Poeta Doctus

I’d been eavesdropping on the recent kerfuffle around Stephen Burt’s “Nearly Baroque” mainly via the Montevidayo blog and had been provoked to compose a far-reaching, involved, learned response, but then I read the definition that opens Burt’s essay:

The twenty-first-century poets of the nearly Baroque want art that puts excess, invention, and ornament first. It is art that cannot be reduced to its own explanation, that shows off its material textures, its artificiality, its descent from prior art, its location in history. These poets want an art that can always give, or could always show, more.

That “art that puts excess, invention, and ornament first” is the point of contention engaged at Montevidayo, not impertinently. But the points that follow strike me as stale and suffocating (an impression that could be articulated and defended at tiresome length).

First, no poem, no matter how close to pedestrian speech, no matter how prosaic, no matter how close to “writing degree zero” it may be is ever reducible “to its own explanation”: no discourse is even reducible to its own repetition, since no word let alone any utterance is ever reducible to a single meaning.

The concerns over the fore- or backgrounding of material texture, artificiality, descent from prior art, or location in history are much more complex and interesting and would lend themselves to lengthy excursus were I tempted to be more self-indulgent and less respectful of my reader’s learning and patience. Briefly, all poems possess a graphic or phonic dimension, an artificiality (being an artefact), a relation to if not descent from prior art (poetry or otherwise), and relation to a given constellation of historical conditions, the visibility of which is dependent on the perceiver’s sensibilities. The poem by itself cannot flaunt or foreground any of its possible aesthetic dimensions because their perceptibility is itself contingent. (This play of presence and absence and its historical contingency became the principle of late Formalist literary history, as in the work of Mukarovsky.)

At work here is a reified opposition variously expressed by pairs such as work/text, symbolic/semiotic, word/world, absorptive/antiabsorptive, readership/thinkership, etc, which are all arguably subsumable under the opposition between the Classic and Mannered (an opposition not itself undeconstructable…)—but that was the topic of the aforementioned long-winded response I here eschew for the sake of the sanity of all concerned.

In brief, every poem always gives more and can be made to show more because of the very nature of the poem as a linguistic artefact. As an example I offer a brief study of the sonic qualities of a most non-Baroque poem, here.