poetry today: position and process : a montage
Poetry now belongs to a subculture. It is no longer part of the mainstream of intellectual life, it has become the specialised occupation of a relatively small and isolated group
...isolated from a larger engagement with society, 'with a lack of connection to the reader' and readings attended
Sometimes it seems as if there isn't a poem written in this
...the questions of relevance, of audience, of efficacy, will always haunt us
One of Malcolm McLaren’s art teachers told him : “We will all be failures. But at least be a magnificent, noble failure. Anyone can be a benign success” not sure about magnificent and noble there, it was Britain in the 70s! But we could all name dozens, maybe hundreds of “benign successes” and everyone knows what Samuel Beckett said : Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Only what does not fit into this world is true.
“…I feel whatever I say will be inadequate to articulate the hours we spend in a condition of poetry, or I find it difficult tonight to separate myself from my work and my work with the world. It is an unruly drama of desire and its depiction. A shape, or a sound, a sentence to compose what is and what isn’t. A circulation that travels an ellipse; sometimes it wobbles and then breaks and from that a poem will begin to take form. A figure announcing itself beside itself. It needn’t be fancy: not unlike a dog barking at its shadow, confusing its own sound as the other’s. Or a solitaire in front of the television speaking back to it out of habit. A mother singing in the nursery. A stoner at the light talking to himself with the radio blasting ‘it’s like this and like that and like this and a.’ I balk at description. It fails me just now. I question even this rhetoric.”
Novelty is now so thoroughly established as an aesthetic virtue that "innovative," "experimental," "fresh," "original," and the like are all terms of praise. It was not ever thus: in the eighteenth century Lord Shaftesbury could write about beauty as a timeless, natural harmony, and condemn innovations in the arts such as orientalism or the gothic with the epithet 'novel'. Even as late as the romantic period (late C18th early C19th), when the concept of originality or novelty was gaining philosophical ground, it could still be looked upon with suspicion...much of the suspicion had to do with whether the new kind of art would be of lasting interest. In fact, this sense of the moment-bound nature of the interesting has continued down to our own time, although without the accompanying suspicion.
And here's a plug for the Elizabethans (the golden age of the late sixteenth century) :
the poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion and break from it in the context of collision...Multiplicity of meaning, 'enclosedness', are the rule rather than the exception ...Lexical resistance is the armature of meaning, guarding the poem from the necessary commonalities of prose.
Poetry shows the ink the way out of the inkbottle the way out of the hard drive -
Poetry’s social function is not to express but rather to explore the possibilities for expression.
Poetry is difficulty that stays difficult.
Conservative anti-modernism continues and appeals to those who claim they can't understand the dislocation, post-subjective non-narratives in much contemporary verse, for the conservative complaint often refers back to a supposed golden age of the coherent, stable "I" of a writer who has straightforwardly true things to express.
So much depends on what you mean by failure, what you want from success, and what you imagine poems do. Insofar as a poem is successful, it fails to fail, but, in failing to fail, it also succeeds at failing. That's a lose-lose scenario (which in the alchemy of poetry we imagine as win-win).
Poetry is to the classroom what a body is to a cemetery.
If reading poetry is not directed to the goal of deciphering a fixed, graspable meaning, but rather encourages performing and responding to overlapping meanings, then difficulty is transformed from obstacle to opening.
Mallarmé says he uses “the same words that the bourgeoisie reads every morning” – in the newspaper – “exactly the same! But… if they happen to find them in this or that poem of mine, they no longer understand them.” Poetry anthologies pile up by the side of the internet, rusty as a prayer belt while witches dance around them in army uniform.
