When I woke up at a little after six and took my second dose of prednisone for my back problem with the other meds I take at that time, I took a hydrocodone–in hopes that it would help with my leg pain, which is still bad enough to make it very painful both the get into bed and out of bed.  Back in bed, I went into one of the flows I often do after taking my opiate, and had enough ideas to blither about here to make a list of them.

I’ve now been out to visit my tennis friends.  Yesterday my pain began lessening, I thought, so hoped I might be able to play this morning although I thought it a long shot.  No way I could.  But I needed bananas, and to banter with my friends, too, so I visited them, insulted their play, then did my marketing.  I had a bit of a nap after getting home, and now am here–with another hydrocodone in me, going for broke in the anti-pain department, and the morphine flow department.

First from thoughts earlier than this morning’s.  It concerns a poem Cummings wrote at the age of 19 that was quoted in Spring, the Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society, number 20, which just arrived yesterday although it’s the 2013 issue.  Mike Webster, the editor, has been valiantly trying to catch up for the past five or more years and is slowly doing it.  Anyway, the Cummings poem is clearly by him, the giveaway being, sadly, its excessive sentimentality—which he got away from in his best later poems.  It is also overly derivative, of poets before Pound and Eliot.  But it has his eye, and “untranslated stars,” which shows up toward the end, and is, in my mind, terrific.  I will only say that “untranslatable stars” would have been interesting but, for me, annoying untrue.

Now to this morning’s thoughts—which, by the way, I considered when having them that they would be material for a blog entry.  That’s no doubt why they began with the medical problems chronicled here yesterday.  Hold that: it’s no doubt why they quickly turned to those problems.  They actually began with a quotation from a letter of Robert Frost’s quoted in an excellent –Oops.

Strange, I was just thinking how I must be pretty free of Alzheimer’s because I seemed to have such a good recall of my thoughts from four hours ago—although, I did write notes about them when finished because of their quantity.  I just remembered, though, that the first of them was a repeat of thoughts I had over a week ago!  And spent a good portion of a blog entry on!  Cheez.

Oh, well, I may have had a few new thoughts about my subject which was basically a condemnation of Horace for wanting poetry to be both instructive and entertaining.  It should only be instructional secondarily, if at all—according to the Poetics of Grumman.  As I don’t think I wrote before, I have never read anything I can remember by Horace, although I must have come across lines or full short poems by him.  This I consider a flaw, a near-serious one, of mine.

It’s only a “near-serious” flaw, however.  That’s because the world has too many people in it, hence every art or verosophy field has too many books anyone serious about that field should have read to be able to have read them all by the time he’s fifty and has too much in his brain to keep stuffing things into it—but will, anyway.  This may not be true of someone serious about only one or two fields: an academic, in other words.  They are prevented from reading all the books they should have in their fields by their innate inability to recognize any book significantly about anything significantly new since what their college years (or, in too many cases, their English professors’ college years) as a book they should read.  It is horribly true of someone serious about as many fields as I, even though most of my seriousness skips most of each field’s details—and most of the other things academics learn, something I by no means consider a virtue of mine, just not a crucial defect.

A new thought, that is, a thought neither from my morning thoughts nor the Frost thought.  A thought my sentence about it at once illustrates: a thought about how often I find some minutely clarifying detail or similar kind of addition (Jesus, my spell-checker just informed me that “addition” was a mistake and gave me the option to change it to “addiction” but not to “Add to Dictionary.”  What is it trying to tell me?  Hmmm, it let my se3cond use of “addition:” pass, then let the first pass, after all.  It’s trying to make you people, who—I’m sure—include government specialists in abnormal psychology, think I’m hallucinating when I accuse them of using my spell-checker against me, not for the first time!!!!

