline, complex.  We can feel the power of certain climactic lines in Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Dante, or Shakespeare, or Dickinson, or Whitman, or Blake - the message comes across - only because the poet has produced a comprehensive, harmonious measure - capable of bearing that unique smoke-signal's affective weight.

Following the discussion of poetry-&-paraphrase from Jonathan, Kasey et al.

I guess I would question whether this is an either-or thing. Why can't a poem have meanings, which can be extrapolated from the poem, & yet retain its integrity & quiddity or whatever as an artistic end-in-itself? The sum is greater or different than its parts - the meanings are abstracted from the poem after all. But these meanings are also evidence of the poem's generative capacities.

Imagine the geometry of a poem as being like a "vesica" - the lens-like shape formed by the intersection of two circles. The shape has integrity despite the fact that it draws from two different figures, two different directions.

I sometimes think that the power of poems has something to do with the compression of meaning into parable. "Telling it slant" (E. Dickinson). You read a 3-line haiku and you experience the pleasure of a whole array of possible meanings, at once. Riddles work in a similar way.

"Paraphraseable meaning" is such a boring way of putting it. The negative connotations stem from the concept's origin in the New Criticism, which was built on a rejection of overt, politicized, didactic poetries of the 1930s (in this it was in line with much 50's art in the US). "The poem must not mean / but be" & all that crap (Archibald MacLeish).

Poets work in such a variety of ways that there is, obviously, no correct method. Negative capability & the passive reception of imaginative expressions & forms is a huge part of the process. However, to deny the importance of "meaning" - & its symbiotic dualities & energies at work in the poem - seems like the kind of rubric which makes a lot of postmodern poetry pretty vacuous & turgid.

Notes Toward & So On (2)

In the previous entry under this heading, I focused on the idea that new directions in American poetry & criticism might involve a new perspective toward symbol and image. On the face of it, this doesn't sound very new. Didn't the modernists just about cover this, from WCW to Pound to just about everyone?

The modernist image was an expression of its era, which was in revolt against the dying embers of post-Romantic Symbolism - its vagueness, otherworldiness, dead rhetoric. TE Hulme and Pound, the founders of Imagism, emphasized the difference between poetic and ordinary (functional) language - the latter, Hulme's "counter" language (words as counters) is abstract and utilitarian; the former (in good British empiricist fashion), using sharpened metaphor, striking juxtapositions, and careful attention to individual things, rather than abstract ideas, allows the reader to see the world anew. The focus is on physical perception. It was the dawn of the Photo Age : even with Pound's ideogram, the desire was for instantaneous perception of relationships.

Needless to say, we inhabit a different era now, a cyber-semiotic age. The computer has given new relevance to the complexity of the sign, ie. in the theories of the founder of semiotics, Charles Peirce. "Signifiers" represent "signifieds"; then, in a sort of chain reaction of semiosis, signifieds become signifiers, on another level. We are close to Dante's sense of the fourfold nature of the image. In the previous post, I wrote about a new version of the poetic symbol, rooted not in an otherwordly allegorical system, but grounded in the complexities of earthly reality. I don't have a name for this new image/symbol : but I'm thinking of qualifiers like "resonant", "harmonic", "parabolic" : signifying-symbolic chain reactions, tending toward an artistic and intelligible unity of meaning and impression - ie. "sense".

Over the weekend here in scandal-prone RI, a story broke on the pages of the Providence Journal. A family accused their lawyer, the son of a former State Supreme Court judge - considered a family friend - of taking advantage of their 16-yr-old daughter; under the auspices of providing her with legal counseling, he had corrupted her with cocaine & sex. The father, an ophthalmologist, related how, in the course of giving the lawyer an eye exam, he had discussed his suspicions that someone was victimizing his daughter; the lawyer said he would do whatever it took to find out who it was.

This is an example of a situation resonating with irony. The eye doctor is blind to the fact that the lawyer and family friend, sitting there under his lens, is the very culprit he seeks. Betrayal lurks beneath the level of mere physical perception. In semiotic terms, the "objects", the signifieds, of this account - the doctor & the lawyer - have become signifiers on another level of intelligibility.

I am suggesting that the evaluation of poetry of our age might have more to do with such parabolic symbolism - with whole poetic systems of intelligible representations - than with Hulme's or Pound's instantaneous cognitive-perceptual flashbulbs. This is why I argued previously that the example of Crane's Bridge - perhaps the most complex elaboration of a "grounded"/intelligible symbol in 20th-cent. American poetry - might be a pivotal reference point for a new kind of symbolic poetics.

