Archive for the ‘poetics’ Tag
Praise the algorithm! Plunging into the silliness: Andrew Lloyd’s career as an Instagram poet
Filed under: Praise and Polemics | Tags: Instagram poetry, poetics, poetry, poetry criticism
Leave a comment Thanks to real poet Michael Boughn for sharing Andrew Lloyd’s article from Vice “I Faked My Way as an Instagram Poet, and It Went Bizarrely Well”—a fortuitous addendum to my last post, “Synchronicitious Critique”.
Corpus Sample: Materializations II: “Gloze”
Filed under: poems | Tags: Grand Gnostic Central, Jake the Dog, poems, poetics, poetry, Ty Hochban, videopoems
Comments (1) Last week’s “materialization” sought to concretize the language by collaging snippets of decontextualized conversation. This week’s tightens the knot, making “the language speak” about the language itself.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is remembered for remarking that “meaning is use.” Taking this maxim literally, I collaged together examples of every use of the word ‘gloze’ drawn from the examples supplied by the Oxford English dictionary under the word’s entry. The word is thereby lexically if not semantically “emptied out” in a cubist fashion, putting Wittgenstein’s contention to an ironic test. The poem is further self-reflexive, because the word means to glare or inspect closely; therefore, the title can be taken to be the imperative tense, instructing the reader to gloze, gloss (another meaning), or otherwise attend to the word itself. The word has the added bonus, aside from its polysemy, of being a pun on the plural of the substantive ‘glow’ and the third person singular conjugation of the verb ‘to glow’ among other things. Attentive readers will also note the poem is a chance fourteen lines….
Though this compositional procedure held promise, I exploited it only two more times, to write the poem “Gnarled Box” (along with “Gloze” included in Grand Gnostic Central) and a longer, much more complex, intertextual work that develops a passage from Lautreamont’s Poesies fittingly entitled “Poesies”.
‘Gloze’ is also the name of the first, self-published chapbook, that served as my calling card in Germany during my first European tour in 1996. And, like “Elenium” it inspired a videopoem by Ty “Jake the Dog” Hochban, viewable after the poem.
Gloze
No more men maye glosen withouten text
Than bylde materles. With fals talkyng
Many gloses are made. With Retorike,
Ne glosed eloquence, some to opteyn
Favour will flatter and glose, with new Glozes
Tainte the Text, and vnto you a fayned
Tale will gloze. Give a good glose from thy strain’d
Goggle eye, peep from the watry Humour,
And glow upon any word you may gloze,
The parasite glozes with sweet speeches,
With the tongue of flattery glozing deeds,
Known only to those who have glozed over
An illusory glozing of light dismally
Glimmering, glosing with the glory of day.
Corpus Sample: Materializations I: “Elenium”
Filed under: poems | Tags: collage, Jake the Dog, Ladonian Magnitudes, parataxis, poems, poetics, poetry, Ty Hochban, videopoems
Comments (1) 
Ironically, at a time when text is at its most material (as something to be cut and pasted, or mindlessly composed or translated by software) it is at the same time most invisible, the sign a mere window onto its meaning, disposable as a paper coffee cup once the latté is finished. Poets have, understandably, especially in recent decades, worked against this trend.
“Elenium” (aside from the elusiveness of its title) slows down the too-ready consumption of the language by complicating its logic. The poem collages overheard bits of conversation without any indication of which words belong to which speakers or even how many speakers there are. However old (and it is very old) this device is, it caused no little consternation to the most vociferous of the reviewers of Ladonian Magnitudes (see the “Product Description” at the book’s page at Amazon.ca) from which this poem is taken.
Happily, the poem inspired a video interpretation (by Ty “Jake the Dog” Hochban), viewable after the poem itself.
Elenium
The isle is full of voices
a tiny little yellow oval pill
Judy Garland ravaged by her phantoms
it’ll all be alright
they’re all pretty full—one’s puffed up
hashish, port, and In Memoriam
we must have some music, some more to drink
and then we are ready for “Shades of Callimachus…”
late night calls for coke are disturbing and boring
I always bring him something from Holland
what have we done yet? —I can see
the flower in the bud—and she is a bud!
let’s remember hysteria was thought to be a migrating uterus
you having sex would never look good
a colony mongrel hand-me-down genes
yet eyes are the guides of love still
that must have given you a twitch or two
with the Xanax I don’t feel like I need a cigarette
though you wouldn’t say you have beaten out your exile
Corpus Sample: “A Visitor from Jerry-Land”
Filed under: poems | Tags: identity, individuality, Ladonian Magnitudes, poems, poetics, poetry, the Death of the Subject
Leave a comment Last week I shared a poem a little more complex and elusive than what I’m wont to compose of late. Whatever difficulty it presented was more logical than anything.
