----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Jones" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 2:56 AM
Subject: Re: "Some Guests" / narrative and lyric


> Frederick, many thanks for the comments. You have said in a far clearer
> and fluent way what goes to the essential core of a poetics I argue for
> and support and have spent a good part of my life trying to think. (The
> cost of this is I throw out 80 to 90 percent of what I write as
> uninteresting and not worth keeping. I am not that prolific.)
>
> It is interesting that in terms of prose novels, historically, a poetics
> of the limited lyric is also pushed and usually known as realist novels
> as opposed to modernist novels. But more so, even in recent poetics this
> limited lyricism is still pushed and more often in the name of a
> Heideggerean poetics which in the second coming is given the name of
> Derrida and Deconstruction. This is why I am so opposed to such a
> poetics and consider it to be a hermeneutics of colonialism or to be
> even more blunt and use Lenin's term, an imperialist hermeneutics. Or
> put another way, the Heideggerean song of the Earth is an imperial first
> person lyric. A song too often repeated in critical journals as
> so-called critical discourse in Latin derived terms and as if the term
> critical is an embarrassed silence on the journal's masthead.
> Deconstruction becomes an excuse to avoid real critique in this slippery
> way. (There is perhaps a real Derrida, but who reads him?)
>
> Perhaps this is also why I find Dorothy Porter's verse novels not only
> interesting but important and I would say very important in terms of
> recent Australian poetics. (I will always remember Dorothy saying to the
> Postmodernists critics; I am a Romantic. Think about the poet's critical
> twist in terms of POV, here, and feel free to laugh.)
>
> Anyways, I will get off me soapbox and press the send button.
>
> best wishes
>
> Chris Jones.
>
>
Chris, I'm not sure what you mean by "a hermeneutics of colonialism" - 
unless you are saying that Deconstruction, delighting in its ability to 
perceive (or invent) "differences" everywhere, ignores real differences (the 
ones over which blood is spilled).  To your main point: in Romantic Image 
(1958), Frank Kermode said that the 20th-century novel, as compared to the 
19th, had become "a branch of lyric poetry."  He also said that reading in 
the 20th century had become something like "undergoing a series of religious 
conversions."  One goes from the "religion" of Proust to that of Hemingway, 
Lawrence, Faulkner, Pynchon etc.  One reads, not, as formerly, to learn 
about a slice of reality and therefore something about the whole, but to be 
temporarily absorbed by a pseudo-reality, someone's "vision."

This insight still strikes me as valid and important.  I long ago saw a 
possible extension of it to science fiction: the reason sci-fi remains a 
despised genre is not that its style and characters are subliterary (which 
they generally are), but that its distance from reality reveals, as in a 
cruel caricature, that of mainstream writing.  And that this greater, more 
conscious distance can be turned to critical ends, creating an 
anti-mythology, a new and timelier realism.  An essay by Michel Butor (in 
Inventories, also written around 1960) made this point in other terms and 
also influenced me later.  I've used science-fiction gimmickry - and 
hopefully more than gimmickry - in a lot of my work.  Sci-fi as a 
structuring device seems especially useful for narrative poetry; other poets 
who've picked up on it include the Swede, Harry Martinson (in "Aniara"), and 
Edwin Morgan (in "Memories of Earth").

But all that's by the way. "Deconstruction becomes an excuse to avoid real 
critique" - exactly.  And this "excuse" pervades not only criticism (and 
"theory") but poetry itself.  Doug Barbour and I have locked horns many 
times about Language poetry; he sees Susan Howe as important, and enjoys her 
work; I see in it nothing but versified footnotes, an academic hermeticism. 
In response to his quotation, from Kroetsch on bpNichols - "The story as 
fragment _becomes_ the long poem, the story becomes its own narrative; i.e., 
our interest is in, not story, but the _act_ of telling the story" - I have 
to say No.  This kind of thinking is evasive, self-serving, pseudo-clever, 
and all too prevalent: a potentially threatening idea ("narrative") is 
verbally coopted, reduced to a meaningless buzzword, and denatured.  The 
story of a story is, most likely, a weaker story than a story about reality; 
for a poem to be about its own construction does not make it a narrative.