Sunday, February 28, 2016
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Monday, February 22, 2016
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Friday, February 19, 2016
Saturday, February 13, 2016
More Ricochet Effect
The Ricochet Effect, which I spoke of in reference to John
Keats and his Odal Cycle, seems to have two distinct significations. The one, I
have enumerated: the quality of intense musicality, and melopoeaic mastery, in
Keats’ verse, and the manner in which every word in the Odes ricochets against
every other word, heightening their sense of exquisite formality. The second
signification is this: the ricochet of the exquisite formality of the Odes
against the narrative/thematic elements which animate the poems, which cause
tensions and stresses to flare up and both abrade and illuminate the texts’
surfaces. In a way, the second signification of the Ricochet Effect, exquisite
formality against narrative/thematic stresses/strains, sets Grecian Urn up as
slightly more interesting than Nightingale. People take Negative Capability in
Keats for granted, and forget how odd the thing is: Keats exerting his
imagination to jump inside (so to speak) an inanimate object, as if it was both
sentient and acted like a boundary between Keats as poet and another sentient
world, so that the music sustains along an odd ricochet with what the
significations of the language are.
A tangent point to dovetail with this, with even broader
significations: Keats negatively capable stance before the world, in the Odes
and elsewhere, as though the world he perceives has a quality of resonating and
shuddering perpetually within itself, in a fashion which suggests both
sentience and sensitivity; has more grounding in scientific fact then the flat-line,
no-metaphysics model inhering in Modern and post-modern literature. As any
particle physicist would be happy to tell you, the resonant, shuddering world
is the real one. Modern and post-modern nihilistic landscapes, which erase
imagination, emotion, and the capacity to create seriously musical language,
are all accursed by the phoniness of pretending a world that does not exist or subsist in reality; a
dead, flat one. The Ricochet Effect, in both of its major significations, has
in-built Romanticism’s acknowledgement of a multiple/plural world, and a
sensitive, responsive world; and the second signification, for Keats, creates
all sorts of chiaroscuro moments, as major key melopoeaic harmonies devolve
into minor key realizations of frailty, mortality, and overextended imagination,
the price to be paid for living on Romanticism’s edge; attempting to balance as
many different imperatives as possible, in poetry and in life. Where formality in poetry is concerned, Neo-Romanticism is capable of evincing a similar edge.
Surface/depth tensions and form/theme tensions in Neo-Romanticism are aligned to several levels in-built to the Neo-Ro oeuvre which Romanticism and Neo-Classicism in painting avoid: the spectacle of a head-on collision between the artist and the world of detailed, nuanced, plain-faced antagonistic circumstances. Keats and Wordsworth, Ingres and David linger in generalities from a stance which may or may not be pained, but is always touched by an imperative to avoid what in the work of art might offend the implied critiques of a conservative, perhaps censorious audience. Meeting Halfway and The Lost Twins both place the idea of queerness boldly, provocatively on the surface, confident of a sophisticated world capable of responding appropriately; and in Apparition Poems, graphic sex and graphic philosophy make clear that a textual challenge is being generated to occupy a position, as responsive reader, that the text is and should be all depth, and that the textual surface is comparatively unimportant. The formality of the Neo-Romantic lynch-pin poem or painting is made to serve the higher aim of focused narratives, addressing focused themes.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Formality as Metaphor
If formality in serious art is a metaphor, then what it does
it represent; what is it a metaphor for? There are no easy answers to this
question; aesthetes may say that Beauty should signify only Beauty, and end in
itself; but there is a deeper truth and mystery hidden in serious artistic
formality. What the most rigorous forms in serious art represent, or are a
metaphor for, is a sense of reciprocity between the highest and lowest levels
of our mind; in Kantian terms, Sensibility and Reason (skipping, in this
context, Understanding). For Sensibility and Reason to achieve some semblance
of harmonious integration, what is tactile must be expressive of empirically
provable principles. Thus, the John Keats Ricochet Effect we have discussed
demonstrates that when language is carried through to its ultimate sense of
musicality, a sense of shuddering resonance inheres for some readers which
produces not only visceral pleasure but extreme intellectual engagement; again,
the harmonious integration of Sensibility and Reason. Understanding or logic,
which mediates the middle turf, helps us categorize the serious formality of
Keats’ language from effect to effect, passage to passage, line to line. The
effect of sublimity, created by Keats’ Ricochet Effect, situates consciousness
as part of a larger whole, harmoniously integrated into other universes,
including language universes. We see, also, in a chiasmus, how Reason can be
situated within Sensibility and Sensibility within Reason; that integration and
interpenetration of separate cognitive spheres can be activated by serious
formality in art. These resonances, when created the right way, are the loudest
noise that human artistic productions are capable of, and why the overall
effect of twentieth century art, which was comparatively formless, is a School of Quietude
Monday, February 8, 2016
John Keats' Ricochet Effect: Star Trek?
