I get the feeling that JL, in his post of today over at the Hotel, via Gerrit Lansing quote, exaggerates the contemporary sway of traditionalist poetics. Why? Whitman & "innovation" won that battle a long time ago. Is it like the pebble in his shoe or the nagging return of the repressed? I mean the possibility that "traditionalist" techniques might represent opportunities denied. Denied by partisanship & polemics. The lingering residue of defensiveness from style battles long over. Red & blue state poetics.

What was the pith of what Pound found & celebrated in "tradition"? The same thing Montale found, that both found via Dante:

Provence, the love-song, the archaic-troubadour springtime mating-call, the epithalamion at the heart of Arcadia or Paradise, the Song of Songs...

the deep natural root of the grand epic-cosmic visions (Homer, Dante et al.). At the center of the Divina Commedia, Dante addresses his theme : What or Who is the real and proper goal of all our willing & desiring & loving (& the substance of our singing)?

[Actually, this forms the overall plot of my own grandiose effort in Forth of July, too, where the poem's path follows the transformations & coruscations of July, jewel-eye, Julius/Juliet, J-El, & so on. The "coming-forth of jewel-eye"]

Inching Along

I'd like to continue the speculations on future poetics begun a few days ago. I don't have time today for more than a couple brief notes.

I think I've made some progress, but there's a need for more interrogation.

First, I've suggested how a sense of living tradition could be built on a notion of active reading/affinity - grounded in love, which undergirds a different attitude toward the origins, identity and presence of the poetic voice (different from major strains of postmodern theory and writing).

Such an approach opens up the possibility that literary style and technique might be generated not solely by the chronological succession of the New, or a deterministic notion of innovation, but by anachronistic connections of affinity (what Mandelstam describes as the "opening of the Bergsonian fan" across widely separated eras).

Secondly, and related to this, I've characterized the "poetic word itself" in (Mandelstamian) Acmeist fashion, as the crossing of two strands: time & eternity, nature and grace, such that poetry is the emanation of harmony, or the evidence of the harmonization, of these two spheres.

Yet this theoretical framework is incomplete, and as such it short-changes poetry. How so?

By forcing poetry to bear the burden of what is basically a metaphysical doctrine, one inhibits poetry's freedom, to some extent. Poetry needs to be free in its autonomy, in its capability to be whatever it wants to be. And yet I don't want to surrender the theoretical grounding which this description of the duplex nature of the poetic word provides. How am I going to resolve this?

Let's say that this notion of the Word as grounded in anachronistic affinity is the vertical axis of a broader definition. When we described Modernism as a literary effort to "catch up" with the zeitgeist, we were overly abstract, since we neglected to focus on the "how" (how this was accomplished).

How this was done involved what we might call an effort of circumference. Let's make this the horizontal axis of our poetics. What do we mean by circumference? The modernist innovations in style & technique - grounded to a great extent in poets like Browning and Whitman - vastly expanded the range of both subject-matter and level of diction. Whitman, in a sense, can be understood as Dickinson's coeval : what Dickinson achieved in the realm of compression and metaphysical verticality, Whitman accomplished in the realm of horizontal breadth and openness, of descriptive capaciousness, of literary magnanimity.

What were the modernist and postmodernist long poems, but experiments in capaciousness, in extending the range of what poetry could include? No wonder that, over the last 50 years, the squabbles between traditionalists and experimentalists have been so divisive and continuous: contemporary inclusiveness clashes sharply with longstanding concepts of traditional poetic technique.

Every poet has to find their own center of gravity or path through these differing perspectives. Inclusiveness, taken as a kind of stylistic absolute, leads eventually to a condition of no-style (anything can be called a poem). Tradition, taken as an absolute, leaves no room for either originality or genuine change.

So perhaps we approach a theory of the poem as something autonomous, self-creating, self-defining; open to both empirical and metaphysical meaning & interpretation, but only in the sense of something possible, potential, discoverable (rather than being defined by a higher or exterior meaning). The poem is evidence of creative labor - labor which in itself is a kind of freedom from prior definitions & orientations.

