Hi Mark

I'm sorry I quoted you partially - I was simply quoting the pieces I was
reacting to, as I would normally with most emails I response to, and not
meaning to warp your point in any malign way. I admit that this will shift
your meaning, but surely that is one of the consequences of dialogue -
mishearings, misunderstandings, little eddies of clarity?

> So the question becomes, do you find--is it possible to find--pleasurable a
> poem with "absolutely no [apparent] structure" until it's done? How long
> are you willing to suspend the need for apparent structure? How about a
> poem in which we define structure as balance, and the whole thing seems
> ready to topple over for most of its length, or a poem in which even the
> connection between one phrase or line and the next isn't immediately
> apparent, let alone the connection between parts, as in many serial poems?

This question seems to assume that "structure" or "form" is the same as
"resolution" or closure of some kind. They seem to me to be quite different
things. In my inability to imagine a structureless poem, I am clearly
speaking of something other than you are: the poem you post (a fine poem,
btw) is, to my mind, by no means structureless. For a start, there is the
syntax of sentences, which it works with great fineness. A structure/form
is set up the moment the poem starts: it's immediately an argument ("The
truth is I only care about words, not every word...")

The withholding of resolution, its (possibly) infinite regress, is itself a
kind of structure. When poems (or any works) succeed in doing that, I find
it exhilarating, and I also enjoy that sense that something might
disintegrate at any moment but impossibly holds itself up, the kind of
pleasure of watching a tightrope walker pretending to be a drunk on a slack
rope. The continuous resistance of the closing off of possibility is I
think something that poetry can do, and is one of the fruitful ways ot
thinking about it. In my own writing - and I am very prosaic at the moment
- it's one of my primary struggles. I can say this with feeling, as it's
one of the struggles (a rather exhausting struggle) I'm having at the
moment, working in a very long and formally constrained genre: how do I
resist the closures of the form? How do I work little explosions which
suddenly permit new possibilities, which, in fact, permit me to _write_?
The only answer is in the language itself, and the question is always, as
you put it, "how much chaos can be maintained, how much of and how complex a
world [can be] apprehended". You would argue, of course, that this struggle
is a step aside from working outside a generic form, but it's only a step: I
work in both ways, both with conventional forms and - especially in poetry -
in forms which evolve as I go. The resistance of the form itself is always
part of the process, perhaps a primary part of it. I deeply relate to Hal's
Duncan quote, but my process has always been an organic one.

Best

A

On 7/1/05 3:13 AM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Interestingly, you left out the last sentence of my very short note: "The
> longer resolution is delayed, which by this formulation means the longer
> the phenomena remain without structure, unresolved, the more new territory
> there is." A familiar enough idea in music, where the delay of harmonic
> resolution allows for a prolonged play of structural ambiguity before
> resolution makes "sense" of it.
>
> So the question becomes, do you find--is it possible to find--pleasurable a
> poem with "absolutely no [apparent] structure" until it's done? How long
> are you willing to suspend the need for apparent structure? How about a
> poem in which we define structure as balance, and the whole thing seems
> ready to topple over for most of its length, or a poem in which even the
> connection between one phrase or line and the next isn't immediately
> apparent, let alone the connection between parts, as in many serial poems?
> Think about a complex German sentence, which, until it's capped with a verb
> prefix at the very end, may not be clear as to its meaning or even entirely
> what it's talking about.
>
> This is an area I enter gingerly, as it's essentially the same set of ideas
> I proposed some time ago and got clobbered by incomprehension for my
> troubles. It's about being willing to allow the poem (and everything else)
> to remain without structure until structure is discovered in the process of
> the making. So the poem becomes "about" structure in a manner analogous to
> music--and the story of the poem, as in music, is the process of discovery
> as it is enacted.
>
> Humans seem hardwired to discover structure. Put any two objects together
> and we make up a story to connect them, to explain their being present at
> the same time. Add a third and we modify the story. Replace that third
> object with another and we invent a different story. Because the objects in
> themselves don't contain any directions, any hierarchy, any determination
> of their significance. Even when laws of physics are involved it's a matter
> of discovery--change the field of phenomena to be described and the laws
> become more or less possible to derive. Apples fell for a long time before
> Newton hypothesized gravity.
>
> It seems to me that we start with an undifferentiated informational soup.
> Call it chaos, call it non-sense. We discover sense, which by this
> construct is the same as structure, by increments. Within a structured
> system of knowledge or language the violation of same, "nonsense," reminds
> us of chaos, which can be both liberating and terrifying. When we find it
> funny we are laughing as much about the suddenly-revealed ridiculousness of
> whatever structure as about the silliness of its violation. Children, who
> are closer to chaos, have an easier time shedding structure and
> experiencing phenomena stripped of relationship to other phenomena. For
> adult poets it requires more of an effort of will, something like throwing
> one's eyes out of focus, to return to a state in which the phenomena are
> yet to be named and any story is possible.



Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com