Now I'd like to quote myself about poetic process, extracting a few short stanzas from a poem called 'Twitching' -
Now to return to some quotes:
Referring to John Ashbery - "I think he demonstrates more what poetic thinking is. It’s both a jumble and coherent.". And John Ashbery says : For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is. What does your poetry do - I guess it gives a kind of blue rinse to the language. At John Cage’s 1952 New Year’s Day concert put on by the Living Theater. Cage played “Music of Changes,” an atonal, rhythmless work for solo piano -
A critic's question:
A change:
Distraction ‘allowed me a way to find out what connections my mind did make.’ Distraction and digression are... methods – as well perhaps, as ethical, democratizing stances - from which to write, and which enable a reader to chart the movement of thought. That a process poem contain – or live with - the contingent knowledges it admits is part of the poem’s contract, and, actually, part of its process. The connection between thought and affect or feeling is important. Digression has something like the form of bliss. Repetition of the theme is the very opposite of that. Any digression enacts (although it may not intend) a criticism because, once one has digressed, the position from which one departed becomes available to a more dispassionate or ironic analysis: it must have been in some sense inadequate or one would not have moved away from it. The option in favour of digressiveness implies a general critique... critical of modes of authority (let's say kingship, or the power of the law, or academic authority) that depend on cultural conventions. While poetry is, in theory, available to anyone, it is demonstrably not for everyone.
Ludwig Wittgenstein said 'Explanations come to an end somewhere'
Now to make a detour :
But then, earlier this year, I watched a short video of the American philosopher, Yale Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, Judith Butler. It was hearteningly optimistic about university education. I'd like to play it for you now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFlGS56iOAg
Finally I'd like to read the poem 'Worldless' - it's a poem in which I tried to convey the experience or actuality of nothing happening -
I am going to present a montage.
In this montage of a selection of quotations everything will probably sound like an 'aside'. But as you know, a lot of things can happen in an 'aside'.
(Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter, The Atlantic 1991)only [mainly] 'by other aspiring poets'. 'It's an unsustainable system. Even the most niche of niche artforms has a- [public] audience. Not so with contemporary poetry'
(Daniel Nester, The Morning News, Sept 2009/June 2010) nation [country] that isn't subsidised or underwritten by a grant either from a foundation or the government or a teaching salary or a fellowship of one kind or another
(Joseph Epstein, Commentary Magazine: web 2011)
(Susan Schultz, A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry 2005)
(Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory)
(Peter Gizzi, from “An Open Letter of Poetics to Steve Farmer")
(Robert Archambeau, Harriet blog August 2013)
...the journalistic critical cliché about a young poet is to say that [these days] “[s]he has found his her own voice,” the emphasis being on his [her]differentness, on the uniqueness of his [her] voice, on the fact that he [she] sounds like nobody else. But the Elizabethans at their best as well as their worst are always sounding like each other. They didn't search much after uniqueness of voice…. It would hardly have struck them that a style could be used for display of personality.
(Thom Gunn,‘Nowadays’)
(George Steiner, 'On Difficulty')
(Charles Bernstein)
(Pam Brown )
(Hank Lazer via Pound/Williams)
(Al Filreis, March 2013)
(Charles Bernstein - NO: A Journal of the Arts #6, 2007, and in Recalculating, 2013)
(Roger Pearson)
(Michael Farrell, An Australian Comedy)
atoms of language
'her cinematic oeuvre'
sounds like
her breakfast
We appear to be reduced
to apostrophe : the elegant
Gee Whiz
interstitial thinking -
everything's
a particle
('Twitching' p31 Dear Deliria Salt Publishing, 2003)
and this poem -
Retarded pretensions
"They won't come through. Nothing comes through. The
death
Of every poem in every line
The argument con-
tinues."
Jack Spicer
nothing more untoward
than monotony
has occurred
my process commences
without instruction,
with an artless question
"anyway, why communicate ?"
surrounded by scenery.
why don't those
migratory birds
leave here ?
is it such
a beauteous ecology ?
having landed in times
when the usual response
to beauty
is to buy it
or to try to
win it,
I make my clunky gestures
towards
a build-a-bricks outlook
(construction, not architecture)
how do I do this thing
& appear not to ? at least
never be seen doing it.
not writing
for any cause
& feeling
consequent guilt
about it.
(exactly
how well-motivated
are you?)
an epiphytic magnavox box
clings to a telegraph pole
beginning the link outwards
transitive and optimistic -
flick that crow off the antenna !
head pell-mell
for the grammar !
(p150 Dear Deliria (Salt Publishing, 2003)
(Alice Quinn New Yorker poetry editor 2013)
“I was completely taken by surprise,” Mr. Ashbery said. “It was just arbitrary bangs on the piano over quite a long period of time. And long pauses. I had been in a drought with my writing. I felt I hadn’t written anything good in almost a year. It really gave me ideas about how to write poetry again.”
