Friday, December 4, 2015
Pleasure and Plebeians Pt. 2
Avant-garde poetry in the English language has had a mediocre reaction to Deconstruction. The tendency is to turn Deconstructive tenets into sound-bites— like, for example, that (using the wonted, tendentious first person plural) we know that language, being arbitrary, cannot open a transparent window onto any given image or topos we may choose. What tends to follow from this is a Deconstructive card trick— that, given the inadequacy of arbitrary language to address themes, we should remove, in broad terms, the thematic from our poetry. Avant-garde poetry should then be constituted by language about itself. It is even suggested that narrative is an antiquated trick in poetry, linked, in its potential obsolescence, to the nineteenth century and back. What then passes for poetry, in many avant-garde circles, is so textually impoverished as to be easily dismissed as gibberish, as the proverbial baby is thrown out with the bath-water and the nose is cut off to spite the face. The extraordinary naivete at work here is the quintessence of the plebeian— reducing philosophy and poetry at once to a collection of sound-bites, dismissing poetic diction and melopoeia as meaningless, even bringing into question whether poetry (at this stage of impoverishment) is being written and published to serve subterranean purposes besides and beyond the pursuit of the aesthetic. What I want to say about the naïve, plebeian reaction to Deconstruction in avant-garde poetry is practical— if there weren’t some adequacy inhering in texts and textuality, we wouldn’t write them. The baby-mush that is Objectivism, Language Poetry, and the like, which evacuates the aesthetic from the aesthetic with a pretense of intellectuality which is actually just a form of thoughtlessness, rattle shaking, and ill-concealed hatred of seriousness (intellectual and otherwise) and serious poetry, has no real place in Posit or Neo-Romanticism except as a set up for us, a MacGuffin to start things off.
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Pleasure and Plebeians Pt. 1
Here’s how Roland Barthes has a way of being, or seeming, suspect: his brief survey of The Pleasure Of The Text makes no mention of harmonious or metrical language in serious poetry. How could textuality engender any more pleasure then it does from poetic diction, musical language, melopoeia, what have you? The texts Barthes tends to lean on are formally barbarous compared, say, to Keats’ Odes; but the larger point I want to make, beyond Barthes being largely a plebeian version of a literary critic and aesthete, has to do with both formality in poetry and how it relates to the intimate I-Thou relationship between writer and reader (with the text itself occupying a middle ground) illuminated by Posit. What I want to express is a practical tangent to what Barthes expresses in his book; Barthes points to what in avant-garde novels is seductive, “cruises” the reader; and misses the obvious point that formality, harmonious language in serious poetry was developed partly for people to seduce each other (usually men seducing women), and that formality in serious poetry is the most obviously seductive facet of any given language, French or English. What the seduction is meant to lead to is an intimate relationship that finds its consummation in the penetration of artful language into the human brain. More on this later.
Monday, November 30, 2015
Poetry Salzburg Review #18
Twenty-First Century Poetry and Poetics by Adam Fieled in Poetry Salzburg Review #18, from University of Salzburg Press.
Lyricism and Deconstruction
from a whirlpool
swirling down,
but sans belief
in signification.
“I” must say I
w/out knowing
how or why
this can happen
in language.
“I” must believe
in my own
existence,
droplets stopping
my mouth—
alone, derelict,
“I” must come back,
again, again,
‘til this emptiness
is known, and shown.
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Neo-Romanticism and Lyrical Ballads
Friday, November 6, 2015
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Stress Fractures: Essays on Poetry
Sunday, September 20, 2015
The & Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Sex as Dialectic
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Neo-Romanticism and the Individual
Saturday, September 12, 2015
Neo-Romanticism and the Academy
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Echoes of Mannerism in Neo-Romanticism
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Platonics and Neo-Romanticism
Monday, September 7, 2015
Ingres and Text
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Our Architecture Did This To Us...
Saturday, September 5, 2015
Neo-Romanticism and the Solid World
Friday, September 4, 2015
More Notes On The Solid World
Thursday, September 3, 2015
(Welcome To) Psychedelic America
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Let's Get Solid...
