It's not unusual to think of poetry as the speech-expression of pure pleasure principle (see John Latta's fine detective work today, re: Joan Retallack's playful writing).

But I can't help thinking of metaphysical or ontological implications. Though I know many poets & artists are opposed to metaphysics on principle. Anti-metaphysics can be a principled stance.

[An aside : but often it strikes me rather as a kind of complacent flatland of self-pleasing epicureans & blind egos (I'm not referring to either Latta or Retallack here, for heaven's sakes!). The self subsists always in relation to something or someone else...]

What I mean to say is that over the last few days I've been pondering along a parallel track to Retallack's comment, quoted at the end of Latta's post today. But maybe I'm thinking of it more abstractly or something. Poetry is distinct from other kinds of writing & language use in that it foregrounds & dramatizes (in & out of "performance") a living breathing speaker - even when there seems no rational reason to do so; in this way it (poetry) seems often to stumble over its own "feet", while ordinary language goes about its functional & impersonal business of declaring useful & necessary things.

& what exactly is happening here, in a linguistic sense? It seems to me that the pleasure of poetry pushes back against language's inherent alienation from that which it indicates. Poetry tries to close the ring of the space separating "horse" from actual horse. Paradoxically, it can only do this through a sort of playful embrace of solipsism and tautology. By focusing not so much on the real horse, but rather on its own imaginary song-horse, the poem, counter-intuitively, gives the horse itself a vivid sort of virtual reality. Thus poetry goes along singing its contrasting counter-melody, against all normal denotative indicative descriptive functional language-use.

The tendency in postmodern poetry has been to celebrate and revel in this contrast between poetic & ordinary speech. I think where I am leaning is toward the idea that all poetry - plain or obscure - whether the poets are conscious of it or not - all poetry is radically different from ordinary usage. This distinction gives evidence of poetry's link with archaic modes of intuition, prophecy and soothsaying, as well as ancient forms of praise & celebration.

It is possible, actually, to conceive of poetry's tautological ring-around-the-rosy as manifesting a form of knowledge-by-analogy, as in visual art - not by analysis or definition, but by modelling and implication...

(the end point being, perhaps, dramatic poetry : where theater & reality, play & history, come into intense engagement...)

I suppose I was being foolish (again), over at Reginald Shepherd's Harriet post announcing his new anthology (Lyric Postmodernisms). Maybe even rude, to intrude on his publication announcement. The discussion (for me) was leaching over from other posts - one by Shepherd on the term "post-avant", another by Christian Bok on contemporary experiment (in response to Shepherd). Actually it was Bok's (re)formulation of some discussion by Shepherd & Paul Hoover - in which Bok summarizes Hoover's idea of a compromise, in current poetry, between postmodern experiment & tradition - that I was criticizing. Shepherd's new anthology seems (from its title & brief descriptions) to represent or illustrate some such compromise. (Bok himself suggests the limitations of such an idea - this compromise - & proposes something else, along the lines of multifarious simultaneous experiment - the "pan-avant".)

Anyway, I was being silly & provocative, using Shepherd's post the way I did. But I get irascible when I hear the term "postmodernism" too often.

& I was registering a protest of my own against this notion that today's cutting-edge & influential poets have found a way to blend postmodern concepts of language & subjectivity etc., with more traditional modes of lyric poetry.

Because actually I think the real new & radical step right now would be a rejection of the recent compositional & stylistic formulae - those which fixate on
20th-cent. notions of language, on language per se as the sole formal, structural material of poetry. I'm saying we go back to the Cranes : R.S. Crane's (& the Chicago School's) Aristotelian concepts of poetic form; Hart Crane's sense of the poem as a mute or silent gesture toward the unsayable.

But I've already explained all this. & the attack dogs are lurking. & the machinery of professional poetry prestige (in which, for the time being, I am not a player) must roll on.

It was gauche of me to add all this to the comment thread at Shepherd's publication announcement. & I owe it to him to actually read the new anthology, which I will do.

& yet I have to be silly, stupid & out-of-sync sometimes; that's part of this loser's game I'm playing.

