Modern and Contempory American Poetry

[ussusimiel]

Again, I generally agree, Orlion, especially about how much the writer/artist (especially the great ones) will generally have access to compared to the reader. I also agree that what a reader sees in a work will more often than not be a mirror of their own desires and wishes. But (and this is where I disagree with you and Av ) not always. I think that there are times (often in relation to specific aspects of a work) when the artist does not fully understand what it is that they have created. I think that this is possible because complete conscious awareness is not an essential part of the creative process.

Another example would be Bram Stoker's Dracula. Here the artist hits on a great image/metaphor that resonates powerfully with his feelings and builds his story around it. A complete awareness of all the implications of it are unnecessary. IMO, once the coherence and unity of feeling are maintained during the creative act, the work will be complete whether the author understands it completely or not.

u.

[Avatar]

Good post Orlion.

--A

[ussusimiel]

Now we're onto the Language poets and starting to get knee-deep (if not neck-deep ) into postmodern poetry. I'm going to spread excerpts from the poems over a number of posts because many are quite long and nearly all include some exposition as integral to their reading.

Since I'm new to this type of poetry I'll quote some of the course's introductory notes to give a flavour of what the intention is in addressing these poets.

Now we.. [we are going to] survey[ing] three related movements or groupings of experimental poetry, covering recent decades to the present... [w]e look at the so-called "Language Poetry" movement as it emerged in the San Francisco Bay area and New York in particular in the 1970s and early 1980s. [Then] we turn to chance-generated and aleatory and quasi-nonintentional writing. [Then we will] look at the recent emergence (or resurgence) of conceptual poetry..... A few of the... conceptualists see themselves as breaking away from Language poetry and embrace a "post-avant" status, while others see a continuity from modernism through Language writing and aleatory writing to conceptualism. The extent to which all these poets... show their indebtedness to modernists such as Duchamp, Stein, and Williams and proto-modernist Dickinson does suggest that our course is the study of a line or lineage of experimental American poetry continuing out of modernism.

By starting with Silliman's "Albany" and Hejinian's My Life, we focus on ways in which - and reasons why - Language poets refused conventional sequential, cause-and-effect presentations of the writing self. The self is languaged - is formed by and in language - and is multiple across time (moments and eras) and thus from paratactic sentence to paratactic sentence. While this radical revision of the concept of the lyric self (and of the genre of memoir) emphasizes one aspect of the Language Poetry movement at the expense of several other important ideas and practices, it is... an excellent way to introduce the group. Bob Perelman's "Chronic Meanings," aside from its contribution to this introduction, also picks up a theme of our course: the experimental writer attempts to encounter death (loss, grief, absence) by somehow making the form of the writing befit that discontinuity and disruption. We began this theme with Stein's "Let Us Describe" and continued it with O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," and will proceed with Jackson Mac Low's "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore"...

Ron Silliman's 'Albany' is the first poem in a 1062 page-long collection called The Alphabet. It's made up of one hundred 'new sentences' (see his theoretical work The New Sentence.).

The 'new sentence

• 'is conceived as an independent unit, neither causally nor temporally related to the sentences that precede and follow it. Like a line in poetry, its length is operative, and its meaning depends on the larger paragraph as organizing system' (quote from an essay by Marjorie Perloff).

Here are the first twenty and then the last twenty sentences:

From 'Albany'
By Ron Silliman

If the function of writing is to "express the world." My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can't afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing "We shall not be moved." My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale's speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle, kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won't read it. Television unifies conversation.

From 'Albany'
By Ron Silliman

Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland in 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and "in defense" the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table.

Here's a short one :

In a Restless World Like This Is
By Charles Bernstein

Not long ago, or maybe I dreamt it
Or made it up, or have suddenly lost
Track of its train in the hocus pocus
Of the dissolving days; no, if I bend
The turn around the corner, come at it
From all three sides at once, or bounce the ball
Against all manner of bleary-eyed fortune
Tellers—well, you can see for yourselves there’s
Nothing up my sleeves, or notice even
Rocks occasionally break if enough
Pressure is applied. As far as you go
In one direction, all the further you’ll
Have to go on before the way back has
Become totally indivisible.

u.

