On the Despair of Creation

"Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images."
--Aristotle (On Interpretation)

"Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning the actions
of men; but like yourself when speaking about Homer, they do not speak
of them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that to
which the Muse impels them, and that only; and when inspired, one of
them will make dithyrambs, another hymns of praise, another choral
strains, another epic or iambic verses- and he who is good at one is
not good any other kind of verse: for not by art does the poet sing,
but by power divine."
-Plato (Ion Dialogue)

So I find myself at a new juncture. On one level I am committed to the task of poetry, but conversely I have reached a new despair in the act of of poetry. By act of poetry I mean that way in which poetry acts as a verb, performing specific but abstract functions in the act of living. I am quite certain that everything I say I agree with the moment I say it, but five minutes or five hours or five days later I cannot commit to whatever utterance I have made. Is this the way all "artists" exist? Perhaps, and perhaps it is a fool's task to attempt any sort of conviction. As Allen Grossman has it: "Art is about something the way a cat is about the house."

I guess the frustration is the experience of trying to hold onto water. It is also compounded today (my sullenness in the moment) by a comment I received in a workshop last week, which should not bother me, that "poetry is most resonant intellectually & emotionally if you wed a better mix of images/metaphor & abstraction." This statement bothers me for a few reasons. First, it ignores my project and secondly (concurrent with the first) it is a supposition that there is a 'good' way to write poetry. Now, I am definitely aware of my disposition to make blanket statements, so far be it from me to, in good faith, dismiss this statement as gibberish. And though I find it obnoxious, the redemption is that it got me to return to thinking about what my project is. So I am going to outline that here, if only for my self-serving needs of writing it down, and to hopefully engage some sort of dialogue with whoever is reading this.

First and foremost, I am Aristotelian in the idea that all language is inherently metaphor and metaphor, as a trope, is in play whenever language is used. Secondly, all language is abstract, oblique. To assume that one can use language to get closer to the natural world is a fallacy of thought. Rhetoric is constructed, and necessarily, though regressive, it constructs us to a large extent. But I cannot help believe that there is a part of us that is not the result of social/linguistic construction, the emotional/animal core that drives us to pure feeling. Because we do not understand this we try to create metaphorical construction, through poetry, narrative, whatever, to try to express and define what we cannot define. If it were possible to do so, we would not continue to create. We all have similar experiences with emotion, but the situations in which emotion arise are different, explicitly or subtly, and they drive us to create in order to help ourselves contain the overwhelming flux and try to contain it in stasis.

For some, this manifests into poems about empty houses, fish-markets, walks in the woods, but this is not how I experience the world of writing. "My lover's eyes are nothing like the sun," I think somebody once said, but they are the most visible manifestation of desire, they represent my desire, her beauty, her understanding, her questioning, her desire, her whatever else (I could fill the internet with how they make me feel). The point is, these are all abstract concepts, but they can be understood by everybody, I don't need a solid image in the physical construction of my lover's eyes, I can be honest and clear only in abstraction.

This is what leads me to my new ideas about the power of poetry in performative culture (and I don't mean the Judith Butler type of performativity). This is how abstraction meets the world of immediacy. I really haven't flushed this out well enough to say much now, but I do believe the future of poetry's cultural relevance lies within the realm of performance and/or the physical and visual field of experience.

When Plato speaks of the muse, I speak of pure emotion. The not-well-understood realm of instinct and creation that is spawned from those moments of consciousness that the world becomes most clear, if only for a brief moment.

Why Hamlet Matters

Ok, my thoughts may not be clear completely, but that is the point of this blog, to exercise my thoughts, to clear out the crap. productive procrastination, one might say.

I left off with a sort of 'where do we go from here' moment, and I, like everybody else, have no idea. But a few things are increasingly clear. First, Poetry cannot survive with any cultural relevance if it continues on it's trajectory. Yes, readership is at an all time high, as is publishing of poetry, but let us not forget that so is enrollment in MFA's, the population is bigger than it's ever been, and poetry is considered, at the popular level, an erudite practice. So poetry is a state of masturbation in it's current form, rather than exegesis. That brings me to my second clear thought: Poetry must change.

