What a delightful company in which I find myself!

Quick note to Marjorie Perloff: of course there's nothing wrong with making value judgments and of course I make them myself: they are and should be subject to debates, such as this one.

Neo-modernism in my sense isn't the same thing as making value judgments per se; rather, it is one quality in art that a critic (a value-judge) can admire or deprecate. I'm trying to argue against one of your many value judgments, the one that says-- unless I mistake the drift of your recent work-- that neo-modernist poetry is better and more interesting-- now and in America-- than other kinds. With that particular judgment at that level of generality, I disagree. With others, as you know, I have agreed. Onward, s

Yup, Stephen, that's why I said I plead guilty. Only I wouldn't call it "Neo-Modern" but just continuation of one of the great movements in poetry, with, of course, necessary differences for different times and conditions--e.g. Susan Howe doesn't write "like Yeats"--you can't today--but she is In the Yeatsian tradition.

Degentesh's women "exhaust their intellectual energy making generalizations about how oppressed they all are..." An important point. We're all suffering but her call to focus outward is so well taken, that I'd like to see the next forum on those alternatives to the poetry of complaint that exhausts both women and men. What ways can we extend language into the world after 150 years of isolated interiority ? What are the options that include both the woman and men, their selves and where we find ourselves.

Thomas Carlyle's Great Man Theory (first made public in 1841) was, I thought, discredited more than a century ago. But it seems to live on in vertical analyses of literary phenomena that depend upon canon-making practices to survive. Susan Howe writes in an entirely different culture than did Yeats, as even the most cursory horizontal analyses (cf. Michael Davidson and countless others who are invested in this sort of scholarship) reveals, making the notion of a "Yeatsian tradition" not entirely inoperative -- I'm not saying aesthetic influences can't be traced across time using (benighted) New Critical reading techniques -- but at least largely inert as to _poetics_, a primarily cultural phenomenon that is (so it says above) the main topic here.

Nor can Susan Howe -- not that she does; I can't know her views on this either way -- disown, as do several major Language poets explicitly, elements of the culture of poetics they inhabit because they don't like the _aesthetics_ they (claim they) produce (e.g., the Program Era, which LangPo posits as something it was responding to rather than producing work under the sign of -- if at all; in fact, 90%+ of the Era post-dates Language poetry, contrary to Perelman's claims -- which is rather like saying one doesn't wish to discuss the elephant in the room, or wishes to shoot the elephant with bow-and-arrow, when one is _inside_ the elephant and therefore physiologically an entity corresponding _to_ the elephant).

It takes a scholar to contextualize a historical moment more than anecdotally, and a type of scholarship that is not of the "movement conservative" variety -- i.e., predicated upon the (emotionally-driven) preservation of specific literary values rather than an objective dissection and historicization of same. What I've never quite understood is scholars' power-grab for canonizing powers, which generally saps their energy for the sort of horizontal analyses that would permit the (historically actual and historically proper) canonizers -- working creative writers -- to have some intelligent context beyond social allegiance within which to pursue their efforts. Instead, we have academics doing both horizontal and vertical analyses at once, and consequently either doing them poorly or fetishizing one at the expense of the other, and meanwhile working poets are being given no context at all outside their own anecdotal experiences and sociocultural prejudices to speak about (and thus make qualitative judgments on, for the purpose of anthologies) their historical moment.

When Emerson coined the term "creative writing" (and also, simultaneously, the term "creative reading") in the early 1800s he was trying to distinguish between how academics read literature and how working writers do; conversations like the one above either muddy those waters or else encourage the struggle between academic and creative forces to be whitewashed or (worse) misstated, as when the academy-dependent and finally academy-born Language poets are somehow mushed together with a creative writing mystic like Yeats, who would have considered them all didactic scoundrels.

Seth

The technology of discourse - the ability to transmit verbal information via technical means over distances of various kinds - has become more powerful over time. These new kinds of prose are incorporated into new kinds of literary productions, poems.