With such an undefined definition, have we come full circle? Are we back where we started, with nothing to show for it? I hope not... For me, anyway, that vertical axis opens at least a possible path beyond both modern & postmodern, while the horizontal axis allows poetry to build on the capacious circumference of its accomplishments.

Think, for further example, of the fey use of traditional form & diction in Ashbery, occasionally, or Jennifer Moxley, for that matter. One could look at this as an option chosen by poets for whom neither obvious traditionalism nor forthright modernist statement quite meet the desired social & political stance. But one could as well imagine the older forms being reworked for the achievement of quite different themes, quite different effects of tone & attitude.

This is what I mean by the unpredictability (& subtlety) of individual practice.

& another thing. Tim argues that when free verse & modernism "happened", the role & function of traditional forms - their presence in literary culture - was irrevocably altered. I agree with this. But I think that if you accept this argument, you must also accept the possibility that, out of boredom with free verse & experimentalism, older forms & form itself might make a comeback (elliptical, dialectical, unexpected). This too, it follows, might fundamentally alter the role and function of modernist style.

Very well-thought-out contribution to the formalism debate from Tim Yu. I agree with much of what he says; but a problem, it seems to me, with much of the debate is that individual practice will always outrun general critical frameworks.

An assumption behind Tim's assessment is that formal verse (sonnet for example) is always an expression of high culture, high seriousness - thus the main effect of Lowell's work is seen as the ironic juxtaposition of low contemporary squalor & the exalted old forms which can no longer contain or express it. But individual poets use form in poetry - from its most basic elements to its most highly-articulated specific types - in ways that are extremely unpredictable. As Jonathan pointed out, Frost, for example, can interpolate colloquial speech into strict forms without any appearance of straining after meter. Modernists might claim that his project - to democratize & "Americanize" forms - to make them popular and relevant in a way parallel to the project of Keats & Wordsworth a century before - failed. Yet Pound's "historical consciousness" (in Tim's sense), and the free verse that followed, has proved to be quite dated as well. What I'm trying to get at is that there simply is no particular "right" way to use or not use traditional forms. And it is impossible simply to consign them to the pile of obsolete machinery, because the present and future use to which they may be put is unpredictable.

This is what I was arguing with the Buffalo crowd about, for a few years there, in the late 90s.

Not "tradition" vs. "experiment", or "rhyme & meter" vs. "new sentence" : but about unity vs. deflection.

Literary phenomena & succession of time-periods. "Who shall have the succession?" (Cantos)

Trying to explain a worldview which emits Stubborn Grew & its sequels, so you might get into it more.

Having Maximus & "A" & Gunslinger before me, and Mandelstam & The Bridge & Ulysses & Finnegans Wake & Cantos & Paterson before me too, slightly further back, and Melville & Dickinson & Whitman a little further back, & Dante & Milton & Homer & Virgil & Ovid & Shakespeare & Bible further further back... not seeing them as "challenges" but simply as absorbing-authentic literary models of reality & totality.

seeing how each new work of necessity "blocks the view" of previous books & simultaneously stands in their shadows. Harold Bloom turns this into a psycho-melodrama-tragicomedy, but in my experience it's more a question of shades of taste... thus I feel what's missing from the style of Olson, say, when I sense the presence, still there, of something earlier & better (stronger, richer, deeper), & yet also see how Olson felt history differently than did some of his overweening or over-confident predecessors...

Anyway, the picture of people and the city & history that I try to present in Stubborn Grew, or the wild directions the poem takes after that, should be recognized as written in the light still emanating from these other books. So for example in the latter half of Stubborn you can recognize when the aegis of the Cantos shifts over to the aegis of Finnegans Wake, and why that might be happening, based on the recognitions undergone by the narrator-protagonist. & these "aegiae"[?] are forms of acknowledgement & also opposing arguments (theirs & my own) about "reality" as I feel it emanating from these writers - Crane & Mandelstam & Vallejo & Pushkin & Shvarts et al. coming forward as kinds of framing "style-testimonies" - some of these writers' influences more pervasive than others'. My own poem's capaciousness having certain architectonic nodes where its own arguments are marked & underlined, in its own strange way.

