Jeffrey Bahr writes:

"I've posted a challenge to any who would engage seriously in the attempt to -- if not reconcile, then at least identify the goals -- among the disparate views of what poetry is, should be, must do."

Tall order. Definition is power. Criticism creates the vocabulary and context for understanding & reception. With such a large abstraction ("poetry") fitted out to explain such a diverse phenomenon, the resulting contention is inevitable.

Langdon Hammer's book mentioned here yesterday presents a sort of close-sociological comparative analysis of the interrelated careers of Crane, Tate & Eliot. Hammer starts out by demystifying some of the reactionary-traditionalist rhetoric offered by some of the big Moderns, Eliot & Pound in particular. Rather than looking at them as defenders of tradition, or backward-looking medievalist-traditionalists, Hammer tries to show how they were pioneers of literature's New Class : entrepreneurs in the business of culture. He talks about how their differing attitudes toward established sources of cultural reception (Eliot's embrace of English establishment, Pound's opposite tack) influenced the amazingly contrastive outcomes of their careers (Eliot the lauded Nobel prizewinner; Pound the jailed treasonous crackpot).

He then looks at the differing responses of Hart Crane & Allen Tate to the cultural atmosphere which Eliot did so much to invent. I'm just getting into this section of the book. He contrasts Eliot's (& Stevens') ability to separate making a living from their identities & prestige as poets, with Crane's theatrically conflicted background. (I will never get over this iconic conjunction : Hart Crane, the son of successful Cleveland candy manufacturer - inventor of the Life Saver - dies a suicide-by-drowning in the Caribbean. Poets' lives often have such strange symbolic-fateful resonance. This is a real cultural-psychic phenomenon, if not an act of Providence.) Crane's path was marked, early on, for the taboo-scapegoat-genius-outsider role.

Hammer argues that Allen Tate's own conflicted response (on many levels) to Crane's example only spurred him to emulate Eliot's career path, and take it further - firmly installing (along with John Crowe Ransom & others) the presence of poet-critics in the English Departments of American academia.

The poet-critic was a new kind of professional person, who combined valuable technical knowledge of two kinds : poetry-making and scholarship. With this dual capability, such a professional could be included in the intellectual power-structure of the "New Class"; with anthologies and textbooks like Understanding Poetry, the ground was laid for the next generation's innovation : the Creative Writing Program.

So I'm just getting into Hammer's book. It's really a "close reading" of the literary biographies of these men, and the consequences for poetry and for "poetry careers" generally. I think it's a wonderful book; provides a kind of lens for viewing today's different atmosphere. Hammer in the early pages focuses on the paradoxical prestige and authority which accrued to Eliot's forms of detachment & disinterest. Because he was neither an academician nor a professional writer or journalist, his criticism augmented the sense of poetry's (and the individual poet's) independent cachet, its cultural autonomy.

In thinking about this, alongside Jeffrey's challenge mentioned above, my first vague thoughts in this direction circle around the idea that whatever poetry offers a society at large must be grounded in some kind of imaginative and intellectual empathy. Poetry has to present a fiction of its own independent momentum : that is, independent to some extent of the poet's individual background, capable of understanding and interpreting others. Yet, at the same time, poetry, if it is to fulfill its purpose, has to be a kind of end in itself : it has to be a source of pleasure for its own sake. And here the special verbal and intellectual capabilities of unique and individual poets are brought to bear. Take, for example, a fine poem in the current issue of Poetry, by Carolina Ebeid, "Reading Celan in a Subway Station". In this poem, with metaphorical sleight-of-hand, the poet fuses listening to an accordion player in the subway with the emotional atmosphere of Celan. It's a very curious magic.

So these dual imperatives - the ability to penetrate history & experience beyond the private & personal, and the ability to raise personal (poetic) expression to a highly-integrated state - seem to underly what poetry is about.

The question about the "professionalization" of creative writing - has been very controversial. When poetry becomes an institution, and part of a larger institution, and a kind of business... what is lost, what is gained? I guess there are no simple answers or single truths about this.

Spiritual truths, down through history, have shown themselves rather disruptive to social arrangements. And sometimes poets must experience life outside the circles of privilege and custom and family and economic self-interest, in order to speak with any authenticity or imaginative empathy about the conditions and lives they encounter. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (discussed in current issue of New Yorker) is an American classic which confronts this issue head-on.

