Two points from Randolph: 1)
>>Again, repeating a question doesn't increase any obligation to answer it.
No one made Stephen ask his questions. Nor is anyone required to justify
their taste. I don't understand the aggression, however playful, occasioned
by inability to enjoy a particular form of writing. You don't have to like
it.

Well, I was asserting that the question is important, not taking it as in
any way proven. But it isn't necessarily aggressive, is it, for someone to
say something like "We expect certain things from poetry, quite ordinary
old things (like the valorization of experience, for instance) and I feel
we have a right to them, but we get craziness, so we turn elsewhere for our
reading of the world."
That's must be quite a common kind of sense felt by a lot of bright and
culturally experienced people, faced with linguitsically-innovative poetry
or whatever stuff, and it's not aggression so much as disappointment,
deriving perhaps from high expectation. To call it an "inability" rather
begs the issue.




2)
>>reading aloud. This is crucial. when I got Prynne's Red D
Gypsum from Keston Sutherland I tried reading it aloud at various speeds.
[.....] that this, and other, poems can be related to as an experience, it
doesn't have to be a cryptogram. The close reading approach is also one I
like. But I prefer to start with my own associations and let them build up
then try to find relationships between these associations and see what
emerges. [...] It's
as much about sensing and intuition as logic. One needs to live with the
text a while to make this work.


This interests me very much. It is crucial and I recognise it as a way of
coping with difficult poetry which works. I did it a lot when I wrote a
thesis on Jack Spicer in the 1970s. I took those things and "said" them
over and over as things I was prepared to believe until I did. I wandered
round fields in North Staffordshire saying these things aloud to trees,
stone walls, crows, passing hikers.... You can do that, you can take
quite impossible texts into yourself until they enter your own psychic
field and thus become recognisable, pseudo-semantic elements. "Living with
the text". You can also take close study as a kind of map-reading, getting
the poem on paper before you and tracing features across it: echoes,
associations, semantic and phonemic patterns... like rivers and woods and
paths on an Ordnance Survey map, and thus build up a kind of sense of an
artifact. And you can study the text by translating the classes of its
features into abstracts and finding a course of events in those terms. I
did both of these once in a study of a six-line poem by Anthony Barnett
which ended up about twenty pages long.

But what has increasingly come to trouble me about these rather determined
exercises in making sense of resistant poems or at any rate of coming to
"enjoy" them-- is the question of how you authenticate the object. To put
it simply: how do you know that what you get from texts as a result of
these applications are actually qualities of the text itself, or how do
you know that you won't get just as good results from almost any text if
you treat it that way? I'm perfectly sure that the Andrews word-columns
would yield a lot to extended analysis along these and other terms. I know
that considerable claims could be made and demonstrated, and impressive
results shown by close study, as well as great uplift or even pleasure
experienced by physical performance. But there would have to be a test,
it would have to be shown that you couldn't get like results from a
randomly generated column of words, and that might be quite difficult.


/PR




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