On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Peter Riley wrote:
> All this about Open and Closed Poetry has been going on for about fifty
> years...

- and he's right, of course, and most of the counterblasts have been going
on a similar length of time too. So this too is "incomplete", not
conclusive, and there's no surprise there, since actually, being alive is
incomplete until we reach its - uh - closure. And, of course, as he
suggests, we should get away from the "binary" vision of an open and shut
case, and acknowledge the shades in between. Ajarness? I'll vote for that.
I'm sorry too if I've appeared prescriptive in this matter: my concern has
been to add "or so it seems to me" in enough places to allay such
suspicions, but I may have missed some.

For myself - ready to fail any logic test Peter sets for me - it seems
that the examples of the makers of "oppressive and cruel things of the
world" (which Peter invokes as instances of incompletion) are capable of
another reading. To me (and I can't answer for anyone else here) these
are the blighters who are just so damned *sure* of themselves that they're
ready to put themselves - and everyone else, actually - outside the
framework of human interaction and negotiation, into the situation where,
ready or not, theirs is the policy which must prevail. I feel that this is
"closed" in that it's incapable of interacting with. Dig it or die. You
can't talk to it. That's closure.

So I've come to mistrust that which claims to offer certainty - in
politics, religion, advertising, whatever - because it's trying to lock me
out from its real workings and just offer me a fait accompli. Blow that, I
want to talk to the Manager about this... And, I have to say that there IS
a kind of poetry which smacks of the same ghastly self-satisfied
"finitude" or "conclusiveness" and I nearly always end up outside it and
monstrously dissatisfied.

I wonder which older or oral poetries Peter means: I haven't actually
found much in the way of conclusiveness there. In oral poetry above all
the text appears to me to be "incomplete" until it's sounded (yes, Cris,
there are other things you could do with it, but sounding's the most
obvious to me) when it becomes capable of a whole range of possibilities.
Shakespeare? Wyatt? Border Ballads? There's so little "finitude" in these
it seems to me. Indeed, there's so much in them which defies finite-ness,
and you only have to look at the constant critical re-assessment which
goes on here, the need to re-read and re-read, to get a sense of their -
um - re-negotiability. When I'm reading just about any old/oral text it's
an exploratory, negotiative process and I love it.

Peter seems to reads a preference for "open" systems as a potential
criticism of formalism - I wonder why, and if he could come up with any
examples. I'd defend the possibilities of form to a great extent - it
seems to me that in general terms it offers real possibilities for
something to push against, something to provide a necessary resistence. To
be sure, a slavish adherence to dictionary-definition form will usually
lead to something which is pretty damned closed, not to mention deadly
dull - but it seems to me that for many years people have been pushing
against the boundaries of formal writing in ways which are creative, and
dynamic.

I can welcome Peter's why? why?? as a salutory voice to anyone who thought
they'd found some kind of holy grail in the self-confessedly murky waters
of "open" practice (have to say I haven't been too aware of any HGs
myself). But if he wants hard, watertight and universally applicable
*answers* - well, he's going to be disappointed, in poetry and many other
things. It's an uncertain world, you may have noticed. The only possible,
tentative answer which is any good to "why? why??" is: because it seems to
work OK!

RC



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