hi keston
with all this angst about whether poets are in or out of or
simply influenced by or writing in abreaction to or whatever
so-called lang-po
i wonder whether it's more a question relating to reading
consciousness - 'states of attention', how one reads anything anymore
i've lost Marjorie's orginal message, but Grace Lake (for example)
is there in 'Out Of Everywhere' (which i think Marjory cited)
does that make Grace a lang-po writer or a mede warbler matters
little more than a jot, unless we are going to define such
territories very carefully
lang-po thereby becomes useless as a pejorative yeah or neh
take Grace's opening line from 'Silk & Wild Tulips'
'Afraid of my father's power the object speaks country does it concur'
quoting from Forrest-Thomson:
'The distancing of artifice produces dislocation and, of course,
discomfort. "The reading of a new poet, or of any poetry at all, fills many
readers with a sense of mere embarrassment and discomfort, like that of not
knowing, and wanting to know, whether it is a wall or the sea." Like
Empson, I want to know whether it is a wall or the sea'.
To whit -
Drawing strongly on, but taking useful issue with Forrest-Thomson, Charles
Bernstein in 'Artifice of Absorption' (to which I'd recommend all readers,
and other variations within this phrase):
'. . . It
seems to me she is wrong to designate the nonlexical,
or more accurately, extralexical
strata of the poem as "nonsemanctic"; I would say
that such elements as line breaks, acoustic
patterns, syntax, etc ARE meaningful rather than,
as she has, that they CONTRIBUTE to the meaning
of the poem. For instance, there is no fixed
threshold at which noise becomes phonically
significant; the further back this threshold is
pushed, the greater the resonance at the cutting
edge. The semantic strata of a poem should not be
understood as only those elements to which a
relatively fixed connotative or denotative meaning
can be ascribed, for this would restrict meaning to
the exclusively recuperable elements of alnaguage - a
restriction that if literally applied would make
meaning impossible. After all, meaning occurs
only in a context of conscious & nonconconsious,
recuperable & unrecoverable, dynamics.
Moreover, the designation of the visual, acoustic,
& syntactic elements of a poem as "meaningless",
especially insofar as this is conceptualized as
positive or liberating - & this is a common habit
of much CURRENT critical discussion of syntactically
nonstandard poetry - is symptomatic of a desire to
evade responsibility for meaning's total, &
totalizing, reach; as if meaning was a husk
that could be shucked off or a burden that could be
bucked. Meaning is not a use value AS OPPOSED TO
some other kind of value, but more like valuation
itself; & even to refuse value is a value & a sort
of exchange. Meaning is no where BOUND
to the orbit of purpose, intention, or utility.'
(apologies to Charles, hi Charles, for replacing italic
emphases with a capital shout - limitations of medium)
and so it goes on
One of the aspects that most characterizes 'Out of Everywhere'
is its typographical and spatializing exuberance. Pleasure in
the text indeed. A feature of Lyn Hejinian's gorgeous Tuumba
booklet series from the 1970s. Go figure
love and love
cris
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