Poems at the Poetry Free-for-all

Meridith

12-14-2004, 11:29 AM

Not so much an answer as an exploration of "Modernist"

Anyway, I like it, so I'm posting it.

Amardeep Singh

Lehigh University

Introduction: English 385. Fall 2001

"You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ a heap of broken images"

--T.S. Eliot

“We can only see ourselves as outlines, cadaverous, sculpturesque.”

--Virginia Woolf

“On or about December 1910 human character changed.”

--Virginia Woolf

"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." (George Orwell, 1940)

Introduction; Goals of the Course (An anti-masterpiece Manifesto)

There was a time when 'British modernism' referred to five of six European authors and about 30 years of time (1910-1940). These were the accepted "great" writers of the period, and whatever modernism was -- past tense since this narrow conception of the "modernist" era only emerged in the academy in the 1960s -- one assumed, could be derived from a reading of the ‘big six’: Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Yeats, Woolf, and maybe Lawrence. No one seemed particularly bothered by the fact that Eliot was an American and that Joyce and Yeats were Irish, and at times wrote bitterly about English colonialism. Why is it therefore still "British"? Nor were many critics troubled by the fact that these five or six writers really are very different from one another, both philosophically and formally. First, in terms of style: some of the canonical writers use “stream of consciousness," some use radical syntax and populate their writings with neologisms and snippets of various languages. But others write much more conventionally. Both Woolf and Lawrence wrote novels -- radical novels, rather unlike any people had written previously -- but still decidedly novels, with complete sentences, with conventional grammar, semi-conventional characterization and plot, etc. If modernism is whatever Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Yeats, and Woolf are, what would that be exactly?

Secondly, the matter of theme. Many modernist writers focus on personal alienation -- from tradition and history, from family life, including heterosexual norms & values, as well as from consumer culture. In terms of theme, we might say that modernists are intentionally, perhaps even revolutionarily, rude: they write manifestoes, are perpetually intoxicated (Freud: cocaine; Joyce: booze), and sleep with whomever they want to, boy or girl. These are the best-known attributes of modernism in form and in theory, but even this very limited group of authors did not express alienation consistently in their writing. T.S. Eliot became a devout Catholic mid-way through his career. Yeats was deeply interested in eastern mystical traditions like Theosophy. And Pound became a fascist, who ranted on Mussolini’s radio stations about the degeneration of Europe before being, eventully, institutionalized. And Woolf also struggled with mental illness, though never quite as publicly. What do these different trajectories have in common, if anything?

If the conventional approach is to look at the Big Six (authors) and define modernism as whatever it is that they are, a goal of this course is to define modernism from the opposite direction. I would like us to try and define modernism, first, from its historical context -- modernism in twentieth century world culture, responding to World War I and other historical events and processes -- as well as from its philosophical and formal principles. This isn’t something we will talk about every day; indeed, my primary interest on any given day is in talking about the literature at hand – reading closely, whether or not our discussions have anything to do with “modernism”. But from time to time, and certainly at the end, it is something I’d like us to come back to.

My instinct is that the fact that there is a multiplicity of approaches to modernism is a good thing, an interesting mess. However, if there is one approach to reading that I am opposed to, or if not actively opposed at least pointedly not interested in, it is the approach to literature that reads everything in terms of archetypes. In archetypal reading, every character is a version – a retelling – of a single primordial story that has been told over and over again, and must continue to be told by writers in the present moment. In this mode of reading, there are a limited number of stock characters or narrative possibilities open to us, and we must repeat them, perhaps with small variations, indefinitely. Many archetypalist readings, especially of modernist texts, are especially dependent on language derived from rather crude readings of Freud and Jung. Responding to Freud, people often look for the Oedipal conflicts and anxieties (an alienation from the father that is also a desire to replace him). Responding to Jung, literature is a way of accessing our collective unconscious; we can see traces of ancient histories even in modern texts. People who read, for instance, Joyce’s Ulysses this way tend to emphasize the parallels to the Odyssey over the myriad aspects of the text that seem to have nothing to do with Homer or ancient Greece. In a gentle form, archetypal reading can remind us (productively) to think about history – there’s a precedent for just about every apparently original idea out there. But in its extreme form, archetypes chains writers (and readers) to tradition in a way that is entirely unhealthy. As if we are trapped in TV land, and everything new must be a version of something that came before. All plots and devices must be adaptable to the sit-com format – deadening.