[ussusimiel]

One of the things I noticed about this course in general, especially the poets after the New York School, is that exposition of the work starts to almost become integral to it. This would fit with the intertextual side of postmodernism, but it certainly runs counter to the mainstream idea of the poem having to 'stand on its own'.

The poem posted below by Bob Perlman is a very good example of this as the exposition adds a layer of pathos to the poem that would, IMO, be completely absent otherwise. With the exposition I find this a very moving piece of work.

Here is one of Perlman's own expositions of the poem:

I'll [say] the following about "Chronic Meanings."....

'CM' was written on hearing that a friend had AIDS; it is an attempt on my part to see what happened to meaning as it was interrupted. If one expects a poem to be more or less narrative, focusing sharply or softly on spots of time, "Chronic Meanings" might feel evasive. But in fact I was trying to be direct; the sentences came as matter-of-factly from my experience and imagination as I could manage. At the same time I knew I would be writing down only the first five words of each sentence, so there was a great pressure for some sort of concision, though I certainly wasn't after a haiku-like or 'poetic' compression: I wanted to feel what real-life, conventional articulation felt like when it was halted in the middle. I did work on (edit) the results to avoid habit and redundancy. As opposed to the classical received sense of poetry outbraving time, "Chronic Meanings" seems to me to face the other way, and to try to register time's evanescence.
The person was Lee Hickman, who edited one of the best experimental mags around, Temblor, in the 70's and 80's. I didn't know Lee that well, but I certainly respected his editing and was grateful for the effort he put into the magazine. The issues were around 150-200 pp., wide and interesting ranges of work from various avantgarde territories so that constituencies were always being introduced to one another. Lee worked as a typesetter to pay for the printing; he did the production, no typos. He put "Chronic Meanings" at the end of the last issue; so it's interesting for me to remember that he typed it. In a way, it was much more direct than any letter of sympathy could have been. In terms of the discussion of meter, rhythm and taste that's been going on here, it seems to me that the distances between points in the conversation are so wide that you finally have to vote with your feet, i.e., your life's work: any *comment* or single exemplification usually strikes the other side as more preposterous evidence of how right your own taste is.

My vote will, I'm sure, turn out to be against iambic pentameter, though I read the Romantic poets with great concern, & Shakespeare & endless others of the Brit canon. IP, written now, often strikes me as anglophilic, nostalgic-Arnoldian. I could go on with the adjectives, but it would be more a display of taste, commitments, cultural aspirations. I like Stevens, but often have to get past his orotundity to re-recognize how good he can be. Hacker's v. good, etc.

I have an MA in Classics, but I don't think that dactylic hexameter will help any living writing. Meter's ultimately a communal thing & new noises have to be fitted to old-new ears. When I read CM my intonation is for a sentence that will continue: (can't mark this very well in email word processes) "So shut the fucking thing [OFF]" without the OFF being pronounced. Counting words is in a way an opposite to the sonic regularities of meter: varieties of intonation within the vernacular.

Chronic Meanings
by Bob Perelman

The single fact is matter.
Five words can say only.
Black sky at night, reasonably.
I am, the irrational residue.

Blown up chain link fence.
Next morning stronger than ever.
Midnight the pain is almost.
The train seems practically expressive.

A story familiar as a.
Society has broken into bands.
The nineteenth century was sure.
Characters in the withering capital.

The heroic figure straddled the.
The clouds enveloped the tallest.
Tens of thousands of drops.
The monster struggled with Milton.

On our wedding night I.
The sorrow burned deeper than.
Grimly I pursued what violence.
A trap, a catch, a.

Fans stand up, yelling their.
Lights go off in houses.
A fictional look, not quite.
To be able to talk.

The coffee sounds intriguing but.
She put her cards on.
What had been comfortable subjectivity.
The lesson we can each.

Not enough time to thoroughly.
Structure announces structure and takes.
He caught his breath in.
The vista disclosed no immediate.

Alone with a pun in.
The clock face and the.
Rock of ages, a modern.
I think I had better.

Now this particular mall seemed.
The bag of groceries had.
Whether a biographical junkheap or.
In no sense do I.

