Poetry then as the accumulated capital safely banked in language ,
Christopher? Or am I reading you wrong?

2008/5/11 Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>:
> Since I left the horse in the paddock I shall let it wander a bit.
>
> <snip>
> It's in the space between 'nearly' and 'identical' that things like poetry
> happen. [DB]
> <snip>
>
> <snip>
> One tries to confront history, stand up to it - knowing that it will always,
> as Hegel said, "leave a remainder"; that it will probably digest one's
> effort. [FP]
> <snip>
>
> Indeed. 'Nearly' is not *identity*. 'A concept does not,' as was said,
> 'exhaust the thing conceived of.'
>
> Time is about comparison which is, in turn, about time, about how we
> conceive of 'nearly': thus the experience of alterity, comparing the new
> self with how the self seemed to be; thus the experience of time's 'passing'
> by comparing the new world with how the old world seemed to be. Time both
> changes and stays the same. And because we cannot completely reach either
> aspect without destroying the other, we have to live time asymptotically.
> But of course that rarely happens: too often we opt for reductions one type
> of which is the sort of finalising vision in which either time eventually
> grinds to a halt or else it leads ineluctably to some idealised stationary
> point: vulgar Darwinianism; Progress; Hegel; even poor, wretched Fukayama.
>
> Unfortunately, having got into it, I don't think one gets out of the problem
> of finality by any sort of philosophically muscular *confrontation*.
>
> Nor is it the case, with all of this in mind,  that the abhorred
> alternative -
>
> <snip>
> 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. [FP]
> <snip>
>
> - actually founders in these terms (becomes noodling and so forth) simply
> because narrative has been abandoned altogether. The narrative of evolution
> is, after all, every bit as much mere juxtaposition as any nasty pomo's
> problematic poetising. Rather it fails where it often does because the
> abandonment of *grand narrative*, the narrative of finality, has simply been
> left as a gap (philosophically Baudrillard seems to me to get into exactly
> this kind of difficulty) so that the constant change of diachronic encounter
> has no stability, no 'remainder' against which to measure itself and
> everything becomes *pointless*. The hands on the clock go endlessly round
> without ever, as it were, moving *forwards*. There is no accumulation, no
> *experience* as such.
>
> A similar accumulation (of unowned *experience* as language) seems to me one
> possible definition of what poetry works with, insofar as one ever needs
> one: not the instrumental substitution of 'the thing conceived of' for the
> *thing* nor yet some sort of over-emphasis of the gap but simply
> an excess of *meaning* over what is meant and the (at)tension between the
> two. This is a different sort of 'remainder'. However, I don't think it has
> much to do with narrative as such and it connects with Dominic's
> 'subtract[ion] ... from the language of everyday reportage' only in
> the sense that _as a practice_ working in this way subtracts itself from
> negative side of 'everyday reportage', from how expressivity is always
> captured and reduced.
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'Life is too precious to spend it with important people.'
> (Harry Partch)
>



-- 
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk