I’m beginning to think this one is okay, after all. One thing I’ve been meaning to point out in case any future students of poetry are ever drawn to my work is that I seem more and more lately to be recycling old images of mine–like the remainder in this piece, and the boats from Klee. I consider this a step up, not down, because it’s a way of multiplying allusions. It’s also a form of variations on themes.
I had high hopes for this one, which I composed yesterday. I even thought I might work a sequence out of it, using the Klee ship “musical theme” as the first step of a visual symphony. But I wasn’t satisfied with what I did with the ships. As I worked with them, though, I came up with a lot of minor ideas I liked. The main one was a suddenly conscious attempt to provide a metaphor for the coming of spring. But I also liked breaking up what was originally as single framed image, and changing the sizes of each unit. Grey-scaling the first two tiny ones seemed a nice touch, too. And the escape of the final ship! I didn’t like my dividend too well, either–after my initial enthusiasm for it (being a sucker for anything having to do with spring). For some reason it doesn’t seem quite there, for me. Maybe I’ll simplify it to, “a brook’s revived consideration of an April countryside.” Yes, I think I was trying for too much. . . .
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Thinking about what Tony Robinson had at his blog spurred me to this motto of my own (obnoxious) practice as a poetry critic: Try for maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing, fully committed to the advance of poetry, as I understand it, and expressed with the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage. I originally continued with “–with no significant suppression of emotion, regardless of the tender feelings of the hyper-offendable,” but upon reflection found that nice to say but too secondary for this motto.
Better: Using the the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage, try to express maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing, fully committed to the advance of poetry, as I see it. Ah, but I now see that “the value of what I’m critiquing” would include what the latter does to advance poetry. Ergo: Try, using the the best balance of clarity and fresh language I can manage, to express maximal understanding of the nature and value of what I’m critiquing.
And here’s a copy (an imperfect one) of my motto as a poet:
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Me Versus B. H. Fairchild and Others He quotes
Language can be a way of rescuing the hidden life, and that way is poetry. You can’t rescue any hidden life, whatever that is, with prose? Or some other art? Or science? Why wouldn’t using language to drown certain aspects of unhidden life be equally or more valuable?
Glenn Gould: “The purpose of art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” And wonder is everything to a poet. It sure isn’t everything to me. It and serenity are only two of many pleasures if is the function of art to provide. Its manner of providing them is what sets it apart from verosophy and other endeavors which can, and try, to lead to wonder and serenity, and other pleasures.
Mandelstam: “We will remember in Lethe’s cold waters / That earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.” Nice thought–but unattainable heavens to dream toward are a high good, too.
Seven propositions:
1. By way of Wittgenstein and Heidegger: A poem is a verbal construction which, through an array of rhetorical and prosodic devices of embodiment, achieves an order of being, an ontological status, radically different from that of other forms of discourse (with the exception of certain kinds of descriptive and fictional prose). I agree: a poem is a verbal construction different from almost all other verbal constructions.
2. Poetry occurs at a considerable distance from the ego. As does almost anything else I can think of, when it isn’t nothing but ego.
3. There exists an infinity of nonverbal meaning. Which the infinity of possible verbal meaning can express.
4. Science is progressive, but Art is not. It doesn’t get better; it just gets different. (The relevance and utility of all poetic forms.) See Mandestam. All the arts, like all the sciences, have become vastly superior to what they were hundreds or thousands of years ago, but anti-progressives mistake the sentimentality that becomes more and more attached to the old because of their age for aesthetic rather than nostalgiacal value. Compare the clumsy “novel” in the Bible about David with almost any competent commercial novel of today, for instance. Consider how much more of existence the best art of today is about compared with earlier art. For just one thing, today’s art has a vastly larger tradition to make allusions to than previous art had. There have been artists in the past as great as our best, but what our best have produced is significantly better than what they did in part because of the what the artists of the past did. (Note, this is a subject requiring a book.)
5. Rules are made to be broken; techniques are made to be used. (They were never rules anyway; they were techniques. The freedom of the artist, like that of the lathe machinist, is the freedom to choose those techniques, those tools, that he deems necessary for the task at hand. The refusal to use technique–and, obviously, to learn it–is the refusal to be an artist, or at least a free one.) I more or less agree with all this, but I wonder how one can avoid using some technique.