RS Crane (Languages of Crit. & the Structure of Poetry), again, emphasizes how Aristotle's Poetics differs in approach from most contemporary crit., even that which uses Aristotelian terminology.

In Winters, Ransom, Empson, Brooks & Warren, et al., the difference is clear right at the beginning, with their various opening definitions of poetry. As Crane shows, these critics define poetry as a branch of discourse. Aristotle defines tragic & epic poetry as a branch of artistic imitation. The poem is an "artificial whole" or "imitation". The imaginative wholeness of the poem evokes, by analogy, the wholeness of a particular action (beginning, middle, end). Aristotle doesn't try to define all poetry; he focuses on examples of a particular kind. Within this kind, the poem is a kind of imaginative simulacrum (mimesis) of an action. This is its substance ("plot is the soul of the poem"); language is the medium (there are other kinds of imitations - visual, musical - which use different media).

The relations between this particular kind of poetry (imitative : tragic/dramatic, epic) and other kinds (didactic, lyric) are not dealt with by Aristotle. But a criticism which takes as its subject the poem as aesthetic whole, rather than the poem as form of discourse, or merely verbal structure, is a criticism which is marking out a different approach to poetry as a whole. The notion of the poem as some form of relation or balance - in Aristotle's terms, a mean between extremes - a balance, that is, between logos & mythos, between medium and theme, between discourse and subject - a relation aiming at a fusion, an aesthetic wholeness, a complete impression, a fruition or fulness (Aristotle's proper "magnitude")... - this whole idea raises new perspectives, new plateaus, for critical reception of various kinds of poetry.

Interesting notes (as usual) over at Hotel Point. I had been thinking vaguely somewhere in the same general area this morning.

That is, about how poetry is an art of modulated speech flow. Something like learning to play the flute or another instrument. There's a level of diction, meter, rhyme, etc., just as there's a level of technique with the instrument. Then there's another level combining fitness & invention, which is maybe somewhat similar to composition. (I know what I'm talking about, having studied piano from age 6.)

(Obviously these are not new ideas - just basic ideas.)

Maybe it's the notions of fitness (these days, anyway) that vary more than any of the other factors (from poet to poet).

My thoughts on the basic motives & purposes of poetry after the movements of the 20th century can be juxtaposed with these interesting remarks at Boston Comment. As Kent Johnson & Stephen Burt in particular pointed out, the demand to innovate originates, not entirely but to some degree, in a political stance. One could say that literary innovation and difference, as we have come to know them, have two roots: first in what I described before as the attempt to catch up with contemporary historical change, and secondly in the notion that literary "experimentalism" (as opposed to simple experiment) marks the boundary of political opposition to mainstream institutions or allegiances.

If one accepts the notion of the poetic word as harmonizing a duplex form of time & reality, then the first motive for innovation noted above has to be revised. I'm not sure how such a poetics applies to any specific political stance.

Inching Along

I'd like to continue the speculations on future poetics begun a few days ago. I don't have time today for more than a couple brief notes.

I think I've made some progress, but there's a need for more interrogation.

First, I've suggested how a sense of living tradition could be built on a notion of active reading/affinity - grounded in love, which undergirds a different attitude toward the origins, identity and presence of the poetic voice (different from major strains of postmodern theory and writing).

Such an approach opens up the possibility that literary style and technique might be generated not solely by the chronological succession of the New, or a deterministic notion of innovation, but by anachronistic connections of affinity (what Mandelstam describes as the "opening of the Bergsonian fan" across widely separated eras).

Secondly, and related to this, I've characterized the "poetic word itself" in (Mandelstamian) Acmeist fashion, as the crossing of two strands: time & eternity, nature and grace, such that poetry is the emanation of harmony, or the evidence of the harmonization, of these two spheres.

Yet this theoretical framework is incomplete, and as such it short-changes poetry. How so?

By forcing poetry to bear the burden of what is basically a metaphysical doctrine, one inhibits poetry's freedom, to some extent. Poetry needs to be free in its autonomy, in its capability to be whatever it wants to be. And yet I don't want to surrender the theoretical grounding which this description of the duplex nature of the poetic word provides. How am I going to resolve this?

