The Plumbline School

Plumbline School closing

2010-04-07T06:22:00.000-07:00

Dear friends & visitors,

The Plumbline School is closing. The postings in the archive remain available, as long as our sponsor (Blogger) stays in business.

Thank you for your interest and contributions. Perhaps the ideas which inspired this project will re-emerge in a new way.

Good Friday Valentine

2010-04-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

Our work is clearer

and clearer seeing

until seeing becomes hearing

what one sees is saying

and then becomes the living

thing seen from within

as if seeing double

the self-made self

it will follow what we do

on earth was already done

in some equidistant heaven

try not to think of a thoughtless clock

only a mind that can’t hang

with its own thoughts

will fail to see

another future

in the prior fact

of thinking itself.

"Corn: From Anatomy to Poetics" by Giorgio Agamben

2010-03-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

It's not often an essay can impress by the qualities alone of form, scholarly virtuosity and elegance but Agamben's "Corn: From Anatomy to Poetics" certainly does. I'll compare it to anything Derrida wrote at the height of his powers. I'll even venture to say Agamben, whose name can't be tied to any current literary movements, is a lot more generous with his sources and can segue into more scholarly categories than even the great deconstructionist. It's no coincidence that I discovered Agamben through the writings of another master essayist Robin Blaser (in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser) who discusses Agamben's unique philosophico-literary contributions to language in his essay "The Irreparable" .

As belonging to a larger text entitled The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics Agamben's essay is actually the record of a literary discussion with friends Italo Calvino and Claudio Rugafiori, all of whom had conceived together of a review, as he says, of "'Italian categories'... a matter of identifying nothing less than the categorial structures of Italian culture through a series of conjoined polar concepts." (The End of the Poem xi). The essay can be seen as a contribution towards an oeuvre of the scale, say, of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism though the scope and design later narrowed considerably to a shorter discussion of "general problems in poetics." (xii) Agamben's work is part of that discussion.

The essay is a work of philology, translation and literary criticism that proposes a general view of meter seen as a break with the musicality of Troubadour poetry. That is its general design: Agamben's thesis develops skilfully through the details of a transition from anatomical (quasi-bawdy) reference to metrical innovation and then to all the semantic possibilities now opened to poetry on a newer (more contemporary) meta-understanding of the relationship between sound & sense. Its content almost amounts to a literary paradigm shift.

The form of the essay, on the other hand, looks strangely at odds with content: divided into Historia, Allegory, Tropology, Anagogy, Sensus Mysticus and Epilogue, it seems to follow a sort of scriptural or medieval Thomistic exegesis. Agamben's exposition can be read in one of two ways: a case of intentional (a poststructuralist sort of) 'irony' at the expense of serious academic reading—a view I'm inclined to adopt—or an ingenious synthesis of classical and contemporary criticism, one that traces out of an ambiguous translation of 'corn' (anus, clitoris or some other purposely ambiguous sense of bodily orifice?) no less than the origins of a veritable metrics revolution. The razo to Arnaut Daniel's Troubadour composition (in its original bilingual form):

Raimon de Dufort and Lord Turc Malec were two knights from Quercy who composed the sirventes about the lady called Milday n'Aia, the one who said to the knight that she would not love him if he did not corn her in the arse.

And here are written the sirventes.

(Raimons de Dufort e N Turc Malec si foron du cavallier de Caersi que feiren los sirventes de la domna que ac nom ma domna n'Aia, aquella que dis al cavalier de Cornil qu'ella no l'amaria si el no la cornava el cul.

Et aqui son escritz los sirventes.)

Thus the philological status of 'corn' in Arnaut's Provencal verses takes us initially to a contested moment in Historia: the historical fact of Arnaut's own substitution of corn for cul in the sirventes that follow the razo. The substitution does more than correct an embarrassing blemish: it creates a textual lacuna (or 'gap', as Agamben says) that becomes the occasion for a crucial "'body of the woman/body of the poem' equation, which constitutes the sirventes's theme" (31). Which in turn leads to Agamben's most developed view of the Arnaut text and Ayna figure as "[t]he site of a fulfillment and an impossibility, of a perfection possible through an imperfection alone". (42) Just the sort of purposeful but playfully ambiguous reworking of traditional materials that's characteristic of so much contemporary poetics.

A quibbling over bawdy terminology creates a textual split after which the history of verse is never the same. But how exactly: how does the essay's typology lead in this way from what Agamben sees as the "somewhat uninspiring interpretative exercises" (23) of the courtly poet's earliest critics to a point in literary understanding where "comprehension is darkened in speech and speech is silenced in comprehension"? (42)

Through scholarly researches that uncover a vital 'corn' to 'cors' transition the 'corn' debate changes female into poetic anatomy (28), the new term 'cors' or 'cor' now meaning a "metrical unit", a structural feature not of a female body but of the verse fabric itself. A nonconformist (more problematic) view of poetry and its constitutive parts arises where anatomy turns into a blemish in prosodic design. A lewd reference to the female body now translates into an equally troubling reluctance on the part of rhymes to do their job within the same strophe. 'Corn' is now understood as "a partially unrelated rhyme" that requires the presence of other stanzas to which rhymes must later refer if compositional unity is to be maintained.

By virtue of this asymmetry of design, and the necessity the reader is now under to regard the poem in its entirety, a new "metastrophical" view of courtly lyric poetry is born in which the appearance of 'corn' then 'cors' marks a continuity and experimentalism divide begun with a substitution of the initially ambiguous 'corn' for a patently obscene 'cul': so that a part of female anatomy in the early Arnaut sirventes now carries over into a new sense of poetry as the place of rhyme displacement. Freed from strophic constraint rhyme loosens like a free radical into the body of the text. Arnaut who "treats all verses as "corns" and...by thus rupturing the closed unity of the strophe, transforms the unrelated rhyme into the principle of a higher relation" (31 italics are Agamben's) is seen as a poet of unexpected novelty, more particularly of verses that always leave something else oddly mislocated within the same poem. The troublesomeness of 'site' makes the reading eye work a little harder, looking no longer for melodic verses to courtly ladies but a more interesting Allegory at work in all poetic texts. In Agamben's words,

If we return, therefore, to Arnaut's sirventes, the whole dispute surrounding Ayna's corn is displaced from its obscene literal sense to a question of poetic technique and from a problem of anatomical suitableness to a metrical matter. The "body of the woman=body of the poem" equation, which is not altogether unexpected but is still not a given, will find a counterpart in the equation of corn as bodily orifice and corn as point of rupture of the strophe's metrical structure." (30)

And:

If the corn is a point of fracture in the unity of the strophe, and if the strophe's metrical structure is not to be irremediably shattered...the laceration must take place with a particular precaution: the unrelated rhymes must be joined in a new metastrophic formal unity. (23)

By linking rhymes within a wider textual body the poet (and reader) avoids the prurience of focusing on one aspect only of the "woman-poem", dispensing at the same time with the purely melodic signifiers that give prominence to the physical Lady: in short, a literal reading of corn as female anatomy must now subserve a higher "harmonic" part-to-whole ordering that now appeals as much to the eye as the ear. Here is the emerging idea of poetry as text. The rupture between rhymes and a Troubadour's sound devices stills the singing voice, the poem's allegiance to a dominant tradition of "oral performance" forever gone, and activates a new type of intellectual viewing such as is typified in the complex sestina form. The body of Ayna, no longer the object of coarse sexual play, is elevated to a more intellectually innovative Tropology: it is even perhaps a morally (or spiritually) edifying way to talk about how the female body can presage a distinctively novel view of textual poetry.

Scattered readings of philological speculation and an emerging transformation of the physical into a symbolic body through Allegory are now bound to veer off into more technical discussions. Leaving melos for metrics will mark the poetic text as a site of errant rhymes and verses that won't end uniformly at the end of every line: enjambments are now seen as a negotiable upper-limit to where poetry can be safely distanced from an encroaching prose, poetry's ghostly Other. Enjambment, the errant verse line, is to poetry at this stage what Arnaut's 'corn' caesura originally was to rhyme.The very "harmony between sound and sense" (35) is put into question.

The bifurcated textual body of the poem can now be reconfigured as a sound and sense, "metrical segmentation and syntactical segmentation" (34) battleground where the distinctions between them are becoming more vaguely defined. If the music of oral tradition has given way to a the poem's metrical unity, which in turn threatens to enter prose terrain through lines (enjambments) whose chief sense-carriers (rhymes) don't appear uniformly at the end, it's even hard to separate sound from sense (a topic that's received in Silliman's view of the New Sentence its only true contemporary post-avant formulation). The "metastrophic" unity signalled by 'corn' now marks a troubling divide between the poem as metrics and poem as site of meaning. This is poetry's Anagogy phase: a kind of even more ultimate & divergent reading of that always troublesome place ('corn' or unrelated rhyme) of the "woman-poem".

Citing Dante extensively (particularly Book III of the Convivio) Agamben draws the most controversial conclusion of all from this growing sense-sound separation: namely, that poetry resides in the ineffability of poetic meanings themselves. Intellect and language, having ruptured almost beyond any formal compatibility, now chase each other around tempestuously like cold and warm fronts, with meanings sometimes gaining the ascendancy over sounds, sometimes sounds over meanings. Again, a perceived imperfection in language (lack of stable rhymes & verse lines), site of potential embarrassment, turns into a new sort of literary perfection. In the hands of the great Dante imperfection is the beginning Inferno stage and the Comedy that ends in beatific vision becomes the Sensus Mysticus form of language itself. Arnaut as the prequel to Dante!

These two synchronous and inverse processes in the act of speaking (and listening)—that of language's movement toward comprehension and of comprehension's movement toward language—communicate with each other in their limitation, such that (as Dante will go on to say) their imperfection actually coincides with their perfection". (39)

And more emphatically still:

And is this not precisely what happens in every genuine poetic enunciation in which language's movement toward sense is as if traversed by another discourse, one moving from comprehension to sound, without either of the two ever reaching its destination, the one to rest in prose and the other in pure sound? Instead, in a decisive exchange, it is as if, having met each other, each of the two movements then followed the other's tracks, such that language found itself led back in the end to language, and comprehension to comprehension. This inverted chiasm—this and nothing else—is what we call poetry. This chiasm is, beyond every vagueness, poetry's crossing with thought, the thinking essence of poetry and the poeticizing essence of thought (41 Italics are Agamben's)

In my previous two posts on Timothy Steele's work on the decline of metrics I noted the author's linking its devaluation to the abandonment of meter for something perceived to be closer to language's natural rhythms. I wonder if Steele is aware of the Arnaut connection to the loss of melos in poetry evolution: perhaps even if he'd consider Dante's own Commedia as a valid testimony to the loss of song, & its decline into an opposing play of sound and sense as outlined in Agamben's essay. Whether the lament for 'song' is at all the same as the celebrated final Dantean paradox of the broken vision of the Trinity in Paradiso: XXXIII : where language, as elevated as this, can envisage a triune God only in fragments. In the terzina,

O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,
sola t'intendi, e da te intelletta
e intendente te ami e arridi! (124-126)

Dante, nearing the end of his journey, wants to celebrate and invoke at the same time this visione straordinaria of a divine mystery imparted to him in three parts: even at the celestial summits the divine essence grasped only little by little, restricted to only its diverse qualities. Intellect and poetic imagination battle it out to the very end. To avoid experiencing similar limitations with regards to other higher mysteries like the Incarnation & the contemplation of God requires a final divine grace (one that seems tantamount to a complete abandonment of poetic language itself):

A l'alta fantasia qui manco possa;
a gia volgeva il mio disio e 'l velle,
si come rota ch'igualmente e mossa,
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.(142-145)

Comprehension and language completely submerged in the divine "love that moves sun & stars."

Russian plumbline

2010-03-05T06:08:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Acmeists, & conjunctions of opposites... on this date in 1966, Anna Akhmatova died. On the same day, in 1953, Stalin died. One lived by the word, the other by the sword. & the survivor outlived her mortal foe - leader of those who executed her husband Nikolai Gumilev, & sent her only child to the gulag. Gives another sense to those famous lines of hers:

Gold rusts, steel decays, marble
crumbles. Everything readies for death.
The firmest thing on Earth is sorrow,
and most lasting is the regal word.

In some of the early posts to the Plumbline, there was discussion of the "theatrical" dimension of human life and history, & how poetry is bound up inextricably with the dramatic fate of cultures & nations. You can see that clearly coming to the fore in the struggle between poetry & dictatorship in Russia : where Mandelstam's early affinity with Ovid played out in a foreshortened imitation (his poem about Stalin sent him to exile & death, as Ovid's poetry had gotten him shipped off to the Black Sea).

There's a thematic aspect to this particular confrontation, since the Acmeists (Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam et al.) had a conception of the project, the vocation, of the poetic Word, as a matter of humanizing, civilizing, and domesticating life on earth. They suffered and died for this vocation, in very dramatic (even iconic) fashion, in a battle with forces of violence and dehumanization : those ideological projects of the 20th century which were engaged in humiliating and defacing the human image.

Akhmatova at least outlasted her opponent. Stalin ["steel"] decays... & "most durable is the regal word."

Plumbline School on Facebook

2010-03-04T12:42:00.001-08:00

Members of the Plumbline School now have an incipient group on Facebook. Hopefully it will be useful means of communication for the far-flung Plums.

& a reminder to visitors : we welcome eligible new members. Please see link at upper right, How to Join the Plumbline School.

Derek Mahon through an Acmeist lens

2010-03-04T06:15:00.000-08:00

If Gumilev had somehow survived the Bolshevik firing squad, and lived another 90 years, I think he might have accepted this poem by Derek Mahon (in the current New Yorker) into an Acmeist canon.

How would he evaluate it? As I'm scribbling this at the office, it will have to be a quick sketch. How would Gumilev read & appraise "The Thunder Shower"?

First of all, it's clearly a poem, with rhymes & stanzas, not prose chopped up into lines. The Russians were (& often have continued to be) more conservative in this area. Gumilev wrote that "poetry wants to distinguish itself from prose." (I'm not making a judgement of my own here : I recognize & value some free verse. Nevertheless I agree with the general idea. Poetry is distinct from prose.)

Secondly, the diction & syntax displays some clarity and simplicity. Poetry, for Acmeism, is "the art of the Word." Language, speech - in its natural, everyday, vernacular, contemporary formations, its common usages - is to be engaged & built upon, not shattered & destroyed. In other words, the given language we speak is to be respected in its integrity. The integrity & wholeness of the word itself is the living ground out of which poetry emerges & effloresces.

Thirdly, poetry is organic - a living whole, in an Aristotelian sense. Gumilev (again, following Aristotle somewhat) conceptualized four basic elements of the living organism of the poem : phonetics, style, composition, and what he called "eidolology" (or what we might term "thematics" or "argument", though it means more than that). Gumilev even analogized these elements to complementary, interactive physiological systems (flesh, bone structure, circulation, nerves).

How does Mahon's poem reflect such an organic whole? First, the entire poem describes a single "action" : the coming & passing-away of a heavy thunderstorm. This is the unifying (compositional) plot which undergirds both the underlying theme, and the flights of wit & fantasy elaborated in the individual stanzas. The calm elegance of the everyday syntax, combined with images of a multitude everyday things (sirens, trucks, honks, beeps, muggy air, world economy, etc.) - equivalent to the Acmeist doctrine of accepting & celebrating the things of this world - are wrought, up, caught up, in the waves of wet & stormy sound. & suddenly the unity of recurrent sounds, images, figures & form begins to gather into the specific gravity of a strictly poetic magic : we begin to recognize the equivalence of the natural phenomenon (the storm) with the verbal action of the work of art. As the poem states : "all human life is there". We are caught up in a unity of natural/artifical life, that is, a creative fusion. The rain becomes a sort of fountain : the faint & subtle Scriptural allusions (Baal, the creche) reinforce a vague feeling of being in the presence of new Making itself. "...a thrush sings..."

The phenomenon I am describing here is an example of Gumilev's concept of "chasteness" : we recognize the integrity and independence of the strictly poetic event - the artwork's inherent value - in the very process of the poem's celebration of the "chaste" integrity of both everyday communication (speech) and everyday natural events.

Then the storm, that "angry downpour" (or Biblical deluge) fades away. "A few last drops drip from a broken gutter". It was only a rainstorm. Yet the concluding lines acknowledge, in a sort of backhanded undertone, the sense that, by way of this poetic/natural process, we have been swooshed into a dimension slightly beyond the ordinary everyday, to apprehend a subtle sort of creative consciousness :

"but the storm that created so much fuss
has lost interest in us."

The poem thus diminishes to a close with this sly understatement.

I would hazard to guess that Gumilev would not only approve this poem, but enjoy it a good deal. & I find it fitting to come upon this work by an Irish poet, so soon after reading that other Irish writer's edifying book (Justin Doherty, The Acmeist movement in Russian poetry). Maybe the ghost of that master guild-poet Yeats (whose work displays both Symbolist & Acmeist dimensions) hovers somewhere nearby.

Justin Doherty on Acmeism

2010-03-02T09:53:00.001-08:00

"...there is an unchasteness of attitude in both the doctrine of "Art for life," and that of "Art for art." In the first case, art... has value only to the extent that it serves goals extraneous to it.... In the second case, art becomes effete, grows agonizingly moonlike..." - Nikolai Gumilev, "The Life of Verse" (tr. by D. Lapeza)

For 30 years or so, ever since I happened upon a book of Mandelstam's selected poems in a local bookstore, I've been fascinated with his work & that of other Russians he led me to : Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Gumilev, Brodsky... I think I've delved as deeply into it as someone who works in an academic library, & never gets past the beginner stage of learning Russian, can possibly delve... & then I come upon something new, & I realize how much I haven't really understood. Justin Doherty's excellent book has had this effect : The Acmeist movement in Russian poetry : culture and the word (Oxford UP, 1995).

One of the things this study has done is lift my perspective beyond a focus on Mandelstam, toward the underlying principles of the group of Petersburg poets with whom he affiliated. Acmeism grew out of various practical associations, especially the so-called "Guild of Poets" - who convened regularly in semi-formal meetings to read and discuss each other's work. This friendly proximity helped foster a kind of professional outlook - a "guild" mentality - which in turn helped the poets to establish some common principles, seen as grounding characteristic, universal elements of poetry, and allowing for a degree of critical objectivity.

I can't adequately paraphrase or even summarize Doherty's book. All I can do is try to point toward some of these salient principles. Nikolai Gumilev, one of the founders of the Acmeist group, can be credited with formulating them, while Mandelstam further elaborated their implications. Here's my rough sketch :

1. The Acmeist movement appeared in Petersburg around 1910, as a critique of the then-reigning but waning Petersburg phenomenon, quite accomplished & sophisticated, known as Symbolism. Russian Symbolism took a mystical view of art and poetry, proposing a categorical divide between the material and the noumenal or spiritual worlds; poetry served as a kind of cultic & mystagogic pathway from the debased world of time and the senses, to a supernal spiritual world of Beauty and Eternity. Poetry was equivalent to gnosticism : a way of knowledge. The Acmeists, on the other hand, committed themselves wholeheartedly to the real, visible, ordinary world of living things, time, and space. They firmly rejected Symbolism's otherworldliness, as well as its amalgam of art and cultic spiritualism.

2. A key defining term for Acmeist poetics is : integrity. Gumilev used a special word for this : "chasteness", or "chastity". We can speculate on his motive for this terminology : integrity (which he also used frequently) has primarily either a structural/physical or a moral sense; "chasteness", in Gumilev's usage, involves these aspects, but perhaps also adds an aesthetic element, a sense of beauty. What did the Acmeists mean by this? As a consequence of their rejection of Symbolism, they affirmed the inherent value, the wholeness of things : that is, of natural life, of language (the "Word"), and of poetry itself. "Integrity" meant that all these things had a "right to exist", and, as Gumilev put it, "on a higher level, a right to be of service to others" [inexact quote from memory]. Thus an acceptance and affirmation of life-on-earth displayed an ethical dimension, and under the umbrella of this overall stance of affirmation, a fundamental equilibrium was established, between the freedom of poetry to be itself, of value in itself, on the one hand, and, on the other, the inherent value of life & culture at large. The two realms were distinct, symbiotic & complementary, all at once.

3. Acmeism, from the Greek "akme" - the acme : perfection, fulfillment, flowering, wholeness... these qualities had more than an ideological or quasi-philosophical reference. For Gumilev and his associates, wholeness and fulfillment had a specific meaning for poetics. The approach was basically Aristotelian, with a strong emphasis on poetry's organic (living) wholeness. Gumilev built on Aristotle's sense of the poem as displaying a unity of beginning-middle-end, of proportion of parts & whole; he developed an "anatomy" of the poetic word with analogy to the systems of the living human body. & this focus on the organic qualities of poetic language helps distinguish such language from other kinds of discourse. The Acmeists began to build a series of interlocking "wholes" of this kind, into a synchronic sense of joyful "philology" - the expression of the poetic Word as a shared effort within a single world tradition, an "Hellenic domesticity" (Mandelstam) crossing all barriers of time & space - centered on the human, and human culture - as sanctioned, reflected, guaranteed by the freedom of the "Word".

4. Acmeism also displays a "reflexive" dimension : standing between Russian Symbolism and Futurism, they thematized (in the poetry itself) the special quality of poetic language as self-fulfilling, as of inherent value. The material of poetry was the living Word. Whereas the Symbolists subsumed poetic speech under the "higher" dimension of music, and the Futurists reduced language to the equivalent of a physical material, something to be smashed, split & distorted at will - the Acmeists accepted the simple denotative meaning(s) of the word as the core, the substance of its value. The inherited language of a culture was to be affirmed & loved along with all other things (in Gumilev's "chaste" vision); the shaping power of art worked in tandem with the given world of nature, not in isolation or alienation. To repeat : this clarity & firmness of expression, the recognition of the akme or beauty of the living language as such, became the bond which united the free & independent sphere of poetry with the actual & ethical world at large. Gumilev & the other Acmeists, again, called this state "equilibrium" (or "integrity") : a synthesis of ethics & aesthetics.

These are just a few very basic aspects of the Acmeist movement. What this suggests to me - as it has for years - is that these concepts, & this attitude, have relevance and application for poets today. We can learn from their shared sense of an objective standard - a "judgement about poetry", as Mandelstam put it. We can learn from their affirmation of the (meaningful, beautiful) Word, and the "world of which it was a part" (W. Stevens); we can learn from the complementarity they discover between the equilibrium of the poem and the normative ethos of civilization, the "teleological warmth" of "domestic Hellenism." The Acmeist's "judgement of poetry" is also a judgement of our own poetry, and the poetry being produced around us now...

Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, & their son Lev, ca. 1913

"H.P." postscript : Neo-Acmeism?

2010-02-25T08:56:00.001-08:00

As is usual with me, I started having second thoughts as soon as I finished the previous post ("Toward a Human Poetics"). Aside from the ponderousness and pomposity of the phrase Human Poetics, it occurred to me that all but one on the list of recommended books were produced by non-poets (that is, aside from Allen Grossman). Scholars, philosophers...

Anyway, I don't want to renounce everything I wrote yesterday. I still believe the general position laid out by these writers is aligned with poetry & the realities & immediacy involved with its making : offers a defense against determinism, abstractions, de-humanization.

But there's a problem with adding the full weight of an articulated ethic or philosophy (such as that of Levinas, or even Grossman) onto a theory of poetry; and a problem with arguing that poetic speech differs fundamentally from other kinds of language-use. I think there's one thing needful that needs to be added to that in turn, as a counterbalance. & I take this one thing from Russian Acmeism (on this, see Justin Doherty's fine book, The Acmeist movement in Russian poetry (Oxford, 1995). Or at least what I think of as an aspect of Acmeism.

I would call that one thing "inner freedom". Mandelshtam outlined what this means in an unfinished essay titled "Pushkin and Scriabin". Very basically, there is an irreducible "free play" dimension to poetry. Poets, makers of poems, are sharing in a mutual process of making (& sharing) free-standing, self-sufficient, works of art. "The word" in poetry creates its own dimensions, its own weights & balances - for its own sake.

Now if I said that this inner freedom was aligned also with a rejection or dismissal of life & the world outside of art - as in various modes of Decadence or Symbolism; or if I declared that the poetic word had no real meaning with reference to that world, no mimetic capabilities, no firm denotations - as with various modes of modernist & postmodernist detachment and autonomy - then what I would be sketching out would no longer be Acmeism.

The Acmeists boldly suggested that the free play of art, and the self-sufficiency (within its proper sphere) of the poetic word, was a normative response to certain basic normative dimensions of life and culture in general. Cultures at large produce the generative circumstances that undergird artistic freedom and its exchanges, out of their own wells of inner balance, or basic orientation toward the freedom and variety of life. That this is an idealization - that is, an idea of the normative - which artists & poets must strive & struggle to instigate & defend, is a good thing : because it means such norms are not simply determined by nature. They are the norms of the living conscience of a culture.

