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.
Showing posts with label metaform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metaform. Show all posts
3.07.2003
2.11.2003
I'm happy to see someone's reading the archives. Jonathan Mayhew writes:
"So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that there is a common, mainstream
Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril."
. . . but I don't think I said that, exactly. Or if I did I didn't explain myself properly (this is back in the early weeks of this blog).
Firstly it's important to distinguish between the "Eliot tradition" (which is NOT what I mean) and Eliot's notion of "tradition" (which is something like what I mean). Secondly, I did not say that poets ignore tradition at their peril. I think I said that the various oppositional streams in US poetry emerged in conscious or unconscious differentiation from the tradition (in a large expansive sense of that term). In other words, poets DON'T ignore this tradition - they play off against it.
Finally I think in various postings, esp. regarding the idea of metaform, I tried to get at the idea of poetry as immediacy, event, "nowness" - that there's a way of looking at poetry in sort of a worldwide sense as a distinctive activity, in which "tradition" is always new, always emerging "now" - this is of the essence of poetry.
I admit that this idea of a category or frame which includes US poetry is unsubstantiated & controversial. But it does also seem to me that there is also a lot of evidence that, at least in its more polemical manifestations, different styles of US poetry have emerged in very clear dialectical contrast with whatever is considered traditional or establishment or mainstream or passe style.
"So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that there is a common, mainstream
Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril."
. . . but I don't think I said that, exactly. Or if I did I didn't explain myself properly (this is back in the early weeks of this blog).
Firstly it's important to distinguish between the "Eliot tradition" (which is NOT what I mean) and Eliot's notion of "tradition" (which is something like what I mean). Secondly, I did not say that poets ignore tradition at their peril. I think I said that the various oppositional streams in US poetry emerged in conscious or unconscious differentiation from the tradition (in a large expansive sense of that term). In other words, poets DON'T ignore this tradition - they play off against it.
Finally I think in various postings, esp. regarding the idea of metaform, I tried to get at the idea of poetry as immediacy, event, "nowness" - that there's a way of looking at poetry in sort of a worldwide sense as a distinctive activity, in which "tradition" is always new, always emerging "now" - this is of the essence of poetry.
I admit that this idea of a category or frame which includes US poetry is unsubstantiated & controversial. But it does also seem to me that there is also a lot of evidence that, at least in its more polemical manifestations, different styles of US poetry have emerged in very clear dialectical contrast with whatever is considered traditional or establishment or mainstream or passe style.
1.31.2003
Hybrid form. The plot of Proust's supreme prose work is riveted to a poetic notion: the return of past time (via an unaccountable, involuntary impulse) to a receptive, responsive Now.
I guess the metaform of this blog is similar: the re-emergence of old poems in a retrospective context. Recapitulation. Mandelstam's "incarnational" take on biology (quoting Darwin or Lamarck, I suppose): "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".
Recapitulation, ontology, teleology. Acmeism's "nostalgia for world culture", the "gold coins of the global humanism of the future": founded on the notion of the Person as microcosm, telos.
I guess the metaform of this blog is similar: the re-emergence of old poems in a retrospective context. Recapitulation. Mandelstam's "incarnational" take on biology (quoting Darwin or Lamarck, I suppose): "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".
Recapitulation, ontology, teleology. Acmeism's "nostalgia for world culture", the "gold coins of the global humanism of the future": founded on the notion of the Person as microcosm, telos.
1.29.2003
Some helpful "rants" from Jonathan today on formalism. I like what he says about Pound's metronome. "The sequence of the musical phrase" would mean a rhythm & tempo not dominated by the fixity of the metronome.
But a more sophisticated use of traditional form & metrics must be represented by poets outside the camps of "early" New Formalism! I just don't know where they are.
& O critics, O reviewers: show me the wheels within wheels!!
The Wheel of (Virgilian) Form: how the innate primal perennial poetic IMPULSE emerges as lyric receptivity; didactic forthright argument; epic vision.
The Wheel of Metaform: how the impulse circles around, from ephebic formal imitation, to mature absorption of experience, to the recapitulation of these experiential metaforms in original, inward form.
"Sounds really German to me, von Heinrich", quoth Socrates.
Well, Socky, I'm looking for a paradigm. I'm weary of the promos for pomo innovative elliptics; I'm weary of threadbare surfing attention to traditional means. Bring your reviews to the table & we will evaluate them in Russian translation.
But a more sophisticated use of traditional form & metrics must be represented by poets outside the camps of "early" New Formalism! I just don't know where they are.
