Don't know why, but this didn't go through this morning - apologies
if it turns up twice -
A
Ah. Dom, you shouldn't lose such arguments. Have you read Paul
Valery's The Art of Poetry?
"Ordinary spoken language is a practical tool. It is constantly
resolving immediate problems. It's task is fulfilled when each
sentence has been completely abolished, annulled and replaced by the
meaning. Comprehension is its end. But on the other hand poetic
usage is dominated by personal conditions, by a conscious, continuous
and sustained musical feeling.
Here langauge is no longer a trasitive act, an expedient. On the
contrary, it has its own value, which must remain intact in spite of
the operations of the intellect on the given propositions. Poetic
language must preserve itself, through itself, and remain the same,
not be altered by the act of intelligence that finds or gives a
meaning."
And so on. Valery is still an amazing theoretician on poetry, or I
think so; oddly, I find only his very final poems satisfying, though
that could well be a problem of not reading French. The others seems
quaint, especially next to Mallarme.
Best
Alison
>The argument I often have with people and never win is the one about poetry
>as communication. Poetry, someone says, is at bottom, primarily, mainly,
>centrally, inevitably and fundamentally a means of communication. Sometimes
>they say it's a way of communicating emotions; especially if they think that
>poems are a good way of expressing inner feelings with maybe some beautiful
>language and some very apt and clever metaphors and images being used to do
>it. But that's not what bothers me. It's the "means of communication" bit
>that bothers me, because it is a normative statement posing as a descriptive
>one, and you can tell this because whenever you hear someone say that poetry
>is at its very heart, essentially, without question and above all else a
>means of communication, they're usually saying it as a way of telling
>someone off for not communicating *properly*. *Obviously* poetry is a means
>of communication, so if a poem doesn't communicate it is a *failure*, a
>degenerate case, The Thing Which Should Not Be. A variant argument asserts
>that even if a poem *appears* not to be very communicative, it still is
>communicating really because all poetry is finally and irrevocably and
>incontestably a means of communication. You can't not communicate. Even if
>you want not to. Even if you think you've managed not to communicate, you
>have because you must have because, you see, poetry is a means of
>communication.
>
>I don't especially desire a poetry that communicates nothing whatsoever, but
>I do resent its communicativity being taken so much for granted. It
>pre-empts everything the poem might do to disrupt communications, or to
>bring the performativity of certain figures of rhetoric into question; it
>means measuring the "success" of the poem in terms of its ability to harness
>that performativity, like a fresh microprocessor plugged into the
>motherboard of rhetoric. This one passes; this one's defective.
>
>It isn't, looping back to science, that science is purely and wholly
>exterior to the social matrix. It is that it *infects* society with an
>otherness that sociology is precisely unable to grasp or recognise because
>it is concerned only with social inter-actions (which it considers to be the
>authoritative Final Context of Everything). Some of the actants in science
>are not social beings; some of them are machines, apparatuses, algorithms -
>artifacts of human design to be sure, but not everything about them returns
>to the father. J. G. Ballard wrote somewhere that in the future our
>computational devices will have refined themselves down to the point where
>they are invisible to us, capable of entertaining purposes indifferent to
>our own and of acting in humanly unimaginable contexts. That is not an
>outcome that can be plotted on any graph of the social: it is, however, an
>outcome that some human beings are more or less consciously working towards.
>
>Dominic
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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