These fields make me feel.
Mount Rushmore in a sonnet.
Some in the party tried.
So it's not as if.

That always happened until one.
She spread her arms and.
The sky if anything grew.
Which left a lot of.

No one could help it.
I ran farther than I.
That wasn't a good one.
Now put down your pencils.

They won't pull that over.
Standing up to the Empire.
Stop it, screaming in a.
The smell of pine needles.

Economics is not my strong.
Until one of us reads.
I took a breath, then.
The singular heroic vision, unilaterally.

Voices imitate the very words.
Bed was one place where.
A personal life, a toaster.
Memorized experience can't be completely.

The impossibility of the simplest.
So shut the fucking thing.
Now I've gone and put.
But that makes the world.

The point I am trying.
Like a cartoon worm on.
A physical mouth without speech.
If taken to an extreme.

The phone is for someone.
The next second it seemed.
But did that really mean.
Yet Los Angeles is full.

Naturally enough I turn to.
Some things are reversible, some.
You don't have that choice.
I'm going to Jo's for.

Now I've heard everything, he.
One time when I used.
The amount of dissatisfaction involved.
The weather isn't all it's.

You'd think people would have.
Or that they would invent.
At least if the emotional.
The presence of an illusion.

Symbiosis of home and prison.
Then, having become superfluous, time.
One has to give to.
Taste: the first and last.

I remember the look in.
It was the first time.
Some gorgeous swelling feeling that.
Success which owes its fortune.

Come what may it can't.
There are a number of.
But there is only one.
That's why I want to.

u.

[Vraith]

I'd never come across that one...I quite like it. The exposition certainly adds some direction/intention/particularity of purpose. Related to that and this:

that exposition of the work starts to almost become integral to it. This would fit with the intertextual side of postmodernism, but it certainly runs counter to the mainstream idea of the poem having to 'stand on its own'.

I always wonder when such things become an issue/argument why they exclude each other? [or even DO they do so?...which, perhaps itself is post, or post-post-modern].

After all, don't we want people to "stand on their own" AND interact? Don't we think, even if we have some respect/appreciation for them, that people who don't/can't do some of both are...just a little ab-human?
Doesn't it make sense for a poem [maybe anything we do, but particularly the arts] to be the same?

[ussusimiel]

that exposition of the work starts to almost become integral to it. This would fit with the intertextual side of postmodernism, but it certainly runs counter to the mainstream idea of the poem having to 'stand on its own'.

I always wonder when such things become an issue/argument why they exclude each other? [or even DO they do so?...which, perhaps itself is post, or post-post-modern].

After all, don't we want people to "stand on their own" AND interact? Don't we think, even if we have some respect/appreciation for them, that people who don't/can't do some of both are...just a little ab-human?
Doesn't it make sense for a poem [maybe anything we do, but particularly the arts] to be the same?

I think the interaction is also there in a mainstream poem. The 'stand on its own' part implies that there is no need for extra material to engage fully with the poem. (That said it is very human to reach outside any poem to attempt to understand it more fully.)

With the poems that I've posted so far (from the Language poets) without the exposition, the experience could easily be of a series of unconnected sentences that were basically gibberish. This isn't the case though. All of these works (for me) carry an intensity that gives them a binding consistency. There may be no bonds between the sentences but the pressure exerted by the fact of their proximity to each other causes them cohere in discernible ways.

I always wonder when such things become an issue/argument why they exclude each other? [or even DO they do so?...which, perhaps itself is post, or post-post-modern].

I am inclined to agree with you here for my own part, but I have met people (poets) for whom only lyric poetry is 'real' poetry. Their resistance to anything like the Language poets is negative at best and utterly dismissive at worst. In that sense the political aspect of the Language poets (we'll see more of it Lyn Hejinian's work (who's up next)) is still very relevant and potent.

In the younger poets that I hang around with there is a increased level of awareness (and suspicion) of the potential of language to be a medium for power. Rather than struggling to wrest meaning out of language they are much more comfortable allowing the language to work itself out. This leaves their poetry (lyric though it is) much more open to what the reader brings to the poems. It is here that I see the conjunction of post-modernism with the mainstream and, as you pointed out, I think that we are post-postmodernism at that point

u.

