Wachtel's study of Russian verse, mentioned yesterday, makes it clear that even the Futurists, despite their brash gleeful revo-destroyo attitude, worked & re-worked their own craft basis, by means of response to powerful & popular works of the past (see his comments on Kruchenyk's re-do of Pushkin's ballad "The Black Shawl", in his language-game verse crime novel, The Brigand Vanka Kain and Sonka the Manicurist).

I'm feeling shrifted & shifted this morning. Thinking back to Hotel Point comments also noted yesterday (last paragraph of his Friday post).

No one can destroy poetry. But are we ruining it & spoiling it (or just missing it) by too much glib talk? The emphasis is on creating unique & exceptional alternative verbal spaces. Should it be, rather, on practice that tries to reach for the essential, the central, the paradigmatic (through careful engagement with tradition-as-craft)? Such does not necessarily have to be "serious" in a ponderous way (as poets like Kruchenyk show). But the power, the acoustic magnitude, of the communicative instruments of poetry - just as in music - depends on refinement, exactitude, and careful listening.

Jordan sez:

Henry writes that the talker is a time-thief. Maybe. That sounds like an absolute position, an all-or-nothing hideout. I bet a poet could be a talker, could be out spending the small change of their observations to get the shiny and soft things they need for the immense ongoing collages, the surreal boxes, a cup of coffee to chase down the spleen.

To blame someone for an "absolute position" (common these days) is to take an absolute position. My approach with these talk/poetry comments is to juggle more than one thing, to point up differences. It tends to bring out other partial non-absolute comments, like the one above. We all may be both talkers (takers?) & poets, but they're not the same thing.

Jordan writes:

"Poetry in English maybe has a future, but that future will come from solitary hard labor," says Henry. I am guessing he means a hard labor that often appears to be abstracted lazy gazing out the train window.

Productive daydreaming is a different issue, probably the most worthwhile activity in the universe but not what I was talking about.

I don't say Talk is bad; I'm just playing up its difference from Poetry.

The hard labor I have in mind has to do with every good poet's unique understanding of precision.

Architecture is frozen music; poetry is silent music.

"Musicien du silence"

Crane in The Bridge called Dickinson, "Silencer".

The imagination approaches the Real as silence approaches music.

The silence before a poetry reading is only the prologue to poetic silence.

The Talker is a time-thief. Time-theft is white-collar crime, the talker gratified by light sentences & cushy cell. The Poet, sentenced to hard labor, is uneasy about doing time.

Snarls, conundrums:

There is no "avant-garde project".

Talking is inimical to poetry. Poetry is made by mute stutterers trying to use the right words. Talk is glib.

Blogs are a form of talking.

Poetry in English maybe has a future, but that future will come from solitary hard labor.

The lyric is pure individualism, confronting the social, the universal, the not-me.

The lyric is the recognition(s) of subjective experience.

Literary politicking is a branch of the will-to-power.

Nobody knows when or how the lyric might speak for the many and thus become part of tradition. This is a mystery.

The lyric is the accidental acknowledging and praising what is permanent in experience.

The lyric attempts to approach the permanent by acknowledging its accidental, temporal, ephemeral aspect.

The permanent is a drowsy garden.