I have been suggesting that the connections between and among the canonical modernist writers is one we might question, and indeed, rather than pull these various writers too closely together, a goal of this course is to pull them apart – find out what makes these texts unique and different from one another. So you might be wondering, why even use the term “modernist” if it creates so many problems, and if it seems inadequately represent the true variety of spirit and style of all of the important writing of the time? In fact, I am not that attached to the term “modernist.” For now, it is an open term; its definition will evolve as the course develops. Whatever term or terms people decide to use to describe literature of the early twentieth century, the language we choose should be there to assist us in understanding the literature as well as the period, rather than the other way around.

The only consistent rule I have used in designing the syllabus for this class is that all of the texts here are amazing pieces of writing. Otherwise, I have had to be somewhat arbitrary. In some cases I’ve had to stay away from key texts (such as Pound’s Cantos; Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake) for purposes of manageability. And even though I believe that some texts from the latter nineteenth century belong firmly alongside the great novels of the early twentieth (and there are a number of texts from after 1945 that might also fit), I have generally limited the chronology to 1900-1945.

With only one exception, I have focused on writers that seem to belong in a rough configuration of the “British.” This includes T.S. Eliot and Joyce, but it also includes colonial subjects like Mulk Raj Anand and Rabindranath Tagore. “British” then refers to writers of any nationality who wrote in Great Britain, or writers from British colonies. The exception I should mention is Aime Cesaire, a Francophone writer from Martinique, whose early surrealist poetry is so important, and yet so widely overlooked, that I felt it necessary to include him despite the linguistic and historical differences entailed.

The first consequence of a revisionist approach to the concept of "modernism" such as the one I have been outlining is that the canon of relevant authors explodes. Let us do away with the ‘Big Six’; in fact there were dozens (hundreds) of writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, and architects who were engaged in serious literary and aesthetic experimentation in England in Europe more broadly, and even outside of Europe. As importantly, upon actually reading, for instance, The Waste Land or Ulysses, one sees immediately that Eliot and Joyce are themselves incorporating many outside sources (or 'intertexts') into their high modernist "masterpieces" (Are they even masterpieces? Perhaps we might think of them are merely brilliant experiments -- "No more masterpieces!" the French surrealist Antonin Artaud once said -- I think I agree). To be quite radical, we could say that writers like Eliot and Joyce are not so much 'authors' in the conventional sense, as collage artists. What would be the implications of this reconceptualization?

A side point: some recent biographies of writers like Joyce and the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald have used their personal correspondence to reveal the remarkable extent to which both writers plagiarized their wives in designing their women characters. What might this do to our conception of their unique authorship? Should the author of The Great Gatsby now be given as Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald???

In keeping with the anti-masterpiece line of thought, this course approaches modernism not as a very limited canon of high literary texts, but as a series of textual, cultural, and philosophical explosions. The texts in this course are all radical, and they do all signify 'modernist', but they do so in ways that are highly varied. The emphasis is on reading in the interest of drawing connections between and among different authors and events, as well as on learning about the transformations occurring in British (and to an extent, world) culture between 1900 and 1945.

The formal inventions of modernism, primarily stream of consciousness writing and the growing emphasis on abstraction, are closely intertwined with modernism's social and philosophical themes. Some of the most important of these I have begun to allude to: the unraveling of social boundaries and the alienation of the subject; the crises produced by industrialization, capitalism, and the mechanization of war, and the intense sense of spatial displacement produced by imperialism.

I might end with a word about the title of the course. The course is called 'The End(s) of the Human' because an overriding modernist theme, present in all of the texts we will study, is the collapse (or explosion) of established Renaissance (and Enlightenment) ideas of the 'human'. If the greatest achievement of Renaissance art was the discovery of perspective and depth of field, it was used not to represent architecture and space so much as the form of the human body. And it is this form that seems to have vanished in the world-view of the modernists. If Da Vinci thought it was extremely important, an act of grandeur, to figure the human body in three-dimensional perfection, as a concrete object in time and space, Picasso looked at the people posing for him (often, interestingly women) and thought of jumbling up bodies with their backgrounds, imagining them from multiple perspectives. Modernism in painting was partly a fad, but it also represented a new fascination with abstraction, a fascination that I see everywhere in the literature of this course.