But poetry, I think, is different from prose. This is the most basic binary here. The effort to somehow overcome lyric solipsism, or obsolete poetic styles, with an injection of prose, & thus make it more "real" - relevant to the present - was an exciting 20th-cent. project (called "Modernism"). But the end result is always that cul-de-sac, that dangerous nullity, that freakish idiot-song, the "poem". This inherent contradiction - that the poem has to be something "in itself", something integral - drives all the votaries of "progress" in the arts up a wall, into deeper & deeper chasms of theoretical vaporism. We carry around a contradiction in ourselves - self/other - which generates all our attempts to make a picture of reality. Our art, our poetry, is inherently janus-faced. The problem with binaries is they attract partisans : everything gets reduced to us vs. them.

Henry,

I think the focus on technology and distance you propose is ahistorical; in fact, the past thirty years (roughly equating to the Program Era) have ushered in an unparalleled period of communal _closeness_ across a geographically diverse series of American workspaces. No longer are we dependent upon Europe for our literature, as at our Founding; nor, as in the period after that, New England; nor, as in the period after that, a small cadre of American anthologists (cf. the Fireside Poets); nor, as in the period after that, bohemian enclaves in just two cities on the East and West coasts of the nation (or, in the earlier portion of that era, a European boheme comprised of ex-pats and those who befriended ex-pats). Poetry is now a real-time, in-person, high-level/high-preparation transaction in thousands of small communities across the country -- because of the Program Era. And technology is used by these communities for self-strengthening and self-projection and post-meetup-collaboration more so than initial communiques; meaning, technology is a second-order phenomenon, in a much _less_ distant world than previously, and not the first-order good you suggest. Scholars obsession with the canard of the "flarflist" obscures the fact that that miniscule, PR'd-up quasi-commune was outnumbered, in the first decade of this century, something like _four hundred to one_ by real-time, high-prep communities attached to graduate creative writing programs. So the "technology" obsession is one scholars interested in vertical analyses that situate the flarfists in the line of Dadaism are crowing over, reality notwithstanding.

The second part of what you say I very much agree with -- the poem as open form (in the cultural sense rather than the classicalist, formal sense), and the idea of poetry as communal project (rather than poetry as the product of "communities" composed of early-mid to mid-career iconoclasts, thus communities only _masquerading_ as communal projects, as bohemia often gave us in the 20th c.; how else to explain all these accursed, aesthetically nonsensical and empirically incoherent "schools"?) is what will lead the new avant-garde forward. With the same aims as the historical avant-garde -- meaning, different goals than Language poetry -- but new means to achieve those ends, as is appropriate to new (non-Yeatsian, sheesh!) contexts.

S.

Seth Abramson is the dude who no one tells about the party but who somehow ends up crashing it anyway...

What language this is, I think I know...but Of all the articles here, the only one I can claim to fully understand is Marjorie Perloff's and, since hers is in response to the others here, which themselves are responses to her original essay, I went to the original essay and--relief!--I could understand every sentence. I returned to re-engage with the ideas that it purportedly spawned here (about "binaries"), but sadly, I am still unable to figure out what these writers are writing about, exactly, or what their articles (with a couple of exceptions) have to do with Perloff's essay, or, for that matter, with the question before the house:

"To continue and extend the discussion [of the Perloff essay], we cast a wide net and invited 18 poets to address the following question: what is the most significant, troubling, relevant, recalcitrant, misunderstood, or egregious set of opposing terms in discussions about poetics today, and, by extension, what are the limits of binary thinking about poetry?"

The limits of binary thinking about poetry! I wonder: is this collection of articles intended for anyone not in full academic immersion? Some responses are specific, clear and even interesting, but many have approached the question, not as something to answer, but as a kind of prompt, and have responded creatively and with full use of associative thinking. Maybe this amalgam of academic jargon and idiosyncratic flight of imagination is the true new hybrid in poetry: half poetry, half dissertation.

In any case, the best part of reading this was being led back to the original essay by Perloff. So, thanks for that.

Joan, go find that Logan fellow. You deserve each other, although he can actually write

Hi Seth,

I wasn't really thinking about flarf there. Not sure what you mean by "ahistorical". I was referring to exponential growth of communications technology say from time of printing press. It negates distances, is what I meant. It fosters "communication", exchange. You're right to point out that technology can actually facilitate the erasure of distance, rather than simply impose itself & proliferate new kinds of texts.

