Archive for the ‘poetics’ Tag
“We must be absolutely modern”: an anecdote for Kent Johnson
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Kent Johnson, literary history, New American Poetry, poetics
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Over at his Facebook page, Kent Johnson continues to probe the legacy of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in his inimitable way. His persistent concern with the movement and its wake prompted me to observe, among other things:
I think it needs be said, too, that, for my part, anyway, I don’t know a poet under, let’s say, 35 who would either recognize the terms of the dispute or even grasp the pertinence of the issue. Their concerns are either identity-political or ecopoetical (and that ‘or’ is not exclusive), and those with the conceptual apparatus would likely judge the whole discussion as formalist, all-too-formalist…
All of which brings to mind the following anecdote…
I’m fortunate to count among my friends a number of poets and scholars half my age, among them, one brought into our circle by a peer of mine, now a professor emeritus of German language and literature. One evening, this young friend, another peer of mine, and myself were carousing, as we poet-scholars are wont to do, this time at my peer’s place.
I forget now exactly how the topic came up, but I recall maybe it had something to do with American poet Charles Olson. Our young friend is a frighteningly-gifted and learned young man, a francophone Quebecer who speaks English and German like a native speaker and who, at the time, as part of his graduate work in Irish Studies, was learning Gaelic (he has since, last I heard, taken up learning Dutch, for the fun of it). Though steeped in the European literary Modernism of the first half of the Twentieth Century, Olson was new to him.
What ensued was a speed-seminar in the Poetry Wars of postwar American, anglophone poetry: Donald Allen’s landmark anthology The New American Poetry, the New Criticism oriented poetry then in power, Confessionalism and Projective Verse, etc. The impromptu seminar ended with a lively reading of Olson’s “La Préface”.
Our young friend’s reaction: “Why don’t they teach us all this in school?!”.
Grammar, linguistic and literary production, and related matters: a note for Kent Johnson
Filed under: Praise and Polemics, The Brouillon | Tags: discursive materialism, ideology, Kent Johnson, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, linguistics, poetics, Slavoj Žižek
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If there’s one thing that indefatigable gadfly of a poet Kent Johnson and I share it’s a stubborn, irritable tick of concern with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and poetics and their “post avant” wake (so wide now few poets or critics seem aware how much they operate within its horizon…).
Recently, his most recent online persona linked an article he had written for absent, “competence, linguistics, politics & post-avant matters”. Therein, he rightly takes to task Charles Bernstein et al. for their loosey-goosey way of discussing (and thinking about) language, grammar, ideology, and society. I can’t say I’m in full agreement with Johnson on all points, but the drift of his argument is surely in the right direction.
It was with no little delight I read in a recently acquired copy of Slavoj Žižek’s 2012 Less Than Nothing the following passage, which sums up pointedly and neatly the fundamental misunderstanding of language (the identification of linguistic or literary production with that of commodities) that underwrote, at least, the early days of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E:
The basic premise of discursive materialism was to conceive language itself as a mode of production, and to apply to it Marx’s logic of commodity fetishism. So, in the same way that, for Marx, the sphere of exchange also obliterates (renders invisible) its process of production, the linguistic exchange also obliterates the textual process that engenders meaning: in a spontaneous fetishistic misperception, we experience the meaning of a word or act as something that is a direct property of the designated thing or process; that is, we overlook the complex field of discursive practices which produces this meaning. What one should focus on here is the fundamental ambiguity of this notion of linguistic fetishism: is the idea that, in the good old modern way, we should distinguish between “objective” properties of things and our projections of meanings onto things, or are we dealing with the more radical linguistic version of transcendental constitution, for which the very idea of “objective reality” of “things existing out there, independently of our mind” is a “fetishistic illusion” which is blind to how our symbolic activity ontologically constitutes the very reality to which it “refers” or which it designates? Neither of these two options is correct—what one should drop is their underlying shared premise, the (crude, abstract-universal) homology between discursive “production” and material production. (7)
I am skeptical Žižek’s characteristically canny observation settles the question (one that extends back to the advent of philology (the science of language) and literature-as-such), but it is surely sharp enough to cut through much of the underbrush!