& O critics, O reviewers: show me the wheels within wheels!!
The Wheel of (Virgilian) Form: how the innate primal perennial poetic IMPULSE emerges as lyric receptivity; didactic forthright argument; epic vision.
The Wheel of Metaform: how the impulse circles around, from ephebic formal imitation, to mature absorption of experience, to the recapitulation of these experiential metaforms in original, inward form.
"Sounds really German to me, von Heinrich", quoth Socrates.
Well, Socky, I'm looking for a paradigm. I'm weary of the promos for pomo innovative elliptics; I'm weary of threadbare surfing attention to traditional means. Bring your reviews to the table & we will evaluate them in Russian translation.
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.
1.24.2003
Socrates: Well, Hankovitch, once again you seem to be running sorta fast & furious. Liable to leave people behind with all your airy abstractions. Lemme see if I can help you outa this mess.
Henry: Please do, Socky. I was over at Jordan Davis' blog, where he was talking about Kenneth K. saying "we were the last to create a world", & the heavy burden of all the prescriptive baggage of being handed an ambition for Unity, & how perhaps writing about what's in front of you, the limits make it authentic as "world"... anyway he said it better in his own inimitable way, & I thought he was responding to some things on this blog & over at Anastasios', and then I noticed I had inadvertently gone into the archive & was reading stuff he had written 3 months ago, late October. . .
Socrates: You ARE confused. Somehow, methinks, we have to speak more simply & clearly about these matters. Poetry is for others, not for just endlessly recycling our own aquaculture.
Henry: I guess.
Socrates: Well, let me see if I read you right. You say there's something called para-form. Well, let's call it meta-form for now, it's more Greek to me. & it sounds like a word for the design or tendency of a poet's overall style, as opposed to "form" in an abstract, generic or strictly technical sense. Is that right?
Henry: well, I guess so.
Socrates: OK, & it seems you are arguing that "form" isn't too important, doesn't even make much sense, without this surround, this metacontext - where the poet's style fuses with the sense of nature, beauty, time, truth, as these are evolving in the culture she or he's in. & some poets, like you said Yeats, Goethe, Ashbery even maybe, Mandelstam in "Flint Ode", Bleguin Sansterre - these poets are conscious of that unitary meta-context, that surround - & their response to it gives their work a kind of coherence or address. That's the meta-form.
Henry: Well, I didn't say that, but maybe it's a nice follow-up. Maybe a poet's deepest impulse, their drive, is to respond holistically to the whole dilemma or wheeling variety around them - & that holism or unitary drive produces. . . coherences, stylistic & thematic saliences.
Socrates: Whew! "saliences" - is that Greek?
Henry: let me get back to you on that. btw, who's Bleguin Sansterre?
Socrates: I'lll call you on the cell about that. Later. In the meantime, you came along with another blast of verbiage today, about MUSIC vs PAINTING & poetry vs prose fiction. . . what the heck was that all about?
Henry: Duh. . .
Socrates: All right, I'll cover it for you. I am Socrates, after all.
Henry: I am Socrates. I am a Man. Therefore. . .
Socrates: Oh shut that door. As I was saying, you was trying to differentiate in a very sushpect way, poetry & the poet from prose & the novelist. The poet, according to Hen, is the representative, the visible sign of Song. Whereas, in prose fiction, the word is a transparent vehicle for a fable - a visualization, a painted scene - in poetry, the musicality inherent in the microstructure of language EMBODIES (sings) its meaning, its referent. It's the difference between the eye & the ear, perhaps.
Henry: I guess that's pretty close to what i was trying to say. [snuffle] Excuse me, I have to blow my nose.
Socrates: So Hen, you are asserting this difference or opposition between poetry & fiction, & the role of the poet & the role of the prose writer. & you were suggesting that just as meta-form rules over microform (& all the USA turf divisions & polemics that involves), so too the musical imperative, the song imperative of poetry rules over the more local turbulence of styles & techniques; because poets in all their variety are still more alike to one another (as & when they make poetry) than they are like (in their methods) those making prose.
Henry: I would also just point out the interesting comments on Anastasios' list about nature poetry - Hopkins & Niedecker & Bunting; & how he connects Hopkins' concept of the unity of natural forms ("inscape") with the "aural analogue", or the onomatopeia of poetic language. We may be seeing sort of a related set of concepts here, related to my notes about metaform (as you call it) & the pursuit of a holistic response to the surroundings (natural, cultural), by way of the inherent musicality. Also curious what Jonathan Mayhew had to say recently about Niedecker & "lightness", the lack of baggage - seems like sort of another name for clarity - the ability to express in such a way that we feel an instant, natural kinship or joyful apprehension - is this a giddiness?