John Keats, especially in his Odes, both patented and
mastered what I call the Ricochet Effect. What the Ricochet Effect amounts to,
in serious poetry, is this: in the economy of Keats’ Odes, line by line and
word by word, each word or phrase is made to ricochet, in exquisite, harmonious
balance, with the words around it. In Shelley or Wordsworth, this is true of
the end-rhymes and uses of anaphora, when they occur; what makes Keats special,
and peerless, is that he effortlessly employs end-rhymes, anaphora, assonances,
and internal rhymes to create a Full Spectacle of words ricocheting off each
other in harmonious balance, so that no words, even “thy,” “thou,” “that,” and
the like, remain untouched. Keats is, as I have incised before, a peerless
verbal musician. But what are the implications of this formal innovation in
serious art— the Ricochet Effect— and what does it mean, as manifestation of
the highest kind of formality in serious art, for the Ricochet Effect to exist
in the human world and in the human landscape, as a thing among things?
Keats did not live, as we all know, to see his work flourish
in an expansive way. During the decades of obscurity following his death, the
Empty Spectacles around poetry, the wheels spinning, one might say, continued unabated—
names meant to be forgotten were cast up, prizes given to dolts and dullards,
fame appointed to stooges and puppets as usual. The way the human landscape is
configured, Keats’ formal innovation— what I call the Ricochet Effect, which
implies totalized, comprehensive musicality in language— had to sit for a long
time before it was pronounced worthy to live past the dolts, stooges, and
puppets of the early-to-mid nineteenth century. The horror of the staging of
Empty Spectacles while genius-level work just sits, waiting to be elevated, is
that it means that for individuals who dare to create on serious levels, what
is guaranteed, usually, is a thankless positions buried obscurely beneath the
stooges, puppets, and dolts. Yet I wonder if there isn’t some wisdom to letting
the most advanced kind of artistic work just sit, just sit there, emanating
into the Collective Unconscious and all kinds of human economies, while the
stage is cleared for its emergence. Serious artistic work, to be mystic, has a
kind of sentience of its own— Keats’ Odes (for me at least) are sentient, and
able to chop into whatever economies they choose to chop into, over a long
period of time. If individuals who create seriously are willing to give up the
drive for recognition, and just let their work sit, then the work can begin to
do its own job of destroying the Empty Spectacles and puppet shows over a long
period of time.
Serious forms in art, as I have said, are (I believe)
sentient, or have a kind of sentience inhering in them. What is sentient in
them is a second individuality, past the individuality of their creator. How
the sentient forms reach out into the world is to find the individuals most
receptive, and begin the process of altering their brains. If this sounds a
little Star Trek, please forgive me…but the mysticism of serious formality in
art is a little Star Trek, a little Vulcan. It is based on granting sentience,
shuddering, resonant sentience, to whatever forms are high-maintenance enough,
complex enough, and exquisite enough to carry it. Why I like Keats’ Ricochet
Effect as a paradigm model is that, as I have incised before, it models not
only serious formality but permanent avant-gardism— because the Ricochet Effect
works so subtly that it changes every time we see it, Keats’ Odes can never
(for me) leave the sphere of the avant-garde. The semi-sad conclusion: for the
individual creators of serious formality in serious art, there may or may not
be redemption or salvation. Often, unfortunately, there is not. But for the
work itself, emanating seen or unseen, heard or unheard, into the world, there
will always be a sentient sense of redemption and/or salvation, every time a
new individual is reached, tormented, exalted, and brain-altered. More Star
Trek soon.
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Issues Around Formality
Formality in serious art is one of the highest expressions
of individuality known to the human race. Why it should be that form and formal
rigor were misrepresented in the twentieth century— from the height of
individuality into a snobbish, classicist ploy, which represented high art as priggish, "Sunday School"— is because the twentieth century was essentially, to
employ America as paradigmatic, a minor-leaning century, in which serious
expressions of individuality were frowned upon in high sectors, both in
America and in Western Europe. Serious expressions of individuality were
largely replaced with empty spectacles, and thus the degeneration of the
century into a kind of school
of quietude
Like, for instance, who Mary Harju is— a serious formalist
who I tend to think will be underrated over a long period of time, but who will
nonetheless fail to drop off into nothingness. Mary is not, to be sure, dazzling
the way Abby Heller-Burnham is; and, to shallower aesthetic minds, is easily
dismissed as too derivative of Renaissance Humanism to be taken seriously as a
major artist. Mary, to me, represents a certain class of artists— formalists—
who are solid, and/or workmanlike, without being dazzling, yet whose work tends
to endure while a surprising number of dazzling showmen/showgirls disappear.
