POETICKS

First a link on behalf of Jared Schickling, who does good things in and for Otherstream poetry.  It’s to a book Jared has published of Kent Johnson’s work, for those interested, as I fear I’m not: eccolinguistics.blogspot.com.  I wish I did more announcements like this one, but I’m such a lazy lout.

* * *

Before getting back to my discussion of poetry continuums, I thought I would briefly comment on  something I just read and would probably about if I did not at once take care of it.  It’s an article in the latest issue of The National Review.

David Pryce-Jones, its author, is a good writer and I agree with a lot of his political views but in his article, he exemplifies one of the three greatest faults of American conservatives, ignorant philistinism.  (The others are the worship of fetuses, and the like and block-headedness about the environment equal to that of the left, but in reverse.  I leave out starry-eyed love of the state religion, formal education because that’s not specifically a conservative fault.)

The subject of Pryce-Jones’s article is Dadaism, and where his binary feelings about that should be easy to guess.  His take is interesting and I agree with much of it.  I have never been a fan of Dadaism.  But much of what he says is plain wrong.  Beckett’s and Pinter’s work was not “solipsistic,” but comically absurd about the human condition (which Pryce-Jones disparages for not being about.   Finnegan’s Wake is not unreadable, just (for me) more hermetic than it should be.  Joyce was not expressing Dadaistic meaninglessness, but too much meaningfulness at once.  I think two things prevent it from being effective (as opposed, as I always try to say, important, and it may be more important a work of art than any other) an accessible plot (it does seem to have a plot; perhaps I mean narrative disunity) and going for short-term brilliance at the expense of strategic brilliance, and/or the better short-term brilliance that would result if its forests’ including clearings.

One thing I deem a fault of Pryce-Jones’s connects to my problem with the Frost/Horace view of art as instructional.  People supports this philistinism when he says, People read books and go to museums to learn what writers and painters can tell them about some aspect of the human condition.”  All too sadly true, except for the lack of the word “most” before “read.”  It’s a fact that at least a few people—the best people–go to books and visimagery for the beauty of existence they sometimes express and, whether conscious of it or not, for its help in keeping them from suicide, or some equivalent thereof.

Note: “Dadaism” is an example of the kind of coinages that come to label new (or apparently new) kinds of art when left to the artists themselves rather than later taxonomists.  Hence the more accurate term for much of Dadaism,” absurdism,” has permanently been relegated to a back seat to it.  I’m speaking of effective absurdism, or art that is satirical of poor reasoning, not Dadaism at its worst, which is just wholly arbitrary . . . well, rubbish.

There are many important kinds of art that derive from Dadaism, which is definitely of great historical importance.  One is minimalistic art., particularly minimalistic painting.  Another recontextualized art like Duchamp’s urinal, which is not absurdist or primarily a joke regardless of how Duchamp considered it.

(Note: my thinking about Dadaism is impressionistic, and in-progress, as should be obvious, but I guess I have a need to make sure people know that I know at times that however ex cathedra some of my statements surely seem, I do not consider them at such times to be Unarguable Truths.  I suppose I should be so sensitive about that, but . . .)

I can’t think of anything further to say about Dadaism so will return to my thoughts about poetry continuums.  I had just described the instruction/entertainment one.  It’s one of the few I would not favor the poetries occupying its middle in the middle over the ones at the ends.  Whereas I think some poems will have no really aesthetical valuable components, I don’t think it’s possible for a poem not to preach something, however implicitly.

My notes refer to two other continuums, more important than the instruction/entertainment one: the plurexpressive continuum which begins with poems with no averbal components and ends with poems mixing aesthetically consequential words with aesthetically consequential mathematics and cryptography and visual images (beyond their mere visual appearance) and sound images (beyond the sound any word must make when pronounced aloud)—and who knows what else.

The other continuum is the linguistic complexity continuum going from some of William Carlos Williams’s most direct poets up to the weirdest genuine language poems.

And that does it for me today.

* * *

.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2015 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Miscellaneous Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.