Two-Minute Aphorisms

The most radically experimental is that poetry which appears without any publicity, scaffolding or promotion whatsoever, completely bereft of explanatory support networks.

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Poetry is verbal music.  If it has no music, I'm not interested.

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Prose is absolutely necessary, especially for the most banal, vapid and insipid communications.  The only thing on earth which does not require prose is poetry.

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Poetry is conceptual music.  If it has no sound waves, I'm not interested.

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You needn't concern yourself with this useless gray pebble.

Stay, Momentary Confusion

Taking off where I left off a few hours ago, to retrieve Sophie from school...

We were mumbling something about critical detachment, about memory.  "Tradition" in poetry.

Tradition : bit of a taboo expression, eh?  Reactionary, neo-conservative, T.S.-Eliotos antique odor there.

Of course 20th-cent. Modernists revolutionized the whole notion - backward & forward, left & right.  But that was already a long time ago.

When I think about poetic tradition, I see something essentially unavoidable, like "family".  But this tradition is very much not a symptom of some filial-Oedipal-patriarchal-economic sense of duty.  It is instead something organic, almost biological.

Watch how young poets struggle to launch collectives, find affinities, soul-mates, define themselves, test themselves against be-laureled paragons, aspire to famousness, & so on.  What doesn't so much interest me here are motivating ambitions & rivalries.  Rather the curious thing is the anxiety, the helplessness, of poets - confronted by the fact that poetry is this livid knot of incomprehensible, uncontrollable, inexplicable lumpish living somethung, which nobody know how to explain, correct, control, or abolish.  Is like the inheritance of some arcane glob of biological (living) what-not, handed down from generation unto generation - the voodoo box of elegant poison Grandpa bequeathed us, whose Grandpa left to him, & so on, with an unreadable curse scribbled on the lid : Take Good Care of Me, Never Abandon Me, or You Gonna Die.

What are all these MFA programs for, if not that?  What are all these mags about?  These awards, these citations, this enormous prestidigitation of prestige?  These quotations in stone?  These honored dead, these beloved unread classics?  Touchstones?  Operatic ecstasies?

The point of the sword is immediacy.  Poetry doesn't need explaining : it's like a powerful speech, it justifies itself in the persuasive dominance of its message.

All the talent of Madison Avenue is compacted here in this syllable of recorded charisma.

But actually, I don't believe all that.  It's like the poetic version of a simplified, bowdlerized, philistine "American Dream" : the past is pointless; everything of value is about me, here, now.  Poetry is the anti-tradition. (Here we get down to the marrow of the dumbed-down American myth.)

Great!  Cool!  Make America Drool Again!  Great Gatsby!

Sounds pretty psychological, actually.  Frazer, Sacred Wood & all.  Siege Perilous.  The double-bind of succession, father & son.  Elongate twilight of Freud's sacrificial totem, across the "grey matter" of poetry itself.  (So maybe it is a symptom, after all?)

The Great Game.

But you mentioned game... (unicorns?)... so let's reiterate : I had this hunch or notion this afternoon about "detachment".

If we think about what we love, about what's beautiful... it occurs to me that the beautiful is always overdetermined : is "meta", one way or another.  What's beautiful entails, and emanates from, reflection (in both the physical & the intellectual sense).

Memory suffuses the object with feeling, identification.  What we love involves reverberations, echoes (mnemonic stimulae).

So, curiously, detachment - the distancing, the psychic freedom from passionate, emotional absorption - allows memory to evoke beautiful response, because it is fused with the recognition of tragic reality (the actual distance of the past, the ineluctable remoteness of lost time).

The plangent feeling of the truth, the power of the documentary.  Classic-Romantic.  (Italian Neo-Realism?  & then - Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  Deserto Rosso.)

The hour draws on... my deep-seated hunches & haunches gettin' tired here, blog.  For Augustine (& for Nicolas Cusanus) time is purely psychological.  Bracketed by the soul.  Begins & ends there.  This is a liberating concept, on the one hand - & also an abyss.