There is no more “human”: neither as a flesh-and-blood entity (the machines and robots take over), nor as the center of the 'civilized' world ('savages' and women take over), nor as the autonomous individual (individuals become part of faceless humanity; ownership and authorship dissolve into mass collectivities).

Meridith

12-14-2004, 11:39 AM

More. Having a bit of time finding exactly what I want.

Modernism in Literature: Poetry

Most serious poetry today is still Modernist. The movement is not easily summarize, but the key elements are experimentation, anti-realism, individualism and a stress on the cerebral rather than emotive aspects.

Discussion

Modernist writing is challenging, which makes it suitable for academic study. Many poets come from university, moreover, and set sail by Modernism's charts, so that its assumptions need to be understood to appreciate their work. And since Postmodernism still seems brash and arbitrary, writing in some form of Modernism is probably the best way of getting your work into the better literary magazines. How much should you know of its methods and assumptions?

You need to read widely: poetry, criticism and literary theory. Modernism was a complex and diverse movement. From Symbolism it took allusiveness in style and an interest in rarefied mental states. From Realism it borrowed an urban setting, and a willingness to break taboos. And from Romanticism came an artist-centred view, and retreat into irrationalism and hallucinations.

Hence many problems. No one wants to denigrate the best that has been written this last hundred years, but the forward-looking poet should be aware of its limitations. Novelty for novelty's sake ends in boredom and indifference, in movements prey to fashion and media hype. Modernism's ruthless self-promotion has also created intellectual castes that carefully guard their status. Often the work is excessively cerebral, an art-for-art's sake movement that has become faddish and analytical. The foundations tend to be self-authenticating: Freudian psychiatry, verbal cleverness, individualism run riot, anti-realism, overemphasis on the irrational. These concepts may not be wholly fraudulent, but as articles of faith they have not won general assent. Modernist work will give you accredited status, but possibly neither an avant-garde reputation nor wide popularity.

Suggestions

1. Modernist work is often the most accessible of today's poetry, thanks to education, public libraries and a vast critical industry. Start therefore with Yeats, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, etc., and follow your interests — back into traditional poetry or forward into Postmodernist styles.

2. Model your first efforts on the better poems of Modernism. You will learn much about the poet's craft, and produce work that is still acceptable to the better poetry magazines.

3. Read the biographies of Modernist artists to understand how and why they made their innovations. Then read aesthetics and nineteenth-century continental philosophy to get a broader view of the matter.

© Litlangs 2000 2002 2003

Meridith

12-14-2004, 11:40 AM

Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry is characterised by technical innovation in the mode of versification (sometimes referred to as free verse) and by the dislocation of the 'I' of the poet.
These two facets of modernist poetry are intimately connected with each other. The dislocation of the authorial presence is achieved through the application of such techniques as collage, found poetry, visual poetry, the juxtaposition of apparently unconnected materials, etc. At the same time, these techniques are used not for their own sake but to open up questions in the mind of the reader.

Modernist poetry in English is often viewed as an American phenomenon in origin, with leading exponents including Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, H.D, and Louis Zukofsky, but there are a number of important British modernists, such as David Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid, Mina Loy, and Basil Bunting.

The influence of modernism can be seen in such later poetic groups and movements as the Objectivist poets, the beat generation, the Black Mountain poets, the deep image group and the British Poetry Revival.

In Ireland a group of poets oriented towards the work of James Joyce established a lineage of Irish poetic modernism. Prominent among these were Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey. Contemporary poets associated with Irish modernism include Trevor Joyce, Michael Smith, Geoffrey Squires, Randolph Healy, Catherine Walsh and Maurice Scully in Ireland, Tom Raworth and Maggie O'Sullivan in the U.K., and Susan Howe and Fanny Howe in the U.S.A.

See also

Meridith

12-14-2004, 11:49 AM

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y

"Goal is not to have a goal," John Cage.

"For modern poetry, since it must be distinguished from classical poetry and from any type of prose, destroys the spontaneously functional nature of language, and leaves standing only its lexical basis," Roland Barthes, from Writing Degree Zero.

