----- Original Message -----
From: "Halvard Johnson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 11:23 PM
Subject: Re: [ Volumes 01 - 07 of Remove A Concept are available now ]
The wonderful thing about 4'33" is that the silence isn't
all that pure. Any sound(s) around rush in to fill the void.
Hal
I know the theory. I was reading Cage 43 years ago; even attended one of
his lectures at Yale. And like any member of the vast herd of independent
minds, I told myself I was impressed by him, as by Sontag's essays and the
other protopostmodernist classics of the time. But the theory is bullshit.
Ambient sounds don't "rush in to fill the void" when the pianist sits there
not playing. Ambient sounds are ambient sounds. What happens is that the
hip postmodernist audience-member - who has read that "any seat in the house
is the best seat," etc. - pretends that he is shaping, enjoying, 'composing'
those sounds. I suspect he will do this for ten or twenty seconds but
pretend (to himself, and to others if called on) that he did it for the
entire four minutes plus. Like relgious ecstasy in the 1600s, sensibility
and sentiment in the 1700s, sublime Romantic exultation in the 1800s,
pretending that circumambient sound is music is one of those fake aesthetic
experiences that people - if they are sufficiently hip - convince themselves
they are having. As far as I can see, postmodernist critics (including some
enthusiastic long-winded sectarians on this list) don't even try to have the
supposed experience (of seeing noise as music, for example.); they
rhetorically assume it can be had and that someone is having it, and pretend
it is the basis of their aesthetic rather than a product.
Yet even if someone out there genuinely enjoys Cage's music -- and I liked
his lecture, in which he cleverly talked against a metronome beat - it has
nothing whatever to do with poetry. Claiming it as the basis of a poetic is
a second-order pretension. Words indeed have many, even contradictory
meanings and connotations; that's what makes poetry possible. But to
pretend on that basis that signifiers can be entirely set free from
signifieds, and that endless columns of word salad a la Raworth are poems,
and that a reader "putting meanings together" from these elements is the
same as - or something higher than - reading --- these assumptions, so
prevalent on this list, are nonsense. Eventually, when the
poststructuralist fad dies, they will be seen to be nonsense. Words are
different from sounds or from smears of color. An abstract art is
worthwhile, and still full of possibilities; an abstract language is a
contradiction. It's a kind of academic parlor-game pretending to be a vital
cultural development.
To associate such word-salads, whether or not they are based on aleatoric
techniques, with the late Holderlin is especially abominable. Holderlin, on
the verge of madness, was reaching after meaning - many, complex meanings.
He was trying to reconcile irreconcilable visions: of Christ and of the
classic gods. He was not "leaving meaning to the reader." Any more than
Pound did in the Cantos. Splashing half-thought or utterly random
associations on a page may look like (modernist) poetry but isn't. A poem
is something shaped and thought through. It can incorporate
improvisational, even chance moments, but these must be justified by an
overall coherence. For an example, a poststructuralist sectarian (not you,
Hal) might look again at my most recently sent work. I admit that I haven't
"read" "Volumes 01-07 of Remove a Concept." Sight unseen, however, I'm
quite certain that my work will survive when those volumes are landfill.
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