But for Augustine (following Virgil) poetry (music) was the very strong magic of ordered time.  The enchantment of syllables, framing, architecturally grounding, the sacred ineffable Now (planted, as Joyce put it, on that very void).

Proust also, echoing Augustine.  Re-echoing the poets (in prose).

The frame supports the picture (Rothko colors dream into infinity).  The beautiful an echo, a reflection.  Sketch, abstract, icon, exemplum, imago - of the immaculate supra-beautiful.

So where does this leave poetry?  Tradition?

Sounds very Symboliste.  But remember : poetry is this intractable breathing spiritual animal - a stubborn problem, a dilemma - a sort of spiritual refugee, a crisis (like Roma in Roma).

Nobody can work it out in advance.  But I do believe it might be possible to re-think poetry (with a capital P) somewhat as the pre-Revolutionary, post-Revolutionary Russian Acmeists did (Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam).  With a sort of Cusanian (conjunctio oppositorum) passionate detachment, or critical engagement.

The paradigmatic or characteristic quality of contemporary cultural reality is immediacy.  All the Faustian technological forces are concentrated on disseminating the charismatic (marketable) product.  Of course there's a large element of risk involved, but this is of the essence of productive enterprise.  Success is the by-word; our future well-being depends on the happy financial outcome.

By the way, I'm not against free markets, or anti-capitalist.  I just believe there exists a scale of values which must mediate the struggle for economic domination, on behalf of equality, liberty, human rights, the common good, the safety net, the peaceable kingdom.  There are things more important than luxury, status, charisma and sway.  There is freedom.  There is equality.  There is justice.

Poetry inhabits this realm of universal spiritual values (see: Mandelstam on Chaadev, Rome, moral freedom).  And by grappling with the chaotic force-fields of articulate speech, it establishes a free space for what the Acmeists termed "the Word as such".

This sounds like a very hi-falutin' bequest.  But it's not, really.  I'm looking at the tradition of the beautiful as a manifestation of the detachment of elegiac (yet strangely hopeful) realism.  Of Blake's metaphysical "innocence and experience".

Social media is bursting with constant, relentless, monotonal cultural aggression, masquerading as sophistication.  The little screen is inundated with seductive, screaming roadsigns.  King Blurb is Trumpet for a Day.

Poetry, on the other hand, resonates with inherent doubleness.  It is not what you think, it is not what you feel.  It is not even what you read.  It is another kind of sign, pointing toward your beating heart.

Listen to it, keeping time... like John Donne's bell.  It tolls for thee.

Defense of a Diagram (3)

I've started reflecting out loud, in a slapdash way, on Ravenna Diagram, an ongoing work-in-progress, comprising a certain diaristic sequence of poem-segments, some of which have appeared on this blog, and which are collected into an incremental design of chapters and books.

The first two postings under this heading ("Defense of a Diagram") might give the impression that the poet in question (that would be me) is merely filling out a pre-existent didactic pattern, standing on a very narrow, marginal, & maybe obsolete theological/confessional set of beliefs.

I hope the reader would be freed from such assumptions by simply encountering some of the poems themselves.  The life of any poetry is deeply bound up with improvisation, contingency, surprise : as Whitman said of Leaves of Grass, it's a kind of language experiment.  Perhaps paradoxically, poetic language (as Osip Mandelstam argued) is much more primal & "raw" than prose.  It is "the cry of its occasion" (Wallace Stevens).  It is a kind of verbal embodiment or model of actuality (the closest linguistic approximation to "incarnation").  Thus, within the dramatic entity which is the poem, any & all kinds of verbal signs, propositions and abstractions are tested in the (poetic) field.  It doesn't matter, in the end, what the argument is, what the doctrine, what the theology, what the cultural tradition - if it doesn't manifest as actual poetry.

So part of the "drama" of what I'm trying to do here is the suspense of a geste.  The poet takes on a difficult task : & can she do it?  Can she make it work?  Can she cross Mandelstam's "two strands" of the "poetic material" - the subject-matter with the verbal medium itself?