However, a more persistent concern with no less complex consequences for that linguistic art whose medium is essentially public has been a struggle with how to maintain individuality in the face of all the forces that would liquidate it. During my undergraduate studies, “the Death of the Subject” was a hot topic. Today, the Subject is, again, dissolved in various identities, whether gender, race, class, or something other, or, even more gravely, as mere data, profiling a pattern of consumption.
In this poem, from Ladonian Magnitudes, that most public of things, language and text, is folded around the singularity of intertextuality and personal allusion to create a space for individual thought and, paradoxically, dialogue and expression. “A Visitor from Jerry-Land” answers an unpublished poem by the dedicatee (though included as an appendix to Ladonian Magnitudes). To further complicate things, its field of reference is unapologetically personal. Nevertheless, in this nearly hermetic space, it remains possible to engage urgent poetical, ethical, political, and existential matters at the site where they all in fact come into play, the individual person.
A Visitor from Jerry-Land
to Daniel O’Leary
“The makar must a wanderer be”
The chance
97% in my favour,
as even the hooligans
who stoned blind
Homer knew,
is the nether lands’
weather is variable
as the garden’s flowers’ colours’
pleasures under its lights.
Sloth, sallow, must swallow
its name’s root’s in Sanskrit
He-Who-Causes-To-Fail
Ferret out and squirrel away
what you can quoth
Master Ant smugly
even before his widescreen TV
where the Albanians’ Lada
is shot to shit and first one
on the scene’s no medic but
a cameraman focussed
on the slumped driver
his passenger’s shock-eyed begging.
The gravy, this meat’s juices
heat-pressed by kinetic attention.
We drove here in a Peugeot,
right away downed two Stoli shots,
and now, hours later, one makes
it up as he cooks supper while
the other scribbles his version
at the dining table. The sheer volume
of spirits swallowed and inspiring here
prevent the endless end of ill-fare.—
Look: the light waxes every morning
and night argues its obfuscations so
we might see its numbers plain.
In this light
an 18th century volume
of Juvenal with French crib
beside the new reading-chair upstairs
aside the modern English
concurs.
Corpus Sample: “After a Legend of the Prior of Urfort”
Filed under: poems | Tags: Grand Gnostic Central, Meister Eckhart, poems, poetics, poetry
Leave a comment My stylistic trend of recent years has been asymptoting to a “poetry degree zero”, a language stripped of overt figuration or texture, relying, instead, on metonymy, allusion, and, what in classical rhetoric might be termed, arrangement. But recently I’ve been hankering for a more complex poetry, not unlike some of that included in my first trade edition Grand Gnostic Central and other poems (1998).
One poem there that embodies what I have in mind is a slightly cheeky retelling of a story about the medieval German mystic, Meister Eckhart, awhile the Prior of Erfort. Eckhart is referred to only paraphrastically, and the spelling of Erfort is modified, as well, for, well, poetic reasons. Whether the poem achieves the sophistication of thought and expression it aspires to I leave, of course, to the reader.
Too, thematically, it touches on the concerns addressed in my last Corpus Sample, since, one way humankind has traditionally attempted to tame the chaos of the wild ride of being alive is to impose a mythic pattern or order, as we’re told the Prior of Urfort seems to, here.
After a Legend of the Prior of Urfort
No soul
Has effect
But by the body held
What you know
What two no one can hold
Weave in a scuffle
These
The plottings
The subtle wishes
Sung by one
An inbred family
On a mountain top
These in one
Divine
He said
Why the title, “Bread & Pearls”?
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: poetics, poetry, poetry criticism
Leave a comment It has some pleasant affinities with the title of Roland Barthes’ magisterial study S/Z.
The conjoined substantives are, first, singular and plural. The initial phonemes of each are in opposition: /b/ voiced, /p/ unvoiced. Orthographically, the consonant-vowel pattern ‘r-ea’ in ‘bread’ is reversed in ‘pearls’, ‘ea-r’. Like the initial consonants, the more-or-less terminal consonants of the pair seem to me again in phonological opposition: both /d/ and /l/ are formed by placing the tongue-tip to the palate, but the former releases the flow of breath, removing the tongue from the palate, while the latter does not.
Semantically, in one regard, the first substantive denotes something edible, while the latter does not; bread is artificial, while pearls are natural (if susceptible to being cultured); however, one sense of ‘bread’ (money) makes both terms media of exchange. The substantives allude, too, to two bible verses not without a certain rhetorical significance.