Socrates: None a your bidness. You're attemptin yr usual transumptive warp-wraparound, & getting vaguer by the min. It creates a bland unity, ends up as a blockade.
Henry: Well, maybe not, Socky, maybe not. Listen to this quotation from Plutarch, commentating on you, Socky, yourself: "Fiction, being a verbal fabrication, very readily follows a roundabout route, and turns aside from the painful to what is more pleasant. . . For not metre nor figure of speech nor loftiness of diction nor aptness of metaphor nor unity of composition has so much allurement and charm, as a clever interweaving of fabulous narrative."
Socrates: Somethin the Publishing Industry has been aware of fer some time.
Henry: Think back to what I said earlier about Mandelstam's "Flint Ode" - how, as Omry Ronen has described, the poem's theme is a meditation on the nature of poetry (it is an Ode, after all). And the PLOT of that story is one that distinguishes the poet, somewhat prophet-like, from the "sleepy" fictions of the mass culture-mind. It's a sort of many-sided individuation process - not for the sake of that individual so much - but through the poetry the culture-mind itself comes to consciousness. Now imbricate that with Plutarch's contrast of traditional poetic form with the pleasures of fiction. The poet, as opposed to the fictioneer, because of an ineluctable vow to the inherent quality of verbal song, is the bearer of what truth there is, in song.
Socrates: But Hen!!!!!! How is this relevant to the newsletters of the poetry clubs of TODAY!!!!! They want to prove themselves!! They want to be poets today & tomorrow! They want to grow in their art! They want to live in their art! They want to make themselves at home in their art! As somebody told you once, "Don't tell us what to do!!!"
Henry: My two or three meta-imperatives here are not prescriptive, Socky. They are really not. In fact I was thinking today that it would be bestest for me & perhaps bestest for us all to stop thinking in the old ways of the USA around here about this stuff. It's not a coffee clatch for the Hatfields & McCoys. We might think toward the larger world & wider publics & ordinary unknown readers. We might think of Poetry as a vast vague meta-imperative which we are free to explore. The tools are basic & primal: 1. the song in words (the poetic imperative); 2. the beautiful & mysterious holistic inscape they encapsulate (the imperative of metaform); 3. the Mandelstamian-Celanian truth imperative (which finds differing modes of expression in poetry & fiction) (Celan's "Walk in the Mountains" story is a meditation on these issues).
Socrates: But Hen, how can something so imperative not be prescriptive?
Henry: Imperative is the wrong word, maybe. I'm talking about the conceptual/creative order that shapes the overall character of poetry. Song, metaformal beauty, and the individuating-epiphanic process of truth's undertone - the sound of the pedal - emerging beneath fable & sleep. These are the larger constellations that overshadow our more parochial concerns.
Socrates: Can I have some of that cookie?
Henry: Please do, Socky. I was over at Jordan Davis' blog, where he was talking about Kenneth K. saying "we were the last to create a world", & the heavy burden of all the prescriptive baggage of being handed an ambition for Unity, & how perhaps writing about what's in front of you, the limits make it authentic as "world"... anyway he said it better in his own inimitable way, & I thought he was responding to some things on this blog & over at Anastasios', and then I noticed I had inadvertently gone into the archive & was reading stuff he had written 3 months ago, late October. . .
Socrates: You ARE confused. Somehow, methinks, we have to speak more simply & clearly about these matters. Poetry is for others, not for just endlessly recycling our own aquaculture.
Henry: I guess.
Socrates: Well, let me see if I read you right. You say there's something called para-form. Well, let's call it meta-form for now, it's more Greek to me. & it sounds like a word for the design or tendency of a poet's overall style, as opposed to "form" in an abstract, generic or strictly technical sense. Is that right?
Henry: well, I guess so.
Socrates: OK, & it seems you are arguing that "form" isn't too important, doesn't even make much sense, without this surround, this metacontext - where the poet's style fuses with the sense of nature, beauty, time, truth, as these are evolving in the culture she or he's in. & some poets, like you said Yeats, Goethe, Ashbery even maybe, Mandelstam in "Flint Ode", Bleguin Sansterre - these poets are conscious of that unitary meta-context, that surround - & their response to it gives their work a kind of coherence or address. That's the meta-form.
