Hpypa Wne EraY !

My resolution : to try some new things in writing. That's why I went & bought an old manual typewriter.

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A poem or an artwork "disintegrates" (Whitman's term for a precipitate) from the stream of time, interest, discourse, chores, etc. It falls, it drops from the sky... because it's complete, it's finished. It has wholeness, roundedness.

"Negative capability" has something to do with the poet's self-transference or absorption into the poem's complete little universe. Unwilled, unforced - a sort of love-manifest. Wholeness and inimitability - the poem radiates the intensity of this total self-transference. (Nobody mistakes Shakespeare for Jonson, or Herbert for Donne, for (obvious) example, or Marianne Moore for anybody else, & so on.)

Look for the density, the specific gravity, of the poet's entire emotional-intellectual participation in the birth of the poem.

This transfer - this back-&-forth - an image of the wholehearted self-giving (non-self-seeking) exchange which is love or charity. Reality as gift.

Aside from foolishness & silliness, wooden stanzas & awkward lines, frustrations & humiliations... isn't this the credo of the poet : not to bend?

In a nutshell, isn't the aim to show an example of Aristotle's argument, that poetry is superior to history, in that it gives life to universals and form to particulars? Doesn't the poet strive to encompass the All in the Small (as in, Rhode Island)? "My circuit is circumference." And how can poetry accomplish such, unless it's free from the demands and rewards of temporary and limited goods - willing to submit to nothing but its own inherent (mimetic or anti-mimetic) requirements?

In my way I've tried to keep clear of anything that would bend poetry toward usages other than this basic one of its own proper ends.

This alone, by itself, is the ultimate geste. The extraneous business - motivations, justifications, explanations - only dilute the force of this elementary strangeness, or wholeness - this unbending universality.

Reading more about Joachim of Fiore these days. I think I'm sort of preparing for next phase of Fontegaia chapter - from the Siena Palio horserace to the 4 horses of Joachim's Apocalypse.

Joseph Ratzinger (currently Pope) wrote a book about St. Bonaventura's theology of history which touches on Joachim. I'm going to look it up.

There's kind of a thread which ties together (in my mind, anyway) Joachim - the Franciscans - San Francesco - Giotto & other painters - hobo America - my Siena poem. (There's also a thread linking Joachim - Vico - Joyce - & me.)

Tying together all these threads about time & history & horseraces & world-renewal. The article on the Antikythera mechanism (basically a very elegant cosmic clock) is in there too somehow.



What is the cornerstone of the wholeness of the poem? Why, the Moon, of course (says the loony poet)! The 7-day week and the lunar cycle... solar reflection (consciousness)... Forth of July (7/4, or "28")...

Mandelstam : "an arch appears in my muttering".

For me, this is one of the most concise & precise characterizations of the poetic process.

Artists testify to the creative experience as a moment which begins when the art-work coalesces, forms an integral whole. Sometimes the poet intuits this process in advance. It's an act of imagination and synthesis. This is the point : the art work is some kind of organic-conceptual whole.

The poem fits together : its sound, its imagery, its plot, its meaning(s). A new invention, a little world unto itself.

Paintings fit together, novels fit together, musical compositions fit together... & poems - rhythmic incantations - also fit together.

This fitness & integrity of the unique art-work - within its very particular and specific mode - prose narrative, drama, music, visual art, poetry - this wholeness - is its ruling characteristic, without which the work does not really exist.

Of course there will be crossings and shadings between verse and prose, narrative and lyric, lyric and dramatic. Novels & plays will be written in verse, prose will intrude into poems, etc. But this does not negate the primary requirement of aesthetic wholeness, whatever the specific genre or rhetorical mode.

If you start with wholeness, and then look at the particulars of diction and style, you might be able to distinguish more precisely the difference between the achieved poem and the merely textual discourse, scribble, speech, imitation, or harangue.

Why poetry-making cannot be taught.

Because the fulcrum of art is imagination. "Imagination" is a name for the synthetic-inventive capability of the artist - the mind in concert with the eye, the hand, the feet, the heart. And because this fulcrum pivots on a desire to represent reality holistically (mimesis, imitation, mimicry). And because this desire to replicate or re-present reality in a new key, in a new medium, is incapable of fulfillment - the medium can never grasp the changing totality.

So what the artist does is surrender to what used to be called the "Muse" - stepping blindly into a trance-like state of creative glossolalia - in order to surrender to reality (since this is the only way to even approach mimesis).