You doubt me.  You wouldn’t if the things they do to me happened to you.  For instance, it is certain to me, and who would be more likely to know, that they have implanted a second brain in me—down around my lower back, which is the real reason for my recent physical ailments.  They switch me into that brain and hold me there as long as they can.  Fortunately, they gave any artificial brains yet capable of keeping me switched for more than a minute or two, but they’re working on it.  This second brain doesn’t show up on any of the x-rays or MRIs of the area it’s in because the government intercepts the data before it is printed and fixes it.  Proof that it exists is the incredible number of typing mistakes I make: I leave off 50% of my required “ed’s” and “s’s” and put in 50% of those when not required, for instance.  Many many more similar problems.

The second brain is also why my political and knowlecular writings are the way they are, too.  One your screens.  They show up the way I wrote them on mine, but they missed an email I got the other day from a friend of mine who thought I was wrong when I described Putin as a mountain goat with two breads who has gone three days without his Cheerios and is very angry, which explains his constant tirades against Marton Koppany.  I quite realize he is too stupid to know anything about Marton.  The tirades I actually wrote about were about ME!

I don’t know why I bother telling you all this consider what the government will do with this entry, but it makes me feel better, and maybe one of the many government agents involved in the campaign to neutralize me will save what I really said to be able later, when I’m dead, to show how clever he and his fellow agents were, and how people like me have no chance against them.  And it isn’t a chance of more than twenty-two thousand to one that someone will much later find what I said among his papers, or those of the few he privately showed them to, who will reveal them to the public—if the world ever recovers from this dark age and The Truth is a legal goal of organizations like the McArthur Foundation.

Right now, I’m listening to SIegfried, which has DOUBLEd my pleasure, in Case tHat is of intErest to anyone.  Not much Chance of that, as RicK, my good friEnD, would agree.  I believe THERE ARE NO others who would.  But ERRORS HERE, I am sure, are possible.

Back, finally to my morning thoughts.  They began, as I said with Frost and Horace.  Quite soon, I felt like revealing that after my “brush with death,” I felt a need to make sure that I got all my thoughts like the one about Frost and Horace recorded somewhere, even I it meant a lot of repetition.  I next felt a need to amplify my observation about my arthritis.  Autobiographical data about my feelings for posterity, you know.  I wanted to make sure my very human response to having been diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 57, which a sample of cells from my prostate made almost certainly valid, and which would almost surely kill be within a few years if left untreated, went into the books on me.  I want people to know I iz a hommin bean regardless of how superior to all other hoomin beans I am.  I wanna be liked, I wanna be liked, I wanna be liked.  Oh, yeah, yes, I wanna be liked.

My response was an perhaps ridiculous increase in my sensitivity to the lethal effects of just about anything that was clearly wrong with me, or even physically different—like a twitch for 40 seconds in a place where I couldn’t remember ever having twitched before.  I wouldn’t think it was a symptom of something unknown that would kill me in a year or less for more than a few minutes, but that would be my first thought.  See, I can be as irrational as anyone.

So my latest self-diagnosis was cancer, probably a return of my prostate cancer.  It last till yesterday when the doctor assured me it was almost certain “just” a nervous system problem due to my arthritic back—because my pain jumped around, which was almost always a symptom of a nerve problem, and the x-rays showed nothing else that it could be.  Although that according to the hand-out I was given when I left, that would have to be confirmed by other doctors, and perhaps other tests.

Throughout my fear that I had something terminally wrong with me, I need to emphasize that I never thought I was being rational.  My objective view was that there were many things that could be wrong with me, and that it probably had to do with my back, which an MRI had shown to have been responsible for serious problems with my legs only a few months ago, and various other tests had shown me free of anything else bad, so I was probably okay, and certainly had insufficient data—and understanding of medicine, to have any rational opinion of my condition.  Still, the main awareness in charge of the situation was not my reducticeptual or scienceptual awareness, although I’m not sure which awareness–or more likely, snarl of awarenesses—was.  Finding out that would be worth doing but right now I feel unable to make any start at it.  Perhaps because the notes I’m turning into this entry have me over-loaded.  Or the combination of them with Crowley-thoughts. . . .