"Narrativity is short-circuited from the moment the reading process is spatialized," Jerome McGann.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y was born in 1971 with the release of a new magazine titled This, which culminated in the release seven years later of the magazine titled L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The early 1970s was an ideal time for a new movement in poetry. Early challenges to mainstream poetry had already begun, thanks in large part to the Projectivist poets of Charles Olson, a Black Mountain poet.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y was not simply a movement to bring renewed interest to language, but to the structures and codes of language: how ideas are represented and formulated to transmit ideas, thoughts, and meaning. Jerome McGann writes of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y in his essay "Contemporary Poetry, Another Route":

Here a conscious attempt has been made to marry the work of the New American Poetry of the fifties with the poststructural work of the late sixties and seventies. As Frost, Yeats, Auden, and Stevens are the "precursors" of the poets of accommodation, Pound, Stein, and Zukofsky stand behind the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers. Oppositional politics are a paramount concern, and the work stands in the sharpest relief, stylistically, to the poetry of accommodation.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y also recognized that language is political. In the same way that American farmers hid behind tree trunks and took pop shots at British soldiers who stood in formation in open fields during the revolutionary war, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S fractured the language in an attempt to wage their own rebellious assault against the social and political structure inherent in the Imperial force of the English language. In doing this, the entire reading process was overhauled, with the reader of this type of poetry forever changed in the way that he or she encounters text of any type.

As McGann continues in the same essay, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S experimented with form and diction, ultimately bringing organization/form to where previously none (or little in the sense of being a poetic work) was found. He quotes advice given to budding L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S by poet Bernadette Mayer in her work, "Experiments":

Systematically derange the language, for example, write a work consisting only of prepositional phrases, or, add a gerundive to every line of an already existing piece of prose or poetry, etc.

Get a group of words (make a list or select at random); then form these words (only) into a piece of writing—whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form, and/or: Use certain words in a set way, like, the same word in every line, or in a certain place in every paragraph, etc. Design words.

Write what cannot be written, for example, compose an index. (Read an index as a poem).

Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial.

Consider word & letter as forms—the concretistic distortion of a text, for example, too many o's or a multiplicity of thin letters (illftiii, etc.)

Attempt to eliminate all connotation from a piece of writing & vice versa.

Work your ass off to change the language & don't ever get famous.
A difficulty for many readers of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y is its preoccupation with fragments, nonsense, and unmeaning; as well its rejection of the narrative model that has been the basis of nearly all types of literature. The traditional mode of reading for referential meaning does not work, as writers of this type of poetry attempt to unlock meaning by first unlocking our preconceptions (and preoccupations) of meaning. Charles Bernstein, a critic and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T, says the construction (and reading) of poetry should not be envisioned as "designing a garden," but rather as "making a path." Where poets before opted to make a path along pre-existing sidewalks and avenues, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S opted to clear-cut through the wild and thick brush of the English language to create previously untrodden footpaths for a new generation of readers.

Whether L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y succeeds to gain a large audience is irrelevent. The movement has brought together a dedicated and insular community that thrives on each other's ideas and perceptions. Many poets who are not L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S have gained a new sense of their "poetic" place and understanding from simply exploring the movement's aesthetic. Ironically perhaps, many writers considered L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S resist the label and attempts to define themselves within it. Despite similarities between the work of John Ashbery and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y, Ashberry has said he doesn't align himself with these poets because he believes language should ultimately depend on references to meanings generated outside language.

Regardless, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y remains an interesting legacy that will continue to bewilder and invigorate generations of poets and readers. David Melnick wrote in the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, where his own work appeared:

The poems are made of what look like words and phrases but are not ... What can such poems do for you? You are a spider struggling in your own web, suffocated by meaning. You ask to be freed by these poems from the intolerable burden of trying to understand. The world of meaning: is it too large for you? too small? It doesn't fit. Too bad. It's no contest. You keep on trying. So do I.

