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It's not worth straining the point any further than that, I think. I was arguing with someone, and they seemed to have no reason to agree with Unoriginal Genius besides being confused about modality -- anything can (possibly) be poetry so nothing is.Prediction: less hermetic poetry makes non-conceptual avant garde poetry hegemonic.Inference to the best explanation: because it has become more hermeticCould maybe think of it as an explanation of conceptual poetry.
Explanandum: less non-conceptual poetry is avant gardeOn 26 April 2018 at 16:57, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Luke> more essentially avant gardeCheers,
Meant just to be a sketch of why think conceptual poetry is not the default mode of representation.On 26 April 2018 at 16:53, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:It's not much of an argument, you could well be skeptical that a "more concentrated" avant garde would be more hermetic rather than, say, more concise, or formal.Also, one might easily suppose that itself makes it more hermetic, nothing to do with any opposing currents.
I must sound a bit of a lunatic.On 26 April 2018 at 16:47, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Does that make sense?Here I just meant that, then, poetry that is neither avant nor conceptual might make the above quality of poetry, hermeticism etc., more essentially avant garde. Again by way of analogy of fluids: as that category of poetry that is neither avant nor conceptual gets bigger it gets less concentrated, so that its opposing category (the avant garde) mixes with it less.]Here I just mean that as less poetry is avant, avant poetry becomes denser, more difficult, more allusive and hermetic. An argument from analogy: "avant" is a liquid, so as it gets smaller it gets more concentrated, more involved with itself. The avant poet has more to do as less poetry is avant.Oh OK, it was just a bad sketch, my apologies. By CP i mean "conceptual poetry"Some poetry that is not conceptual poetry is avant, but the bar is higher. That just makes sense, to me.
> Some creative poetry is avant (let's not get over excited) but less than before.
> As avant becomes narrower it becomes deeper, more hermetic, because it doesn't lose capacity.
> A less hermetic poetry makes hermetic poetry more avant, by expanding and so diluting the category of non-progressive poetry.
On 26 April 2018 at 16:25, Jaime Robles <[log in to unmask]> wrote:I too cannot follow what you are saying, Luke.On Apr 26, 2018, at 6:23 AM, Jamie McKendrick <00001ae26018af73-dmarc-reques[log in to unmask] > wrote:Luke, I’m at sea with the acronyms. CP isn’t the Communist Party but what? Creative Poetry? As oppose to? Uncreative Poetry?May be my fault but I really can’t follow this. I get the impression that poetry is being placed in divided camps but can’t see the demarcations or the need for them.JamieNo, I mean as long as some creative poetry is progressive CP will underscore the difference between progressive poetry and the rest. So presumably it makes poetry more hermetic. Cool.On 26 April 2018 at 12:24, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Ah, I think it's just nonsense... anything can be poetry (possibility) so it's all poetry (actuality) so nothing is (impossibility). I mean, great. I should leave.LukeOn 26 April 2018 at 11:47, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:LukeI'm not saying at all that my writing definitively or really does what I claimed, at all, that it makes quotation redundant. But I wonder if it'd be a reasonable response to CP: making poetry less hermetic. See I'm having "that argument" again, that poetry is over as a "progressive" art form. I don't think CP precludes technical innovation, that would be completely insane. It might make that a failure, in some terms, but I'm not sure what those are.Cheers for your replies,On 26 April 2018 at 09:43, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:LukeCheers,> I don't know. I don't trust PerloffI do sometimes get the impression Perloff is simplifying things but that she can't say she is. And I liked your song, but can't think of anything in poetry that I do in the same way as music. Words don't stick to me that way.On 26 April 2018 at 09:28, David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]> wrote:It's a never-ending and I guess ever-to-be-unresolved argument, abstract versus realist, indeterminacy versus narrative, non-sense versus sense. Even the terms of formulation seem inexhaustible. On the one hand the overthrow of narrative frees poets from the shackles of the Big Victorian Paterfamilias in the sky, on the other it disenfranchises the narratives of the excluded - for instance how do you accommodate black prison writing with the primacy of don't know, refuse the subject, and you refuse their lives. Yet Nobodaddy's cult of sense and realism does feel like the skywriting of the property market: take my dead hand for life it says, mort-engage me for all your days. But yet again - abstract painting, the CIA's favourite art form, as they say.I don't know. I don't trust Perloff but I don't trust Larkin either.I think I'll go listen to some music instead. Di-dum-di-dah tra-la ...BestDaveOn 25 April 2018 at 21:19, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:LukeBest,Thanks for talking. I am relatively naive about poetry, so while I am not using I think technical terms incorrectly the discussion can fall apart too easily.I wouldn't say that the two are always mutually exclusive, at all. She opposes indeterminacy to e.g. 'The Waste Land', which I think is a great poem. I think I may have given the wrong impression by being unclear on what "being a poem" amounts to, but then there's different answers to that. I just meant that a poem you can't explain can still be a poem. And by extension, quotation might not need explanation.> A good answer, Luke.Oh, thanks!