Let's say that this notion of the Word as grounded in anachronistic affinity is the vertical axis of a broader definition. When we described Modernism as a literary effort to "catch up" with the zeitgeist, we were overly abstract, since we neglected to focus on the "how" (how this was accomplished).

How this was done involved what we might call an effort of circumference. Let's make this the horizontal axis of our poetics. What do we mean by circumference? The modernist innovations in style & technique - grounded to a great extent in poets like Browning and Whitman - vastly expanded the range of both subject-matter and level of diction. Whitman, in a sense, can be understood as Dickinson's coeval : what Dickinson achieved in the realm of compression and metaphysical verticality, Whitman accomplished in the realm of horizontal breadth and openness, of descriptive capaciousness, of literary magnanimity.

What were the modernist and postmodernist long poems, but experiments in capaciousness, in extending the range of what poetry could include? No wonder that, over the last 50 years, the squabbles between traditionalists and experimentalists have been so divisive and continuous: contemporary inclusiveness clashes sharply with longstanding concepts of traditional poetic technique.

Every poet has to find their own center of gravity or path through these differing perspectives. Inclusiveness, taken as a kind of stylistic absolute, leads eventually to a condition of no-style (anything can be called a poem). Tradition, taken as an absolute, leaves no room for either originality or genuine change.

So perhaps we approach a theory of the poem as something autonomous, self-creating, self-defining; open to both empirical and metaphysical meaning & interpretation, but only in the sense of something possible, potential, discoverable (rather than being defined by a higher or exterior meaning). The poem is evidence of creative labor - labor which in itself is a kind of freedom from prior definitions & orientations.

With such an undefined definition, have we come full circle? Are we back where we started, with nothing to show for it? I hope not... For me, anyway, that vertical axis opens at least a possible path beyond both modern & postmodern, while the horizontal axis allows poetry to build on the capacious circumference of its accomplishments.

Issue #10 of Robert Archambeau's magazine Samizdat arrived today, always welcome. In it he has one of his "thematic reviews" titled "The New Modernists", covering books & anthologies such as Manifesto : a Century of -isms (ed. Mary Ann Caws), 21st-Century Modernism, by Marjorie Perloff, & poetry by Kruchenykh, Moxley, Salerno, Strickland & others.

Archambeau's general point, in simplified summary, is that literary Modernism never died (contra Postmodernism) and that an array of good poets carry on its methods of innovation & renovation. In his discussion of Moxley, he notes how her allusive style, her attachment to Hart Crane, her melding of Romanticism & the avant-garde, and other characteristics underline a poetics in which all time (in art, at least) is simultaneous - which Archambeau calls a "profoundly modernist idea".

This last is true: but I don't think he takes it far enough. There are a number of ironies inherent to the whole modernism/postmodernism question. Literary modernism could be described as poetry's attempt to catch up - technically, thematically - with the social/scientific realities of the 20th century, with the speed of the zeitgeist. It was, as they say, a "modernizing" effort. It was an heroic & dazzling endeavor. But now it is also "historical". In a sense, poetry has caught up - and the "modernizing" effort, as it fades into historical memory, now becomes oddly dated itself. This is one of the insights of postmodernism, the motto of which might be, "OK, now what?" Because postmodernism provides no answer to its own question, it abides in this limbo or symbiotic dependency on its predecessor. Thus to suggest a proper title for advanced poets of today to be "the new Modernists" - as Archambeau wants to do - adds another layer to this Zeno's paradox of labels, since clearly a new modernist has still not quite "caught up" with the zeitgeist, is still engaged or identified to some extent with the heroic laboriousness of an era which is now past.

It may be a modernist critical cliche that "all time is simultaneous", but, as time goes by, such articles of faith sound more and more like just that, articles of faith. And we know that in poetry, or art in general, faith is not enough : we need the "proof" provided by aesthetic rightness, the "certainty" of the achieved art work. The question for contemporary poets may not be the postmodernist one ("What next?"), but rather - "if time is simultaneous - How so?" Is there some aspect of spirit or self which measures/transcends time? Is there some aesthetic equilibrium (beauty?) which really (or only metaphorically?) supercedes or triumphs over clock time? How, exactly, is this revealed in poetry?