I've made these feelings overt on this blog, but now I want to explore the possibilities for evolution. Certainly Poetry is already evolving. The Flarf poets embraced the internet as one phase of evolution, the Conceptualists provide us with another, and this all began with the Language school. And a rundown of the other movements that are currently rearing their head. The self-titled (ironically, of course) "Hate Socialist Collective" or more commonly the Neo-Language poets of Juliana Spahr, Joshua Clover, Geoffrey G O'Brien, etc., all Marxist influenced politicalists, the Neo-Concretists led by Geof Huth, and whatever you might call Kent Johnson's brand of poetic statement. Of course there is the mainstream (modernism), and so many more individuals working in other neo-movements (Neo-Dark Room collective, Neo-formalists, etc.) and a rash of individuals forging their own way (Robert Grenier, Clark Coolidge, Rod Smith, Carlos Lara, Giori Gios (sp.), Martin Beeler) and of course the what can be called Third Generation New York School (Susan Wheeler, Sarah Manguso, Robert Polito, Jennifer Michael Hecht).

But wait, there's more: The Los Angeles Poets: James Krusoe, Holly Prado, Bill Mohr, etc, and the other Los Angeles poets: Reed Wilson, Stephen Yenser, Calvin Bedient, David St. John (I group these two differently stylistically), then there are the...you get the point. If anybody who is mentioned here disagrees with me, or is offended, I'm sorry. We have no clarity in the current situation and I'm basing this all on instinct. I'd also like to hear about what I am leaving out. Regardless, the point is that of these trends very few are new, but they all invite what Stevens famously said in the Adagio "All poetry is experimental poetry."

Now, I have been influenced by all of these movements in one way or another, but my greatest influences can be found in "The New American Poetry: 1945-1960" ed. by Donald Allen. Spicer, Creeley, Ashbery, Kerouac, Duncan, Olson, O'Hara, et. al. Different schools, definitively different but a community of pushing forward, reaching to the expanses of emotion in different ways. One could not publish such a book today, there seems to be very little commonality in the poetic direction of today's movements. Where Allen's Anthology's blood congealed in honesty, integrity, and exploration, today's movements are all scarred by that 'Neo' haunting almost every one. And this is fine. Let them relive the past. Let them fester in the mold and bones of tradition.

What is necessary for the survival of Poetry is a branching out, a deeper desire for honesty. Perhaps this cannot be achieved on the page any longer. We live in a post-Gutenberg world, and it is time for us to accept that. The printed book will never 'die' per se, but it will become something different, something less accessible, more erudite, and perhaps elitist. I knew if I wrote long enough today something would come to me. I am proposing another 'Neo'.

Not proposing, that is too weak. Demanding. We are not on the cliff of something new, we are already falling into the unknown past, tumbling amidst the oral tradition, the transference of poetry into something performative. People will always read, that is as simple a truth as can be expressed, but there was a time when most people could not. Literacy was reserved for the Classless eclesiasts, royalty, enfranchised. The rise of literacy was the biggest political force in the western world. We are again at that crossroads. Art has found a home in suburbia. Progressive art never will be so populist, but it must change to meet the times, to enable itself to at some time later be as accessible as the mainstream is now. Poetry exists in the honest act of attempted communication, regardless if the intended message is recieved, it is the attempt that is poetry. We receive by the act of seeing, this is the act of reading, seeing the words. But sight must have sound, because we receive by hearing. We can meditate on the sight/sound inside our own heads forever and never understand. Poetry can no longer exist as a hinge of sight and sound of the written word, it must grow into the sight and sound of a human being those words. This is why K is a great poet, why we must strive to present poetry in a different way. To merge the written with the act of communication on every level possible.