... excerpt from a further comment, sent as addendum to Reginald Shepherd's Lyric Postmodernism post at Harriet:

"For the Chicago critics, a poem is an aesthetic SHAPE, organized primarily by plot and dramatic action, for which the language is only one of several contributing factors. I want to transpose this notion to apply to poetry in general, by positing this notion of the poet's mute GESTURE as the organizing principle of the poem's aesthetic form. Everything involved in this gesture works toward the integrity and fulfillment of Crane's "impossible" new word (which again, is not so much a verbal word, as the sum total of the aesthetic-communicative gesture).

I would say that Ashbery is the great American exemplar of the poet as de-centered self offering poetry as unaccountable discourse. This kind of practice fuses seamlessly with postmodern theoretical concepts of the status of the subject, the power of language-as-system (or language-as-differance), etc. It is this whole approach I am calling into question, with these two notions of 1) language as primarily a human invention, a tool of human agency; and 2) poetry as rooted in mime and mute communicative gesture."

A great American exemplar of the sense of poetry I tried to outline in previous post is, of course, that valentine friend of George Henry Gould - whom Crane apostrophizes here as the "Silencer":

To Emily Dickinson

 
You who desired so much - in vain to ask -
Yet fed you hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest -
Achieved that stillness ultimately best,

 
Being, of all, least sought for: Emily, hear!
O sweet, dead Silencer, most suddenly clear
When singing that Eternity possessed
And plundered momently in every breast; 

 
- Truly no flower yet withers in your hand.
The harvest you descried and understand
Needs more than wit to gather, love to bind.
Some reconcilement of remotest mind - 

 
Leaves Ormus rubyless, and Ophir chill.
Else tears heap all within one clay-cold hill.

Here's another comment sent to Harriet (this one to Reginald Shepherd's post on his new anthology):

"Postmodernism is over.

It's time to move on.

The era of the de-centered self, of the self as a function of language, of reality as a product of language, of the poem as an intervention or crossing of language processes, of the poem as a compromise between lyric and alterity, of language as objective material substance, of the poem as language experiment, etc. ....... - all these things are over and done with.

The low-brow opposition to these formations - ie. the movement for poetry as oral expression, the poem as performance, the poem as rebellion & anarchy against language & culture, the poem as joke, scandal, obscenity, debasement, etc ...... - these phenomena will always be with us, among young people who aren't very much interested in learning how to read or write.

The future of poetry is represented by something happening in between these two tendencies. This something occurs wherever poets remove themselves from the grid of 20th-century philosophy and linguistic theory and poetics. Neither human identity and subjectivity, nor the art of poetry, are simply equatable with language or discourse. The new poetic humanism insists that language is a product of a human creative act - language is a tool invented by human beings. Rather than being mysterious functions of language itself, humans are the makers of language. Language itself is part of the larger realm of gesture and communication. Art is the mute human gesture toward reality and feeling. Poetry is grounded in mime - muteness - mimesis. This muteness envelops the substance of both human subjectivity and objective actuality. Art and poetry are not a swerve away from identity and actuality, not a confession of language's inability to mean anything; instead poetry and art are a human gesture toward the substance of actuality and meaning and feeling. The best poets are focused very intently on the details of this situation (actuality), rather than eliding and sliding away from it based on deluded 20th-cent. notions of language."

Reading more in Lee Smolin's book (Trouble with Physics). Vast (not quite infinite) expense of intellect and academic resources on sometimes fantastic & surreal by-roads of (mostly unverifiable) string theory.

Can one make a very stretched analogy to the realm of American poetry? Experimental tests and logical rigor might be compared with the poet's effort to find an authentic rhetoric (or is that a double oxymoron? "all poets are liars...").

Formerly paraphrased as the now muchly-derided "finding your voice".

Just as string theory blithely proposed multiple dimensions, with only the most tenuous connection to testable reality, so postmodern poetry dismissed voice, levels of diction, all the problems of rhetorical address... since these elements are seen as epiphenomena of "personality" or "the author" or "individualism"...

