Joe, your comments on "overcoming" remind me of
Nietzshe (sp?). Is he a major influence on you?
Candice
--- joe green <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> "This is excellently put. The solution, in
> political poetry, is
> Brechtian "alienation": objectivity, or what appears
> to
> be objectivity, where the reader expects pathos."
>
>
>
> Or pathos where the reader expects alienation and
> the usual effects.
>
> The point is that a good poem is what remains after
> encountering or
> ignoring or transcending all systems that exist to
> prevent its existence.
> As Eliot said, the poem is judged by every other
> poem out there.
> It can be a unique instance only because it
> encounters the uniqueness
> of everything else. That also means it can, more or
> less do exactly what
> another good poem does and in the same way if it is
> true that it can do
> so because the other poems exist in the same mode
> of overcoming – that
> those instances have not been exhausted. At a
> certain point a “sentimental”
> poem can be a real poem – overcoming ironies and so
> on – but only if all
> that resists it is somehow overcome.
>
>
>
> The poetry of sincerity is exhausted just because
> its opposite is never
> really encountered. The poetry of alienation has
> more going for it
> since alienation implies something that is seen as
> necessary to
> overcome. And there are emotions that are not
> banal – grief.
> But how to overcome just the usual utterance?
> Poetry that doesn’t want to encounter emotion and
> instead
> to claim that it exists in some abstract mode--such
> as
> LangPo does—and still wants to make a pretension to
> significance
> and meaning utterly baffles me. Why should I care
> when I could
> be reading King Lear?
>
> I love Ulysses and Finnegans Wake just because the
> more
> I read and discover the more I see to discover.
> I’m delighted with a “difficult” text but only if
> there is something there
> – not banal utterance tricked up a la mode.
>
> I love scholarship and have spent many days
> bellycrawling
> through libraries to, for example, discover if
> Shakespeare
> could have known what was meant by a “Republic” in
> the
> sense it was understood just 100 years later etc
> etc but nothing
> is more pointless than the classification and
> placing
> of poets in schools. Wordsworth, for example, a
> poet sincere.
> Matt Arnold reading him for beauty and rest.
>
>
> But you read his great poems and discover that
> a central trope is nothingness, desolation,
> impossibility of knowing,
> vacancy etc coupled with the great insistence that
> all of this can
> be overcome. This insistence continually betrayed.
> No closure. Not conscious irony but a real poet
> encountering
> the opposite of what he wants to mean and even doing
> so never really
> seeing that in his own poems.
>
>
>
> Look at the Ascent of the Alps..Book 6 of the
> Prelude.
>
> Wordsworth anticipates ascending to the top.
> Ah, that’s where the Sublime is!.
> And …then:
>
>
> "That from the torrent's further brink held forth
> Conspicuous invitation to ascend
> A lofty mountain. After brief delay
> Crossing the unbridged stream, that road we took,
> And clomb with eagerness, till anxious fears
> Intruded, for we failed to overtake
> Our comrades gone before. By fortunate chance,
> While every moment added doubt to doubt,
> A peasant met us, from whose mouth we learned
> That to the spot which had perplexed us first
> Wemust descend, and there should find the road,
> Which in the stony channel of the stream
> Lay a few steps, and then along its banks;
> And, that our future course, all plain to sight,
> Was downwards, with the current of that stream.
> Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
> For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
> We questioned him again, and yet again;
> But every word that from the peasant's lips
> Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
> Ended in this,--'that we had crossed the Alps'.
>
>
> Ha! So what do you do? He never noticed that he
> was at the top—missed the Sublime. Admits this….
>
> And then this attempt at recovery!
>
>
>
> Imagination--here the Power so called
> Through sad incompetence of human speech,
> That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
> Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
> At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
> Halted without an effort to break through;
> But to my conscious soul I now can say--
> "I recognise thy glory:" in such strength
> Of usurpation, when the light of sense …
>
>
> Lost, lonely, abyss, usurpation all words that again
> and again betray what he wants to assert.
>
> Then he descends and makes another recovery:
>
>
> The melancholy slackening that ensued
> Upon those tidings by the peasant given
> Was soon dislodged. Downwards we hurried fast,
> And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
> Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
> Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
> And with them did we journey several hours
> At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
> Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
> The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
> And in the narrow rent at every turn
> Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
> The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
> The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
> Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
> As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
> And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
> The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
> Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light--
> Were all like workings of one mind, the features
> Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
> Characters of the great Apocalypse,
> The types and symbols of Eternity,
> Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
> Whoa! He really needed that! And on and
> on – revisions of the revisions…always wanting that
> Eternity…language always undercutting it… but
> something new emerges.
>
> The Right Stuff.
>
>
>
>
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