Gabe and Doug,
This is an interesting discussion. I want to ask how common is this sort of
thinking which asks: 'where the writing comes from'? Put another way; is this
a big concern that writers (poets, novelists, critics et al) have and perhaps
consciously or unconsciously are concerned with or invest in? If you have
time, I'd like to hear your comments.
Just as so yous knows where I comes from (no need to address this, just trying
to let on what my concern is) my hunch is the question of origin, where does
writing come, for example, is one of the biggest or most often repeated
illusions of immanence. Immanence is then understood as being immanent to
something. This is an illusion which confuses immanence with transcendence,
since saying something is immanent to something is transcendental. (The only
thing immanence is immanent to is immanence.) It is an easy step from where
does writing come from to where do I come from? The repetition of this
question fascinates me and is in materialist philosophy a serious
philosophical problem called stupidity. (There is no judgement involved in
this term, that is important to understand. Stupidity is a serious
philosophical problem and it appears to be concerned with a transcendental
plane or plan in terms of origin or in terms of narcosis; the problem of
narcissism.) Schelling's Transcendental Idealism and Hegel's Dialectic both
have a concern with origin and this leads back to the problem of zero in Kant
as the pure form of time. What I am also getting toward is the question of
the remnants of Romanticism which insist on sticking around, of bobbing up
all over the place. I suspect, also, Freud is often mis-read as being
concerned with origin, but that is another discussion altogether, so I will
leave off here.
best wishes
Chris Jones.
On Fri, 11 Oct 2002 16:40, you wrote:
> >Quoting Douglas Clark <[log in to unmask]>:
> >> Your character is amassed out of your neuroses
> >> and it is character that makes a good poet.
> >> Collins is bland, it seems.
> >
> >Okay I was afraid of that. But, Douglas, doesn't you gets suspicious about
> >sketching a hardline post-Freudian romantic poetics? Maybe it's a cultural
> >thing, because it seems that, at least in the American I know, such a
> >pathologizing of the poet's interior and character is a thing of the past
> > -- albeit the recent past. It seems (and I hope it's true) that in
> > America younger
> >poets just don't allow themselves that, forgive this, kneejerk association
> >between poetic value and the romantic malady of talent. Hmm.
>
> Well, Gabe
>
> I'd like to hope so, but given the range of poetics at work in the US (&
> elsewhere), & the kind of thinking I often see in young writers, I suspect
> that something like this still plays in a lot of writers' sense of 'where
> the writing comes from' (drummroll etc).
>
> Oy!
>
> Doug
>
> Douglas Barbour
> Department of English
> University of Alberta
> Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
> (h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>
> Speech
> is a mouth.
>
> Robert Creeley
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