- and so the unreadable productions pile up, in the departmental building just down the street from the one with the untestable physics theories. Vanity Babel.

(I admit I couldn't get past the first 4-5 lines of Jorie Graham's poem in this week's New Yorker. So it's not fair to judge, but I'm going to anyway... it struck me as hair-raisingly pretentious. The voice of some fantastic Poetry Establishment - which, having invested everything in a mandarin, hyper-refined stylistics, has no funds left for this problem of rhetorical address - the physics of making statements having some faint relation to ordinary speech among theoretical "equals". I know there is a complementary - and equally large - problem with "popular" styles : but I'm more put off by what you might call "establishment exceptionalism". In this sense, Ron Silliman, for example, is a spokeperson for the status quo. Shadow-boxing with mediocre traditionalist poetry is a way of angling for special credit : because this deep problem of rhetorical address - voice, style - is the intractable, unavoidable challenge for every poet.)

(p.s. but I will go back & read the Graham poem all the way through. I might change my mind.)

Notes Toward & So On

The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.

These big yak sessions about where poetry is going next, they are, which, a sucker for, I am.

Definitions of various critical notions - such as Image, or Symbol - change over time. Symbolism, as inherited from Poe and Baudelaire and Mallarme and the Russian Symbolists, was tinctured with something approaching allegory : the radiant, outlined image or symbol was an earthly representation of some intellectual, spiritual, supernal substance.

The modernist movements of the 20th century were strongly marked by a rejection of Symbolist-Romantic spiritualism, vagueness, emotional blur. The emphasis was on positivism, the strict isolation of art & poetry within their own autonomous spheres, reductionism in notions of "true (scientific) statements", etc.

Aesthetic developments shared in these trends. Thus the Hulme-Pound push for imagism carefully limited the image to a concrete, isolated representation of some actual thing, or the yoking of two isolated things so that they resonate as an isolated (metaphorical) third thing. The New Critics, strongly influenced by the categorical scientism of I.A. Richards, isolated the poem within its own "autotelic", self-referential aesthetic sphere.

Nevertheless, there were counter-trends at work. Eliot, in his critical writings, and especially in Four Quartets, promoted a notion of imaginative synthesis, in which poetic language united the intellectual & the emotional in the image from "outside" (his "objective correlative"). Stevens, the quasi-Romantic, quasi-Symbolist, turned around and around his central, productive metaphors - simultaneously uniting and distancing the beautiful and the real, "poetry" and "life". & remember Marianne Moore's apothegm : "imaginary gardens with real toads in them".

But perhaps the most substantial counter-example was offered by Hart Crane. Of all the American modernists, Crane learned the most from James Joyce about the properties of symbolic language. Just as Joyce grounded his symbols in the steady, all-round gaze at concrete reality (Dublin, Ireland), so Crane centered his (double) vision on something both actual and metaphorical : the Brooklyn Bridge. In this way, the poetic symbol emits a double resonance : toward actuality, on the one hand, and toward a universe of metaphorical similitudes, echoes, and meanings, on the other. The verbal symbol is grounded in actuality. Similarly, Joyce's early notion of "epiphany" draws the symbol out of the "quiddity" - the substantial reality - of each particular thing. (Similar to GM Hopkins' notion, 50 years earlier, of the radiant things of the world speaking their essential nature - which is, that is, to speak themselves.)

One way of thinking about the progress of American poetry after 1950, is as a search for an adequate idiom to represent reality, on the one hand, and discover the unique, particular purpose for poetry, on the other. A hunt for the Grail, or wild goose chase.