Maybe I'm confused & contradicting myself here. I'm not a philosopher... not a systematic thinker. What I want to emphasize is this concept of art as play. For some, this would only suggest poetry's fundamental childishness, its perpetual adolescence (in such terms Milan Kundera, in an essay of a few years back, belittled poets & poetry). But the joy of free play - like a witty rejoinder from the scaffold - can be a powerful thing : a reminder (to culture at large) of what life is really all about...

*p.s. "wells of inner balance"... sort of a plumbline phrase, no?

**p.p.s. Very apropos, with regard to this "inner balance" of normative culture, is Mandelshtam's famous (& witty) rejoinder, after a public reading in the 1930s, to an inquisitorial demand (from a Soviet apparatchik) for his "definition of poetry." Mandelshtam replied : "The poet's sense of being right [or, 'inner rightness']."

Toward a "Human Poetics"

2010-02-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

Have been reading some new things... seem to be finding something of a philosophical ground for ways I have thought about poetry for some time...

ie. notions about the status of persons and real things... Levinas has a concept of ethics as the ground of philosophy, and the ground of ethics itself is the "face-to-face" encounter of self and another... that the human person is not determined or defined by language, that in fact the ethical encounter of persons is a kind of ur-language, the "language-before-language"... that poetry is fundamentally dialogical, & involved with a Bakhtinian (& Kenneth Burkean) sense of the dramatic Now...

Here's my beginner's reading list for a "Human Poetics"... (I haven't read them all yet myself!)

Harold Kaplan / Poetry, politics, culture : argument in the works of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams (Transaction Bks, 2006)

Michael Eskin / Ethics and dialogue : in the works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan (Oxford UP, 2001)

Daniel Schwarz / The case for a humanistic poetics (U. Penn., 1991)

Allen Grossman / Against our vanishing (conversations with Mark Halliday) (Rowan Tree Press, 1981)

Emanuel Levinas / Entre Nous (Columbia UP, 2000)

Here is Levinas, as quoted by Harold Kaplan in an appendix to his book :

"My view is opposed to the tendency (in)... contemporary philosophy that prefers to see man a simple articulation or a simple aspect of a rational, ontological system that has nothing human in it; even in Heidegger, the Dasein is ultimately a structure of being in general, bound to its profession of being, its "historic deeds of being", its event of being....
"Similarly, in certain trends in structural research, rules, pure forms, universal structures, combinations which have a legality as cold as mathematical legality are isolated. And then that dominates the human..." [think Foucault, etc.]

As Kaplan argues, the philosophical and theoretical trends that Levinas is criticizing have consequences for poetry; whenever the human person and the person's inner freedom, and inner ethical stance with regard to another (in which both persons in the face-to-face dialogue have substance, validity, actuality) - whenever these dimensions are dismissed, or subject to a determinist reduction of one kind or another (cultural, political, natural, etc.) - then poetry, and persons, are no longer there...

Mandelstam, by way of Michael Eskin

2010-02-12T10:27:00.000-08:00

1

In an appendix to his book Poetic Affairs (on Paul Celan, Durs Grunbein, Joseph Brodsky, and the kinship each poet shares with Osip Mandelstam) Michael Eskin deftly draws together some logical threads of Mandelstam's "Acmeist" poetics :

1. aesthetic : "Mandelstam's notion of the 'living word' ties in with the overall Acmeist endeavor to create 'an organicist poetics... of a biological nature' - a poetics predicated on biology and physiology, on 'the infinite complexity of our inscrutable organism,' and on the basic notion that a 'poem is a living organism'" [Poetic Affairs, p.139]. More than that : "The breathing, moving human body is the ultimate ground of poetry. The 'poetic foot,' Mandelstam notes, is nothing but 'breathing in and breathing out.' The poem is literally animated into existence by 'the breathing of all ages' to the extent that it is the articulation of the breathing, moving bodies of countless poets 'of all ages' [ibid.].

The image of poetry projected here is strikingly reminiscent of the ecstatic "speaking-in-tongues" event on the day of Pentecost, as described in the New Testament : poetry here is akin to the descent of the Holy Ghost, by means of which people from "all lands" begin speaking together, each in their own languages, yet mutually understanding each other.* Poetry is a physiological embodiment, shared "inscrutably" across time & space.

2. ethical : The Acmeist movement developed in the early 20th century as a dialectical response to the otherworldliness of Russian Symbolism. Eskin explains : "'Acmeism is not only a literary phenomenon,' Mandelstam notes in 1922... This new ethical force... consists first and foremost, in the reversal of the Symbolist denigration of the real, phenomenal world of the here and now... Mandelstam emphasizes the world's very reality and materiality as the Acmeists paradigm and horizon...
"A love for the here and now, for 'all manifestations of life... in time and not only in eternity' - a love for this world and this reality, for one's 'own organism,' for one's singularity, cannot fail to bear on sociopolitics. What kind of sociopolitical setup will foster and secure the possibility of this kind of Acmeist existence?... Mandelstam lays out his own sociopolitical vision:

'There are epochs that maintain that they are not concerned with singular human beings, that human beings must be put to use, like bricks, like mortar... Assyrian prisoners swarm like chicks under the feet of a gigantic Tsar; warriors personifying the power of the state inimical to the human being shackled pigmies with long spears, and the Egyptians are dealing with the human mass as if it were building material... But there is another form of social architecture who scale and measure is... man... It doesn't use human beings as building material but builds for them... Mere mechanical grandeur and mere numbers are inimical to humankind We are tempted not by a new social pyramid, but... by the free play of weights and measures, by a human society... in which everything is... individual, and each member is unique and echoes the whole.'" [ibid., pp. 139-140]

Eskin notes how this stance had consequences for Mandelstam's personal fate, & which was echoed by Brodsky in his remark that the poet "is a democrat by definition" (& here we further note the shade of Pushkin, standing behind both Mandelstam & Brodsky).

Finally, Eskin reiterates Mandelstam's supremely dialogical concept of poetry. M's famous essay "On the Interlocutor" likens the poem to a message in a bottle, set afloat on the sea toward an unknown friend/reader in the future; when conjoined with the charismatic ("Pentecostal") sense of poetry outlined above, we understand that each reader, each one of us - when we truly encounter a poem - has become the intended recipient of the message. We are conjoined - in a kinship of friendly dialogue & companionship, across the sea of time & space - with the poet in person.

[*Note : these references to the Pentecost are my own interpolations, not not discussed in Eskin's text.]

2

& how would I relate all this to our Plumbline?

I feel a sense of weight : of the earthly weight of material things, and the weight of lived experience. & I relate this first of all to all those dimensions of poetry which remain unspoken : the submerged portion of the iceberg, so to speak : all the overtones & undertones & inexplicable feeling-tones & hidden meanings & unknowables which help give a poem its resistance, its resonance, its own specific gravity. & further, I relate this to living specificity and particularity, that vividness and local accuracy which are part of the glory of poetry - a synthetic brilliance of referential & evocative vision : faculties of Mandelstam's "infinite complexity of our inscrutable organism." These are dimensions which weight the "middle path" of our plumbline : tied deep down in the heart of faithful utterance, Wallace Stevens' "spirit of poetry" as the "companion of the conscience." & then I think of all this as impelling the poet to strive for a poetry that can speak... like this :

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. (- Wallace Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry")

Heart of my Plumbline

2010-02-12T07:11:00.001-08:00

What is the Plumbline School? The answer is sketchy and schematic. And this is not a bad thing : its inchoate character offers an opening for each of us, & for our readers, to articulate a variety of perspectives & insights.

But the amorphousness may also be contributing to the sort of halting, dormant feel of this weblog (though the prime factor, I'm pretty sure, is that we're all mighty busy...). & I must here register my disagreement with the position of Timothy Steele, at least as presented in previous posts by Conrad. I view Steele's stance as simplistic. First of all, he sets up a rigid binary between what he is terming "form" and the free-verse experiments of Modernism (and postmodernism). Secondly, he develops his polemic by laying the blame for an assumed decline in contemporary poetry at the feet of "the schools". It is exactly this kind of superficial polemic - so familiar on both (illusory) wings of "experiment" & "tradition" - which the Plumbline School was organized to overcome. So I'm going to try to re-formulate some of my own basic ideas about this project, in hope of stimulating others - to comment, or to join as new members. (Note : the basic orientation which we share, the organizing ideas, can be found in the early posts to this site - for which please visit the archive.)

I'll try to be a simple & clear as I can. The Plumbline School, as I see it, is interested in the underlying nature of poetry, its ur-form, beneath the layers of specific techniques and styles. Thus, we are exploring a hypothetical middle ground, where "form" emerges, not as one half of the traditional duplex "form-&-content", but as a new, living shape derived from the fusion of style and subject-matter, of art and experience.

In this we would follow some of the directions outlined by Aristotle in the Poetics, in which he describes the form of poetry as a new, distinct shape, not reducible to its words alone, but analogous to 3-dimensional sculpture : resulting from, emanating from its language - a new & distinct dramatic/conceptual/sensible/affective unity. Out of this amalgamating, fusing process, something paradoxical happens : now content is form; & the formal dimensions - the words, the music, the spectacle (in dramatic poetry, at least) - are actually its material content, the building blocks out of which this new & previously-indefinable shape in born.

In this scenario, the old cliches about "form & content", style & subject-matter, which have provided fodder for all the literary battles of at least the last 100 years, are set somewhat to one side. We are looking at a middle ground whose substance is form-as-fusion, in which style & subject-matter are both inalienable and interchangeable. "The Word is Psyche", as Mandelstam put it : a physiological, psychological organism : an experience.

& yet I think the battles will never completely disappear, because this form/content binary is rooted in a more fundamental dichotomy : between experience and art. The balance of Aristotelian form, which we are proposing, is itself grounded in a more basic balance : between reality and its representations. This is where the "plumbline" search for balance, harmony, and modesty of means (Ars est celare artem, as Horace says : Art camouflages art) becomes a modus operandi : a means by which the poet opens the channels between a new, unknown creation (the work of art) and the matrix of shared experience and intelligibility from which it emerged, and within which it discovers shared meaning. In this way the poem can be likened to a gyroscope : spinning & wobbling, magically centered on itself - yet at the same time subject to the horizontal thread of the tightrope along which it travels, and to the vertical weight of gravity holding it to a deeper center (the earth).

In a follow-up post I'll try to describe how this orientation has developed, for me, from an absorption with Osip Mandelstam's life-work...

& thinking thus of Mandelstam, I realize now that my image of poetry-as-gyroscope is itself insufficient. Yes, in poetry, we seek this free-spinning balance between opposites. Yet the poem is not a gyroscope : not simply an object, or a toy. The poem is bread : the poem is wine : the poem is flower. The poem is the offspring of a dialogue. The poem is lovingly communicative : it is fundamentally diaological : a form of love.

Rachel Wetzsteon on Philip Larkin

2010-02-12T06:58:00.000-08:00

In some comments on recent posts here, I mentioned the late Rachel Wetzsteon as a poet who negotiated, in her poems & essays, a middle ground between "form & content" (that old two-faced griffin) - between experience & art. The Contemporary Poetry Review has just published a posthumous essay of hers, which provides some evidence for this. Here's her concluding sentence :

"In 'Born Yesterday,' Larkin finds a happy medium between 'Nothing and paradise,' joy’s absence and its fragile or otherworldly abundance; and if we are skilled and vigilant and flexible enough readers to pay attention to this important, quietly profound poem, we will be enthralled."

Timothy Steele's Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter: the case for a new Formalism

2010-02-01T15:58:00.000-08:00

Part 2

Steele's thesis is valid: vers libre is a more hybrid, complex and structurally vital element of poetry than even its most conservative practitioners have realized, with even Pound and Eliot having to word their own formulations of it in as exact a language as possible. Eliot is even said to have favoured the elusive ("musically indefinite") meanings of poetry, the effect of conveying poetic meanings only piecemeal and indirectly, to the dull straightforward senses of metered verse. The result for us of this shift away from meter is not its displacement by anything that equals it in poetic strength: rather metrics and imaginative freedom become vital components of poetry that won't be torn out of each other's arms without the loss of something vital in the creative processes. We seem to have inherited a bifurcated notion of poetry that won't ever be restored to anything like its more classical Aristotelian sense.

Steeles cites even Coleridge as saying that without meter the genius of poet (and poetry) would remain hidden (Missing Measures 190) There have been those, too, like Emerson, Blake and Whitman who've openly espoused abandoning the rules, making the poet both writer and technician after his own heart. Which is not to abandon meter but to rework it in an entirely individualistic mode. And in the case of Eliot and Pound there's the call to write not with the accentual-syllabic line but as if the poem were rather sheet music and words musical notations likes staves and bars. In Steele's estimation, the die's been cast for a persistent verse/Poetry opposition conditioning our understanding of the nature of verse in general:

To say that poetry exists in a realm of its own is not necessarily to say that meter should be abandoned. Yet meter's rules are not individual but comprehensive: they ask the same obedience and offer the same rewards to all poets. This quality brings meter into conflict with views which stress the self-sufficiency of the individual poet and poem and with views like Williams' which hold that even private legislation is not to interfere with the poet. (192)

Even if the act of writing poetry is spontaneous, inspired by the world or emotions & ideas, there's a lingering sense that without rules or acknowledgement of writing 'technique' poetry would be too rambling and disconnected to work. It's interesting that by eliminating categorically a division of poetic composition called meter, a whole host of competing 'rhythmical structures' always hurry in to fill the void. Traces of a classical literary 'influence' that won't go away: the invisible void lying hidden beneath the fragments and revealing itself primarily as prose poetry.

And if the leap from metrics to music could work on aesthetic grounds only, innovators wonder if a similar kind of artistic foray into experimental science weren't feasible. Since poets seemed to despair, as Steele argues in his most interesting chapter "Sciences of Sentiment", of ever matching the classical authors for literary freshness & vitality—poetic models, materials and techniques all but already taken— they looked to improving on the process rather than product of their writing. The desire for a more scientific attitude to writing stems, once again, from the association of meter with an antiquated literary past and non-metrical verse with the progressive bent of modern scientific method (240).

Metrics was envisaged as the terrible link to the past that had to be broken for new art to emerge. Whether in the form of Pound's "Make It New" slogan or Marinetti's notion of the " revolutionary" overthrow of the traditional means of literary production or Whitman's equating true poetry with the spirit of science and democracy in his own day—a kind of 'ageism' crept into the literary consciousness whereby novelty and experimentalism always now came to be more highly esteemed than the old classical models. A bewildering array of "isms" also made their way into literary parlance: the zeal (present still today!) with which bands of poets always strive in literary competition for the newest name, newest manifesto is testimony to this emerging 'scientism' in letters. As Steele wryly puts it,

This imperative [to adopt science as model of artistic composition] contributes to the "isms" characteristic of the poetry and art of the early decades of this century; the champions of each "ism" pronouncing themselves the embodiment of the newest New and the rightful successor to the next-to-the-newest-New-but-nonetheless-now-old New. These isms reflect not only a concern with making art novel, but also with securing scientific validation for it (246)

The need to return to tradition is more necessary than ever, the author concludes, especially as contemporary poets seem to have made a Faustian pact with radical novelty, their artistic spirits compromised by this incessant idolization of experimentalism for its own sake, and led to embrace, among other things, qualities of "superstition" and "irrationality" in artistic work (274-276). And to replace isosyllabic measures with a new metrics (however that was envisaged by Pound, Williams, etc.) is something that never really happened either. Leaving poets (and the academic-poets who had a direct stake in vers libre milieu) with just vaguely defined notions of personal intention and subject-matter as the only compositional principles to guide them. Metrics seen as an accessory to the predominantly anti-meter culture: a related but largely irrelevant subspecies of poetry writing.

I'd like to end with a plumbliner's estimation of the anti-meter debate and may offer an opinion of my own. If just to add a little clarity to the discussion. As someone who's been pulled in two very distinct traditions and literary styles (British and American), I've always tried to resolve inner-tensions through a typically Canadian syncretism (as Atwood would say): namely, by taking the best from both, and trying to align my own personal sympathies along a sort of sensible middle ground, not too rigidly 'formalistic' nor too wildly experimental, a good style always the result of sound familiarity with the great literary canons of the past and their historical developments, as well as the odd tampering with tradition and the established tools of the trade (like meter, diction).

Canada has experienced its fair share of poetry innovation. The radical Tish poets of 60s Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (Canada), a movement very much inspired by the active presence of Americans Olson, Creeley, Duncan and Blaser, probably represented the most significant era in Canadian experimentalism. Poets Frank Davey, bpNichol, bill bissett, & Daphne Marlatt for a time turned the Canadian literary establishment on its head, rearranging elements of visual, aural and First Nations iconography to create distinctively (very unCanadian) dissonant, 'otherstream' styles. News of bpNichol's winning the Governor-General's Award for best poetry even caused a stir in the House of Commons.

Not that Canada hadn't seen poetic innovations before Tish but just not to that radical degree. In 20s and 30s Montreal, for example, writers like Robert Finch, F.R. Scott and John Glassco, working out of McGill University, were at the forefront of a distinctively tamer 'modernist' movement in which Canadian innovators found elements of a European Aesthetic/Decadent movement more congenial to a distinctively Canadian poetics, for which reason (among others) they never really took to what they considered the inhospitable Imagist poetry of their contemporaries Pound and Williams. Even if the young McGill writers chose to emulate authors who opted for unbridled 'subjectivities', the result was a loosely 'formal' or lyrically self-defining Canadian style.

I suppose I'm a product of both these versions of literary iconoclasticism. By nature and educational upbringing tied conservatively (and perhaps a little sentimentally) to my Dryden, Browning, Tennyson and Swineburne, taking notes mostly from the standard Oxford Anthology of English Verse, I regarded literary individuality as a little alarming & chose, in my daring moments, to be conversant with a sort of wild-eyed Romanticism instead. In typical early Canadian modernist fashion, I followed the poetic impulses of Page, Layton, Pratt and Souster.But with exposure to more radical European and American poetries came, of course, intellectual maturity and a more settled appreciation of literary différance so that I can recall even now the exhilaration at discovering the heterodoxies of Tzara, Mayakovsky, Verlaine, and the postructuralist theorists ( Deleuze, Kristeva) who seemed to justify radical 'otherstream' poetics. It's been my own writing goal to infuse a Canadian-style modernism that shied away from Pound and Williams with the more personally satisfying 'fragmentariness' of postmodern verse ushered in (and made popular) by the radical Tish experiments. And to believe that the synthesis still makes for a meaningful poetic expression.

The question, therefore, of whether to restore meter to its former prominence in contemporary verse (in some new Formalist style), if only in outline, to me really amounts to something like what Ron Silliman's perhaps proposing for prose poetry: a New Sentence configuration of the verse line "altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity" ; or perhaps what visual poet Geof Huth's thinks of as a poem's most essential stand-alone constituents— the 'pwoermd'— that's given him, as he says in his most recent blog post, the very flexibility to write "thaumatrope poems, planned zoetrope poems, and...various visual poems meant to take advantage of various optical illusions"; or perhaps what "polyartists" Richard Kostelanetz, Aram Saroyan, Gary Barwin and Ed Baker regard in their practices as primary multimedia sources of art (ranging from computer graphics to pictograms to the barest minimalist typography).

Or what any number of poets will say is significant poetic 'form' or a verse line's key rhythmical nature if asked just what is worth preserving in their work. Steele stresses that legacy-making power of metrics throughout his book, even enjoining young poets to follow the examples of poets like Larkin who may have produced relatively little in their lifetime but whose great popularity and legacy will be keyed directly to their metrics. But I'm inclined to think that Huth's 'pwoermds' or Silliman's New Sentence or Baker's exquisitely spare visual poetry may make them just as memorable. I do believe, in fact, that something will always take the place of traditional 'meter' (and anything else regarded as enduring and worth preserving)and make any departure from it not so much a rupture as a kind of released "intensity" of the original metrical paradigm. I believe 'meter' is a property of language that is destined to spring, as by a natural l evolutionary process, into differentiated uses: a spontaneous tendency of artist and their materials to 'deterritorialize' poetic practice.

I guess in this way I've tried, in typically Canadian fashion, to bring together what's to me seemed to be the best tendencies in two poetic traditions.

Beauty & the Concrete Mix

2010-01-29T17:47:00.000-08:00

Jeanne Gang, an architect for the Plumbline School...

Timothy Steele's Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter: the case for a new Formalism

2010-01-29T15:56:00.000-08:00

Part 1

I've held almost as a sacred truth that academics make the worst poets, and generally they do. Examples are too numerous to mention. Convinced as I've been for the longest time that 'creative writing' professors, with the mainstream publishing industry at their beck and call, have literally dictated to the rest of us the terms of poetic style and suitability. And if there's anything we should have learnt from this debacle it's that teaching verse does not a Poet nor student of poetry make!

The only thing worse than academic-bards with their flatlined verses is the 'imitator'-poet, of which there are many in creative writing classes, who slavishly work primarily to conform to prevailing 'aesthetic tastes. The result, in Canada at least, has been a proliferation not only of middling (state-sponsored) literary magazines catering for academic and imitative writing (Arc, Fiddlehead, Malahat Review, etc) but a flood of dull, insipid verses anthologized and served up as models of good writing by the poet-teachers who perpetuate a vicious cycle of teaching, writing and publishing: the result of which is a product whose cultural hold on the general public is almost non-existent.

But there are exceptions and Timothy Steele, a poet writing in an emerging new Formalist tradition and a first-rate literary scholar, is among the few who admirably practice what they preach since in their writings there isn't the glaring disconnect between theory and writing proficiency (James Wright, John Berryman, Robin Blaser and perhaps today Louis Dudek, Rosemarie Waldrop and Annie Finch are other examples of skilful practitioners). In Missing Measures Steele outlines a history of a very basic verse/poetry misunderstanding (or perhaps misreading) to which can be attributed, in his view, the almost vehement hatred of anything in contemporary poetry that smacks of metrics, rhyme and traditional poetrywriting in general. And because deep, sensible scholarship is everywhere wedded to appreciation of the effect of literary tradition on contemporary practice, Steele's own case for a sensible second look at the "anti meter revolt" is a very convincing one. There's a lot at stake. I don't think there's anyone at present who seems more qualified, in both theory and practice, to revive interest in traditional poetics.

I don't think Steele's intention is polemics but his handling of literary history and specifically his interpretation of the most important texts, modern and classical, tend to point to a vital reappraisal of the role of prosody in contemporary writing (or those elements such as rhyme, rhythm, and other figurative devices most serviceable to poets). Steele is (and always will be) not a little antithetical to the modernist revolution in poetry (as his disparaging comments on Marjorie Perloff's reading of Aristotle's Poetics attest (168-170)) but he does answer the call to base the antimodernist(-postmodernist) case on pretty sound scholarship:

As will become evident in this study, certain confusions in modern discussions of verse have resulted from the fact that the legacy of the Greeks has not been adequately recognized and that the difference between their situation and ours has not been sufficiently appreciated. We cannot ask of others or ourselves absolute precision when we speak of "poetry," and we should not damn such terminological imprecisions as must inevitably attend any general discussion of the art. Yet we should be aware of something of the history of the word and should bear this history in mind when we use the word. (Missing Measures 21)

Not just citing sources ( from Aristotle, Quintilian, Plutarch to Pound, Eliot and Williams) but drawing vital connections between theory and poetic practice everywhere is Steele's métier. I get the feeling as I read him that this may have been the way the Victorian defenders of traditional prosody felt when confronted with the modernists: always a little overawed by the attractiveness of novelty conjoined to sound literary understanding and, as a result, even a little disoriented.

The modernist contention (as expounded in varying forms by Eliot, Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Williams) is, simply put, that meter is stultifying, a gross distortion of the looser, more natural 'rhythms' of poetic language. In Eliot's and Pound's formulations it amounts to saying that instead of meter and syllables crammed into place (Pound's famous "ti-tumming" parody of iambic lines) the poet's primary concern should be with the natural 'rhythms' of language itself, subordinating form to subject matter at hand. Metrics came to be disassociated from the modern world in which they lived. Poetry as a vehicle of real life and language, unfettered by Victorian diction and mannered sensibilities. Always something approximating well-written prose. In Ford's words,

I wish I could take for granted the Reader's acceptance of the doctrine that Poetry is a matter of the writer's attitude towards life, and has nothing in the world to do—nothing whatever in the world to do—with whether the lines in which this attitude is put before him be long or short; rhymed or unrhymed; cadenced or interrupted by alliterations or assonances. One cannot expect to dictate the use of words to a race; but it would be of immense service to humanity if the Anglo-Saxon world could agree that all creative literature is Poetry; that prose is a form as well adapted for the utterance of poetry as verse (cited in Missing Measures 160)

But it's that crucial substitution of meter for 'rhythm' Steele finds problematical and worthy of the detailed historical study that forms most of Missing Measures. Problematical because all too many interested readers and writers of poetry take for granted a distinction that's had to endure many flights, reformulations and digressions throughout literary history to arrive at its present form. To trace that anti meter rhetoric to a verse/Poetry dichotomy is the book's primary task: beginning with the Poetics and chronicling the myriad ways in which the primary Aristotelian verse/imitation dichotomy gets reappropriated (and at times reinvented) by scores of writers, theorists and literary exegetes. So that by the time we get to the age of vers libre it's hard to pin down what exactly is in 'prose' that's preferable to verse, Eliot referring to it in his celebrated essay on Kipling as "the musical impression upon the sensibility" (cited in Missing Measures 162), Williams as a "variable foot" & Ford as the "intimate ear.