Robert Archambeau, Josh Corey et al. have been musing about a new "post-indeterminacy" era, & what might herald it.

I remember when my own feeling for poetry revived & got redirected, reading the brilliant/elusive imagery in Mandelstam.

So I wonder if a new poetic style might have something to do with a focus on the wholeness, vividness & multivalence of symbol & imagery.

"There is a current and exceedingly stupid doctrine that symbol evokes emotion, and exact prose states reality. Nothing could be further from the truth : exact prose abstracts from reality, symbol presents it. And for that very reason, symbols have some of the many-sidedness of wild nature."

and:

'We write in symbol when we wish our words to present, rather than analyse or prove, their subject-matter... Symbol endeavors, as it were, to be that of which it speaks, and imitates reality by the multiplicity of its significance."

- Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images (1949)

[note : he wrote, not indeterminacy, but multiplicity of its significance. Again, something to do with the work of metaphor.]

I don't want to give the impression that Prickett is just re-asserting Romantic articles of faith. I'm still working through his thesis, but he seems firmly centered on the paradoxes and difficulties involved. "Poetry" - the act of imagination - through the ages - gets proclaimed as the living Mind itself, granted all authority in every intellectual sphere... or it's shunted aside as either mere feeling, or only the faded remnants of worn-out superstitions (Vico). Fundamentally unserious, in our science-prose world.

In a sense this is the project set out for every poet - to find a productive level, an authentic basis, for meaning-making. Finding what (new) can be said.

You want meaning, drummer-boy? Try to figure it out.

 5
  
 Cornered in a crossweave   of very pianissimo
 scales   tumbling down terraces   I learned
 a lot from him   I learned little things
 that mean so much in music   get the little
  
 things together   the way you build a house
 and then the whole structure will stand up
 get the patient on her feet and   Presto
 dancing the minimum   the minutest
  
 waltzing bee   across a waft so fa so fine
 handwoven llama threads   all manual
 cowpuncho Nilon Ship's Clothing   the map
 a tiny honey palm-lamp now   within a fable
  
 of the feeblest roost   or nest   beneath a
 river of Egyptian stars   one lone nut
 (almond, acorn) tunneled in the rivulet
 of a silky   milky   nebulae blanket
  
 and sheets of big muddy   scarab sound
 or terraces of rainbows  out of the cosmos
 of her sorrow   44 stitches to the cinch
 of a single googol [coined by a child]
  
 squared off on a grid of linked unchains
 twirling toward mid-April   Washington
 or Lafayette   leftover in a Thursday rain
 vale, Jo   it's a map of...   from a distance
  
 shielded   ink kenosi-shrouded crossroad
 or galaxy of frailest   grassblown wind
 a quantum myrrh held   in a widow-
 pain   a   microscopic   dust sirocco
  
 gleams there   dead ahead and   green
 kayak in a rocket in a yippie eye O kayak
 pi A-grid a-wool manually-done and   a.k.a.
 Mplmnde. Mojómemo Lt. Col. Greenègresham
     
                                    1.22.2000

Meanings cannot be equated with referents ("that thing out there") and words are not pointers. Meaning is a sponge, and words are its food. Meaning is The Blob : organic, living, minatory - & I'm a-comin' t' gitcha!!!

...I understand such books probably sound turribly stuffy & old-hat. Nothing new there for poets in those quotes. All ABC stuff (Coleridge's notion of participation, etc.).

What I'm appreciating, though, is the subtlety of analysis, & the way he identifies sources & trends in thought about these problems. You start to see the genealogy of certain familiar ways of defining things. Thus for example, Ron Silliman's focus on Jakobson's 6-sided figure for language (see today's post) : using Prickett's angle of focus, one might start by recognizing a certain techno-positivist character to Ron's application. As if language is this 6-sided "object" which one can manipulate & turn about in various ways : & as if this manipulability is language's main point of interest to us, as poets & readers. Where is this approach to language coming from? Curious that such a functionalist notion of language is used to defend a poet (Coolidge) who is defiantly "non-functional" in Ron's sense of the word (ie. "vulgar representation").