More Night Expression

So I have just come from a show, experimental theater as it were, (probably not just, this will be edited tomorrow, but just as in just now), and an afterward experience where I can say that in my life I have never felt less theatrical. But that is neither here nor anywhere for this piece of mental-masturbation or whatever we choose to call this blog. So I saw three short shows: "Comfort Food" by Chana Porter, "Big Red Drum Set" by Veronique Jeanmarie, and "Kammerspiel!" by Johnny Cigar. This is not a theater review, so don't worry. What it is is a questioning. I stand by what I said about theater/poetry in my last post. The theater is, as Seneca and so many others have said, is about exegesis. So is poetry, but poetry has become exegesis for the poet alone, it is broader effects and perhaps affects on its readership, but the intense, immediate emotion one experiences in the live performance is purely affect, the implications are effect.

This is perhaps what poetry lacks. The modernist move to an affectless verse led to some wonderful work, but it also led to a new tradition of boring, emotionally distant work. The vision of the reader of the poem is purely conceptual, whereas the vision of viewer of a play or theatrical presentation is as close to tangible as conceptualization gets. Now, this could easily lead me down two divergent paths of shameless traditionalist ranting, both of which I must tread slightly to light the way of my true course, my true west as it were. I am speaking of prosody and concreteness (in the sense of visual poetry, not concrete images). Now, prosody still maintains itself, even in the most "experimental" of poems. Each poem finds it's music, it's rythm, whether it be the "breath" method, the blank verse, or internal only to match content. Concrete poetry, inversely, denies prosody. It is the meeting of vision and language, sort of shunning and embracing de Saussure's sound/image concept simultaneously.

I suppose what I'm doing is creating the metaphor that the blank page for the author is the empty stage for the playwright. Or Play Write. Both need actors (words), light (layout) and music/sound for success. Well...Sam Beckett may disagree in the case of the playwright. I'm sure there are many who disagree, and I can think of many examples to counter my point. However, those examples exist in the past, and I am concerned with the present of poetry. The presence of poetry. It is audacious of poets to even begin to believe that words alone present the stripped down soul of communication, but yet this is a belief that is ever-present in our field. Bah! Fie! and Fuck You! I say.

I have a friend, K, who has such a strong poetry in performance that I regularly think of the work and am frozen. Frozen by the possibility that I will never find the energy in "poetic" language and construction to achieve what she does on stage. Obviously this is a fear based on broken syllogisms, but still, they present my point rather well. I fear that poetry has grown so far from what I love, in the overall sense, the popular and wide-read journals present us with gibberish: well-crafted but fearful of emotion, smart but not intelligent. I'm sure there are a wide range of reasons that populist poetry has faltered, why the greats remain in the minds of the poets but not the general public, but none is more apparent than this: Poetry is boring.

What the contemporary consumer of media is interested in is being spoken to, not at. I'd venture to say that even somebody who inspires a great sense of disinterest in me, Billy Collins, recognizes this. The whole group of these populist writers that adorn the pages of Poetry (Chicago) and every other buzz journal knows this. The problem is, they write for the concerns of themselves, to protect themselves and wallow in the prize-mania and nepatistic universe of praise and mild fortune that their particular brand of word-play creates. They are so protected that they have no emotion at all, for fear of the sentimental maybe, or maybe because they believe that craft weighs more than feeling or pure-thought. I believe it's the second one.

I must organize my what next thoughts, this should be a ride.

Thoughts from the Night

"All conceptual writing is allegorical writing," say Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman in the newly notorious "Notes on Conceptualisms". Hmmm. How easy would it be to ignore this facet of contemporary writing while developing an argument about writing. But that is not an option I suppose, though the little power the conceptualists yield is a paradox: pure ignorance by the community gives them their desired result and allows them to marm away with each other about how smart they are, and how all great art is rejected in the beginning, while acceptance into the discussion gives them a relatively stable field of influence. They are sincere in insincerity, and this is their greatest strength.

So how does a young writer deal with their particular brand of writing? Confrontation, evaluation, and either acceptance or rejection. They do and say some oddly profound things, and one must have a certain amount of respect for the group(s), and I have even been swept up in the political/theoretical energy they emit. But it is short lived for any thinking person, as you quickly begin to see each person in the group as one-person-one-trick. Not to say that Christian Bok and K. Silem Mohammad don't do great things, or a great thing each, but after awhile one begins to question the use of repetition as in, a la Apollinaire, "my greatest fear is to become my own greatest influence."

