Wasted some time in comment-box squabbles over at limetree. I guess I must come across as a querulous curmudgeon, trying to shut down healthy discussion.
Surprised myself sometimes, at the extremity of my animus against poetry/politics debates.
People think I'm being a-political or conservative, when I try to separate poetry from these theoretical or praxis-oriented discussions about literature & politics. But I don't believe that's really the case. I simply believe that poetry speaks most effectively to social & political concerns when it remains in its independent poetry sphere. Poetry-making has complex difficulties of its own, and the misguided attempts to water them down, through group efforts & theorizing, really get one no closer to either effective politics or authentic poetry.
Showing posts with label polemics2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label polemics2. Show all posts
4.22.2004
3.12.2004
Kasey comments on a new anthology of 20th-century American poetics.
Ron Silliman's claim that the "us vs them", the postmod vs. premod, or, in his terms, Quietude vs Post-Avant, clash is a fact of (literary) history, does not tell us much about its actual importance. Teams of dogmatists & partisans, in the various realms of human foolishness, can often be found bickering about things for which neither side actually has a real affinity.
Aggressive literary partisans and polemicists obscure the fact that a living role for poetry in a culture (just as in the case of science or philosophy or religion or economics or politics) is bound up with a set of deep and substantial and sometimes deceptively simple questions, which every culture addresses in the process of historical change. Any good general literary history - of poetry in English, say - makes this crystal clear. Poets "represent" both general-cultural and individual responses to these questions.
The polemicists will stridently claim that it is precisely because of the seriousness with which they take these larger questions, that they are able to distinguish the good from the bad, the new from the old hat, etc. But poets themselves are usually not so aggressive : they are too busy grappling, in their poems, with the unanswered questions per se. & the partisans assiduously avoid the fact that good poetry, and its reading public, do not need their help in sorting these cultural questions into pat categorical pigeonholes & critical cliches.
Ron Silliman's claim that the "us vs them", the postmod vs. premod, or, in his terms, Quietude vs Post-Avant, clash is a fact of (literary) history, does not tell us much about its actual importance. Teams of dogmatists & partisans, in the various realms of human foolishness, can often be found bickering about things for which neither side actually has a real affinity.
Aggressive literary partisans and polemicists obscure the fact that a living role for poetry in a culture (just as in the case of science or philosophy or religion or economics or politics) is bound up with a set of deep and substantial and sometimes deceptively simple questions, which every culture addresses in the process of historical change. Any good general literary history - of poetry in English, say - makes this crystal clear. Poets "represent" both general-cultural and individual responses to these questions.
The polemicists will stridently claim that it is precisely because of the seriousness with which they take these larger questions, that they are able to distinguish the good from the bad, the new from the old hat, etc. But poets themselves are usually not so aggressive : they are too busy grappling, in their poems, with the unanswered questions per se. & the partisans assiduously avoid the fact that good poetry, and its reading public, do not need their help in sorting these cultural questions into pat categorical pigeonholes & critical cliches.
3.08.2004
Trying to think again a little (& not getting very far this morning) about poetry & the political.
How it seems to come down to who is left out of the picture - whether it's women in Afghanistan, or low-wage workers in the U.S. This is also what it comes down to on a local level. Here in RI, as the national election season gets going, the state legislative session & budget process also gets underway. One of the contentious issues is zoning for low-income housing development. RI is one of the most crowded states, with the lowest rate of new housing development, & the highest rents, etc. Major problem.
A law went into effect which would have made it easier for developers to build low-income housing outside the metro ghetto, in the well-off suburbs. It was immediately stymied by court action & now the legislature is trying to work out a compromise.
What it seems to come down to, as usual (I'm simplifying for emphasis), is : are you going to make room for the poor in your world? Between the rich & well-off in RI, and the corrupt and grabby politicians & special interests (state employees, labor & business all together), the poor get short-changed, & suffer for it, & thus the general culture & quality of life are degraded too.
Of course whether you're talking personally, locally, nationally, or internationally, political issues are not simply objects of moral platitudes, but practical problems, subject to inventive solutions.
Neither the anti-government individualism of the Republicans nor the self-righteous patronizing attitude of pro-government Democrats is good enough. One leads to laissez-faire injustice; the other to onerous & often inhumane bureaucracies. But I lean toward reform & positive government efforts, collective public action for the common good. So I guess that makes me more of a Democrat (in the current definition of such, anyway). I don't see government as inevitably bad.
What does this have to do with poetry? Not much, I guess.
Poets will always be alert to the drama of history, small & large. The interlocking webs of mutuality. & will find ways of making verbal music out of this.
The frustration for me involves not even making a dent in the US subculture of poetry, much less reaching any kind of general audience. & what the heck, I'm hardly writing it at all these days. & I've learned to be irritated & disillusioned with the subculture in almost all its manifestations. For most it's enough simply to decry capitalism & demonize Bush & there you are. I think the US is a mess because we haven't come to terms on the social contract, but self-righteous honkings on left or right are pretty boring and unoriginal, not to mention unhelpful in any way. Very oddly & interestingly enough, we will have to re-learn this - the terms of the social contract - along with China.
(I should remember that my particular literary frustrations are not political at all, & that becoming involved in a helpful way does not necessarily have anything to do with writing. )
I imagine a poetry that doesn't purvey political stereotypes to its captive audience, but presents a complex image of "reality" through the medium of various traditions, modes, forms.
this is probably the last "political" poem I wrote (published a while ago in Fulcrum). A section from "All Clear". Note the figure of the abject, or the left-out; the dove; the "succession". I guess I tend to repeat myself (including blogging this poem before).
