I meant "moral substance" in previous post in a vague sense. What I'm thinking of, I guess, are artistic or aesthetic approaches which do not intentionally close off moral-ethical ramifications, or meanings in general. Such intentional hermeticism has always been an option for poets and schools of poetry, to one degree or another. A defensive maneuver. You can see it in the so-called "decadent" aesthetes of the 19th-century fin de siecle; in some versions of Imagism; in New Critical valorizations of the autonomous "aesthetic object"; in aspects of the NY School; in latter sections of The Maximus Poems; in Language Poetry & other postmodernisms.

You can see it also, in a way, in the bourgeois-boho, fashionable epicureanism which Robert Archambeau recently analysed. What he describes is certainly not hermeticism : but it's a set of cultural codes which restrict artistic implications to a very narrow range.

I am not trying to criticize these defensive aspects of poetic practice just for the sake of being negative. I have practiced them in many ways in my own writing. Rather I'm trying to make room for the recognition of other possibilities, other avenues - the kind of thing that Langdon Hammer attributes to Hart Crane's project (which was over-compensatory & extreme in its own way). I mean the approaches akin to what is referred to as (or used to be called) "seriousness", "the grand style", epic, heroic poetry.

...a difficult thing to discuss intelligently, I'll agree with Daniel Green there. Still not satisfied with my own remarks. Big mistake to focus narrowly on the "seriousness" of poetry, to forget about the ways that it delights & pleases & diverts with comedy & elegance & wit & all. This IS a kind of medicine we're talking about.

& yet poetry, no two ways about it, challenges its audience. For the same reason that more people watch TV than go to the ballet. It is a refined & intense form of art. But I will let my original arguments stand, I think. The poetry that does win for itself a large, lasting readership, is that through which the poet has stepped beyond the workshop and the technicalities : the poetry that applies its technique to expand - following the steps of the poet him- or herself, pushing the boundaries of the game, struggling to re-present the most fateful commitments of conscience, the most devoted, sustained explorations of consciousness.

Emily Dickinson : "My circuit is circumference -"

Getting back to Jonathan's "decorum", just some square-hole-in-a-round-peg thoughts...

thinking of an intellectual economy of various decorii. Imagining an imaginary literary culture, obsessed with codes, styles, formats, fashions, pecking orders, which nevertheless fails to meet a foundational or primordial fitness test, having forgotten the first principles of the decorum of its particular calling.

Poets set the benchmarks or patterns, by means of which they attune all the little elements of fitness to their sense of fitness as a whole : how a poet fittingly behaves on this straw-strewn threshing-floor.

Who in modern US poetry applied him or herself to Dante's fitness test? In relation to the poet's response to the challenges of the present?

Pound had the grandiose ambition & the social indignation. But observe the contrast between these two paradigmatic exiles.

I have the feeling that contemporary poetry fails a fitness test, in two or three basic directions, at least:

1. failure to acknowledge the difficult technical challenges to good writing in general.

2. failure to recognize the serious themes of great poetry : magnanimity, justice, vision (Dantean terms).

3. assumption that poetry is a means and not an end : a means to social conformity & worldly success.

4. assumption that poetry is a means and not an end : a means toward expressing sour, narrow-minded resentments, rather than exploring paths toward the amelioration of conflict & suffering.

I feel stuck between the sub-cultures of #3 and #4. The former exemplified in the MFA industry, magazine verse, the various cliques of youth-Kult "party poetry", etc.; the latter exemplified, just to use a small current example, in Dale Smith's implying a similarity between contemporary US & Nazi Germany (here). I know this wasn't the main thrust of Dale's point : but it's the typical coin of the realm among the cult of poesie du ressentiment.

Nota re a map of bloggosphere poetics.

Quiet muggy Friday I feel like tooting a horn.

In the poetics of bloggosphere, I see 2 large general blogislands or tendencies stemming from branches of 20th-cent. unofficial experimental poetry.

1) stemming from NY School, mostly. The underlying stance seems to be a kind of modesty regarding the place of poetry in culture at large. Poetry is deeply playful & unserious; it is an aesthetic response to the world of experience, which knowingly knows its ephemerality; we respond to it as art within the world of art; yet this playfulness paradoxically & tangentially colors reality too, so eventually it becomes seriously unserious or a committed stance toward life as a whole in some sense - a poetic response to experience. . .

2) stemming from Modern/Projectivist/Langpo, mostly. The underlying stance seems to pivot on a faith in an "avant-garde project" which is not simply a playful response to existence but a determination to change socio-political circumstances; art is seen in the context of social reality, which has a kind of immediacy & forcefulness - a challenge to commit oneself - which encourages what could be called revolutionary attitudes toward both art and society.

& where do I, HG Poet, stand with regard to these islands?

It will be objected that I am reducing these tendencies to cartoon stereotypes; that there is a basic aesthetic component to the # 2 stance, as well as underlying social commitments to # 1.

Well, I have learned from & been attracted to both tendencies. But I am sceptical.

If I think of the "minor style" of the NY School, I am, on the one hand, reminded of the Great Works of Art looking ironically over my shoulder; and on the other hand I think that choosing a stance of informality, ephemerality, can, in a strange way, pre-program the poetry : whereas I think the effort of poets should be to escape any kind short-circuiting offered by style idioms. If I'm being unfair here, it's not directed at the genuine poetry (New York is essentially a great poem), but at the notion of poetry as bohemian club life.

If I think of the "serious-critical social attitude" of the avant-garde, I am sceptical again. My experience or encounter with poetry over the last 30 years seems rooted in a concept of poetic language which is in dialectical opposition not simply with "prose" but with the mechanistic, disenchanted worldview for which poetry is the perennial alternative. But this notion of poetic language is predicated on a somewhat idealistic/Platonic notion of the relation between mind & reality : playful & tricksterish in its own way, and obdurately opposed to political formations which masquerade as aesthetic activity. (This is not to say that poetry cannot speak to politics. Far from it. But first it must be poetry.)

[p.s. please not to misunderstand. I'm not against parties & having fun, even though I'm basically a bookish homebody. I play harmonica, guitar, keyboards. The little jug band I'm in has a party gig tonight. I'm just against confusing poetry with socializing. I respect & admire the improvisational performance-oriented fun & funny poetry emanating from NY School & elsewhere; it's just that my own area of interest, I guess, hovers around certain visionary capacities of writing. The visionary (as I understand it) is also devalued or dismissed by the sophisticated obscurantism of various strands of postmodernism.]