But, back to allegory. Most conceptual writing is based on appropriation at one level or another, and the cynical argument would be that all writing is based on appropriation (to paraphrase Joshua Clover: None of those words are mine, I heard them all from other people). Let the cynics be cynics. So I agree, all "conceptual" writing is allegorical, and that all writing is conceptual, but not that all writing is allegorical. Ah, the slippery slop(e) we must climb.

So here it is. Poetry is the expression of a moment, a pure moment. Any false creation of meaning (not metaphor) that covers up or obscures the emotion of a moment is like creating night to obscure night. When poetry is translated into an other form such as theater, prose, film, etc. it becomes an allegory: a place becomes existent in order to re-represent the original night which is the poem, which, in turn, is the moment of creation. The text and the moment are one, or at least share in undisturbable cause and effect, like a planets orbit is the effect of the gravitational pull of its home star, or better like the day is effect of nights absence.

This, in no way, should be taken as a critique of other forms. Each artistic form is unique, and contains its own poetry. I would very much like to see poetry assert itself in such a powerful way as to regain the admiration of the other forms, but they are strong where poetry is weak. This is especially true for theater, a form that contains emotional impact both in the immediate and the resounding, whereas contemporary poetry has impact only in reverberation. But this is a digression that leads to the thought.

The move from modernity to post-modernity to wherever we are now has left the world of poetry a great many wreckages of beauty and sublimity. However strong these are, the great moves by the modernists persist in the devouring of truly creative energy. Eliot and Pound were great poets and thinkers, assholes both, and to listen to them or take their advice is a fools gamble. But they are the most pervasive influence in contemporary, mainstream poetry, mostly because they can be imitated with a modicum of success.

If we look around the past half century we find the greatest influences, the poets we believe to be encased in the museums of poetics we call the Norton, are all individuals who yield no true following but admirers. Dylan Thomas, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, James Merrill, on into the current crop of mainstream originals of Rae Armantrout, Terrence Hayes, Jack Spicer (because his small field of influence grew incredibly after the reissue of "My Vocabulary Did This to Me"), Susan Wheeler and many more; of all of these voices one could say "brilliant, original, and purely singular." Though they all have obvious and not so obvious influences, their originality of style and/or thought reduces the chance that they will be imitated, at least successfully. But Pound and Eliot. No prob. Why?

Because of ease. All we need do to prove this is look at the last two or three years of back issues in any mainstream poetry journal to find the basic tenets of Eliot and Pound at work. Concrete images. Emotional distance. Metaphor driven. Constructed. Neat. These are not the poems of great thinkers. These are the poems of great imitators, soon to be forgotten in annals of social consciousness, except for the dinner parties in 2042 when the "My grandfather was a very successful poet," statements will be made by at least ten people in the room.

So where do we go from here? We cast off the allegorical, we dismiss the ease, we bear down and get dirty and confront ourselves and our culture, writhe in our filth and excrement, our pleasures, our joys our loves. We wed ourselves to the unknown if for no other reason than to spend a night in the sack with the taste of somebody new. Poetry can no longer be what it once was, the distance of the self from emotion, emotion from thought. It must become bedfellows with all art. Poetry must lay in the dungeons of theater. It must gambol in the meadows of film. It must be public. Painting. Dance. Advertising. Poetry must escape the prison set forth by the modernists, the conceptualists, the executors of state. Poetry must have no more comfortable confines of which to call its own.

"Baroque" then "post--"

When it comes to what I'm trying to say and how I say it there are two different me's working. This is why, after talking with Meghan last night, I find myself so lost in this process, where a few months ago I was so certain. So not two different me's, but a me in a transitional space, trying to veer away from the space of the last project into the language of the new one, one that strips down the world in a way where I have to confront myself and my role and the world. Plus all the confusion of other daily life, which is another shedding/stripping.