(p.s. note date of composition, with echoes of this.)
How it seems to come down to who is left out of the picture - whether it's women in Afghanistan, or low-wage workers in the U.S. This is also what it comes down to on a local level. Here in RI, as the national election season gets going, the state legislative session & budget process also gets underway. One of the contentious issues is zoning for low-income housing development. RI is one of the most crowded states, with the lowest rate of new housing development, & the highest rents, etc. Major problem.
A law went into effect which would have made it easier for developers to build low-income housing outside the metro ghetto, in the well-off suburbs. It was immediately stymied by court action & now the legislature is trying to work out a compromise.
What it seems to come down to, as usual (I'm simplifying for emphasis), is : are you going to make room for the poor in your world? Between the rich & well-off in RI, and the corrupt and grabby politicians & special interests (state employees, labor & business all together), the poor get short-changed, & suffer for it, & thus the general culture & quality of life are degraded too.
Of course whether you're talking personally, locally, nationally, or internationally, political issues are not simply objects of moral platitudes, but practical problems, subject to inventive solutions.
Neither the anti-government individualism of the Republicans nor the self-righteous patronizing attitude of pro-government Democrats is good enough. One leads to laissez-faire injustice; the other to onerous & often inhumane bureaucracies. But I lean toward reform & positive government efforts, collective public action for the common good. So I guess that makes me more of a Democrat (in the current definition of such, anyway). I don't see government as inevitably bad.
What does this have to do with poetry? Not much, I guess.
Poets will always be alert to the drama of history, small & large. The interlocking webs of mutuality. & will find ways of making verbal music out of this.
The frustration for me involves not even making a dent in the US subculture of poetry, much less reaching any kind of general audience. & what the heck, I'm hardly writing it at all these days. & I've learned to be irritated & disillusioned with the subculture in almost all its manifestations. For most it's enough simply to decry capitalism & demonize Bush & there you are. I think the US is a mess because we haven't come to terms on the social contract, but self-righteous honkings on left or right are pretty boring and unoriginal, not to mention unhelpful in any way. Very oddly & interestingly enough, we will have to re-learn this - the terms of the social contract - along with China.
(I should remember that my particular literary frustrations are not political at all, & that becoming involved in a helpful way does not necessarily have anything to do with writing. )
I imagine a poetry that doesn't purvey political stereotypes to its captive audience, but presents a complex image of "reality" through the medium of various traditions, modes, forms.
this is probably the last "political" poem I wrote (published a while ago in Fulcrum). A section from "All Clear". Note the figure of the abject, or the left-out; the dove; the "succession". I guess I tend to repeat myself (including blogging this poem before).
(p.s. note date of composition, with echoes of this.)
4
Christmas is coming but here in sleepy-febrile Florida
tied at the neck under stage lights one big brother
wrestles with another and when this battle is over
who will wear the crown? as a gospel voice in the rotunda
croons in my ear and as reporters cluster by the grave
of Robert Trout (“Iron Man of the Blitz”) and you perceive,
ephebe, the idiom of this intervention (requiem
for a midnight sun or century) and through the nave
today they bore a body to the columbarium
(rotund profundity beneath nine bells) only him
(Brown, William Wallace, Jr.) a homeless man
and blind who stopped the wheels of the imperium
one day right on the street asking the father of
George W. please pray for me and he paused there
(the President) and said come along with me
to St. John’s we’ll pray together
the music of what happens when no man is
and the bell tolls for thee like Janis Joplin’s
high note who will wear the crown? your doom
Kosmos a little world curls into bronze
and sounds from the 132 rms of a pallid prize
to the 132 acres of N. Main Cemetery (Providence)
where you’ll find me (here now there then) mourning
a vagabonded end of century where a dove strays
from San Francisco down to Florida an unknown
hobo Noman left behind his leaf gone brown
is your redemption (sleepy time and railroad
nation) W.W. is his name crowned here and gone
12.3.2000
2.09.2004
I'm sorry, but the culture of poets seems a total bore to me. It's as if we were supposed to be a devoted fan club for some obscure chess association, and required to be up to speed on the personal lives, gossip, awards ceremonies, funeral orations, etc., and that this somehow was the substance of the way of life. . .
& ironically the professed avant or post-avant wing of that society was supposedly dedicated to a depersonalized, politically-critical, collective notion of the role of the art form, against all that decadent & mealy-mouthed artsy narcissistic solipsism of the academicized mainstream. Their "collectivity" is nothing but a farm school or adjunct sub-college or self-help support group for league careers in that same greeny grove.
Something essential is missing when you domesticize & acclimate poetry to its own (sub)-culture. What's missing is its own otherness, its capacity for criticizing, transcending, metamorphosing the social and aesthetic conditions which produced it. This is its originality, and its social function. But now a fake otherness - paralleling "rebel" social behavior in pop culture - an ersatz otherness pawns itself off as the very medium of literary exchange. Poetry subcultures are built upon modes of talking or writing in special ways, distinct side-of-the-mouth idioms, like in-house passwords.
The real challenge is to find a middle ground, a mode of address to human political, social, aesthetic and philosophical issues outside the poetry sphere. W.H. Auden was very interested in a kind of "objective" mode of address, beginning with his leftist sympathies during the 30s, and complicated later by his religious convictions (which permit a kind of general address to the human condition) and by his deep interest in the social & satirical poetry of the Restoration era.