What I'm attempting - & have been working at for a long time (say about 35 years) - is an adventure in vastness, enormity, & grandeur.  The long, long, long poem, the epic.  Melville's American "anti-Bible" (Moby Dick) - Pound's "tale of the tribe" (The Cantos) - these are models.  Ravenna Diagram was preceded by a number of earlier such works from my hand : In RI, Island Road, Stubborn Grew, Lanthanum, et al.

Thus there is a genre, a mode, a literary context, and a history (a tradition, you might say) which helps to place what I'm trying to do.  There are many other poets working this vein, in one way or another.  (Robin Coste Lewis' "Voyage of the Sable Venus" is a recent, celebrated example.)

But what spurs me on?  Is it some kind of character flaw - obsessive-compulsive behavior?  Megalomania?  Competitive, rivalrous overdrive?

Not really, I think.  The motive gets back to the question of the "argument" or the over-arching theme.  A work of literature has a specific gravity - heavy or light, depending on the poet's skill and the gravitas of the theme.  The Idea, the First Idea.  The one who attempts the epic must have something to say, something urgent to get across.

At root, poetry is a spiritual activity.  "A Tear is an Intellectual Thing / And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King" (Blake).  Spirit and conscience guide the creative freedom of the artist.  As such - as a spiritual activity - the poet & the poem make absolute claims about the "nature of things."  Thus I have harped repeatedly, on this blog, in many different ways, that poetry is the most adequate (& thus accurate) verbal representation of Reality as a whole, as a wholeness.

These notions lay a burden of obligation - a "burden which is light."  The inherent suspense, the drama of the poet's geste, is to prove worthy of these claims, in the fulfillment of the work.  What is your definition of poetry? the interrogator asked Mandelstam, hoping to catch him in some kind of Soviet fallacy.  The poet's sense of being right, he replied.  You can actually hear Mandelstam's conscience speaking there - his feeling of obligation to express the inner rightness of his vision.

So no, with Ravenna Diagram I am not filling out a simple pre-ordained ideological pattern.  Rather, I'm exploring a mystery - trying to express what little I can see of the underlying nature of things.  That this involves an historical sense seems basic to my own interest.

If one is proposing a metaphysical or theological way of interpreting experience, then one can sketch out a plain model of vectors or intersecting lines of force : history, time, the divine (the spiritual), the personal (subjectivity), poetry, and the history of poetry (tradition).  & if one is willing to conceive of Jesus (in the manner of David Jones) as the point in timespace where Man (humankind) and the Divine intersect "in the order of signs"... as the living template or paradigm of every human person - then "the historical Jesus" - or the "Jesus of poetry" - is where all these vectors coincide.  Obviously, not every reader of poetry is going to be prepared thus to conceive the nature of things!  But that's part of the joy & thrill & suspense of the enterprise : how the strange encounter is tested & plays out in the poem itself.  One need not accept the doctrine (inchoate, mysterious & confused as it is) in order to enjoy the song.

The Labarum

The King Must Die

We apply faulty words to profound things, words which are then misunderstood and misused, by ourselves and others.  Yet the words are necessary - or perhaps we simply desire them, we can't live without them.

The Spirit of God = the Spirit of Love.  The Mind of the Creator = the Mind of Love.  The source of all phenomena is a creative origin, a living Mind - oriented toward wisdom, freedom, wonder, truth.  Toward Life.

Powerful intellectual movements have arisen which simultaneously enlighten us about our moral darkness, while at the same time denying our capacity to change by means of such knowledge.  We are held captive by our own unconscious drives (Freud, Lacan).  We are unknowingly dedicated to a tragic will-to-power (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger).  Even those who acknowledge the power of human enlightenment transmute it into an ineluctable, objective process of historical determinism (Hegel, Marx).

The three traditional Abrahamic religions, in contrast, make a bolder claim : "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  God is a personal God (despite the fact that  this hypothesis is beyond our comprehension).  The moral root of civilization and humanity consists in the re-ordering of the individual human soul toward higher ethical purpose - toward the Spirit of Love, and the common good which is its expression.  Toward what is called "the Great Commandment" (to love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and likewise, to love your neighbor as yourself).

All three Abrahamic religions have much to answer for.  The root of the problem lies in the idolatry of their own verbalized doctrines.