The New Critics developed a kind of 20th-century neo-classicism, by focusing solely on the internal properties, the strictly aesthetic rhetoric, of "the poem itself". The Confessionals broke that mold, liberating poetic form and bringing into the poem vast areas of "experience" : but at the price of setting a whole new mold or mask in place - the anecdotal egoism of personal narratives & psychodrama, which only reinforced more general currents of American exceptionalism and narcissism. The "Deep Image" poets explored the character of symbol and image more directly : but limited to a narrow range of Jungian-Surrealist "subconscious" material - another layer of psychologism. The Beats took their breakout from New Critical traditionalism in the direction of counter-cultural adventure narratives, which exhibited literary-generic limitations of their own. The Olsonian Projectivists and Black Mountain poets took adventure narrative to another level of psychic-spiritual development - toward zen, Jungian-occult Christianity, and other forms of poetic nature-&-cosmos mysticism. The NY School executed a balletic inversion of New Critical practice : the poem retained its playful aesthetic independence - but now it was grounded, not in the morose narrativity of the Confessionals, but in the plangent de-centering of the "I", and a plunge into an American sort of "high-pop" aesthetic pleasure principle : the firmness of the literary symbol always somewhat undermined by the talky, self-deprecating persona of the Whitman-O'Hara-Ashbery narrator (talking-rambling in the foreground, rather than the Eliotic disinterested background). The language poets and post-avants executed their own kind of inversion, this time turning around the anecdotal narcissism of 70's free verse by systematically dissolving both "subject" and "object" : dislocating entirely the logic of meaning, syntax, rhetoric. What was autotelic, for the New Critics, on the level of the poem itself, became totally opaque, for the language poets, on the level of individual words, since, for the language poets, poetic "language" was reduced to a kind of denatured "thing", without any external correlatives or consequences whatsoever. This was a radical move, both in a political and an aesthetic sense : but it was part of a wider trend in postmodern philosophy, heavily indebted to Nietzsche, Derrida, and other theorists of the dislocation of discernible meaning. With language poetry we come to a kind of terminus to the notion of "epiphany" or "objective correlative" or Coleridgean sensual-intellectual symbol, since the word (in language poetry) no longer has symbolic capability : in fact, the "language word" actively disrupts consistent representation.

The wild goose chase of post-WW II American poetics, while not finding what it sought, in a sense offered a glimpse of a profile of what remained undiscovered. Only a new, "post-postmodern" mentality or worldview will ground a new style or poetics. My guess is that critical appraisal of new work in poetry will be based on the nature and status of the image or symbol, understood in a new way. An image, or verbal picture, is already a symbol of what it represents. Often the most radiant or vibrant images are metaphors - ie. they apply a contrast or similitude, in order, first of all, to add force to the impression of the thing portrayed, and secondly, to imply a web of meaning (between the two parts of the metaphor, and among all the other things these parts imply or resonate with). This web of resonant interconnections is the symbolic order of the poem. And when the original image is an "epiphany", in the Joycean-Cranean sense - ie., grounded in the apprehension or experience of actual things and natural processes - a symbolic resonance is generated on yet another level, the poem gains in substance and objectivity. The metaphorical double (or perhaps four-fold) vision of the "earthly symbol" is the "bridge", in Crane's sense, or the "rose", in Eliot's (incarnational) sense, to poetry's essential utterances. It may also provide a bridge between the distinctive dialect of American poetic idioms, and the broader stream of (worldwide) poetic tradition.

By focusing on the sensuous-intellective presence or "weight" of an image-complex, or the overall symbolic resonance of the poem, critics will no longer be hampered by a narrow emphasis on the performing personality (stylistic mannerisms, cuteness, cleverness) - the "stand-up comedy" feel of much contemporary verse; nor will they be subjected to the mystagoguery of serious postmodern "experimentalism", which drowns symbolic representation in discontinuity, abstraction, and literary pretense - a combination of overt intellectuality, depleted sense-perception, and emotional shallowness.

Fleeting notes (in midst of work) to Josh's post of yesterday:

Like most oppositions, Altieri's is probably both a necessary discrimination, and an oversimplification. A period style cannot be reduced to one-word labels (lucidity/lyricism). What for example is the role of the so-called 'scenic' in establishing a 'lucid' storyline, a narrative which embodies a particular moral/ political challenge? The "scenic" can't so easily be dismissed. Witness the poetry of Anne Winter.

On another issue: one should be careful not to assume clear separations or grant simple "objectivity" to, or simple causal relations between, literature on the one hand, and socio-historical changes on the other. Josh seems to be presenting another version of the Marxist-materialist "superstructure" causal theory of art & culture. Stephen Prickett has a lot of helpful things to say about this (see previous posts on his book Words and The Word).