My own sense is that what will be really "new" in the near future is not a new modernism, in which innovative technique is foregrounded as a gesture toward the modernizing value of invention. The "new" poetry will explore and reveal the meanings & values - on many different levels, both thematic & technical - of "literary time", as something characteristic & distinct from clock time. When this contemporary work comes into its own it will be a new era, distinct from both modern & postmodern. I don't have a name for it.

Our mini-mini-essay is dedicated to Gravity Probe B, launched today (cf. para-sestina posted here last week, "A Waiting Game").

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
                    - Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Re-reading B.J. Leggett's useful book, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory. Interesting chapter on what Stevens may have been getting at with the title "It Must Be Abstract". How he drew upon I.A. Richards' book Coleridge on Imagination to come to a notion of how the mind - whether in perception ("the poet of reality") or imagination ("the poet of fictions") - always abstracts : that all words are imaginative abstractions, creations of thought. In this way he plays/works with the imagination/reality pairing, without getting stuck (like some of his critics) on one prong or the other.

Mandelstam somewhere: "Love the idea of the thing more than the thing itself."

Byzantine icons, Nicholas Cusanus. "God" being a human concept, a name, for something we cannot really grasp; humankind as imago dei one of its imaginative corollaries, a concept which can come to have meaning both in contemplation & action. Coleridge on the imagination as the expression of the divine "I Am". An imaginative idea of the economy of the earth. "O what a piece of Work is Man!"

Leggett shows curiously how Stevens was also heavily influenced by a biographical study of Giambattista Vico, about the same time Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake.

The new poetry will not just comment, luxuriate or complain. It will have thought through the problems of existence, and will play the whole 88 keys, from the most lofty to the most basic practical & moral dilemmas. It will relate & integrate them all in a new light.

It will not flatter your vanity or soothe your nerves or feed you candy or agree with your notions or pretend to be what it's not. It will offer a form of reality for your interpretation. Its inherent truth will challenge, encourage, inspire, delight & rebuke. It will give you new ideas as it interprets the world.

I'm sketching the outlines of a different paradigm for poetics, different from that which dominated the last century. The new-old paradigm would not accept an a priori agonistic or dialectical stance with regard to past poetry, spurred (as it was in the 20th century) by social/political violence, crisis and disorder.

The new approach would acknowledge its debt to, and its affinities with, an underlying basic poetic process itself; it would recognize the cultural architecture formed by this process which seeps into experience, art becoming a second nature (the "second life of art", in Montale's terms).

The metapoetry which might stem from this approach would be an outcome of the poet's recognition of affinities with, and differences with, these models of art/nature, which are already suffused throughout everyday and aesthetic experience; "metapoetry" because the ensuing dialogue with past works would in turn suffuse the work itself.

Classicism in this sense, is essentially a recognition that the embodiments, the incarnations, so to speak, of the poetic activity of distant times, is not necessarily a dead weight or an inimical influence; but a series of saliences or models - examples of achievement and goads to revision.

Sometimes I've been criticized for my repetitive definitive assertive assertions about what "poetry is". But in today's literary climate, a return to basic first principles might be a healthy thing.

The confusion in avant-garde oppositional circles seems to be what it's always been : a displacement of the most basic aspects of poetic making with technical novelty. Imitation, as practiced in all the thousands of MFA programs etc., is castigated as not only unnecessary but as positively bad (The "School of Quietude" polemic is only the latest in a long line); what is put in its place are rotating models of literary rebellion or idiosyncrasy, as if rebellion & idiosyncrasy themselves were the substance of art and poetics. This is the fundamental mistake.

The contempt for imitation reveals an underlying misreading, an erasure of past poetries and their replacement with an a-historical continual revolution. But past poetries will not go away, will not be shunted aside; what the various idioms of futurism reveal, more than anything else, is aesthetic impoverishment and the debasement of literary values.

The oppositionalists read Whitman or Dickinson, for example, as utterly sui generis, geniuses from nowhere, whose lack or displacement of any lineage whatsoever then becomes a model for authenticity. But the activity of poetic making came before them; their technical achievements are a secondary effect of the intensity of their poetic thought, not simply stepping-stones in some kind of diachronic procession of unconventional literary progress or revolution. Literature does not simply "add on" to some "advances" in a linear progression : it wavers over time, swayed by individual authors whose insight & capability allow them to counter whatever rhetorical excesses or inauthenticities overshadow their times.