 Judaism forgets the global, providential purpose of its own calling (to be a "guide to all nations"), and devotes itself to separation from "the outsiders".  As a result, Judaism is unable to recognize its own Messiah, the one who is actually carrying out the providential purpose of the original commandments.

Christianity, once it canonized its texts and latched onto worldly states (in Constantinople & Rome), began to persecute its own elder brother (Judaism) - misreading St. Paul's polemical distinctions between "law" and "grace", and using them to lay the foundations of Western and global anti-semitism, with all its unspeakable historic consequences.  Jesus said, "I have come not to abrogate the law, but to fulfill it."  Law and grace depend upon each other : the Spirit of Love is law-abiding (in the sense of abiding by the Great Commandment).

Islam denies God's saving intervention in history, by way of Judaism, and his "personification" in the Messiah (Christianity).  As a result the Spirit of God remains remote and unaccountable, reduced to a commander of submission.  But the Oedipal dynamic underlying human anthropology - outlined in Robert A. Paul's important study, Moses and Civilization - illuminates the psycho-sociology of a patriarchal world order.  Where there is submission there will inevitably also be the flip side of the coin : domination.

We have all gone astray in the midst of our imaginings, says the prophet.  We inhabit a conjectural world, and our conjectures are finite, human, & imperfect, wrote Nicholas of Cusa.

This dynamic which Robert Paul explores is at work in all three Abrahamic religions.  Ultimately I think we could characterize it as the historical legacy of human nature's battle with death.  Death threatens the continuance of human social life.  Paul's anthropology explains how the the paradoxical conjunction of 1) individual mortality with 2) collective social continuity, produces transformative mythologies of "royal succession", the conjunction of divine and earthly kingship serving as the basic model or "political explanation" for the existential dilemma of human mortality.  The Oedipal complexes and neuroses on the individual level are recapitulations of an essentially collective, political, anthropological reality (or we could say they are two faces of a connected reality).  This, for Paul, is a global phenomenon, exhibiting its variations (transformations) in every human culture (not just the Abrahamic religions).

Two things seem clear to me from Paul's analysis :

1) The deep-rooted violence which accompanies this human history is at least in part a consequence of patterns of patriarchy.  The whole question of "royal succession" - Freud's young males of the horde overthrowing the tyrannical old males - is rooted in a power struggle over the pacified, objectified female members of the puzzle.  The third person - the woman in the middle - is left out of the equation, except as a matrix of sexual pleasure and biological continuance.

2) Paul's model, while deeply explanatory of human behavior, is fundamentally empirical.  It is scientific, in his own sense of based on the "reality principle".  Thus, for Paul, any transcendental or metaphysical dimension is ruled out of the analysis.  The positing of a cosmic Spirit or a personal God or eternal life or life-after-death, or any such metaphysical proposition, is held to be a product of human imagination, or at least as groundless in an "evidentiary" sense.

I would suggest, however, that modern science itself has unraveled many of its own materialist, positivist, and empirical certainties in the course of the last century.  Physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology have all bumped up against the unknown, the unexplained, and the paradoxical.  This, of course, is their modus operandi and raison d'etre : but these revolutionary "unknowns" have somewhat tempered the pride of scientific positivism.  It's possible again to imagine our own blindness : & to wonder in the face of the unknown.  As I understand it, the spirit of poetry, of the human imagination, still presents possibilities which stretch beyond the "reality principle" as we know it.  In the matrix of the poetic (a feminine Muse?) it's possible to "remember" the roots of reality in creative freedom : to find a harmony between the beauty and wonder of nature and the intuition of a cosmic Mind... a divine Spirit... a Spirit of Love...

Verbal Promontory

Integritas, consonantias, claritas : dimensions of beauty, according to Thomas Aquinas.  In James Joyce's translation : "wholeness, harmony, radiance."  Claritas : radiance, brilliance, intelligibility.

The work of art - if it's a thing of beauty, then it's a "whole" thing, an integral thing, a distinct, whole something.

Beginning, middle, end.  Shape, design, coherence.

