Interestingly, you left out the last sentence of my very short note: "The
longer resolution is delayed, which by this formulation means the longer
the phenomena remain without structure, unresolved, the more new territory
there is." A familiar enough idea in music, where the delay of harmonic
resolution allows for a prolonged play of structural ambiguity before
resolution makes "sense" of it.

So the question becomes, do you find--is it possible to find--pleasurable a
poem with "absolutely no [apparent] structure" until it's done? How long
are you willing to suspend the need for apparent structure? How about a
poem in which we define structure as balance, and the whole thing seems
ready to topple over for most of its length, or a poem in which even the
connection between one phrase or line and the next isn't immediately
apparent, let alone the connection between parts, as in many serial poems?
Think about a complex German sentence, which, until it's capped with a verb
prefix at the very end, may not be clear as to its meaning or even entirely
what it's talking about.

This is an area I enter gingerly, as it's essentially the same set of ideas
I proposed some time ago and got clobbered by incomprehension for my
troubles. It's about being willing to allow the poem (and everything else)
to remain without structure until structure is discovered in the process of
the making. So the poem becomes "about" structure in a manner analogous to
music--and the story of the poem, as in music, is the process of discovery
as it is enacted.

Humans seem hardwired to discover structure. Put any two objects together
and we make up a story to connect them, to explain their being present at
the same time. Add a third and we modify the story. Replace that third
object with another and we invent a different story. Because the objects in
themselves don't contain any directions, any hierarchy, any determination
of their significance. Even when laws of physics are involved it's a matter
of discovery--change the field of phenomena to be described and the laws
become more or less possible to derive. Apples fell for a long time before
Newton hypothesized gravity.

It seems to me that we start with an undifferentiated informational soup.
Call it chaos, call it non-sense. We discover sense, which by this
construct is the same as structure, by increments. Within a structured
system of knowledge or language the violation of same, "nonsense," reminds
us of chaos, which can be both liberating and terrifying. When we find it
funny we are laughing as much about the suddenly-revealed ridiculousness of
whatever structure as about the silliness of its violation. Children, who
are closer to chaos, have an easier time shedding structure and
experiencing phenomena stripped of relationship to other phenomena. For
adult poets it requires more of an effort of will, something like throwing
one's eyes out of focus, to return to a state in which the phenomena are
yet to be named and any story is possible.

Here's a translation of a poem by José Kozer. It's lost some of its
formatting, but mostly survives.



LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

The truth is I only care about words, not every word (I don’t care for the
Ìword word, if truth be told) snow isn’t a word I care for (I don’t care to
be cold, and snow–I mean to say lyric snow–has become so commonplace) one
less word now: and for the letter n there are others. A multitude. Nabob,
an exotic word–not the least chance to use it, a sonorous word, but there’s
an overabundance of sonorous words, we can discard it: what’s left? The
fugitive image of any word, lacking an image leaves a concept (leaping
inside us) it crumbles: in truth I care not at all for the word nothing,
abstractions leave me limp with boredom, tepid tepid abstractions: I want
to see and touch (above all touch); I want to sniff the spoor of the word
buckwheat, my god, how many combinations: the words are mill-stones
turning; whatever word a mill-vane broken into syllables; and on the shore
the dying, what does it say. Marah, marah: is that what it says? I listen
closely, nothing but interference; and I taste, I crush a stem of purslane
against my palate, but it clarifies or tells me nothing now: here on the
edge, manna, masquerade are the remaining words, backward, or forward to
this place, at the edge: what, to what to speak with words: listen to me,
the bread that I’ve put on the table parts, down to the center of its husk,
brings forth ash (ants brought forth once more): and then, what. Things
are obscured by so much thought, classification and description,
description doesn’t bring the chameleon back to the chameleon, doesn’t
bring back the mother, doesn’t bring anything back to us, let us yield,
that the jacaranda of this life is passing, I am homet (the lizard):
nothing. A green thing that lost its tail. The masquerade of her whose veil
is dropped, see the face’s skull, the body’s bones, skin of golgotha peeled
away now: the donnybrook I was once, now I hear myself and slide inwards:
outside a lovely day. Euphrates. Much distance. A god of nickle or zinc
can’t cope with peo- ple, nitrogen has been enough to keep me alive.
Spurious, but alive. With some or another word but not with every word.
The word Capulí tells me nothing, it has nothing to do with me; dying,
let’s see, I can’t adjust to its destiny: nor, finally, to the
dictionary–too vast. At the final moment any word will do; linen, for
instance, at that moment: the ark on one’s shoulder, bread on the table,
hand on head, and at the head’s point of transcendence, be it the word
wheatfield that I hear, for instance, in the yellow crossing of axles: or
be it bread, by omission. And might I see made whole all crumbled things.





At 06:25 PM 1/5/2005, you wrote:
>On 6/1/05 3:15 AM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > It seems to me that inversions are mirror images of systems of order (which
> > is I think what we mean by "sense") and as such make coherent and
> > consistent "sense": what's been changed is the core metaphor, not the
> > process by which it's elaborated or the pattern it forms.
>
> > What I take to be
> > nonsense, and I'm very invested in this, is unstructuredness, which, given
> > our human natures and the nature of the languages we've generated, may in
> > fact be impossible to achieve, either as writer or reader; attempting to
> > approach it nonetheless can serve to extend the boundaries of possibility
> > at the same time that it marks them.
>
>Hi Mark
>
>Swiftly - Yes, there's a difference between parody and satire or what I
>called "black humour" and nonsense. Which is not to say that the boundaries
>between them are not murky. The former very often rely on inversion for
>their various anarchies. They are not "revolutionary", in that they do not
>challenge the existing order but in a strange way pay tribute to it; great
>satirists (Swift, or even Terry Pratchett) are very often conservative.
>Though there's Brecht: you could argue however that his parodies of homily
>texts in the Manuel of Piety might be said to be equally tributes.
>
>Pure nonsense - some surrealist texts, say - baffles any attempt at "sense".
>But complete structurelessness is, as you say, an impossibility, and I'm not
>sure it's even a desirable impossibility - I find it very difficult to
>imagine a poem that might give me aesthetic pleasure that had absolutely no
>structure. I very often like the kind of stuff which loses all connectivity
>except syntax, it does interesting things to my brain... And if it is to be
>funny, or not simply affectless, there has to be some recognisable trace of
>logic there, to permit the recognition of incongruities, to set up enough of
>an expectation for it to be imploded. This process is a bit more complex,
>anyway, than simple inversions, especially if seemingly random elements
>suddenly intrude and derail it.
>
>Best
>
>A
>
>
>Alison Croggon
>
>Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com