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Chris I liked your snap too. And I was planning on responding to your earlier mention of Bakhtin, as I too have thought that he managed to dismiss poetry (or lyric poetry as such) too easily as monologic. My argument would be, however, that he has some of this right: the novel brought dialogicism into a kind of new space, & then various poets, in their attempts to get beyond the ego-dominance of lyric found ways to bring it back into poetry. I once said it this way: Bakhtin's major point concerning heteroglossia is that it is the inescapable condition of living language: The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendetious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases)--this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensible prerequisite for the novel as a genre. (262-263). Or for any "novelistic" writing. Given the English language's propensity for alteration, adaptation, engagement with and appropriation from other national languages, it is particularly susceptible to the "novelization" of all genres. I would argue, however, that poetry, in the process of "novelization," confronting and accepting the centrifugal experience of heteroglossia, has retained its separate generic stance as poetry precisely because that generic stance allows it particular, even subversive, insights about the nature of language and reading which might be lost in a novel. Poetry has always argued its own power to transform reality, though it has traditionally made that argument in terms of a "unitary language," which stood above and against the centrifugal forces of the demotic speech of the marketplace. While, following Bakhtin, I have argued that in the modern world, poetry has been novelized and has come to use language democratically, in full awareness of heteroglossia, I also believe poetry still serves the possibility of radical transformation. Given "the fundamental condition, that which makes a novel a novel...is the speaking person and his discourse"(332), then poetry-- speech eech to each --as bp Nichol puts it in The Martyrology, Book 2--is novelized. Nevertheless, and this is the point of departure for this paper, poetry takes such speech, with its reflection of the "social languages" around us, and renders it mysterious, delivering the word as simple signifier back to its numinous position as object. Doug On 29-Nov-06, at 11:50 PM, Chris Jones wrote: > On Wed, 2006-11-29 at 13:55 +0000, Barry Alpert wrote: > >> I suspect there might be a particular philosophic text or concept >> which >> would further illuminate your snap. What might you be referencing? >> Barry > > Thanks for the nice comments, first. It was very literally a snapshot > in > that I needed to write it down and my email client was open so I wrote > it on that with the intention of maybe sending it later but just as I > finished and read it a severe thunderstorm forced me to shut down my > computer to prevent the recent treat of a new ADSL modem and always on > internet connection being blown up, not to mention that I had also > recently rebuilt my computer as a 64 bit system which took some effort > and as a result of this urgent shutdown the snapshot got sent > automatically. (I should explain that we get frequent severe thunder > storms here and cannot use computers in such times. Even the microwave > has blown LEDs and I forgot to unplug the washing machine from the > electric socket so I hope it still works since it is also controlled by > a microchip.) > > As to a philosophic text or concept... ummm, all I can think of is I am > currently very slowly reading again Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination. > Bakhtin's theory of the novel as dialogic has been a big influence on > the way I think of poetry in that I think poetry is or at least can be > a > novel or novelistic, which is to say always new. So I would say that > the > snapshot does attempt some sort of dialogic intention. I also disagree > with Bakhtin that there is a poetics which is monologic in the sense > that it presents the poets worldview or subjectivity as an individual. > I > think all people are dialogic which is another way of saying people are > complex. (Although I can understand why Bakhtin needs to set up this > fiction of Romantic poetics as something to attack in terms of his > philosophy and literary theory, of course.) Other then that there is no > conscious connection I can think of. I am also concerned with affects > or > emotions as modifications of bodies which again connects to complex > characters and with compressing images as tightly as I can get away > with. > > > don't know what else I could say, Chris Jones. > > Douglas Barbour 11655 - 72 Avenue NW Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9 (780) 436 3320 http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/ Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy) http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664 You may allow me moments not monuments, I being content. It is little, but it is little enough. John Newlove