Amuse-bouche: Sunday 6 December 2020
Filed under: Amuse-bouche | Tags: contemplative ecology, contemplative studies, Douglas E Christie, Gerard Manley Hopkins, mindfulness, poetics
Leave a comment This week: some thoughts on the untimely timeliness of Gerard Manley Hopkins…
Douglas E. Christie, early on in his The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, contrasts John Muir on a sugar pine with Ronald Reagan on the redwood. For Muir, the tree before him is “an inexhaustible study and source of pleasure” noting how “at the age of fifty to one hundred years it begins to acquire individuality, so that no two are alike in their prime or old age. Every tree calls for special admiration.” On the other hand, running to be governor of California, Ronald Reagan (in)famously observed, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.”
However much Reagan’s words express an entire culture, what Christie’s juxtaposition brought to my mind was, first, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ notion of “inscape”, that which individuates each thing as the unique, singular thing it is, what Muir perceived in the mature sugar pine and what Reagan and his ilk are insensitive to. Hopkins’ sensitivity to the singularity of individuals expressed itself in a number of ecopoems avant le lettre. One thinks of his lament for a felled grove, “Binsey Poplars”, or the more profound, radical grappling with the destruction of the natural world, “God’s Grandeur”, a poem I’ve long had by heart. Hopkins’ sensibility in this regard breathes the same spirit as what inspires Christie’s attempt to find common ground between contemplative traditions, primarily those of antique and medieval Christianity, and contemporary ecological thought and concerns.
Of course, Hopkins’ poetry is not only precocious in its concerns, but in its formal innovations. On the one hand, he was motivated by the etymological fascinations with the then-new discipline of philology to dig into the roots of the English language and the prosody and potentials of the soil from which it sprang to develop his own markedly singular style, characterized by its alliteration, “sprung rhythm”, and coinages. His poetic oeuvre is rife with examples, one dazzling as it dense being “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection”. Such sensitivity to language as poetry’s material ground and the invention that it motivates makes Hopkins a precursor of that poetics that finds its most extreme expression in the coinages of Celan, for instance, or the metrical inventions of, surprisingly, William Carlos Williams in his searching out the “variable foot” proper to the American vulgar tongue. Little wonder Jerome Rothenberg includes Hopkins in the opening selections of his assemblage Poems for the Millennium, volume one.
Finally, it strikes me that Hopkins is also ahead of his time in possessing and presenting a sense of what today goes by the more general rubric of “mindfulness” (something Williams, too, expresses as early as 1921 in his poem “Thursday”). The meditative, contemplative mindset is most emphatically attentive, as Hopkins was, to the individual (rather than then type) and the material (as something in-itself rather than merely as for-use, the way his language stands forth rather than retreating into meek transparency). It does, however, also, culture empathy, kindness, and self-compassion of the kind Hopkins ventures to offer himself in one his “dark sonnets” “My own heart let me more have pity on…”.
Hopkins was one of the first poets I was exposed to in school that turned me on to poetry. It’s good to be reminded of how enduring and inexhaustibly rich his work continues to prove to be.
Condensation as Recomposition
Filed under: poems | Tags: Ladonian Magnitudes, Max Richter, Peter Gregson, poems, poetics, poetry, procedural poetry, recompositions
Comments (3) Like many these days, I’ve been passing the time enjoying various televisual entertainments, most notably very carefully rationing out my viewing of Paolo Sorrentino‘s The Young Pope and The New Pope. Among these series’ many pleasures is the soundtrack, which introduced me to the British cellist and composer Peter Gregson.
Gregson, along with Max Richter, have both written what they term “recompositions”, Gregson recomposing Bach’s cello suites and Richter Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Gregson’s and Richter’s reworkings are not without precedent: it’s an old compositional trick to take a phrase or theme from another composer’s music as an element for a new work of one’s own. These recompositions are, however, admittedly more radical and thorough reworkings of the original material.
In my own way, I’ve been writing recompositions for a long while. 
One form, inspired by Pound’s found dictum that “dichten = condesare” (roughly, to write poetry is to condense), I termed “condensations”. The simplest compositional procedure, a manner of erasure avant le lettre, was to reduce a given text according to a rule.
The example I share below compresses H.D.’s book Sea Garden into a single poem, rendering each of the volume’s poems as a couplet made of the poem’s first and last line. I retained H.D.’s original capitalization and punctuation as a tacit way of indicating my recomposition was in a no way a unified, straight-ahead lyric poem. The results of this poetic compositional procedure strike me now as being very aesthetically similar to Gregson’s and Richter’s musical recompositions, which is why I share the poem “Sea Garden” from Ladonian Magnitudes, below.