Scholar Timothy Steele is an invaluable resource for a correct understanding of the scope and nature of the verse/Poetry distinction on which his work hinges: so many misdirected notions of the nature of poetry, as he rightly claims, have resulted from not acquainting ourselves properly enough with the classical sources.

But as poet he's also faced with elucidating a predominant free verse milieu to which traditional metrics is almost considered anathema. As practitioner of a new Formalism in America there's a lot at stake here for him. How do history and literary theory resolve the tension in the poet's soul? How does the academic keep a cool enough distance from the subjectivities of his craft to write in a form that, as Eliot says, reconfigures and revolutionizes the very paradigms he eschews? To lose that crucial arm's-length separation from self-promoting theory is to produce a highly compromised poetry, such as characterizes the literary output of many academic poets & their students today.

So in a remarkable way Steele's book is directed as much against a shoddy understanding of 'free verse' as against the shoddy writing that results from it: a silent condemnation, after all is said and done, of the writing institutions to which he belongs. The greater the critique, the greater the demands placed on the teacher to offer a markedly superior poetry. And, of course, it follows only the very best teachers can combine the advancements made by their own exemplary researches with the creation of greater writing standards. Ironically our greatest modern poet-teachers (Pound, Eliot, Williams and Yeats) weren't academics at all.

The almost perfect poem: Robin Blaser's "Image-Nation 2 (roaming"

2010-01-14T16:22:00.000-08:00

we are journeying in company with the messenger

     but there, it was
there     'you' saw
the head of a horse burn,
its red eye flame   'you' stepped
to the fireplace where the meta-
morphosed log lay without a body
and put 'your' hand over the seeing

turned by that privacy
from such public peril as words
are, we travel in company with the messenger

the name of the bird who fell
from the hands of O-moon
is Naught     if following
angels, shaped tears, nourished by
Sodom apples, we draw darkness,
a kind of mud     (in the moonlight
white blossoms hastening to fall
are cut free)

then we, the apparatus, burned by a night
light, are travelling in company with the messenger

To continue the Deleuzian reflections on poetry and poetics.

If a poet draws a line between two points, any beginnings tied to ends, or readable coordinates we gather along a horizontal plane, won't really amount to much. Even the conquering vertical that is a poem's title, standing stanchion-like over the text and reader, leaves us cold in its shadow. Best not to erect it like a cross. And because Blaser's poem won't connect the dots in this way nor obey straight linear impulses—primary cause of weak poetry!—nor even give an unbroken title it leaves us "roaming" instead. Perfect and impervious to the punctuality of mediocre writing.

Better to be nomadically errant in Blaser's perfecting sense than predictable. After all, if you follow the footsteps, laid fresh in the morning snow, do we find the poet or "Naught"? No, the poem. Flawlessly knit, with no single "flight" here (or messenger) that doesn't at the same time open up one of a myriad sites, such as that ranging from invocatory 'you' to the "O-moon". The first of many but it's always best to work somewhere between that 'you' and the moon to find the true poem.

What counts as "flight" anyways? It's the turn toward the initial view of a flaming red-eyed horse or the transforming fire itself. Marvelous epic origins but resulting in the death of origins. The fire, for instance, is not a cause of real horses, imaged or not in the sacred flames: any more than to pass your hands over Blaser's embers is to feel the heat of divination, "kindling the heat of the father" as he says in his translation-poem "Pindar's Seventh Olympic Hymn". The impulse is divinatory but nothing rises through the smoke, not even "the name of the bird".

What doesn't exist can emit only shifting particles or make meaning out of "metamorphosed logs", fading to the point of becoming imperceptible, as already a new assemblage is about to be released over the poem's plane of immanence. Now fake birds of paradise appear in the moonlight: hearth embers dimmed into a late day of transgressed hope, "Sodom apples" and fields turned to mud. White embers are a becoming-blossom hurrying to their fall.

The reader, intuiting the poem's own machinic assemblage, or because it takes one to know one, is also an "apparatus" of sorts, every bit the molecular (never a 'molar') text that is the measure of the poem's speed and significance. So that we end with an apparently ironic inverse of heatless fire: a night light that actually burns. Unopposed by daunting titles (verticals) or sweeping localizable events (horizontals), Blaser's "Image-Nation 2" cares only to run diagonally between (& through) the most disparate languages, myths and cosmologies.

A perfect block. Without beginning or end, always at work in the middle, the poem that roams is perfect. Initial mythic pulsions become "nonpulsed", memories fade since travelling with the messenger dispenses with permanent sites and opts for a regime of molecular becomings: as how else is it possible to move from the red-eyed horse to metamorphosed logs to dying blossoms.

In fact, the log lying without a body may be a quasi-true symbol of the unorganized, disarticulated body the poem is: in fact, Blaser's poem may be in the most generalized sense possible the only body it has, a body without organs (logs, heat, names), destined only for pure abstract movement. And the poem that roams completely unhindered by bodily trappings of time, memory and sense (the broken, curvy and ruptured poem) is perhaps the most perfect of all.

Reading Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: I"

2010-01-08T10:25:00.000-08:00

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Some procedural principles of my own:

(a) a reading shouldn't exceed 500 words;
(b) I randomly chose the following passage from Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus to serve as a general 'paratext' for my reading of Stevens's opening verse:

"But to break the becoming-animal all that is needed is to extract a segment from it, to abstract one of its moments, to fail to take into account its internal speeds and slownesses, to arrest the circulation of affects. (p. 260 from Chapter 10. 1730: "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible...");

(c) I don't like to talk about linguistic units but rather about more interesting lines of flight or deterritorialization;
(d) I view the poem (and its first verse) as a map "with multiple entryways and exits";
(e) I regard the critic's language as always "acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying"; and
(f) I offer my first reading of Stevens's "Thirteen Ways: I" as a general description only.

______________________

Twenty mountains and thirteen ways. Snowy habitat and a solitary blackbird distinguishable not by wing, tail but eye only. The poet's first verse is a bird's moving eye. The significant question is whether the poem's a "program" for transformative viewing or a lyricist's plain and simple address.

To me it's clear. We don't ever dare to take from the bird's true motion a single identifiable (read codifiable) moment and treat it as Stevens's true poem (haecceity): we continue the rêve, transported by the object's physicality and potential to move freely over the white plane of true flight. It's potential to mix flight and feeling at the same time is something which will be eventually regarded as its primary "becoming-animal" experience.

Snowy mountains don't form a backdrop for flying blackbirds as much as simple speeds do, & rates of descent and slow-moving flight formations across the sky. An interiorized type of flight, in particular, that can't be expressed initially as anything but a synecdoche. But more than that. Landscapes over which the eye of flight roams can't (as in aerial photography) really be plotted as points, depressions or peaks for a bird's eye in flight is a total of "speeds and affects". Stevens's first way is then an assemblage and not a set of decipherable coordinates.

Furthermore, it's a question of eye for eye: the slowing, transformative power of bird-vision in place of an authoritative (which in the case of humans may even become voyeuristic) viewing that's always centered, always full of meanings. Eye does not co-opt eye. Slowing with the blackbird in mid-flight over snowy valleys is not a type of arrested activity, tracked on the viewer's sensory radar And since this type of moving has been interiorized, the only way to distinguish the "moving thing" from its environment is to see the bird's body as a smooth planar surface over which the viewer and viewed pass as flights towards a new deterritorialized 'site' .

Stevens's bodiless eye is permissible only because of a truer body of which it is part. The moving eye can be said to belong to a much more general Body, organless, smooth and always tied to flows, a site for traces of flights rather than a knowledge grid. Lines in Stevens's opening verse are striations ("schizzes"). The flying eye is where one among many entryways into (and exits out of) the essentially heterogeneous Body of flight can be envisaged: with space always for one more ( n+1) Viewing the blackbird's flying eye is a becoming-animal, a radically liberatory sense of engaged reading.

What does "the eye of the blackbird" signify? Nothing that frees us this easily from the rooted strictures of 'text' need fear stoppage of bird flight (poem's primary flow) or the threat of lexical units supplanting flights and entryways altogether. Or even twenty mountains and thirteen ways.

2010-01-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

Some reflections on the Bachelard quotation:

"If meanings become too profuse, it can fall into word play. If it restricts itself to a single meaning, it can fall into didacticism. The true poet avoids both dangers. He plays and he teaches. In him, the word reflects and reflows; in him time begins to wait. The true poem awakens an unconquerable desire to be reread."

Avoiding profuseness and a too clean, too neatly compressed language use is a poet's mandate. True. The danger is in not allowing language to skirt middle options since the middle is always the poem's true origin (in medias res).. But I'd like to make distinctions—though none exist really— preferring to see the poem as a "body without organs (BwO)" (after Deleuze) and the desires a poem awakens as flights and intensities skimming lightly over its smooth planar surface. Intentions and works always intersect transversely. Even if thoughts cause unseemly striations, the effect is too free us from stultifying "totalizing" designs and delight in the almost infinite multiplicities the text can now reveal to us.

Wherever you begin in a poem both a beginning and potential for infinite flows and "reflows" can be assured. In Deleuzian theory (as in my acceptation of that term) the BwO is not a metaphor: it's rather an 'abstract' machine universally applicable to any concrete writing project or, more properly speaking, a radical text-becoming that unleashes creative vectors (after Charles Olson) or can, if necessary, disclose the turning or twisting force of prosodic language (after Ron Silliman). I believe Bachelard may have anticipated this postructuralist rethinking of the primacy of "flows" in poetrywriting, pointing the way to a true radical heterogeneity of meaning.

2010-01-01T14:31:00.000-08:00

A warm thank you to Henry for approving my request to join 'Plumbline School'!

The idea of a "mean between extremes" to me says that the potential orneriness of poststructuralism needs to be tempered by a respect for traditional form and content (and unfortunately what's been sacrificed in much contemporary poetry, especially in Canada, is the lyric voice).

I've recently written (at my blog) a poetic 'paratext' on Canadian poet bpNichol's The Martyrology: Books 1 & 2. Using a single page from Gilles Deleuze-Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus as a palimpsest, I've composed a series of poetic reflections on a single line from Book 2: "saint of no-names" against both the text and illustration found on Deleuze-Guattari's page. It is, of course, a work in progress. I'm a poet driven by theory (whether I acknowledge it or not), and deleuzian theory articulates wonderfully the essentially liberatory nature of language and of the creative "flights" it offers the poet.

I invite everyone to take a look at the last five blog posts in my http://didiodatoc.blogspot.com/. I also manage (with another poet/visual artist) a blog ( http://deleuzecanada.wordpress.com/) devoted to a strictly deleuzian reading/critique of all things Canadian.

We're now a Poet's Dozen

2010-01-01T13:18:00.000-08:00

Happy to welcome Conrad DiDiodato to the Plumbline School.

& Happy New Year, too!

Heart & Plumbline

2009-12-22T10:25:00.000-08:00

Quoting my own comment to previous post, courtesy of JH Stotts timely visit... :

Learned recently (from curious & deep tome titled "Hamlet's Mill", by G. Santillana & M. von Dechend) that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing often conflated the symbol for "heart" with that for "plumbline." One of the myths held that when a person dies, Osiris weighs the heart in the scales with the "feather" (symbol) of truth... there we have a kind of double measurement : the plumb-weight or plummet (of the heart), set in the scales of justice...

Anyway... nice to think of this valuation of heart, balance, measurement, & plumbline...

"In measurement began our might" (WB Yeats)

- Happy Holidays, everyone... !

The humble sublime

2009-12-04T09:13:00.001-08:00

Last month the online zine Digital Emunction posted a mini-essay I wrote, titled "Neglected Phd. monographs & the American Sublime". You can find it here. Speaking of neglect, I've been neglecting to contribute to the Plumbline. But the nice thing about websites is the archive : it's not hard to find what we've all contributed here. I hope the Plumbline will keep growing.

Anyway, the "humble sublime" might be something of a plumbline concept. The idea goes back to those great 20th-cent. critics MH Abrams & Erich Auerbach; my mini-essay begins to examine how this dimension of style has manifested in some American poets. Basically, the "humble sublime" has to do with writing that accentuates a conjunction of opposites : the "high", awesome, ineffable divine or transcendent, with the most ordinary, humble, "low" realities of human experience. (In Russian, I believe they call it something like bytye & byt - beauty & the daily grind.) Bringing the two together in some kind of Midway fairground.

Gaston Bachelard on the Middle Path

2009-11-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

I was reshelving a book in my office and noticed a volume on the shelf that I hadn't picked up in a couple of years-- a collection of selections from the work of Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie (edited by Collette Gaudin). I remembered being disappointed when I first got the book that it was a collection of snippets rather than something more substantial. I pulled the book off the shelf anyway and flipped it open at random, coming to this:

From the standpoint of its will to shape expression, the literary image is a physical reality which has its own relief. More precisely, it is the psychic relief, the multi-leveled psyche. It furrows or it raises; it finds a depth or suggests an elevation; it rises or falls between heaven and earth. It is poly phonic because it is polysemantic. If meanings become too profuse, it can fall into word play. If it restricts itself to a single meaning, it can fall into didacticism. The true poet avoids both dangers. He plays and he teaches. In him, the word reflects and reflows; in him time begins to wait. The true poem awakens an unconquerable desire to be reread. (28) [Empahsis in original; original source: L'Air et les songes, 286.]

So sometimes the merest chance brings you something you need. (My mother used to half-believe this about the Bible, but felt it was a little too "superstitious" to be morally reliable.) I am less cautious about such things than my mother and I needed to be reminded about this middle path for poetry, which of course does not necessarily mean "mainstream." I think I was drawn to the passage, too, because of the word will in that first sentence. I've been reading William James, whose philosophy is in some ways an exploration of the idea of the power of will to create meaning. Here, Bachelard attributes will to the "poetic image" and only by extension to the poet who "creates" the image, or discovers it. This conforms with my own experience writing poems, in which language wills itself into meaning as a kind of collaborator with the one holding the pencil or sitting at the keyboard.

During my poetic lifetime -- the last thirty years or so -- it seems as if the reactionaries have had a steady presence that continues the orientation of the New Critics but without the New Critics' skills; and the theoreticians of language and power have had an opposing presence that claims at least sometimes to descend from Pound and Williams, but also from the Objectivists and Olson. (I've never got Olson and in fact published a poem against him in APR several years ago.) I've long felt bereft in this landscape. I trace my own descent from Pound and Williams, but I also acknowledge Eliot (despite Dr. Williams' disapprobation). I also honor my teacher Donald Justice, though I write nothing like him and resemble him only in my failure to be prolific and perhaps in my general pessimism. Also in my poetic makeup are some voices I have tried to disown over the years: from early adolescence Kipling and Edna St. Vincent Milay. I still have my mother's volumes of these poets on my bookshelves and while they are no longer central, I learned traditional metrical practice from them, for which I am grateful. And from my later adolescence comes my continuing attachment to the so-called Confessional School of Berryman, Plath, Lowell, Sexton, and Snodgrass. A very unfashionable group these days, but also a group, I'd argue, that practiced a middle-path poetics, with a concern for both matter and meter, subject and language.

Bachelard's definition of poetry, if that's what it is, also insists upon a reader, but a reader who has the gumption to reread, who is open to the poem's insistence on being reread. It seems to me that contemporary schools of poetry have either over-emphasized or under-emphasized the reader, either pandering or pushing away, didacticism or word play. I think the division reflects a fundamental dualism we have been unable to get beyond in Western poetics (with some notable exceptions); we feel driven to be one thing or the other, completely; we are made uncomfortable by mixed states.

[Cross-posted to Sharpsand.]

Scorch the Sheets

2009-10-19T17:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about Joseph Deumer’s comment on my interpretaton of the last line of Don Paterson's 'Wind Tunnel’ - “I'm sort of sorry to learn that "scorch the sheets" is a slangy phrase for sex. I had in mind something closer to that cold pentecostal fire you mention earlier having simply consumed the poet without even waking his wife.” – and have come to the conclusion that he has a very good point. The phrase “scorch the sheets” certainly refers to the sexual act and I think Paterson means the reader’s mind to turn that way, and not just because -as my daughter told me she learned in English lit today –“if you don’t know, sex is always a good guess.” However, the grammar of the second half of the line – “you do not scorch the sheets, or wake your wife” – belies the obvious interpretation. “Scorch the sheets” has no onanistic secondary meaning that I know of. It seems to refer exclusively to super heated activity between consenting adults and, one would assume, would require waking one’s partner. So that “or” necessitates a rethink in mid line and Joseph’s suggestion seems to be the right way to go. Acts 2; 1-4 makes it clear that after the sound of a mighty wind filled the house the disciples saw what looked like fiery tongues moving in all directions, and “it sat upon each of them. And they were filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” It all seems like a fair description of a poetic epiphany and makes perfect sense in the context Paterson provides. So why didn’t I think of it?

On a poem by Don Paterson

2009-10-11T22:32:00.001-07:00

I wonder if my post on Don Paterson's poem "Phantom" might be of interest to the Plumbline School.

R.P. Blackmur & "tradition"

2009-10-06T08:33:00.000-07:00

Reading in & about essays of RP Blackmur, & really liking it. Unlike his more doctrinaire contemporaries, A. Tate, Yvor Winters, & other New Critics, who insisted on establishing strict moral-theological rules of order for the critical enterprise, Blackmur's approach reminds me of Eugenio Montale's "superior dilettantism".

Literature & poetry seem to be, at one basic level, the free play of human imagination. No matter how severe, serious, obsessed & tragic the writer may be, there's a form of "make-believe" going on which is irreducibly playful. & I think this dimension gives the critic a place to stand, an independence. The notion of "tradition" - literary tradition - is a purely critical notion. It has no application outside the sphere of criticism itself. But within criticism, it seems to me that tradition is rooted, not in cultural, religious, or any other kind of mores; rather, real tradition is grounded, paradoxically, in this free play of imagination. It's something grounded in aesthetics, in the sense of beauty.

I'd hate for my statements to be taken as an argument for art-for-art's-sake or pure aestheticism. On the contrary, I think most good art emerges from deep within the larger world of human behavior, history, experience, feeling & thought. It absorbs & reflects upon all those things that impinge upon our sense of beauty. This is the basic challenge to any art which would escape various forms of decadence, futility, desiccation. But the other side of that challenge is the goal of actually making something beautiful or meaningful from all those impingements. & criticism's call to evaluate the results of that challenge, in particular poems & works of art, is ultimately rooted in the tradition of the free play of the imagination. This grounding gives the critic a means to appreciate & evaluate the qualities of poems which may stem from values & beliefs very different from, even at odds with, his or her own.

(Incidentally, Blackmur, like any good critic, bases his commentary on patient, careful evaluations of individual poems - both good & not-so-good samples from a poet's work. This is a modus operandi which Mairi keeps practicing here at the Plumbline, thereby setting us a fine example.)

[cross-posted to HG Poetics blog]

Wind Tunnel

2009-09-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, in autumn, the doors between the days
Fall open; in any other season
This would be a dangerous mediumship
Though now there is just a small exchange of air
As from one room to another. A street
Becomes a faint biography: you walk
Through a breath of sweetpea, pipesmoke, an old perfume.

But one morning, the voices carry from everywhere:
from the first door and the last, two whirling draughts
zero in with such unholy dispatch
you do not scorch the sheets, or wake your wife.

Don Paterson

In the ordinary course of things a vehicle moves forward and the air around it stands still. In a wind tunnel the usual paradigm is reversed - the air moves and the vehicle stands still. As the title of Don Paterson’s poem is “Wind Tunnel” I suppose we might begin with this idea in an attempt to unpack the piece. In the first verse the narrator envisions ‘you’ the reader walking. You move through the air, which carries a series of smells. In the second verse ‘you’ are stationary, apparently in bed, and suddenly exposed to two ‘whirling draughts.’ So we know the title is justified, even if we don’t know exactly what it means. It’s the paradigm shift, brought about, one suspects, by the opening of ‘the doors between the days’ that holds the key to what is actually going on here.
Sometimes, in autumn, Paterson claims, the doors between the days fall open. Why, one wonders, in autumn. The poem itself provides no clues, but as it’s a poem and not a loose baggy bit of prose everything in it must be relevant, must carry its share of the author’s intention. ‘You,’ the reader, could make a guess at the significance of the season. Something about the word play between autumn and fall, and the fact that “Sometimes, at the vernal equinox, the doors between the days spring open,” just doesn’t strike the right elegiac tone. You could leave it at that and you’d finish reading the work with a satisfactory sense of what the guy was going on about. Or, you could trawl through your brain trying to come up with connections from folklore or mysticism, or religion. You could put a few word combinations into your search engine. In this case you probably wouldn’t come up with much. Or you could read more of the poet’s work, on the assumption that there were thematic links of some sort in his oeuvre, or that minds tend to run in ruts.
If you did you’d find he was much taken with Dante in the collection following the one you were reading, and you might remember, or discover, Dante’s “Autumn Song” where he gives his take on the emotional weight of the season. “Do you not know at the fall of the leaf/how the heart feels a languid grief.../and how sleep seems a taking thing.../and how the swift beat of the brain/ falters because it is in vain.../ and how the chief/ of joys seems – not to suffer pain?..../ and how the soul feels like a dried sheaf/ bound up for harvesting. And how death seems a lovely thing... In a poem called “Waking With Russell” which appeared in this next collection, Paterson writes, “Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin/ And the true path was as lost to me as ever.” The Italian is from Dante’s Inferno. “Midway on our life's journey, I found myself /In dark woods, the right road lost,” and suggests that there is a safe connection to be made between the season of the poem’s setting and a spiritual, if not crisis, at least stalemate, of long duration.
Did Paterson actually have such an association in mind when he wrote the poem. Who knows? Perhaps not even Paterson himself. For the reader the association supplies, not the key to all mythologies but a form of acoustic resonance, the poem absorbing more energy and resonating with more force and subtlety when other, sympathetic frequencies are sounded with it. A poem reverberates according to the play of the reader's mind, the way a bodhran responds to the play of the hand under its skin.
“In any other season this would be a dangerous mediumship.” The term ‘mediumship, inserted as an almost casual warning, is freighted here. It suggests that sometimes the opening of the doors leaves ‘you’ open as well, to voices from another realm, spirits, or demons, or other immaterial things with knowledge beyond the commonplace, that they want to share, using you as their spokesperson. As soon as the idea is introduced however it’s as good as dismissed. We’re assured that now, at this time of year, the opening of the doors is safe. The narrator is not quite reliable though. He says the opening of the doors will result in nothing but a small exchange of air, ‘as from one room to another’ but in the next line you find yourself out in the street. The moving air wafts you into a dreamlike, almost Proustian moment, back through your life on a series of evocative smells. It is the messenger Peter speaks of in “Mairi’s Valentine,” passing “a note right under your nose,” and allowing a glimpse of “the real ahead.”
What are these doors then, and what is their significance? That they are liminal spaces is obvious at first glance, the threshold between wakefulness and sleep, the altered consciousness of a dream state, ambiguous and indeterminate ‘not here’ and yet ‘not there’ places. Paterson suggests what it is that lies across the threshold in a comment in The Book of Shadows. “The realm of the infinite states, those ineffable, discrete, impossibly various moods of my childhood, I neglected to cultivate simply because I could not apprehend them in language. I wander in, occasionally, through the usual open doors – the edge of consciousness, the sense of smell.... The spell of music can sometimes raise them. But if I could make just one reproducible – even the bleakest and most melancholy – its quality of the eternal would make for a richer life than the one I endure.” Tellingly he refers to the means of access to these states as “the usual open doors.”
In the second, shorter verse, the previously dismissed danger involved in this channelling is made apparent. It may be safe enough in autumn, but presumably time has passed without you noticing and one day, instead of a harmless exchange of air you find yourself inundated by voices “from everywhere.” From the first door and the last,” a phrase reminiscent of the biblical “I am the first and I am the last” usher “two whirling draughts.” In a description of the four lives or stages of life of the poet Paterson compares the poem to a building, first a house and then a tiny fane, or temple, with doors capable of shutting the poet out, or of opening again, at a later stage, to let him in again. “Now he must pass through that dead zone most poets enter in midlife. By now thoroughly suspicious of the entire enterprise, he leaves the tiny house of the poem to inspect the facade, and learn something of the architectural mysteries he once had no desire to penetrate, such was his dumb faith in their ability to shelter him. .. It looks like a tiny fane to a banished god, he thinks to himself, fatally, as the door shuts in his face.” This opening and shutting of doors has to do, I believe, with a conflation of the spiritual and the poetic, the house of poetry with the house of God, and signals, as in the nineteenth psalm, an ushering in of the spirit – “be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in” – and the draughts seem to be something akin to the sound like a mighty wind that descended on the disciples at Pentecost, allowing them to speak to everyone in the world in his or her own language, despite the “unholy dispatch” with which they zero in. Dante’s angel also arrives in a sound like a howling wind that "strikes against the forest without let." (Inferno, IX, 69-72). The final line qualifies the unholy dispatch. Whatever the message is it is so urgent that you do not “scorch the sheets.” That is, you don’t indulge in any of your perhaps usual early morning sexual recreations. But why not?
The sexual act, for Paterson, is a way out. He says, in The Book of shadows, “There were times, moving slowly inside her in the dark, when I would pause, and realise I was not there. Only the movement again restored some flicker of allegiance to the here-and-now from which we had all but been all but exempted.” The mediumship allowed by the opening of the doors then, has put him in touch with something of such import that the poet narrator can’t risk an activity he knows will take him out of either himself or the time and place of the revelation. Paterson has spoken of poetry as “a private transaction between the author and God,” and Wind Tunnel seems to be explaining, insofar as such a thing could be explained, the mechanics of the interaction.
I was perfectly content to leave the interpretation of this final line there until Joseph Duemer, a fellow writer on this blog, said - “I'm sort of sorry to learn that "scorch the sheets" is a slangy phrase for sex. I had in mind something closer to that cold pentecostal fire you mention earlier having simply consumed the poet without even waking his wife.” – and I realised that he was absolutely right. The phrase “scorch the sheets” certainly refers to the sexual act and I think Paterson means the reader’s mind to turn that way, however, the grammar of the second half of the line – “you do not scorch the sheets, or wake your wife” – belies the obvious interpretation. “Scorch the sheets” has no onanistic secondary meaning that I know of. It seems to refer exclusively to super heated activity between consenting adults and, one would assume, would require waking one’s partner. So that “or” applies the brakes and necessitates a rethink in mid line. Acts 2; 1-4 makes it clear that after the sound of a mighty wind filled the house the disciples saw what looked like fiery tongues moving in all directions, and “it sat upon each of them. And they were filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” It all seems like a fair description of a poetic epiphany, reinforcing Paterson's comment about a private transaction between the poet and God.
Are all, or any, of these scraps of information necessary to enjoy the poem? They are not. They can’t be. The poem is never constituted by its meaning alone. It wouldn’t be a poem if it was. Paterson’s use of language and poetic device is as important here as the meaning.
The opening phrase, for instance – Sometimes, in autumn – introduces a strange ambiguity to the piece. Sometimes – now and then, occasionally – in autumn, that is, in a short season of any given year, something happens. This framing of time in terms that are both open and closed sets a very different tone than the more direct “once or twice a year.’ The Counting Crows song ‘Hard Candy has a similar opening – “on certain Sundays in November when the weather bothers me” refuses to actually place the action in the same odd way. Compare these phrases to the opening of Hardy’s “The Return of the Native” – “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight,” which feels very particular. It doesn’t use the deictic ‘the’ to specify the time but it feels as if it did. It isn’t any Saturday, in any November, but the particular Saturday that the action of the novel began on, at a particular time of day. The end result, in Paterson’s poem, is to begin by disorienting the reader.
There’s an interesting use of pararhymes in the piece– the second syllables of sometimes and autumn, doors/days/dangerous/draughts, faint/first, such/scorch, street/sweet, that add to a slight sense of disjunction. The ear hears the almost rhyme but the eye doesn’t see it. It’s almost subliminal. There is some noticeable use of alliteration – pea pipesmoke perfume, wake wife whirling walk, a half rhyme in biography/draught, and then the surprise, after the mystical ambiguities and the religious allusions, of the sharp slang of “scorch the sheets.”
Paterson said, in The Book of Shadows, “Poetry is a mode of reading, not of writing. A poet is someone skilled in manipulating that innate human capacity to make things sign. They advertise the significance of the form in its shape or speech, build in enough strangeness and intrigue to have the reader read in, enough familiarity to repel them, and calculate enough reward for their effort. But so much poetry now is all advertisement, or all familiarity, or all strangeness, or all calculation.” Wind Tunnel seems to have struck a nice balance.