6. Form is an extension of subject matter rather than of ideology or religious belief. Every work of art requires a container; I call that container form; one calling it “an extension of subject matter,” if I understand him, needs to tell me what, then, is containing it and the subject matter it is an extension of. I don’t know what ideology and religious belief have to do with it; how would they be not subject matter?
7. Meter is not the reins to keep the horse of the poem in check; it’s the heartbeat of the horse. Drop the reins. (Clearly this is an argument for meter rather than against it.) It is almost impossible to convince poets who never bothered to learn prosody that meter is something that emerges from within the language rather than something that is imposed externally upon the language. Even conversational English is very loosely iambic. I think meter is both natural and imposed–necessarily imposed to add predictability to balance the difficult-to-accept unpredictability of horses going beyond prose that poetry at its best is.
A poet is always limited by the fact that he has to write for other human beings. Just to be argumentative, I would say that a poet’s having to write for others (and he needn’t) greatly increases his field of play. (Note that our Wilshberian’s poet writes rather than composes. It never occurs to any Wilshberian that a poem might be more than words.)
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Today a not-very-good copy of one of the visual poems I plan to have in my next show:
Not much to say about it except that it is inspired by one of the more famous of Wordsworth’s sonnets, which describes how the ocean, “with his eternal motion make(s)/ a sound like thunder–everlastingly.”
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Xerolage30 is the issue of mIEKAL aND and Liz Was’s Xexoxial Editions’ series of one-author collections of visiotextual art that was devoted to my work. I was looking through it for accessible purely visual poems to use in my next local exhibit. I wasn’t too happy with how little pleasure the items in it gave me, although the objective part of my brain told me they were mostly pretty good. I ended choosing eleven of the 20 or so in the collection. I’m not sure how many I’ll use–no more than seven or eight, probably, because I want half my pieces to be fairly recent mathemaku. I may not use the following, which is the (not too accessible) mathemaku I made for the cover of Xerolage30:
I think of this as sort of parallel to Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” for it’s a summary of what’s in Xerolage30, many of my best poems at the time of publication. The divisor is where the mid-heaven is in my astrological chart, so represents my poetic career peak. The poems in Xerolage30 times that peak equal the collage of fragments from many of the pieces in my collection, with a remainder of “mystery,” and other things from my “Odysseus Suite.”
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Every year Geof Huth posts some kind of “homage” to me on my birthday–which, as everyone should know is 2 February, Groundhog Day, the same as James Joyce’s and Ayn Rand’s. The same as Tom Smothers’s, too! And just a tick from Gertrude Stein’s, 3 February, I’m relieved to say. The one he just posted here may be his best yet. It consists of a series of dictionary definitions of words having to do with my personal life (such as “connecticut,” the state I was born in) and my obsession with defining poetics (and the universe). Very funny, in good part because of his cruelly accurate understanding of me.
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This is the third in the series of reworkings of an old textual design I posted the first two of in Entry 637. Useful for entries I have nothing else for, which are becoming standard for me, now.
I like this but am not sure why. It holds my interest. I seriously wonder whether it indicates I have a talent for this sort of thing. It seems to me anyone could use Paint Shop to make other designs equal to or better than it. The “asemic poems” I’ve seen posted usually seem as interesting to me as it. Oh, well, I enjoy making these, so as my mind fades away, I guess I’ll continue to.
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At Spidertangle there’s been a discussion of how visual poetry sells. Poorly, needless to say. Along the way, John M. Bennett said, “Yes, the discussions about vispo can sometimes be interesting – a game, as you say – - – tho i think what they tend to miss is that the poetry we’re trying to create is much more than simply visuality. for me at least, the poem i try to make functions visually, sonorously, textually, conceptually, formally, metaphysically, metaphorically, ambiguously, performatively, etc etc etc and all equally importantly and at the same time. so from that perspective a discussion about vispo or soundpo or whatever misses most of the picture. or, it’s a game, something sui generis, of interest as a kind of thinking in its own category.”
I added: “Further thoughts: that there are two kinds of poetry: people poetry and a different kind I haven’t thought of a good name for. A people poem either states an opinion about human life which those who like the poem like it because they agree with the opinion; or it expresses a human feeling that those who like it empathize with. The other kind may also express an opinion and/or feeling (actually, it can’t avoid doing this to some degree), but has what I think of as larger interests of the kind John listed. The most important of these for me are aesthetic—what the elements of a given poem are doing rather than what they are saying. I think there is only a very small audience for such poetry, similar to the audience for avant garde music or mathematics.”
