Yes I know, particular poems, and that is where I am so interested in this thing - what else does a poem have in place of its words? Nothing. And yet those words and the order they are in always seem to carry more (or indeed less) than something they appear to point to, or from. What is it about a Benjamin Peret poem that still gives it a dangerous tang that a poem by Bernstein (name picked out of a hat) does not etc? Is it just down to biography and literary history? I really don't know.
And I didn't mean that you were being reductive, I know you were referring to the Gascoyne poems - it's just that what you said reminded me of those who are - he said digging a deeper hole for himself.
Cheers
Tim
On 16 Aug 2013, at 18:45, Jaime Robles wrote:
Hi Tim, That was a very local analogy about idea v syntax. Local to the questions asked about particular poems. As was the comment about dream v reality. Sorry to have given the appearance of being so reductive.
Jaime
___________________________
On 16 Aug 2013, at 09:19, Tim Allen wrote:
Hi Jaime,
There was more to the surrealist poem than a written recreation of the dream state even though yes, the dream state was important as a vehicle, a carrier of STUFF, in the Freudian sense. Surrealist poetry also developed from the nonsense lists and cut-ups of Dada, from automatic writing itself, from the so-called cubism of Reverdy etc and of course the Symbolist legacy of finding the strange in the ordinary. And most important of all there was the polemical and political push feeding the thing. Therefore I don't actually think that the 'ideological' and the 'syntactical' necessarily produce the same effect. There has been a move over the past few years from some literary academics to reduce surrealism to a mechanical aestheticism, sucking the revolutionary impulse from it to leave a dry core that they can then call inferior to their own favourite form of postmodernism.
Cheers
Tim
On 14 Aug 2013, at 16:46, Jaime Robles wrote:
Hi Tim and Robert: I think I would have approached the question of parataxis in these poems from a different angle. The sudden shifts — logical or not — are meant to recreate a dream state, and dreams are characteristically filled with abrupt jumps in time, being, logic and perceptions. That's why the poems appear to use parataxis, conjuring as they do, the jump-cut reality of dreams. Which is what the Surrealists were striving for.
Ideological or syntactical, the effect is the same. I suppose this brings up questions of language structure and meaning.