Entry 363 — Evocature
Ron Silliman’s Ketjak is discussed, and quoted, in an interesting review quoted by Barrett Watten in an entry to his blog here. I mention it now because of two thoughts that crossed my mind when I read the three paragraphs of Ketjak quoted near the beginning of the review: one is that it was not a language poem, as Barry Schwabsky, the author, claimed, nor is it even a poem. It is not a language poem because it employs no linguipoetic devices–no devices, that is, based on syntax, orthography or inflection. It is not a poem because it has no flow-breaks, only jump-cuts, which I do feel qualify as flow-breaks. The work, assuming it continues to be prose, is what I call evocature, a variety of literary prose.
But it’s supposed to be among the break-through texts of the language poetry movement. Am I panning it by saying it does neither language nor poetry? No. I am merely improving the way it should be taken, which is as a break-through text of what has become language prose.
Of course, hardly anyone will accept that Silliman’s text is not a language poem. But considering it a poem makes it extremely difficult to distinguish poetry from prose, which I think important to do. It also makes the task almost wholly dependent of subjective choices. Using my definition, one can distinguish a poem from prose easily by counting the objectively discernable flow-breaks in it. Disregarding my definition, one can only tell the two apart (it seems to me) by counting how many elements a given text has that poetry has long be believed to have more of than prose such as figurative language, melodation (alliteration, rhyme, meter, etc.), fresh diction, density, lineation, formal shape (such as the fourteen lines a sonnet has), and much else. One must also subjectively evaluate the aesthetic importance of these since no text will have them all, and what everyone would agree is a poem may have only one element of poetry but have it too powerfully not to qualify as a poem whereas a piece of political prose might have a great deal of trite flowery language to qualify quantitatively as a poem, but not qualitatively. For communication’s sake, it thus makes much more sense to me to prefer my clear definition of poetry to any other one.
As for nullinguistically eschewing any definition, at all, or one that can be applied to anything, it is my simply claim that that is simply to ignore the search for truth. That is something I, for one, can’t do.
I quite like the excerpt of Ketjak, by the way. I don’t know enough about what’s been called language poetry to know for sure how historically important it is, but I suspect it has not been greatly over-esteemed.