Just so you know

Went to the bookstore and picked up a new paperback, Tom McCarthy's novel C, which sounded intriguing in a review I'd read. Skimmed a few pages... put it back down. I don't much care for novels or stories written in the present tense, which seems to be all the rage these days. Actually I have a strong distaste for it. I'm not reading a film scenario; I don't need the extra illusion of watching a movie unroll directly onto the printed page. I like the residue of the past tense : it's like the shadow cast by the fictional scenes evoked in the imagination.

These days people think technique (rhyme, stanzas, etc.) is some kind of statement in the style wars, some kind of personal attack on somebody else's style, some kind of catological brandifery, an elitist's rebuff, an affront to ill-educated, resentful yokels...

Technique only becomes useful after the artist has left it behind... I mean what you see as some marvel of virtuosity is really just a side-doodle of some other irreducible motivation, the whale beneath the surface...

Once you start talking about technique, or the obvious elements of style, 9 times out of 10 either you don't get it or the work itself is a bore. A reference to technique is of value only when resolving some very specific conundrum in a particular passage... To repeat, people gab about vapid elements of style in order to praise or bash things they either don't bother to understand or which aren't worth reading in the first place...

If the surface elements of style are working at all properly they enfold themselves conveniently & modestly in larger motions of thematic and affective import - ars est celare artem, as I useta say, "the art is in hiding art"...

Let's talk about some (possibly literary) values :

understatement, impersonality, restraint, objectivity, historical sense.

Respect for the speech and discourses which are not poetry, respect for the experience which is not language. The stoniness which is not the word "stone", but inspired it, evoked its evocation.

Serious, not turgid; light, not facile; sweet, not saccharine; bitter, not sour; clear-sighted, not jaded; generous, not egotistical; fair, kind & true.

What might temper & strengthen & sweeten the "scene"? Those things that are outside it. When poets accept the challenge of the world of thought, language & experience which is beyond their local disputes, their fickle enthusiasms for themselves & each other.

Maybe I have time to do a little more mental mountain climbing (or digital finger-slalom) this morning.

Continuing with the Turing biography. "turing" makes me think of a lathe; but apparently the family name stemmed from "Turin", Italy. A.T. was certainly an Olympics-class mental climber.

He's in college, & getting into mathematics, & Russell's Paradox ("the set of all sets, which contains itself", etc.). "'Normally,", wrote Russell, 'a class is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a man.'"

(Aye, there's the rub.)

Georg Cantor's infinity [of infinities] research.

The fractal spiral of self-reflective patterns [the J! the J! the blue J!]. Art's resonant echo-chamber.

But let's get back to poetry. I have a hunch this Russell Paradox can be applied, in some kind of analogy, both to literary style ("what do we do after MODERNISM???"}, and on a more basic level, to the relationship between text (written symbols) and real experience; AND, on a more cryptic level, to certain theological notions.

I won't try to cover all this in one lecture.

On coffee break, I'm reading about Turing, and I'm watching college students go by, umbilically attached to cellphones, I-pods. & I read, "This lack of any simple connection between mathematical symbols and the world of actual objects fascinated Alan." I'm watching the students go by, I'm slurping my coffee, & I'm thinking about the relationship between text and person, and between poetic text and vocal recital, dramatic performance.

I'm thinking about that relationship, because I'm trying to follow up on the previous post, the bit about poetry's serious side opens a space for its aesthetic reception.

This particular intellectual/emotional/spiritual pleasure & value, as we know it anyway, follows specifically from writing & reading, from texts.

But, paradoxically, the benchmarks, the classics, the models which make up the substance of an ongoing tradition in poetry - these originated in periods of revolutionary change : when 1) writing, printing & literacy spread far & wide, and 2) when the vast energies of vernacular languages were absorbed into poetry.

So the classics are packages of newly-grasped forms of energy (reading; new languages).

Our pleasure & learning - through reading & writing - draw on sources which are amalgams of spoken language & new writing tools.

I'm reminded of one of Mandelstam's most striking formulae : "Poetry is a plow which turns up the deep layers of Time, and spreads them on the surface." He's referring to contemporary, Acmeist poetry as he understands it & wants it to be : reaching back into those vital sources, those original amalgams of popular speech and writing technology (Dante, the classic of classic exemplars).

& it's close to Hart Crane's Nietzschean sense of poetry's potential to "reincarnate", to re-capitulate, archaic or eternal times (Marlowe, Pindar...).

"I don't want Ovid in translation; I want the living, breathing Ovid," Mandelstam wrote. (I'm quoting from memory.)

The forms taken suddenly by ancient poetry are springs or sources : fresh, eternal beauty. (This is a sort of classicism, I guess.) Why? Because they embody this symbiosis of text & speech, of symbol & actuality, of poem & person.

Not models or patterns; sources.

Russell's Paradox, which arose in the attempt to conceptualize the basic nature of mathematics, also applies, somehow, every time we read the "imitation of a speech act". It applies, somehow, to our concepts of rationality itself : what is the status of an abstraction, a metaphor, a word? What (if anything) grounds their logical architecture?

