AN AFTERWORD ON MODERNISM

1. "any poem may be examined, not only as an imitation of nature, but as an 
imitation of other poems"
- Northrop Frye "Anatomy of Criticism" (1957):
'Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype'

2. As an afterword to a previous posting on the significance of Mikhail 
Bakhtin's 'dialogic' critique of literature for an emergent analytic, 
polyphonic processual approach to poetics after 'glasnost', I wanted to 
indicate [could 'gesture to' be a near synonym?] a few points of possible 
connection between this critical rethink evident in Russian literary 
productivity and commentaries and developments elsewhere, by way, relatively 
expeditiously, of several short interconnected readings.

3. The Symbolist Ideal of the Literary Text,
Mallarme: "Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir a un livre."
[cited in Frye p.122]

4. Bakhtin's Rabelaisian World:
[see posting of May 31] Note should be made that provenance of this writing 
and its imaginative wellsprings is unusually convoluted. Published in Moscow 
1965; English translation by Helene Iswolsky for MIT Press 1968. Originated, 
however, as a dissertation for Gorky Institute of World Literature, Moscow 
1940, and written up some years earlier. The material is thematically linked 
to the critical essay 'Discourse in the Novel' (1935; collected in "The 
Dialogic Imagination" 1981), which expresses an evolving view about 
literature Bakhtin was formulating after being sent into exile as a 
dissident at Kustanai in Kazakhstan from 1930.

5. James Joyce as Rabelaisian Encyclopaedist,
from exile in Paris and Zurich:
"it is 'Finnegans Wake' which is the chief ironic epic of our time" (Frye 
1957 p.323);
"In the riotous chaos of Rabelais, Petronius, and Apuleius satire plunges 
through to its final victory over common sense. ... The gigantic figures in 
Rabelais, the awakening forms of the bound or sleeping giants that meet us 
in 'Finnegans Wake' and the opening of 'Gullivers Travels', are expressions 
of a creative exuberance of which the most typical and obvious sign is the 
verbal tempest, the tremendous outpouring of words in catalogues, abusive 
epithets and erudite technicalities which since the third chapter of Isaiah 
(a satire on female ornament) has been a feature, and almost a monopoly, of 
third-phase [ie formal/ imaginative/ allegorical] satire." (p.236)
"The theme of encyclopaedic parody is endemic in satire, and in prose 
fiction is chiefly to be found in the anatomy [or Menippean satire], the 
tradition of Apuleius and rabelais and Swift." (p.322)

6. The Post(Modern) Book in British Poetics:
"It has been clear for some time that the ecumenopolic wen of London that 
has been engulfing all else in its environment is itself being engulfed by 
the IMF and its global entourage.
Many of the poets in 'A Various Art' [Carcanet 1987] labour aesthetically, 
without any requirement in their praxis to do otherwise. The book-making of 
many of those included is a necessary and significant part of their poetry 
production, a part that, in all but three cases, has been contributed to by 
Andrew Crozier or Tim Longville, or both.
J.H.Prynne's most profound contribution to poetic life is through books of 
poetry rather than single poems and any selection from his work is 
sufficient to jeopardise the spacetime of his release and gather".
Allen Fisher 'Towards Civic Production', on "A Various Art", in 'Reality 
Studios' 10 1988:66-85.

7. The Long Poem as Processual Text:
"Within works - particularly 'Place' [1971-80] - the poet's reading provides 
'resources' and quotations that are not offered as *evidence* of a case, but 
are part of the work's 'shading', the co-existence of mutually cancelling 
cross-references. They contribute not to a unity of meaning, but to an 
expansive semantic indeterminacy.
The work is therefore learned in a curiously off-hand way... 'coherence' is 
criticized as censorship of the possible, and the poems present their 
alternatives to such ordering, occasionally as images, but mostly by 
offering interfering narratives that combine the condensed reference and 
poetic use of specialist languages of J.H.Prynne with the juxtapositions and 
leaps of Tom Raworth.
The excitement of the texts lies in the tension between the forward thrust 
and the lateral shifts which creates a jagged polyphony, what Fisher calls 
'plurivocity'. The texts are a 'participatory invention', therefore, and the 
reader has to enter into their 'irregular actions' to create a temporary 
coherence line-by-line."
Robert Sheppard 'Irregular Actions' [1985] on Allen Fisher, newly collected 
in "Far Language" (Stride 1999).

8. The Poem as Processor of Images:
"the more radical poetries have turned to the deconstruction of image. There 
are three main ways in which this has occurred:

(1) the image, in all its concretion and specificity, continues to be 
foregrounded, but it is now presented as inherently deceptive, as that which 
must be bracketed, parodied, and submitted to scrutiny" [Ashbery, Palmer, 
Scalapino, Silliman];

(2) "the Image as referring to something in external reality is replaced by 
the word as image, but concern with morphology and the visualization of the 
word's constituent parts" [Concrete Poetry: Gomringer, de Campos; Cage, 
McCaffery, S.Howe, Drucker; and indeed the Russian Formalists];

(3) "Image as the dominant gives way to syntax: in Poundian terms, the turn 
is from 'phanapoeia' to 'logopoeia'. 'Making strange' now occurs at the 
level of phrasal and sentence structure rather than at the level of the 
image cluster so that poetic language cannot be absorbed into the discourse 
of the media... comes to us from Gertrude Stein, from whom image was never 
the central concern, via Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen" [Collidge, 
Hejinian, Bernstein, Armantrout, Andrews].
Marjorie Perloff 'Against Transparency' in "Radical Artifice" (University of 
Chicago Press 1991)


These original snapshot extracts, for illustrative purposes of review, on 
image--word--poem/text--book as cogent source materials, catalysts, jogs to 
further comment, perhaps (if and/or when ever, though not, in my case, for a 
few days at least).




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