Sea Garden
after H.D.
Rose, harsh rose,
hardened in a leaf?
Are your rocks shelter for ships—
from the splendour of your ragged coast.
The light beats upon me.
among the crevices of the rocks.
What do I care
in the larch-cones and the underbrush.
Your stature is modelled
for their breadth.
Reed,
To cover you with froth.
Whiter
Discords.
Instead of pearls—a wrought clasp—
no bracelet—accept this.
The light passes
and leaf-shadow are lost.
I have had enough.
Wind-tortured place.
Amber husk
as your bright leaf?
The sea called—
The gods wanted you back.
Come, blunt your spear with us,
And drop exhausted at our feet.
You are clear
of your path.
The white violet
frost, a star edges with its fire.
Great, bright portal,
still further on another cliff.
I saw the first pear
I bring you as an offering.
They say there is no hope—
and cherish and shelter us.
Bear me to Dictaeus
and frail-headed poppies.
The night has cut
to perish on the branch.
It is strange that I should want
as the horsemen passed.
You crash over the trees,
a green stone.
Weed, moss-weed,
stained among the salt weeds.
The hard sand breaks,
Shore-grass.
Silver dust
in their purple hearts.
Can we believe—by an effort
their beauty, your life.
Concerning the late Ernesto Cardenal, the Communist Hypothesis, and related matters…
Filed under: Ecology, The Brouillon | Tags: ecosocialism, Ernesto Cardenal, Herbert Marcuse, Liberation Theology, poetics, poetry, Saint Francis of Assisi, the Communist Hypothesis
Comments (2) Social media (in this case, Facebook) for everything disturbingly evil about it can provide gist for no little cogitation.
The Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal died Sunday 1 March 2020 at 95. His work (which 
I first read in that brick of an anthology Poems for the Millennium, Volume II (UCP, 1998)) is exemplary for me, because of its development of an “objectist” sensibility (a poetry of bald statement shorn of metaphor or ornament) wedded to a (religiously!) profound social sensibility that extends to all living creatures.
Understandably, when I learned of his passing (on Facebook), I shared the news with my vast friends list of 374. Things got interesting, however, when I followed a link to the news of his death at one of my favourite poetry sites, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, which quoted a passage from The New York Times obituary it had shared, which passage I shared in turn:
“Christ led me to Marx,” Father Cardenal said in an interview in 1984. “I don’t think the pope understands Marxism. For me, the four gospels are all equally communist. I’m a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ, and is a revolutionary for the sake of his kingdom.”
The identification of socialist tendencies in Christianity (unsurprising for those not unacquainted with Liberation Theology, the German Peasant Rebellions during the Reformation, or radical social movements from around the time of the English Civil War, let alone jokes about a certain socialist Jew…) and the very evocation of “communism” elicited rapid responses happy to affirm Cardenal’s artistic gifts but quick to condemn (as “nuts” in the first case and in the second as an example of “some crazy idea of ‘sharing’ that millennials, with a social media-fed knowledge of history, may lean towards”) his embracing what French philosopher Alain Badiou and others have called The Communist Hypothesis.
Now as interesting as it would be to take up the twin topics of Liberation Theology or the Communist Hypothesis (regarding the latter, a good read is this article by the inimitable Slavoj Zizek from 2009) what’s more curious is how those critical of Cardenal’s politics can at the same time respect his poetry whose nearly every line is imbued with his own “communist” perspective. On the one hand, I am the first to maintain a distinction can be made and maintained between a poet’s poetry and their politics, even when that politics rears an ugly head in the work; an even earlier and more important influence on my poetry is the figure of Ezra Pound, a poet who famously went very “wrong / thinking of rightness”. But in Pound’s Cantos, for instance, the author’s “fascism” (arguably as idiosyncratic as Cardenal’s Christian Marxism) and suburban anti-semitism appear only sporadically, while Cardenal’s socialist sympathies are ambient throughout.
Ironically, the critical commenters, above, react to neither the specific synthesis of Christ and Marx and the related, resulting “communism” nor Cardenal’s poetry, for the former finds its sustained and complex articulation in the latter. Cardenal’s “liberation theology” is an ecosocialism avant le lettre, concerned not only with class struggle and the metabolic rift that underwrites it, but with the relations, oppression and liberation of all organisms and the environment that sustains them. Cardenal’s sensibility opposes to the Abrahamic legacy that believes God bestowed dominion over the earth and its creatures to Man a vision more akin to the animistic, Hindu, or Buddhist, or, in the Christian tradition, to that of Saint Francis of Assisi, for whom all Creation forms a family, composed of all the children of God. Likewise, Cardenal’s politics finds echoes and support in the thought of Herbert Marcuse, for whom the liberation of human beings is inextricably bound up with the liberation of nature from human exploitation.