[Orlion]

I, too, like it.

As far as the exposition being paired with the poem.... it depends.

First, is the poem meaningful or is it merely an art? If the latter, exposition is pointless and, I'd argue, harmful to the poem which, in this case, should stand on its own as a work of art.

Now, if it is meaningful, is it specific? Or is a more general meaning sought for? In the latter case, exposition brings the meaning from general down to specific, and thus ruins the point. After all, most people won't try to interpret a work of art if an interpretation is provided for them by the artist.

Now, if the meaning is specific and the artist wants it to be known, the exposition is necessary. It is even more so in a case like this (unless you are me and was able to get the general form of the poem ) I particularly like how his exposition contained the inspiration, but I really liked how he tied it up to how the poem should sound.

[Avatar]

I like it too.

I'm not sure if I want the poet to tell me what it's about...but then meaning is secondary to my enjoyment, so perhaps it doesn't much matter.

--A

[ussusimiel]

I'm glad that you both liked it. I was mildly surprised that you did, Orlion, given your stated tastes (maybe it's just wastrel hipsters that you don't like ). I'll be interested to see how you react to the 'chance operations' poetry of Cage and MacLow (never mind the conceptualism of Kenny Goldsmith and the Flarf of Mike Magee ).

I think that the Language poets (and maybe the rest of the writers I'll post from now on) would have a very sceptical position on the idea of 'art'. I think that most of them would see it as an elitist notion that is often a vehicle for the maintenance of social, cultural (and thus political) power. The dethroning of the 'artist' and the interrogation of the meaning of 'art' seem to be integral to their work. This is a very postmodernist position to take.

Personally, I couldn't read a piece like 'Chronic Meanings' without the exposition (I don't have the constitution of an Avatar ). With no internal coherence, without some external reason for its existence, to me, it's just gibberish. Now, that probably says more about me than anything else, but I am someone who is interested in poetry. Imagine trying to convince someone who has no interest in poetry at all that this is 'art'

u.

[ussusimiel]

Next up are a couple of pieces from Lyn Hejinian's 'novel' My Life. These are notable for their lyricism. Hejinian is a founding member of the Language school. Before them I have posted some material that talks a bit about her work and her way of writing.

…Like most Language writing, her work enacts a poetics that is theoretically sophisticated. …Hejinian's work, for example, is committed to exploring the political ramifications of the ways that language is typically used. Her work differs, however, from the traditional, identity-affirming, political poetry of most left-wing writers as much as it does from main-stream poets. The poet Juliana Spahr has written of Hejinian, "It is easier to trace the influence of language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's aphoristic statement that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,' or to apply Viktor Shklovsky's theory of making strange' to Hejinian's poetry than it is to relate her work to the contemporary poetry usually anthologized in the Norton or Heath anthologies of American literature."

Although Language writing tends to be anti-confessional and antirealist, Hejinian's work does not reject these forms. Her long “novels” My Life (2002) and Oxata (1991) unabashedly draw on her own experiences and are in some ways recognizably autobiographical. Rather, Hejinian’s work insists that alternative means of expression are necessary to truly represent the confessional or the real. Her work, repeatedly concerned with biography or autobiography, explores the relationship between alternative writing practices and the subjectivity that these genres often obscure. The alternative form that Hejinian uses most frequently is what has come to be called the "new sentence," a form of prose poem composed mainly of sentences that have no clear transitions. The gap created by a text that moves from subject to subject invites the reader to participate, to bring his or her own reading to the text.

Crucial to understanding Hejinian's work is the realization that it cultivates, even requires, an act of resistant reading. Spahr noted, "Her work is deliberately unsettling in its unpredictability, its diversions from conventions, the way it is out of control." In her essay "The Rejection of Closure" …Hejinian develops a theory of an "open text" that defines both her earlier work and her current work. An "open text," she writes, "is open to the world and particularly to the reader….[It] invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies." [link] to Poetry Foundation bio.