Philosophers, of course, have chewed over aesthetics forever.  "Our aesthetic response is subjective, but the beauty to which we respond is universal."  Or so one argument goes.

And humanity displays something called "common sense" - sensus comunis.  We share sensibility (response to experience) and understanding (comprehension of same).  Whether or not these are "transcendental" or somehow otherwise determined.

Philos. 101.

Why am I going on like this?  I have ten minutes before I leave the building.

Poetry is one of the modes of human art-making.  We make whole objects, which manifest their own integrity, their coherence, their radiance.

The poet's sense of history differs slightly, perhaps, from that of the historian or the philosopher.  Because the poet responds especially strongly to the aesthetic dimension of a poem - no matter when the poem was produced.  Poets, of course, may have a more or less acute critical sense (say, of the social/existential/political differences between today and 200 B.C.) - which can affect their responses to poems of past ages.  But I think there is always a basic (or maybe residual) artistic response to the "poem as such".  This is why they (the poems) keep getting translated anew.  There is something integral which inheres in them.

I have to shut down now.  So why am I going on like this?  I have no general advice for writers (all those would-be poets in Seattle this weekend).  But for me, the adventure of making poems has a lot to do with responding - in my own stuff - to miraculous writings of long ago (or not so long ago).

Claritas, radiance, intelligibility... there is always hope for the sensus comunis of world civilization.  But maybe we need the detachment from the gamesmanship (our own, & our crowding contemporaries).  We need to sense the objectivity of art, and find our own mode of detachment.

I have built a sort of stony promontory in words.  It's lonesome out here.  But I'm hoping it will last, after the cookie-cutter parade has passed on by.

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

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.)

Related topics (there are many, many others) :

allusion, beauty, commentary, complexity, incarnational poetics, literary absolute, mathematics, musicality, negative capability, paraphrase, reader, recapitulation, time...

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...

There were values (impersonality, historicity) of the "Golden Age" of the American Moderns (1st half of 20th cent.). One only has to think of Eliot's essays, Pound's clusters of reference-allusion, Moore's exactitude, Crane's epic expansiveness, Stevens' conversations (in the poems) with precursors & contemporaries, his ambition for a "theory" of poetry in poetry... (though they each show as much originality & subjectivity as impersonality/objectivity...)

There have been at least 3 or 4 generations between now and then, during which American poets for the most part (though of course not entirely) were fixated on their own subjective interiority and the private experiences of life in a vast & singular nation. In retrospect, and in comparison, the early Moderns - whether they lived in the U.S. or abroad - come across (to various degrees) as exiles. The 2nd generation lived in their shadow; the 3rd generation rebelled against the New Critical crystallizations of the 2nd; and the 4th generation rebelled against the egocentricities of the 3rd - by the application of protocols or methodologies (the postmoderns, the "post-avants").

Perhaps the next step will be a sort of "silver age" - a 2nd flowering of some of the compositional principles underlying the Stravinskian neo-classicism of the early 20th-century. Methodologies of surface style will no longer be sufficient. There will be a return to "3-dimensional" composition : uniting topical subject-matter with generic modelling with original invention.

"Torque", on the other hand, is a method for controlling style, a sort of literariness-gizmo. You spin the axle of ir-reference and ir-reverence, like a wheel of chance. But a style can't transcend itself if it's not aimed, from the beginning, somewhere beyond literature. In a comment to Ron's post today, Curtis Faville mentioned Larry Eigner's cumulative momentum as he writes into the unknown. Seems apropos here. The "unknown" is the theme which draws and compels the writer. But a style which is all technique - only technique - can never surpass itself.

This is a paradox about some of the very subtle and highly-wrought styles in our mannerist and mandarin scene - rather than self-surpassing, they are self-devouring. They become brittle style-displays, rather than the trace of an authentic poem (left behind like a cicada's husk).

Style surpasses itself; poetry supersedes literature; poet runs faster than writer (often into brick wall).

A poem's momentum must surpass its style. A wave is more powerful than the sum of its molecules. This does not mean style is inessential : style makes the wave. (If it has no self-surpassing momentum, the style is no good.) You can go back later, straggle through the beach wreckage, & admire that chilly curve.