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Emotions and Inter-Dialogism
We assume here that there have been Inter-Dialogic leaps on both sides. Yet, if these are two emotionally vulnerable, emotionally unstable individuals, what has been communicated from brain to brain cannot sink in and be assimilated the right way. This is especially the case if booze is involved, which confuses boundaries and senses of proportions and forces things to flow in a warped direction. That warpage gives 1488 an eerie glow, and an edge (hinging it back to what I used to call post-avant poetry) of strange dimensions and unclean leaps, unclean (less-than-wholesome) consciousness. What emerges is an ambiance of the ensign visionary deadness, employed to define Apparition Poems as a literary text. The significance of the linoleum floor as a symbol is that it works as a synecdoche of all the different forms of warpage on offer here— alcoholism, emotional desperation, overactive imaginations, and (perhaps most tragically) Inter-Dialogic leaps which suggest both some purity of intention and some genuine psycho-affective chemistry, but which are getting trampled by the inhumanity of the landscape these characters inhabit. Linoleum floors are cold, un-homely, homogeneous surfaces, which reflect (also) the coldness (deadness) of the complete severance between the two in question. The warm, companionable, sensuous side of drunken-heartedness— vino veritas, also— is being buried by consciousness which can no longer have stable reactions, so that what has been learned from the requisite Inter-Dialogic leaps knitting soul to soul cannot be recalled and skillfully employed the right way. It may be the case that the muse of 1488 knows this, and that it accounts for her severance of the relationship. If so, the protagonist has a ways and means of accessing a note of pure pathos, which resounds in the poem, even as he also reveals that his assumed mastery of his muse’s heart, and what it has in it (“all that ever was/of drunkenness”), has to be false, because he seems not to know the reason for the sudden severance, which should be clear to him. When Inter-Dialogism is nullified by subjectivist interests, consciousness can fester and transform itself into all shapes and sizes of narcissistic delusion, even as the protagonist in 1488 attempts to reach beyond his narcissism, bring circumstances back to life.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Melopoeia and Time
One of the oddities here
is that melopoeia, and melopoeiac tension/release games, compensate for the
frustration of the protagonist’s circular Inter-Dialogic interaction with time
as an impersonal force, impinging on his consciousness. The music manifests in
clusters, which is one accustomed manner/mode of melopoeiac practice, and in
end-rhymes as well. The Inter-Dialogic tension here— the knowledge that
anthropomorphized time “wants,” in an impersonal fashion, to co-opt and destroy
everything I, as an individual, either have or have created— makes it so that
the poem, which begins with “I want” and finishes with “I wants,” has in it a
sense of metaphysical exploration of combined interactions between personal and
impersonal forces, what has perceptible bounds and what does not. The problem
with the poem anthropomorphizing Time is that the poet’s instinct to do so,
though it jibes with his aesthetic intentions, must nonetheless be riddled with
the doubts and inconsistencies of consciousness reaching too far past itself,
and its own empirical understanding. The principles of pure reason— Kant’s top
rung of what human cognition can achieve— can only speak of Time as an
intuitive force in human consciousness, and not strictly knowable past that. We
do not know if Time-forces inhere in the universe which manifest some form of
consciousness or personality (this being a correlative to God-forces addressed in 1613). They might. To the extent that the poem sketches (briefly, and in a poetic fragment) a semantic and melopoeiac circle in space, where the end and the beginning are
rough parallels, what is suggested is a sense of stalemate with an impersonal
force which cannot help but touch us, in both Inter-Dialogic interactions and
out, while also manifesting evidence that no consciousness can inhere in it,
and the personal and the impersonal become so hopelessly intermixed that the
poem gets lost in its own music. To be lost in melopoeia, while also dry iced
by an I-it perspective, makes the poem its own kind of hybrid, built of parts
which ache to transcend their limitations and know what is not readily known,
even as what is shown to consciousness here is frightening, frustrating, and fragmented.