Dear Mark - nobody's tarring you, with brush or feathers, that was just
a general remark about *pomo* in the context of foreground/background
theory - nothing I've read by you seems remotely like what I meant by
it. I *was* by quoting Carroll's not-so-nonsense gently (gingerly)
pulling your leg (not your knee) about the slightly maudlin tone of
 >got clobbered by incomprehension for my troubles.< (Unless it was
ironic, in which case kneejerk yourself!) I'll try to read your long
poem, though I am presently suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder or
something like it & have trouble finishing books or very long mails. I
was using deep structure in a very vaguely Chomskian sense - I'm not
sure that brain chemistry will ever explain the mysteries of language or
the soul, but I do not assume that all languages have the same deep
structure(s), just as all musics do not. Benn, of course, had never
heard of Chomsky, who was more than knee-high to a cricket in the
mid-50s but unknown in Europe at least. Which Mass in D-minor do you mean?
cheers
Martin


Mark Weiss wrote:

> I'm not defending pomo in general (and it's annoying being tarred with
> that brush), I'm explaining the thinking behind a process as a way to
> understand "nonsense."
>
> The disorder I suffer from isn't so much "insufficient attention" as
> "knee-jerk irony," or what I took to be such. Forgive me if I misread.
>
> What we can I think say about a poem that works is that the
> constraints on possibility mount as the poem proceeds--the first word,
> image, construct can be anything, the last can be very few, tho we
> often don't know, as writers or readers, which one until it happens.
> As in music--there are lots of D-minor chords, there's only one Mass
> in D-Minor. But add to that that there need be no other externally
> articulable rules governing the process in a poem--it invents its
> rules as it finds them.
>
> The deep structure (I'm not using the term in Chomsky's way, and I
> don't think you were--was Benn?) is finally brain chemistry, which has
> limits (within which a great deal of variation) that we're almost
> unaware of. The question isn't collapse into chaos so much as how much
> chaos can be maintained, how much of and how complex a world apprehended.
>
> Kozer loved my long Australia poem Different Birds, up as an ebook at
> the Shearsman site. He said he read it biting his nails--"he's going
> to lose it, he can't sustain the balancing act"--until the end. A case
> of a lot of material kept in the air until it discovered its
> resolution.Ifd it hadn't, tant pis--I can always write another poem.
>
>
> At 12:54 PM 1/6/2005, you wrote:
>
>> Oh, but they do receive attention - one just doesn't always react
>> overtly to what one attends to (think of all those lurkers...). You
>> seem to be suffering from Insufficient Attention Disorder ;-)
>> >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.< Well, I often think about
>> complex German sentences - here's one where the whole doesn't quite
>> make sense until the semantic information delivered by the participle
>> at the end arrives: Sie gestand, sie habe eines Abends nach einem
>> alkoholisierten beiderseits vereinbarten Wiedersehen aufgrund
>> verschiedener gewalttätiger Übergriffe seinerseits und
>> zugegebenermaßen in Erwartung einer beträchtlichen Erbschaft den
>> besagten schon lange getrenntlebenden Ehegatten mit seiner
>> Seidenkrawatte, die sie vor vielen Jahren anlässlich seines
>> Geburtstages in einem Berliner Modeschäft erstanden habe, erdrosselt.
>> But of course the Satzbau (which the late Gottfried Benn thought was
>> behind everything) is a form, infinitely variable, it is true, a
>> preexistent deep structure permitting precisely that longterm
>> expectancy of closure not to collapse into psycho-semantic chaos,
>> just as in music - as you say - the whole (the first movement of the
>> *Eroica*, say) only really fully makes sense at the end, if that
>> expectation has been set up, which requires a background (as Hans
>> Keller would say) to set up/off the foreground. If we agree on that -
>> which is somehow selbstredend, I feel - then there is a consensus -
>> whether or not the background is of a material or an ideal nature
>> (they are two sides of the same coin.) But I've seen a quite a bit of
>> *pomo* poetry that sets up no background & doesn't therefore succeed
>> in creating a foreground gestalt. And I agree with Pound that no vers
>> is libre for the poet wanting to do a good job, or words to that effect.
>> There's no etymology for "gingerly" apparently - a pity, as you say.
>> cheers
>> mjay
>> Mark Weiss wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks for the kind thoughts, Martin--they serve as a reminder of
>>> what I
>>> was alluding to. My ideas apparently deserve no attention.
>>>
>>> Be nice to know the history ofthe word, how a common spice became
>>> synonymous with apprehensiveness.
>>>
>>> Mark
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> At 11:54 AM 1/6/2005, you wrote:
>>>
>>>> Mark wrote
>>>> >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.<
>>>>
>>>> '"I weep for you", the Walrus said, "I truly sympathize"'....
>>>>
>>>> "Gingerly" * is* a lovely word, innit?
>>>>
>>>> cheers
>>>> mjay
>>>
>>>
>