> let’s say has a subject - it forfeits its status as poemOn 25 April 2018 at 21:02, Jamie McKendrick <00001ae26018af73-dmarc-reques[log in to unmask] > wrote:A good answer, Luke. But it sounds as though you think that if a poem is ‘about something’ - let’s say has a subject - it forfeits its status as poem. I can see an argument for ‘indeterminacy’, which it seems Perloff explores as a tradition from Rimbaud to Ashbery, but the argument is surely being taken too far if indeterminacy is made into a defining property of a poem?JamieSent from my iPad> Not a critique, just a question.Sure.
That book doesn't talk much about obscurity, if I remember correctly, but indeterminacy as in free play and ambiguity. A way of being a poem rather than being about something. I wouldn't expect the reader to know I was talking about Christmas, but I guess would like the poem to work as if they did.On 25 April 2018 at 13:20, Jamie McKendrick <00001ae26018af73-dmarc-reques[log in to unmask] > wrote:Hi Luke,Not a critique, just a question. When does ‘indeterminacy’ become mere obscurity? I suppose I’d have to read Perloff’s book to find out.Here, though, I’m wondering how anyone, even someone who knew Bobrowski’s poems, would be able to recognise the quote, and then construe it purposefully.JamieSent from my iPadMy essay ends:Peace etc.,
Take e.g. 'Weather' near the end of my portoflio:
We let the motor run to throb
as we leave it. It's so cold: repeat that it is cold.
A morning frost climbs dead trees, so
we load the car, soon
in France and idle in its winter sun.
I wake here, to thunder in a hut
crow to a village with
no road, ah I just sing
he says .
I think there's a momentary immoral emotion to the phrase 'thunder in a hut / crow”, and that the line-break I use here emphasizes it. In my last few poems I hope to consistently use white-space to draw attention to the appetite. The quote, from a Bobrowski poem, points to ambivalence. In the original, in translation, a rooster, who comes to stand for Christmas, claims the hens are fighting each other, and he only wants to crow. The reader may try to explain the emotional moment of the image, the crowing thunder, by analysing the structure of the montage, but I think they'll find its use of quotation shapes the rest of the poem into the tradition of poetic indeterminacy (see The Poetics of Indeterminacy). What is the speaker ambivalent on? How does that link to the urbanity at the beginning? Is the speaker lamenting an urban life, or trying to escape its simplicity? I think the poem raises these questions but cannot answer them, and to that extent the emotion, which for Pound forms any Image (Prepositions p), is elusive. The poem's explanation is indeterminate.
Instead, and in contrast to the birth of God, the quote implies that the thunder, the village, a holiday, and belonging are all voided by song.
Because, in mirroring my loss of appetite, quotation empties out the poem, maybe the poem edges toward rest, Zukofksy's scientific definition (Prepositions p). How might that cover impersonality, voice and the value of poetry?
LukeOn 18 April 2018 at 17:27, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:LukeCould that 'catch his breath'? Something trickier, to work toward.Thanks,On 11 April 2018 at 19:18, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Luke> deliberate immoralismLike, I don't know, a rested appetite.On 11 April 2018 at 18:07, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:> Just got my copies of Poems for the Millennium.Will be a good exercise just to compare the greats with relative unknowns. I mean, I'm so jealous of Rimbaud's translation, and it's not a bilingual edition. Amazing really. It'll sound dumb, but part the reason I keep mentioning crowing, beside its sound, is cos I thought "Only a cock stood on the roof tree" from Eliot's poem was about Rimbaud. As well as jealousy, in general, I mean. A great poem, though I'm no critic. I feel like even four quartets is a bit disappointing.Cheers anyways,LukeOn 11 April 2018 at 18:01, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:LukeThanks Tillla.Best,On 11 April 2018 at 17:29, Tilla Brading <[log in to unmask]> wrote:keep reading and writing anyway ...maybe not 'wrong', just 'different'; who's to say others are 'right'?On the spectrum of writing some work will suit some people and not others .... ditto in music. There's a milieu somewhere.sez I,TillaTilla BradingOn Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 6:17 PM, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:LukeCheers,<image.png>Well, you know.Sorry couldn't stay away...>> I know everything.
I do think I figured out how to write as I was intending during my MA course -- like noise. So, denying Olson's "moral perception", slower than feeling, quicker than intellect. I think it does work, deliberate immoralism: I think the music then enacts its opposite. I've posted so much crap. but do you think it works like that -- at all? It definitely stumbles a lot, anyway? Maybe the wrong sort of questions to asl/ The quote is from Bobrowski... cheers for all the recommended reading, really.
Sorry if I'm just wrong...