Something is missing, folks. The real radical poet is not the denizen of an idiom-club or the successful careerist. It's the one whose "middle voice" touches a chord in the public at large : an effect of, rather than a betrayal of, originality. This is the continual challenge to the authentic literary professional, not the card-carrying clubhouse member, frittering away time with gladhanding pals & weeping crocodile tears on every occasion. Because poetry does not belong to individuals : it happens to them & changes them.
I admire the "Petersburg" notion of these things (Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva [honorary member], Gumilev, Mandelstam, Brodsky). Pushkin started it. The human being possesses social dignity as inalienable right. The poet, as poet, possesses a particular social prestige or status as a consequence of fame for producing authentic works of art. One should defend the former with one's life, and treat the latter with professional detachment.
My sermon for today. (I know you can all think of contemporary poets, young & old, who do not fit my stereotype or deserve my diatribe.)
& ironically the professed avant or post-avant wing of that society was supposedly dedicated to a depersonalized, politically-critical, collective notion of the role of the art form, against all that decadent & mealy-mouthed artsy narcissistic solipsism of the academicized mainstream. Their "collectivity" is nothing but a farm school or adjunct sub-college or self-help support group for league careers in that same greeny grove.
Something essential is missing when you domesticize & acclimate poetry to its own (sub)-culture. What's missing is its own otherness, its capacity for criticizing, transcending, metamorphosing the social and aesthetic conditions which produced it. This is its originality, and its social function. But now a fake otherness - paralleling "rebel" social behavior in pop culture - an ersatz otherness pawns itself off as the very medium of literary exchange. Poetry subcultures are built upon modes of talking or writing in special ways, distinct side-of-the-mouth idioms, like in-house passwords.
The real challenge is to find a middle ground, a mode of address to human political, social, aesthetic and philosophical issues outside the poetry sphere. W.H. Auden was very interested in a kind of "objective" mode of address, beginning with his leftist sympathies during the 30s, and complicated later by his religious convictions (which permit a kind of general address to the human condition) and by his deep interest in the social & satirical poetry of the Restoration era.
Something is missing, folks. The real radical poet is not the denizen of an idiom-club or the successful careerist. It's the one whose "middle voice" touches a chord in the public at large : an effect of, rather than a betrayal of, originality. This is the continual challenge to the authentic literary professional, not the card-carrying clubhouse member, frittering away time with gladhanding pals & weeping crocodile tears on every occasion. Because poetry does not belong to individuals : it happens to them & changes them.
I admire the "Petersburg" notion of these things (Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva [honorary member], Gumilev, Mandelstam, Brodsky). Pushkin started it. The human being possesses social dignity as inalienable right. The poet, as poet, possesses a particular social prestige or status as a consequence of fame for producing authentic works of art. One should defend the former with one's life, and treat the latter with professional detachment.
My sermon for today. (I know you can all think of contemporary poets, young & old, who do not fit my stereotype or deserve my diatribe.)
2.02.2004
. . . finally (& I know I'm repeating myself from many a previous blog entry), I think the pseudo-battles represented so well by Ron Silliman tend to obscure the harder questions about what constitutes literary value in poetry. In other words, while it may be true that much or most mainstream poetry is absurdly & glaringly poor-quality, undeserving of a real mainstream audience, I assert that much or most non-mainstream poetry is equally fake, elitist & coterie because it's easier to write that way. It's non-mainstream because it lacks the values - intensity, inspiration, originality, scope, relevance - which would deserve & eventually win a wide audience (& I'm not referring here to "accessibility" or "marketability" or other such merely cynical measures of taste).
I guess while most people were watching the Superbowl, Ron Silliman was watching an old Oppositional-School of Quietude rerun (see his 1st note to his post today). Why do I sense both match-ups smell strongly of the locker room? Maybe it's because whenever I read SoQ I hear "socks".
He doesn't realize that his obsession with & resentment about literary pecking orders signals his connection with the establishment. An establishment in which poetry actually plays no part whatsoever. This may sound like zen but it's just basic literary criticism.
He doesn't realize that his obsession with & resentment about literary pecking orders signals his connection with the establishment. An establishment in which poetry actually plays no part whatsoever. This may sound like zen but it's just basic literary criticism.
11.06.2003
The philosophical "paint-myself-into-a-corner" problem shows up in chess games all the time. The critic-polemicist enters the game as White Knight. Of course the ultimate checkmate is to tip over the board itself : but this is another form of one-upmanship. . . Ultimate Pacheesi. Prof. Hinkel, by by the way way, has written extensively (extenenenenensively. . .) about the cheese/chess oscillation conundrum. See his article in Amazing A-Mazes, "Cheddar Man in Petersburg : Prehistoric White Night?"
The player, too, is captive of caprice
(the sentence is Omar's) on another ground
crisscrossed with black nights and white days.
God moves the player, he, in turn, the piece.
But what god beyond God begins the round
of dust and time and dream and agonies?
- JL Borges, "Chess"
Jonathan's cute comment is a mild & funny version of something I descibed yesterday as "malice constitutes the game of oppositions":
This got me thinking again about an idea I had several weeks ago: avant-garde eye for the mainstream poet: A team of four or five post-avant bloggers descend on the hapless straight man and start telling him to lose the blurb from Robert Pinsky, straighten out his similes. I think this could work. Any volunteers?
I've been talking about this phenomenon since the beginning of HGpoetics & long before; actually it's been my way of participating in the literary malice game.