The Janus-face of poetry. One one side, an art form, with its own raison d'etre and center of gravity. On the other, a social act, a form of participation in the general endeavor of living on earth.

One would think that both poets and critics, in their respective ways, would want to take this doubleness into account somehow.

Writing (and art) can present itself as a sort of Archimedean lever - a means of mirroring/distancing phenomena in order to examine and understand them. With some writers and writings, this can take the form of a moral accounting, an ethical judgement.

John Barr's essay in Poetry, in which he urged poets to get out of academia and root their poetry in life-experience, triggered a lot of criticism (not directed so much at this particular argument, but at his related call for a more popular, populist poetry). It is tempting to couch such exhortations in debonair or rugged iconolatry (Hemingway and all that) - but one could interpret his position as a subset of the broader notion of the Janus-face : that art and poetry stand on two legs (representation and reality, or experience). (Of course, the idea that two such legs exist at all has been the source of vast volumes of scholarly cogitation, debate, obfuscation, and artistic prestidigitation over the last 40 years - ie., aren't they really one leg? Or no leg at all?)

Meanwhile... all this reading & writing about Renaissance Siena has got me in an ut pictura poeiesis state of mind. So I am thinking of poetry, not just as a visual canvas, but as a civic mural in a public space, presenting a dual, dialectical, Janus-like substance.

...as I try to figure out where I'm going with this Siena poem, I keep thinking of the fact that most of the famous long poems - whether verse dramas or narratives - are stories (or groups of stories). & since Don Quixote at least, poetry has faced a big rival in the novel.

Long narrative poems continued to be written through the 19th century. Thomas Hardy was maybe the last of that line, with his King Arthur verse novels (though there have always been a few verse epics & novels here & there - Archibald MacLeish wrote one, I think; Stephen Vincent Benet...). Frost wrote little verse short stories, and others imitated him.

In an essay over yonder I wrote about the theories of some of the Chicago Critics - in which they offer a sense of "form and content" almost diametrically opposed to the received 20th-cent. notions. With them, the verbal surface (the diction, style, figuration, verbal texture etc.) is, paradoxically, the content (the material out of which the poem is made). A poem's form is the complex intellectual-emotive gesture or shape which emerges from the combination of theme (argument) and plot. In this sense, an achieved poem's form is unique and inimitable.

What I'm thinking (tentatively) of doing with this Siena obsession is constructing a sort of altarpiece. Sienese pre-Renaissance art is well-known for multiple narrative perspectives. They will have a set of small pictures showing vignettes from a saint's life - or even cartoon-like action sequences, showing different stages in a single dramatic event. These little pictures will surround the large group image (Madonna & Child often involved); then there will be another whole set of images on the reverse side of the altar.

So the idea is to present a mosaic of lots of different small insights or perspectives, leading toward a larger, enfolding set of themes or design. What that design is I am not at liberty to expatiate on at this time.

The difficulty here is that this kind of long poem seems to lack narrative drive. Or it takes a heck of a long time to get the momentum going in that direction. This is an example of a problem with current poetry generally. It's like an art form which has had its top layer taken off (& shunted over to fiction). What poetry is left with is primarily anecdotes. Diaristic, essayistic responses to actual events in the real world. The similarity between much contemporary poetry and private journal-keeping - or journalism per se - is perhaps something poets tend to avoid thinking about. What myth-making and fiction used to do, was establish an imaginary surround - within which the elaborate thematic and allusive powers of the poet could flourish & play. I don't want to suggest that contemporary poets lack the wit and imagination to re-work the real world in very playful and effective ways... in fact, the opposite may be the case. Necessity is the mammy of invention : in the desert of the (un-fictional) real, poets have to play even harder.

What "Siena" might do for me (I fervently hope) is offer sort of a parallel, indirect version of that "imaginary surround" which a straightforward narrative plot provides for fiction.

... but it's not about me & my story, ultimately. Poetry has to do with expressing truth - through feeling, sensibility. All the poems in the world are just scraps of paper, little piles of litter, old signs, that accumulate and drift around the psyche-life and its memories, its thoughts, that deep round well.

