I'm not defending pomo in general (and it's annoying being tarred with that
brush), I'm explaining the thinking behind a process as a way to understand
"nonsense."
The disorder I suffer from isn't so much "insufficient attention" as
"knee-jerk irony," or what I took to be such. Forgive me if I misread.
What we can I think say about a poem that works is that the constraints on
possibility mount as the poem proceeds--the first word, image, construct
can be anything, the last can be very few, tho we often don't know, as
writers or readers, which one until it happens. As in music--there are lots
of D-minor chords, there's only one Mass in D-Minor. But add to that that
there need be no other externally articulable rules governing the process
in a poem--it invents its rules as it finds them.
The deep structure (I'm not using the term in Chomsky's way, and I don't
think you were--was Benn?) is finally brain chemistry, which has limits
(within which a great deal of variation) that we're almost unaware of. The
question isn't collapse into chaos so much as how much chaos can be
maintained, how much of and how complex a world apprehended.
Kozer loved my long Australia poem Different Birds, up as an ebook at the
Shearsman site. He said he read it biting his nails--"he's going to lose
it, he can't sustain the balancing act"--until the end. A case of a lot of
material kept in the air until it discovered its resolution.Ifd it hadn't,
tant pis--I can always write another poem.
At 12:54 PM 1/6/2005, you wrote:
>Oh, but they do receive attention - one just doesn't always react overtly
>to what one attends to (think of all those lurkers...). You seem to be
>suffering from Insufficient Attention Disorder ;-)
> >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.< Well, I often think about complex
> German sentences - here's one where the whole doesn't quite make sense
> until the semantic information delivered by the participle at the end
> arrives: Sie gestand, sie habe eines Abends nach einem alkoholisierten
> beiderseits vereinbarten Wiedersehen aufgrund verschiedener gewalttätiger
> Übergriffe seinerseits und zugegebenermaßen in Erwartung einer
> beträchtlichen Erbschaft den besagten schon lange getrenntlebenden
> Ehegatten mit seiner Seidenkrawatte, die sie vor vielen Jahren
> anlässlich seines Geburtstages in einem Berliner Modeschäft erstanden
> habe, erdrosselt. But of course the Satzbau (which the late Gottfried
> Benn thought was behind everything) is a form, infinitely variable, it is
> true, a preexistent deep structure permitting precisely that longterm
> expectancy of closure not to collapse into psycho-semantic chaos, just as
> in music - as you say - the whole (the first movement of the *Eroica*,
> say) only really fully makes sense at the end, if that expectation has
> been set up, which requires a background (as Hans Keller would say) to
> set up/off the foreground. If we agree on that - which is somehow
> selbstredend, I feel - then there is a consensus - whether or not the
> background is of a material or an ideal nature (they are two sides of the
> same coin.) But I've seen a quite a bit of *pomo* poetry that sets up no
> background & doesn't therefore succeed in creating a foreground gestalt.
> And I agree with Pound that no vers is libre for the poet wanting to do a
> good job, or words to that effect.
>There's no etymology for "gingerly" apparently - a pity, as you say.
>cheers
>mjay
>Mark Weiss wrote:
>
>>Thanks for the kind thoughts, Martin--they serve as a reminder of what I
>>was alluding to. My ideas apparently deserve no attention.
>>
>>Be nice to know the history ofthe word, how a common spice became
>>synonymous with apprehensiveness.
>>
>>Mark
>>
>>
>>
>>At 11:54 AM 1/6/2005, you wrote:
>>
>>>Mark wrote
>>> >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.<
>>>
>>>'"I weep for you", the Walrus said, "I truly sympathize"'....
>>>
>>>"Gingerly" * is* a lovely word, innit?
>>>
>>>cheers
>>>mjay
>>
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