.

Critical Valentine

2009-09-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

Prose that keeps
trying to remember
to be poetry
is prose
not poetry
poetry’s sent to get past
these unrhymed
broken lives
while prose
always wants to settle
somewhere here
what makes
that star falter
but a state
of wonder?

The Poetics of Being

2009-09-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

I just came across an interesting question, posed by Paul de Man - “Can we find out something about the nature of modernity by relating it to lyric poetry, that we could not find out in dealing with novels or plays?” According to Adrian del Caro, in his introduction to “Holderlin: The Poetics of Being, Heidegger believed the question could be answered affirmatively even if it were to include philosophy. Contributions toward an answer anyone?

Steve Fellner on Accessibility in Poetry

2009-08-30T20:13:00.000-07:00

Steve Fellner posted on accessibility in poetry this past Friday. While Fellner's qualms with accessibility take a turn towards comparative queer theory, he deftly uses rhetorical question to raise many points about what we mean by "accessibility" and just what, exactly, we want to access. I responded with a quick post on my thoughts regarding the poet's responsibilities. You can read it at the bottom of his post.

What's the Reader's Role?

2009-08-30T07:25:00.000-07:00

So it's been something around nine months since I made my last contribution to the Plumbline School. Let's just call it a sabbatical from blogging and move on.

Like my last post, I'm going to take the lazy way out and do a re-blog. I just finished reading a good post on what makes a poem over at Jim Murdoch's blog. Rather than re-hash what he said, I'll just point you toward it. Murdoch, a novelist, makes some excellent points about the reader's tasks when it comes to poetry. Be sure to read the whole thing, and also check out the links at the bottom of his post.

How to Read a Poem

2009-08-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

I gave the following one-page handout to my Intro to Poetry students on Monday. It of course contains all sorts of assumptions about the nature of poetic language that I don't spell out -- it it a set of instructions, not a theoretical statement.

Instructions: Begin, in so far as it’s possible, without preconceptions and do not rush to make a judgment about whether you like or dislike a poem, or whether it’s good or bad; most of all, do not dismiss mysteries or difficulties as weird or incomprehensible (at least) until you have worked through the steps below. Read the poem aloud. Now read it again to yourself without (yet) trying to understand it in order to get a feel for the whole thing. As you go through the steps below, write notes on the page the poem is printed on, or in your reading journal.

1. Read the sentences (not the lines) for the basic, literal meaning of the poem. What is the setting? Who is speaking? What is the tone? (Tone is usually defined as the speaker’s attitude toward the subject matter as revealed through the speaker’s word choices, rhythms, etc.) Are there words you don’t know the meanings of? If so, look them up. Does the title of the poem offer a key to the situation the poem describes or enacts?

2. After you understand the basic meaning of the text, including the definitions of any unfamiliar words, look at the images (clusters of words that represent a sense impression: sight, sound, taste, etc). Do the images suggest anything more than their literal meaning? Do they rise above simple description? Are there patterns of images? Does the author use figurative language, i.e., metaphors or similes, etc? If so, what is the effect of these figures?

3. Stick to the actual text of the poem and do not import “explanations” for things you don’t quite understand from outside the poem. Not yet, anyway. For instance, say you are reading a poem in which the speaker seems to shift from one subject to another without transition. It might be tempting to say, “Well, maybe the speaker is drunk.” But unless there is a glass of whisky in the poem, you have no warrant to make such an assumption. Sometimes you have to simply “bracket” certain parts of the poem and save them for later analysis; this is far better than trying to “solve” every mystery on first (or second) reading.

4. Now look at the ways in which the lines break up or coincide with the poem’s sentences. Does this patterning affect the rhythm (and thus the tone) of the poem? Is the poem broken into stanzas? If so, are the stanzas integral to the organization of the subject matter? Do the lines of the poem seem to have a regular number of syllables? (Alternatively, do stanza contain lines that vary in syllable count according to some pattern?) Do the lines have a regular number of stressed syllables and if so are they evenly distributed in the line? If the lines do not show patterning of syllables or stresses, is there some other principle of patterning at work? Does the poem contain rhymes? If it does, do they fall into a particular pattern? If there is a pattern, is it simple or elaborate? What are the effects on the reader’s understanding of the patterns you have discovered?

5. Are there any hints about the larger context in which the poem was created? Time period? Author’s biography? Major historical or cultural events? Does the poem allude to other works of literature?

6. Now read the poem aloud again. At this point you are prepared to begin to make judgments about the poem’s meaning. Whether you “like” the poem or not is of interest to you personally, but not very important in the larger scheme of things. (Another way of saying this would be: Until you have read a lot of poems in the manner outlined above, your like or dislike of a particular poem is uninformed and thus not very valuable to the wider conversation about poems.) At this point it can be useful to write a brief summary of the poem in your reading journal.

Spirit of Poetry, Companion of Conscience

2009-08-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

Helen Vendler, in a piece in the NY Times Book Review yesterday, on a newly-edited selected poems of Wallace Stevens, quote this passage from an award speech Stevens gave before the Poetry Society of America (when he was 72) :

"Individual poets, whatever their imperfections may be, are driven all their lives by that inner companion of the conscience which is, after all, the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds. I speak of a companion of the conscience because to every faithful poet, the faithful poem is an act of conscience."

This chimed somewhat, for me, with a previous post ("Ethos of Wayfaring").

Best of My Summer Reading

2009-08-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

Poetry
Body Traffic by Stephen Dobyns (contains some great poems about aging, some very original looks at various body parts, and a sequence of sonnets about Cezanne that's really about writing poetry)
And by Michael Blumenthal (wow, I'd never heard of this guy before a friend recommended the book. Lyrical, discursive, classical and innovative at the same time, truly hybrid in the way that the Norton Hybrid poets fail to be, mostly)
Money for Sunsets by Elizabeth J. Colen -- This was Denise Duhamel's judge's choice for Steel Toe Books' contest this summer. In the foreword, Duhamel compares Colen's prose poems to David Lynch's Twin Peaks and Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons
Zephyr by Susan Browne -- This was my editor's choice for Steel Toe Books' contest this summer. Press release here: http://www.wku.edu/~tom.hunley/steeltoebooks/news.htm

Textbook
Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio -- Great exercises and discussions. I plan to use this and Michael Theune's Structure and Surprise with my grad students this fall.

Novels
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn -- The most twisted, constantly-surprising, disturbing thing I've read in a long time. It's the kind of strangeness that Chuck Fight Club and Brett Easton Ellis strain after, but I never felt like Dunn was straining, just presenting her own way-out vision of the world.
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Euginedes -- Dreamy, lyrical, mysterious, and a nice quick read

Strange Drapes Valentine #54

2009-08-15T09:59:00.001-07:00

On the luciferic side
of the issue the drinkers
and talkers and other kinds of
ecstatic folks I go back and
forth between the Vikings

and the monks of the kells
the holy inlets where the
elves and pale sylphs
were last observed
and written down

and those who don’t trust words
lost in the art of sailing around
them and the plunder of time
and place the more violent
side of the argument takes.

I'm Just a Poor Wayfaring Stranger

2009-08-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to see the blog starting up again. As I mentioned in comments to Henry's post, I'd like to urge my fellow Plumbliners to pitch in and contribute. I'd be willing to commit to posting something at least once a week and would invite other members of the blog to make a similar commitment-- if once a week is too often, then twice a month. Whatever suits. I make the request because I have found the discussions we began with useful and stimulating and I'm looking for more of the same. I'm just a poor wayfaring stranger looking for a few companions to join with me. By the way, I'm not looking and I don't think Henry is either, for any kind of party-line agreement here. There are some fundamental tendancies most of the Plumbliners share, but those patterns of agreement are, I suspect, pretty loose. Here is a challenge, then: I invite each of the plumbliners, over the coming couple of weeks, to post a statemnt of their poetics, however brief or elaborate; or, if that's too much or too abstract, then how about following Henry with a list of recent reading, perhaps with a bit of annotating hinting at how the reading connects up with one's larger ideas about poetry. I'll put something up along these lines within a day or two of posting this.

Hybrid Nation

2009-08-14T17:12:00.000-07:00

Am reading fine book by J. Stephen Russell, Chaucer & the Trivium (along with trying to read original Canterbury Tales).

Russell analyzes the differences between modern & medieval thinking. He talks about the influence, on the medievals' sense of language, of a dual, hierarchical culture (Latin & vernacular). & of the importance of systematic, Aristotelian logic : the 10 defining "categories" of a thing, & their adaptation to medieval school-learning (by Boethius, Porphyry, others). Here's a quote :

"What emerges from this dense enumeration is a pair of distinctions. First, of course, are species, genera, and individuals, material that was amplified in [Porphyry's] Isagogue. Second is the distinction between 'of' and 'in', that between necessary (essential) attributes and accidental ones.

"This second distinction is, with only a bit of overdramatization, the cornerstone of medieval philosophy, the taxonomy that held (and, some would say, still holds) the world together." (Russell, p. 35)

The difference between of (what can be said of a thing) and in (what is integral to the identity or substance of - definitive of - a thing). Substances and accidents - how important this concept was to the Middle Ages is indicated by these lines of Dante's final vision, at the end of the Divina Commedia (Paradiso 33) :

I saw that in its depth far down is lying
Bound up with love together in one volume,
What through the universe in leaves is scattered;
Substance, and accident, and their operations,
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple light.

Today hybrid cars are all the rage (focusing our attention on the species "automobile", to the neglect of the genus [mass] "transportation"), as well as hybrid poetry (see the Norton anthology American Hybrid - a politic fusion of "old & new") & hybrid art forms (or product diversification) of all kinds...

I wonder if there's a way to recuperate this distinction (between "of" & "in") for poetry criticism. Today the "impure" holds the positive valence, whereas the "pure" is under suspicion (logocentrism, racial "purity", essentialism, etc.). But the political manipulation of racial hatreds, for example, could be analyzed as a version of logical category-confusion (ie. the "purity of the (German, white, black, take your pick) race" posits a substantial aspect (race) for what is in truth an accident (race is an accidental aspect of the genus human being). & the proposition of "hybrid" poetries - ie. Ron Silliman : "there is no such thing as poetry, there are only kinds of poetry" (I'm quoting from memory) - referring to such things as, I guess, slam, post-avant, "SOQ", elliptical, neo-objectivism, Slow Poetry, Investigative Poetics, conceptual, flarf, & all the other USA schools-tribes, etc. etc. - might also be a kind of category-confusion. Cui bono? Who benefits? Is it possible that these hybrid forms offer a sort of brand diversification, a way simultaneously to make inroads in, & to maintain (or re-vivify), the academic industry of teaching poetry-writing? & in the pursuit of "accidental" qualities, are we obscuring (or denying) poetry's more basic, integral substance?

[crossposted to HG Poetics]

My plummy summer reading

2009-08-14T16:08:00.000-07:00

Following up on Joseph's idea. Recently read or reading :

the newspaper (NY Times, Providence Journal)
New Yorker
The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
a mystery by Josephine Tey
Saint Louis (in French) by Jacques le Goff
Canterbury Tales, by Chaucer
Chaucer & the Trivium, by J. S. Russell

(No, I don't smoke a pipe, wear tweed, or work for Left Overbie University...)

Ethos of Wayfaring

2009-08-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

Have been pretty absent & absent-minded around the Plumbline lately. Partly due to personal circumstances (a strange summer), & partly due to somewhat of an impasse in my thoughts about "plumbing" (constipation, Henry?).

Joseph D. & Mairi have offered us some models, here, for moving beyond a general terminology of "the middle" - showing how "plumbline" values are manifested in particular poets & their poems. I've been too scattered to do that, myself. & too involved in poetry website discussions/squabbles (especially at the Poetry magazine Harriet site) - among various hotheads, wannabees, nobodies, & cranks (like me).

But this morning it occurred to me that I might be able to salvage something for the plumbline from a few of those controversies - if only to add another layer of generalization to our field of interest....

Two of the topics of interest (to me) on those websites have been 1) the rise of "hybrid" forms of experimental poetics - Flarf, Conceptual Poetry, etc.; and 2) the nagging debates over the purpose & value of the "poetry teaching industry" (MFAs, etc.).

I would like to try to propose a statement of (my) principles which addresses BOTH of these topics, together, in a unified way. I've done this in a piecemeal way in various comment streams on said websites; but here's how I would summarize my position :

1) Poetry is One Thing (with tremendous variations). It is not whatever anybody decides to name as poetry. For example, when Kenneth Goldsmith, the main proponent of "Conceptual Poetry", copies an entire day's issue of the NY Times, and calls it "conceptual poetry" - I would, au contraire, describe this as an oxymoron, or contradiction, rather than a description. It is not poetry. Poetry is a verbal art with its own distinct characteristics (some of which Aristotle began to analyze, way back when).

2. Poetry and poetic making are inseparable from experience at large. The aphorism which Keats assigned to the Grecian urn - "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty; - this is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" - is a perennial challenge to every artist and maker : ie., where & by what means comes to pass the conjunction of beauty and truth, art and experience? (& this is perhaps one of the bases underlying our "plumbline" concept of the poem as an equilibrium, a balance of forces).

3. With #2 above clearly in mind : the social vocation & role of the poet can be best summarized as the companion. The aspects of artist, craftsperson, fabulist, musician, performer, scholar, etc. - all these are subsumed under the primary role of something like wise fellowship. The poet is our companion - Whitman's camerado/camerada - on the "road of life". A poem is a testimony : bears witness to felt & comprehended experience. A poem which achieves the status of art - which fulfills its aesthetic purpose - is one which faithfully comprehends & reflects some aspect or value of that shared experience. (& to say this is not, on the other hand, to rule out the most baroque & parodic fabulations & gleeful take-offs & lethal/tragic ironies & vicious satires & zithery re-makings of same.)

It seems to me that when this (traditional) ethos of the poet - the poet's social role - is better understood, then some of the gnarly ethical problems of "teaching" poetry & writing might be re-formulated (& maybe redeemed). Writing will be subsumed under the ethos of language-use in general; poetry-writing will be integrated with the study and practice of literary history; "creativity" and "self-expression" will be re-valued in relation to elementary education (& arts education) as a whole.

One need only reflect on some of the great "engaged" poets of the last century - Spanish, Russian, Italian, French - Char, Montale, Akhmatova... we could each make our own list - to recognize a common thread in their verse : an evocation, an expression, of the shared experience of living through those brutal & tumultuous decades. The ethos they represent seems distinct from the image of the poet as experimentalist or craftsperson; and the influence of ethos seems like a kind of undercurrent which has all kinds of implications for literary style...

Charm vs. Riddle

2009-07-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

Have been reading remarkable book by Eleanor Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature (led there by way of her writings on Wallace Stevens).

In a chapter on modes & genres, she contrasts ancient charm poems with riddle poems, & discusses how charm as a mode (hypnotic, mellifluous, enigmatic, highly-wrought) held sway during the 19th century (Keats, Poe, Tennyson) "up until about 1915". Its counterpart, the riddling manner, she sees as akin to the "line of wit" - cites Dickinson as one exemplary "riddler".

I guess the proverb falls somewhere in between. Charm poetry aims to cast a magic spell; the proverb or adage is gnomic wisdom, hortatory & didactic; the riddle confronts the reader with a quiz-problem. (& maybe charm/riddle ends meet in an enigmatic middle.)

The riddle shades over into the enigma, which is not quite so cut-&-dry : edged with profundity & mystery. In terms of rhetoric, the enigma is a simile, or metaphor, in which one half of the figure is hidden, missing, encrypted.

Cook suggests that some of the disputes over style in poetry are rooted in this generic (or modal) distinction between charm & riddle - & that the disagreement is mostly a matter of taste, rather than quality...

2009-07-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

Joel Brouwer on Hayden Carruth, at the Harriet blog.

a new Plumbliner

2009-07-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

Pleased to welcome Laura Harriss to the Plumbline School! (yes, we have summer classes!)

Saturday update : I mean, welcome, Laura Johnson! (see Laura's comment below)

Plumbing Verse Daily

2009-06-22T17:54:00.001-07:00

http://www.versedaily.org/2009/aboutjosephduemerbpj.shtml

The Rewards of the Obdurate

2009-06-17T19:48:00.000-07:00

In June 3rd's TLS Christopher Reid presents the entirety of Ian Hamilton's "Untranslatable" and offers a short account of it, in the context of a discussion about how much 'human detail' to put into or leave out of a poem, and how that decision might affect what we here have referred to as the transparency of the work. He gives a perhaps convincing account of the rewards to be found even in poems you don't 'get'. The relevant paragraphs follow, for the benefit of anyone who missed the review.

"Some of [Hamilton's] very shortest poems have, in the interest of concentration, had circumstantial detail so efficiently purged from them, they all but resist penetration. At their best – “Memorial”, for instance, or “Home”, or “Awakening” – they can deliver espresso-sized shocks of intimate revelation; otherwise, when they are reduced too far and the human detail has been more or less obscured, reading them can be as frustrating an activity as unpicking tight knots in damp string. In Lowell, it was the high-handed squandering of human detail, the careless, even callous, spilling of beans about those who had loved and trusted him, that Hamilton rightly deprecated; but in seeking not to commit the same sin, he sometimes forfeited the very quality that would have allowed a poem to live and speak.

He was too sharp an operator not to have known the dangers. Nonetheless, there is a poem thought to be from the 1970s or 80s, “Untranslatable”, which Alan Jenkins has included in a short section of “Unpublished and Uncollected Poems”, and which suggests a diehard attitude to the whole business. Its obvious difference from most of Hamilton’s work is that it is outwardly addressed, almost a public pronouncement – which may, paradoxically, be why he withheld it – but it has its own obliqueness of attack and is defiantly terse. In its totality, it reads:

There are certain lines – whole poems even:
I have no idea what they mean;
It’s what I can’t grasp that draws me back to them.”
Yours used to be like that, and so did his.

The speaker of the first three lines, to which the fourth is, I take it, the poet’s reply, or rebuke, in propria persona, could be expressing any friendly reader’s misgivings – as well as his or her undiminished fascination. Because the rewards are there in even the most obdurate poems. They exist in isolated subtleties of versification, deftly placed line-breaks, choiceness of phrasing, fleeting plangencies, beauties that seldom depart from the range of the ordinary speaking voice, never advertise themselves loudly, and yet suggest that the “platonic” poem is indeed within the writer’s grasp."

Clive James in Poetry (July '09)

2009-06-17T07:13:00.001-07:00

Fine, wide-ranging essay by Clive James in upcoming July issue of Poetry (should be online soon). Among various interesting topics (James Merrill, free/formal verse, US/British crossovers, what makes poems last, "command", etc.), he writes about Michael Donaghy, American/British poet/critic/musician who died in 2004 - & Donaghy's book of essays & interviews, The Shape of the Dance. I don't always agree with James (his snipe at Whitman in a previous essay bothered me), but I enjoyed this one...

A Modest Book Proposal: The Norton Anthology of Prime Time Poetry

2009-06-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that Norton has put out three anthologies featuring various types of poetry that aim at difficulty, following up on the work of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and other modernists who championed difficulty in poetry. In previous posts I basically positioned the two-volume _Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry_ as their right wing book, their _Postmodern American Poetry_ as their left wing book, and their new _American Hybrid_ as their decidedly left-leaning bipartisan effort. What I’d like to propose is a comprehensive anthology of the third party poetries that are left out. The poets I have in mind flow from what Richard Gray refers to as “Whitman and American Populism: Sandburg, Lindsay, Masters.” I would add Don Marquis as another forbearer of the kind of poetry I have in mind, also proletariat poets such as Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Fearing, and Charles Bukowski. Looking to French masters, I would say that the poets I want to champion take their cues more from Jacques Prevert than from Stephen Mallarme. I thought about calling this proposed book The Norton Anthology of Populist Poetry or The Norton Anthology of People’s Poetry, but those terms have political implications that I’m not interested in pursuing here. I also thought about The Norton Anthology of Accessible Poetry, but the cover would have to have a wheelchair ramp on it, and that would look stupid.

Remember when there were only three TV networks and all the shows with mass appeal came on at 7pm, 8pm, 9pm? That was called prime time. Does TV Guide still refer to that time slot as prime time? I don’t know. I think there are several strands of contemporary poetry that could fall under the umbrella term of prime time poetry, poems that are “written in the language actually used by men” (Wordsworth), poems that attempt to clearly address the day-to-day concerns of ordinary people, rather than disdaining poetry’s potential audience and being happy to write for a pocket audience, poems that are written for the whole family (David Kirby, for one, says he writes with an intelligent sixth-grader in mind).

What follows is a very rough table of contents. Michael Theune has pointed out that Stephen Burt and Ron Silliman don’t always like the poets that they champion. This has made me feel like I have permission to propose an anthology that includes some poets that I don’t necessarily enjoy. (I’m not saying which.) Why would I do that? The best explanation I know of is a statement of Forest Gander’s that actually appears in _American Hybrid_: “Like species, poems are not invented, but develop out of a kind of discourse, each poet tensed against another’s poetics, in conversations, like casts of wormtrails in sandstone.” The following are some types of poetic discourse communities that I would like to link together and champion as prime time poetries.