(Excerpt from) My Life
by Lyn Hejinian

A name trimmed ............They are seated in the shadows
with colored .....................husking corn, shelling peas. Houses
ribbons..............................of wood set in the ground. I try to
.........................................find the spot at which the pattern on
..........................................the floor repeats. Pink, and rosy
..........................................quartz. They wade in brackish water.
..........................................The leaves outside the window
tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them,
making it impossible to look past them, and though holes
were opened through the foliage, they were as useless as port-
holes underwater looking into a dark sea, which only reflects
the room one seeks to look out from. Sometimes into
benevolent and other times into ghastly shapes. It speaks of a
few of the rather terrible blind. I grew stubborn until blue as
the eyes overlooking the bay from the bridge scattered over
its bowls through a fading light and backed by the protest of
the bright breathless West. Each bit of jello had been molded
in tiny doll dishes, each trembling orange bit a different
shape, but all otherwise the same. I am urged out rummaging
into the sunshine, and the depths increase of blue above. A
paper hat afloat on a cone of water. The orange and gray
bugs were linked from their mating but faced in opposite
directions, and their scrambling amounted to nothing. This
simply means that the imagination is more restless than the
body. But, already, words. Can there be laughter without
comparisons. The tongue lisps in its hilarious panic. If, for ex-
ample, you say, “I always prefer being by myself,” and, then,
one afternoon, you want to telephone a friend, maybe you
feel you have betrayed your ideals. We have poured into the
sink the stale water in which the iris died. Life is hopelessly
frayed, all loose ends. A pansy suddenly, a web, a trail
remarkably’s a snail’s. It was an enormous egg, sitting in the
vineyard—an enormous rock-shaped egg. On that still day
my grandmother raked up the leaves beside a particular
pelargonium. With a name like that there is a lot you can do.
Children are not always inclined to choose such paths. You
can tell by the eucalyptus tree, its shaggy branches scatter
buttons. In the afternoons, when the shades were pulled for
my nap, the light coming through was of a dark yellow, near-
ly orange, melancholy, as heavy as honey, and it made me
thirsty. That doesn’t say it all, nor even a greater part. Yet it
seems even more incomplete when we were there in person.
Half the day in half the room. The wool makes one itch and
the scratching makes one warm. But herself that she obeyed
she dressed. It talks. The baby is scrubbed everywhere, he is
an apple. They are true kitchen stalwarts. The smell of
breathing fish and breathing shells seems sad, a mystery, rap-
turous, then dead. A self-centered being, in this different
world. A urinating doll, half-buried in sand. She is lying on
her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along
the road she has cleared with her fingers. I mean untroubled
by the distortions. That was the fashion when she was a
young woman and famed for her beauty, surrounded by
beaux. Once it was circular and that shape can still be seen
from the air. Protected by the dog. Protected by foghorns,
frog honks, cricket circles on the brown hills. It was a
message of happiness by which we were called into the room,
as if to receive a birthday present given early, because it was
too large to hide, or alive, a pony perhaps, his mane trimmed
with colored ribbons.