Of course it is possible to teach and learn some of the skills which are necessary preliminaries of this creative furor (these preliminaries used to be called "versifying"). But the furor itself - what used to be called "inspiration" - can't be taught or learned in school. It can only be suffered. No one wants to undergo this, who hasn't already had a premonition about it long before.

The concept of "holistic representation" - the sense of immediacy, actuality and truth-to-life, which is communicated sometimes by the faintest and most abstract artistic means - and is the most difficult thing to achieve, and is the measure of an artwork's integrity (wholeness mirroring wholeness) - should perhaps be the real benchmark of aesthetic judgement (that of both critics and artists).

Seem to be going through a phase of inner tumult.

Perhaps because of that, the notion of looking at poetry as "construction" or sculpture appeals to me. To think of the poem as a special kind of object with its own 3- or 4-dimensional character. In this thing, "history" or facts or (auto)biography or description or rhetoric or vocabulary or style or sound or etc... all these things are building materials for something which absorbs them & turns them into something else, something sui generis.

This kind of poetry is the antithesis and the antidote to contemporary forms of attention-deficient scatterbrained distracted intellectual/aesthetic feeding-frenzy, which seems to be the current mode of mental collage-logorrhea.

You can't flake things off from this kind of construction : it's all of a piece, and infinitely self-reflexive & resonant.

(but such a thing would be a bore if simply autotelic, self-contained. the poem would have to be thematically relevant, moving... & yet multiplex, multivalent, multifarious.)

Here are two more short sections (present for Jonathan):

1

 
The blithe young maidens dancing in a ring
In the peaceful street, in the ancient hill town
In the painting, slowly fading on the wall
In the ancient hill town -
How many were there?  Five, seven, nine?
All in a ring - did they sing a counting game?
One, two, three... faster, faster!
Only a ring now (one dizzy blur).


 
2

 
The path from the beautiful day
Through the summer maze, through the needle's eye
Back into sunlight.
                      The blind step
From a screenless porch, to fly through the air
And roll in pliant grass...

 
- different eras, different names and flags
For the human effort.  The mute donation
Of the groundlings : wholeness
Counting up to one

 
And one (the hermit's witness).

But vagrancy with the intent of rendering... wholeness, the whole thing.

Poetry presents icons or images - ecological proportionate pictures, as opposed to explanations. The picture acts like a parable or metaphor - reaching reason & understanding at a slant.

But you already know...

R.S. Crane is the greatest. I love this book. Get it back in print!

The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, U. Toronto Press, 1953

(Not least in that he led me to 1770s poem by Sir John Henry Moore, called The Duke of Benevento - a riot)

What Crane does among other things in this book is debunk, in a wonderfully ironic tone, most of the criticism of the last 3000 years or so, focusing however on 2 strands of 20th-cent. criticism : New Critics, and "myth criticism" (the method of discovering hidden themes, symbols, layers of meaning, which explain how Henry IV or Hamlet are really recreations of archaic myth or the Jungian racial subconscious). He shows that both trends are reductive in different directions, and by the end of this book you'll see a lot of affinities between standard modern lit crit and medieval pedantry (pseudo-science, pseudo-theology).

His argument is that what these critical approaches miss is the substance of poetry-making itself. What poets are about is the fashioning of "concrete wholes" (poems); what this process involves is the shaping of a form, which coalesces around a dynamic, creative idea. Poets & artists recognize this process : they experience the inability to write or compose anything, until this shaping idea, this ruling spark, manifests itself - the catalyst, which triggers the coalescence of the whole thing. Crane talks about it as happening with the writing of critical articles as well.

He describes the Poetics of Aristotle, almost alone in the history of criticism, as focused on the how of the poetic process itself: laying out a kind of layering of "default mechanisms". It's not a simple symbiosis of "form & content": form dominates & suffuses everything, uniting the material into an imaginative whole - in the same way that wood becomes different built things, or clay is shaped into various forms, so language is shaped to the organizing concept - the "plot" in dramatic & narrative poetry, the "argument" in many other modes. These layers of "default" (this is my own terminology, not Crane's) - in other words, Crane, via Aristotle, describes how the verbal texture, the language itself, becomes the "material" of the "thought", the thought in turn is the "material" of the characters, the characters in turn are the material of the plot - kind of an overlapping or layered spiral of formal energy. (You could find analogues in the design of kinds of poetry other than dramatic : diction/concept/speaker/argument, etc.)