Stand Up: Charles Harper Webb, Ron Koertge, Lisa Glatt, Gerald Locklin, Denise Duhamel (who shows in Michael Theune’s _Structure and Surprise_ how she has written poems using the structure of a standup comedy routine, Edward Field (the term “Standup” comes from his book _Stand Up Friend With Me_, prose by Webb, who has edited two fine anthologies devoted to this type of poetry

Ultratalk: David Kirby, Barbara Hamby, Mark Halliday, Jason Bredle, Nin Andrews, Thomas Lux, Stephen Dunn, Robert Wrigley, Kim Addonizio, Tony Hoagland, Dean Young, Bob Hicok, Lawrence Raab, David Clewell, Martha Silano, essays by Kirby/Hamby, Halliday, and David Graham

Expansive Poets: Molly Peacock, Marilyn Nelson, Greg Williamson, A.E. Stallings, Kelly Cherry, Catherine Trufariello, Chelsea Rathburn, Timothy Steele, excerpts from Kevin Walzer’s prose book _The Ghost of Tradition_, Dana Gioia’s essay “Notes on the New Formalism,” and Mark Jarman’s essay “Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers and the New Narrative Poetry”

Slam Poetry: Taylor Mali, Saul Williams, Patricia Smith, Jeffrey McDaniel, Karyna McGlynn, Robert Bonair-Agard, Grace Bruenderman, Marc Smith, Buddy Wakefield, Jack McCarthy’s essay “Note From The Poetry Underground,” and Susan B.A. Somers-Willet’s essay “Can Slam Poetry Matter?”

Performance Poetry (poets who regularly read their work aloud at places like Seattle’s Red Sky Poetry Theatre, Portland’s Cafe Lena’s, San Francisco’s Cafe Babar, and New York’s Bowery Poetry Club): Hal Sirowitz, Bob Holman, Leanne Grable, Marion Kimes, Alan Kaufman, A.D. Winans, Antler, Chocolate Waters, June King

Laureates (just the ones who have taken seriously their roles as representatives of the poetry community): US Laureates Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky, a few state laureates (Jack Myers, David Bottoms, Kevin Stein, Greg Pape, Fleda Brown); San Francisco Poet Laureate Lawrence Ferlinghetti (his “Populist Manifesto”), former Seattle Populist Poet Bart Baxter

Singer/Songwriters: Leonard Cohen (he's already in one Norton Anthology), Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Regina Spektor, Eminem, Coner Oberost

Cowboy Poetry: J.V. Brummels, Red Shuttleworth, Lisa Lewis, Jennifer Malesich, Paul Zarzyski, and Rod Miller’s essay “A Brief Introduction to Cowboy Poetry, Or Who’s the Guy in the Big Hat and What is He Talking About?”

Plumbline to Kenosis

2009-06-05T16:14:00.001-07:00

I sketched out a very personal (& probably very local) take on poetic "impersonality" over at my blog this evening... perhaps one way to conceptualize an escape hatch from the American (in particular) cul-de-sac of competing styles...

Tom C. Hunley’s second blog post: American Hybrid (Part II)

2009-06-04T09:56:00.001-07:00

Norton now has three Contemporary American Poetry anthologies in print. First, there’s their mainstream anthology (as if any American poetry were mainstream, as if we weren’t all living in exile within our own culture, some more gleefully than others), which is now the second volume of _The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry_. This anthology, according to its introduction, is “characterized by its pluralism, by its welter and crosscurrents,” including both “the raw and the cooked” (Robert Lowell’s phrase), Black Mountain poets, Beats, New York School poets, deep imagists, confessional poets, poets associated with the Black Arts Movement, and some poets from across the pond. One thing that binds these disparate poets, according to the book’s introduction, is the shadow of the big Modernist poets Pound, Eliot, Yeats, etc., which “loomed like a massive edifice over postwar poets, who sometimes worried that all routes to innovation had already been explored and exhausted.”

Next, there’s Norton’s anthology of experimental poetry (as if all serious poems weren’t experiments) _Postmodern American Poetry_, which actually appeared nine years before the revised _The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry_. The Beats are again represented, as are the New York School poets (two generations’ worth, as Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett enter the Norton canon here); Deep Image poetry factors into this one too, in more breadth; there’s the Language poetry of Jackson Mac Low, Michael Palmer, and others; and there’s a nod to performance poets, represented by David Antin, John Giorno, Wanda Coleman, and others.

Though the rhetoric may have led readers to think that _The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry_ represented a kind of mainstream canon while _Postmodern American Poetry_ anthologized otherstream poets mounting a bold challenge, we can see that there’s a lot of overlap. Both anthologies start with Charles Olson, for one. John Ashbery made both books, as did Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O’Hara, Gary Snyder, and quite a few others. It seems to me that all of those poets who are represented in both anthologies are “raw,” according to Lowell’s formulation. While the editors of Norton’s “mainstream” anthology made pains to include “experimental” poetry, the editors of _Postmodern American Poetry_ aren’t about to go anywhere near John Hollander, James Dickey, Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell himself, or anything that would have been on the Hall/Pack side of the 1960s anthology wars, rather than on Donald Allen’s side.

But a new release would reconcile the division “between the experimental and the conventional,” we were promised, and this year Norton released its hybrid (as if all serious poems didn’t arise from a mixture of styles and influences) anthology. I was excited about this at first, thinking the editors were sincere about pursuing their thesis. Unfortunately, reading the book was like listening to a compilation album that promised to fuse the best of mainstream and alternative music but that quickly revealed its mercenary purposes: the mainstream artists needed indie cred and the alternative artists wanted a larger audience. I didn’t get as much pleasure from reading the poetry as I had hoped, and I don’t believe it fulfilled its middle child promise of reconciling differences.

Like _Postmodern American Poetry_, this anthology seems to be skewed in favor of the “raw.” Okay, Robert Haas has made the trek from the mainstream anthology to this one; he’s married to Brenda Hillman, so he’s accepted into post-avant circles by association. Norman Dubie is also granted both mainstream and hybrid status, as are Charles Wright, Amiri Baraka, and Jorie Graham (a surprising omission from the pomo anthology). That’s five who appear only in the mainstream anthology and the hybrid anthology. The following poets appear both in _Postmodern American Poetry_ and _American Hybrid_ and not in Norton’s mainstream anthology: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Kathleen Fraser, Barbara Guest, Paul Hoover, Ann Lauterbach, Nathanial Mackey, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, and John Yau. That’s twelve. Also, the younger poets in _American Hybrid_ seem to uniformly proceed more directly out of “raw” poets such as Michael Palmer and Gertrude Stein, say, than out of “cooked” poets such as Theodore Roethke and Louise Bogan. It seems to me that the very people who commandeered the word “experimental,” which belongs to all serious poets, have now also commandeered the word “hybrid,” which properly describes all serious poets.

Don’t think that I’m writing this to prop up “mainstream” or “cooked” poetry; I, too, dislike (much of) it. I think what we have here is something distinctly American: two parties (out of many) declaring themselves THE two parties, and then coming together in a mercenary bipartisan spirit of mutual backscratching, reinforcing their own power bases and leaving everyone else out. In my next post, I will write a modest book proposal for the anthology I would like to see Norton do next, one that defies these false binaries and the false compromise of their hybrid anthology.

Pith and Gist

2009-06-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid Joseph H's discussion of his personal poetics is in danger of being overlooked in the comment section so - in case anyone missed it, which they don't want to do - it's over at Perpetual Bird.

Confused Valentine

2009-06-03T13:12:00.000-07:00

Modernism is clinical depression
post-modernism is deranged depression
a normal reaction to an unfortunately
now normal variation on plangent
themes of madness

in my family everybody fought
with everybody so escape
got confused with peace
and rape with theft
but I refuse to be intimidated

by the present moment anymore
my goal in life
is to eliminate the egotism
of writing a poem
in the very act of writing it.

Relevant, accessible and coming to a television station near you.

2009-06-01T20:28:00.000-07:00

Maybe we’ve been taking the wrong tone in our discussions. The inimitable A.A. Gill commented in yesterday’s Times on the Oxford poetry scandal – don’t you love the idea of being able to work up enough interest in poetry to create a scandal? For those of you who missed it I offer the following excerpt from ‘ Poetry’s turn for the verse.’ It introduced a discussion of the BBC’s verse off to find the best poet in the land ever (Contenders are Donne, Milton and the author of Beowolf), and the question of whether poetry belongs on television. The answer is no, at least according to Gill, but it’s his contribution to the problem of accessibility I wanted to draw to your attention.
“ It has been rhyme-and-reason week. You go 100 years without ever thinking about a poet, then all of a sudden they are everywhere. The scandal at Oxford managed briefly to elbow venal MPs off the news. There was something hopelessly, Wodehouseianly English about these stories. The greatest crisis in democracy since the Reform Act brought about by duck houses, tampons and moat cleaning, and then Oxford dons reaching for the smelling salts with one hand and a stiletto with the other, all over predatory libidos, and bluestocking innuendo. You wonder, would they ever have managed to elect Byron? Precocious, strong on classics, popular verse, shags everything in a corset, including his sister. Or Dylan Thomas? Or Catullus? The poet Michael Horowitz was on the Today programme with a voice that sounded like a wax cylinder tiptoeing out of a brass speaking tube. He explained that poetry had caught an infection from the rest of the ghastly, pustular, commercial world. Poets, he readily said, should be solitary, distanced, and possibly consumptive and sexually ambivalent. The BBC has been doing its best to bring poets and poetry kicking and screaming, or perhaps mincing and weeping, into the nation’s green room; to turn them into the culture’s footballers. Which means poetry has to be played out under the arc lights of the Tristams’ favourite culture words, which are – all together now – “relevant” and “accessible”. What rhymes with relevant and accessible? Patronising and explanatory and simplified and unenthusiastic? Can you all go away now and make a poem out of those wonderful words? Use your coloured crayons. Relevant and accessible actually means mediated by a friendly, classless autodidact who can josh and cajole you through the tricky business of pentameter and sonnet form and make sure you don’t feel culturally embarrassed or aesthetically humiliated. . . I’ve always vouched that there was no human activity that was above, below, or beside the box, but after this week I’m beginning to think maybe poetry is the exception. Television is a show and tell medium, and so, in a completely different sense, is poetry. The BBC has been confronted with the quandary of what you actually show when the poetry is showing itself. The visons collide, and what you get is the equivalent of old masters printed on T shirts. Bad art and bad fashion. Poetry won’t be filleted into sound bites. The words remain, but the poetry evaporates. Poetry is hard. It exists at the ceiling of comprehension and feeling, and when when you come down with the sense of it, it’s miraculous as anything man has conceived. Having it delivered like pizza by Fiona Shaw isn’t quite the same thing. It’s not television’s job to tease and trick reluctant folk to open poetry books, just as it isn’t poetry’s business to make people watch television. We get to poetry by our own circuitous routes, and the enjoyment and awe are greater for it. Finally though, poetry doesn’t belong on television because it isn’t a mass medium.”

New Things? (or Spring Fashion?)

2009-05-28T04:58:00.000-07:00

Critic Stephen Burt declares a shift in American poetry style, toward a new "restraint" & "objectivity". John Latta (in his post of May 27th) takes exception.

I've always found something faintly pedestrian in "objectivism", "imagism", & the WCW rubric "no ideas but in things" etc. Though I guess now & then such doctrines offer a needed counter-balance to facetious poetic solipsism, decadence, self-indulgent mannerisms, etc. I'm drawn more to Wallace Stevens' constant exploration of the riddles of imagination & reality, his oscillations between "the ideas about the thing" & "the thing itself".

The best Stevens scholar I know of is B.J. Leggett. His recent short book Late Stevens (Louisiana State Univ. Press) is just superb. Shatters much of the received wisdom about where Stevens received his wisdom, & what he made of it all...

Tom Hunley's Teaching Poetry Writing

2009-05-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

I'm really glad Tom Hunley's a part of the Plumbline School. I'm discovering, as I'm reading more and more of his work, that he's an excellent, adventurous, energetic poet. But what I already KNOW is that he's thought deeply about poetry writing pedagogy, a subject on which he's written an excellent book, Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach. In this book, Tom argues that those who teach poetry writing need to do away with the traditional workshop model and should consider embracing instead a pedagogy inspired and structured by the five canons of classical rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. This is vital, big work, and work that I think would appeal to all those intrigued by issues taken up on this blog.

I've thought a little more about this over at the Structure & Surprise blog, trying to link up some of what Structure & Surprise tries to do with the big paradigm shift Tom argues for, encourages, and helps to make possible.

2009-05-07T01:19:00.000-07:00

I'm experiencing such sensory overload here in HCMC that it's a little hard to pull my thoughts together. Nevertheless, I wanted to at least make a few notes in response to some recent posts here, with the intention of extending my thoughts and perhaps revising them later.

First, a note of gratitude to Henry and the group he has assembled here. It has been a long time since I have felt around me such a sympathetic community of interest in issues that have bedeviled me. Thanks to one and all. Here then are some random jotting from a Saigon cafe, numbered for easy reference:

In comments to the previous post Joseph Hutchinson suggests that we cannot get outside the problem of relativism. Everyone's golden mean is different, individually determined, he says. There is certainly a good deal of truth in his assertion, but I don't think it has to be debilitating to our project. The charge of hard relativism only holds up, I think, if you focus on the individual to the exclusiin of his / her social context. Human forms are, as Henry remarked, pretty durable and they tend to root practice in a social matrix that, while not immutable, is stable enough for practical purposes.
For me, a poetic middle ground and middle voice would look something like the following: A) a poetry that records and investigates experience. [Individual experience is always located within sets of overlapping social practices: no private language.] B) A poetry that while acknowledging and even encoding the limits of language to express experience, refuses to fall into relativism or nihilism. C) Constant reinvention of older forms. D) A respect for grammar, at least at a "meta" level. Ordinary grammar is already so full of breakages and switchbacks that it seems irresponsible to add to the difficulties. E) Style: a play between loose and tight, between freedom and restraint, between perception and wit.
A concern for the connection between the aesthetic and the ethical, the poetic and the political.

I make these notes as much for myself as for others, but I am very much interested in hearing responses from one and all.

Critical Situations

2009-05-06T07:50:00.000-07:00

Just a not-so-brief (& probably wayward) response to Joseph's recent post from Vietnam (Situations). His travel report seems like a parable of the relation between poetry and its social/ethical ground. And as such, it is relevant to Michael Theune's latest post on the ethic of the middle.

Joseph paints a picture of the tentativeness of the stranger in a foreign place - the heightened awareness of the role of social forms, the mutual process of recognitions and mis-recognitions - the sort of happy/tense apprehensions of both traveler & host. & then he recognizes this as an experience of the context which saturates & informs art and poetry. Poetry's "forms" (stylizations) can be seen as isomorphs of social customs.

There's an implied warning here, about an over-emphasis on novelty for its own sake. The exaggerated focus on technical innovation obscures the context of complex social forms already in play. It sets art off in a world of its own, of merely technical specialization & sophistication.

One can imagine the experimentalist's retort : social context is the very ground and motive for our innovations! We're doing it to fight the oppressive boredom of conventional art - on behalf of social and artistic freedom!

Recently I've been trudging my way slowly through a monograph by British thinker Gillian Rose, on the 19th-cent. German philosopher G.F. Hegel (Hegel contra Sociology). Very rough sailing. But I think I understand some of the very basic aspects of Hegel's Aesthetics. Hegel's "severe", critical philosophy of history is built on notions of human alienation from, & mis-recognition of, a true comprehension of "absolute Spirit" (the source of creation & history), and the ethical bases of (ideal, normative) human mutuality and freedom. (Writing in Prussia, around 1800, his universal history appears to give little weight to the new democracy rising across the Atlantic.)

What does this have to do with our "situation"? As philosopher, Hegel stakes out a perspective somewhat outside (& critical of) the sphere of art & poetry itself. Artistic forms are "epiphenomena" (my quotes) determined by more general & basic social formations, undergoing the historical process of realization and self-recognition. (One can see why Marx took Hegel as his theoretical template.)

For Hegel, there are only 2 types of art : "classic" and "romantic" (not to be confused with "romanticism"). His "classic" art is equated with ancient Greek epic and tragedy. The art is rooted in the self-reliant, organic freedom of Greek democracy : law, culture and art are one whole (as opposed to both Oriental & Roman societies, where law is allied with dominating administrative power). Neither politics nor religion are alienated from this self-determining community. And Greek art expresses this cultural context : "beauty has for its inner meaning the free independent meaning, not a meaning of this or that but what means itself and therefore signifies itself [my italics]." According to G. Rose : "The classical form of art is a unity of meaning and configuration [ie., content & form]. Meaning and configuration are distinct but not separate; configuration does not re-present meaning but presents it." Rose relates Hegel's example of Greek tragedy, in which real ethical conflicts (between the authority of family vs. community - ie. Antigone, or the Oresteia) - recognized by the whole community - are ritually & dramatically - & severely, simply - presented in the theatre.

Hegel does not merely idealize Greek art & culture. He describes the role of slavery & violence in creating the Greeks' "concrete" forms of democracy. But the "classic" offers a kind of template for integral, "non-alienated" art : art which presents a unity of "meaning & configuration".

In later historical eras, art & poetry reveal themselves to be a sort of index of the distortions of freedom present in society at large. "Romantic" art - emerging from societies in which both religion and the state have been removed from free consciousness & self-determination, and turned into forms of illusion & oppression - becomes strictly sidelined, irrelevant to the inner workings of those societies (except as further forms of illusion). They become "subjective" : mirroring the private concerns of deracinated individual "subjects", or representing art's own processes in a solipsistic hall of mirrors. For Hegel, "romantic" art has lost touch with both reality and beauty : strictly speaking (in his terms), it is no longer art at all.

Clearly this is a grim & "severe" perspective indeed. On behalf of a supreme abstraction of historical world-process, Hegel slights the (partial) ethical integrations of both the medieval & modern eras, and characterizes them as a wilderness of error (a learning-process, nevertheless, for the historical World-Spirit). Greek art is idealized, while contemporary democratic culture & its arts are outside the analysis. The individual is described as "subject" to the inescapable illusions of larger, determining historical forces...

So what does this have to do with us? Hegel's underlying argument - that art is a reflection of the social forms (& inhumanities, injustices) of the culture from which it emerges - applies a critical lens to contemporary debates about the role of poetry & its style. & his characterization of the "classic" - as a harmony of "meaning" and "configuration" - parallels the Plumbline notion of the norm or the middle. We are circling around this recurring concept of the dual aesthetic/ethical "golden mean".

Of course, some strains of sophisticated contemporary poetry incorporate social theory into their stylistic forms & processes. Postmodern, NY School, "Language", elliptical, "investigative"... all of these styles offer some self-conscious critiques of poetry & art themselves. Various more-populist styles also offer examples of both social and artistic protest. Does this mean, by evoking an admittedly very primitive notion of Hegelian social critique, we are offering here merely an amateurish and anachronistic re-delving of an over-worked ground?

Possibly, I don't know... but in response, I would suggest the following :

1) The ancient, vernacular forms & customs of both poetry and culture-at-large tend to be very hardy & long-lasting. The forms are (sometimes, as Joseph suggests) tools for consciousness - which outlast or partially repeal the deformations of oppressive social structures.

2) Hegel's template of the "classic" (as a harmony of meaning and configuration, or theme and form) is only possible where art is simultaneously free & contextualized : both aesthetically integral & socially engaged. Art, on the other hand, which depends on theory - which reflects a critique which negates art's independent validity - seems to be ultimately self-cancelling. It fulfills its own prophecy.

The Middle and Aristotle's Ethics

2009-05-05T18:21:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a bit about Henry's post from April 22, about the Plumbline and the broken middle. I have two responses.

1.

I know the middle gets a bad rap (as Henry notes, it's often thought to be the site of the middling, the mediocre), but I think there's some thinking we can turn to for some direction regarding how we might disentangle the agonistic but hopeful middle from the notion of mediocrity: Aristotle's Ethics.

For Aristotle, the right action was to be found in the middle, between two extremes. For example, between the problematic positions of cowardice and foolhardiness is the virtue of courage.

What intrigues me about this view of ethics is that the extremes are a site for unthinking. One simply is cowardly; or, one simply is foolhardy. The middle requires that one both be informed and be prepared to act in the face of danger. That is, one knows risk, but is prepared to act, anyway. Far from being the cite of middling mediocrity, the mean in Aristotle's Ethics is the site of risk and transformation.

Perhaps the poetic-aesthetic middle the Plumbline School considers and pursues has much less to do with stereotypical ideas of the middling and much more to do with Aristotle's thoughtful, energetic, engaged, critical middle...

2.

When mystico-ethical thoughts such as the above fail me, I turn to a simple formulation: the middle already is being theorized by Elliptical and Hybrid theorists, so it is clear that the middle simply is a site of much theoretical interest, and, thus, we at the Plumbline need not worry too much about thinking about the middle. But we do need to think about the middle in new and revelatory ways, or at least in fuller and more sophisticated ways than those already proposed by Elliptical and Hybrid theorists. A lot of this more-sophisticated thinking already is happening on this blog, I think, and much more is to come, I'm sure. (For example, I very much look forward to Tom Hunley's idea for a new Norton anthology...) We need to continue to work to show what the middle can do...

Very good to be skeptical and self-critical, certainly, to be thoughtful (especially when one is full of thoughts as smart and careful as Henry's), but also good to realize that what's happening here already is and needs to continue to be lively, insightful, and productive.

Tom C. Hunley's first blog post: American Hybrid (part I)

2009-05-04T07:47:00.000-07:00

This is a hybrid like the Toyota Prius is a hybrid. All of your hip, socially-conscious friends are driving them. You feel vaguely good about yourself, like you’re doing your part for the planet and like you’re in with a good crowd. At the same, you’re in physical discomfort, you secretly fear that your girlfriend will leap out at the next red light, into the passenger seat of a Vette or Porsche – and you wouldn’t blame her.

I bought this book with high hopes, having just read two new collections bearing the fruit of some serious cross-pollination: All-Night Lingo Tango by Barbara Hamby and Ka-Ching! by Denise Duhamel. The former is filled with utterly un-stodgy formal poems. Hamby is playful with form the same way Kenneth Koch and some of the Oulipo writers could be. All-Night Lingo Tango reads like an intelligent, exuberant stylistic melding of Expansive Poetry (itself a melding of New Narrative and New Formalism) and the Whitmanian Ultra-talk poetics that Hamby has helped champion. Ka-Ching! gives the lie to the notion that experimental poems must be obscure. Duhamel’s poetry is highly experimental. She is a mad scientist, but a fun, accessible one. In addition to formal, playful poems similar to Hamby’s, Duhamel has cross-pollinated Russell Edson and Robert Lowell in some of the best confessional prose poems I’ve come across.

In American Hybrid, Cole Swenson and David St. John oversimplify the current poetic landscape, just as Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey once did with Naked Poetry and Elliot Weinberger did with Outsiders and Innovators: American Poetry Since 1950. Rather than the old Raw versus Cooked or Outsiders versus Insiders, now it’s Post-Avant versus School of Quietude or Elliptical versus Mainstream, but it’s still the false binary choice of a two party system that divides the world between two entities and sells everyone else out. The editors pretend to consolidate differences between two warring factions and pat themselves on the backs for being so inclusive, but there’s a lot more poetry out there than is dreamt of in their philosophies.

Situations

2009-05-02T01:17:00.000-07:00

Going around Hanoi and trying to speak Vietnamese (with my limited vocabulary and grammatical resources) has made me acutely aware of the social contexts in which language operates. In a restaurant, certain kinds of words and sentences are used; in a shop, different words and sentences. In fact, this makes it easier for me to communicate because I know what to expect in different places. I've also learned to expect several stock questions: How long have I been in Vietnam? How old am I? What work do I do? What country am I from? And because I expect these questions, I don't have to think quite so hard, but can fall back into language I already know. Such acts of communication always take place within some social context. Aren't poems the same, in some respects. In poetry, the shop or restaurant might be replaces with a mode or genre -- an elegy or a sonnet. So the conventions of conversation or poetry are not something -- at least initially -- to be gotten outside of, but something to be used. The actual language of a conversation or a poem can only be extracted from the context by an act of critical violence, an act of Abstraction, to adopt Blake's terminology. But surely we don't want to be limited to conventional subjects and modes. True enough. I offer my observation only to make the point that such conventional situations can carry a good deal of satisfaction and even emotional power. They ought not be sneered at or avoided in favor of novelty or originality, I think. Such moments of mutuality can be deeply significant. Poems, like my primitive conversations, start in such places and such moments.

_____________
Cross-posted at Sharp Sand.

2009-05-01T05:26:00.001-07:00

Debating on the "hybrid" in poetry continues here. See more recent posts at this blog too.

New on the Line

2009-05-01T04:38:00.000-07:00

Very pleased to welcome Tom Hunley to the Plumbline School!

Who Does Poetry Belong To?