(Excerpt from) My Life
by Lyn Hejinian

Reason looks for ......Where I woke and was awake, in the
two, then ..............room fitting the wall, withdrawn, I
arranges it............. had my desk and thus my corner.
from there.............While waiting, waltz. The soles of
..........................our boots wear thin, but the soles of
..........................our feet grow thick. The difference
..........................between “he presented his argument”
and “they had an argument.” I still respond to the academic
year, the sound of the school bell, the hot Wednesday morn-
ing after Labor Day. Must the physiologist stand apart from
the philosopher. We are not forgetting the patience of the
mad, their love of detail. The sudden brief early morning
breeze, the first indication of a day‘s palpability, stays high in
the trees, while flashing silver and green the leaves flutter, a
bird sweeps from one branch to another, the indistinct
shadows lift off the crumpled weeds, smoke rises from the
gravel quarry——all this is metonymy. The “argument” is the
plot, proved by the book. Going forward and coming back
later. Even posterity, alas, will know Sears. As for we who
“love to be astonished,” there are fences keeping cyclones.
Might be covered, on the ground, by no distance. She spread
her fingers as she spoke, talking of artifice, which extends
beauty beyond nature. Perhaps it is only a coincidence. For,
as Neitzsche put it, “If a man has character, he will have the
same experience over and over again.” In the morning at eight
I sense the first threat of monotony. Give a penny with a
knife. Candor is the high pitch of scrutiny. I was tired of
ideas, or, rather, the activity of ideas, a kind of exercise, had
first invigorated me and then made me sleepy, so that I felt
just as one does after a long, early morning walk, returning
unable to decide whether to drink more coffee or go back to
sleep. The uncommon run of keeping oneself to oneself. The
piggy-back plant is o.k. Tell anyone who telephones that I’m
not home. I liked doing that, had made rooms for dolls on
trucks that way, looking in on them through windows. It was
a pretense of keeping our distance from anything that ap-
peared pretentious. A sorry mess, but well-framed. As if a
contorted checkerboard formed the portrait of a handsome
woman in a hat of several ochres and umbers. The dog circles
more than a moth before resting. Let the traffic pass. They
were on vacation and therefore bored. Someone wanted to go
away from everywhere forever but jumped into the bay. We
were warned such accidents happen while mothers talk on
phones. A doodled gnarled tree. Milk belongs to the
mythology of cats but it makes them sick. Ours was a stray
with ringworm. One night each year on Boston’s Beacon Hill
the curtains remained undrawn and the public was invited to
peek in. I didn’t wear my dark glasses because I didn’t want a
raccoon tan. Yet this needs shading in. It seemed that I didn’t,
after all, want a birthday empty of sentimentality. It’s on the
compulsive buyer’s rack up front. The real adversary of my
determination was determinism, regulating and limiting the
range and degree of difference between things of one day and
things of the next. I got it from Darwin, Freud, and Marx.
Not fragments but metonymy. Duration. Language makes
tracks.

u.

[ussusimiel]

Here's the last selection from the Language poets. We're onto the 'chance operations' of Cage and co. next. Brace yourselves!

These excerpts are from Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, an extended reading of Emily Dickinson's poem 'My Life Has Stood a Loaded Gun'. This is an extremely slippery Dickenson poem that resists a single reading. We tried as a group while we were doing the course and it was a fascinating experience in how meanings multiply just because of a couple of indeterminate pronouns. Try it yourselves sometime!

Not sure that these count as poetry but they do provide an insight into how important writers like Dickenson and Stein are for someone like Howe.

First a small bit about Howe's book:

A focal point of Howe’s book is an extended examination of “My Life had Stood—A Loaded Gun—,” a poem which, after Howe’s exhaustive, inventive scrutiny, you will hear as internalizing a vast poetic tradition as well as a profound consciousness of historical trauma. “This is a frontier poem,” Howe asserts. Dickinson becomes both pioneer and weapon, maker and instrument.

Howe writes: “‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—’ explores the ambiguous terrain of dream, between power and execution, sensuality and sadism—here the poet would tread and draw blood. Trigger-happy with false meaning her poem is an ambiguity of progress, a descant on dissembling.”

To foe of His—I’m deadly foe—
None stir the second time—

How to reply to a shot? With a shot?

Howe gives us a Dickinson passionately reading, hearing, and counterhearing. She undertakes for Dickinson what she calls an “archaeology.” In a series of bravura readings, Howe evokes a complex heritage of captivity narratives, frontier experience, King Philip’s War (1675-76), the ideas of Puritan ministers Cotton and Increase Mather, and antinomian dissidence alongside Dickinson’s intense engagement with Shakespeare, Browning, George Eliot, the Brontës. [link]

'My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -'
by Emily Dickinson

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him -
The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master's Head -
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I'm deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--

(Excerpts from) "My Emily Dickinson"
by Susan Howe

Emily Dickinson once wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson; "Candor--my Preceptor--is the only wile." This is the right way to put it.

In his Introduction to In the American Grain [1925], William Carlos Williams said he had tried to rename things seen. I regret the false configuration--under the old misappellation--of Emily Dickinson. But I love his book.

The ambiguous paths of kinship pull me in opposite ways at once.

As a poet I feel closer to Williams' writing about writing, even when he goes haywire in "Jacataqua," than I do to most critical studies of Dickinson's work by professional scholars. When Williams writes: "Never a woman, never a poet.... Never a poet saw sun here," I think that he says one thing and means another. A poet is never just a woman or a man. Every poet is salted with fire. A poet is a mirror, a transcriber. Here "we have salt in ourselves and peace one with the other."

