Hello cris and Alison.

Well, I expose myself here as a child of (I suppose old fashioned)
structuralist poetics, the texts on my shelves being Culler, Lawler, and
Hollander.  The intersting thing about the Lawler book is that he discusses
"language connoting celestial background" (phrase from cris's email of 16
April), and, of course, that he draws his title from "The thing I hum
appears to be / The rhythm of this celestial pantomime." _The Man with the
Blue Guitar_ (echoed by "It's a little like the urgency which derives from
disatisfactions with the imperfect fit or the phantom pitch to which we hum
-  that Rennaissance, what did they call it, something akin to 'stimmung'
that we 'tune' ourselves to through our work." in cris's email of 19 April).

Lawler examines structures in the language of (English) poems, structures
that he claims "communicate through, over, and beyond the lexical statement
as such". He identifies a few of these stuctures, and begins a discussion of
how and why they work. "Celestial" comes into it as the arguement is that
these structures (or you might call them tropes or games or play or
patterns) work because they are transcendent in the sense that they are
utterances of patterns deep in nature - either in the human or scientific
sense of the word.  The "few significant patterns" (that is, he believes
there are others as well) Lawler examines in what he claims is only a
provisional manner are chiasm and parenthesis; enjambment; coda of reversal;
coda of irony; prepositionalising, refrains, journey motifs;
mono-polysylabbic collisions and oscillatory imagery.  For example, there is
an extended passage where he discusses the wave and particle theories of
physics, and their paradoxical unification in the work of Niels Bohr, as
patterned in some poems of Hopkins. Transcendence in Lawler is defined as
the capacity to go beyond one's self and enter into that which is not one's
self, please excuse my clumsy formulation here, not (necessarily) in the
religious sense, but in the sense of recognising the existence of others and
(as in Bloch) hoping beyond current conditions to a better world that can be
worked toward.

Well ... now is the end of my stolen playtime ... for today, that is.

Leona

>From: cris cheek <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: cris cheek <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Partly Writing 2
>Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 14:33:42 +0100
>
>Hi Alison,
>
>looks like nobody else apart from Leona (thanks Leona  -  looked it up,
>still none the wiser) wants 2 play.
>
>Also looks as if i might have inadvertently written something meaningful
>which is a worry;)
>
>Perhaps it's a point that much (i hesitate to say all but *might* go there)
>in poetry (the performances of the writing and dissemination) has yearning
>for measures of openness as well as inevitably effects measures of closure.
>Such yearning *might* be read as desire for 'things' to be other than they
>appear to be and such yearnings can come both from the pit of despair (that
>'being, close to tears') and the projections borne through joy.
>
>Writing poetry in and of itself connotes possibility. If one were content
>with things as they are one would have no need to say anything? Writing, as
>production of both difference and differance (accented appropriately)
>*might* betaken as a sign of yearning.
>
>It's a little like the urgency which derives from disatisfactions with the
>imperfect fit or the phantom pitch to which we hum  -  that Rennaissance,
>what did they call it, something akin to 'stimmung' that we 'tune'
>ourselves
>to through our work.
>We never attain 'it', or even only rarely glimpse 'it'. Writing traces our
>inividual and collective attempts to fly ever closer to 'it'.
>something like that
>I think those notes came in and around a reading by Will Rowe from the poem
>'Corpses'  by Nestor Perlongher which he himself translated.
>this kind of thing start to tease 'it' a little . .?
>
>love and love
>cris


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