2009-04-28T03:40:00.000-07:00

Nothing terribly profound to report from my Vietnam sojourn, but I have been thinking about that old question of the relationship between poetry and the society that produces it. In my meetings with poets here, that's an area I'm trying to explore. I've read a fair amount of Vietnamese history and a great deal of Vietnamese literature, both ancient and modern, and the conventional view is that poetry is very important to Vietnamese society. In fact, that is the view with which I began this loose and gangly research project. My thesis -- at least my implied thesis -- would run something like: Vietnamese society values poetry whereas American society does not and that tells us something about the relationship between the arts and society more generally. Underneath that is Henry's agon, of course, the cry of the Americna poet for some sort of recognition, a role to play. But be careful what you wish for.

Vietnamese people will point out to you that many of their statesmen have also been poets, that poetry is taught in school, and that books of poetry are to be found widely distributed in modern Vietnam, but the more I look, the narrower this distribution seems to be. Now days, it often looks like a sentimental social construction maintained as part of an overall Vietnamese self image. Which, I guess you could argue, is more than we have in the US. But in the US there are hundreds if not thousands of literary institutions -- reading series, small presses, etc. -- whereas in VN there is not so much of that, partly because the official Writers Association stands as an official literary institution that is supposed to facilitate such matters, but often doesn't. What you have instead are networks of literary friends who find ways to make a literary life sometimes in and sometimes out of official channels.

At any rate, those are some rough impressions about the comparative sociology of American and Vietnamese poetry scenes. I hope to see a lot more and refine my thoughts over the next month as I travel around. As it happens I'll be having dinner tomorrow evening with the president of the Writers Association and I want to ask him how he sees that institution's role in a modernizing Vietnam.

Plumbline & Broken Middle

2009-04-22T11:05:00.000-07:00

Here is my confession : since setting the Plumbline School on its merry airy erring way, I've had unspoken doubts & misgivings about what it all means. It began in a reaction : against what I perceived as a certain exaggerated or parodic or intentionally superficial or "facetious" atmosphere in the contemporary poetry realm (manifested at the time by "flarf" poetry - but this is only one example). But a simple reaction tends toward the reactionary : & I've worried that an emphasis on the "normative" and the "center" in poetry is a recipe for a staid, conventional stance (Joseph Hutchinson made this quite clear in his response to an invitation to join, a while back).

A second problem, for me, hovers around the idea of labels and abstract categories. To claim a poetry of "the middle" seems to homogenize & standardize a great deal of difference and variety; to look at it from another angle, it seems an awfully vague measure - so abstract as to be incapable of actually characterizing much.

I've tried, in various ways, to sharpen the idea, to make it more interesting : exploring such things as the relationship between mediation (the "golden mean") and ancient concepts of aesthetic and natural beauty; the issue of Metaphysical "wit", the yoking of opposites in a pithy metaphor, image, or aphorism; the differences between a poetry of experience and a poetry of discursive knowledge (Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility"); & finally, the notion of "the middle" as an ethical category, and its relation to poetry (Mandelstam's "sense of being right", etc.).

These are indeed some curious facets of the middle : but I don't think they answer either of the problems I've raised. We are still left with the question of how this concept of the plumbline relates to our poetry, and to contemporary poetry generally - if it does, at all! & we are still left with the 1st of my problems - that is, the slippage between the notion of "the middle" and mere, bland, complacent mediocrity (conventional, middle-brow or uncritical art).

Other members of the Plumbline may feel differently about these issues : perhaps I'm exaggerating the dilemma. But recently I've come upon some writings that might help me move forward. I was reading the final essay in Geoffrey Hill's Collected Essays (the essay title escapes me at the moment - something about modernist poetry). There he makes a reference to the late British thinker Gillian Rose, and her concept of "the broken middle". The phrase betook me to her book of that title, from the late 90s.

I'm not very well-read in philosophy & "theory" generally, and I found much of it hard going. So I welcome corrections to the following inadequate paraphrase. But basically Rose's book is a reflection on the status of contemporary philosophical thought, in the post-modern era. With deep readings of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Arendt, Luxemberg, Adorno, Heidegger, Lacan, Levinas, & other modern & postmodern authors, Rose describes the agon of "authorship" in a post-Enlightenment, and post-Holocaust era, when post-structuralist theory has attempted to critique and dismantle "instrumental reason", the ideological underpinnings of Western society and governance, and to replace them with various alternative modes of discourse and social (non)structure.

Rose's very basic countering concept is formulated as "the broken middle" : a term describing the human condition, and the condition of human mediating social institutions, as always both sin-ridden and redemptive; violent and law-ful; and that this "compromised" (my term) condition is not escapable by way of verbal or ideological sleights-of-hand, but must be endured, deeply & critically evaluated, and lived. Surprisingly, she adds a small "lyric" toward the conclusion, which goes :

I am abused and I abuse
I am the victim and I am the perpetrator
I am innocent and I am innocent
I am guilty and I am guilty

(a poem which seems to echo both Whitman and some ancient Sanskrit passage)

I will have to go back to G. Hill's essay to see how he relates Rose's work to poetry in particular. But it occurred to me today that this notion of a "broken middle" - a mediation which is inevitably conflicted, compromised, endangered, guilty, and above all implicated, engaged - might offer another way to think about our "plumbline". The middle, here, is not simply a form of "instrumental" discursive management or technical flair, transposed to the sphere of aesthetics. The middle in this sense doesn't offer a "solution" to anything : it is not necessarily a resolution, or even always "peaceful" : in Rose's terms, it is more like an agonistic arena. Such a concept, in fact, might be applied to an interpretation of the contemporary poetry scene in another way : if the middle is conflicted, unresolved and agonistic, then the poetry scene - full of broken, distorted, and mistaken or incomplete formulae for competing styles - none of which seem to find much favor with an indifferent or uncomprehending public-at-large - the scene itself seems to reflect, to offer some evidence for, that agonistic state of things. Agonistic - yet still offering an elusive promise (or dream, or possibility) of reconciliation.

Hybrids & the Allegory of Poetic Motoring

2009-04-17T06:28:00.001-07:00

Mark Wallace & Mike Theune are taking up (again) issues of schools, camps & technique, over at Mark's Thinking Again blog.

*

Meanwhile, John Latta brackets "Hybrid" hype with the bleak, disillusioned analytic of Adorno (JL's post of Tuesday the 21st).

Life Under Water

2009-04-14T23:27:00.000-07:00

Maura Dooley’s new collection, Life Under Water, arrived late last week. I ordered it after I read Ben Wilkinson's review in the TLS a few weeks ago. Ben was a little ambivalent about the collection but his comments, especially the phrase “unreliable histories, human frailties and emotional distortions of memory recur,” led me to an internet search, a live reading and a click here to purchase. He deals at some length with the opening piece, The World Turned Upside Down, and to my taste that poem was worth the price of admission.

Whether consciously or not, Dooley reverses the point of view Auden presents in “Memorial for the City.” Her narrator looks out through a pane of ice, “To break and lift a frozen pane/ And see my city made strange...” instead of seeing the city, as Auden’s narrator does, “from the public side of her mirrors.” Instead of the city’s speeches and statistics, which fail to impress Auden’s speaker, Dooley presents, with what Ben Wilkinson calls “deft specificity,” things that emphasise the traits of Auden attaches, in “The Dyer’s Hand,” to his historian, rather than his poet– ‘an interest in human beings, and their lives, which he believes are not preordained by fate but depend on the choices they make, for which they are fully responsible, an interest in the present only insofar as it relates to the past and to the future, and interest in actions, great or small, which reveal the direction in which the actors are moving. ‘All of the historical moments Dooley presents involve the choices made by individuals and the consequences of those decisions.

She begins by evoking the Frost Fairs held on the Thames when it froze, and the way gazing through a waver of heat distorts the vision as much as looking through a pane of ice-“The way fires at Frost Fair once/ made all that was constant tremble “– a reference to the great fires that burned on the ice during the fairs, to warm the revellers and spit roast whole animals for their suppers. The fairs were well known for the numerous disasters and near disasters caused by the failure of the populace to heed the warnings that the ice was about to break. In Feb of 1814, for instance, the last of the frost fairs, a four day event that featured an elephant walking across the river, ended when the ice began to thaw suddenly and crack. In spite of several obvious warnings and an intermittent drizzle of rain the festivities continued until, on a sudden the ice “floated with the printing presses booths and merry makers, to the no small dismay of publicans, typographers, shopkeepers and sojourners.” The sudden breaking up of the ice had been recorded at least since the thirteenth century, and often enough resulted in loss of life and property, but none of these precedents or warnings seemed to make much of an impression on the crowds.
Halfway through the first stanza the imagery slides quietly into another event. The ‘tremble’ induced by the fires of the frost fair is followed immediately by “a shiver of flame, fire on ice, 1643, the country shook as it watched.” It is unclear where the frost fires end and the events of 1643, as the parliamentarians gain the upper hand over the King, leading eventually to his execution, begin but it does seem clear that Charles’ long series of provocations and ill judged decisions is behind the reference. The “Welsh prophetess” made the connection between fire and these events explicit in the publication of “Wonders foretold by her great prophet of Wales: which shall certainly happen this present year 1643 by strange fires, and great waters.” “That there shall also be many great fires in many parts of the city of London (mark you that now) for her doth very well understand there will be many hot fires.” I don’t mean to say that Dooley is referring directly to an obscure seventeenth century soothsayer, only that images of conflagration and flood were used, even at the time, to express the dire political situation.

The second stanza takes the phrase “fire on ice”, away from the concrete meaning attached to it in the opening lines and utilises its metaphoric aptness to the visual distortions of snow blindness, as in Josphine Johnson’s “As men who once have seen/ White sun on snow,/white fire on ice,/ And in a wide noon, shadowless,/ Gone blind with light, “ to move from the frost fairs and the civil war into the story of Berentz’s expedition to find a northern route to China. “The glint of refraction/ distorts the story handed down” of his winter in Nova Zembla after his ship was caught in the ice. Berentz chose, after their progress was thwarted, to separate from Corneliz, his expedition partner, and to proceed south-easterly, intending to round the northern point of Nova Zembla, a decision that led to his imprisonment in the ice. The details of the crew’s efforts to survive the bitter cold in a driftwood hut, combating polar bears, depression, and the constant darkness became, as Dooley suggests, refracted, over time, until, by the nineteenth century, Dutch nationalist poets promoted the story of the arduous winter in nova Zembla as a legend of national heroism. By the time it was translated into English, the story was already known as an adventure “so strange and wonderful, that the like hath never been heard of before.”

Dooley’s "bitter weeks of past and future/ held in the long cold of the moment,” vividly conjures the disorientation of the men huddled in their hut. The cold had stopped all of their clocks and they had no idea, in the long arctic darkness, whether it was day or night. Eventually they made a twelve hour sand glass to estimate with, but the feeling conveyed by Dooley’s phrasing, with its echo of Eliot’s “time future contained in time past, if all time is eternally present,” and of Auden’s historian with his interest in the present only as it relates to the past and the future, is of the long suspension of time in the cold and dark. Her image of "everything drained, thinned/ to a blankness, pattern that lost all pattern,” not only captures the dense snow falls and the two inches of ice on the walls around the trapped men but it echoes Auden’s vision in Memorial for the City, where “The humor, the cuisine, the rites, the taste, The pattern of the City, are erased.” Dooley, however, turns away from despair. Perhaps she knows that as the ice began to break around Berentz’s men in the spring “the piles resembled the houses of a great city, interspersed with apparent towers, steeples and chimneys,” rebuilding the civilization the cold and dark had torn down. The same “glint of refraction,” that distorted Berentz’s story also caused him to see “the sun at Nova Zembla on the 20th of January, 1597, fifteen days before he was expected,” a point of optimism and hope perhaps alluded to in her phrasing, and certainly in line with her next image. After a lifetime of looking, William Bentley manages to isolate, from the bleakness of snow, its individual flakes, and discover “no two ice flowers are alike,” moving from winter to spring inside a single phrase.

The final stanza turns back to the warming streets of the opening lines, and the anticipated melt, to make apparent the vision of the poem and justify what Wilkinson calls the “ambitious ecological tone” of the work. The attitude of Auden’s historian is important here. He believed that this historical world is a redeemable world. The sleet and slush that confronts Dooley’s narrator when she looks out of her ice window is a “damp longing for silence,” “that might be a city made strange, life under water,” life after the untempered fire of the sun does its worst, life after the flood, but it predicts, as the Welsh prophetess predicted, an impending disaster that the right choices on our part might avert.

Dooley’s imagery is lyrical, concrete and metaphorically apt, at the same time as it is so richly allusive that in twenty-five short lines “it orders into a possible community a crowd of past historic occasions,”* and encapsulates Auden’s idea that “historical foundations are crucial for supporting a contemporary poetry which is itself meant to play a crucial role in the act of living.”**

*Auden
**Daniel S Holder on Auden’s “Writing.”

The Penny of His Attention

2009-04-09T21:27:00.001-07:00

29 May, 1956
Dear Mr. Shakespeare,
I remember promising to send you in writing an account of what I conceive to be the purpose of my poetry, though I think I was possibly over-confident when I did so. Such explanations usually read very heavily. However, put it this way: I have no ideas on what poetry is, in the abstract, but I have sometimes asked myself in the past what exactly I am doing when I write a poem. Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt or perceived. I feel it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation, since one’s deepest impulse in writing (or, I must admit, painting or composing) is to my mind not “I must tell everybody about that” (ie. Responsibility to other people) but “I must stop that from being forgotten if I can” (ie. Responsibility towards subject). When writing a poem I am trying to construct a verbal device or machine which will, upon reading, render up the emotion I originally experienced to as many people as possible for as long as possible. You’ll remember I called it a slot machine into which the reader inserts the penny of his attention. Of course, the process of preservation does imply communication, since that is the only way an experience can be preserved . . .the distinction between communication and preservation is one of motive, and I think the latter word gives a very proper emphasis to the language-as–preserver rather than language-as-communication. In other words it makes it sound harder, which it is! I forget if you asked me whether I thought poetry important: I’m afraid my opinion on it would be about as valuable as that of a beaver upon dams. It’s certainly important to me, but I doubt if the world would miss it much. All the same, I can’t imagine how people exist without practicing some form of art...
Yours sincerely,
Philip Larkin

From The Times Literary Supplement, April 3, 2009

Nibbling on Anthologies, Old and New

2009-04-08T17:11:00.000-07:00

Hayden Carruth's anthology is a definite "must buy" for me, but I still have ink dribbling down my chin from nibbling on the Norton Anthology's American Hybrid. Yes, I bought a brand spanking new edition, and "no", I am not tearing it up to feed to my Chow Chow pawing at the back door. I actually liked some of the poems in it. Some of these poets would be most welcome amidst us Plumbliners. Some of them are, to use my favorite Midwestern jargon, "damn fine" poets.

For instance, some of Donald Revell's work in this anthology appears relatively transparent, serious, and grounded. Does he use classic turns in his work? No, not all of the time. Does spirit and earthiness disappear into techno talk? No, he actually made sense to me. For example, "My Trip" seemed lucid--even though I must admit I read it while sipping on a Cabernet Sauvignon with Schubert's final symphony echoing in the background.

Here is my challenge to all of us Plumbliners: peruse American Hybrid and find one poem that reflects our Aristotelian/ spiritual/ lucid quest. Let us be tough but fair. Let us use actual examples from poetry to make our points more clear.

I must go, as my Chow Chow is whining, and I am beginning to bore myself.

new to the Plumb

2009-04-07T20:09:00.000-07:00

Very pleased to welcome Susan Sonnen to the Plumbline School!

Second thoughts : Hayden Carruth's anthology

2009-04-07T18:05:00.000-07:00

I'm still getting started with Voice That Is Great Within Us. & wanted again to express gratitude to Joseph D. for drawing attention to this anthology. Now I think my rather tetchy comments of previous post revealed the typical defensiveness of a somewhat self-educated poet, faced with a Great Voice...

First of all, the Bantam edition is not so hard to read! (& anyway, the nearest library probably owns a hardback version.) More importantly, the poems are nourishing, in a way not suggested by my initial, judgemental remarks.

It was quite astute of JD to juxtapose this anthology to the factional perspective of Ron Silliman & his cohorts. There is a distinction to be made between objectivity and mere abstraction, between impersonality and de-personalization. & in this regard maybe there is more to be said about the Poetry-Industrial Complex as it has developed over the last century. The valorizing of Innovation in the arts seems closely tied to the 19th-century March of Progress, mechanized industrialization, the rise of technocracy. The social revolution idealized by the supposedly activist poetics of the "experimental" wing always requires an antagonist/partner in the struggle : thus poets are shuttled like flocks of geese into various tendencies & movements, and these groupings then provide more grist for the intellectual mills...

Meanwhile - as a result of so much bustle of cognitive & verbal activity - the distinctive, the personal, the subjective, the psychic, the basically artistic, the substantially poetic - along with, ironically, the shared, the ordinary, the everyday, the common, the universal - all these tend to get lost in the shuffle, or slotted into some ideological program or other.

I realize these remarks will sound reactionary in some quarters. A-political. An echo of "Fugitive" anachronism. My answer to that is twofold. First, read Carruth's anthology. It's neither a-political nor reactionary (though it is, understandably, a reflection of its time). One of the things poetry - like science - does, is to bend so lovingly & attentively over its own proper materials (language, ordinary speech, the world of song... the world itself, as an expression of beauty) that a kind of independent objectivity (ie., freedom) arises naturally out of such devotion. This is how poetry attains to something like architecture or sculpture : to the wholeness, quiddity & disinterestedness of natural objects (a measure of Keatsian "negative capability", freed from "irritable reaching"). Stone, sunlight.

Second, I would like to point toward the inevitable subjectivity of human experience. My sensibility is not the same as yours; my background & consciousness & personality & character & fate are my own. This essential difference is something we all share in common, alongside all the general human traits & genetic inheritance & history. & what is poetry, & what is a poet to us? As I see it, a poet is someone who steps forward & makes a song, speaks artfully, out of the depths of both private & shared experience. This takes a certain gift & a certain (brave, vain?) willingness - to stand up & represent reality through words, to evoke & articulate one's individual sensibility & understanding. Because in a way every poem is an end in itself : every poem, in its very practical uselessness, is a summing-up of life. A formulation. So the poet stands at the end of the line, as a summation (every poem says "the buck stops here"). & this aspect of "the end", it seems to me, militates against the submerging of the individual talent into general ideas of historical development, artistic movements, & so on. Every poem is an act of individuation : & I include in this Homer, Shakespeare, Langland, Rilke... all of them, every artist.

Along with this, I would add that I respect Ron Silliman, & believe I understand, somewhat, his impulse to celebrate the energized, the contrary, the unofficial streams in American poetry, as opposed to the staid & the conventional. What I am suggesting is that the idea of the artist at the forefront of history & social change is itself a shackling cliche, because it subordinates the individual mind, heart & spirit of the poet to some kind of program. Very valid & wise endeavors for human improvement lead the way : they are an necessary element of survival & humane civilization : but the artist, qua artist, must approach them on his or her terms. & that involves something distinctly primordial & sui generis - the process of art-making itself - which cannot be managed or harnessed or even explained completely (hard & carefully as Aristotle tried) from the bleachers.

OK, I have rambled on more than I thought I would...

Charles Burchfield - Starlings in the Rain, Wellesville, Ohio 1920

A new member of the Plumbline

2009-04-07T06:28:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to welcome Chris Bays to the Plumbline School!

On First Looking into Carruth's Anthology

2009-04-06T16:22:00.000-07:00

Some off-the-cuff reactions...

Have to admit I've never seriously perused The Voice That Is Great Within Us. Came out in 1970, the year I went to college. Already by then I considered myself a bonafide poet, having written many poems (starting around 1965) & having read TWO (two!) NY School anthologies, as well as that fine collection, A Gift of Watermelon Pickle (9th grade).

I'm sure I picked this up & glanced through it more than once. It was the kind of thing that scared me off.

Still in print... but the physical book says something about the state of poetry in the USA. Only $8., from Bantam Books - yet the blurred typeface, the sloppy production, is close to unreadable. You get what you pay for.

Might be interesting to compare Carruth's anthology to American Hybrid. & before compiling a new Voice That Is Great, we might want to linger here a while...

Strengths - clarity, simplicity, elegance. These poems are made things, distinct utterances. A clean austerity. Today we seem to have displaced this discursive independence. Poems are always pointing somewhere else - toward something personal, political, topical, moral (& most often, half-educated academic pseudo-aesthetical). Clever, officious, detached (or all three), they elbow you in the ribs. The fence between art & 24/7 news cycle etc. has been torn down. This makes contemporary poems both more knowing & less solid, somehow. (I'm GENERALIZING.)

Weaknesses - goes back to the same thing. Carruth has an instinct for the well-made poem, long after the demise of "New Criticism". Many of his selections seem to snap neatly shut, with a smug pursing of lips. I'm sure they (the poets) didn't think so : they were comparing themselves to those really neat snuff-boxes (think Frost, Hecht, Wilbur), whose Hippocrene perfection they had avoided (by way of free verse & a touch of Hemingway).

Missing : Richard Hugo, Edwin Honig, John Tagliabue... many more, certainly. Michael Harper (& these are just my personal acquaintances). But that's how it is with anthologies.

I don't mean to emphasize (supposed) weaknesses. Very glad that Joseph pointed this way. & I'm just starting to read it. (With the same old trepidation. Our greatest strength is ignorance.)

p.s. someone recently - a non-poet, but a poetry reader - sent a comment to one of the posts at the Harriet blog (I've looked for it, but haven't been able to find it). He said that in contemporary poetry he sees a lot of technical sophistication, learned in MFA programs - but not a lot of gravitas : that seriousness (of purpose) which we find compelling. There is some of that, however, all through the Carruth anthology : like certain paintings from the 30s & 40s. Clarity, simplicity - terse & direct presentation. Ordinary speech, forged & hammered into elegance.

Fashionable Nonsense

2009-04-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

Re. Joseph's comment on the previous post, about the theorising of poetic language as inaccessible to lived experience. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense - Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science discusses the abuse of concepts and terminology in talking, in their case, about philosophy and the natural sciences, but in a way equally applicable, as their examples show, to conversation about poetry, in an attempt to give discourse "a veneer of rigor." It seems to me that much of contemporary poetry - I was looking at polyaesthetics and mathematical poetry yesterday, for example - is incomprehensible, but much of contemporary discussion about poetry is equally opaque, and often, I suspect, for the reasons Bricmont and Sokal give below. I don't mean to say that poetic discourse uses scientific language, but that a clever person could change a few words in their introduction and produce an exactly parallel critique of what Joseph called ' the epistemological dead end of theorized language' about poetry. The common caution - "the opinions expressed in this posting are not necessarily those of the guys in charge" - obviously applies here.

"The goal of this book is to make a limited but original contribution toward the critique of the admittedly nebulous Zeitgeist that we have called "postmodernism". We make no claim to analyze postmodernist thought in general; rather, our aim is to draw attention to a relatively little-known aspect, namely the repeated abuse of concepts and terminology coming from mathematics and physics. We shall also analyze certain confusions of thought that are frequent in postmodernist writings and that bear on either the content or the philosophy of the natural sciences.

The word "abuse" here denotes one or more of the following characteristics:

1) Holding forth at length on scientific theories about which one has, at best, an exceedingly hazy idea. The most common tactic is to use scientific (or pseudo-scientific) terminology without bothering much about what the words actually mean.

2) Importing concepts from the natural sciences into the humanities or social sciences without giving the slightest conceptual or empirical justification. If a biologist wanted to apply, in her research, elementary notions of mathematical topology, set theory or differential geometry, she would be asked to give some explanation. A vague analogy would not be taken very seriously by her colleagues. Here, by contrast, we learn from Lacan that the structure of the neurotic subject is exactly the torus (it is no less than reality itself, cf. p. 20), from Kristeva that poetic language can be theorized in terms of the cardinality of the continuum (p. 40), and from Baudrillard that modern war takes place in a non-Euclidean space (p. 147)--all without explanation.

3) Displaying a superficial erudition by shamelessly throwing around technical terms in a context where they are completely irrelevant. The goal is, no doubt, to impress and, above all, to intimidate the non-scientist reader. Even some academic and media commentators fall into the trap: Roland Barthes is impressed by the precision of Julia Kristeva's work (p. 38) and Le Monde admires the erudition of Paul Virilio (p. 169).

4) Manipulating phrases and sentences that are, in fact, meaningless. Some of these authors exhibit a veritable intoxication with words, combined with a superb indifference to their meaning.

These authors speak with a self-assurance that far outstrips their scientific competence: Lacan boasts of using "the most recent development in topology" (pp. 21-22) and Latour asks whether he has taught anything to Einstein (p. 131). They imagine, perhaps, that they can exploit the prestige of the natural sciences in order to give their own discourse a veneer of rigor. And they seem confident that no one will notice their misuse of scientific concepts. No one is going to cry out that the king is naked.