Poets of Interest:
John Ashbery
Charles Bernstein
John Cage
Clark Coolidge
Lyn Hejinian
Bernadette Mayer
Michael Palmer
Leslie Scalapino
Gertrude Stein

Meridith

12-14-2004, 12:04 PM

C-o-m-m-u-n-i-c-a-t-i-n-g an ad-hoc introduction to american language poetry, de-fiAntly not "idle babbling": any queries(?) please. Outside the manifesto.
"Pilots & meteorologists disagree about the sky."*

from TJANTING, by Ron Silliman

"Seriously, these sorts
of far away
presentations enfold
their columnar pretense."

from GRADATION, by Charles Bernstein

"In its first dumb form
language was gesture
technique of travelling over sea ice silent
before great landscapes and glittering processions
vastness of a great white looney north
of our forebeing."

from SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE, by Susan Howe

One of the architects of the Language movement, Ron Silliman, has said of this type of poetry, it's a "community of concern for language as the centre of whatever activity poems might be". Silliman would also confirm that this notion may be expounded in any style or method providing the product is not merely a "voice poem", that is, the writer conveying to reader a "natural" message in narrative sequence. Charles Bernstein once said, "there is no natural writing style". If there is a "natural" writing style then it is fact based on assumed knowledge and methods or patterns of delivery, leading to, in the words of William Hartley, author of the influential volume Textual Politics and the Language Poets, " a socially contrived basis of...writing". Language poetry is about going beyond the boundaries "traditional/conventional" language usage places on notions of meaning. This re-working of material through aesthetic discourse is done in a political light, or at least with a political awareness, though in a way which refutes the idea that language should only refer to that which occurs outside itself.

The Language poets do not exist as an anathema. They are grounded and influenced by many earlier poets and movements, such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein (of "the rose is a rose is a rose" fame), Charles Olson (and The Black Mountain/Projectionist school in general), John Ashbery, Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, the Dadaists (especially Tristan Tzara), The Russian Futurists, and Surrealism. In the case of the Russian Futurists they identified with a movement that was born out of revolution in the same way as they themselves were a resistance to the Vietnam War and Watergate. Similarly, the Dadaists, with their hatred of the corrupt and war-decadent European State system sought a "truth". As Tristan Tzara had said in his "Introduction To Dada":

It seemed to us that the world was losing itself in idle babbling, that literature and art had become institutions located on the margin of life, that instead of serving man they had become the instruments of an outmoded society.

As will be obvious to the reader by now, Language poets do not separate the political from language. And in a sense all language IS political.

Language poets are an extremely diverse though networked group of practitioners. There are a plethora of small magazines and presses devoted exclusively to their work, and also a communal (if somewhat defensive at times - a kind of "us" and "them" attitude towards more traditional and conservative schools of verse) spirit that allows extremely diverse poets to feel they share a common ground. Some of the American journals which have been significant over the years, since the first issue of This in 1971, a year seen as the starting point of the movement, are L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, SULFUR, TEMBLOR, QU, MIAM, ROOF, TOTTEL'S, SINK, and TRAMEN. Major anthologies include: In The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (selections from the journal of the same name), eds. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein; The American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman 1986; Language Poetries, ed. Douglas Messerli, 1987; and From The Other Side Of The Century, ed. Douglas Messerli, 1994. There are numerous poets and critics , and in many cases poets are also critics. Some of the most influential poets are: Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Ray DiPalma, Carla Harryman, Steve McCaffery, Susan Howe, Ron Silliman, Diane Ward, and Lyn Hejinian.

The Language poet, regardless of differences of aesthetics and theory, looks to the value of the individual word. As the Russian Futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchonykh wrote in their 1913 manifesto "the word as such": [in their poetry] "the word developed as itself alone". Through the combination of individual words, phrases, sentences, etc., each word is attached to another by a series of associations. The pre-Babelic notion of one universal language comes into play here. In much the same way as Marx's "commodity fetishism" may be seen as an answer to the corruption of speech by capitalism, itself a necessary step to liberation, the confusion of Babel may be seen as a learning curve. The loss of mono-articulation does not deny its universal roots/associations. As in the State of Nature people used language to work together as a tool for survival, as opposed to the capitalist use of language for profit and subjugation, so the language poet tries to recapture this original "purity" of words. In a sense the avant-garde, in general, might be perceived as being a series of rearrangements of anachronistic sensibilities.

