Peter, I certainly gave a hostage to fortune when I spoke of the
'necessarily decryptic reading of the text' triggered by algebraic
'epigraphs to _Triodes_. With your usual savvy and, in this case, a certain
Mark Antonine je ne sais quoi (16 compounds of 'crypt' at the last count)
you home in. Admittedly Candice compounded the sin by flourishing the
dreaded word, but I sense an economical use of tarbrushes in your response.
I suggest that if I'd put speech marks round that 'decryptic', you wouldn't
have an argument to begin. My (very limited) knowledge of theory suggests
that 'decoding' (semiotic or whatever) has been around for some time as a
rough synonym for what we understand as 'interpretation' or were 'taught' as
'close reading'. You'll find nothing closer to the tea-leaves end of the
market in anything said about that text in this thread. This includes
speculation about syllable patterns emerging in meaningful relationship
across textual space, something based on the poets' own modest argument
against the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, and in any case, implicit
in poetic practice half a century ago (Robert Duncan's "the 'light' in
delight'). Isn't it better to work with an author's _own_ secondary material
in these matters, than someone else's?
    (btw Cris, isn't _that_ in a sense 'visual')
    You talk about 'tone' and I think Candice has partly addressed this in
speaking of 'mood', and I think tone is relevant to this text but _only
because_ there's a sufficiently stable 'voice' coming through. You and I
would probably agree on a number of not-so-old jhp texts where compaction
_abolishes_ any hope, but the most impressionistic, of tone. It reminds me
of the wry comment of a critic that,'In order to discuss line/sentence
counterpointing we need to be able to distinguish a line from a sentence'.
    I'm a big fan of the idea of never mentioning this poet on the list
again, but then you've got to help!
I'm equally for what I believe Nate Dorward has suggested several times,
text-based discussions of _other_ poets. Nothing too heavy, or exhaustive.
Just text-based.
    As a farewell to charms perhaps, could I explain by way of an
extravagant (and to many younger list-members forever 'cryptic') comparison,
the enduring lure of this poetry. Max Miller, comic genius, got away with
censorable (and sometimes censored ) material by never saying it ; just
leading the audience up to the point where they did it themselves and were
'hooked', complicit.

    Happy birthday and many more of 'em,

John
-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]>
Aan: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Datum: donderdag 27 juli 2000 12:34
Onderwerp: Sugar factory


>Actually I don't think there's anything wrong with this decrypting
>business,I really have nothing against it at all.   It's difficult to say
>how I view it without sounding frivolous, which I don't really feel.  Like
>if I say it would make a good substitute for Poker or Trivial Pursuit--
>you could invite selected friends  and all get round Red D Gypsum and
>really have a go at unlocking it....This would be both creative and
>recreative. I mean this-- I know people who do this sort of thing with
>poetry, to good effect.   It would be creative, in the way John said, but
>restricted to a very particular focus, and you can surely understand people
>-outside- that entranced circle not understanding why on earth you want to
>do it, or even being irritated?  Like wanting to know why of all poets JHP
>is privileged into this very close and unquestioning examination, as if you
>couldn't do that with any number of modern poems -- not actual decrypting
>but the meticulous unravelling of semantic implication, image-development,
>phonetic subtext etc.  Of course you can, with almost any poem, good or
>bad.  I once published a 10-page essay on a 16-word poem by Anthony
>Barnett, with no question of crypts.
>
>
>And you can understand that people -outside- wonder how you know you want
>to do it.  I mean there seem to be big gaps in the logic of this. If, as
>Candice said, you enter into it because you know that this is "great
>poetry" -- if it needs decrypting how do you know this before you have
>decrypted it?  And if you do know this, why do you need to decrypt it since
>you already have from it the greatness of poetry-- what more do you want?
>(Or as John said (forgive me, John) that the felt need to decrypt proved
>that the  text begged decrypting, which is like saying that the felt need
>to eat chicken proves that chickens were created to be eaten.) This is the
>same question about privileging, there is obviously a prior commitment to
>this particular poet. That's what really needs analysing, the nature of
>that attraction (or, for some, repulsion) which I think is to do with its
>relationship to the whole history of poetry.  The decrypters assume they
>are on a treasure-hunt; that there could be problems with this kind of
>writing, just does not enter into it for a second.
>
>But I'm glad to see that Candice also decrypted Randolph Healy, than whom I
>cannot think of a poet further distant in spirit from JHP.  Randolph's
>encrypting was one of several responses to a specific occasion of hurt, in
>that poem.  JHP's (insofar as he does it) is a generalised condition .
>
>I know that JHP believes in encryptment, he has said so, though not so as
>to make his entire texuality a construct of encrypting. But I think he's
>wrong. He once gave a lecture on Barnett in which he spoke of the necessity
>to conceal messages in connection with Barnett's Jewish ancestry. Like the
>coded notes children pass under their desks. This barely made sense for AB
>and certainly can't be transferred to JHP -- The idea that  he encrypts
>because he is (or we are) in some way censored or suppressed seems an
>impossible thought.   What power, what authority, would  think for half a
>second of the need to suppress JHP?  He has in a sense suppressed himself
>by writing as he does.  It all seems to me like another instance of the
>absolute determination to be alienated.  Angry young men again, everywhere.
>
>
>And I think JHP has elsewhere expressed this as a belief in metonymy (which
>northerners like me think of as simply "replacement") as poetical method,
>and you might then have something very close to encrypting but which needs
>a different kind of analysis.  So that one term is replaced by another, but
>the new term doesn't simply decode back to the original.
>
>Well even Tony Harrison needs decrypting sometimes, does he not?
>
>For encrypting, if it takes place,  is a particularly blatant, and, dare I
>say mechanical version of a process which is of the nature of poetry,
>modern poetry anyway-- the displacing, turning, shifting of terms, shooting
>elsewhere, constant quest to lift the discourse from singular vision and
>echo the possibility of the whole.  Which is probably its only chance of
>survival.
>
>--
>
>two appendices to this note---
>
>The question about "tone" still bugs me, as for instance--  What do you
>make of the iterated "Uh" in Triodes?  I respond very positively to the
>newly extended and  dignified periods of that poem (without knowing what
>they're doing) but that little thing irritates me intensely, and I think I
>know why.
>
>I'm trying to remember what I was asked.  I'd like to give an example of an
>impossible traverse - the connection made by sheer breakage so that there's
>no question of grasping it, but you are  forced into an unknowable trust.
>But I can't find an instance which isn't by a list-member, or someone
>suspected of being one, or the Aztec himself.  I'll keep looking.
>
>--
>
>I apologise for having been so forthcoming recently. It's the quiet season
>for bookselling.  But in three days I'm 60 and that should depress me
>enough to keep me quiet for a week or two.  Samuel Menashe (74) gave a
>reading in Cambridge on Tuesday during which he suggested deliberately
>breaking a mirror to make sure you live for another seven years.
>
>
>/PR
>
>
>



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