So enough about me and my personal problems. I awoke this morning to absence. Not the being alone, but the expectation of something being there that wasn't. This is, perhaps, at the heart of my thesis journey: how to exist in a place, how to fill the absence with its own regressive absence, whether in the visual or textual or combination of both. So I turned to Robert Creeley's poem "Nothing New," which is sort of his farewell advice to young poets, and a sharing of what he has learned or not learned of the world. I give you this:

"I like, rather am caught by, that sense of history
deliquescing, becoming commentary on its own agencies of
recording, a schizophrenically dividing pattern of multiple --
realities, all contesting, all "right" from their own demanding
perspectives. A friend spoke of the hermeneutical phase of
history, that stage where it becomes the study of its own
meaning. And then the baroque, and then the post--."

Then, for some reason, I was struck again by Grenier's statement "I HATE SPEECH" which both is pertinent to and in contrast of the current state of affairs in what I termed "The Post-Gutenberg" world we live in.

Most of my interactions with people, the important people in my life, come through text. Whether it be phone text messaging or e-mail, facebook, etc. But most importantly I try to communicate my version of my truth through poetry. Generally my face-to-face interactions are with folks I know either nothing of or marginally, and this expounds a certain freedom, but more generally a distinct restriction. When I try to speak, to be honest in speech, I am never given the opportunity to because of peoples consistent waiting to speak themselves. This is why poetry is, for me, my most valid form of communication. Perhaps this is too personal or whatever for a open web-site, but I guess the honesty in text is the only choice I feel I've been given. Which leads me to the fact that I've been chasing the goal, searching for what I'm not actually interested in. So, while I go try to find that, I'll leave this poem and the basic thesis statement and let you guys decide if I have room for these thoughts to grow:


A moment of taste. Words
on tongue, like late night moonlight and ocean
where reflection meets itself on dark horizons.

Because we are not outside of being:
These words: little ways.
There is nothing else.

Why look for existence?
In the sky a point.
And then the sun.

You and I.
You and I.

III.

Everything has changed.

IV

Writing is the post-condition of a moment.
Composition is an extraction of simplicity.
When you read this a gap will form.
I can only concern myself with my particular forms of diminishment and project
them on to you. That is why you read with interest. Words are a reflection of the self.
The act of writing does not differ from the act of war.
The moments in which one becomes fantastically scarred are the moments I am
concerned with.
The moments of great yearning.
It has nothing to do with death because it has everything to do with death.
Each new poem my possible last words.
Every time I write I start with an emotional distance then try to close that gap. Fill
the emptiness.
The word, the image, has everything to do with the thing itself. Otherwise it would
be something entirely different.
Every argument its own concept.

"Precision is a mask that imprisons an object in a set form. Only through imprecision does an object become free and able to be seen. Abstraction is imprecision."

Thesis Project

Ok...so it's been awhile, and now I want to change directions. Perhaps writing here, even if nobody reads it, will allow me to align my thoughts, or at least get some thoughts out there. I'm looking for help too people. If you do follow this over the next few weeks, unhinge my arguments, suggest readings that could be helpful, or just comment as you will. At times my personal frustrations with non-thesis life may bleed through. Ignore that. So, let's begin.

This morning I woke to thoughts of many different things. Mostly revisiting and trying to fantastically undo certain words or non-words I may have let go. Anyway, I also woke to the idea of "My life post-Gutenberg." I don't mean the actor, I mean the press. The printing press. I'm not sure exactly what this means, but I have some idea. For those of you unfamiliar with the textual arguments, and the loss of the book as we know it, there is plenty of info out there which I won't bother presenting here. Just know that in linguistic philosophy circles the written text vs. the spoken text has been a debate for the extent of the existence of the written word (the first reference I know of is in Plato's "Phaedrus," and I know of it through none other than Derrida, who provided us with the table from which to continue the debate in "Of Grammatology"). Ok, so there's that. Foundation.