A new essay over here : My Quietude.

MAXIMS OF COOL QUIETUDE


Invention is the mother of necessity.

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Poets are painters and should be treated as such (rubbing alcohol).

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Critics ought to approach poetry the way Teddy Roosevelt approached the River of Doubt.

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People generally believe poetry is made of words. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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A poem is a ziggurat.

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A poet is a rat.

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The best poetry is always in translation. One discovers this after the native tongue has turned to gibberish.

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Poets are deaf-mutes surrounded by packs of gossip hounds.

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Poems are made out of pure lead.

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American poetry - an oxymoron. Some have lived and died (simultaneously) for an oxymoron.

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Good background article on the Chicago School.

Most of them seem more interested in fiction than poetry, but not all (I want to look for the study by one of the "3rd generation" Chicagoans, Adena Rosmarin (Power of Genre, on 19th-20th cent. poetry). Implications of their general approach might be worth exploring. RS Crane in the book I'm reading (Languages of Crit. & Structure of Poetry) writes about how Aristotle's Poetics is not about the social or political aspects of the subject, but is an investigation of how "good poems" (in the mimetic mode - tragedy, epic) get written.

On a side note, I've mentioned here before how the opening of Stubborn Grew - which, by the way, appears to be out-of-print now at Spuyten Duyvil - was generated in part by the Poetics. I was reading a study on it, which argued that the Poetics "does what it says" in a sort of para-poetic way. This gave me the idea that a long poem could open with sketches exploring the concept of writing a long poem, of telling stories. Gives it sort of an echo effect, a reflexivity.

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.

"Nowadays when the nature of poetry has become so uncertain that everyone is trying to define it, definitions usually begin: 'Poetry is words which, or language which, or discourse which,' and so forth. As a matter of fact, it is nothing of the kind. Just as we should not define a chair as wood which has such and such characteristics - for a chair is not a kind of wood but a kind of furniture - so we ought not to define poetry as a kind of language. The words are of the utmost importance; if they are not the right words or if we do not grasp them, we do not grasp the poem. In another sense, they are the least important element in the poem, for they do not determine the character of anything else in the poem; on the contrary, they are determined by everything else. They are the only things we see or hear; yet they are governed by imperceptible things which are inferred from them. And when we are moved by poetry, we are not moved by the words, except in so far as sound and rhythm move us; we are moved by the things that the words stand for."

- Elder Olson, from "An Outline of Poetic Theory", first published in 1949


Sounds a little paradoxical, huh? Sounds a little against the grain of the last 50 yrs? More later, hopefully.

reading an Elder Olson essay on Aristotle's Poetics. Olson was part of the so-called Chicago School, a 50s grouping with a little different point of view from that of the New Critics.

When I started Stubborn Grew, I was reading another study of the Poetics, which argued that the form of Aristotle's text resembles that of a tragic plot, and as such, is designed to do what it describes, setting up sort of a reflexive, self-mirroring framework.

This influenced the opening of Stubborn, in that the introductory sketches simultaneously reflect on poetry-making, on the one hand, and begin to act out the orphic pattern of the plot, on the other - sort of a hall of mirrors. "Bluejay" : the mime (schtick) of a mimic. So the mimicking narrator and "Bluejay" are somewhat like Russian dolls-within-dolls (the narrator mimicking a "black-talking" Bluejay, himself a mimic).

This Olson essay I'm reading outlines 3 steps: the instinctual pleasure/learning we derive from imitation (mimicry, schtick); the moral or ethical disciplines by which imitation is molded (the depiction of "good & bad" characters & situations); & finally the experience of made things (poems, dramas) as good-in-themselves (their intrinsic aesthetic value - a discovery which, to some degree, circles back around to the original instinctual springs).

I suppose, ideally, there's an equilibrium to these three levels. What is the ethical root or motive which fuses with the aesthetic goal? What would Ovid on the Black Sea, or Dante in exile, or Walt in the hospital, speak to the powers that be (as of 11/3)? - to all the feuding, angry factions?

Another Olson, in another Ovid spot... ("Watch-House Point")