These practitioners, would, of course, reject the notion of the "romantic" poet who defines self through comparisons to the "natural" world, looks for a specific (predictable) series of references to subvert the reader, and as a consequence making the poet's ego central to perceptions of the outer world, regardless of persona (which is often something of a facade in any case). Steve McCaffery says : "Reference in language is a strategy of promise and postponement; it's the thing that language never is, never can be, but to which language is always moving." Words, like labour and production, can so often become victims of "commodity fetishism", assuming "a fantastic form different from their reality" (Capital 1, Marx) - as we are "told" what we "know" we become increasingly complacent and victimized by language. Julia Kristeva, in Revolution in Poetic Language, examines the liberating nature of the semiotic ("includes drives, their dispositions, and their divisions of the body by the ecological and social system surrounding the body, such as objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents" - Hartley), and the contrasting oppresive "symbolic" ("logical and orderly framing of language" - Hartley). She says, in "The Signifying Process":

The regulation of the semiotic in the symbolic through the thetic break, which is inherent in the operation of language, is also found on the various levels of society's signifying edifice. In all known archaic societies, this founding break of the symbolic order is represented by murder - the killing of a man, a slave, a prisoner, an animal. Freud reveals this founding break and generalizes from it when he emphasizes that society is founded on a complicity in a common crime.

In the same way, the "romantic" poet exploits our complicities to reference his/her self and divert our attentions from the commonweal. In the course of this we become complacent and dulled to the mode of production that removes surplus labor from its producers, in Marxist parlance.

It is worth noting that despite their general obsession with theory and critical practice, the Language poets tend to be anti-Academic (i.e The Academy), and in fact grew out of an antipathy towards the Academic verse of the 50s and 60s, as well as the incorporation of poets such as Creeley, Duncan, and Olson into the literary canon of the era. Language poetry, above all else, should challenge the reader. Stimulation comes of disorientation. The Russian Formalists were fond of the word "ostranenie" which may be roughly translated into "genuine strangeness". There are boundaries, but only insofar as they are constructs of a post-Babel Capitalist world (the dismantling of the "common" language providing a complex market and consequently the ideological starting point for Capitalism). They are there to be passed through, or over, or under, or negotiated in some way.

Language Poetry in Australia, at least in terms of publishing, is in its infancy, despite certain poets (such as Kris Hemensley and a circle of poets "centred" around Melbourne's Collected Works Bookshop), having worked in a similar vein to their American models for many years. In 1991 Meanjin ran a special Language Poetry issue which included both American and Australian practitioners of the art. This issue prompted much dialogue amongst writers and theorists around the country. One of the major questions addressed was whether or not there could in fact be a school of poetry in Australia recognized as Language Poetry. It could be argued that "Language Poetry" is purely an American phenomenon (be it one heavily influenced by modern European - particularly French - theory and language experimentation) and that Australians have, like other nations and cultures, hybrided its theories to suit their own social, political, and linguistic peculiarities. According to Sigi Curnow in her article "Language Poetry And The Academy":

The term "Language" in this enterprise ends up exhibiting the kinds of textual dislocations with which writing itself is preoccupied; unstable, localized, "Language" becomes a sort of shifting signifier, embracing a diverse range of practices and concerns.

To conclude, I'll quote Ron Silliman quoting (a favourite Language past-time!) Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The social revolution ... cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.

M -- Here

So you see, what I mean by abstraction is incredibly broad. I feel I've only dipped my baby toe into the sea of its knowledge, which is why I asked for any comments opinions, on any piece. It's a "catch all" phrase in so many ways and applies to so many movements within a moment.

Language poetry (which I referred to as sound poetry, wrongly) is entirely different from the abstraction which I use (Ie my relation to the natural world) but it fascinates.

It is further complicated because most of the writing on this subject seems to want to put Abstraction into a historical time period of WWI to WWII (Modernism) Which is why I used "abstraction" which seems less a "period" term.

I am concerned with the here and now of this movement, which is impossible to really dive into without some historical reference to literature and visual medium. I've not even included that, the surrealists, the abstractionists, the modernist painters, sculptors etc. If you google 'abstract art' you get much more into the political aspect of abstraciton, the rebeling against the dicatates of society, capatlism, the war(s).