So, in the same year that "Of Grammatology" hit's the American consciousness, 1972, (I may be a little wrong in this, but I'm not worried, this is definitely post french publication, and as these things are not of one person but a result of the culture, I'm just laying the mental imagery for myself in an arbitrary timeline) Robert Grenier writes "I HATE SPEECH". Hmmm...no big deal you say. But it is. The Gutenberg press appeared in the mid 15th century and is arguably the most influential invention of all time. It allowed the masses access to information, allowed for social thought to be enlightened by the commoner (though this perhaps took centuries to develop) which could be closely linked to the rise of capitalism as we know it in an argument I'm not going to have, and, artistically speaking, it released the waters of what we call our current "textual existence." Current philosophers say that the printing press created an "alphabetic monopoly" that led to the reduction of symbol culture, that repressed the visual development of social coding and replaced it with a standardized textual world, one in which the letter is favored over the image.

I think this is a relatively simple argument, and one that I overly simplify here, and also one that can easily be dismissed to an extent. If one removes the words text from a can of Coca-Cola, but leaves the pattern in place, we are able to consume the meaning. We are a culture, a species I say, that exists in a world of visual coding, text is simply a way for us to translate the visual world because, try as we might, we cannot speak in images.

To take another step back, for my own unscrambling, and if anybody is actually interested, the foundation of linguistic arguments has for a very long time focused on syntax. Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, first (well, not first, but famously) exposed the arbitrary nature of individual words. His work led to Roman Jakobson and the Russian school of Structuralists examining language from this syntactical standpoint, i.e. words only mean anything in combination with other words. In the artistic movements, Modernity, Surrealism and Dada, which surrounded these arguments we can see this tension at play. Modernity suffered from realism, Surrealism suffered from over-excitement of combination and surprise, and Dada was just suffering. Then something enormous happened. Poetry looked west. Poetry became American.

I'm taking huge logical leaps here. I know.

So we see this new American movement in poetics, or several. Some weighed the power of speech over text, but some, those who seem to be the most influential in the contemporary argument, weighed the written word just as heavily. Poems wed the page, so to speak. So we see figures like Charles Olson suddenly slipping in symbols, the slash most specifically (look up "Kingfishers") Robert Duncan inserts little drawings, and Jack Spicer says "I won't to write a poem which is nothing more than the pointing of a finger" and "No one listens to poetry," they read it (ok, liberal interpretation there). Text itself became a revolutionary act, not the spoken text, but the words on a page, sitting there permanent, both arguable and not, but, nonetheless, text became a real artifact, not just a translation of thought.

So then comes along this one word in the mid-sixties from the rushed typewriter of Aram Saroyan (as the story goes). "lighght". That's it. Concrete poetry was nothing new, not even in America, but this little word set off a maelstrom in the world of poetry, and even congressional politics. But I'm not concerned with such arguments. I'm concerned with this word, this poem, as it exists in 2009, the age of the internet, the world post-Gutenberg.

I suddenly awoke today to the thought that physical text, poetry as art, may only have a place next to paintings in museums, or locked away with the statues in the basement as Ashbery would have it. Its true that electronic poetry has opened the doors for some very interesting artistic phenomena, but the induction of e-poetry should not have a baby with the bath water result. It really changes nothing, but adds to what's already here. So, what is it about physically holding a book and looking at the text that is so fascinating to someone like me, and so insubstantial to so many? This is the question that I ask as I move forward.

I have laundry to do.

sadness not sadness then explode the thought yes of you again tonight the options are not so slight. come and be with me jude, then we can write. so no. no again. poet, look like god. sever from me the unintentional leverage of halflights, moonnlights, sunday mornings. sickness is bereft, the flue, as a whale and I cannot breathe sufficiently to allow for newer or better days. not alone. the writing has all stopped. it is all being written to or fro. and still you are always in my nearness. always in a sense of how close i can be to myself, with nothing lacking, or lacked, or lax. I want to fly to you. not in the metaphysical sense. I want to fly to you. Suppress the good of distance. the angst of silence, the mode of green as i see you so much in dreams, so much in tempermental fits of regret and desire. every morning is only that, only a morning.