"Oppositional poetics", built on a structural us/them division, is, in essence, a way of short-circuiting thought, a way of not talking about poetry, a way of avoiding substantial literary opportunities or challenges, a way of deleting reference to outsider audiences (outside the coterie) or general/anonymous audiences, a way of dumbing-down/negating literary history, a way of. . .
It's been the modus operandi of language-&-related school ("post-avant") polemics for years now. (It goes back before that to the hoopla around the New Americans, the debates about Paleface/Redskin, raw/cooked poetry; it goes back before that to the polemics of Moderns vs. Victorians, traditionalists vs. experimentalists, WC Williams vs. Eliot, & before that to Americans vs. British. . .) & I've been badmouthing it for years. It's been fun. Prof. Hinkel has even written a book about it : it's called The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As "The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey Into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey. . ."
This got me thinking again about an idea I had several weeks ago: avant-garde eye for the mainstream poet: A team of four or five post-avant bloggers descend on the hapless straight man and start telling him to lose the blurb from Robert Pinsky, straighten out his similes. I think this could work. Any volunteers?
I've been talking about this phenomenon since the beginning of HGpoetics & long before; actually it's been my way of participating in the literary malice game.
"Oppositional poetics", built on a structural us/them division, is, in essence, a way of short-circuiting thought, a way of not talking about poetry, a way of avoiding substantial literary opportunities or challenges, a way of deleting reference to outsider audiences (outside the coterie) or general/anonymous audiences, a way of dumbing-down/negating literary history, a way of. . .
It's been the modus operandi of language-&-related school ("post-avant") polemics for years now. (It goes back before that to the hoopla around the New Americans, the debates about Paleface/Redskin, raw/cooked poetry; it goes back before that to the polemics of Moderns vs. Victorians, traditionalists vs. experimentalists, WC Williams vs. Eliot, & before that to Americans vs. British. . .) & I've been badmouthing it for years. It's been fun. Prof. Hinkel has even written a book about it : it's called The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As "The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey Into the Labyrinth of Mirrors Known As The Garden of Forking Paths : My Journey. . ."
10.01.2003
9.26.2003
As of today I am renouncing the terms avant-garde, post-avant, progressive, or experimental with reference to poetry, and taking a page from good old Minnesotan Ignatius Donnelly (who makes such a brilliant appearance, along with Thomas "Little Nappy" Dorr and magic-man Bluejay, in Stubborn Grew), I am going to refer to everyone somehow aligned with those terms as "Atlanteans" (also in the Hart Crane-ean sense, I guess).
Anyway, those Atlanteans who have been able to absorb, with some spoonful of composure, the tectonic shocks of the Houlihan squabble, may want to move on to a critique of a different kind - based on a cogent & sweeping argument about the nature of language in poetics : "The Enchanted Loom", by Paul Lake.
I think this is a very elegant and thought-provoking essay, perhaps groundbreaking for some poets. Groundbreaking in that Lake first of all uses contemporary science (chaos theory, artificial intelligence, cognition studies, etc.) as an Archimedean lever against both modern & postmodern orthodoxies regarding the nature of language. He quotes cleverly from Jonathan Swift in the process. Then he shows how these same scientific developments, by changing our understanding of order, meaning & information in nature, have correspondences with the process of literary composition and reception. (His holistic analysis chimes very cutely with the report circulating - which I mentioned here yesterday - about the findings of a British researcher, showing that our minds easily translate sarcbmeld wrdos, as lnog as the fsirt and lsat ltetres are in pclae - we read them holistically in a natural way.)
I think if poets can get past the attack on Language poetry (which, by reading it only as a manifestation of an outmoded philosophy of language & art, is only a partial reading), they might find Lake's ideas very useful for generating new models of writing, reading & teaching poetry (on the relation between text, fiction, and imagination - on "implicate" literary wholes & the relation between writing & reading - on how imaginative-fictional order is paralleled by different techniques in poetry).
I have a few reservations about the essay, after a first reading. First of all, how could anyone not like Tristram Shandy!! Secondly, I think the argument is faintly shaded by the potential for simply a new form of deterministic naturalism. The notion that small particular events are all implicated in larger, determining folds of meaning, could imply merely a new, more sophisticated Newtonian machine-universe. Furthermore, to argue that literature is the transmission between writer & reader of these information-wholes, and good literature refines these transfers, elides an elusive but fundamental element : the notion of incommunicability; that there are things or concepts or realities that are at the edge of or beyond speech & expression. In my view, this aspect is tied very profoundly with the adventure of poetry-making. In fact I might propose a kind of counter-complex to Lake's complex of wholism-information-communication; it would read something like uniqueness-incommensurability/infinity/freedom-silence.
Tristram Shandy's hilarious self-decomposition of the "book", the literary artifact, the embarassing "thingness" of people, novels & books all together, points, in my view, toward the inescapably imperfect and inescapably human fundament underlying all our theories & productions of "reality". But this fundament can be understood in a comic sense. I can only translate this into religious terms, which is my fumbling version of the incommunicable. As I tried to describe it in the interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket (which, by the way, shows all kinds of parallels with Lake's essay), it's for me an "incarnational" poetics, summarized perhaps best in Mandelstam's essay on how western art was set free by the historic event of Redemption (unfortunately I can't recall that essay's title; will try to find it). In Mandelstam's terms, Redemption released art into a realm of free play, without any shadow of determinism or responsibility to anything beyond itself. For me, this symbiosis, redemption/free play, says something about our "existential" experience as human beings. "Death on the cross" corresponds existentially with Everyman's consent to mortality : we suffer and die freely, in order to discover essential or ultimate freedom itself, in order to experience spiritual rebirth & "the freedom of the children of God".