Our goal is precisely to say that the king is naked (and the queen too). But let us be clear. We are not attacking philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general; on the contrary, we feel that these fields are of the utmost importance and we want to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism. In particular, we want to "deconstruct" the reputation that certain texts have of being difficult because the ideas in them are so profound. In many cases we shall demonstrate that if the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing.

There are many different degrees of abuse. At one end, one finds extrapolations of scientific concepts, beyond their domain of validity, that are erroneous but for subtle reasons. At the other end, one finds numerous texts that are full of scientific words but entirely devoid of meaning. And there is, of course, a continuum of discourses that can be situated somewhere between these two extremes. Although we shall concentrate in this book on the most manifest abuses, we shall also briefly address some less obvious confusions concerning chaos theory (Chapter 7).

Let us stress that there is nothing shameful in being ignorant of calculus or quantum mechanics. What we are criticizing is the pretension of some celebrated intellectuals to offer profound thoughts on complicated subjects that they understand, at best, at the level of popularizations.

At this point, the reader may naturally wonder: Do these abuses arise from conscious fraud, self-deception, or perhaps a combination of the two? We are unable to offer any categorical answer to this question, due to the lack of (publicly available) evidence. But, more importantly, we must confess that we do not find this question of great interest. Our aim here is to stimulate a critical attitude, not merely towards certain individuals, but towards a part of the intelligentsia (both in the United States and in Europe) that has tolerated and even encouraged this type of discourse. "

2009-04-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

For anyone interested in the recent discussion here and in Joseph's blog about a new Great Voices list, and who missed Mark Wallace's February discussion of Michael Theune's review of The Iowa Anthology of new American Poetries, it's worth taking a look at, especially as a lesson in the fraught business of making a list in the first place. I particulary appreciated Michael's remark, near the top of the long list of comments following the entry, that "While the middle space seems like it is a meeting ground for opposites, and so signals an end to the “poetry wars,” middle space poetry (as I argue in my forthcoming review) in fact very often depends on an other to define itself against. Much middle space theory sets itself up over and against a whole range of “accessible” poetry, from slam to “ultra-talk”/”stand up” poetry. Middle space poetry does not end the poetry wars, but rather wages it by other means." I had naively thought the Plumbline School, by promulgating an avoidance of extremes, would be a non-conflict zone. I begin to see the error of my ways.

A New Anthology?

2009-04-02T06:24:00.000-07:00

Picking up from the comments to my previous post about The Voice that is Great Within Us:

If we start in 1914, we lose Eliz. Bishop, who was born in 1911, as well as Chas. Olson (1910) and Th. Roethke (1908). Then there were a bunch of American poets born in 1923 - 1926 who have always seemed to me to form a generational group: W.S. Merwin, Donald Justice, James Dickey, Anthony Hecht, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Koch, Jack Spicer, A.R. Ammons, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, David Wagoner, then 1n 1927, John Ashbery. It's remarkable how many of those were born in 1926 alone.

So, many anthologies of modern American poetry begin with Whitman and Dickinson as founding figures, and go on from there. Anthologies of Contemporary American poetry often begin with Pound, Williams, and Eliot, the generation that we'd be cutting off in favor of some new beginning. What would that beginning look like? Lowell and Bishop, even though Bishop comes too early?

The first poet in the Carruth anthology to be born in 1914 is John Berryman, perhaps not an exemplary founding figure, but an interesting one. David Ignatow, Weldon Kees, William Stafford, and Randall Jarrell, are also born in 1914. I lay out all these names and dates in order to discover whetehr there might be some generational logic that would allow us to begin our anthology less arbitrarily than merely picking a date. I'd be inclined to go back and pick up Olson, Bishop and Roethke myself, but I'd be interested to hear what others might do with this chronology.

The Halt

2009-04-01T20:48:00.000-07:00

In honour of National Poetry Month I propose, at the risk of exposing the abysmal gaps in my education and hogging the blog, to discover some new poets. New to me, I mean, not new to the rest of the world. The first problem is, how exactly does one go about constructively broadening one’s horizons. I could find a thousand unknown versifiers on the internet if I had worlds enough and time but I haven’t. I’m looking for poets who fill the gaps not just pleasant dalliances. I could just open the updated and expanded version of The Voice That is Great Within Us that’s being bandied about by the erudite guys who run this operation but they’re still debating the table of contents so I’m on my own.
A happy accident led me, this morning, to the Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert. That he’s an honorary Plumbline poet is indisputable. In a talk given at a conference organized by the journal Odra he said: "So not having pretensions to infallibility, but stating only my predilections, I would like to say that in contemporary poetry the poems that appeal to me the most are those in which I discern something I would call a quality of semantic transparency (a term borrowed from Husserl's logic). This semantic transparency is the characteristic of a sign consisting in this: that during the time when the sign is used, attention is directed towards the object denoted, and the sign itself does not hold the attention. The word is a window onto reality."For Herbert “a bird is a bird/slavery slavery/a knife a knife/death is death.”
“Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is no wizardry of words.”

The first poem I came across was ‘The Halt.’

“We halted in a town the host
ordered the table to be moved to the garden the first star
shone out and faded we were breaking bread
crickets were heard in the twilight loosestrife
a cry but a cry of a child otherwise the bustle
of insects of men a thick scent of earth
those who were sitting with their backs to the wall
saw violet now - the gallows hill
on the wall the dense ivy of executions

we were eating much
as is usual when nobody pays”

Given Herbert’s involvement in the Polish resistance during World War II and in the political situation in Poland as it developed over his lifetime it’s fairly easy to read The Halt as a poem about men in a desperate struggle pausing for awhile in a garden. To begin with there is the word ‘halt’. Not stop, or pause, or rest, but halt, with its harsh middle English/ Germanic sound, its military associations and its sense of a temporary suspension of something ongoing. The piece is full of Christian symbolism - the hortus conclusus, the evening star that calls to Vespers, the breaking of the bread, the echoes of the supper at Emmaus and the gallows hill – that seems to function as a device for gaining or maintaining a broader perspective on the situation at hand. That such overt religious gestures manage to pass almost unnoticed at least in a first reading is probably due to the slightly disorienting effect of no punctuation and the tension immediately induced in the reader by the uneasy combination of peace and menace in the imagery. Garden, star, cricket, loosestrife, the bustle of insects, the smell of earth all suggest an almost pastoral repose disturbed by the host ordering the table moved instead of requesting it, by the cry, which is quickly accounted for by the phrase ‘but a cry of a child’ as if it might be interpreted as something altogether less benign, by the men with their backs to a wall and by the gallows hill and the dense ivy of executions immediately following. It was the phrase ‘ivy of executions’ that first caught my attention and having read the poem several times I’m still not sure what it means but it’s certainly one of those things that communicates before it’s understood. Ivy has long been emblematic of death and resurrection, but is also associated with fidelity and memory. A plaque in the Mehrinplatz, in Berlin, quotes Herbert as saying “The loss of memory by a nation is also its loss of conscience,” and it’s not much of a jump to see how ivy, in that context, might come to be associated with executions, especially by someone involved in political struggle. The last two lines seem to me likely to refer to the necessity of taking of responsibility for one’s actions, on a personal and/or political level. Bogdana and John Carpenter noted that the poems of Pan Cogito “consistently apply ethics not only to action but to the possible, viable action of everyday life, taking human failings into account,” and that observation seems relevant here.
In Herbert’s ‘Still Life with Bridle’ the coming of twilight and the shifting of the ambient light to violet featured in A Halt is paralleled in a paragraph that could stand as its prose prelude - "Dusk is falling, the last acrid, Egyptian yellows go out, cinnabar becomes gray and fragile, the last fireworks of the day grow dark. All of a sudden there is an unexpected pause, a short-lasting interval in the darkness as if somebody in a hurry opened the door from a light room into a dark room." The Halt is that pause or interval in the darkness but the men around the table plainly see that it will descend around them again. The space may temporarily be transformed into a hortus deliciarum, oriented to the pleasures of its owner, the bossy host, and his guests but the Christian symbolism underlying the imagery suggests that Herbert believes the door will open again onto the light.
One little poem is hardly an education in a man’s life work but it’s one poem more than I knew this morning and one poet more that I have at least a nod in the street acquaintance with. If you mention his name over dinner I’ll at least be able to pretend I know who you’re talking about.

The Voice that is Great Within Us

2009-03-31T15:21:00.000-07:00

About the time Henry initiated the Plumbline School, Ron Silliman was drawing up lists, one of which indicated that Hayden Carruth "isn't much read" these days, a judgment I started out to dispute, then thought, "Oh, what the hell," and let it drop. Many of Carruth's books are in print -- there are both a Collected Longer Poems and a Collected Shorter Poems from Copper Canyon Press, along with several books of essays on poetry and jazz. Carruth was a second-generation American modernist, though, and it is that generation, that includes Lowell and Bishop and Roethke, that the currently ascendent schools of poetry must be at pains to dismiss; thus, I'd argue, Silliman's offhand remark.

But that's by way of prologue. Carruth has been very important to me in charting my own course down the center. So I was pleased to find Henry's post with the long quote from Carruth the other day. Here is another part of the case for Carruth being made an honorary member of the Plumbline School: His 1970 mass-market poetry anthology (also still in print), The Voice that is Great Within Us. I'm just getting ready to return to Vietnam. When I go there, I usually try to take a couple of American books to give to friends there, many of whom are English teachers and professional translators, and poets. In browsing around Amazon, I ran across the Carruth anthology, which I have given away to many students over the years, but which I hadn't looked at closely for a while. I ordered a copy, which arrived yesterday. In his introduction, Carruth talks about getting an envelope of poems from Wallace Stevens on day and another from E.E. Cummings the next when he was editor of Poetry magazine. He goes on to sketch out the capaciousness of American poetry and his anthology selections reveal a very wide taste; more than that, they reveal a time in American poetry before the Fall.

A look at the Table of Contents of The Voice that is Great Within Us provides evidence of a prelapsarian paradise where Jack Spicer and Conrad Aiken have converse, where Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fearing meet on friendly terms, and so on: Lorine Niedecker, Richard Eberhardt, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Thomas McGrath, William Bronk, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Donald Justic, Richard Wilbur. . . Carruth's anthology suggests that American poets might have more in common than they realize. The recent divisions are largely political, I'd argue, rather than aesthetic. No, check that. I'd say that in the recent divisions into schools, a narrow politics drives aesthetics.

Seventh Street

2009-03-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

Kit Robinson's "Seventh Street" (from The Messianic Trees) begins with description:

Over and above
old captains' houses
now fallen into
funk, the train

passes. Further, trucks
docked to load
manifest ramps, then
darkness of tunnel

and the passengers reflect
on each other.
Light nicks the
surface of the

globe, even under
water.

On a train, someone describes what he sees (houses, trucks, a tunnel, passengers), then takes a first interpretive step in the third sentence, though still in a very descriptive mode.

But the diction changes in the next sentence, from a description to the word "description":

.... This lazy
description of the
way things are

tells more than
it knows.

A "lazy" description might contrast with a "hard-working" or "serious" description, in which case the descriptive mode of the first 13 1/2 lines of the poem is being criticized. But "lazy" can also mean "relaxed," the opposite of "tense" or "stressed out," in which case the previous mode is not being criticized.

The phrase "tells more than / it knows" is also ambiguous: it might mean the description is more a matter of telling than of knowing (more mimesis than epistemology?). If this is combined with the critical reading of "lazy," then the poem would be arguing against that descriptive mode because description does not generate knowledge.

But "tells more than / it knows" might mean something like "says more than it realizes it is saying," in which case the "lazy description" is being given a positive value because of its suggestiveness.

Further, I also hear a play on "tells more than / it [shows]" here. In many discussions of poetry, "description of the / way things are" is privileged because it shows rather than tells, so this moment in "Seventh Street" could be understood as a counterargument: this "showing" mode "tells" as much as it shows; it "tells more than / it knows [it does]" not in the sense of being suggestive but in the sense of "telling" more than it is intended to, and more than it is aware of in its emphasis on "showing."

Now, the shift in the poem's diction (from "concrete" to "abstract") does suggest, at least at first, that the poem privileges its critique of "lazy / description" and of the mode of "show, don't tell." If that was all it did (without a possible counter-reading), it would be a matter of "lazy abstraction" arguing with "lazy description," and it would hardly be worth talking about at this length.

However, the next sentence begins to make clear that things are not that simple:

.... Say
something about conditions
and you have

that to look
at too.

The diction remains "abstract" while also becoming self-referential: "something about conditions" is what the previous sentence brought into the poem. Such abstraction, this sentence concludes, is also something "to look at," just as the scene described earlier was something to look at. The poem makes "you" "look at" these modes and see them not as a hierarchy but as an interwoven pair that poems have to work with. "Telling" is not being privileged over "showing," in a critique of those who would privilege "showing" over "telling"; rather, the inevitable interaction of the two modes is being acted out, through both modes at the same time.

This interaction becomes completely clear in the poem's final sentence:

.... Your
station stop is
this writing's end.

The "lazy / description" and the mode of saying "something about conditions" have been kept in separate sentences until now (hence my emphasis on sentences), but they meet here in the conclusion, as the train ride stops and the poem ends. The two modes are not opposed; they interact. And they are, the poem argues, both necessary to the making of a poem, and to its interpretation.

(I am enormously grateful to Ron Silliman for his review of The Messianic Trees a few weeks ago, which inspired me to buy Robinson's book.)

[cross-posted from my blog]

Of the Center

2009-03-30T07:17:00.000-07:00

Hayden Carruth, as quoted by Don Share on his blog :

"Pound is the leader, at the very forefront. Yet because of that, paradoxically he is at the center too: so much - one is inclined to say everything - comes from him. We at the center have a difficult time, often enough; always defining and redefining our position, entering correctives to the debonair pronouncements of the extremes. Not rationalism, we say somewhat acidly, but let us at least be reasonable; not positivism, but not enigma either; and in the matter of fashion, yes, we are friends with Robert Lowell, but we are friends with Robert Creeley too. It is a difficult work. But we take comfort from knowing that Pound is one of us, a man of the center, and that the love of proportion and justice requires, not a baser passion, as some assert, but on the contrary, as in his writing, the strongest and purest passion of all."

-- Hayden Carruth, "On a Picture of Ezra Pound," Poetry, May 1967

Holding such views about the "center", perhaps Carruth should be made an honorary member (sadly posthumous) of the Plumbline School. I know Joseph Duemer has spoken of him.

Transparence and obscurity

2009-03-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

There’s an interesting commentary by Hugo Williams in this week’s TLS that comes at the question of transparence and obscurity from a practical slant. He’s talking about the fact that his poems are often short.

“’What’s the matter?’ said Wilko Johnson, a musician, who, admittedly, always fills up his tracks with music. ‘Couldn’t you think of anything else to put?’ He has a point. Often I can’t. Or rather, I can’t think of the other thing which might be made to lean up against the initial burst of activity like a kind of dream neighbour. I love it when a poet takes a risk and hands you something impossible which you have to deal with on your own. The spark which jumps across the opposing terminals delivers a participative shock, which is poetry’s secret weapon. Who did that? You did! Unfortunately the times when the two halves ‘pay back’ are rare; more usually the leap seems fanciful, a try-on, so you put the second part on a new page and call it a new poem.”

Or you don’t. You let it stand and trust to the reader to make some sense of it when there’s a good chance the pay off will be inadequate to the effort, simply because you haven’t worked hard enough, you were being self indulgent, or as Williams suggests, your original impulse was slightly off base.

The ‘jump across opposing terminals’ doesn’t just happen at key structural moments, of course. In some poems every line is a leap of faith, every image, allusion or metaphor a hurdle, either because the source material is impossibly obscure or impossibly personal. The impossibly obscure category shrinks daily as cultural source material is so readily available that anyone with access to the internet can figure out just about any reference to anything that actually comes from the collective culture. A student approaching The Wasteland, for the first time, for example, could easily improve on Eliot’s own notes in a few hours. Even allusions that could reasonably be expected to belong to the collective unconscious are traceable, but no-one except your therapist can be expected to know that the ‘whip stitch’d boat shoes’ in your poem stand in for the fact that your dad regularly beat the daylights out of you when he took you out in the motorsailer on Sunday afternoons, and it’s just not cricket if the poem makes no sense without that titbit of information.

Joseph Hutchison's March 26th blog entry on Ivan Blatny provides a perfect example both of the structural neighbour from hell jump and the deliberately obscure one. Blatny may have had insanity as an excuse but we’ll bracket that and just look at the poem, which is a short one.

MISSPELLED
So restoration is not spelled au
I spelled it so thinking of the czech word restaurace
to restore
and go with a lady to the Room
like a unicorn in the mirror
all naked in the mirrors
so that I could see the blood trickling.

Hutchison’s analysis is a much more rewarding read than the poem itself, and includes a defence of the work as well, but the main points are that leap from the discussion of a spelling error to the going somewhere with an unknown lady bit, and then the opacity of the images in the last four lines. It’s possible there is a connection between the two parts, and it’s possible that the images are directly related to it – perhaps the young Blatny failed a spelling quiz in eighth grade and his teacher took him into the next room and caned him till he bled, which reminded him of the school play, a version of Equus, starring unicorns instead of horses, set in the hall of mirrors at Versailles and directed by said teacher, because the English teacher always directs the play - it’s possible, but it’s not relevant or fair. The reader has no way of knowing what Blatny’s ‘tics’ or the poem mean, regardless of what Johannes Goransson claims to the contrary, and any guesses he might make won’t repay his efforts with comprehension. There’s no “participative shock,” as Williams puts it. Poetry, like religion, requires a certain degree of comfort in the presence of the unknowable, but it shouldn’t expect its devotees to live in complete darkness and isolation.

Reginald Shepherd talks, in a recent entry on his blog, about the unavoidable and legitimate difficulty of poetry addressing complex subjects and mentions Eliot’s remark that true poetry communicates before it is understood. He gives the example of reading Prufrock for the first time and says that it was the feeling of the poem, its language and emotions that led to a desire to understand it. Eliot however didn’t shirk the surely primary responsibility of actually being understandable once the effort was made. Shepherd uses the examples of Sudoku and crossword puzzles as an indication of the willingness of people to engage in considerable mental effort to no really practical end, but I think it’s highly unlikely that anyone without the incentive of professional or academic interest is going to expend as much effort on a poem as they would on a crossword puzzle. I’m not saying they have their priorities in order, I’m just saying it’s so. Hutchison could have done a month of Sundays worth of puzzles in the time he took to come up almost empty handed on ‘Misspelled.’ For most readers the ‘pay back’ has to be better than that. Yeats put it well.

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart.

He was ostensibly talking about theatre but the warning also applies here. It’s a sad end for a poetry lover.

Equal Weight

2009-03-26T07:08:00.001-07:00

From "All He Surveyed", Paul Goldberger's article on the architect Palladio, in current New Yorker (3.30.09) :

"It’s odd to think of history’s most famous architect being as obsessed with animal smells as he was with scale and proportion. But not being afraid of the ordinary side of his job was a key component of Palladio’s genius. To him, architecture existed to solve problems, and he seems to have given equal weight to elevating the image of his clients, making their lives function more smoothly, and creating beautiful objects for the world. Figuring out where to put the farm animals and shaping designs of transcendent beauty were all in a day’s work."

Welcome

2009-03-26T04:42:00.000-07:00

Happy to welcome Mairi Graham to the Plumbline School!

The Gap in the Middle

2009-03-20T16:55:00.000-07:00

Martin Earl, in his recent post over at the Harriet blog today, had this to say :

"But poetry has lost its documentary rigor; even the sense of documentary rigor in the way John Ashbery conceives of it, as a flux of detail that is intensely particular but oddly impersonal, fundamentally aleatory. Marilyn Hacker achieves this same rigor. In her case the observing self is foregrounded, but held mercifully in check by traditional craft. In the cases of both poets, the aesthetic carriage is unimpeachable. Most of contemporary poetry’s interests, especially among the younger poets, range from disposable meta-poetic performance on one end of the spectrum to the anemic representation of the feeling self on the other. The world – as a subject – seems to have fallen through the gap in the middle."

This attitude - look for a balance between craft & "documentation", by means of which "the world" can emerge as "a subject" - seems near to some of the things we have been talking about here.

Poetry and Tags

2009-03-19T08:17:00.000-07:00

Rob Mackenzie neatly summarizes and tellingly quotes from a Cleanth Brooks essay here. You need to read Rob's post for the full contextualization of the telling quotation, but here it is anyway (the poem in question is Robert Herrick’s Corinna’s Going a-Maying):

What does this poem communicate? If we are content with the answer that the poem says that we should enjoy youth before youth fades, and if we are willing to write off everything else in the poem as ‘decoration,’ then we can properly censure [modern poets such as] Eliot or Auden or Tate for not making poems so easily tagged. But in that case we are not interested in poetry; we are interested in tags.

This implies that what "modern" poets do is write poetry without such "tags," such simple messages that one can glean from a poem. And note that the three poets Brooks lists as "modern" could not be more different from each other.

What comes to mind for me is something I read sometime last year in which a non-reader of poetry responded to Carol Ann Duffy's poems by calling them "difficult." For readers of contemporary poetry, this is a bit of a shock: one may or may not like Duffy's poems, but they are not difficult (at least not compared to those written by the vast majority of contemporary poets with several books to their names).

But perhaps the difficulty in question is the absence of such "tags."

[Cross-posted, as Joseph D. suggested, from my blog.]

Your Brain on Poetry

2009-03-19T05:03:00.000-07:00

Apologies for not posting here for a while. I'm preparing to go to Vietnam for several weeks beginning next month, but I have been thinking about the issues central to the Plumbline School's project, as I understand it. What follows is just a couple of quotes with brief comments, but perhaps they will be of interest. I expect to have several more things to post her in the next few days, then there will be a period of silence while I travel. Since I'm going to be hanging out with poets in Vietnam, perhaps I'll have some things to share. Anyway, here are some notes posted earlier this morning on my own blog:

I'm not big on biological reductionism when it comes to the arts, especially when the evolutionary biologists start talking about the "evolutionary value" of this or that cultural practice, making up their little just-so stories. But I was intrigued the other day by this article describing the way the brain processes jokes. It occurred to me long ago that a lyric poem and a joke share certain structural similarities -- ones Michael Theune could no doubt elucidate in detail -- but in simplest form, the punchline, the payoff, the turn or the pivot that surprises. So here we have the human brain, which loves pattern and repetition, music:

This process, of memory formation by neuronal entrainment, helps explain why some of life's offerings weasel in easily and then refuse to be spiked. Music, for example. "The brain has a strong propensity to organize information and perception in patterns, and music plays into that inclination," said Michael Thaut, a professor of music and neuroscience at Colorado State University. "From an acoustical perspective, music is an overstructured language, which the brain invented and which the brain loves to hear."

But the joke, which the brain also likes, depends on variation and timing and detail:

Really great jokes, on the other hand, punch the lights out of do re mi. They work not by conforming to pattern recognition routines but by subverting them. "Jokes work because they deal with the unexpected, starting in one direction and then veering off into another," said Robert Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of "Laughter: A Scientific Investigation." "What makes a joke successful are the same properties that can make it difficult to remember."

In poetry, then, one is forcing the brain to operate on more than one level. In an older paradigm -- that of the left and right hemispheres of the brain -- it was possible to imagine something similar going on: the left hemisphere's interest in and control over meter and pattern combining with the right hemisphere's interest in novel arrangements. The physiology is of course much more complicated that the metaphor, but the metaphor is still suggestive. Poetry integrates different kinds of cognition, even kinds that might seem to be in conflict with each other.

A good joke or a good poem has a ground of pattern against which a specific path is picked out and that path has turns and surprises concealed in it, sometimes using the camouflage of pattern to conceal itself until the right moment. Question: What does the surprise -- the punchline -- yield in terms of knowledge? Insight? Understanding? Can a punchline or a surprise be empty?

Tramps in Mud-Time

2009-03-12T12:02:00.000-07:00

Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.
- Robert Frost, "Two Tramps in Mud-Time"

Some discussions over at the Harriet blog have distracted me from the Plumb, but also got me ruminatin' again.

To whit : do poets take poetry too seriously? Is there a perceptual disjunction between poets & readers? Do readers read for pleasure, & poets write for something else? Is what is play, for the reader, rather serious work for the poet? Or is the reader passionately searching for sustenance (as Franz Wright recently claimed), while poets are playing effete games?

A possibly related question : what happened to the ancient "dignity" of the poet? Dante thought of his poem as a work of moral edification. The works of Homer & the Greek dramatists served as benchmarks of public morality, the source of proverbial sententiousness, the foils for the Platonic Academy. Has poetry devolved to mere entertainment - diversion - pleasant pastime?

Is there such a thing as "serious play" anymore (a conjunction of opposites, there)?

This is a question which bears not only on poetry per se, but on the place of literature & literate culture in the world at large.

It also bears, I suppose, on the old mystery of the Person, the "status of the individual", "subjectivity" and common life. Is the individual person a phantasm of biological &/or economic forces, an accidental product of necessity? Or is the individual Person the measure of all things, the pivot of both freedom and responsibility? This bears on our conception of art : is it a purely social product, with a public function & a set of common, shared dimensions? Or is it the purest expression of individual personality, rising from the depths of (Proustian, say) subjectivity, and (Freudian, say) psychology? From the hidden places of childhood, of personal memory & desire, our emotional roots?

