Frank quoted from Jonathan Ivry:
'Stevens's "supreme fiction" becomes his term for an unreachable, idealized
"meta"-poetics, in which the "recursive self" might be replaced by an
articulation of self-presence: "I have not but I am and as I am, I am." ...
Louis Zukofsky expresses his ideal state of poetry in terms adopted from
calculus; poetics is a definite integral with lower limit speech and upper
limit music. ... Zukofsky recognizes that not only is subjectivity caught up
in mechanistic recursive loops, but that language is similarly trapped in
circles of referentiality. The ideal poetics can transcend these "strange
loops" only by aspiring to a condition of music, in which self and language
are no longer referential and expressive but rather performative and
self-identical.'
It's pretty nice to indulge in fancies like linking poetry to mathematics
via (in this case) definite integrals (why not integrals with plus and minus
infinity as bounds, just to soup things up?). And recursion,
self-reference, strange loops. It's hard to avoid the scientific tropes of
the age, is it not? I rather like the idea of poetry as a superposition of
states.
Killing the Buddha sounds extreme. Guess it could be a Zen thing.
Alan Marshfield.
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