Art as free play - freedom taken to its anarchic, human limit - is an essential aspect, an equal counterpart to the drive to share & communicate information. Tristram Shandy is a glorious representative of this case. & there are many 20th-century examples as well, which cannot easily be dismissed by a new scientific paradigm. But "thought is free", as well - and I think Lake shows very clearly that new perception can and should lead to new and much-needed artistic values in the 21st century.
Anyway, those Atlanteans who have been able to absorb, with some spoonful of composure, the tectonic shocks of the Houlihan squabble, may want to move on to a critique of a different kind - based on a cogent & sweeping argument about the nature of language in poetics : "The Enchanted Loom", by Paul Lake.
I think this is a very elegant and thought-provoking essay, perhaps groundbreaking for some poets. Groundbreaking in that Lake first of all uses contemporary science (chaos theory, artificial intelligence, cognition studies, etc.) as an Archimedean lever against both modern & postmodern orthodoxies regarding the nature of language. He quotes cleverly from Jonathan Swift in the process. Then he shows how these same scientific developments, by changing our understanding of order, meaning & information in nature, have correspondences with the process of literary composition and reception. (His holistic analysis chimes very cutely with the report circulating - which I mentioned here yesterday - about the findings of a British researcher, showing that our minds easily translate sarcbmeld wrdos, as lnog as the fsirt and lsat ltetres are in pclae - we read them holistically in a natural way.)
I think if poets can get past the attack on Language poetry (which, by reading it only as a manifestation of an outmoded philosophy of language & art, is only a partial reading), they might find Lake's ideas very useful for generating new models of writing, reading & teaching poetry (on the relation between text, fiction, and imagination - on "implicate" literary wholes & the relation between writing & reading - on how imaginative-fictional order is paralleled by different techniques in poetry).
I have a few reservations about the essay, after a first reading. First of all, how could anyone not like Tristram Shandy!! Secondly, I think the argument is faintly shaded by the potential for simply a new form of deterministic naturalism. The notion that small particular events are all implicated in larger, determining folds of meaning, could imply merely a new, more sophisticated Newtonian machine-universe. Furthermore, to argue that literature is the transmission between writer & reader of these information-wholes, and good literature refines these transfers, elides an elusive but fundamental element : the notion of incommunicability; that there are things or concepts or realities that are at the edge of or beyond speech & expression. In my view, this aspect is tied very profoundly with the adventure of poetry-making. In fact I might propose a kind of counter-complex to Lake's complex of wholism-information-communication; it would read something like uniqueness-incommensurability/infinity/freedom-silence.
Tristram Shandy's hilarious self-decomposition of the "book", the literary artifact, the embarassing "thingness" of people, novels & books all together, points, in my view, toward the inescapably imperfect and inescapably human fundament underlying all our theories & productions of "reality". But this fundament can be understood in a comic sense. I can only translate this into religious terms, which is my fumbling version of the incommunicable. As I tried to describe it in the interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket (which, by the way, shows all kinds of parallels with Lake's essay), it's for me an "incarnational" poetics, summarized perhaps best in Mandelstam's essay on how western art was set free by the historic event of Redemption (unfortunately I can't recall that essay's title; will try to find it). In Mandelstam's terms, Redemption released art into a realm of free play, without any shadow of determinism or responsibility to anything beyond itself. For me, this symbiosis, redemption/free play, says something about our "existential" experience as human beings. "Death on the cross" corresponds existentially with Everyman's consent to mortality : we suffer and die freely, in order to discover essential or ultimate freedom itself, in order to experience spiritual rebirth & "the freedom of the children of God".
Art as free play - freedom taken to its anarchic, human limit - is an essential aspect, an equal counterpart to the drive to share & communicate information. Tristram Shandy is a glorious representative of this case. & there are many 20th-century examples as well, which cannot easily be dismissed by a new scientific paradigm. But "thought is free", as well - and I think Lake shows very clearly that new perception can and should lead to new and much-needed artistic values in the 21st century.
9.24.2003
Here's something apropos to literary debates, from Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities:
"Ulrich thought privately that it would be just as easy to agree as to argue. Contempt showed as clearly through the politeness as a tidbit in aspic. He knew that Walter would again be annoyed with what he had just said, but he was beginning to long for a conversation with someone with whom he could agree completely, for once. There had been a time when he and Walter had had such conversations: the words are drawn from the breast by some mysterious power, and not one word misses the mark. But when one talks with antipathy the words rise like fog from an icy plain. He looked at Walter without resentment, certain that Walter also felt that the further the conversation went the more it was deforming his inner convictions, but that he was blaming Ulrich for it. 'Everything we think is either sympathy or antipathy!' Ulrich thought. At this moment he was so vividly struck by the truth of this that he felt it as a physical pressure, like the bodily contact of people swaying in unison when they are jammed together. He looked around for Clarisse."
Jordan Davis wrote something on his blog like this (about sympathy/antipathy) about a month ago.
Maybe a kind of Viennese attention to emotional undertones.
There's a neat "Museum of Sound" in Vienna, with an interactive room devoted to the science of harmonics. At one station you experience how any kind of rhythmic drumming, as it increases in speed, begins to sound first like a car engine revving, and then turns into a musical tone (with an ascending pitch). Another station in the same room illustrates how speech sounds - vowels, consonants - have effective overtones & undertones just like music, which among other things activate "color zones" & other responses in the brain (again, as in music).