I think Charles Peirce, for one, would look askance at the 6-sided operational model. Why? Because in semiotics, signs overlap & form hierarchies. Which also parallels the notion of an earlier philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt : that the basic meaning-unit of language is not the word, but the sentence. If the basic meaning-unit is the sentence - and if signs form hierarchies, overlaps & algorithms of meaning and effect and affect - what happens to the simple die-cast theory of signifier/signified, etc.? The signifier disappears into the signified, and what is signified becomes, in turn, a signifier, on another, sequential plane of meaning. The notion of "symbol" and symbolic meaning, in this sense, does not fit neatly into a 6-sided dissection ("we murder to dissect", as another poet wrote).

[p.s. on this idea of the symbolic sequences of signifier/ied/iers : as an example of just one among many types of this overlap phenomenon : see Mandelstam's essay "Conversation About Dante", where he describes Dante's chains of metaphors - "imagine an airplane in flight, launching another airplane off its wing, and then the 2nd launches a third..." (rough quote from memory). This whole question - of how multiple layers or branchings of meaning form & dissolve hierarchies of emphasis - an issue for logic & rhetoric - seems worth thinking about. When Mandelstam wrote that future critics would investigate the impulse behind the text, he was adumbrating the difficulty involved in tracking meaning, the author's elusive motivations. The complexity involved seems to explode any simple, atomistic notion of language as a cube with (6) definable applications.]

Once a year or so, on a seasonal basis I suppose, Jonathan decides that Joseph Brodsky was an overrated poet. Jonathan doesn't know much Russian, as far as I know, nor much about Russian literary culture of the 60s-70s-80s-90s. But he feels qualified. In Russia, Brodsky is considered a major poet, an immoveable presence & influence.

There was always sort of a vague Brodsky-resentment in the American poetry puddle. I remember a long rambling put-down by Sam Hamill in APR, to which I responded with a letter. That must have been in the early 80s.

Nobody has ever claimed Brodsky's poetry in English (translated or otherwise) was great shakes. But he was not an American poet. He was something cosmopolitan & not easily cataloged, & disturbing to some in the little proffy-professional ego-puddle we call American poetry.

[By the way, I have been reading M. Blanchot lately, thanks to Jonathan. Blanchot had some very insightful things to say about poetry/prose, language/meaning, Mallarme, Proust, Simone Weil, lots of other French authors, Broch, etc. He's emits that special Paris odeur de "I am so profound & serious" - but, unlike some of the other theorists & critics, he keeps it beautifully concise.]

On poetic language/meaning (in the essay translated as "The Mystery of Literature") - or the old form/content chestnut - he seems to be saying that, in poetry, these two make an irreducible pair. In ordinary speech, the words disappear into the meaning; in poetry, there is this oscillation - each one of the pair trying to be all-in-all, yet each needing the other. Somewhere in that irreducible tango lies the special form of truth which poetry offers.

Reminds me of the question John Irwin asked himself in the book about Poe & Borges (Mystery to a Solution) - how do you write a mystery story that the reader will want to read a second or third time (even though the crime is "solved" at the end of the 1st reading)?

Poetic form (the words) traps meaning in a circle or a ring, which thus becomes a kind of fountain, ever-renewing, everlasting. I tried to express this in an old poem, the opening poem in Way Stations:

OCEAN STATE


 
Here the waters gather along the shore.
They meet the land breathing in foam,
and roll the sleepy pebbles and shells
back into long sand waves as before.

 
Our moon, casting her antique spells.
A motionless iris in the whale’s eye
of the sea, her unspeakable name
sinks to the bottom of lonely wells.

 
Her low whispers frame the deserted dome.
Her light covers the circus floor.
And she lifts, with one nocturnal sigh,
the heaving swells in a silver comb.

("Ocean State" is the motto of Rhode Island. Reminder : I was born on RI Statehood Day - 5.29.52 - a kind of circular number.)

[marginal note by Celan to his poem "In Eins":]

M a n d e l s t a m m -
Und so wird man verstehen, daß die Gedichte M's nicht, wie man verschiedentlich von ihnen sagte, "hermetisch" sind, sondern vielmehr offen, weit aufgetan dem Auge, das sie in ihrer ganzen Zeittiefe zu begreifen versucht.
Schluß: DES MENSCHEN ORT - EIN ORT IM ALL (Gellhaus 1997, 340)



[M a n d e l s t a m -
And thus one will understand, that M's poems are not, as it has been occasionally stated, "hermetic", but rather open, disclosed to the eye, which tries to grasp them in their entire depth of time.
Conclusion: THE MAN'S PLACE - THE PLACE IN THE WORLD]

Reading Maurice Blanchot on Mallarme, courtesy of Jonathan.