Okay, I’m too the next set of notes, and am unsure what they mean.  They were about a rant about, and serious discussion of, freedom of speech.  What’s unsure to me is the lead-in to it.  The lead-in is from my Frost/Horace.  Prejudices, like mine against poems about virtues, as feelings so not examples of irrationality?  Yes, but there’s more that remains vague to me.

Oh, I meant to say that one of the useful continuums for poetry is the one from pure instruction up (yes, it’s my rendering of the continuum and if I want pure instruction at the left, I have the right to put it there!) to pure entertainment (by which, remember, I don’t mean the morons’ meaning of “entertainment” as something that provides pleasure for the uncultured but not to be taken seriously, but simply, and rigorously, “the goal of all art”).

“Evil you should not be doing/ Because it is a bad thing,” is a terrible poem, but a poem, because lineated, however the halfwits who want to deny anything they don’t think wonderful to be art will wail it’s not poetry but doggerel, which is also is.  (This is not a dogma of mine, but I don’t think it worth supporting with rational arguments one more time.)

My little couplet would be at the left end of my instruction/enter-tainment continuum.

TO BE CONTINUED

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2015 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Pronouncements & Blither. 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.

The day got away from me, and now it’s almost my bedtime, so just the following for this entry:

A Dogma:  For someone to say that he could have been a great poet if he’d wanted to may be true, but it reduces to “I could have been a great poet if I could have been a great poet.”  To be a great poet requires having been born with both the ability to become one, and a temperament that compels one eventually to desire being one.  Ability, which most people seem to think the only real requirement, is only half the requirement.  Ergo, to become a great artist or verosopher of any kind is simply to follow one’s instincts.  They will inevitably get one to one’s vocation and all that is needed to be effective at it.  Note: I have arguments for this position.

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Just something I quickly wrote but like enough to make sure I don’t lose it: “I almost fully agree, John–but I think effective haiku can be and have been written in the 5/7/5 form.  One problem is that so many people seem to think the 5/7/5 form makes a text a haiku.  However, to be a haiku, a text needs to include the haiku resonance–or some equivalent of it.  My rough idea of that is something experienced due to the resolution of strong tension between two effectively represented disparate (possibly even incongruous) images that puts one experiencing the haiku in (implicit) touch with some universal archetypal truth–usually very simple like ‘time goes by’ or ‘spring can’t be far behind.’  Intensity of experience rather than broadness is what counts.  Different but equal.”  Something to come back to and expand upon?  Maybe.

A further thought: a haiku produces a cliche too unexpected not to be full appreciated viscerally.  All archetypal truths are cliches.  A major purpose of art is to uncliche them.  Note: I’ve never felt I had a good grasp of the archetypal, although I’m sure of some of them.  I don’t think I’ve defined it.  Maybe I will get around to trying to.

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Today, some ragged boilerplate I’ve had versions of here more than once before but am continuing trying to find a way of expressing that might find a larger audience than my writing at this time has:

Right of the Decimal Point

In his review of (a translation by Richard Dixon from the original Italian of) Robert Calasso’s Ardor I’m currently partway into, David Schulman selects the following “insight” of Calasso as “of great value, and moving to read,” “How can we know something that doesn’t let itself be known? In only one way: by becoming to some extent that thing itself.”  Schulman describes Calasso’s book as “a reading of the Vedic metaphysical world,” which pretty much explains the quotation.  That Schulman himself has written a book called More Than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India explains his reaction to it.  My own instantaneous reaction to it: “Pure Gush.”

By the time, not many minutes thereafter, that I stopped reading the review and began this, I had a better opinion of it: “Rather interesting Pure Gush.”  At this point, the review, the book reviewed, and my idea of Hinduism (which I call “intelligently ignorant”) had combined with my innate (intelligently ignorant) self-confidence to urge me not simply to write what I’m writing right now, but to consider it a possible start to a book about my entire philosophical outlook, and the idea that I will be able to make that book something many readers would enjoy.