Yet this type of artist; and there are tons of them in different rooms at PMA (Philadelphia Museum of Art), too; have a strange karma— never to appear dazzling, but only solid; and yet to
find their work enduring in a solid way, and in such a way to suggest that the
expressiveness of mere formality, when executed in a rigorous fashion, is 60/40
correct as the approach to serious art in general. Innovation (maybe, and I am playing Devil’s Advocate here) counts 40/60 less then solidity. Minor artists and their empty spectacles throw the whole enterprise into the garbage,
as they are taught to do in the school of quietude; but in a more liberated century, artists will have to decide for themselves what mere formality and
formal rigor count for, even as I have a suspicion that Mary’s paintings may
sneak up on some in an uncomfortable fashion over a long period of time.
My own approach to formality in poetry is a complex one. As of one hundred years ago, rhyme and rhyming poetry still dominated most poetry economies, both in the United States and Europe. That poetry should involve heightened language, what is commonly referred to as poetic diction, was not then in question. Century XX stripped things back so that by the turn of the century into the twenty-first, when I began to seriously publish, rhyme and rhyming poetry, and poetic diction with it, had been replaced by a hodge-podge of free verse or blank verse approaches (blank verse being unrhymed iambic pentameter, like Paradise Lost or Hyperion), and an ambitious poet was forced to make a kind, manner or form of music that would have been considered stunted from the 1920s and back. Being a student of the Romantics and Milton, I chose to address this difficulty, which takes formality in poetry and cheese-grates it, by using a technique I call "clustering"; building musical effects into poems without being obsequious (usually) to the convention of end-rhymes.
On the other hand, when by 2018 I found myself publishing The Ballad of Robert Johnson, I felt that the time had arrived when hand-over-fist formality could again be accepted into English-language poetry, as both an expression of individuality and a rejection of what were still standardized poetry operations. The Ode On Waves, in '19, and Wayfaring Angel and On the Schuylkill, in '20, followed this through. As of '21, The Witches of South Philadelphia upped an ante of sorts by pushing formality into a textual ring with the fractures, sores, and abrasions attendant on Modern and post-modern writing; as Eliot had with The Waste Land, only heavier on the sauce about rigorous form meeting, and attempting to cohabitate with, rugged, rough disjuncture, in a collage context. Then, in '22, Elegy 702, from the Cheltenham Elegies series, assays a multitude of tasks, some about conservation of form and formality, some positing the poem as self-conscious semi-parody of form and formality, while extending the thematic range of what Keats' odal form has been willing to address, and balancing other formal approaches within that series.
Twentieth-century avant-gardism (and I do consider Robert Johnson an adjunct to post-avant or the avant-garde) was short on discussions of formal beauty in high art. "Beauty" itself, as a manifest aim in art, was mistrusted, and gamed against heavily. In a way and on a very salient level, this travesties the entire endeavor of serious art, which must include, as a component aspect, the idea that formal beauty ranks high on imperative spreadsheets, no matter what other avant-garde imperatives may ride alongside it. This game against formal beauty guaranteed that, in the twentieth century, the likes of William Blake— a comparative novice/amateur, whose worth as a higher artist is contained in a philosophical imperative and visionary stance puerile next to both Keats' Odal vision and Hyperion— could be given a higher ranking than Keats, who supersedes Blake at every point, both as formalist and philosophe.
Keats' prosody, his metrics, the formal beauty of his best poetry, is a political statement in and of itself, against society which would impinge on the individual, against individual-slandering authority as well. In a certain way and on a certain level, formal beauty in high art is the ultimate cultural statement of individuality and innovative power against authority, and an ultimate statement (also) of rebellion. By granting extreme non-homogeneity to the work, which inheres not just superficially but profoundly within the works' confines, and raises the work to a level at which history must be brought into focus by the works' grandiosity (and I do mean grandiosity against mere novelty, as mere novelty is one quagmire built into century XX avant-gardism), the work situates itself within its own transcendent mode of visualization/realization, and authority instantly cringes at having its vestments and privileges stripped from it. Century XX avant-gardism (as manifest in both artistic work and literary theory) was very secretly invested in different forms of homogenization, up to and including complicity with authoritarian governments— thus, its tendencies to de-emphasize, demean, and degrade formality and/or formal beauty, in poetry if not prose.