I still think I found a sort of unusual door through the long poem. It's been hard for me to write poetry at all since then, for the last 2-3 years, but I have hopes for Dove Street as a possibly authentic outgrowth, if I can keep focused (while other projects are underway).

As a matter of fact & conjecture, dear patient Reader, I think we're just beginning to discover
the weirdness of it all. . .

Henry goes back to Berryman, looking for traces of himself. . .
& discovers anew what Berryman was doing
with his long poem. . .
which was in part to answer Pound & Eliot et al.
with the spirit of Yeats (whom they thought to have superceded)
& to answer the spirit of Yeats
with Berryman (& Shkspr, & Spenser. . .)

why is this important?
because the silly men et al.
have got it all wrong. . .

David Hess, in a controversial mood, writ:
"I don't think what you said was that foolish but, like I said, these struggles for the
definition of poetry give me a belly-ache. Sometimes they are necessary, but more
often seem superfluous to any engagement with historical context -- what Josh is
partly interested in -- and the complexity of the art."

David, it wasn't exactly a definition I was looking for. I was trying to characterize the distinctive process or activity of making poetry, and how it synthesizes the pre-verbal & the verbal. Earlier back in Jan. or Feb. on this blog I wrote a lot more about this. My notion of "tradition" is bound up with the idea that poetry-making is a distinct activity which not only has not changed much, essentially, over the centuries - moreover, it's an activity with a special relationship to time itself : that is, poetry tries to present a special kind of immediacy, or contemporaneity, which absorbs the past into the Now. This aspect actually changes how you "define" Tradition : ie., if poetry-making is a special attachment to Nowness, as well as a somewhat perennial, unchanging, distinctive activity, then, in some sense, Tradition must be Now, or it's not Tradition, either.

Quick thoughts on Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time (thanks, Jordan), which I just started reading.

Kind of a neo-Bergsonian perspective. Consideration of modernist, postmodern aesthetics & design principles, by way of re-conception of Time (as a kind of living entity).

What if poets didn't immediately translate "the New" into "new writing styles"? What if they understood "the new" as an aspect - the nature of which we don't quite grasp - of time itself? Of course on the level of the obvious that is, obviously, the definition of "novelty". But for Kwinter that's merely obvious because we don't really understand time.

I would try to relate same to my notions of the connection between tradition & "nowness" (see blog entries for 1/28-1/31). The metaform of the poet is a unique correlation of Now. (Tradition = characteristic activity = poet making Now.)

Here's a quote from Kwinter:

"The so-called emergence and evolution of forms will no longer follow the classical eidetic pathway determined by the possible and the real. Rather, it will follow the dynamic and uncertain processes that characterize the schema that links a virtual component to an actual one. What is most important to understand here is that unlike the previous schema where the "possible" had no reality (before emerging), here the virtual, though it may yet have no actuality, is nonetheless already fully real. It exists, one might say, as a free difference or singularity, not yet combined with other differences into a complete ensemble or salient form. What this means is that the virtual does not have to be realized, but only actualized (activated and integrated); its adventure involves a developmental passage from one state to another. The virtual is gathered, selected - let us say incarnated - it passes from one moment-event (or complex) in order to emerge - differently, uniquely - within another. Indeed the actual does not resemble the virtual, as something preformed or preexisting itself. The relation of the virtual to the actual is not therefore one of resemblance but rather of difference, innovation, or creation (every complex, or moment-event, is new). Thus the following should be clear: realization (of a possible) and creation (through actualization-differentiation) are two intrinsically distinct and irreducible processes. The first programmatically reproduces what was already there, formed and given in advance; while the other invents through a continuous, positive and dynamic process of transmission, differentiation, and evolution.