The basic character of poetic making has never changed. It is a verbal response to reality, a narrative ordering of experience, keyed to harmony (in both its musical and its logical or thematic senses). Praise come naturally to this activity; lyric ardor unites the perception of, and the desire for, what is beautiful; elegy and mourning express its loss; the logic of truth places beauty in a moral context; irony and denunciation are its negative image, its complementary shadow. The technique displayed in the working-out of this activity is secondary, the way Coleridgean fancy is secondary to imagination : poiesis itself is inherent talent, capability, a natural artfulness which emanates technique, rather than proceeding from it.

The great narrative of human experience is illegible without the first perception of the over-arching shape of the narrations which are already there. This is a hard thing to explain, but it gets to the root of the distinction between classicism and revolutionary modernism, or acmeism and futurism. The acmeist, for example, enters into a dialogue which is already ongoing : what this reflects is an aesthetic receptivity - beginning in childhood - to the natural continuity of human expression with time and nature. We learn the beauty of language and songs and stories at our mother's knees; our own artistic endeavors take place in the context of pre-existing beautiful sounds (other poems, other stories, other narrative orders). The world is shaped by the great narratives that preceded us : literature is not merely demystification, a purely negative critical activity of disaffection or disillusionment : it is also a sharing in the delightful apprehension of a stable and recurrent beauty or an underlying order.

This kind of classicism gives rise to those personal canons of aesthetic fitness and rightness which spur the poet to make something likewise, something both new and fitting : something right for the time and place. The great models of the past also challenge the poet to reach beyond the petty, the minor, the vulgar, the repetitive, to make something genuine, authentic and aesthetically meaningful in the clearest terms, for the widest, most disinterested audience.

This book by R.A. York mentioned earlier here (Poem as Utterance), surveys various 20th-cent poets - evaluates the discourse, the communicative gesture, in their poems, in terms of what shared assumptions or shared experience or knowledge - shared with the reader - it reflects.

Looking at poems for what is left unstated, what can remain implicit, or what can be included "informally", conversationally, because it's assumed to be general knowledge, shared experience. How the conveyance of shared experience builds confidence or a sense of authority granted.

Frost wrote somewhere that good poems don't instruct the reader about what they don't know; they express gracefully what the reader knows already.

Are poems a kind of discourse production - or can they be rather a relief, a vacation, a rescue from same? Since the achievement of a communicative poiesis (perhaps a kind of conjunction of opposites) allows so much effort & expostulation and explanation to drop away?

Back to Josh Corey's remarks on "poetics of relation" etc.

Glissant's ideas, as summarized by K. Prevallet, have been in the air generally for quite a some time, no? - the notion of errancy as a path into connection & otherness, the de-centered openness to marginalized voices and perspectives, the emphasis on the "rhizomatic" as opposed to the "rooted", the centralized, the hegemonic. . .

In fact it seems pretty obvious that experimental poetics of many flavors have invested themselves in the general postmodern trend of these concepts, no?

Maybe the hinge factor here is the "relation" between this cluster of ideas on the on hand, and the idea of the poet as reporter and investigator and documentarian, on the other. There is something interesting here which connects the notion of repertorial independence & objectivity with the sidelining of the poet's own self-presentation & ego; an appealing idea, but booby-trapped - since "objectivity" invests the narrator-histor with simply a transmogrified Authority, the centrality of the scriptor having simply shed one skin & donned another.

Poetry, objectivity, Ouroboros. . .

more later maybe.

Josh Corey on "relational poetics". I haven't read the Fence issue, but I ask this :

Isn't this a time-honored crutch for good old bad writing : to turn "social relevance" into a theme or a technique or an ideal ??? It's a "branding" method.

The "others" are always subjective in a fallible way. "We" are relevant & "social" in an original, critical way.

But I guess I should read what he's talking about. This is starting to sound like I'm carping !!!

Good blog-in by Ron today. Food for thought. The scramble for authority among different New American Poetry mullahs in 60s & 70s. Like a sport with fans & partisans. How can anybody write under these conditions? The desperate search for the right model among young wannabes. "Projectionism" should be the name for it. But of course it was exciting.