For the moment I just want to toss these questions out there... often however I sense this underlying unease or nervousness in American poetry culture, which might have something to do with an uncertainty about what is the right balance of seriousness & fun, responsibility & freedom. (Or maybe it's just me...)

F.D. Reeve & the invisible currency

2009-03-08T19:17:00.000-07:00

From a letter to the NYT Book Review, in the March 8th issue, from poet F.D. Reeve (responding to David Orr's essay of previous week, on poetic "greatness"):

"Greatness isn't the problem; irresponsibility is. The avaricious banker's greed is matched by the self-centered poet's solipsism. Neither cares about the social context; neither even conceives that success depends on the aptness of the work's social function and a discipline's formal power. From reading a book of poems we should have an idea of the basic nature of a society and its culture. Ignorant of and indifferent to their useful roles, however, the banker grabs all the bonuses possible and the poet concocts endless, irrelevant lyrics. Bankers who value this conventional poetry contribute to the foundations that support it, and poets who want to be published provide the material. Now, perhaps, if enough banks fall and enough publishing comglomerates collapse, we'll discover our oddballs, our different voices, our adequate innovators, who, like Dickinson, like Melville, like Whitman in their time, have been invisible in ours."

Trying and failing vs. trying to fail

2009-03-07T12:59:00.000-08:00

The sentence—as opposed to the fragment ...—the sentence tries and fails. (Joseph Duemer)

When I was in graduate school, I was fully absorbed in literary theory—which is not a surprise, since the program I was in was called "Comparative Literature and Literary Theory." I had a period in which I was quite fascinated by Jacques Derrida—especially by his studies of those writers whose work is especially susceptible to deconstruction because their ambitions for completeness are so especially extreme: Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, or Edgar Allan Poe (at least as Jacques Lacan read him).

Even then, I was struck by something odd about those postmodernists who held up Derrida as a reason to write fragmentary, incomplete texts. Such writers thought that the lesson of deconstruction was that one should not try to construct anything complete. Even then, that seemed like nonsense to me, even at a simple logical level: works which do not aim at wholeness are not interesting enough to deconstruct. A "fragment" that is intended as a fragment does not "try and fail," as Joseph Duemer puts it; instead, it tries to fail. The fact that attempts at wholeness or completeness will fail in ways that are inevitably invisible to the author but can be spotted by alert analysis is not grounds for fragmentary, incomplete work, be it anthropology, linguistics, fiction, or poetry. (There are, of course, many other putative reasons to be "postmodern," to which this critique does not apply!)

[Cross-posted on my blog, too.]

Language & the World

2009-03-06T18:15:00.000-08:00

Novelist John Banville in The Guardian: "Civilisation's greatest single invention is the sentence." [The rest of Banville's short statement is here.] While I don't subscribe to the young Wittgenstein's "picture theory" of language, in which every proposition is a picture of reality, as a writer, I have the strong sense that every sentence is a line thrown out into the world in order to retreive something of the real.Sometimes you catch something, sometimes you don't. But that doesn't quite catch it either; the sentence -- as opposed to the fragment, which is always self-referenmtial -- the sentence tries and fails. It is the pattern of those trials and errors that give us what access we have to the real.
_________________
Note: Cross-posted to Sharp Sand.

2009-03-06T08:50:00.000-08:00

Very pleased to welcome Andrew Shields to the Plumbline School!

The Sense of Being Right

2009-03-06T07:37:00.001-08:00

*
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls.

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
- Bob Dylan

No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.
- Gospel of Matthew (Sermon on the Mount)

Around 1930, when Stalinist repression was closing in around poet Osip Mandelstam, he was asked by an interviewer for a definition of poetry. He replied, in typical pithy fashion : "the poet's sense of being right" (or sense of "inner rightness").

M's adage planted itself in my mind years ago, & keeps returning, like an unsolved puzzle. About 13 years ago I wrote a couple of impressionistic essays for Chris Reiner's spunky little magazine Witz, which attempted to come to terms with it; I will try to come up with an online copy of the 2nd one ("Sense of Being Right"), which raised more questions than it answered. (The 1st Witz essay can be found here, & here.)

The crux of the puzzle is that M.'s defining characteristic for poetry comes not from aesthetics but from ethics and morality. In the latter Witz essay, I wrote that M. had asserted that poetry's purpose - its end, its telos - resided beyond itself : in a realm of the moral imperative, an ethical Absolute. "Rightness". And I said that it was a mistake to separate this moral telos from some hypothetical (aesthetic) beginning - in creative nature, in process or praxis, etc. Rather, M. is saying that the "beginning" is in the end : they cannot be separated. And he bolsters this position by suggesting that poetry (at least, Acmeist poetry - his poetry) has, as its subject, "the idea of Man". Not Man as Citizen (or subject of history or the State), but the idea of Man in its most universal and inclusive (& non-gender-specific!) sense :

"It's not Rome the city that lives through the centuries
But man's place in the universal scheme."

In other words : our human being, our nature as individuals and as species, is constituted and characterized by moral conscience. Our consciousness is a moral consciousness : our inner compass or gyroscope, our "sense of being right", is an expression of inherent justice (or the seeking thereof).

Mandelstam elaborates on this in another essay, on Pyotr Chaadev, a 19th-cent. thinker perhaps somewhat comparable to Emerson in the U.S. Chaadev's theme was that Russia's destiny depended on a quality (represented by the choices & acts of individual Russians) which he called "moral freedom". Roughly speaking, he was reminding Russians that individual conscience - and not the forces of the collective, the State, or history - is the anchor of civilization.

In another place, M. portrayed this general view of things as "the gold coins of humanism" - a Renaissance-vision of civilization as a kind of personalized, human hearth. Nothing is outside the human spirit, which makes the world a "home" ("domestic hellenism") : and yet Man is the measure of all things only so long as she/he remains devoted to a consciousness of rightness & justice - to an absolute, standing beyond our willful grasping. To a "plumbline", in other words. So this allegiance to something beyond ourselves is actually our defining, distinguishing characteristic - that which makes us human.

What I am suggesting here, is that our "plumbline" is not simply a kind of critical tape measure, a tool we can apply in some detached technocratic fashion. In Mandelstam's view, poetry is a living tradition, a distinct emanation of our humanness per se : it is far too engaged and intertwined with the moral & existential choices facing individuals and peoples, now & every day, to support the arrogance of mandarins, aesthetes, jobbers, technocrats. Poetry is the living speech of the Personal and the Human - the Individual and the People; that which reaches deep, grasping & mirroring our common nature with a piercing, proverbial intensity.

& if culture, civilization & poetry are built on the expressions of individual conscience & spiritual freedom, then, for working poets, issues of theme, rhetoric, & mode of address become both problematic & more pressing. None of the partial measures of value - populism, programmatic engagement, aesthetic autonomy, style for its own sake, canonicity, etc. etc. - can be deemed either absolute or even substantial. Rather, the measure of value seems to return to a kind of independent affinity of whole persons - a line of ethical/aesthetic communication - established between poet and reader, dramatist and audience. Here the ethical can be distinguished (analytically) from the aesthetic - but they cannot be separated. Poetry returns to humane expression between integral and individual persons. Concrete & unique, because moral-historical existence is only apprehended in the incomparable particulars of changing life.

Thus we are reminded that a plumbline dangles from a point of leverage (related, perhaps, as Joseph mentioned in a comment, to Pound's Confucian notion of the "unwobbling pivot") which stands in its own firmament, and firmly beyond the reach of those changeable circumstances to which it is applied as measure. This is an image of human conscience aligned with justice, the moral absolute. The fact that both poetry and human life generally dangle from the same spiritual pivot is what makes possible the various syntheses, on various levels (ethical, aesthetic, political), of the mediating "golden mean". And this same pivotal situation holds out a perennial promise to the artist, that her labors will find an echo with an understanding audience.

Plumbline Affinities

2009-03-05T08:07:00.000-08:00

John Latta, in his blog post of today (3.5.09), offers some sharp observations, which might be useful in relation to our own concept of a "plumbline". The values reflected in the poetry of Niedecker, Reznikoff, Bunting (via Eliot Weinberger, Latta himself & others) - some of the tendencies of the "Objectivist" movement, toward a balance between style and mimesis - would be worth our while exploring, if we want to avoid re-inventing the wheel (with rustier tools than they possessed)... In fact I think some of Zukofsky's critical writings - his way of conceptualizing poetry - could be aligned, to a degree anyway, with what we are attempting to outline here.

Robert Archambeau has also written in various places about documentary, "investigative poetics" of the 90s(?) (Kristen Prevallet, & others) - a trend in poetry that also shows some affinities...

On the other hand, I don't want to identify what we're just starting to do here, with any particular tradition or stream. I'm well aware that many of my own initial February posts on this blog come across as incredibly abstract, pedantic, turgid... but in my own defense, I'd say that we are trying to establish very basic foundations for new ways of reading poetry (our own & others').

The "plumbline" represents a jumble of building blocks, corresponding to elementary structural aspects of poems - functions which are often displaced in the ongoing discourse of reviews, polemics, chit-chat & so on. When you start to distinguish between these elements - when you mediate between them, analytically, with something like a plumbline - you set them in play : you make it possible to recognize balances & relations, discords & concords, in the making/reception of different works. It becomes possible to see how a poem can be both an integral work of art, and a reflection or re-invention of experience (the non-literary).

Here's Zukofsky, from his 1931 statement on Objectivism -

"An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. (Military use)—That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars."

Hybrids

2009-03-04T04:43:00.000-08:00

I've been reading casually in Swenson & St. John's American Hybrid. I'll have to read a lot more carefully before I try to say anything definitive, but my first impression is that there is a great deal of poetry here, but not so many poems. Another way of looking at this might be that many of the poets collected here are interested in texture at the expense of structure. For the moment, this is just a conjecture that needs to be fleshed out . . .

Pluralism?

2009-03-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

Are there really only "two traditions" of American poetry, as Ron Silliman says in passing in this blog post? And even if we can sort poets into one of two baskets, what value does the sorting have? And who dies it leave out? Isn't this a little like saying that there are two traditions in American religion, the Protestant and the Catholic. The first thing such a division does is erase all sorts of useful distinctions among members of those groups -- Lutherans are different from Pentecostals, etc. -- and the second thing it does is consign to oblivion anybody who won't fit into one of the baskets -- Jews, in my analogy, or Animists. I think this sort of binary thinking has led, not just to needless po-biz controversy, but to a real distortion of understanding of a poet like, say, Hayden Carruth, whom Silliman consigns to a "conservative" oblivion despite the fact that many of his books are in print and that -- at least among the folks I know -- he is still read. [More on Carruth shortly.] Maybe it was Henry Rago, in the issues of Poetry Silliman makes note of, who saw American poetry in its actual plurality rather than Daryl Hine and Silliman, who saw and continue to see it as divided and constrained.

Eliot & the lingua franca

2009-02-27T11:25:00.000-08:00

"Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself to be a return to common speech. That is the revolution which Wordsworth announced in his prefaces, and he was right; but the same revolution had been carried out a century before by Oldham, Waller, Denham and Dryden; and the same revolution was due again something over a century later. The followers of a revolution develop the new poetic idiom in one direction or another; they polish or perfect it; meanwhile the spoken language goes on changing, and the poetic idiom goes out of date... No poetry of course is ever exactly the same speech that the poet talks or hears : but it has to be in such a relation to the speech of his time that the listener or reader can say 'that is how I should talk if I could talk poetry.' This is the reason why the best contemporary poetry can give us a feeling of excitement and a sense of fulfillment different form any sentiment aroused by even very much greater poetry of a past age.
"The music of poetry, then, must be a music latent in the common speech of its time..."
- T.S. Eliot, "The Music of Poetry" (1942)

Speech, Gesture, Situation

2009-02-27T07:57:00.000-08:00

Pretty eloquent statement by poet/critic Martin Earl, over at Harriet blog, which seems to have some affinities with Plumbline concerns. The problem he mentions at the end, about how the art of poetry survives in a "post-literate" world, is interesting, & seems related to something I've been (vaguely) pondering about lately, from a slightly different angle (may try to elaborate on this further later) -

that is, I've started to wonder about the "figure" or "gesture" a poem or poet makes - the implied or unspoken situation, setting, or framework within which the poems (as texts) exist. The context within which we actually enjoy, appreciate, or understand particular poems.

Have been thinking about this, actually, in relation to an unpublished manuscript I have, which combines a (semi)fictional memoir with a group of poems. & also in connection with Gabriel Gudding's book, Rhode Island Notebook, which, it seems to me, is a piece of writing nested in an extremely dramatic kind of personal gesture (autobiographical, documentary, & theatrical - ie. the actual writing of it while driving alone, cross-country - at the wheel of his car).

Underlying poetry-making is a powerful drive to communicate. But these days, machines can communicate; language is depersonalized. The "Romantic" foregrounding of the Poet and the poet's personality started to go out of fashion in the late 19th century, & the trend intensified, coming to a kind of climax in late-20th-cent. postmodern philosophy (deconstruction, etc.) & related poetry movements (Language Poetry, etc.).

Not sure how this relates, as yet, to particular "Plumbline" concerns. Except one could look at these issues through some kind of lens drawn from rhetoric. There have been investigations (starting with ancient philosophers & literary theorists) into the relation between a speaker's "ethos", and the persuasive force of a speech-act. "Your word is your bond"; "talk the talk, walk the walk" : that kind of thing. So in terms of poetry : can we discern some kind of "balancing act" between the poet's personal testimony - the witness of individual experience - and the poem itself as an independent, free-standing literary text (or work of art)?

How large a factor, in the persuasive power & effect of poetry, lies with the context, the atmosphere, the "unwritten" dramatic gestures which frame the text itself?

Does the dramatic gesture a poet makes, with & around the actual poems, have some bearing on the issues Earl raises (post-literacy, marginalization of poetry, etc.)? & how does this relate to a previous topic raised here (& yet to be explored further) - ie., what, today, is the nature/value of dramatic poetry & verse drama per se?

(some more personal thoughts on this over at my own blog today)

The Turn

2009-02-26T18:36:00.000-08:00

Greetings, All,

Though acquainted with the general principles of the Plumbline School, I am still acquainting myself with, tonight, the thread of the conversation that's begun on this blog. Therefore, I will not enter with any grand declarations (give me a day or two), but will say simply that I look forward to being a part of this ongoing conversation, the study group of this school.

Additionally, to offer a sense of where I'm coming from, I'd like to point anyone interested to my own blog:

http://structureandsurprise.wordpress.com

There, you'll see that I'm very interested in the turn in poetry. Simply put, I think 1) turns are vital parts of poems (and I'm not the only one; T.S. Eliot calls the turn "the most important means of poetic effect since Homer"), 2) turns tend, when mentioned at all, tend to get severely downplayed in the ways we talk about poems, and 3) we should think and talk more about turns.

I have a feeling that thinking about the turn will illuminate (or add further light to) some of the conversations started here... Now, let me see...

Cheers!
Mike Theune

Plumbline Valentine

2009-02-26T14:17:00.000-08:00

IS POETRY LIKE

Is poetry like the economy
full of sub-prime mortgage lenders
off-shore tax delinquents
needing balancing out
great wealth (read greed)
the height of self-absorption
or what needing regulating where would
the architectonic get to in cabaret music
next we’re going to be marrying the unborn
still not sure we care about one another
enough to suffer any intolerance
to our virtue in the icy rice paddies
of discursive thought far from poetry’s crib.
No, poetry is not like the economy, stupid
and no you’re not stupid
but what the economy must even out
forcing us to share as brothers and sisters
the baying bitch wolf of poetry must point to
still the losing of it all.

Can the Lyric be Political?

2009-02-26T07:21:00.000-08:00

I want to point to an exchange of comments between myself and Robert Bernard Hass at my personal weblog, Sharp Sand. The original post dealt with Elizabeth Alexander's poem "Praise Song for the Day," which she read at President Obama's inauguration. The post, but particularly the comments, bear on issues central to the Plumbline School.

R.S. Crane & "imitative poetry"

2009-02-25T06:08:00.000-08:00

Part of the complex of topics out of which the "Plumbline" has started to emerge has to do with the relation between poetry and drama. (This emergence was actually triggered by an anecdote about Abraham Lincoln reading Macbeth.)

Again, one of the further motivating impulses has been a reaction, on our part, against various kinds of stylistic excess or extremism, which tend to inhibit the range of poetry's representations - that is, poetry's ability to marshall its medium (language) in the cause of presenting some recognizable scene, character, or action from nature or experience.

Finally, a third impulse or direction taking shape here has to do with the relation between criticism & poetry, theory & practice. This is a question we have to ask ourselves : how do we frame a critical approach which is actually useful and relevant, both to our own writing, and to the way we read & evaluate the poetry of others? The "plumbline", running down the center, is a kind of symbol for analysis : the discovery & application of some kind of measure (an analytical tool), which would help us distinguish the different parts of a good poem, and how they work together.

All three of these concerns come together in the work of the mid-20th-cent. scholar R.S. Crane, a member of the so-called Chicago School of literary critics. If I were to choose one book to serve as a guide to the "plumbline", it would be Crane's The language of criticism and the structure of poetry (Univ. of Toronto Press, 1953). Sad to say, this book is out of print & not so easy to come by. And his thinking is so meticulous, judicious, & rich, that it will be a real challenge for me to try to summarize and adapt it to our use.

For now, anyway (I'm at work!) - here is a very quick sketch of some aspects of Crane's approach that seem especially relevant:

1. Crane tries very hard to defuse the polemical power of competing critical approaches. He calls for a kind of critical "relativism". It's not that there is no such thing as the truth : rather, there is no such thing as a single right method of criticism, since poets, critics & readers all come with a great diversity of interests, motives, needs & approaches.

2. Aligned with #1 is Crane's allegiance to Aristotle. Much of the book is an investigation and adaptation of Aristotle's empirical, analytical approach in the Poetics. Aristotle's own careful definitions of his "lines of inquiry" limit a priori generalizations, theoretical abstractions : he starts from the particular object at hand, and develops a language and method of analysis specifically drawn from that object itself. Thus the Poetics is a practical criticism, in that Aristotle is asking, "what is a good poem? & how do poets make them?"

3. The results of such a method of empirical, differential analysis are very striking. Crane, following Aristotle, finds that poems are "concrete wholes". That poems are formal shapes, or structures, whose holistic or organic design is not reducible to the analysis of their grammar or rhetoric. That the fundamental, distinguishing characteristic of the specific kinds of poems which Aristotle discusses - that is, "imitative" or mimetic poems - is just that : they are representations of persons, actions or things as we know them in life, from nature. Crane makes it clear : this is not the only kind of poem there is. In fact, many great poems (such as Dante's Divina Commedia, Spenser's Faerie Queene) are of a different kind altogether. They are not mimetic : rather, they are didactic, based not in imitation, but in argument and persuasive rhetoric.

4. The mimetic poet shapes all the elements of the work - including setting, character, plot, thought, style - in order to effect an integral or holistic impression. This is the goal of the "shaping process" which is composition.

One can see immediately how Crane's Aristotelian distinction of basic kinds of poetry (mimetic, didactic) relates to issues we have been discussing. For example, the distinction between the metaphysical & the Restoration poets, as abstracted by Johnson & Eliot, may be seen to hinge on this distinction between mimetic & didactic. The question of finding a "happy medium" folds into Crane's description of the shaping process of a mimetic whole.

*

Here's a brief quote from Crane, which bears on another area of interest : the issue of beauty as proportion - as the finding of a point of mediation, which allows for a synthesis of distinctive parts, the composition of an integral whole. This is from a passage where Crane is talking about the critical process as a comparison between the hypothetical aims and intentions of the poet, and the "necessities and possibilities" inherent in the hypothetical form of that particular kind of work. (I emphasize "hypothetical" because, as Crane points out, we can never know for certain about the poet's intentions, or about the exact structure or form she/he is attempting to compose.)

"There is nothing unfair to the writer in such an approach, inasmuch as we are not engaged in a judicial process of bringing the work under a previously formulated general theory of literary value, but in a free inquiry whose aim is simply the discovery of those values in [his/her] work - among them, we always hope, unprecedented values - which [she/he] has been able to put there. They will always be values incident to the form of the work and its matter at all of its structural levels; and it will be appropriate to interpret what we find in terms of a distinction between three classes of works considered from this point of view : works that are well conceived as wholes but contain few parts the formal excellence of which remains in our memory or invites us to another reading; works that are rich in local virtues but have only a loose or tenuous overall form; and works that satisfy Coleridge's criterion for a poem, that it aims at 'the production of as much immediate pleasure in parts, as is compatible with the largest sum of pleasure in the whole.' These last are the few relatively perfect productions in the various literary kinds, and as between the other two we shall naturally prefer the second to the first." [pp. 182-183]

Taken out of context, this sounds like the dullest & driest kind of study outside of Economics. But in the context of an investigation of actual poems, along "lines of inquiry" such as Aristotle (& Crane) suggest, this passage has a lot of useful implications.

There is the notion that a beautiful or "perfect" work will naturally remain in memory, & be something to which we want to return. & this in turn is related to the Aristotelian concept of imitation, that a (mimetic) poem presents an image from experience which we recognize, which we can possibly identify with on some level, and which therefore moves & pleases us by its truthful mirroring.

Further, there is the assertion, in the quotation from Coleridge, that a good poem will exhibit a harmony betwen whole and part, such that distinct parts give pleasure, but do not detract from the pleasure of the whole. This is exactly where we were tending, in the discussions of the plumbline as "golden mean", & etc.

Finally, there is the implication that - through a careful, empirical investigation of particular poems, looking toward what aims the poet had in composing its particular features in just that way, and asking if the overall form or dynamic of the work has achieved those aims - we can come to a fair critical estimate or understanding of a poem's import and achievement. In other words, a kind of conscious or reflective intellectual sanction for our initial, instinctive responses. (We like a poem : now we can say why.) This seems to be a process which we would try to approximate in the kind of aesthetic measuring that a "plumbline' suggests.

Third Way Poetics

2009-02-23T15:51:00.001-08:00

An instructive discussion from Mark Wallace on "third way poetics" that draws on a review by Michael Theune of Reginald Shepherd's recent anthology. Brief reference is made to the forthcoming American Hybrid anthology as well. Basically, more poetic geography.

The Plumbline School

Plumbline School closing

Good Friday Valentine

"Corn: From Anatomy to Poetics" by Giorgio Agamben

Russian plumbline

Plumbline School on Facebook

Derek Mahon through an Acmeist lens

Justin Doherty on Acmeism

"H.P." postscript : Neo-Acmeism?

Toward a "Human Poetics"

Mandelstam, by way of Michael Eskin

Heart of my Plumbline

Rachel Wetzsteon on Philip Larkin

Timothy Steele's Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter: the case for a new Formalism

Beauty & the Concrete Mix

Timothy Steele's Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter: the case for a new Formalism

The almost perfect poem: Robin Blaser's "Image-Nation 2 (roaming"

Reading Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: I"

We're now a Poet's Dozen

Heart & Plumbline

The humble sublime

Gaston Bachelard on the Middle Path

Scorch the Sheets

On a poem by Don Paterson

R.P. Blackmur & "tradition"

Wind Tunnel

Critical Valentine

The Poetics of Being

More on the Reader's Role

Steve Fellner on Accessibility in Poetry

What's the Reader's Role?

How to Read a Poem

Spirit of Poetry, Companion of Conscience

Best of My Summer Reading

Strange Drapes Valentine #54

I'm Just a Poor Wayfaring Stranger

Hybrid Nation

My plummy summer reading

Ethos of Wayfaring

Charm vs. Riddle

a new Plumbliner

Plumbing Verse Daily

The Rewards of the Obdurate

Clive James in Poetry (July '09)

A Modest Book Proposal: The Norton Anthology of Prime Time Poetry

Plumbline to Kenosis

Tom C. Hunley’s second blog post: American Hybrid (Part II)

Pith and Gist

Confused Valentine

Relevant, accessible and coming to a television station near you.

New Things? (or Spring Fashion?)

Tom Hunley's Teaching Poetry Writing

Critical Situations

The Middle and Aristotle's Ethics

Tom C. Hunley's first blog post: American Hybrid (part I)

Situations

New on the Line

Who Does Poetry Belong To?

Plumbline & Broken Middle

Hybrids & the Allegory of Poetic Motoring

Life Under Water

The Penny of His Attention

Nibbling on Anthologies, Old and New

new to the Plumb

Second thoughts : Hayden Carruth's anthology

A new member of the Plumbline

On First Looking into Carruth's Anthology

Fashionable Nonsense

A New Anthology?

The Halt

The Voice that is Great Within Us

Seventh Street

Of the Center

Transparence and obscurity

Equal Weight

Welcome

The Gap in the Middle

Poetry and Tags

Your Brain on Poetry

Tramps in Mud-Time