Henry: Well, I didn't say that, but maybe it's a nice follow-up. Maybe a poet's deepest impulse, their drive, is to respond holistically to the whole dilemma or wheeling variety around them - & that holism or unitary drive produces. . . coherences, stylistic & thematic saliences.
Socrates: Whew! "saliences" - is that Greek?
Henry: let me get back to you on that. btw, who's Bleguin Sansterre?
Socrates: I'lll call you on the cell about that. Later. In the meantime, you came along with another blast of verbiage today, about MUSIC vs PAINTING & poetry vs prose fiction. . . what the heck was that all about?
Henry: Duh. . .
Socrates: All right, I'll cover it for you. I am Socrates, after all.
Henry: I am Socrates. I am a Man. Therefore. . .
Socrates: Oh shut that door. As I was saying, you was trying to differentiate in a very sushpect way, poetry & the poet from prose & the novelist. The poet, according to Hen, is the representative, the visible sign of Song. Whereas, in prose fiction, the word is a transparent vehicle for a fable - a visualization, a painted scene - in poetry, the musicality inherent in the microstructure of language EMBODIES (sings) its meaning, its referent. It's the difference between the eye & the ear, perhaps.
Henry: I guess that's pretty close to what i was trying to say. [snuffle] Excuse me, I have to blow my nose.
Socrates: So Hen, you are asserting this difference or opposition between poetry & fiction, & the role of the poet & the role of the prose writer. & you were suggesting that just as meta-form rules over microform (& all the USA turf divisions & polemics that involves), so too the musical imperative, the song imperative of poetry rules over the more local turbulence of styles & techniques; because poets in all their variety are still more alike to one another (as & when they make poetry) than they are like (in their methods) those making prose.
Henry: I would also just point out the interesting comments on Anastasios' list about nature poetry - Hopkins & Niedecker & Bunting; & how he connects Hopkins' concept of the unity of natural forms ("inscape") with the "aural analogue", or the onomatopeia of poetic language. We may be seeing sort of a related set of concepts here, related to my notes about metaform (as you call it) & the pursuit of a holistic response to the surroundings (natural, cultural), by way of the inherent musicality. Also curious what Jonathan Mayhew had to say recently about Niedecker & "lightness", the lack of baggage - seems like sort of another name for clarity - the ability to express in such a way that we feel an instant, natural kinship or joyful apprehension - is this a giddiness?
Socrates: None a your bidness. You're attemptin yr usual transumptive warp-wraparound, & getting vaguer by the min. It creates a bland unity, ends up as a blockade.
Henry: Well, maybe not, Socky, maybe not. Listen to this quotation from Plutarch, commentating on you, Socky, yourself: "Fiction, being a verbal fabrication, very readily follows a roundabout route, and turns aside from the painful to what is more pleasant. . . For not metre nor figure of speech nor loftiness of diction nor aptness of metaphor nor unity of composition has so much allurement and charm, as a clever interweaving of fabulous narrative."
Socrates: Somethin the Publishing Industry has been aware of fer some time.
Henry: Think back to what I said earlier about Mandelstam's "Flint Ode" - how, as Omry Ronen has described, the poem's theme is a meditation on the nature of poetry (it is an Ode, after all). And the PLOT of that story is one that distinguishes the poet, somewhat prophet-like, from the "sleepy" fictions of the mass culture-mind. It's a sort of many-sided individuation process - not for the sake of that individual so much - but through the poetry the culture-mind itself comes to consciousness. Now imbricate that with Plutarch's contrast of traditional poetic form with the pleasures of fiction. The poet, as opposed to the fictioneer, because of an ineluctable vow to the inherent quality of verbal song, is the bearer of what truth there is, in song.
Socrates: But Hen!!!!!! How is this relevant to the newsletters of the poetry clubs of TODAY!!!!! They want to prove themselves!! They want to be poets today & tomorrow! They want to grow in their art! They want to live in their art! They want to make themselves at home in their art! As somebody told you once, "Don't tell us what to do!!!"
Henry: My two or three meta-imperatives here are not prescriptive, Socky. They are really not. In fact I was thinking today that it would be bestest for me & perhaps bestest for us all to stop thinking in the old ways of the USA around here about this stuff. It's not a coffee clatch for the Hatfields & McCoys. We might think toward the larger world & wider publics & ordinary unknown readers. We might think of Poetry as a vast vague meta-imperative which we are free to explore. The tools are basic & primal: 1. the song in words (the poetic imperative); 2. the beautiful & mysterious holistic inscape they encapsulate (the imperative of metaform); 3. the Mandelstamian-Celanian truth imperative (which finds differing modes of expression in poetry & fiction) (Celan's "Walk in the Mountains" story is a meditation on these issues).
