Dear BPs

I couldn't get to the Colloquy and so didn't hear Ric's talk and haven't
grasped its content subsequently, so that what follows doesn't refer to it
at all, but---


All this about Open and Closed Poetry has been going on for about fifty
years in my experience and still hasn't started to make sense. I still
don't know what an Open poem is supposed to be. A simple binary opposition
seems to be being forced onto a multiple writing-reading process which
deserves something more complex.

Open is again and again correlated with Incomplete. But an open door is one
thing, an incomplete door is something very different. Why does it have to
be believed that any kind of finitude in a poem, any conclusiveness and any
formal patterning, in some way restricts the reader's potential and
represents something oppressive or mean-spirited? This has never been
shown or proved to be the case and I don't know any reason why it should
be. It goes against all my experience of reading older and oral poetries.
Like if you don't complete the structure syntactically but leave it "open"
or fragmented: This means you are opening imaginative possibilities to
the reader? Or this means you are leading the reader into a difficulty and
leaving him/her stuck there clueless and abandoned? It means you are
proposing freedoms, or it means you are proposing a self-hypnotic gerundive
suspension of human capacity?

So the basics need to be sorted out first. Is the Openness a condition of
the poem or an effect? Does the author's openness in some sense of freedom
of spirit, automatically transfer itself through the text as a quality of
goodwill by translating itself into broken lexical structures? It seems to
me not to, not without a craft of completion.

Why do we believe that brokenness is a virtue? Is it because we hate having
to buy complete packaged things called "products" and think life has been
ruined in this part of the world by shops selling "products"? Isn't that
obviously nonsense?

Or do we find instead that the oppressive and cruel things of the world,
like racism, are themselves likely to be incompletions, that they are are
the results of half-baked theories which don't follow logically to their
conclusions or don't attempt to include all the possibilities of the fields
of thought in which they claim to be operating? which silently omit
relevant matter or rest on unproven assumptions and leap over
non-sequiturs, and so in their own ways insist on being unfinished. The
thinking remains incomplete and is translated into harmful act because of
that. Is it claimed then that unfinishedness in poetry is a different and
special kind of unfinishedness from his?

These are very important basic issues concerning contemporary poetry which
people don't seem to want to face. There was a very interesting essay by
Nigel Wheale in an old PN Review ( I could probably find the reference)
about Pound, simply asking what do we make of the relationship between the
non-sequiturs of his poetical writing in the later Cantos as against the
non-sequiturs of his anti-semitic broadcasts during the war at the same
time. Can we really value the one very highly and ignore the other as
irrelevant when they both obviously spring from the same source? It means
asking what quality of thought and act in the world the Cantos and their
legacy actually propose.


/PR





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