One of the best environments for poetry I ever encountered was a small group of poets who met off & on for a couple of years at Sylvia Moubayed's house in Providence. Edwin Honig, several local poets. It was not exactly a workshop; more like a round table. We'd take turns reading new poems & then comment on them. It wasn't perfect; but it was healthy. The poem is a toy, a self-contained work of art, an effort : it is symbiotic & inalienable both from the living poet who stands there & presents it, and also inalienable from the sympathetic, engaged, critical audience which listens & responds. The poem may have a history & a set of poetic choices & a projected ambition - but these remain in the background when it goes forth & has to stand up for itself & justify itself artistically in the presence of others.

Reading Rykwert on break. More interesting stuff from Aristotle & Plato's Sophist.

Thinks the term poiesis might have changed in late 7th cent. BC when poets started charging for their services & refining their techne (the main purpose being to create a monument to fame more lasting than marble - not their own fame, but their patron's - cf. Pindar). Poiesis before meant "making" more generally.

Distinctions between acquisitive techne - hunting, fishing, fighting - and productive techne - agriculture, shipbuilding, architecture, etc. Also distinctions between productive mimesis (the carpenter builds this table based on the concept "table") and imitative mimesis (the painter paints a copy of carpenter's "this" table).

acquisitive techne = rhetoric, sophism ?
productive techne = poiesis ?

(tendencies or sharp distinctions?)

Haven't had much time to blog lately.

Readers probably put off by my para-religious discourse sometimes. I can't help it, sorry : it's part of me, ever since religio-psychological crisis here at old Brunonia in 1973, when I thought Shakespeare & Jesus were hovering around my dorm room.

My work in poetry a scrap heap of hesitant forays. Line from which the title came :
"Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose."

Have been reading a lot about the ancient Greeks. Am interested in POETICS as an exploration of the borderline between different kinds of knowledge : philosophy, science, history, poetry. & poetry as means of presenting states of feeling & experience that are elusive, not so easily subject to definition & categorical discourse. Talking about this some in the Jacket interview with Kent Johnson.

No, this blog post is not a resume, sorry.
No David H., I'm not a "projectivist". Too much magic thinking & mumbo-jumbo, not enough art.

But I AM recurrently interested, very much so, in the concepts circling around poetry and "polis", or city-making. It's a steady theme in Pound, WCW, Olson, Crane's long poems. It's something I've generally taken an interest in, having an M.A. & experience in neighborhood organizing, living in a little city-state, etc. No this is not a resume, sorry.

Poetry is not rational discourse. But it's not necessarily irrational. Wallace Stevens was so interested in this issue. It's not rational because underlying its organicness (sound & sense synthesis, animality) is a kind of a priori AFFIRMATION, prior to dialectics or discussion. It's an enunciation all by itself that creates a roundedness, a sense of pleroma, fulness. That a priori emphatic phatic speech - is that what worried the philosopher (Plato)?

Funny doubleness of poetry : dangerously solipsistic on the one hand; amazingly responsive to direct immediate particular reality, nature, thingness, emotion, experience, on the other. Consequence of the impulse to make sounds, prior to their "correctness", appropriateness (Dante ends Divina Commedia with imitation of baby talk).

Yet the art is about fitness & finish. Which also represent or reflect ethical qualities. Place in good poetry where technique, theme, inspiration coalesce. Cannot be willed or faked. Also often domesticated into permanent Boredom-world (I too dislike it).

Orphism represented "soul search" in Greek world of power-polis. World poetry, poetry in English, American poetry, New American subcultures - what a universe of Babble ! But poetry is an unaccountable synthesis, an appearance of talent, a rarity. & we sicken ourselves on rich food.

Here's an old poem (I know, I posted this back in Jan.):


at noon

Orpheus sings alone,
his lyre left in the wind
moaning in elliptical harmony.

Persephone sleeps, her head
hidden in her arms, and shadows
of clouds passing over her hair.

And John, in his prison, hears
dance music in the rooms above,
and the sound of an axe on stone.

OK David, I will try to spell it out, since I'm not making myself clear. I will try to be concise & not repeat earlier bloggings too much.

