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.