Distinction he makes between Valery & Mallarme. For the former, poetry is a vehicle of meditation, intellectual mastery; for the latter, purely an aesthetic object formed from words (words from which everything has been refined away, except for this aesthetic essence).

An aesthetic based in turn on the one characteristic of language which fascinates Mallarme : the way in which words replace, disperse - distance themselves, abstract themselves - from the real things they sometimes represent. In so doing, words present themselves in aesthetic form - as poems.

Maybe my shadow-boxing with Language Poetry over the years has been, in part, a battle with my own fascination with, my own bent toward, some such seductive doctrine. Solipsism, solitude, silence, music.

How different the doctine of the Chicago critics (not great poets themselves, admittedly - but going back to Coleridge, for one, anyway...). Here the aesthetic imprint of a poem is not so simply yoked to the words, the language medium, per se.

Just as Mandelstam juxtaposed the Ukrainian philologist Potebnia (with his notion of the "inner psychic image" of the word) to the Russian formalists (with their poetics based on a linguistics which analyzed the word into separate functions) - the Chicago School opposed the strictly linguistic poetics of the New Critics, with a kind of metalinguistic concept of the poem. That is, the poem can't be reduced to its linguistic medium : rather, the medium conveys an imaginative whole, a complex image (a single lyric, or an entire play, or an epic).

Still, Mallarme (and lurking behind him, Poe & Baudelaire) accomplished something permanent (he discovered a sort of antimatter) : everything after has to take it into account. How that gets done, in theory & practice, is the big question. Celan maybe took it to the limit. Every word refers to some train of thought & feeling - conceptual, experiential, personal. Yet the words are so encrypted in their own musical silence as to both invite & defy "meaning", interpretation. The defiance itself is rendered as (tragic) beauty.

So Celan sort of has it both ways. His defiance of meaning is not a literary game or an ideological program. It stems from a felt awareness of death, wrong, grief, hope, love - which are, in a sense, extra-poetic "referents". Or they are elements from the realm of fact & "journalism" which are both acknowledged & somehow won for poetry, absorbed.

I'm sure all this sounds awfully obvious to those who've spent more time with these poets & these issues.

Who were the "Chicago School", or "Chicago critics"? A group of scholars/critics, several affiliated with U. Chicago, who shared an interest in the philosophy of Aristotle, esp. his approach to criticism outlined in the Poetics. Published around mid-20th century. They rate about a column & a half in the Princeton Encyc. of Poetics. Elder Olson, R.S. Crane, Richard McKeon, et al.

Not finding a whole lot about them off the bat, here in Bruno Library. I suppose their approach got a bit lost in the shuffle of jazzier 60s-80s stuff, like post-structuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, new criticism, etc.

Trends that (very roughly speaking) they seem to follow from Aristotle's lead:

- lit. criticism a branch of philosophy
- criticism not an exact science since based on human productions rather than nature
- there is an empirical, inductive, "differential" approach to examining any subject, which pays great attention to the particular line of inquiry into its object of study; said object can be seen from a variety of aspects, depending on the approach, & doesn't fall neatly into larger systems of abstraction
- poetry can be approached from various aspects & lines of inquiry; the Poetics approaches it with respect to its specifically artistic ends or purposes
- criticism appears in many guises & methods; often conflicts & disagreements arise, not due to genuine disagreements or contradictory positions, but because different critics are working from completely different frames of inquiry
- poems and poetry are two different things
- poems are not reducible to language as such; rather, they are artificial forms or constructs which organize plot (action), character, thought, diction, & "ornament" into an aesthetic unity or system (form).
- the meaning of a poem is not reducible to its lexical, etymological, thematic, etc. coordinates : rather, a poem creates a kind of inference-producing form or system. The audience infers from the verbal evidence, and its inferences have emotional/aesthetic/intellectual consequences, which represent the formal impact of the work
- a poem is an aesthetic whole or unity, within which the verbal material or diction appears as one part among others. One measure of a poem's quality comes through an examination of how well the various parts of a poem are coordinated in creating the totality of effect or aesthetic whole.

