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.