Be that as it may, my non-instantaneous reaction to the quotation is that I’d have to read Calasso’s book properly to judge it.  Instead of doing that (although I may get Calasso’s book), I’m going to describe why the quotation, if incorrectly taken as a statement out of nowhere, is Pure Gush, not to dump on Calasso but to define Pure Gush—and get into my “entire philosophical outlook.”

By”Pure Gush,” I mean, simply, eloquently- and/or intelligently-expressed opinionation with not only no empirical support, but no possibility of empirical suppport.  Pure Subjectivity, in other words.  Or, generalizing on the basis of what I’d term “post-axiomatic undefinables,” with the proviso that the search for truth can’t go anywhere without undefinables.  I believe one of the essential function of what I call verosophy, by which I mean any search for significant truth, as importantly opposed to just science so including fields like history and philosophy . . . An essential function of versosophy is the reduction of the number of axioms dogmatically beginning an understanding.

I define an axiom as any necessary undefinable that, so far as we know, does not follow from any other possible axiom—or cannot actually be defined.  The Calasso quotation concerns knowing something, which can and should be but isn’t defined (as I, remember, am assuming although Calosso may well have defined it in his book).  I am now going to define it, using axioms I find valid: “knowing something” means “having encountered an environmental stimulus that one’s nervous system has converted to a brain-state one’s brain considers a piece of knowledge.”

The axiom involved in my definition is that knowledge equals perceptual experience of material reality, and nothing else—except mind.  A related, necessary axiom is that nothing exists (for me) than my perceptions of material reality—and my mind (and memory of my perceptions of material reality).  My over-all philosophical outlook begins with (1) the axiom that something exists that I call material reality; (2) something exists that is aware of material reality that I call my mind;  and (3) that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Material reality is the final face of reality; in fact, it is the only possible face of reality.  Hence, something called a rock that common sense considers outside us is, for us, only a brain-state caused by a chemical reaction (or some equivalent I’m ignorant  of), that was cause by some previous chemical reaction when light from some object the person involved considers a rock hits the eye.  All that counts is the final result.  Everything else is irrelevant.  To babble about the rock’s being a bunch of atoms that are a bunch of quarks, etc., does not change this.  The brain-state will remain the rock for us no matter what science finally decrees it “really” is.

My supporting reasoning for what I’m trying to say: there is no difference between a chair that we perceive as a rock and a rock that we perceive as a rock; hence it is what we perceive a thing as being that counts, not any unknowable verity about it.

I’ve just recognized that I have to posit secondary axiom, and call the first 3 “primary axioms.”  No, let me call the first axioms “physical axioms” and introduce “metaphysical axioms.”  My first metaphysical axiom is that other human beings possess minds that are not perceptible.  I accept this as a superior possibility because I like it1, and it makes analogical sense to assume that because my body and my thinking are quite similar to the bodies and thinking of others, they are in every way like I am (although possibly never exactly like I am in any way).  Does my outlook have any more metaphysical axioms?  Frankly, I don’t know.  I expect we’ll find out at some point.

Warning; throughout this text I will be digressing all over the place, for I expect to be compiling notes toward a philosophical outlook rather than anything reasonably unified.  I’m an old fart without the time for anything better.  While in this digression, let me add that I am beginning at pretty extreme fundamentals, thus saying little that is new and much that will seem, and possibly be, more than a little unsophisticated.  Puerile, obvious, null . . .  Stick with me, though, and I’ll begin getting subtle, albeit much crazier.  (I tend to consider myself both more stupid than the worst famous philosophers and more intelligent than the best of them.  Without the latter, why would I be writing this book?)
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Many years ago some broad lured Surllama, as Kevin Non-canonical Kelly was then known, from Port Charlotte, Florida, where I live. He ended hundreds of miles away in some West Coast State whose name escapes me. As a contributer of wacked-out poems to the publication Lost & Found Times, probably the most otherstream publication ever, with two pwoermds in Ampersand Squared, Geof Huth’s anthology of one-word poems (“dwenrch” and “tonguesill:), the broad thus cut the otherstream poet population of Port Charlotte to one.