Gabriel Gudding posted a remarkable statement on "position-taking" while I was gone. May try to excerpt it here; worth quoting. I agree with him 99.9%; or, in other words, I agree with him completely on a certain level, and on another level am in slight disagreement.
I agree with him on the comic (& sometimes tragic) fallibility of all our assertions.
I agree that the internecine poetry wars have an overall effect similar to the one characterized by the Musil quote, above.
Where I disagree, I guess, is the implication (and perhaps I am mistaken in drawing this conclusion from GG's statements) that all this futility should inevitably enjoin unanimity-through-peacemaking. Sometimes differences are unavoidable. Is peace without unanimity a possibility? I think so, if we recognize & acknowledge the inherent value & the contributions of our antagonists.
So, I see how generous Ron Silliman has been, while I was out of the country, to acknowledge my presence in these poetry issues (and Kent's & Gabriel's) despite that fact that I am in sharp disagreement with his "theoretical position".
On one level, my fulminations against "avant-gardism" fall both within the category of Gabriel's general human foolishness (& aggression), & Ron's category of doomed traditionalism (like King Egbert(?) drawing his sword against the sea).
Still, the other side of the coin holds my basic position, which is as follows:
In Democratic Vistas, Whitman exalted the English language for its supple attention to the matter-of-fact, and glorified it as the language of freedom. This concept does not, in my view, put Whitman among the victorious "crazies", as Ron Silliman would have it (in his blog post of Sept 15). Nor does Emily Dickinson's precision & concision read like craziness either. The binary theory of American poetics simply replaces one illusory orthodoxy with another. Gabriel Gudding's prose & poems show repeatedly (through eclectic quotes from "obscure" old authors) how the Old is actually the New. What would be new, for now, to me anyway, would be a poetics of multivalent directness, communicability : a poetry which absorbs & musicalizes the news we read in the paper & the things that happen to us every day; as I wrote months ago on this blog, the Now, as opposed to the New. I hear the inevitable protest that this is a vague edict, which is unfair to the pioneering, testing, resistant avant-garde. But my general point is that poetry is a difficult art : promoting the "experimental", as if it were something you get for joining some school of literary practice, merely befuddles critical response; and I use the example of a possible communicable-real poetry, a poetry of direct address, because this is a value of poetries that the standard US avant-garde would find inimical (such as some of the poetry of the 18th century : Pope, Goldsmith) merely because it comes out of the past and out of a culture concerned with (those evil) "norms". Ron Silliman's characterization of the Houlihan attack as simply another benighted & doomed journalistic sub-defense of the normative Olde Guard is not quite accurate. Houlihan's example of a valuable poem (by Franz Wright) would have been thrown out of court by traditionalists, New Critics, & Language Poets alike, yet it works, because, as she pointed out, it succeeds in communicating (aesthetically) a difficult and authentic reality.
"Ulrich thought privately that it would be just as easy to agree as to argue. Contempt showed as clearly through the politeness as a tidbit in aspic. He knew that Walter would again be annoyed with what he had just said, but he was beginning to long for a conversation with someone with whom he could agree completely, for once. There had been a time when he and Walter had had such conversations: the words are drawn from the breast by some mysterious power, and not one word misses the mark. But when one talks with antipathy the words rise like fog from an icy plain. He looked at Walter without resentment, certain that Walter also felt that the further the conversation went the more it was deforming his inner convictions, but that he was blaming Ulrich for it. 'Everything we think is either sympathy or antipathy!' Ulrich thought. At this moment he was so vividly struck by the truth of this that he felt it as a physical pressure, like the bodily contact of people swaying in unison when they are jammed together. He looked around for Clarisse."
Jordan Davis wrote something on his blog like this (about sympathy/antipathy) about a month ago.
Maybe a kind of Viennese attention to emotional undertones.
There's a neat "Museum of Sound" in Vienna, with an interactive room devoted to the science of harmonics. At one station you experience how any kind of rhythmic drumming, as it increases in speed, begins to sound first like a car engine revving, and then turns into a musical tone (with an ascending pitch). Another station in the same room illustrates how speech sounds - vowels, consonants - have effective overtones & undertones just like music, which among other things activate "color zones" & other responses in the brain (again, as in music).
Gabriel Gudding posted a remarkable statement on "position-taking" while I was gone. May try to excerpt it here; worth quoting. I agree with him 99.9%; or, in other words, I agree with him completely on a certain level, and on another level am in slight disagreement.
I agree with him on the comic (& sometimes tragic) fallibility of all our assertions.
I agree that the internecine poetry wars have an overall effect similar to the one characterized by the Musil quote, above.
Where I disagree, I guess, is the implication (and perhaps I am mistaken in drawing this conclusion from GG's statements) that all this futility should inevitably enjoin unanimity-through-peacemaking. Sometimes differences are unavoidable. Is peace without unanimity a possibility? I think so, if we recognize & acknowledge the inherent value & the contributions of our antagonists.
So, I see how generous Ron Silliman has been, while I was out of the country, to acknowledge my presence in these poetry issues (and Kent's & Gabriel's) despite that fact that I am in sharp disagreement with his "theoretical position".
On one level, my fulminations against "avant-gardism" fall both within the category of Gabriel's general human foolishness (& aggression), & Ron's category of doomed traditionalism (like King Egbert(?) drawing his sword against the sea).