Cardenal, being the poet he was, can speak for himself. As he writes in his poem “New Ecology” (a portion of which in English translation can be read, here):
Not only humans longed for liberation.
All ecology groaned for it also. The revolution
is also one of lakes, rivers, trees, animals.
With him, we can only imagine, long for, and work toward the day when “The armadillos are very happy with this government.”
OULIPO now and then
Filed under: poems | Tags: Christian Bök, Ernst Robert Curtius, Eunoia, Joseph Conte, Ladonian Magnitudes, OULIPO, poetics, poetry, postmodern poetry
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“Oulipo turns 60, but given how much we hear about it these days, it feels more like 150″ says George Murray at Bookninja. To some of us, it seems much older.
For my part, I learned about the OULIPO and composition by means of a generative device in the early nineties, thanks to Joseph Conte’s goldmine of a study, Infinite Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Not that long after (or so it seems this morning), Christian Bök’s Eunoia appeared to equal acclaim and, well, annoyance (a book, for those who don’t know, is composed by means of a generative device, after the OULIPO).
For me, the controversy was tiresome, having read Conte’s work and, more importantly, Ernst Robert Curtius’s classic oeuvre, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, which details ancient and medieval modes of composition which quickly dispel any illusions the OULIPO and its epigones are avant garde. (Though I do know that matter is more complex than I allow for here).
I expressed my impatience with the whole matter, boiling Curtius’ excurses into the following poem from Ladonian Magnitudes, one among several that got up the nose of that book’s most notorious reviewer. The poem is four quatrains and a concluding line, despite WordPress’ formatting constraints…
Liposuction & Related Procedures in Antiquity
Lasus Pindar’s master made a poem sans σ and a millennium later
Nestor of Laranda in Lycia wrote an Iliad each book less a letter Tryphrodorus Aegyptus did the Odyssey
So from Baroque Spain via Peter Rega
From Fabius Planciades Fulgentius’ De aetatibus mundi et hominis λειπoγραμματoς
Hucbald’s Charles the Bald eclogue beginning every word with C one-hundred and forty six lines
Late Roman grammarians’ παρόμoιoν
O Tite, tute, Tati, tibi tanta, tyranne, tulisti a scolia for a Caracalla’s Banquet
where as Aelius Spartianus has it from his brother Geta every dish alliterated
The so-called “figure poems” τεχνoπαίγνια in the Greek Anthology
Porfyrius Optatianus rendered in Constantine’s Latin
Alcuin, Raban Maur, Sixteenth Century Hellenism followed
Pre-Alexandrian Persian lines in trees and parasols
Eusonius follows Plato’s for the Sophists logodaedalia in his Technopaegnion
Each line of one poem starting and finishing with one syllable and the last word’s the next’s first
Catalogues of single syllable limbs, gods, foods, questions “yes” or “no”
A myth crib every line turning on one syllable
Grammatomastix’s monosyllables amputated prefixes lifted from Ennius and Virgil
The “versos de cabo roto” Urganda chants before “…a certain village in La Mancha…”
Writing on and conversations with Bruce Andrews and Amiri Baraka
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: American poetry, Amiri Baraka, Bruce Andrews, Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich, literary criticism, poetics
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Back in 2008 (!), I had the good fortune to meet (among others) a then-younger scholar of Amerikanistik, Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich.
Now, the rest of us are lucky enough to get to know his work: the Electronic Poetry Center has made available as a PDF download his dissertation on American post-avant poet Bruce Andrews, Dissensual Operations: Bruce Andrews and the Problem of Political Subjectivity in Post-Avant-Garde Aesthetic Politics and Praxis, you can download and read, here.
Admittedly, reading through a theoretically state-of-the-art dissertation on a notoriously difficult poet can be a challenge. Interested readers can jump straight to a wide-ranging and penetrating interview that is appended to the dissertation, here.
Büscher-Ulbrich also conducted one the last interviews with Amiri Baraka, one no less lively, you can read, here.
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
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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
Poeta Doctus 