This sense— that twentieth century avant-gardism was secretly a game against formality, and/or formal beauty, and thus posited against an important component element of major high art consonance— is what makes it so easy to dispense with. By emptying art of anything artistic, both avant-gardists and centrists proved themselves to be non-artists. They, thus, might as well have been government clerics or bureaucratic scripters— they were there, in art spaces, for the wrong reasons. This century, a gauntlet has already been laid down against these middling-at-best structures, welcoming formality and/or formal beauty in high art back into the fold, understanding what put amateurism in place of giftedness and inverting things back to where they belong. Rebellion in century XX avant-gardism was faux-rebellion— more in cahoots with authoritarian impulses and destructive games than not— now, we stand ready to let our own version of prosody, its masterful manifestation and enactment, to dictate terms to us about how we may cultivate any extreme form/manner of artistic individuality against the rest of the world (art-world or otherwise) which is not us, and thus make a potent political statement that there is room, in American society, for individuals to stand against the masses, and for the realization of beauty, from individuals on out, to become an event of some consequence for the whole of society at large.
Thursday, February 4, 2016
Form: Odal Orientations
John Keats Odal Cycle, as I call his five major odes, is not
warped by an excess of dichotomous energy, where poetic formality is concerned.
There are slight variations, but the form the five Keats’ Odes take is similar
(and unique onto itself). My own five odes, which may or may not constitute an
authentic cycle, have the problem of a kind of
formal “lumpiness”— four of the odes are formal, and employ Keats’ own odal
form; while one is informal, “jazzy” not just because it's an Ode On Jazz, but because it employs high level poetic musicality in a way which attempts to
translate something about jazz music, and its approach to formality, into
serious poetry. Keats’ formal innovations could
align him with (if we want to attempt to make precise translations) Bach or
Beethoven; so that, by employing his forms, I also attempt that sort of
classical, classicized musicality. That’s the formal backbone of On Exile and the rest. Having my five-ode sequence waver between “jazz” and
“classical” orientations creates, to bring things back to square one, the sort
of dichotomous energy which some readers may find confusing, and certainly less
an orderly procession than the march through Keats’ odes.
Where the narrative-thematic is concerned, Keats odes stick
to the transcendental— imaginative landscapes, immersion in mythologies, meta
and/or ekphrastic poems which take works of art as their starting place, raw
nature, including sexuality, in chiasmus with the human brain (his extension of Wordsworthian
dynamics). The world Keats inhabits, here, resonates and shudders; it is a
living world, animated by the vivacity of an imagination which Keats “fancies”
has its own reality, against the merely tactile. Keats demonstrates for us,
with no holds barred, exactly what Modern and post-modern literature blood
sacrificed; the sense that the world we live in is alive, and does, in fact,
resonate and shudder with life. The nihilism of Modern and post-modern
literature naively dismisses Romanticism as naïve, and creates, consolidates,
and maintains a world skewered towards obsolescence, deadness, and human
impotence in the face of attempting to achieve transcendental states of
consciousness.
If Modernism and post-modernism are naïve in the face of
Romanticism, it is for the simple reason that scientific fact points the human
brain towards the realization that the world around us really does resonate,
and shudder, and that mysteries inhere in nature which can lead our minds
permanently upwards. The jejune Modern/post-modern sense of world-weariness and
effete skepticism have less basis in scientific fact then Romanticism does, try
though Modernists and post-modernists might to invert their efforts into a
talisman against naivete which is secretly experientially sound. My odes are
somewhere in the middle of this— not as transcendental as Keats, more about
individuals, human landscapes and relationships, intimacies which inhere on
these levels, and also pain before corruption and coercion, where human
collectives are concerned.
The fall of 2002 is when I wrote Ode
On Jazz, as I was gorging myself on jazz at that time, and I had a sense of
spiritual harmony about my life, both because of the marriage I had going then
and because the feeling in the streets in Aughts Philadelphia was exactly what
I had been searching for since I began writing seriously. Philadelphia
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Quietude/Non-Quietude
For me, the twentieth century is all about the science
of the empty spectacle— and there is a science to the creation, maintenance,
and created obsolescence of the empty spectacles which constituted most of the
landscape of the twentieth century. Empty spectacles which work depend on what are called razzmatazz effects— large numbers of people gathered together in one
space create the right kind of razzmatazz effects, for example, from sporting
events to political rallies to popular music concerts. A crowd of 60,000 fans,
gathered to see a football game, or Bruce Springsteen, is a decoy against the
fact that both events have no real relevance in pushing the human mind, or the
human race in general, forward. Both are set in place by the media to represent
vitality, but the vitality is all surface level. Underneath the surface,
there’s the dead, flat, quiet emptiness of what the twentieth century actually
was. Which, by the way, would not necessarily be the case if the high sectors
(science, philosophy, high art) kept up, and moved forward in the right way; in
the twentieth century, they did not. A surfeit of razzmatazz was not balanced
by the gravitas achievements which the human mind, when loosed by individual and individualized consciousness, is capable of.