_____________________________________________________________________
What would I like about this poem if I liked it?.
(Peter Schjehldahl)
_____________________________________________________________________
Distraction and digression as process :-
Poetry '... that can be seen to demonstrate [a] dynamic process; it is both distracted, and attends to that distractedness. That is, it is able is to detach, drift off, and to simultaneously observe those operations as they occur. Distraction as a mode of thought and perception is consonant with the ‘process poem’. The emphasis ideally bringing out something of the texture, the individuality, of one’s own thinking, a kind of ‘hearing the gears change’.
(Tim Wright on Distraction)
(Ken Bolton, 2011)
(Tim Wright on Ken Bolton)
(Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1979-1801)
(Ross Chambers, Loiterature)
(Ted Pearson)
_____________________________________________________________
That's the end of the montage
Over the years I moved gradually from being an opponent of the academy to thinking of it, briefly, as a haven for poets who couldn't get state-funded arts grants becoming fellowship-funded post-graduates, and progressing more recently to an indifference to academic institutions. I realize that I'm saying that when, here I am, having been invited to talk to you by your colleagues in the English Department of Auckland University and also having spent sixteen years employed by a university sciences library plus having done some part-time tertiary teaching over the years. But universities so often seem to have an institutionalised version of poetics ensconced in English and Cultural Studies departments as a form of professional currency, but without having real political/social influence or relationship outside of the university (and little within it for that matter - especially in these end-times of the dominant, unmitigated free market).
__________________________________________________________
Worldless
where’s my donkey : thursday evening
catch the train,
seagulls circling
Central Station
catch a bus
pick up a paint chart,
at the gallery -
Korea and Kinglake
photography exhibitions
(different)
a very thin man
in Oxford Street
in red leather pants
talk on Eastside Radio
read two poems
at the bus stop
long haired boys -
regenerate fashion,
retro,
fashions
arrive & go by
really quickly -
I had to live through
the entire decades!
(peeved)
catch a bus,
redhead woman driver
playing jazz piano cd
loudly, in the bus
(suits the traffic)
catch the train,
seagulls gone to Pyrmont,
night workers
eating chocolates & chips
(hunger)
walk to the seafood shop
buy the dory, grilled
walk home
*
I am the donkey : saturday afternoon
step onto the crossing,
lift palm to car,
thanks driver.
quicken pace, cross smartly,
think
‘why do I do that
why do I want to live
am I depressed?’
Scottish sentimentality -
car alarm with violin
(answer)
*
I pass the donkey : tuesday morning
walk to the bus stop
(forgot my watch & silver ring)
open umbrella,
light rain shower
catch the sad bus
through the streets
around
sad blocks of flats
paint swatches
(I must remember)
what colour the door?
the brick fence, what colour?
coffee at Zoo,
hair colour in the arcade
(regrowth)
buy underwear,
blue, mauve,
& stripey
buy preserving jar
(lemons)
buy
honey, celtic sea salt
& iodised sea salt
carrot & celery juice,
the juice maker
takes ages
to juice the vegetables
almost miss the bus
quickly buy the newspaper,
here’s the bus
winding back
past Centennial Park
there’s the donkey,
no, it’s a horse
(mistaken)
here are the streets
around
the sad flats
& here’s
the Cauliflower Hotel
listen to Patti Smith ‘Twelve’
(Changing of the Guards!)
on an ipod
on the bus
on the move
but in the clouds
(worldless)
thought stuck,
pinned down
stupid under
a roaring sky
*
there is no donkey : friday night
hazard lights
in the bus lane
police
remove the number plate,
the driver
brays drunkenly
(caught)
going home
to make a poem
(this one)
to give my problems
to you, reader
(contagion)
everything fails
when all else fails,
when all else
skyrockets
some of what I think
is a piece of crap
some of what I know
is worse
some things I say
shouldn’t be said
my heart,
meaning
my feelings towards you,
reader,
meaning
my straight ahead empathy,
though
is
in the right place
nearly home,
the streets seem dark
enter the house,
hug you,
my synthetic coat
squeaks
p109 - 'Home by Dark' (Shearsman Books, 2013)