Of course I'm bowdlerizing a great deal. Encourage exploration of RS Crane & Elder Olson essays. What I like about what I'm discovering is a kind of historical awareness & systematic approach to some of my own vague tendencies over the years toward "realism", ie. the balance between the verbal texture of poems & the representations they effect. I find very refreshing - startling, even - some of the comments of these critics on the distinction between philosophies which view poetry as a distinct productive activity, on the one hand, and philosophies which view poetry as simply a special form of language or discourse, on the other. Also their inductive approach to reading, analysis & critique.

Of course, was reading BJ Leggett's fine book again today, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory : the chapter dealing with what Stevens drew from Charles Mauron's book Aesthetics and Psychology, in particular the bit about the usefulness of obscurity:

the poem must resist the intelligence
almost successfully...

- which section pretty much contradicts everything I've been saying here. For Stevens, at least during a phase of his career, poetry opposes paraphrase and explanation... but I can't adequately paraphrase this excellent study right now...

"Resonance" and "Symbolism", Jonathan & Kent - they both seem relevant to the process I'm trying to outline. Resonance closer to Stevens, in that it has no implication of fixity of "image"; Symbolism - Yeats was clearly a symbolist of a sort - but the word seems too systematic, like allegory - for what I'm thinking of. Actually Greg's definition of "vision" seems about right.

The poem integrates its parts in such a way that they begin to resonate overtones of "symbolic" meaning, they are iconic pointers, aspects of a whole representation, with which the reader can identify or feel-with-affinity in several ways at once.
Such that a context is provided for individual images proper, or strings of imagery, which begin to echo in the reader's sensibility.

"Aura", writes Catherine... now that's hovering somewhere between resonance and vision!

I am interested in something I brought up a few days ago, this question of the image as a complex of feeling and intellect. & how the poem or song creates the conditions - sets the stage - for a symbolic or dramatic expression of the image.

I'm thinking of the image-complex itself as a subset or reflection-in-miniature - a dramatic re-presentation - of a larger whole, a life-complex, let's say: the complex or "whole" which is experience per se. Mimetic holism.

And the relation of these aspects to style: the values of clarity, simplicity, order, intelligibility, emotive-expressive power. Because the deep & moving experiences - or recognitions - of life can display not only subtlety and mystery, but also a resolving, overwhelming simplicity of thought & feeling. (Not to mention the simplicity in mundane ordinary everydayness!) I'm saying poetry has a right to be simple and direct as well as original and obscure.

We live in an amazing "Alexandrian" age of multiple discourses, each of which can quite easily form its own worlds of self-referentiality. So perhaps the most important intellectual tool of the practicing poet is his or her private sense of an interlocutor, a listener.

Probably a lot of the bitterness and frustration of poets has to do with their own muddled sense of who they want to address.

Reading Henry IV (1 & 2) past couple days. Following up on yesterday's comment:

Shakespeare is intent on thematizing the inescapable riddles & conundrums of lived experience. Thus these plays I'm reading hinge throughout on surprise, the overturning of expectation (most prominently, Prince Hal's overturning his playboy reputation, "to mock the expectation of the world").

His deep contemplation of experience renders his plays close to infinitely interpretable, infinitely accessible. Thus if there are any secret or hidden aspects to them - hermetic in the true sense - these are quite minor effects (topical references hidden, say, out of political caution), compared to the larger, thematic moral mysteries which his characters enact.

I don't think there's a hermetic (in the sense of trobar clus) bone - nay, fingernail, sirrah - in his body.

I just want to say one last thing tonight, before 28 becomes 29, which is, that, beyond all my glibbery explicationary activity hyarabouts, there are 1 or 2 or 3 levels or aspects of Forth of July which remain & will remain classified. I have not discussed & will not discuss them. As Akhmatova says about her long "poema" Poem without a Hero, "it's a casket with a triple-false bottom", or some such. secrets of the life-raft (or Nile barge, cf. OM)

As for perception of wholes. . . sometimes I think I get clearest ideas around 4 a.m., when I can't sleep.

Pondering this morning about the contention over styles of poetry, & the proposal for a debate, I thought Gabriel Gudding got it right (on his blog recently) to emphasize the importance of wonder & surprise. A debate format would probably result in fiats & pronunciamentos that the pronouncers have no right to make, a needless taking of sides. More subtle distinctions might be elicited through exploratory conversations. (ps Chris Lott says this better.)