In art, the twentieth century razzmatazz was all about
movements which espoused a rhetoric of stunted thought, stunted emotion, and stunted intimacy between individuals— Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Modernism,
post-modernism. The oeuvre of Andy Warhol actually bothers to announce itself
as empty spectacle; but it is self-knowledge which points back, in a
self-referential way, to its own desolate emptiness beneath the surface. Pollock, Rothko, and the rest land us in similar territory, as does Duchamp, before Warhol and Koons after. These artists are all, including Warhol, as
quiet as they can possibly be, in their own anticipated obsolescence. They are empty spectacles made specifically, and in a purposeful way, to be destroyed
into complete nothingness, like big crowds for sports and the like. Again, all
is desolation beneath the surface. The fact that a book like Finnegan’s Wake,
which is so blatantly a case of the emperor wearing no clothes that it begs to
be laughed at (as does a hearty slice of Proust and Woolf), could be considered
a twentieth century talisman, of real worth and boasting real literary gravitas inhering,
is an indication of the essential school of quietude gestalt form of high art
and high sector life in the twentieth century. Poetry in the English language
more or less announced its obsolescence as well, as centrists wrote harmless
greeting cards, and avant-gardists churned out gibberish, a simulacrum of
something purposeful, but not involving thought, emotion, or intimacy between
individuals somehow, on any level. Philosophy and science I will touch less; specifically
because whether Deconstructionism lives or dies still seems like an open
question, and science is not my field, though it is apparent that faux-science in the
twentieth century was rampant too.
The twenty-first century has to be better. Some of us have
already set a body of work in place, beginning with the Nineties, which assures
this. The irony, and it is a major one, is that if this a century of
substantial progress, the polarities may reverse, and the surface razzmatazz
and empty spectacles of the twentieth century will at least partially disappear. The price to pay
for profound depth is a surface which must, of necessity, be quieter, as real,
permanently relevant noise is generated. It may be that, in the twenty-first
century, the masses are at a loss as to how to amuse themselves— if governments
choose to emphasize individuals and the high sectors, this will almost
certainly be the case. The stadiums full of cheering fans will no longer find a
prominent place in the national economy, the media will be tamed or
disbelieved, and the school of quietude which was the twentieth century aegis
or rule-book will invert into a century being, in a manner of speaking,
avant-garde; standing in a place where boundaries are being destroyed and
serious creativity is being pursued with vigor. Or, humanity being what it is,
some of the empty spectacles will continue to balance what is happening in the
high disciplines. Who knows? But I will say that, for this century to repeat
the quietude of the twentieth is now an impossibility. Philadelphia in the Aughts and Teens has already
decided that for the rest of the nation, and the human world.
Monday, February 1, 2016
To Satan (2nd Draft)
Let it not be said that his
rhetoric drifts
out of focus on Earth for a casual minute—
nor that just retribution is
not terribly swift
for those who disrespect his intimate
business;
as the new mother, tethered
away from her child,
meths up, eats what she doesn’t want
to mortify dread that she might be
other
then a perfect Satan’s gofer,
brain-washed, wild—
infanticide-schemes, inverted taunts,
floorboards arranged under
carpets, defiled.
Pentagrams engraved on
truth's justice-seats,
masks woven wanly of paint-wearing flesh;
abattoirs littered with
poison-dwarf sweets,
histories chopped out for infants, near death;
what are they scripting of filth, for what?
That all the false idols, set in a line,
might dance
tangled, backwards, to all that lends dread?
How is he drifting? He’s
straight, he’s shut
against any heart holds a heavenly chance
of imposing their visions, getting bardic in bed.
You’re a ruddy old Big Man
Downstairs, you,
fibs so jejune I can’t hear but to laugh—
your buttons are pinned upon
somebody who
mistook all the fame for a fortunate
path.
Why governments swoon before
truth is clear—
you set the bar too high, and low at once,
no
innocent cleric can face all the dumbness—
why all of these drones from
downstairs, not here,
can’t spit out a lick out of being a dunce,
define for the ages what being a bum is.
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