Dear BPs,
Doug has "solved" the open/closed question of poetry by changing the
meanings of the terms. And quite rightly-- he's using them in a strict,
defined, philosophical sense which at last makes them work; you could go on
for ever declaring certain features of poetry "open" or "closed" in a
polemical or subjective way without really getting anywhere, as poets have
for a long time. This is good because it means this discussion has actually
got somewhere, which it wouldn't if people had just stood firm. I think
the undoubtedly valid senses of openness as an intent circulating among
poets now need to be related to this stricter definition. Not my job,
because I've never made that claim.
But I do think there's a problem where he says that one tendency of writing
poetry may be to "refuse as much circularity and reference to
author-subjectivity as possible". The linking of these two terms is rather
slipped in, and I don't know that it's justified. I don't see that
ellipticality necessarily entails self-portrayal and even less
individuation. Quite the reverse could be the case, as in such writings as
mediaeval devotional lyrics or oral high-song, which are written in
accordance with strict conventions (including a severe ellipticality)
allowing the minimum of author individuation, requiring skill of a quite
different kind. A modern poet wanting to eschew circularity could hardly
get less author-subjective than this. The product "shows" the author hardly
at all, though its creation is a matter of personal pride.
Circularity is a song feature: song always repeats and comes back.But song
is polar to the representation of the confessional voice and is always more
or less anonymous. The more it says "I" the more it says no-one. When it
says "I wish I'd never been born" the listener greets it with a smile.
That's what song is like, everything it touches immediately becomes
something else without losing its identity. Well I guess it becomes
something you can witness without entailment.
Actually Lee Harwood's current poetry strikes me as like that: the
elegance, poise and precision achieve a kind of anonymity (possibly related
to the quality elsewhere called "objectivism") : like that long hospital
poem which contains not so much as a hint of what it feels like for him
personally stuck there with a heart condition.... and is the result of the
experience rather than the record of it. He becomes witness to the world
rather than to himself, which is why the music and spacing of the text are
so tenuous and refined, because that's the way he finds the world. What it
offers the reader is authenticity, which is something you don't get without
an author.
The difference between him and Hugo Williams (I don't have those particular
poems to hand) lies for me in how the self is projected. It's actually a
quite delicate matter because both of them may be said to project the self
in a self-welcoming way, indeed both can be quite unabashedly self-admiring
(though Lee's latest work is much more austere). I've always found
Williams' poems self-projecting in a collusive way, the reader invited into
an association where we are asked to rejoice in shared disdain or reflexive
hommage. Not much to do really with being closed (circular) or reactionary
-- Jeremy Reeds' work affects me in much the same way and he's in
Conductors of Chaos and vaunts his bohemian rebellions left right and
centre.
This preference is moral (thus requires an agent) and has nothing to do
with fantasies of eradicating single-author responsibility. Neither is it,
of course, the only way of achieving objectivity. Counting
first-person-singulars will never tell you anything about the
subjectivising level of a writing.
Damn! Letter too long. Pubs have closed.
/PR
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