Afraid I don't see too much point to the open-closed discussion as it is at
present being held because all forms that finish are closed, even those that
say they are open, even those that the poet claims are constantly continuing
but are, eventually, finished by his/her death. With death, the pretence that
there isn't a single author comes to an end too. Artaud unfinished? Sorry,
not. Unfinished cathedrals are closed forms. King's College is a cathedral
if Peter wants it to be -- who but the Church says it has to have a bishopric?
The question is rather whether a form may or may not be circular; that is,
closing by a kind of formal self-reference, a winding back. Or on the other
hand whether forms may incorporate a constant disturbance from outside or
inside, refusing as much circularity and reference to author-subjectivity as
possible, even to the point of disrupting themselves into unintelligibility.
Unintelligibility, in all its various modes, eventually creates closed forms
the minute the process finishes because the subjective author has written
"enough" (or, conceivably, has chosen -- he/she has chosen -- say, some
mathematical procedure to say "enough"). Even if interpretation is left
"entirely" up to the reader, so that a poem is set as an eternal puzzle to
decipher or recreate for eons to come, the finishing of the text determines
the form of the puzzle, the possible combinations from which the
interpretations will be extrapolated. Such forms may be described as "cast
into the mode of openness such that the presence of the single author (in the
case of collaborations, authors) is hidden." That may be a proper, even
interesting, aesthetic-politicised stance, whatever. But the result will
occupy a certain point nearer or farther from complete openness (which is
formlessness, randomness, utter collapse of alphabet).
For, really, open-closed is a spectrum or cline with neither full closedness
nor full openness ever attained at either end. And, as I say, I don't see the
problem: along the cline lie various styles and genres. Why do we have to
keep excluding other people's genres as either "boring", "authoritarian", or
"leading poetry astray"? It seems so undemocratic to me, so scornful of
people unlike ourselves: the subjective author-control in one of its worst
forms, the myth of progress in art sustained at a time when humans are leading
the world towards disaster. Very odd. For example, just because I myself
have (as I have) become bored with the easiness of sonnet writing, I don't
exclude someone's writing a well-nigh perfect modern sonnet. Just because
I've presently been preoccupied with world historical problems in my own
poetry, requiring a much plainer style than is approved of by the narrow-
minded, I do not exclude returning to some of the more open forms I've
practised in the past, because I do remain highly interested in that. I just
think aforesaid disasters slightly trump an "aesthetic" concentration at this
point in my writing until I've said what I think needs to be said from the
single-author viewpoint. I disapprove of the view, I'm afraid, that the
single author no longer has anything to say because it is a lie about how we
all act everyday, as bumptious and self-righteous as you like. We can't
reform that entirely by the inexpressible. I equally disapprove of the view
that says we can only write in the way we act everyday, because who, finally,
knows what that is? Part of it IS inexpressible. Or, if performance poetry is
too heady a mix, what could that mean except an increased responsibility on
the part of the performer not to become a Hitler?
What if human interference with planetary balances is beginning to tell us a
story with closure? Shouldn't that affect our sense of all these questions?
I don't exactly have a domesday mentality, but I if things turn out as bad as
I fear in my worst moments we shall prove one day to have been fiddling while
Rome burns. Therefore, post-modernism can only be one wing of art and any one
avant-garde consciousness cannot possibly face up to the full extent of our
dangers. That way forward seems mean and narrow, even if brilliant as you
like.
The other way is to get more generous than we are at present, find co-
operation not division, stop being so snotty, and go full-head at all of our
art's possibilities. We can't afford not to. Art is at its best a brilliance
that transforms its materials, whereas either manifesto writing or expression
of opinions that amount to manifestos are merely the operations of the
controlling consciousness (usually out to control others).
Doug
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