Much more, of course, could be said….
Poeticritical Serendipity
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Karoline von Günderrode, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, Lyn Hejinian, poetics, poetry, poetry criticism, The Unfollowing
Leave a comment 
Donald Wellman reviews Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing, describing it as follows:
Fourteen lines on each page, that’s sonnet length. Little rhyme [or] syllogism employed. No tidy conclusions. Each line as long as it needs to be. Most discontinuous with one another but not necessarily so. It seems there may not be a logic other than method in the construction of Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing (Omnidawn 2016). Nothing follows, no conclusions, the title says it all.
The well-read might be circumspect about a book composed in this manner, sections riming with a sonnet’s length, parataxis the lines’ principle of arrangement, by a poet long-associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (Hejinian is included in both Silliman’s In the American Tree (1986) and Messerli’s “Language” Poetries (1987)), published in 2016.
Such readers might be prompted to further reflection over the implications of these 
compositional characteristics of Hejinian’s book when they read in Alice A. Kuzniar’s Delayed Endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin about Karoline von Günderrode’s fifteen-verse “Ein apokalyptisches Fragment” (published in 1804), that “…each verse appears as a disjointed fragment in an unconnected, nonteleological series”.
I leave this juxtaposition to speak for itself, for readers with ears to hear and hearts that care to.
Multiversic takes on 9/11
Filed under: poems | Tags: 9/11, Fanny Howe, Peter Dale Scott, Peterloo Massacre, poetics, poetry criticism
Leave a comment Despite its being the fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks Sunday, I had decided to, here, pass over the event in silence. Then, The Griffin Trust website posted Fanny Howe’s “9/11”.
I was struck—as I often am—by the commentary accompanying the poem:
Is it virtually impossible to write about certain events that are too immense, too devastating, too charged on so many levels? To go into the specifics, one risks being maudlin, self-absorbed, short-sighted, too emotional. To try to broaden the discussion and perhaps recklessly try to scale something to the universal, one risks being too political, polarizing or simply missing the mark.
Howe’s poem, of course, avoids being too “self-absorbed” and “too political”—by “suggesting the heart of the event’s impact, is how it affects who and what we love.” I wonder what the commentator thinks of Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy or Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony or Holocaust.
By way of contrast and to broaden and concretize the discussion, let me offer these two poetic texts that both fail to escape the commentator’s extremes: “The Tao of 9/11” by Peter Dale Scott (that both goes “into specifics” and is “too political”) and one of my own, excerpted from a longer work, that, too, is “too specific,” composed, as it was, in real time.
Writing a poetry including history is no easy matter, and the question how far the “heart of the matter” escapes history’s particulars and the machinations of power no less demanding.
Listening for the Heartbeat of Being
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: poetics, poetry, poetry criticism, Robert Bringhurst
Leave a comment 
McGill-Queen’s University Press has just issued a collection of criticism on the work of Robert Bringhurst, Listening for the Heartbeat of Being: The Arts of Robert Bringhurst, edited by Brent Wood of the University of Toronto and Mark Dickinson of OCAD University.
I therefore seems timely to repost a link to a short essay on Robert Bringhurst’s poetry, which can be read here.
Nine Provocations to a Sympoetics
Filed under: Praise and Polemics | Tags: avant-garde, conceptual poetry, Frühromantik, poetics, poetry, Romanticism, semiotics, Walter Benjamin
Comments (1) The Analytic and Synthetic Writer. “The analytic writer observes the reader as he is; he calculates accordingly and develops his machines in order to have the desired effect upon him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates a reader as he should be; he does not conceive of the reader as still and dead, but rather as lively and counteractive. He allows what he has invented gradually to come into being before his eyes, or he entices the reader to invent it himself. He does not want it to have a specific effect on the reader, but enters with him into the holy relationship of the tenderest symphilosophy or sympoesy.”—Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragments 112, (1797-1801).
Christian Wolff, difference, and Saussure. “Wolff’s importance for philosophy generally and for the philosophy of language in particular tends to be underestimated today. For example, staying within the philosophy of language, he seems to have been a prime source, not only for the doctrine in question here [thought’s dependence on language], but also for the revolutionary idea in the Herder-Hegel tradition that language and hence conceptualization and thought are fundamentally social, as well as for the idea, later fundamental to Saussurean linguistics, that difference is at least as important for the constitution of concepts as similarity.”—Michael N Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition, Oxford, 2012, 79.