When you start considering individual poems from this approach, as particular formal inventions worked out from a unique set of "plot" instigations, shaped into a unitary, irreducible aesthetic entity - you really are looking at poems differently from those approaches which involve cataloging the poem's meanings based on an analysis of the vocabulary (usually, as Crane shows, applied with some simple set of oppositions - the famous New Critical "tension"), or installing the poem in a preconceived set of anthropological, psychological or mythological theories.

For Crane, the matter hinges, as I've remarked earlier (yesterday), on whether the critic looks at poems as simply a special type of language use, or, on the other hand, poems are conceived as conceptual objects, formal events, the apperception and appreciation of which involves language to the same extent that we take an interest in the "clay" itself in pottery or sculpture.

This book came out in 1953. Much happened in poetry & criticism in the 2nd half of the century (Crane died in 1967). One way to look at the new movements of that time in American poetry (Lowell's Life Studies & confessionalism, "Deep Image" etc., NY School, Objective-Projectivism, Beats, etc.) as reactions against the pedantic, reductive methodologies promoted by New Criticism ("shape a beautiful object using formal diction & traditional technique which is self-contained and autonomous based on a skillful balance of opposing tensions"). But, as Crane shows, the overwhelming trend of literary criticism, since the Alexandrians and Horace, has been against the Aristotelian approach, & has favored philological and rhetorical analyses of the poem as a species of language, rather than, with Aristotle, as a type of art, an organic form, the mystery of the making of which can only be studied inductively, a posteriori. So that one can see, for example, that the Language poets' dialectical appropriation of Russian Formalist and New Critical philology, or the structuralist & post-structuralist resolution of literature into language codes and defunct language codes, respectively - that these "new" movements actually retain and repeat the ancient categorical biases : poetry is "decoded" as a rhetorical or linguistic phenomenon, and then recruited into whatever agenda the critic pursues.

Let's have a new approach, which focuses on the poem as conceptual whole, the product of a creative process - often a mimetic or dramatizing process - which involves forming an integral, beautiful representation, a unitary effect : irreducible to mere linguistic coding or critical appropriation. This is a theory for artists and poets, rather than for critics, philosophers & rhetoricians.

RS Crane (Languages of Crit. & the Structure of Poetry), again, emphasizes how Aristotle's Poetics differs in approach from most contemporary crit., even that which uses Aristotelian terminology.

In Winters, Ransom, Empson, Brooks & Warren, et al., the difference is clear right at the beginning, with their various opening definitions of poetry. As Crane shows, these critics define poetry as a branch of discourse. Aristotle defines tragic & epic poetry as a branch of artistic imitation. The poem is an "artificial whole" or "imitation". The imaginative wholeness of the poem evokes, by analogy, the wholeness of a particular action (beginning, middle, end). Aristotle doesn't try to define all poetry; he focuses on examples of a particular kind. Within this kind, the poem is a kind of imaginative simulacrum (mimesis) of an action. This is its substance ("plot is the soul of the poem"); language is the medium (there are other kinds of imitations - visual, musical - which use different media).

The relations between this particular kind of poetry (imitative : tragic/dramatic, epic) and other kinds (didactic, lyric) are not dealt with by Aristotle. But a criticism which takes as its subject the poem as aesthetic whole, rather than the poem as form of discourse, or merely verbal structure, is a criticism which is marking out a different approach to poetry as a whole. The notion of the poem as some form of relation or balance - in Aristotle's terms, a mean between extremes - a balance, that is, between logos & mythos, between medium and theme, between discourse and subject - a relation aiming at a fusion, an aesthetic wholeness, a complete impression, a fruition or fulness (Aristotle's proper "magnitude")... - this whole idea raises new perspectives, new plateaus, for critical reception of various kinds of poetry.

Seems that among the Chicago School notions I've been following, the one that interests me the most is this concept of the poem as an artificial-imitative construct. RS Crane makes it clear that Aristotle, anyway, is being very specific in the Poetics - is not talking about all kinds of poetry. And "imitation" does not equal "realism" - does not mean an attempt to "faithfully reflect" a stable external reality. Mimesis in poetry is a verbal artifice or autonomous creation, reflecting the poet's inner concept of an action (the plot) and its consequences & implications. Part of the interest (pleasure, etc.) derived from such a production does involve our ability to identify & understand the action, and the characters involved - thus it requires an element of verisimilitude (the characters are either "better than us" (epic, tragedy), "worse than us" (comedy), etc.). But there is no simple equation of experience and the art work; the poem is a selection & recreation of events - real or imagined - in a completely artificial medium.

We might be able to extrapolate, from the ways an audience absorbs & responds to a dramatic poem or an epic poem, to the action(s) or purposes of poems in general. This seems to be what's happening when Elder Olson or RS Crane talk about how the diction & verbal texture are only one element - and perhaps not the most important one - of a poem's structure. They refer to Coleridge's criticism - the way he balances considerations of verbal effects with the nature of the poem's argument, theme, "thought" - the images & concepts evoked by the words. Like Aristotle, Coleridge thinks about poems as imaginative wholes or unities - this unity as being perhaps the foremost structural element, the formal resolution, of its overall beauty, radiance, claritas. Here the notion of fitness or decorum comes into play: the verbal texture in each of the poem's parts must relate fittingly to the subject-matter & contribute to the total effect. (Coleridge distinguished poetry from prose as having pleasure, rather than truth, as its end, and as being beautiful, not only as a whole, but independently in each of its parts.)

A "didactic" poem does not imitate an action. But mimesis plays a role in all poetry, lurking in the imaginative indications, implications, inferences, suggestions of every figure & trope.

So if we start thinking about poems as imaginative/conceptual/mimetic wholes - representing & imitating actions and "mental actions" (choices: decisions about things) - then, it seems to me, this opens up new ways to read. & I mean read whatever little book of poetry you have in front of you.

Who were the "Chicago School", or "Chicago critics"? A group of scholars/critics, several affiliated with U. Chicago, who shared an interest in the philosophy of Aristotle, esp. his approach to criticism outlined in the Poetics. Published around mid-20th century. They rate about a column & a half in the Princeton Encyc. of Poetics. Elder Olson, R.S. Crane, Richard McKeon, et al.

Not finding a whole lot about them off the bat, here in Bruno Library. I suppose their approach got a bit lost in the shuffle of jazzier 60s-80s stuff, like post-structuralism, deconstruction, new historicism, new criticism, etc.

Trends that (very roughly speaking) they seem to follow from Aristotle's lead:

- lit. criticism a branch of philosophy
- criticism not an exact science since based on human productions rather than nature
- there is an empirical, inductive, "differential" approach to examining any subject, which pays great attention to the particular line of inquiry into its object of study; said object can be seen from a variety of aspects, depending on the approach, & doesn't fall neatly into larger systems of abstraction
- poetry can be approached from various aspects & lines of inquiry; the Poetics approaches it with respect to its specifically artistic ends or purposes
- criticism appears in many guises & methods; often conflicts & disagreements arise, not due to genuine disagreements or contradictory positions, but because different critics are working from completely different frames of inquiry
- poems and poetry are two different things
- poems are not reducible to language as such; rather, they are artificial forms or constructs which organize plot (action), character, thought, diction, & "ornament" into an aesthetic unity or system (form).
- the meaning of a poem is not reducible to its lexical, etymological, thematic, etc. coordinates : rather, a poem creates a kind of inference-producing form or system. The audience infers from the verbal evidence, and its inferences have emotional/aesthetic/intellectual consequences, which represent the formal impact of the work
- a poem is an aesthetic whole or unity, within which the verbal material or diction appears as one part among others. One measure of a poem's quality comes through an examination of how well the various parts of a poem are coordinated in creating the totality of effect or aesthetic whole.

Of course I'm bowdlerizing a great deal. Encourage exploration of RS Crane & Elder Olson essays. What I like about what I'm discovering is a kind of historical awareness & systematic approach to some of my own vague tendencies over the years toward "realism", ie. the balance between the verbal texture of poems & the representations they effect. I find very refreshing - startling, even - some of the comments of these critics on the distinction between philosophies which view poetry as a distinct productive activity, on the one hand, and philosophies which view poetry as simply a special form of language or discourse, on the other. Also their inductive approach to reading, analysis & critique.

Hamlet's Mill can be read as an extended improvisation on some astonishing essays by Simone Weil (see her Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks). Despite the profound ambiguities & historical-cultural distortions of her (very Jewish) anti-Jewish bias, Weil is worlds apart from some of the New-Age gematriastic numerological-astrological-gnostical book-biz blah-blah around these topics. Basically, she bears witness to the harmony of Hellenic-Hebraic understanding (the traditional evidence of "psychic wholeness" in "the West"): science/art, knowledge/soul, transcendence/suffering. Though she distances herself from her Jewish roots, she never disavows the "need for roots": nor the centrality of suffering & love - suffering for proud "knowledge" (grace redeeming fallen gnosis).

(This is, as we know from the Romantics, Dante, & others, a traditional role for poets, too: saving the appearances, synthesizing reason & love.)

The HM authors (Santillana & Dechend) acknowledge her as one, of just 2 authors, who has a clue.