The "indeterminacy" mode of much postmodern art & literature was part of a philosophical era which emphasized our inability to define or separate the subjective from the objective. But Prickett argues that the Kantian & post-Kantian paradigms, which underlie that trend in philosophy & literature, cannot do away with a shared human sense of experience per se (however much our words for it change through time). He points to A.D. Nuttalls' approach to Shakespeare (A New Mimesis) & other writers. Nuttall emphasizes how powerful felt experience breaks through the stylizations of each literary era (the complexity of Shakespeare's characters & situations breaks through the monarchical-classical literary dicta & crystallized rhetorical artifice of the time; in the same way the personal drama of King David depicted in the Bible breaks through the literary ideology meant to shape and contain it). Prickett shows how Nuttall's approach is close to, but not quite the same as, that of Bakhtin; but I can't get into the complexities of all that here.

We could look at this blog symposium on the future of post-post-post-indeterminacy etc. as a search for a critical vocabulary for what kind of poetry breaks through our own period stylizations into something new & compelling. Prickett returns the focus to the pivotal role of metaphor. Metaphor, he says, stands between diction/etymology on the one hand, and "story" (history, narrative, discourse, science, etc) on the other. Poetry circles around & centers in metaphor itself. Prickett goes back to the disjunctions of the Elijah story and the sayings of the pre-Socratics, & links them with Coleridge & other Romantics, to illuminate how metaphor creates a double-focus or double vision in order to do at least two things: 1) synthesize & relate opposites (Heraclitus' notion of the logos joining opposites in the equilibrium of the taut bow); 2) create a double-focus vision, in order to represent both new discoveries, and the inherently unrepresentable. He looks at the black-white rorschach image of the 2 profiles which form the shape of a vase : you can't see both the vase & the faces at the same time : your focus continually shifts back & forth. He links this to Dante's scene in Purgatory with Beatrice & the Griffin : when Dante sees this lion-bird directly, it's an absurdity : but when he sees it reflected in Beatrice's green eyes, he sees how the animal shifts quickly back & forth between beast & bird.

& Prickett links this, also, with the dramatic exchange when Dante first meets Beatrice again, & she chastises him : Dante, and the reader, cannot synthesize the image of Beatrice as avatar of divine justice, with her personal injustice toward him : we suddenly see the self (Dante) broken & humiliated just as he achieves the earthly paradise : the shock of this breakdown of the self reflects back on the self's (in)capacity to "comprehend" experience & reality - and then to narrate or describe it at all. We are confronted in this text with both a compelling narrative situation ("lyricism") and a paradoxical representation of the shocking and the "indescribable" (the "lucid").

That "traditional" writings (Shakespeare, Dante, Bible) already exhibit, for their times, both the problems & the solutions - both the lyrical-compelling narratives and their critical paradoxes - should give us pause. A critical estimate of what is valuable to us in poetry today cannot be based on simple oppositions between supposed socio-political-historical pressures (reified always already into ideology), on the one hand, and rejected, stereotyped or valorized period formulae, on the other.

& why is poetry criticism & reviewing such thin gruel today? (If I'm wrong about that - if I'm just not reading the right journals - I wouldn't be surprised!!! Tell me what I'm missing, please.)

Does it have something to do with the "Age of Theory", as it's called? New instruments of critical thought were applied to literature, for the advancement of Theory itself, & basic issues in aesthetics were no longer of interest. The Chicago School got lost in the shuffle.

Believe me, I'm just speculating. Haven't really studied the intellectual history of all this. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

What was that battle about, back in St. Petersburg, in Viacheslav Ivanov's "tower", at the turn of the LAST century, between Russian "Symbolists" & "Acmeists"?

& why should this matter to you, bloggiste?

Symbolism was a cultural paradigm, part of the atmosphere, fin-de-siecle. Mallarme one of its chief avatars.