We’ve stayed in touch, sorta, since then, but his Internet presence seems mostly confined to Facebook , mine to e.mail and here, so we haven’t been exchanging much more than helloes and hilarities of one sort or another.

A week ago, though, he posted something by Jon Rappoport at Facebook that annoyed me. This resulted in an exchange here, which has gotten me tottering ever-so-who-knows-where. Here’s what it said:

From the Things That Make You Go Hmmm file:

“It’s important to understand that the professionals who put the most emphasis on the brain as the source of consciousness are also the people who drug it, sedate it, coerce it, and try to control it. They’re going mad trying to reduce life to purely physical terms. They’re agents of destruction.”

– Jon Rappoport (via Disinformation)

I’m going back to it to present my detailed response to it because Kevin is having trouble with what I’ve so far said at Facebook.

1. I agree that a lot of people with credentials in fields having to do with cognition, psychology, neurophysiology, etc., believe the brain is the source of consciousness. I immediately want Jon to define “consciousness. I can’t respond until I know what he means by it–and how the brain is its source.

My impression is that certified scientists tend to consider the brain the seat of consciousness.At this point I have to distinguish the contents of consciousness, which I’ve begun calling, “consciation,” pronounced KAHN shee A shuhn, from consciousness, which experiences it. I visualize each person’s consciousness (or awareness or soul or mind or ego) as a room that a representative of each instant of a person’s life enters through the front, is experience in some way by the walls of the room, then exits through the back.

The consciousness is not part of the brain, unless you want to call it an immaterial (and thus imperceptible) part of the brain that is somehow stuck to the brain. Its contents, however, are something the brain supplies it with in some manner, one instant after another. Each such instant seems to be some different configuration of active brain-cells.

Certified scientists seem to agree with me on this, only differing from me in beliving the consciousness to be something material that somehow evolved, but it is different in kind from matter, so cannot be comprised of matter, or have evolved from it. That’s an assertion, but I feel I have strong arguments to justify it, but no time now to get into it, because it strays from the text I’m trying to respond to.

2. I think I’ve now said enough to indicate I agree and disagree with Rappoport. I agree that scientists are wrong to think that consciousness is part of the brain, but disagree that they are wrong to consider it the source of consciousness’s content. That content’s nature is entirely due to the material brain, as proven by the effect of material drugs on the brain.

3. What Kevin seems most concerned with probably has nothing to do with what the consciousness is. It is Rappoport’s belief that brain-scientists (let’s call them) are “agents of destruction.” Since they regard the brain as an unmagical physical mechanism, they “drug it, sedate it, coerce it, and try to control it. They’re going mad trying to reduce life to purely physical terms.”

My response is that many scientists don’t know what they’re doing, and those they prescribe drugs for should be wary of them. But the drugs absolutely work much of the time. I myself take synthroid because my thyroid gland doesn’t work very well anymore; without this drug, I become unenergetic and not a happy boy. This is uncontroversial because synthroid is simply a chemical that the thyroid is known to make when healthy, so it simply replaces something the body ordinarily makes on its own. I believe all the other drugs brain-scientists have come up with similarly replace chemicals a healthy body would make on its own, or with chemicals that function as those chemicals would–except, of course, for the many drugs that are attempts to help that don’t work, or work but have bad side-effects, etc.

In short, I see nothing wrong with the attempt to use drugs to try to improve brain health.

The other side of this is the use of drugs, often unconsciously, to control others, hyperactive boys, for instance. Good use and bad use of drugs is a major social problem, I agree. I have no problem with anyone’s thinking it important. But I’m a theorist interested in how the brain works. Hence, what effect certain drugs have on the brain is revealing. I have larger concerns, though: I want to know, for instance, the mechanics of how we solve problems, not the details of what chemicals are involved (however important). Ergo, I’m in another field than socio-political concerns. I just am annoyed that the misuse of drugs is said to have something to do with an invalid belief in the physicality of the brain and of life.