Still, the other side of the coin holds my basic position, which is as follows:
In Democratic Vistas, Whitman exalted the English language for its supple attention to the matter-of-fact, and glorified it as the language of freedom. This concept does not, in my view, put Whitman among the victorious "crazies", as Ron Silliman would have it (in his blog post of Sept 15). Nor does Emily Dickinson's precision & concision read like craziness either. The binary theory of American poetics simply replaces one illusory orthodoxy with another. Gabriel Gudding's prose & poems show repeatedly (through eclectic quotes from "obscure" old authors) how the Old is actually the New. What would be new, for now, to me anyway, would be a poetics of multivalent directness, communicability : a poetry which absorbs & musicalizes the news we read in the paper & the things that happen to us every day; as I wrote months ago on this blog, the Now, as opposed to the New. I hear the inevitable protest that this is a vague edict, which is unfair to the pioneering, testing, resistant avant-garde. But my general point is that poetry is a difficult art : promoting the "experimental", as if it were something you get for joining some school of literary practice, merely befuddles critical response; and I use the example of a possible communicable-real poetry, a poetry of direct address, because this is a value of poetries that the standard US avant-garde would find inimical (such as some of the poetry of the 18th century : Pope, Goldsmith) merely because it comes out of the past and out of a culture concerned with (those evil) "norms". Ron Silliman's characterization of the Houlihan attack as simply another benighted & doomed journalistic sub-defense of the normative Olde Guard is not quite accurate. Houlihan's example of a valuable poem (by Franz Wright) would have been thrown out of court by traditionalists, New Critics, & Language Poets alike, yet it works, because, as she pointed out, it succeeds in communicating (aesthetically) a difficult and authentic reality.
9.13.2003
One last little blast before I head to the airport. I'm accused of binary thinking; also it's implied I've been ungenerous (along with J. Houlihan) to a neophyte poet. (I think "revolving door / of its throat", by the way, a nice line too, only it's spoiled somewhat by the preceding "breath" of "nipple").
It seems to me that as the ruffled progressive wing circles the wagons, there has been no recognition, in a generous or non-binary way, of the positive qualities of the Houlihan critique. "We" know better, apparently. Well, I don't think so, guys. (See, again, the notes recently sent in commentary at Limetree.) There is a continuous process of bankrupting of general literary values, on behalf of parochial, self-serving corner-shaving.
It seems to me that as the ruffled progressive wing circles the wagons, there has been no recognition, in a generous or non-binary way, of the positive qualities of the Houlihan critique. "We" know better, apparently. Well, I don't think so, guys. (See, again, the notes recently sent in commentary at Limetree.) There is a continuous process of bankrupting of general literary values, on behalf of parochial, self-serving corner-shaving.
9.12.2003
The turbid moiling of the Houlihan hullabaloo subsides as the weekend approaches. Like a "sensitive plant" or touch-me-not, the scene shrinks at the approach of a stolid outsider. The confident poet will find the sedimentary layer, and the insightful critic will attach a prognosis (using proboscis) to something similar, I suppose, as the squabbling deliquesces on down to its point of origin.
9.09.2003
Jonathan weighs in on Joan Houlihan. I'm somewhat bemused by the vehemence of this & other negative takes. Again I see an unwillingness to address her main arguments (obscurity & bad writing among the "progressive", lazy resting-on-laurels among the established, et al.), along with a willingness to belittle her own poetry (which really is not a point against her essays), & to question, very tweedily, her "credentials".
All this vehemence makes me ask: is criticism actually possible with regard to contemporary poetry? Contemporary culture is most adept at creating complete autonomous worlds (poetry movements, football seasons, ghettos, SUV ads, music videos, computer games. . .). These pastimes are so pervasive and all-consuming that, in comparison, perhaps, a general notion of "good writing" seems inconceivably boring. "Progressive" poetry creates its own terms for production & consumption, which have a lot to do with an aura of performance & "liminality" & immediate experience, and little to do with "normal" or even traditionally or measurably elegant syntax or vocabulary.
All this vehemence makes me ask: is criticism actually possible with regard to contemporary poetry? Contemporary culture is most adept at creating complete autonomous worlds (poetry movements, football seasons, ghettos, SUV ads, music videos, computer games. . .). These pastimes are so pervasive and all-consuming that, in comparison, perhaps, a general notion of "good writing" seems inconceivably boring. "Progressive" poetry creates its own terms for production & consumption, which have a lot to do with an aura of performance & "liminality" & immediate experience, and little to do with "normal" or even traditionally or measurably elegant syntax or vocabulary.
9.08.2003
& then you have Ron Silliman describing Alan Dugan as "conservative poet", or the folksy folks in Philly having a "Progressive Poetry" festival. These are political labels, extrabulantly sub-, or eben anti-critical.
Everybody in the Big Tent! C'mon in, the water's dry!
Everybody in the Big Tent! C'mon in, the water's dry!
8.02.2003
What bearing does this have on poetics? If you accept the existence of something we can call the universal, as expressed in the many-in-one, then there is no such thing as an autonomous, self-referential artifact; everything persists in relationship, a circumstance which has moral implications. You cannot avoid the communicative function, the cognitive aspect, the social relationship, of the artwork. This may sound like I'm contradicting earlier comments here; but what I railed against before were forms of poetics theory & criticism which stem from a politics already riven with a pre-existing duality (basically, us vs. them), a partisan commitment to, let's call it, class struggle. Instead I asserted a unity of humane values, a "tree of life", from which stem both an ethical way of life in the world and artistic activity. That this "tree of life" is under attack by forms of greed, complacency, epicureanism, misguided ideologies, authoritarianism, and violence does not mean one necessarily must assent to a manichean world view which identifies evil with capital and good with labor; evil with dull mainstream inter-communication vs. good avant-garde artifact-production. This notion I have of art which communicates universal values is actually a challenge to invite poetry to engage with the fully-human existential & political & social problems facing the world.
