<snip>
Poetry then as the accumulated capital safely banked in language ,
Christopher? Or am I reading you wrong? [Dave B]
<snip>
In broad terms I was suggesting that *truth* lies in discrepancy, in a
tension between two modes; that there is a sort of cognitive latency in
updating one mode to take account of the other. My second point derived from
that. We can attempt to reconcile the succession of time with our sense of
its presentness either by finalising the former into the latter (as when
Helen Bannerman melts the tigers into butter) or by another sort of
finality, treating succession (question beggingly) as though it were merely
presentness being experienced repetitively in line with Santayana's maxim
(quoted in the Harper's piece) or by Laurie Anderson's mother's parrot. The
former implies closure, the latter its absence. Both flatten out our
experience, albeit in different ways: the tyranny of the normative versus
gollygosh amnesia.
So poetry is a _practice_, in my terms, of keeping up that tension, of
avoiding its suppression. But there are other modes (and other tensions) at
work. That between public and private, for example. Which is better, a civil
state which is fastidious about planning permission but ignores missing
children (and those others who 'appear' on the doorstep) or a police state
where there is no private space? Again a poetry, whether publicly or
privately directed, which fails to admit that tension is weakened in its
purpose.
And there's an interesting modal tension (public/private and
synchronic/diachronic acting together) between whether we view language in
the rear view mirror as *traces* (Emerson called it 'fossilised poetry') or
through the windscreen as the potential of what's ahead. Here again, to the
extent that one does not live and work with it, one loses.
Where cultural capital does come in, I think, is after the point of capture:
questions of meaning, value, appropriateness etc belong to those *in power*.
That has two effects. The obvious one is that what's disfavoured struggles
to make it past the gatekeepers of the mainstream and often it simply dies.
The less obvious one is that assaults upon the existence of the mainstream
come to be seen not as the (averted) risk of its destruction but as a
prequel of its renewal .
<snip>
... those of us who do find ourselves working the fragment & the
non-narrative ... [Doug B]
<snip>
Max's link truncates the Harper piece: a sort of action against narrative in
itself. But what I have begins, more or less, with *pursuit*: the (utopian)
'pursuit of happiness'. And there is a considerable aesthetic distance
between all those Brooksian well wrought urns and (say) Beckett's 'Ever
tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better' kind of
persistence or pursuit. That is one possibility for why one values the
fragment. Or the fragment could be an outcome of that sense of ruin implied
in my last point above, so that it carries the bootprint of subsumption but
remains quite wild and stubborn nonetheless. Or it could form part of a
network, hooking up with other things _within_ the world (the Harper's piece
speaks of culture as recombinative), creating another part of the content
_of_ the world, rather than commenting _upon_ the world, having (some of)
the world as its content, as narrative tends to imply. None would be Fred's
'noodling'.
And _non_ narrative, as you put it; not always _anti_ at all.
CW
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'Life is too precious to spend it with important people.'
(Harry Partch)
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