You write, "No more speaking for us." By this I suppose you mean, making general statements about poetry. But making general statements is not inherently wrong; & I can't "speak for us" unless my general statements are accepted as true to some degree. It's perhaps unusual to make general statements; but a main element of my "poetics" is the claim that making poetry is a distinctive activity, distinctive from "writing", distinctive from prose, distinctive from other kinds of discourse. & I'm claiming that this distinctive activity is characteristic of poetry in general.

OK. The root distinction between poetry & other language usage is that poetry originates and remains inalienable from SONG. The core of poetry is the fusion of sound & sense, each of them given equal value (where as in prose, sound is made a transparent vehicle for sense. I'm speaking of the prose function & the poetic function : I'm not denying that some prose has poetic qualities & vice versa). This fusion of sound & sense stems from song itself.

But what is music, what is song, what is the "fusion of sound & sense"? They are incomprehensible without a particular sense of time : that is, time in its immediacy, in its PRESENCE, in its now. In prose of all kinds we project our thoughts & responses into the otherness of a conceptual or fictional elsewhere. Even the poetic evocation of a reality, experienced in the "now" of our reading of a novel, is the experience of another time and place. Not so in poetry - even if these "prose" aspects are part of it (say in epic or narrative or even lyric reminiscence) : poetry is a recitation, a performance, which has an immediacy, an embodied presence lacking in other genres. Even as we read a poetic text from a long-dead poet, this immediacy is implied (it is a score for oral recitation).

Finally, what I'm saying is that this modal, generic quality, this distinctive effect of poetry, spills over into its techniques, themes, subject-matter, and colors all of them. Which brings me back to the general statement I started with : poetry-making has the effect of bringing time past and future into Now, into contemporaneity. & this in turn is an effect of its descent from song. Poetry embodies & incarnates Presence, insofar as we experience presence in verbal art (there are other ways to experience it, of course).

& I think these general qualities have consequences for more particular aspects of style, worldview, and so on. Because for me anyway, "presence" implies the presence of a person, of an individual. & this implication runs contrary to massive intellectual/artistic forces of the last few decades. Person, personality : critics elide them with an "ism" (individualism). But this elision loses. . . me. & as I tried to show in earlier post, Island Road exemplifies this whole process in a particular way. In Island Road, Shakespeare is now, dead Berryman's dead fictional "Henry" is now, again. It's a kind of literary resurrection into NOW. & this "presence" is a parodic, burlesque parable, "through a glass darkly", of the divine Imago, the Person, in the eternal Now.

Just a thought in response to Gabriel ("Conchology") Gudding's long essay "From Petit to Langpo", which appears on his blog (& in an earlier version? in Flashpoint magazine).

The essay shows how democratic pedagogical principles like "everybody can write" could lead to "everybody has an inner poet waiting to get out" and "poetry is the lyrical record of personal experiences". With such truisms you can see how opposition might grow, from modernists ("poetry is the extinction of personality", "make it new", "a poem is a machine made of words") to New Critics ("a poem is an autotelic self-enclosed object"). One can see how the wave could swing back from New Critical rules to the ragged edges of biography & personality (the Confessionals, the Beats). Or how the NY School might opt out stylishly (while borrowing) from both.

It's ironic that Creative Writing schools would focus on the "craft" of empowering, squeezing out & purveying personal experience, rather than on the art of poetry itself. But I suspect Gabriel's history is a little one-sided : you could probably find offhand quotes from his same set of late 20th-cent. poets on the pedagogy of poetry, which emphasize (instead) the impersonal "craft" aspects. (I'm just guessing, though, not making a case here.)

The issue of solipsism or individualism in art cuts deeper than pedagogy & the professionalization of poetry. As I've been saying in various places on this blog, the nature, the ontological status, of the human person is a deepening mystery; how that mystery gets radiated through the modes of story & poetics creates what we call genres. (hey, who do I think I am, Northrop Frye?)

Today will try to record some thoughts on poetics, my poetics, hgpoetics, which came on coffee break on Thayer St. this morning; drawing on some threads from nearby bloggers, without being too prolix I hope. Inchoate ideas. Because I may be on strike (I hope not) in a day or so, & blogging may not be so easy after that.

