Peter Riley wrote:
>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."
valorize
To raise or stabilize the value of (a commodity, etc.) by a centrally
organized scheme; gen. to evaluate, to make valid.
Seems to me that craziness is not a bad thumbnail sketch of the world. I'm
tempted to caricature the valorizing of experience idea. It's as if one
requires a poem to reveal the order underlying apparently chaotic
experience, a metaphysical Paul Daniels, or even to mirror the readers
ideology. A fairly comfortable kind of poetry, and a view that would
exclude the possibility of enjoying quite a lot. I'm also tempted to go on
about kinds of poetry that would enlarge the possibilities of experience,
that would transform one's view and one's capacity to view, the world. But
valorizing is more interesting than that. I'd like to think it over. I was
reading Hopkin's Wreck of the Deutschland the other day and I got terribly
excited. I haven't felt that way since I was washing out the fridge and,
not noticing the bulb was missing from the inside, sent several amps up and
down my arms and thorax (a damp cloth makes a hell of a contact). David
Bircumshaw mentioned the other day the idea that some people felt that a
whole category of alleged poetry was fairly distant from the spring and
source. Well GMH does it for me. As do so many writers who could be fenced
inside or outside a string of equals signs. What gets me down is the
suggestion that a certain kind of poetric cannot work, even in principle.
Obviously there is dross. But I'm very uncomfortable with the notion of
rejecting en bloc. When I do read something that seems to be a complete
dud, I always try to reread at least twice. You never know when you might
surprise yourself.

Peter also wrote:
> 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?
This is so important I'm almost inclined to say it's irrelevant. One of the
things I really like about poetry is the way it continually lands one in
the middle of paradox. Artifice and the inspired. The important and the
trivial. And as with the point in hand, there is perhaps no final way of
deciding. Pattern will emerge, no matter what. It might be the networks of
ganglions in our retina, or the convolutions of our intestines, but yes, we
will find articulated structures of resonance given any concatenation of
words, lexical or no. Was it cris cheek who posted on pleasure? And Henry
Gould's wonderful contributions on conceptual rhyme spring to mind. One can
try for objectivity. For example, last summer I was working with a group of
Italian, Spanish and German teachers of English and they were very keen to
know "how do you interpret a poem." (The German chap used to ask "What is
the correct analysis of this poem"). So I had a shot at giving them a
strategy that would have the appearance of method. They brought in an
unseen poem for me the next day. I gave them a three point package. First,
bring in the body, i.e. read the thing aloud, a couple of times. (I'm
toying with the idea that the mind is not coincident with the brain, but
may take in stretches of the lungs, heart, epidermis, hands and feet as
well). Next, I asked them to list the blindingly obvious features of the
poem. This was a huge degree of consensus here. Thirdly, they were asked to
list anything they thought unusual in the text. Again the consensus. So,
perhaps some evidence that such approaches are not entirely without
objectivity. Or at least grounded in the text. Though to be honest with
you, I don't really mind. Verifying the object doesn't interest me as much
as the experience of the poem itself. Even if that experience turns out to
be wrong, whatever that means. I'm beginning to think that the scaffolding
of the world has rusted away entirely in any case.

Best wishes

Randolph Healy

P.S. Peter, I really like your "linguitsically-innovative poetry".
Lingutsilly-innovative?(Wittgenstein: "there is more grass growing down in
the valleys of silliness than up on the barren heights of cleverness.") Or
the French school, Langoustine innovation?
Oh, and Hegel'spopping up reminds me of Bertrand Russell's:
"By the law of the excluded middle, either 'A is B' or 'A is not B' must be
true. Hence either 'the present King of France is bald' or 'the present
King of France is not bald' must be true. Yet if we enumerated the things
that are bald, and then the things that are not bald, we should not find
the present King of France in either list. Hegelians, who love a synthesis,
will probably conclude that he wears a wig."


Visit the Sound Eye website at:
http://indigo.ie/~tjac/sound_eye_hme.htm
or find more Irish writing at:
http://www.nd.edu/~ndr/issues/ndr7/contents.html

----------
> From: Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: nuke followup
> Date: 27 July 1999 12:20
>
> 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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