"The crux lies here: Actualization occurs in time and with time, whereas realization, by limiting itself to the mere unfolding of what preexists, actually destroys and annihilates time." (pp.9-10)

[p.s. deepest apology for turgid head-trip on 1st day of SPRING]

This reminds me of a book by another Sanford, Sanford Budick:

Dividing Muse : images of sacred disjunction in Milton's Paradise Lost (which looks at Philo's concept of the Logos as a differentiating principle, & how Milton adapted that).

So in order to make "new" poetry - in relation to what has already been made - "tradition" - the poet might need to grasp a new notion of time & "nowness" itself. Rather than relying on simple contrast of old & worn-out versus shiny & brand-new.

Some comments on Ron Silliman's remarks today (2/27), on Brian Kim Stefan's "Creep" theory.

Ron has a frame for everything, which if I might oversimplify, goes something like this :

There is a community in opposition to mainstream capitalist-controlled society. There is an avant-garde, oppositional poetry & poetics community which stems from & represents this wider community. There is no alternative to membership in this community : anyone who claims otherwise is either a dupe or a sellout. Language Poetry is the classic manifestation of this oppositional community. The younger generations have so far failed to meet its standards, either because they do not recognize the L-Po techniques which they themselves have imitated, or because they are tempted into apostasy by the wider capitalist "serial publication" culture. ["Rugged"] Individualism in this context is false consciousness, a joke.

Maybe an important thing to recognize in this constellation of ideas is that for Ron, thinking about this political community or this alternative culture is a creative activity in itself, and poetry is an outgrowth from this activity rather than something with its own independent center & sphere. & while my first impulse is to try to debunk this whole intellectual constellation as a tautology, a mental prison-house, I have to recognize a strange parallel to the concept of "tradition", or the main line of development in world poetry, which I proposed as the real (though denied) context within which oppositional poetries happen. They are both framing concepts.

I guess the reason I feel more confident in my own concept is that the frame is still poetry per se; also as I have tried to sketch it out, my concept of tradition is fairly open-ended. That is, I don't propose a set of particular works or styles as "the tradition", but the idea of poetry as a global, characteristic, distinct ACTIVITY, which re-arranges the relations between past & present, history and Now.

And the basic error of Ron's concept is that he has imposed one distinct activity (political philosophy) on another distinct activity (poetry), the former providing a kind of control function. Of course, both poetry and philosophy stem from the same source, human creativity, so it's possible to design all kinds of bridging perceptions & vocabularies & judgements - this is the substance of this kind of intellection, Ron's actual creative-critical activity. The problem appears when we recognize that there are a variety of political philosophies, rather than a single one, and a variety of poetries : so that the bridge-making from ONE philosophical community to absorb one acceptable poetry is inherently partisan. In Ron's case it proceeds to a series of polemic oppositions between a capitalist-individualist-market-driven Mainstream on the one hand, and the righteous community of oppositional poets on the other. & his comments on post-lang-po generations exhibit a bemused confusion about why all these youngsters don't fall more solidly & appropriately into his constructed camps.

It seems useful to me to go straight to the perception that for Ron is most taboo : the poet as individual Person. The Person develops distinct notions & attitudes which sometimes get verbalized or crystallized in philosophical beliefs or political opinions; the Person who may also be a poet approaches the distinct activity of making poetry from a similarly unique & individual perspective. Sometimes through the miracle of communication & shared beliefs & common needs, communities form & collaborative work is accomplished; books are edited & published, poems shared, cathedrals are built. We can argue about the status of individuality & consciousness until the sun goes down; but I for one will always tend toward recognizing the inimitable uniqueness, difference, particularity of each thing among species & groups & abstractions. It's how the poem differentiates itself that it comes out of the shadow of its predecessors & the gene-pool of those that have gone before.

Spontaneity. . . then again, Nowness (awkword word). Eliot's Tradition after great labor comes to sounding everything Again, Now, Anew. I remember finding some phrase once in Zukofsky for that but I can't remember it! How he felt himself re-doing what is always done in every age. Contemporaneous/perennial.

