Doug, it is still an interesting question in terms of line breaks.
It more or less goes to the heart of why or how our respective poetics
can be positioned as diametrically opposed, not that this is a bad
thing, of course. It could first be seen as my autocratic (and hence
totalitarian) poetics as opposed to your democratic poetics and this
could rest on how the decision of line breaks are made. What follows
then is from an autocratic perspective. Obviously I would understand
that a staunchly modernist democratic poetics has a different solution.
For me, to decide on line breaks as a decision made by the people would
be to position the subject as a principle on which the decision is made.
>From the perspective of autocratic poetics line breaks then become in
principle Romantic since it is the Subject which is placed at the centre
of the poetics and this entails an obvious quarrel with Kant's a-priori
which positions the subject first and hence it follows places poetry as
the finite centre of philosophy (and where poetry goes missing in
Hegel.) This is a basic problem that an autocratic poetics must face
since what is already demanded in the hierarchy of such a poetics is
immanent total critique. The choice then becomes one of not where to
break a line, at this word or that word for whatever reason, but first
the choice to choose or not choose (from Kierkegaard) and from this to
choose as that which is already chosen (Deleuze, machinic desire) and
further by an absolute force which is beyond or way outside the text and
textual relations. This is what I call absolute deviation which breaks
classical logic as a sort of destructive inverted Epicurean schema of
being such that absolute deviation is the first coming of being as
creation which is total critique and actually univocal. (Absolute
deviation must be univocal and actual otherwise there will be no
deviation. It implies that there is no ground and no foundation, not
even void and atoms and that absolute deviation creates matter, space
and time as narrative/lyric and that any foundation or scaffold
collapses into the text rather then being taken away. Hence form is
created as collision of sense and affect. Narrative is then essentially
absolute and relation is secondary.)
It follows on from this that it is not a choice between line verse as
poetry and novels as extended prose but that poetry is already chosen in
which prose novels and line verse are homogeneously all poetry.
Homogeneity is then difference in itself where difference is not given
as diversity but is created as always novel. (There's an argument with
Aristotle's poetics here also which I'll skip past.)
anyways, I had better stop here, since this could go on for many more
words and I still haven't got to a modernist democratic poetics..... and
I am meant to be working on revisions of a long ms.
On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 09:42 -0700, Douglas Barbour wrote:
>
> I guess I think only in terms of my typing....(the computer allows for
> text block but I tend to set my prose too to a left margin, & somewhat
> broken right, as in e-mail).
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