7.31.2003
Dave writes:
I don't really see any discussion or development going on, more like an endless string of tautologies that trip themselves up and then you have to start over again with the definitions.
You say you believe in a poetry beyond the ideological cliche or political position yet you constantly stress how your poetic beliefs stem from your centralist political beliefs and how Poetry should mirror those beliefs.
So what's up with that?
I've been at a music practice, hence the delay in responding to your question, Dave. I think what interests about literature, from Homer to Virgil to Dante to & so on, is that human choices & passions & speculations & dreams & guile & drama - all these things - trump the verbal systems that would contain them, be they religious, political, what have you.
Poetry only concentrates this effect & makes it more elegant and musical (as Dante is more musical than Joyce, despite his best efforts).
This is how poetry is beyond politics, at least in one of its dimensions.
I don't have "centralist" beliefs; I said that beneficial change comes to our earth from the center of humane values, & I said it was "central" only in the sense that it proceeds from life itself, that which survives & overcomes death & destruction - through its own wisdom, & through divine intervention (grace).
I think of poetry as a branch of this basic (yet mysteriously dual) life-force; a kinship recognizable in its freedom & unpredictable integrity.
I think that covers most of my supposed tautologies. But thank you for asking.
I don't really see any discussion or development going on, more like an endless string of tautologies that trip themselves up and then you have to start over again with the definitions.
You say you believe in a poetry beyond the ideological cliche or political position yet you constantly stress how your poetic beliefs stem from your centralist political beliefs and how Poetry should mirror those beliefs.
So what's up with that?
I've been at a music practice, hence the delay in responding to your question, Dave. I think what interests about literature, from Homer to Virgil to Dante to & so on, is that human choices & passions & speculations & dreams & guile & drama - all these things - trump the verbal systems that would contain them, be they religious, political, what have you.
Poetry only concentrates this effect & makes it more elegant and musical (as Dante is more musical than Joyce, despite his best efforts).
This is how poetry is beyond politics, at least in one of its dimensions.
I don't have "centralist" beliefs; I said that beneficial change comes to our earth from the center of humane values, & I said it was "central" only in the sense that it proceeds from life itself, that which survives & overcomes death & destruction - through its own wisdom, & through divine intervention (grace).
I think of poetry as a branch of this basic (yet mysteriously dual) life-force; a kinship recognizable in its freedom & unpredictable integrity.
I think that covers most of my supposed tautologies. But thank you for asking.
7.28.2003
You mock, David, you mickey-mocker : but everything starts over with me.
Poetry is (& always was) the beginning of is.
I continually start over with what is basic and universal, in contrast to the complacent assumptions, the in-group distinctions, the tendentious binaries, the parochialism, the superficiality - all those distractions from the real thing. The aim should be the disinterested reader, not the insider networks.
Poetry is (& always was) the beginning of is.
I continually start over with what is basic and universal, in contrast to the complacent assumptions, the in-group distinctions, the tendentious binaries, the parochialism, the superficiality - all those distractions from the real thing. The aim should be the disinterested reader, not the insider networks.
3.26.2003
Jordan. . . I guess it's not the dream part that bothers me, it's the Dismantle. As I contemplate the dust storm of poetry list & blog political talk, I see mostly sterile, self-righteous, ignorant condemnations, by people who don't recognize or understand the values that sustain our own culture. It's a closed spiral of capitalism, globalism, militarism, Americanism, according to them : and they themselves are the flip side of the Rush Limbaugh US-right-or-wrong spouters. Both apply a utopian perfectionism in order to sit in judgement - one says America is always right, the other America is always wrong. It's a kind of rigid thinking. Unable to comprehend that politics is the art of the possible, and that we have to also look at societies laterally, comparatively, not just from a vertical superior position.
I'm part of a study group at my church. We're looking at Papal encyclicals on social life over the last 100 yrs or so. There are several consistent principles or themes over time, centering around the inherent dignity of the human being. Some of the economic principles struck me : such as the idea that labor & capital need each other, and need to find common ground; also the idea that the right to own property is a basic right & a social good, though it is a right that is qualified by the common good and by the responsibilities of stewardship. These are deep & pervasive global ideas, which the superficial anti-capitalist conspiracy mentality cannot understand.
Most of the so-called conscientious protest I read on the poetry sites strikes me as mental ignorance & complacency. It's a kind of glorying in marginality, and the irony is that those who spend their hours & years in fussy ressentiment, rather than doing something useful for themselves or their world, are the most parochial types of all.
I'm part of a study group at my church. We're looking at Papal encyclicals on social life over the last 100 yrs or so. There are several consistent principles or themes over time, centering around the inherent dignity of the human being. Some of the economic principles struck me : such as the idea that labor & capital need each other, and need to find common ground; also the idea that the right to own property is a basic right & a social good, though it is a right that is qualified by the common good and by the responsibilities of stewardship. These are deep & pervasive global ideas, which the superficial anti-capitalist conspiracy mentality cannot understand.
Most of the so-called conscientious protest I read on the poetry sites strikes me as mental ignorance & complacency. It's a kind of glorying in marginality, and the irony is that those who spend their hours & years in fussy ressentiment, rather than doing something useful for themselves or their world, are the most parochial types of all.
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