On Mon, 2009-03-16 at 20:39 +1100, Alison Croggon wrote:
> Just curious, Chris - _which_ novels need more lyric?

Thanks for your comments, all. Just to clear up some confusion this is
the actual process of writing with the added advantage that your
comments accelerate this process, hence my added thanks. I am also
taking advantage of the practical everyday issues of schedules given
this involves four books, although how I organise my writing schedules
around a three hour half life of morphine iterative style may be of
little interest (if I am permitted some frivolity... mmm, was Proust on
morphine?) I have quite some sympathy with Frederick's sentiments except
to say I have covered all these readings in decades past and am only
questioning some of that reading for direct practical reasons. (That
should read more slowly but I am trying to be quick; breakthrough pain.)

Alison's non-question addresses the question since it involves a
confusion between lyric as a quantitative number and that of lyric as an
aesthetic quality. Bakhtin is concerned with a qualitative question, if
I am to follow his reading of Kant. The difference between monologic
lyric used in lyric poetry and dialogic lyric is a qualitative question
and not a quantitative question. Also, this is not a moral question as
to which sort is better then the other but simply a question of
different ways of writing, lyric poems and (verse) novels being
different. It also makes no moral claim as to the question of misreading
or how a non-question functions as a way into a question, of course. 

Pound's poetics confuses the difference between two different
multiplicities in Bergson and so what Pound claims, in his reading of
Bergson, to be different in his poetics by the quantitative addition
still remains as monologic lyric. (This is not original to me, it has
been said before, but I am avoiding a much longer discussion, if I may.)
Dialogue then is not a question of quantitative addition of single
lyrics which reproduce monologic lyric rather then producing dialogic
lyric. The question of whether Pound is successful in breaking the
cliche is another question but all I am interested in is how Pound does
what he does and why Pound's additive monologic lyric cannot be dialogic
lyric. So the dialogic remains as an open question which Pound was
unable to solve. (I should admit that Pound's idea of breaking the
cliche by the weight of numbers in a monologic lyric I find attractively
amusing. Thinking about trying this.)

Unlike Pound, I don't have the luxury of leaving an explanation for my
poetics to others but instead face an ethical imperative to take
responsibility for my discourse since gay and lesbian avant-garde
writing formations and my own involvement in this and experimental verse
novels make this demand by the nature of the poetics. Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick has also covered this ground with the questions of how writing
formations which seem to address only a small minority number of gay and
lesbian people also carries a poetics that seems to sweep across an
entire social field and with this what appears as the entire field of
modern poetics. (Lee Edelman has also been here.) So, in this respect,
the quantitative question takes on a different perspective and questions
democratic poetic practices, such as my democratic poetics, in a way
that would not otherwise be the case. If the majority by numbers think
homosexuality is wrong and if we are to continue with this majority
numbers way of thinking as morally correct then does this make it right
that beating gay men to death is a majority approved action? Unlike
Pound, I don't have this option. So it seems key questions for
democratic poetics which leave themselves open to readers to decide
involve questions of life, rights and to return to Plato, education.
Hence the imperative for the poetics book. (Language poetry also seems
to argue a democratic poetics, hence my interest.)

I do have some hope that the poetics book can be a more relaxed
explanatory style and one of the dangers when facing large amounts of
writing is a sort of urgent panic which slows things down too much so
early and relaxed feedback can actually increase writing speed. I find
always wearing socks also helps since I don't then look at the purple
splotch skin which is beginning to cover my ankle when I cross my legs. 

Hope this explains the questions more, best wishes, Chris Jones.