But I still say that this kind of utilitarian, transitive speech is the essence of PROSE, and that poetry is something else. And when vers libre or chance operations or flarf or langpo or documentary poetry or found poetry incorporate chunks of this new proliferating everyday PROSE into poetry - this new "material" - the results may SOUND superficially more attuned to the zeitgeist, more "contemporary" : but this is only half the problem. The other half of the problem is that these materials are now part of that strange-other-intransitive-solipsistic-autotelic art-object called POEM. Marjorie Perloff exalts the "experimental" wing, which leans heavily on these techniques of prose-absorption; but I think the danger is pretty clear when you look at what the "conceptual poets" actually produce. There's no poetry there anymore; the term has been neutered, rendered meaningless; anything is poetry if you say it is.

Fabulous! Thank you.

I agree with Ms. Perloff about the anthology.

But how come you're not crazy about Frost?

A truly fascinating and educational “symposium”, but it leaves me with a question:

I always forget, do we open our boiled eggs on the large end or the little one?

If ever a tempest in a teapot there was.

Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

For me, this quote really sums up nicely not only the subtle distinctions of the dynamic of 18th century 'wit', but really unites it with both a Socratic dialectics, and more importantly, Continental philosophy. In the title of my post you will find a word, of my invention which is a mainstay of my process of analysis. It collideorscopically collapses or rather modifies, the usual sense of irony with an added notion of sound and logic combined into a figural chimera, ie earony, but also eerony, as in eery, or irrational irony, taking only the sound of the beginning of irrationality and abruptly giving it a Socratic 'clown-silenus face' -ir- is also used in chemistry, as a formative element in the names of three-membered heterocyclic ring systems, ironically to indicate saturation or unsaturation, etc.. Syntaxis is the latin word for Essay, but I have repurposed it in the sense of a word like Chemotaxis, therefore to return Semiosis to a more standardized and universal programme and continuity of biological nomenclature systems, and in fact, in a Linnaeus like twist, this fragment of Yeats might be given the binomial species name Syntaxis irroneam.

How so? Recall Deleuze and Guattari's theme of "The Schitzo's Stroll", from Heidegger to Romanticism this figure of thought posits an ecological self, or rather ecologies of becoming self.. Here is a possible page for reference: http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/deleuze/broglio/broglio.html

The trick is something like the binary exerted in classical times by Socrates in the debates over the character of divinity. In early Greece, and this is attested to in Indra Kagis-McEwen's work, dynamism was more sacred, see notices about Daedalus' mechanical guardian statues, etc.. whereas Socrates posits the development of stasis as divine. In the Tao Ti Ching we find a 3rd figure ie Changeless Change, and in Ihab Hassan we find nature described as "Omnirational" If nature is able to absorb any rationality, then any Binary is ever only part of a Bifurcative processing of a single field, a kind of 'habit of growth' if you will. To say one is beyond binaries is to push the bifurcative process up the ladder of abstraction say, but as in programming, there will always be 'break-points' where because of some combination of elements, processing must procede along differentiating pathways.
In ancient Indian poetry, verses were often composed of 'little steps' and even in the western world, poetry and 'feet' are no strangers.. this metricity is both foundational and ironic, and possibly irronic in a classical sense if we also hear an echoic of metis-ity.. ie cunning. (see tric'). The strange attractor in the Yeatsian Fragment is the term "Enterprise" and so quickly, let us think of Seymour Krim's story of running around naked from his little anthology of the beats. One way of reading this has to do itself with irrationality in a social context, but the other idea, is something closer to "The Emperor has no clothes".. The way it works is simple. Look at the word Nation, and then the word Notion. That is irronic criticism. Culture is an abstraction, an operating system laid on top of a shifting ground, a nomenclature system, and one which is highly invested in both differentiation and valuation re: Nietszche (perhaps)ie the bugaboo that only valuation is valuable, and it is in so many ways. But
what is an Inter-prizing or Inter-prising?
Prise comes from prendre, a taking, seizure, capture

see now, Song, let them TAKE it.. not the offhanded sense of it, but SONG as citadel perhaps.. and like an empty burden Yeats proposes what? Insanity? certainly. There is no conquering of semiosis, because like the sticky tar monster in the old epic, you cut it in half, and then you have two foes, or go further back, the hydra..

and so, by inter-prising in the sense of prising off a mask, even the duality of non-duality can be shown as a fundamental bifurcative processuality as if dialectics were a kind of stroll, two legs to maintain a single torso's propulsion..

The prize goes to the sorcerer smart enough to enact those specific forms of blindness which render her vision trans-subjective, which as in a game is the great secret, because subjectivity itself is a sort of infinite binary, subjectivty is something like 1/infinity, or as one approaches infinity.. no matter what you multiply one by, it always remains the same, but that approach, yes, that is where the insane singing figure like pi, Enters pi, like Heraclitus into the river.

"Ask not..." ties a knot in opposition, and forms an alliance.

nice one GM..

a Gordian Bonne mot, or an expression of the 'vitis negativa' where the chestnut is a transparent grape with a little scene of Alexander inside offering fate's string his simple resonant s-word.. or vita negativa then, or rather, via negentiva, for what is being, or poetry, but the original chiasmus of chaosmos?

"We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind
And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;
Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush,
We are but critics, or but half create,
Timid, entangled, empty and abashed,
Lacking the countenance of our friends."

W.B. Yeats

The Pedant

So many verses read, references compiled,
so many titles quoted and remembered;
a wealth of prosodic structure understood.
You have studied every poet from Petrarch
to Poe to Plath and none of it
has done you any good.

You have never quite experienced exactly
what the poet’s count and meter said you should,
done that of which all these poems speak.
Vicariously you lived, your chips untendered,
your connection weak and for all intents and purposes
now almost dead and past your peak.

You have traded all your living, the edge and energy,
the colors of the life that set you on this path
for the lives of all the others that you’ve studied,
dissected and dismembered, and never found
that truth of which you seek, the epiphany
you always thought you would, that now,
you finally realize, you never really could.


Copyright 2010 – Ponds and Lawns: New and Corrected Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald

I have two new coinages for you today: alert the New York Times! I guess I owe the pair to the essay by Marjorie Perloff and some of the responses to it in The Boston Review. They got me thinking about what Perloff calls “conceptual poetry,” but which, in most cases I know of, is—by my definition of poetry, conceptual prose. So, were they conceptual prose poems, in which case I would call them conceptual evocature, “evocature” being my name for prose whose aims are those of conventional poetry, a focus on images, psychological relationships, scenes (but not stories) or mixtures of two or all of these to evoke deep feelings.

That meant I had to find a name for conventional evocature, the prose poems everyone is familiar with. At first I tried “intellectual evocature” for conceptual “poems,” “sub-intellectual evocature” for the other kind. I was completely against the negativity of this, truly believing that neither sort of text was inferior to the other (or to what I considered poetry), but I found it extremely hard to come up with a better term.

My Roget was no help: the only antonym it gave for “intellect” was “insanity.” Eventually, I settle on “lyrical,” a term I’ve long used for what most people in the field would agree is “lyrical poetry”—poetry whose focus is on images (especially metaphorically-employed), psychological relationships, etc., and no longer, it seems to me, on its melody, however primary that can be in some of our greatest poetry. Result: a kind of prose concerned with feelings one can ascend to by solving a difficult mathematical problem or seeing suddenly the way two atoms work together chemically or how to win a knight in a game of chess called “intellectual evocature”; and a kind of prose concerned with feelings generated by the daffodils Wordsworth once wrote of or a love gained or lost or a red wheel/ barrow called “lyrical evocature.”

That prose that is both intellectual and lyrical should go without saying. I believe that any such mixture will almost always be more one than the other, thus adhering to its definition as more lyrical than intellectual if called lyrical, and the reverse if called intellectual. That none will ever be able to identify some specimens of mixed evocature as one or the other does not invalidate the definition since no definition that does not fail at its borders in some trivial way is possible.