Behold, I make all things new. "The Bible is muh main book (blog?)."

As it is. . . when the universe comes home to the odd & distant nooks & crannies of a particular unique person's essence (soul expressed in character written in experience). David the sinner-man harper hand in hand with his Maker.

So that you hear the universe through the homey voice of someone who's come home - & that filter changes the nature of the universe.

Stevens probably put it more concisely somewhere.

Just another quick response to Jonathan. He writes:

"There is no set of cultural references presumed to be shared by all educated readers.
Eliot's notes to the Waste Land already posit the end of a common Victorian culture of
reading. Pound takes this a step further. So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that
there is a common, mainstream Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril."

But if I think of "tradition" specific to poetry, I don't think of the set of cultural references. I think of poetry as a characteristic, unique activity. & I think there are traits of poetry-making which are pretty timeless & global. "Poetry is avant-garde because it doesn't change much." (quoting himself) & I try as many have before me to get at that peculiar activity in some places on this blog ("metaform", "event", etc).

The healthy thing about Eliot's awareness of tradition - whether we agree or not with the specific qualities he chooses to emphasize - is that it counters the parochial, polemical mirror-world of oppositional poetics, where claims & counter-claims for value or importance are always made in the context of opposing some OTHER poet or poem or style. . .

I'm happy to see someone's reading the archives. Jonathan Mayhew writes:

"So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that there is a common, mainstream
Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril."

. . . but I don't think I said that, exactly. Or if I did I didn't explain myself properly (this is back in the early weeks of this blog).

Firstly it's important to distinguish between the "Eliot tradition" (which is NOT what I mean) and Eliot's notion of "tradition" (which is something like what I mean). Secondly, I did not say that poets ignore tradition at their peril. I think I said that the various oppositional streams in US poetry emerged in conscious or unconscious differentiation from the tradition (in a large expansive sense of that term). In other words, poets DON'T ignore this tradition - they play off against it.

Finally I think in various postings, esp. regarding the idea of metaform, I tried to get at the idea of poetry as immediacy, event, "nowness" - that there's a way of looking at poetry in sort of a worldwide sense as a distinctive activity, in which "tradition" is always new, always emerging "now" - this is of the essence of poetry.

I admit that this idea of a category or frame which includes US poetry is unsubstantiated & controversial. But it does also seem to me that there is also a lot of evidence that, at least in its more polemical manifestations, different styles of US poetry have emerged in very clear dialectical contrast with whatever is considered traditional or establishment or mainstream or passe style.

I have been doing this blog for almost a month. Looking back, often embarrassed by the incoherence & obscurity of some of my pronouncements on poetics (especially in the last few days).

Current emanations from some of the blogs listed to your left point up the ambivalence, ambiguity, controversy at the borderline of poetry & politics, poems & "scenes".

Two things that have recurred in my comments: 1. search for a way of thinking about "form" (form & "metaform", etc.); 2. the assertion that "oppositional" poetics has to be seen in relation to a sometimes invisible tradition-at-large.

Am I making this up? I can hear Socrates or some other interlocutor immediately challenge me : "To the contrary, sir: Tradition is a construct - its definition will vary depending on the motivations of interested groups & individuals. Tradition is the embattled prize of divisive culture(s). So your version of T-at-large is likewise an interest-driven imaginary construct, no more valid than any other."

I have to go for the moment but maybe can figure this out later.

(& cf. Anastasios' comments on natural form & sound values of words in GM Hopkins & unity of being & English tradition over at Ineluctable.)

"Gee willikers, Hen," sez Socrates, "you're waxin summit polemickal there, ain't it? Uh mean it is a stretch nowzadays to be exclamatoriatin about an Eliotic Trudgdition, thinksme! Havn't such as Wallie Stevens, for landsakes, proven oncet & for all that America has its own autochthonic ways & means - like when he said quite clearly if offhandedly that he disliked the critical habit of allus hearin the voices of other poets in a poet, as if a poet couldn't simply just be him or herself - etc & so forthus. . ."