Note how many spiritually-inclined nuts take drugs to esacape their brains and material reality.

My return hmmmmmm to Kevin is about what I have just written. I fear it doesn’t clarify my position, at all.

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Here’s a first draft of something I wrote today (with enjoyment) that may be a final draft (except for trivial corrections):

Seamus Heaney: “The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get at truths about who we are and what we are or might be. . .” in Finders, Keepers, Selected Prose 1971-2001, Farrer, Straus and Girdidoux, New York, 2003.

No one who knows me will be surprised at how loath I am to disagree with a Nobel Laureate in Literature, but I’m afraid I don’t merely disagree with the quotation above, but find it a hairwidth short of being Against All I Hold Sacred.  The arts, as I understand them, provide us with the beauty those of us who are supra-reptilian, at least some of the time, need in order to get through this life.  They have nothing to do with getting us to “truths about who we are and what we are or might be.”  Those truths are worth getting us to, but what I term “verosophy” for the search for significant truths (basically, science, philosophy, history and a few other things) are our means to them, not the arts.

What particularly angers me about opinions like Heaney’s is the implication that, hey, we can get something of value out of the arts, we can learn about ourselves!  The arts have a use!  They aren’t mere frivolities.  Such opinions also imply that learning is much more important than simply enjoying.

My bias goes back to my constantly hearing that Shakespeare, one of my heroes, wrote Great Works because of how much his plays teach us about ourselves.  Right, I would never have figured out what jealousy was had I not encounter Othello.  Or been able to work out for myself that excessive ambition can be a bad thing—especially if you run into a man not born of woman due to his having been “untimely ripped from his mother’s womb.”

True, literature often explicitly has to do with us. For people like me, however, it was only occasionally an art until Shakespeare and others disconnected it from morality plays, and the like.  And when poetry was able to find other subjects of interest besides people.  Music, on the other hand, has always been a true art—instrumental music, that is, or music that is music alone.  I’m no historian of the arts, so don’t know when music separated significantly from sung literature, but I’m sure it has by now—for, again, the supra-reptilian.  The masses need words with their sounds, it would appear.

Visimagery, my term for visual art, only recently disconnected from people, and became an art, albeit not for many.  The dance has no way of disconnecting from people.

Am I a hedonist for my views on the arts?  Sure.  But what those who look down on hedonists don’t realize, there are different kinds of hedonists: (1) reptilian hedonists, the ones who  excessively and close to exclusively pursue food, sexual pleasure and those of the arts that require minimal aesthetic intelligence to enjoy, which is what halfwits mean by “hedonists”; (2) mainstream hedonists who have a healthy attraction of food, sexual pleasure, and middle-brow arts, but devote a good portion of their lives pursuing other pleasures: sports, say, or carpentry, or sewing, or religion, or charity . . .  Yes, charity.  I say that no one does anything unless it gives him pleasure to do it, or at least gives him less pain than anything else he is equipped to do—in his opinion.

Then there are (3) the supra-reptilian hedonists, to get back to the kinds of hedonists there are.  These are the uncommon few whose hedonism compels them into the highest forms of Art (highest, because requiring the largest brain to create and appreciate, the way the highest forms of science more clearly do—because they can be translated into I-pods and incredible hallucinogenic drugs and rockets to the moon).

When I began this rant, I only wanted to tee off on what Heaney said—partly, I’m afraid I have to admit, I’m afraid I have to admit because he was so much more socio-economically successful as a poet than I—in spite of?  no, because he never tried—no doubt could not try—to do anything consequential in it.  Not that he wrote no superior poems.  It’s just that he might have written them all, with just a few shifts of subject-matter, tone and outlook, in 1950.

Frost was the greatest such poet I know of.  He is responsible for some of the greatest poems in our language, but could have written them all in 1890, with just a few shifts of subject-matter, tone and outlook.  We (I mean, we in Greater England) have a fair number of poets like them now, but not one (that I know of) who was like Eliot, Pound or Cummings were when Frost was America’s most popular poet—who has been recognized like those three were.