“semiotics cannot generate semantics” and related matters. “…there is a crucial homology in modern European philosophy between the constitution of metaphysical systems in ‘Spinozist’ terms via the principle of determination as negation, the structuralist idea of language as a system of differences with no positive terms, and the commodity-based economy of negatively related exchange values. In all these cases the question arises as to the ground upon which the differentially constituted system relies: the system of ‘conditioned conditions’ leads in Jacobi’s terms to the question of being; meaning cannot be explained in differential terms because mere differentiality requires a ground of identity (semiotics cannot generate semantics); and the notion of value itself makes no sense in purely relational terms because exchange values are grounded in use values.” —Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 169.
Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776-1810) on speech as writing. “Tell me, how do we transform the thought, the idea, into the word; and do we ever have a thought or an idea without its hieroglyph, its letter, its script? Truly, it is so: but we do not usually think of it. But once, when human nature was more powerful, it really was more extensively thought about; and this is proved by the existence of word and script. The original, and absolute, simultaneity was rooted in the fact that the organ of speech itself writes in order to speak. The letter alone speaks, or rather; word and script are, at source, one, and neither is possible without the other…”—in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1977), pp. 213-14.
Duncan on Language. “‘What was it like in the late 1940s if you were concerned about language?’ And then you found that language itself was a process, in Whorf and Sapir. And along with this, Olson wanted to reject the symbolic role of language. I was also interested in Cassirer’s approach to language as a total system of symbols. But it’s a process, you see; it’s not a system.” —Robert Duncan, 1983 interview, in A Poet’s Mind: collected interviews with Robert Duncan, 1960-1985, ed. Christopher Wagstaff, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2012, 89-90.
On Poetic Form.
“Form is never more than an extension of content”—Robert Creeley, quoted by Charles Olson in “Projective Verse” (1950).
“[Ron] Silliman wrote Revelator according to a simple procedural concept: a long poem with exactly five words per line, and exactly enough lines to fill one notebook.”—Sam Rowe’s review of Revelator (2013) at Full Stop.
“…there is a ‘fluid’ as well as a ‘solid’ content, that some poems may have form as a tree has a form, some as water poured into a vase.”—Ezra Pound, “Credo” (1912), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (9).
Against Expression. “…it’s meanings I’m after, not expression. I’m anti-expressionist. But I don’t think expressionism is disorder. I’m anti-expressionist because I dislike personality and I dislike integration. And in general, I have a double play between meaning and feeling, which keeps me quite busy.”—Robert Duncan, in an interview with David Ossman, 1960, in A Poet’s Mind: collected interviews with Robert Duncan, 1960-1985, ed. Christopher Wagstaff, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2012.
The Reader as Producer. The thesis of Benjamin’s “The Writer as Producer” might be cast as “the reader should not be a consumer but a producer alongside the writer.” This demand echoes later formulations that turn on oppositions analogous to consumer/producer: Bernstein’s absorptive/anti-absorptive or Goldsmith’s readership/thinkership. However, such demands that the reader labour along with the writer are already met in the the Jena Romantics’ opposition of the analytic/synthetic writer and their practice of the fragment that require of the reader active collaboration in a “sympoetry”. Theoretically, the opposition between the passive reader and active writer collapses in Barthes’ work/text, which he thoroughly deconstructs in S/Z: reading is a kind of writing. What power, then, can Benjamin’s demand have if in practice it was met a century before he made it and in theory it is always already met?
On our “romantic” unconscious. “A veritable romantic unconscious is discernible today, in most of the central motifs of our ‘modernity’ [or ‘postmodernity’]. Not the least result of romanticism’s indefinable character is the way it has allowed this so-called modernity [or postmodernity] to use romanticism as a foil, without ever recognizing–or in order not to recognize–that it has done little more than rehash romanticism’s discoveries.
…it is not difficult to arrive at the derivatives of these romantic texts, which still delimit our horizon. From the idea of a possible formalization of literature (or of cultural production in general) to the use of linguistic models (and a model based on the principle of auto-structuration of language); from an analytic approach to works based on the hypothesis of auto-engendering to the aggravation of the problematic of a subject permanently rejecting subjectivism (that of inspiration, for example, or the ineffable, or the function of the author, etc.); from this problematic of the (speaking or writing) subject to a general theory of the historical or social subject; from a belief that the work’s conditions of production or fabrication are inscribed within it to the thesis of a dissolution of all processes of production in the abyss of the subject. In short, we ourselves are implicated in all that determines both literature as auto-critique and criticism as literature. Our own image comes back to us from the mirror of the literary absolute. And the massive truth flung back at us is that we have not left the era of the Subject.”—Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute (trans. Barnard and Lester), Albany: SUNY, 1988 (original French, 1978), 15-16.