Well, thanks, Socky - at this point (on a dark & snow Monday morning at the office) all I want to say is that one of the striking aspects of whut I been calling the oppositional poetics of the USA is that the "tradition" in roughly Eliot's sense is always an unheard interlocutor or double of the style at hand - whether it be the obsessive formalism of the langpos or the chipper lightweight quality of the NY School or the primitivist-pioneerism of the Projectivistickal set - there is always the broad wide universal tradition of poetry in English serving as the invisible agonist or antagonist to the oppositional style

Here's what happens with US oppositional poetics: see Ron Silliman's blog entry for 26 December 2002, where he suggests there is a kind of deliberate bad writing, a tactical dumbing-down, in mainstream poetry, exemplified by a sample Billy Collins poem. Contrast that blog entry with his extravagant praise for Lyn Hejinian in blog entries for today (1/3/03) and yesterday. Silliman sort of deifies Hejinian's formal maneuvers (37 chapters of 37 sentences; later edition with 8 new sentences added to each chapter), as though she were some kind of Chinese Empress carving out, pioneering, with a geometrical literary augury, a new literary space. It's an exaltation of formalism which establishes the border between mainstream & oppositional, codifying the boundaries of the new village.

This maneuver is only made possible by the denial of tradition-at-large, the Eliotic paradigm, which I described in the email to Kasey Mohammad earlier today. The vaunting of Hejinian's simple but ritualized numbering technique exemplifies the American originary pretense - which, in the context of an awareness of the complex numerology of ancient, medieval & Renaissance poetics, looks like a deliberate dumbing-down too. I believe, however, that this is NOT the case: I don't think for a moment that either Hejinian or Silliman are trying to pretend that they invented numerical formalism. I just think that by the late 20th century, US poetry balkanism necessitated the reinvention of simple wheels for small village life.

From an email to K. Silem Mohammad, whose blog carries some interesting discussion on the concept of poetic "ear":

I've been following the "ear" discussion, & have a few comments.

Often I find myself agreeing with Jeffrey Jullich, though the value of empirical studies (of versification, sound, etc) depends on how you integrate them into some more holistic response. Statistical analyses are pretty similar (a Bell curve) no matter what the topic; unless you combine your data on cloud grayness over Detroit with other factors, you won't know much about the weather. In the case of poetry this does tend to circularity, since a given work's "virtues" inhere in such a symbiotic way as to challenge or defy analysis.

Where I agree with him completely is on this notion of a more inclusive critical vocabulary (the "Quintillian tropes"). It seems to me that the focus on "ear" might be motivated by a search for a means of critical measure within a set of poetic idioms which is already too narrow (post-Language writing) - (ie. referring to J's comment that you could insert lines from various post-lang poems somewhat at random). Here it seems like a literary-historical perspective of some kind is absolutely necessary - but I guess it depends on what you are trying to do. I don't feel the same loyalty to the contemporary alternative poetic idioms that many share in this neighborhood of interest.

If I were to sketch out a literary-historical paradigm, I would see the development in the US of oppositional idioms as both style-forming and community-building. There are 2 layers of opposition : one, sort of superficial, opposes contemporary "mainstream verse culture". The other, more profound opposition, is to the notion of a central or universal (or western) Tradition, a paradigm constructed mainly by Eliot and instituted rather programmatically by the New Critical generation (Tate, Ransom, et al.). This 2nd divide is quite fixed in the US, like the 2 main political parties. The counter-idea to Eliot is that the real American tradition is Emersonian, original, individualistic, even eccentric. The achievements of Whitman, Dickinson, and some of the Moderns are given in evidence of this counter-tradition.

In my view it is precisely this double-layered oppositional stance which undergirds the idiomatic communities (NY School, Language Poetry, Projectivist, Beat, etc.). The strength & vitality of idiomatically-differentiated styles comes at a price : the denial of even a modified version of Eliot's notion of a broad tradition. And it is that denial which contributes most to the lack of a more complex set of critical tools such as Jeffrey noted.