Socrates: But Hen, how can something so imperative not be prescriptive?
Henry: Imperative is the wrong word, maybe. I'm talking about the conceptual/creative order that shapes the overall character of poetry. Song, metaformal beauty, and the individuating-epiphanic process of truth's undertone - the sound of the pedal - emerging beneath fable & sleep. These are the larger constellations that overshadow our more parochial concerns.
Socrates: Can I have some of that cookie?
Formalism some more. Another angle on "para-form" (& I recommend in the regard a book by S. K. Heninger titled "Proportion Poetical").
The polemical fracturings between supposed formalists & supposed innovators disguise the fact that both fall together on one side of a deeper fissure - between poets & prose fiction writers. I know that even to admit the difference is highly controversial. But - & the Heninger book is very helpful here - the divide goes back to Plato vs. Aristotle on the nature of poetry. Is the poet, per Aristotle, primarily a maker of fictional imitations of a real or idealized reality - ie. primarily allied to PAINTING - so that verse & metrics are incidental? Or is the poet, ala Plato, the inspired (drunken) vessel of divine fury, possessed by a dithyrhamb, primarily allied to MUSIC? Does the poet require & insist on music in order to be able to invent the appropriate mimesis of the ideal harmony of the spheres? Or is versification less important than realistic description & plot?
The debate since Pound & modernism has intensified, with the different crosscurrents very obvious in Pound: he needed free verse both in order to be properly "musical" AND in order to include a more accurate representation of "contemporary reality". But the musicality of Symbolism was to some degree predicated on a rejection of prose, everyday speech, "journalism"; while on the other hand the metrical traditionalism of someone like Frost served as a kind of grid or framework to HIGHLIGHT or intensify "ordinary speech", the Wordsworthian poet speaking the language of everyperson - and so avoiding the symbolist distancing effect.
But as I say underlying this internal debate, it seems to me, is what makes formalist & anti-formalist close kin : their allegiance to poetry as opposed to prose. Poet means "maker"; fiction means "made thing" - yet the poet is signed by a vow to primitive SONG, while the novelist is devoted to "ut pictura" through the rhetorical drone or equilibrium of prose description - a very different endeavor.
This poetic allegiance to the immediacy & presence of song can be seen to have consequences for the poet's role in culture, on the one hand (the implications for "para-form"), and consequences for the poet's technical development (the implications for form: how does the poet balance the "music" & the "painting"?)
The polemical fracturings between supposed formalists & supposed innovators disguise the fact that both fall together on one side of a deeper fissure - between poets & prose fiction writers. I know that even to admit the difference is highly controversial. But - & the Heninger book is very helpful here - the divide goes back to Plato vs. Aristotle on the nature of poetry. Is the poet, per Aristotle, primarily a maker of fictional imitations of a real or idealized reality - ie. primarily allied to PAINTING - so that verse & metrics are incidental? Or is the poet, ala Plato, the inspired (drunken) vessel of divine fury, possessed by a dithyrhamb, primarily allied to MUSIC? Does the poet require & insist on music in order to be able to invent the appropriate mimesis of the ideal harmony of the spheres? Or is versification less important than realistic description & plot?
The debate since Pound & modernism has intensified, with the different crosscurrents very obvious in Pound: he needed free verse both in order to be properly "musical" AND in order to include a more accurate representation of "contemporary reality". But the musicality of Symbolism was to some degree predicated on a rejection of prose, everyday speech, "journalism"; while on the other hand the metrical traditionalism of someone like Frost served as a kind of grid or framework to HIGHLIGHT or intensify "ordinary speech", the Wordsworthian poet speaking the language of everyperson - and so avoiding the symbolist distancing effect.
But as I say underlying this internal debate, it seems to me, is what makes formalist & anti-formalist close kin : their allegiance to poetry as opposed to prose. Poet means "maker"; fiction means "made thing" - yet the poet is signed by a vow to primitive SONG, while the novelist is devoted to "ut pictura" through the rhetorical drone or equilibrium of prose description - a very different endeavor.
This poetic allegiance to the immediacy & presence of song can be seen to have consequences for the poet's role in culture, on the one hand (the implications for "para-form"), and consequences for the poet's technical development (the implications for form: how does the poet balance the "music" & the "painting"?)
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.
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