David Hess is asking for a definition of "post-avant", an adjective applied by Ron Silliman. Interpreting Ron's perspective (hypothetically): he's referring to contemporary young poets coming after the Language Poetry phenomenon. He thinks perhaps of langpo as an American terminus (language/writing brought to a certain limit) for avant-garde literary energies of the 20th century. After the terminus, that energy has waned & new demands, new cultural forces & imperatives, have yet to crystallize.

Jordan & Jonathan meanwhile, wrote a little this week about childhood - what it means. Which reminds me of what I wrote on this blog in various places about the status of the Person in poetics; and the comment I made yesterday about Frank O'Hara's tongue-in-cheek manifesto on "Personism" (in the context of various worldview-scaffoldings which help undergird modernist poetics & technique).

I know this DOES sound prolix & rambling; please bear with me.

In an essay in Mudlark, I wrote about how the Byzantine-Christian anthropology of humankind as imago Dei underlies Western art & the poetics of Mandelstam. We are talking about ultimate worldviews or scaffoldings. I would like to consider childhood as a theological category. How so? The child - as opposed to the adult - persists in a particular relation to the parent. Consider the child/parent relation as a symbol of the human person's relation to God. Consider it before dismissing it : think of it as an image of an image, a fractal corollary.

God as parent : how ridiculous! But only if taken literally. And about God we can take nothing literally.

The poetics of the modernist & postmodern 20th century can be regarded as a culmination of the Renaissance concept of Man. The Renaissance concept placed the human intellect at the center. The Medieval concept (stemming from Byzantium), on the other hand, developed a trinitarian anthropology : body, soul, spirit. The soul is like the somatic mirror of the body in another dimension (eternity). The spirit is like the intellectual light which unites body & soul in insight & discernment.

These three, of course, correspond to the divine Trinity : Father, Son, Spirit.

The character of any poetics of the Person would be determined by its underlying anthropology. How do we know & respond to experience through this particular lens?

Consider Charles Olson's Jungian "Maximus" projection as a counter-weight/imitation of Yeats & Pound's sense of the history-transcendent uber-Self (at the vortex of the decks of cards playing out the personae of both A Vision and The Cantos). (Kenneth Warren in his magazine House Organ has mused on this extensively.)

I look upon Jung & Olson as fascinating, searching. . . heresiarchs. Gnostics of poetry. Look instead at THIS Maximus (from Byzantium) :

Thunberg, Lars
Microcosm and mediator : the theological anthropology of Maximus the Confessor
Chicago: Open Court, 1995

(I call them heresiarchs in no dogmatic sense! Only in the sense of Nicholas Cusanus and his doctrine of "Learned Ignorance". These metaphorical-theological-conceptual scaffoldings are metaphors for religious & spiritual insights - experience at the borders where words fail & vision goes dark.)

A post-avant poetics of the Person would interpret our experience of time, the earth, the universe, science & art, good & evil, mortality, love & knowledge through a post-Renaissance lens. Such a lens would offer no prescriptions for technical developments in art : but it might change the way we perceive the role of art in the life of the person, and by extension, the role of the poet in the life of the culture. Such things have stylistic & literary-generic repercussions.

In an email, David Hess replied to the previous posting here to say that his distinction between knowing/being was partly an echo of DH Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature. He said he was thinking more of the way some Modernists set themselves up (say in epic forms) as guides to general knowledge (Pound, Olson), in a way that poets of "being" (say, Oppen, Celan) never would.

I responded to say that there might be some validity in this distinction; but that some strains of postmodernism, drawing from Heidegger & Derrida among others, make such a distincton impossible, since the status of both knowledge & being becomes "illegible". & that this might be one reason that, as DH wrote on his blog, the language poets, for example, couldn't decide between "system" & "anti-system".

It seems like down the ages very few poets have had the capability to articulate, in their own poetry, its epistemological status in relation to other forms of knowledge. How is poetry a form of knowing, if it is? One of the most interesting books I've read on this issue is Jerusalem & Albion, by Harold Fisch (Schocken Books, 1964). It might be that reflection on this issue (which is also the question of the nature of poetic speech) would be productive - lead to new understandings of the poet's role.

Of course, meditating on the nature of poetry has also been the yeast & the grist for everlasting cliches & sentimentalizations : what's unusual is a poet who can think philosophically or scientifically while writing poetry.