My two terms did not remain permanent, though. Before I’d used them without thinking when first writing about the two kinds of evocature, I’d already coined “lyricopoetic” and “cognitopoetic.” Once I realized I’d put them aside, I was upset. What a shame to have to give up such clever coinages! Their replacements seemed better, though: unpretentious and fitting.

But I didn’t stick with them. What changed my mind, besides my parental pride, was first the coldness of “intellectual” compared with “cognitopoetic.” Not that the latter glowed with warmth, but “poetic” did seem to me significantly to counter the coldness of “cognito.” I quickly realized, too, that it was a much more specifically appropriate adjective than “intellectual”—because of that “poetic.” It was clearly a good thing for a reader to think “poetry” when told of a kind of literary work called “evocature.” The adjective would work much better, too, when applied to some art other than conceptual prose. For instance, an asemic “poem” described as “cognitopoetic” should quickly turn an engagent’s thoughts to language (as the work itself, which might contain no words, might not); the same work called “intellectual” would be nowhere near as helpful in that way. Ergo, I’m going with my coinages. Not that anyone but I will use either set.

Forgot to say in my previous post I simply quoted the entry I had just made to my blog at poeticks.com.

Since I'm posting again, I just wanted to say that the term, "neo-modern," surprised me; I thought the stupidity of the term, "postmodern" would never be surpassed. Why my contempt for these terms? Because they are based on the term, "modern," which is pretty much meaningless so far as the arts are concerned--because just about nobody using it has ever seemed to care what it meant.

The Lily and the Snow

I met a girl coming through the woods
and asked her, "Where are you from?”
“The Land of the Lily," she said.
“Where is the Land of the Lily?”
“The Land of the Lily is where I am
from.” "Where are you going?”
“I am going to the Land of the Snow.”
“Where is the Land of the Snow?”
“The Land of the Snow is where I am
going.” “Where are we now?” “We are
in the woods between the Land
of the Lily and the Land of the Snow.”
“May I come with you to the Land
of the Snow?" “No. Only one
who is from the Land of the Lily
can go to the Land of the Snow.”

Binary thinking cleverly disguises self / other distinctions. If we wish to validate our existences would we not be better served by alliances instead of boundaries? Binaries continue to exist as organisms, but poetry, extending selves into languages, appropriates formulations subtle and diverse. Reducing poetry to binary oversimplifications fails to illuminate for long; multiplying them can be replaced by other models from matrices to probabilities to the indefinite demonstrations that some perceive as spirit.

What?

reap fun
as bodhidharma
before Emperor Wu
a Persian
we knew

koan consurgentibus
lack of enlightenment
is enlightenment
Hi, my name's Mithra
I'm a myth

from a distance
the ugly stones
at water's edge
glitter like diamonds
but still smell
like rotten heads
when passing by

reef punitive
idiotic
loyal
sun

symposiarch regarding the glass / half full (of himself) because (he reasons) it is not the purpose of such an object to be empty, but rather / to be emptied of that which fills it

a tattered coat upon a stick / an improvised salute aboard the raft of the medusa / and a poets red glare / of having had too much sparkle / bursting bubbles / tongue tip / throat back / singing:


"--my business is circumference... --the primeval man was round..."


======


by jupiter it has been sworn that if we will not be quiet, we will be divided again in two, and will be left with only one leg to stand and hop upon, like saci perere juggling embers from a pipe, with nothing left for us but to curse the kernels that are flung at the screen / of poetry / as the cockney chorus rhymes a raspberry tart / when anyone mentions a poet's art


======


within the loop or circle of what we can recall / in the course of any given year, between binaries of hot and cold (hunt the thimble, prick the needle) / we might perceive ourselves / not as in a mirror / but echoing inward / and call this a poem / but of course, that which is hollow is most resounding / and the language of the drums / is shake your sad ars-longa for godsake / hurry hurry get on the a-train / petrarca's trionfi, love /
lyrics dividing us / like names on a map / but we turn involuntarily / when we think ourselves called


("--We are obliged," says he, "to suffer it, because no one knows when a man rises up to hold forth whether he will be moved by the Spirit or by folly. In this doubt and uncertainty we listen patiently to everyone... Two or three of these are often inspired at one and the same time, and it is then that a most charming noise is heard in the Lord's house.")