Wonder & surprise, wholeness. From the vantage of 2003 it's possible to look at a numbered span of literary time, say 1950-2000, without a spirit of judgemental contention so much as attention to & appreciation for a vast poetry tundra, a unique efflorescence (maybe not really unique, but certainly unrepeatable); making possible a certain critical response - a distancing of our own - without reductive polemics. Ironically, Ron Silliman's blog is exemplary in presenting a sense of that vastness, side-by-side with the polemical maneuvering which doesn't do justice to the era.

Wonder & surprise. Besides all which above, when I think of poetry as a phenomenon at 4 a.m., its essence becomes only more strange, spectral & mysterious. I begin to sense it as a kind of mana, a word-flesh of a sort, passed from poet to poet, from ghost to ghost. The stylistic & technical discoveries & fireworks of individual poets I see as forms of deflection (or inflection?) - rocketing off the poetic black (w)holes of earlier poets. Thus the emphases of Olson or Niedecker or Ashbery or Lowell or Bishop or Berryman or you-name-um are a kind of verbal clothing, shrouding, hiding of something. . . and you begin to see the variations played by an Olson or an Ashbery or a Zukofsky as filigree overlaid on impulses recognizable in Eliot or Pound or Stevens, & themselves doing the same from previous eras. . .

the unique-intense intelligibility - the verbum ipse - expressed through the individual sensibility - a mana stretching back to the psalmist David, dancing & singing naked around the ark of the covenant, and before that to the shaman or woman muttering oracles beside a version of the pythian tripod.

The process of poetic making seems to involve the individual poet's attempt to find a form for that essential intelligibility; it must be intelligible to themselves & fit like the finest woven coccoon before it will be intelligible eventually to anyone else.

Mr. James Behrle writes (outlining his view of Joan Houlihan's approach):

A poem *must* mean something, something that can be consumed. Like a Big Mac. A poem must be something that can be discussed in a circle, taken apart and put back together. A poem is something that can be taught and understood. There is no rigor to push language, to test sounds, to create dissonance, to make it new.

Knowledge has been identified with food since at least the Genesis story of the Tree of Knowledge.

But food means more than gobbling down protein & vitamins for "survival". The nourishment is often indistinguishable from the pleasure. What I understand Houlihan to be referring to, in her critique, is the pleasure of Pound's logopeia, the "dance of the intellect among words".

Now Mr. Behrle may be correct in saying that the poetry of his "we" often involves no simple transfer of meaning, in fact it may involve a rejection of "meaning" in this sense altogether, and still remain poetry. But it would be too bad if the rigor of his "we" style of consumption denies the pleasures of meaning altogether. Houlihan's quotes from various auto-pilot playfully ambi-meaningless experimental taste-defying word-gumbos simply underlines her argument that certain pleasures of ordered meaning are missing there.

Responding to JK (of today, 8/7) :

it seems like there is a basic difference between:
1) this text means [. . .] to me
and
2) in this text, the author is communicating [. . .].

A text will trigger all kinds of thoughts & insights in a reader; but this is a little different activity from that of trying to "hear" exactly what the author is communicating.

It's possible that Gary's "mis"-translation is actually an effort to convey more exactly what the poet is saying in the original. I suppose there are as many ways to do this as there are languages (or more).

Kasey quotes Mukarovsky's On Poetic Language, an excellent book.

Mukarovsky admits a duality between artifact & communication, but leans toward the self-referential pole (he is also writing this at the height of the modernist era).

I wrote earlier this week that if the poem doesn't work as art, its sociopolitical "communications" are meaningless.

Nevertheless I am leaning & pushing in these blogpolemics toward the communicative pole.

Because, I guess, I believe in "universals", or some ground of truth (thinking of Chas. Peirce here). & for me a corollary of universals is that if they exist, they must exist in some kind of dialectic or duality with partial truths, differentiation of languages, etc. The problem of the many & the one.

How does this relate to poetics? Well, if you accept the notion of universality, then there is a problem with the purely self-referential, the autonomous artifact. Because everything exists in context & relation to general, universal truth. You cannot avoid communication, even if the emphasis may reside in pure aesthetic effects. (Of course, postmodernism already made this critique of modernism, but on behalf of a relativity so complete, so aleatory, it makes communication a moot issue. Postmodernism exploded the self-enclosed artifact & left smaller artifacts bobbling & wandering through "mass culture".)

& frankly I think it's intriguing to consider the hypothesis that there is a motivating situation underlying the supposed divide between "mainstream" & "experimental" (as we know them now, that is in their contemporary versions) : the situation in which the collapse of shared universal narratives pressures art to build these self-referential models, sort of compensatory utopias.