Agreed, Fred, totally.  And "Rain" - quite wonderful - exemplifies your 
points.  Except for the great grouping of Unfathomable Poems, I always see a 
narrative, a story, a telling built upon tellings---just as I see these in 
novels, plays and, yes, even VileBoris' catflap scratchings.  It is 
frightening to tell a story truly---and no wonder, then, that poets, 
especially, avoid it.

Judy

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frederick Pollack" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 11:16 AM
Subject: Re: today's low / "Rain"


> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 9:40 AM
> Subject: Re: today's low
>
>
>> David Bircumshaw wrote:
>>> I like your casual reference to 'that line of Badiou's', Dom.
>>>
>>> Well, from what little I know of Badiou I believe he uses the poetry
>>> of Mallarme and Pessoa as his reference. Now I can understand the line
>>> in relation to Mallarme, and too in respect of some sides of Pessoa,
>>> though not to all his disintegrating personae, but otherwise it
>>> excludes too much.
>>> Most poetry ever written in fact.
>>>
>> Truths are rare...
>>
>> But "subtracts itself from" does not mean "excludes" (your poem FAILS! 
>> immediately as soon as it opens its front door to the outside world). I 
>> think it would be a mistake either to take Mallarme as an exemplar of 
>> language at some extreme of rarefication or to turn that example - which 
>> doesn't really, in the end, account even for Mallarme - into a standard 
>> for poetry in general.
>>
>> Fred's discontents with this notion of poetastry as rarefaction are 
>> well-documented, which was why I wanted to suggest that the oneiric, 
>> world-wrenching aspect of his own poetry also satisfies (possibly without 
>> really wanting to) Badiou's description. A cute, pseudo-mathematical way 
>> of putting it would be to say that poetry "diagonalises" the public idiom 
>> of "ordinary reportage": it neither confirms nor refutes the doxa (the 
>> poet "nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth"), but traverses them 
>> slantwise.
>>
>> Dominic
>>
>
> I can't address myself to Badiou; don't know enough about him.  But "the 
> discourse of ordinary reportage" is thoroughly suffused with ideology, 
> both in what it notices and says and what it doesn't.  What I complain 
> about in contemporary poetry, whether it "rarefies" or deregulates or 
> thoroughly abstracts from that discourse, is that it doesn't successfully 
> combat that ideological character.  Rather, it invents auxiliary 
> ideologies, attaches them to the main body, and regards this as a critical 
> act.  The assumption behind C. D. Wright's poem is that rummaging through 
> a messy purse of private associations is somehow warmer, more human, truer 
> than "ordinary reportage."  The latter agrees; that is why mainstream 
> poetry is mainstream. The noodling, non sequiturs, inscrutable allusions, 
> crossed-out or superimposed lines, chance juxtapositions etc. of the 
> avant-garde are to me the same product in different packaging, with 
> different additives - more astringent and depersonalized, hence more 
> attractive to academic intellectuals.  The latter believe that narrative 
> is inherently oppressive, that all narrative is Establishment narrative. 
> I think that narrative is the element that can never be finally coopted 
> and controlled, and that's why I insist on it (or how I rationalize my 
> attraction to it).  And what you call the oneiric and world-wrenching 
> aspect of my work is, to me, suggested by narrative itself.  Once you 
> commit to story, go all the way with it; a great story is never merely 
> escapist, but critical and (in however dark a sense) utopian.  In a sense 
> my work wants to "subtract itself from" prevailing discourse, but only in 
> order to attack it.  And I use the strengths of that discourse, 
> syntactical clarity, spareness etc. (strengths that it, to judge from my 
> students' writing, now feels it can discard), against its ideological 
> assumptions.  I think I do this in non-narrative forms also, and in poems 
> that observe the day and its discourses from within, as well as from 
> dream-worlds.  As here:
>
>
> Rain
>
>
> A poem turns bad
> when it tricks you into
> forcing new similes -
> complex without context -
> on common things.  Rain
> for instance.  It can be done:
> someone was first
> to say that rain is like applause,
> silk tearing,
> a banner straining,
> a vast comforting meaningless whisper.
> Invent one and
> enthusiasts will say
> you've given nature back to them,
> their eyes, the things of this world,
>
> etc.  All weekend, rain
> moving east.  Saturday,
> lightning.  I wait
> for a tree to fall (as they usually do
> here), hit a wire,
> kill our power.  But the thunder stops;
> rain remains,
> steady and tepid, east-northeast.
> For ten minutes every few hours
> it falls more noisily, densely.
> Backups and accidents;
> flood-watch in effect .
> When it stops, the heat rises
> immediately.  The grass and
> hosta are thicker;
> azaleas appear, and tulips saved
> by deerspray.
> For a week they maintain
> a brave front, as if satisfied, healthy.
> But the rain, as the radio
> says, didn't begin to lift
> the drought.
> We remain in a chronic serious drought.
>
>