Mallarme took the alienation, the de-centeredness, the Void (drawn in subterranean fashion from Poe) - in itself an inalienable element of human experience (in traditional Christian terms, "fallenness") - and applies it, translates it, into a theory of language. And a script for the social role of Poet.

In this operation, he was percursor of much philosophy, much theory, for the century to follow. Thus the exaltation of Poetry among the philosophers, from Heidegger to Derrida. (Maybe the existentialists, drawing from Kierkegaard, were more realistic about the (in)adequacy of poetry & language as antidote for experiential alienation.)

In Symbolism, the magic of language replaced traditional religion as the skeleton key to the heavenly, otherworldly saferoom.

Acmeism was a struggle against this literary pseudo-religion. Elena Corrigan, in Mandelshtam's Poetics, relates how difficult & longlasting this struggle was for M. in particular. His early poetry was Symbolist in tenor, & suffused with an awareness of the "non-being" of poetic speech, the inherent "displacement" of experience.

The "school", the "theory" of Acmeism was a formulation of literary principles on the level of the essay & the manifesto. One of its basic attitudes was an enmity toward symbolist "stars" & otherworlds. Poetry somehow had to participate in & celebrate the goodness to be found in this world; it was to participate, through "craft", in civilization-building and the continuity of culture.

Such an attitude (stemming from pre-WW I, pre-Revolution Russia) sounds naive in comparison with the subtle obliterations of 20th-cent. post-structuralism & deconstruction, the Mallarmean myths of the empty, de-signified word.

Corrigan describes how Mandelstam's own working theory changed & developed through the 20s & 30s. The notion of literary culture-building molted into a concept of fellowship, "kinship", between reader/writer. Symbolist otherness in poetic speech was absorbed into a larger pattern of "reading" - which begins in catastrophic break or alienation (the text from reality), but metamorphoses into a kind of journey, of kinship & recognition.

It seems to me that underlying these theoretical positions (symbolism, acmeism, affirmation, alienation) are more basic stances or attitudes - psychic responses to positive & negative experience.

Literature can acknowledge, name & identify the terrors of life : it can even (as in the case of Mallarme & symbolism & many of the theoretical discourses that followed) produce a philosophical armature or logic which identifies with, sometimes glorifies in, existential absence, dislocation, meaninglessness.

The anguish of existence is a human predicament, an aspect of experience.

Poe & Whitman might be seen as avatars of these opposing stances : anguish or celebration; denial or affirmation.

But it would be a mistake to channel poetry into a theory of language which sponsors only one or the other stance.

Identity, non-identity. Being, otherness...

Language doesn't merely displace or obliterate or create a phantasm of the thing it represents. The relation is dialectic between word & thing; speech can move toward both denial & affirmation, blindness & recognition. So the theory of poetry based on a language of displacement & non-identity is a partial one, which limits poetry to only one half of the phenomenon.

Every affirmation in words represents a kind of promissory note, a letter of credit - standing for the fact, deed, thing which it affirms. Thus a poetry situated in the language of affirmation is constitutionally modest & humble - it acknowledges its own partiality. It does not replace the flower but depends upon it, stems from it. (Mallarme's recognition of the displacement effect of language also humbles poetry, in another way. It destroys rhetorical bombast. But only so long as it refrains from becoming a technique, a modus operandi, in its own right : a complacent acceptance, a glorification, of alienation.)

Mandelshtam's Acmeism developed not only in conflict with the abstractions of Symbolism, but in conflict with the violence & fraud of the State, and with the constitutional fatalism of Russia. Thus in this context the literary "Word" was pure affirmation - "the Word is bread - it shares the fate of people : suffering" (or something like that). How different from the Mallarmean notion of the Word as purified of worldly corruption! Actually, they share an idealism of poetic speech - but for Mandelshtam this is rooted in "the people" as language-nation, the people as a whole - rather than solely in the poet as scapegoat, (self)sacrifice.

I think you can see in Celan's fascination with Mandelstam a means by which he tried to integrate poetic speech (at the most knowing & sophisticated depth of literary self-alienation) with a kind of silent or unspoken "sense" - of solidarity with the living & the suffering. & to make this fusion a "definition" of poetry.