I may be wrong.  There’s the line William Carlos Williams began that may be a true shift of technique, which is what I’m talking about.  But I feel he just added a new voice to what Hulme, Eliot and Pound had been doing before him—common language, fewer abstractions, free verse, haiku aims—in short, imagism.  The New York poets took Williams’s later “anti-poetry” (in the sense that free verse about trite or near-trite subjects is a kind of anti-poetry) just a little bit further, with Ashbery adding the jump-cut mode of Eliot in “The Waste Land” and following the lead of Stevens by going back, much of the time, to high intellectualism—though Eliot had also preceded him there.

The Language Poets are definitely new the way Eliot, Pound and Cummings were, but none has yet the socio-economic standing of even Cummings.  Several have done well socio-economically in life, but as academics, not as poets.

That’s in for this entry.  Pretty wandery, eh?  I’d love to be able to do five a week like it for a dozen weeks, though.  Enough for a short full-length book of musings.  I would be surprised if none of the many academics who have a more accurate take on Anglophonic poetry than I would not be able to find more than two or three egregious errors in my ramble.  I think I’ve said more of value than any of the correct could, though.  If only for some of the supra-reptilians out there.  Or so I have to believe.

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I talked myself into trying to get this blog going again, beginning easily, with a bit of Grumman boilerplate in response to a New-Poetry thread that began with a post about a  review by William Logan of two books by British Poet Laureate Carol Duffy in which he derided her use in one poem of the word, “swoon.”)

In one post to the thread, Richard Wilsnack mentioned that he “happened upon this quote in Poetry magazine this past week, and it echoes Logan’s bit” :

[Philip Levine] was blunt and categorical in his statements. He introduced the class to Hemingway’s notion of a “shit detector.” He pointed to the use of “azure” in a student’s poem. “Question: When is the last time you heard the word ‘azure’?” A few students fidgeted uncomfortably. “Answer: The last time you did a crossword puzzle.”…Fake language made bad poems.

—Mark Levine, “Philip Levine,” in Remembering Poets, Poetry (March 2102)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/245418

My first thought was about how Philistine Levine is.  A poet’s duty, it seems to me, is to use as much of the language he can.  But do try to use it freshly.

Later I realized my biased aesthetic cerebral zone had led me astray, not for the first time.  More accurately, the lofty reasoning zone in my cerebrum told me I’d gone astray.  According to it (and I tend to yield to it more readily than to any other of my zones although I recognize that it, too, has biases), there are many good ways to do poetry.  One surely is to use the whole language, but that doesn’t mean the use of only the words in a given narrow lexicon might not enable a poet to do things a whole-language poet would not be able to do.  Key words: “focus” and “intensity.”

The classical haiku is an excellent example of the use of ordinary words only.

I suppose I would go on to say the truly greatest of poets would use all possible words at times, but also limit himself at times.

Hey, I may not be saying much, but at least I’m saying!  And ultimately the issue involved, critical fairness, is consequential.  In the same thread, I expressed the wish that Logan wouldn’t write about dead poets only.  One witless participant at New-Poetry quickly let me know that Carol Duffy is alive.  “Not by my standards,” quoth I.

I didn’t go on to state my standards, but I guess I ought to.  I consider a poet to be a contemporary dead poet if he does nothing of significance (yes, here comes the boilerplate I’ve no doubt repeated more times than any other over the years) that many poets who have been literally dead for fifty or more years did.

An insult to poets like Carol Duffy?  Not necessarily, because I truly do believe that a contemporary dead poet can write poems of the highest value!  Such poems will still annoy me and make me call their authors dead, which isn’t fair to them, but is fair to the many poets whose work is crowded out of cultural visibility by dead poems,  most of them decidedly not of the highest value.  The world needs to be told that living contemporary poets exist.  There may be a better way than using terms like “dead poets” to get the word out, but I’ve never found it.

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