& what is "reality", then? Maybe Mankind, for example, is, indeed, a man...

[see, philosophes, the much-debated Aristotelian/Scholastic notion, that there are no universals, only individuals... nominalism loops into Berkeleyan idealism... & back into Peirce's futuristic, "thought-like" realism... & back into poetic quiddity, vivid particularity... ut pictura poiesis... I-am-That-I-Am, I-will-be-what-I-will-be, JHWH...]

and the poem & the person, and the text & the real, and the student & the mp3-player, inhabit this unpredictable borderland, where they flow back & forth...

I'm circling around a holistic conceptualization of art which includes personhood. Getting back to those dilemmas outlined in Carol Christ's book (Victorian & Modernist Poetics).

OK, class dismissed.

Jonathan likes to cogitate upon the conundrum of literary schools & conventions. & I'll grant that in every time period forms of writing reproduce a kind of basic introductory Acceptable Style, and an established Constellation of Authoritative Authors who are the acknowledged Prestigious Ones.

But what does it mean to say this, or criticize the situation? Not much. If you don't specify the particular Snipe - if you don't investigate & evaluate specific works of art - you're not doing a critical job of work.

Here's a popular Double-Yr-Money Shell Game which you can watch on the streets of New York:

The Gamester displays 3 shells :

1. Official Verse Culture
2. Rebel Verse Culture
3. Border Verse Culture (oscillating between #1 & 2)

The penny or nugget is Poetic Value, which the gamester/rhetorician shifts rapidly from one shell to the other.

The Gamester can play this game for hours, without ever applying Poetic Value judgements to a single work of art. We're playing it right now!!!

Notes Toward & So On (2)

In the previous entry under this heading, I focused on the idea that new directions in American poetry & criticism might involve a new perspective toward symbol and image. On the face of it, this doesn't sound very new. Didn't the modernists just about cover this, from WCW to Pound to just about everyone?

The modernist image was an expression of its era, which was in revolt against the dying embers of post-Romantic Symbolism - its vagueness, otherworldiness, dead rhetoric. TE Hulme and Pound, the founders of Imagism, emphasized the difference between poetic and ordinary (functional) language - the latter, Hulme's "counter" language (words as counters) is abstract and utilitarian; the former (in good British empiricist fashion), using sharpened metaphor, striking juxtapositions, and careful attention to individual things, rather than abstract ideas, allows the reader to see the world anew. The focus is on physical perception. It was the dawn of the Photo Age : even with Pound's ideogram, the desire was for instantaneous perception of relationships.

Needless to say, we inhabit a different era now, a cyber-semiotic age. The computer has given new relevance to the complexity of the sign, ie. in the theories of the founder of semiotics, Charles Peirce. "Signifiers" represent "signifieds"; then, in a sort of chain reaction of semiosis, signifieds become signifiers, on another level. We are close to Dante's sense of the fourfold nature of the image. In the previous post, I wrote about a new version of the poetic symbol, rooted not in an otherwordly allegorical system, but grounded in the complexities of earthly reality. I don't have a name for this new image/symbol : but I'm thinking of qualifiers like "resonant", "harmonic", "parabolic" : signifying-symbolic chain reactions, tending toward an artistic and intelligible unity of meaning and impression - ie. "sense".

Over the weekend here in scandal-prone RI, a story broke on the pages of the Providence Journal. A family accused their lawyer, the son of a former State Supreme Court judge - considered a family friend - of taking advantage of their 16-yr-old daughter; under the auspices of providing her with legal counseling, he had corrupted her with cocaine & sex. The father, an ophthalmologist, related how, in the course of giving the lawyer an eye exam, he had discussed his suspicions that someone was victimizing his daughter; the lawyer said he would do whatever it took to find out who it was.

This is an example of a situation resonating with irony. The eye doctor is blind to the fact that the lawyer and family friend, sitting there under his lens, is the very culprit he seeks. Betrayal lurks beneath the level of mere physical perception. In semiotic terms, the "objects", the signifieds, of this account - the doctor & the lawyer - have become signifiers on another level of intelligibility.

I am suggesting that the evaluation of poetry of our age might have more to do with such parabolic symbolism - with whole poetic systems of intelligible representations - than with Hulme's or Pound's instantaneous cognitive-perceptual flashbulbs. This is why I argued previously that the example of Crane's Bridge - perhaps the most complex elaboration of a "grounded"/intelligible symbol in 20th-cent. American poetry - might be a pivotal reference point for a new kind of symbolic poetics.

Robert Archambeau, Josh Corey et al. have been musing about a new "post-indeterminacy" era, & what might herald it.

I remember when my own feeling for poetry revived & got redirected, reading the brilliant/elusive imagery in Mandelstam.

So I wonder if a new poetic style might have something to do with a focus on the wholeness, vividness & multivalence of symbol & imagery.

"There is a current and exceedingly stupid doctrine that symbol evokes emotion, and exact prose states reality. Nothing could be further from the truth : exact prose abstracts from reality, symbol presents it. And for that very reason, symbols have some of the many-sidedness of wild nature."

and:

'We write in symbol when we wish our words to present, rather than analyse or prove, their subject-matter... Symbol endeavors, as it were, to be that of which it speaks, and imitates reality by the multiplicity of its significance."

- Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images (1949)

[note : he wrote, not indeterminacy, but multiplicity of its significance. Again, something to do with the work of metaphor.]

Jonathan's comments on translation & Milosz are interesting. But to say you have a unique aversion to translation's effects seems a little like special pleading. Obviously the reader has to make allowances. But a diet consisting solely of poetry in the original would exclude a lot of readers, for one thing, and impoverish poetry in general on the other. Poetry thrives on translation and mongrelization.

Jonathan's aversion (should this be a name for a symptom?) is connected also with what seems to me to be a rather narrow focus on surface elements of style. Some of the awkwardnesses of Milosz might even be seen as virtues, if the telos or overall motive of his poems is viewed from a different angle (say, in Poundian jargon, through the lens of logopeia rather than solely through melopeia).

He's probably right, though, that much of the clumsiness is due to the translating.

I know this sounds simplistic, polemical, unfair. It is. But these are tendencies, not sharply-drawn distinctions. & I'm just trying to resolve my own problems of composition & style.

Between ordinary speech and literary artifice : always this balancing act.

Didacticism of the Moderns (Pound, Eliot). Contemporary poets inherited from them the notion that experiment & technique are something separable and to be acquired. I think earlier poets considered these things something you learn in your apprenticeship & don't talk about too much.

Why? Because in the older sense of style, the aim was a holistic impression - a seamless unity of voice, manner, technique, subject. The complex becomes simple and the simple is complex; the poem resolves itself into a singleness, a unified impression, a whole.

Why I'm attracted to poets like Stevens & Crane, who are sceptical about the idea that technique + novelty = originality.

feeling a little better about the poetry today.

perhaps I should build on those very elements that seem out of style at the moment: simplicity, clarity, ordinary speech, the lack of flashy & baroque "technique". ars est celare artem.

I am interested in something I brought up a few days ago, this question of the image as a complex of feeling and intellect. & how the poem or song creates the conditions - sets the stage - for a symbolic or dramatic expression of the image.

I'm thinking of the image-complex itself as a subset or reflection-in-miniature - a dramatic re-presentation - of a larger whole, a life-complex, let's say: the complex or "whole" which is experience per se. Mimetic holism.

And the relation of these aspects to style: the values of clarity, simplicity, order, intelligibility, emotive-expressive power. Because the deep & moving experiences - or recognitions - of life can display not only subtlety and mystery, but also a resolving, overwhelming simplicity of thought & feeling. (Not to mention the simplicity in mundane ordinary everydayness!) I'm saying poetry has a right to be simple and direct as well as original and obscure.

We live in an amazing "Alexandrian" age of multiple discourses, each of which can quite easily form its own worlds of self-referentiality. So perhaps the most important intellectual tool of the practicing poet is his or her private sense of an interlocutor, a listener.

Probably a lot of the bitterness and frustration of poets has to do with their own muddled sense of who they want to address.

Is America about to REPEAT, on a Gigantic (& perhaps Farcical?) scale, the "cleaning up", the smoothing out, the "correcting", of Elizabethan/Metaphysical poetics, by the Augustans of the Restoration period?

This could be very. . .

or is an empowered (comic-book) FLARF going to take it to the enemy? Or become the enemy? Go for it, Kasey. Be there, Kent!

I will stick with the stutter - too old to change.

More interesting comments from Josh Corey, relating to very general approaches to style. Raising a question about whether there is a "symbolist" aesthetics (Baudelaire, Eliot, Lowell), which accepts (is built on) the conceptual framing (allegorical?) of perception, as opposed to a more free-form, "pure perception" aesthetics stemming from Pound & Olson. I'm paraphrasing here.

His remarks seem a least tangentially related to distinctions I've made recently (& periodically) between very general "acmeist" vs. "futurist" poetics : the notion that poetry is in part a reflection/recurrence of the past - the Otherness of the past being recognized & reconciled in a re-making of the Same (ie. Stevens'

"the ever-never-changing Same,
appearance of Again, the diva-dame"

or something like that) - which could encourage a Crane, for example, to re-make rather than throw out the pentameter -

or perhaps these differences reflect an older, more basic distinction, between the beautiful & the sublime?

But I wouldn't like to promote yet another simplistic binary. Seems pleasant, though, to take these paths into matters of style rather than literary politics. Quietude/Negativity is not symbolist/imagist is not beautiful/sublime is not the cooked/raw is not New Critical/Confessional is not mainstream/oppositional. . .

the critic would evaluate the poem or poetics as a many-sided complex/simple within the circus of contemporary verbalizationzzzzzzzzzzz. . .

Josh Corey made an excellent comeback to my flippid comments on "poetics of relation". I just haven't had time to think about it since.

"Investigative poetics" - fascinating dimension. Something deeply satisfying in the dream of combining roles of poet and historian/investigator. Pound's & Olson's & Dorn's charge.

A poet could spend a lifetime creating a style that combines these contrasting elements & impulses in a new way.