It all seems to mesh and overlap and it's all a bit overwhelming. So I'd really like to know what the "average" (not to suggest talent, mind you) writer around here thinks/deals/approaches the subject.

Harry R

12-14-2004, 12:14 PM

So basically you want to discuss most of the major developments in poetry in the past 90 years?

It's a big subject.

Personally, when it gets to the more extreme fringes I find it can get very boring very quickly. But not to engage with Modernism, in a broad sense, is to pretend that the C20th didn't happen.

A site like PFFA isn't the best place to try that kind of thing. For a literary website, the general tone is often surprisingly anti-intellectual.

Harry

Harry R

12-14-2004, 12:18 PM

Ah. Now I understand. You seem to be using 'abstraction' in analogy to the visual arts - but I still don't know what that means for writing. Explain, please. Or just post an example of a poem - yours or someone else's.

Harry

Meridith

12-14-2004, 12:21 PM

"So basically you want to discuss most of the major developments in poetry in the past 90 years?"

Well nothing quite that ambitious. Okay, yeah, maybe.

At least, I was hoping to discuss abstraction on a more personal basis of each poets usage and what they find relevant and/or helpful to their work.

Why anti-intellectual around here?

Meridith

12-14-2004, 12:23 PM

Originally posted by Harry R
Ah. Now I understand. You seem to be using 'abstraction' in analogy to the visual arts - but I still don't know what that means for writing. Explain, please. Or just post an example of a poem - yours or someone else's.

Harry

Okay, here's one of mine

An early draft, so... fair warning, but one that prompted the post

I dredge my fingers through talcum powder and shoot
it from my tips, letting it fly upon the air and smack
the mirror that stares at me recognizing the past,
a crescent of new moon benediction.

To think that powder, so seedless, could mask,
could coat my wrinkles and fill my youth as I stand
a woman perched betwixt the double yellow line of madness.
I have traveled down this road and written thesis upon thesis

upon my tongue, burned as incense, when I was too weak
to leave this bed and too warm to lift a pen to keep inky proof
of unraveling mysteries that burn at night but lose themselves
with sunshine and dusty floors.

I have painted imaginary figure eights upon my thumbs,
drawn with an index finger, ‘til I was calmed by eternity
and resolute with sleep. This is the way the world should be,
fleeced as sheep, bahing and beying, hoofed in a mountainside

of lichen and snow mist. This place where my iris falls short
of blades of grass cannot compare to the crawl of rock toward sea,
impassive and girdled by canyons and waterfall.
I dreamt of subways holding rocket propelled bodies

inhaling the smell of urine and crisscrossing each other with
smudgy soles from sticky floors, with deadened eyes that cannot
remember mountainsides of lichen and laurel, but know rhythm
and pace compounded in hearts ‘til the constant roar of track

and shuffling bodies is as the roar of the fall: water and waste,
human and hollow, matter, shape and consequence, all as I lie
in my bed, seedless. I spread my chalky fingers upon the sheets,
goldenrod with streaks of death; who am I?

I place my cheek upon the bed away from the pillow and listen
to the careful stream of my heart, the careful grind of my hoof on rock,
causing the air to chase the new moon sliver upon my tongue,
like a host, like body and blood.

Harry R

12-14-2004, 12:24 PM

Anyone interested in the recent American stuff might want to check out UbuWeb:

http://www.ubu.com/

Eclipse:

http://www.princeton.edu/eclipse/

And some blogs. Ron Silliman:

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

Josh Corey:

http://joshcorey.blogspot.com/

Henry Gould:

http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/

Harry R

12-14-2004, 12:27 PM

Originally posted by Meridith
Okay, here's one of mine

OK, before I make any comment, can you pick out which aspects of that poem you think are key to this discussion?

Harry

Meridith

12-14-2004, 12:33 PM

Yeah, sure. The natural world as spiritual (heaven) the modern world as (hell) if this is in fact, reflected, the duality of life on the physical plane, and within the narrator.

Harry R

12-14-2004, 12:41 PM

Originally posted by Meridith
Yeah, sure. The natural world as spiritual (heaven) the modern world as (hell) if this is in fact, reflected, the duality of life on the physical plane, and within the narrator.

That's just subject matter. Any formal/technical aspects?

Harry

Meridith

12-14-2004, 12:54 PM

Sorry, how about how the sound, the aural tonal compostion of words plays into the effectiveness of the piece.

(I apologize for any unclearness on my part, as I say, I've only dipped my baby toe into this but very much want to learn/understand more, much more)

River Not

12-14-2004, 10:19 PM

I just want to see if I'm following some of this correctly -

Originally posted by Meridith
The formal inventions of modernism, primarily stream of consciousness writing and the growing emphasis on abstraction, are closely intertwined with modernism's social and philosophical themes

Many modernist writers focus on personal alienation -- from tradition and history, from family life, including heterosexual norms & values, as well as from consumer culture.

I've mixed around your text in attempts to locate your working definition of abstraction -- in relation to 'modernism'.

If I follow correctly, abstraction in relation to modernism is defined as alienation, or perhaps, ideally, a uniqueness amongst the masses, and perhaps also a sense of nihilism against the masses, which is not what I'd call an ideal perception, even though nihilism's function is based in the idealogical, but I'm digressing.

So, if abstraction for the modernist is distinction, what does this say with regard to archetypical thinking? surely Jung's "collective unconscious", for example, isn't as important to modernistic abstraction as is his (presumed) theory of making ones conscious self distinct from the collective unconscious.

The emphasis, it seems, is on the reckoning, the awakening, rather than the archetype, the general.

or maybe I'm lost.

but how does the theme of alienation correspond to a theme of an ever-present, over-bearing archetype?

or have I just agreed with your argument against perceiving modernistic abstractionists as those writers of yore primarily consumed with [the degenerative effects of] archetypical/normal consciousness?

Meridith

12-23-2004, 01:39 PM

"I've mixed around your text in attempts to locate your working definition of abstraction -- in relation to 'modernism'.

If I follow correctly, abstraction in relation to modernism is defined as alienation, or perhaps, ideally, a uniqueness amongst the masses, and perhaps also a sense of nihilism against the masses, which is not what I'd call an ideal perception, even though nihilism's function is based in the idealogical, but I'm digressing."

No, no. It's impossible to have nihilism without idealism. No digression there. And yes, to a great deal I believe abstraction through modernism is about alienation from society from general forms of accepted expression across the boundaries of the arts. For poetry, both against society and against form, sometimes even against words and "normal" approaches to free verse, to construction and for the reader, to digestion. I think a great deal of the point is to make the world/reader stop and take note by saying

"Look, I am showing you the common through new eyes, decide for yourself what the work means and think more about the experience, object from which I am taking my muse. See it fresh. Judge and rethink"

"So, if abstraction for the modernist is distinction, what does this say with regard to archetypical thinking? surely Jung's "collective unconscious", for example, isn't as important to modernistic abstraction as is his (presumed) theory of making ones conscious self distinct from the collective unconscious.

The emphasis, it seems, is on the reckoning, the awakening, rather than the archetype, the general.

or maybe I'm lost."

Well, these are heady waters. I feel I'm swimming in the deep end of the pool as well. What you say about Jung about rejection of archetypal thinking is, I believe true. The point was to remove oneself from the past, from modes that had become routine as a way of seeing the world, both the Spiritual and the Secular. So yes, the personal awakening, the specifics of self were ulitmate.

"but how does the theme of alienation correspond to a theme of an ever-present, over-bearing archetype?

or have I just agreed with your argument against perceiving modernistic abstractionists as those writers of yore primarily consumed with [the degenerative effects of] archetypical/normal consciousness?"

I think you've just agreed! with my earlier and rather feeble attempts as I was grasping for a more eloquent voice on these matters. Yes, I think simply leaving abstractionists to a dated period of time, dug in to the rebellion, leaves little for the NOW of whatever "movement" there is either across the board or individually. There seems precious little that I can find to read on the here and now of abstractionism, of the aliveness or the boundaries of this realm.

So again, very much swimming in the deep end of the pool with my writing. Trying to decipher what holds meaning for me in the past and trying to apply it in a personal and unique way. So far, I am having mixed results. Not willing to quite though. Not by a long shot.

I am most interested in some new kind of emeshing of past and present, of the focus on sound to create layes of meaning, of the ability of language poets to leave room in the work for breathe, for the reader to interpret the open spaces.