When Thoreau wrote his Introduction to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he ended by remembering how he had often stood on the banks of the Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River English settlers had re-named Concord. The Concord's current followed the same law in a system of time and all that is known. He liked to watch this current that was for him an emblem of all progress. Weeds under the surface bent gently downstream shaken by watery wind. Chips, sticks, logs, and even tree stems drifted past. There came a day at the end of the summer or the beginning of autumn, when he resolved to launch a boat from shore and let the river carry him.

Emily Dickinson is my emblematical Concord River.

I am heading toward certain discoveries....
*
In the college library I use there are two writers whose work refuses to conform to the Anglo-American literary traditions these institutions perpetuate. Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein are clearly among the most innovative precursors of modernist poetry and prose, yet to this day canonical criticism from Harold Bloom to Hugh Kenner persists in dropping their names and ignoring their work. Why these two pathfinders were women, why American -- are questions too often lost in the penchant for biographical detail that "lovingly" muffles their voices. One, a recluse, worked without encouragement or any real interest from her family and her peers. Her poems were unpublished in her lifetime. The other, an influential patron of the arts, eagerly courted publicity, thrived on company, and lived to enjoy her own literary celebrity. Dickinson and Stein meet each other along paths of the Self that begin and end in contradiction. This surface scission is deceptive. Writing was the world of each woman. In a world of exaltation of his imagination, feminine inscription seems single and sudden.

As poetry changes itself it changes the poet's life. Subversion attracted the two of them. By 1860 it was as impossible for Emily Dickinson simply to translate English poetic tradition as it was for Walt Whitman. In prose and in poetry she explored the implications of breaking the law just short of breaking off communication with a reader. Starting from scratch, she exploded habits of standard human intercourse in her letters, as she cut across the customary chronological linearity of poetry. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), influenced by Cezanne, Picasso and Cubism, verbally elaborated on visual invention. She reached in words for new vision formed from the process of naming, as if a first woman were sounding, not describing, "space of time filled with moving." Repetition, surprise, alliteration, odd rhyme and rhythm, dislocation, deconstruction. To restore the original clarity of each word-skeleton both women lifted the load of European literary custom. Adopting old strategies, they reviewed and re-invented them.

Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein also conducted a skillful and ironic investigation of patriarchal authority over literary history. Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection, and connotation? Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence? What inner articulation releases the coils and complications of Saying's assertion? In very different ways the countermovement of these two women's work penetrates to the indefinite limits of written communication.
*
Emily Dickinson took the scraps from the separate "higher" female education many bright women of her time were increasingly resenting, combined them with voracious and "unladylike" outside reading, and used the combination. She built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on inteIlectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy. Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, a "sheltered" woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking. "He may pause but he must not hesitate"-Ruskin. Hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal Empire building. Hesitation and Separation. The Civil War had split American in two. He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition.
*
When I love a thing I want it and I try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from the universal is the entrance into evil. Love, a binding force, is both envy and emulation. HE (the Puritan God) is a realm of mystery and will always remain unknowable, authoritarian, unpredictable. Between revealed will and secret will Love has been torn in two.
DUALISM: Pythagoras said that all things were divisible into two genera, good and evil; in the genus of good things he classified all perfect things such as light, males, repose, and so forth, whereas in the genus of evil he classified darkness, females, and so forth. -- (Thomas Aquinas, “On the Power of God,” p. 84)

Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean. What is the communal vision of poetry if you are curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine. I go in disguise. Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and knowledge broken, visionary energy lost, Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse. First I find myself a Slave, next I understand my slavery, finally I rediscover myself at liberty inside the confines of known necessity. Gun goes on thinking of the violence done to meaning. Gun watches herself watching.
*

u.

[ussusimiel]

Okay, so now we're moving onto the more esoteric stuff where chance operations and computer programs are used to generate poems. Here the line between creativity and generation starts to become blurred and also the line dividing music from poetry (and later photography from poetry) starts to be interrogated in an interesting (to me) way.

I'll start with one of John Cage's mesostics from 'Writing Through Howl' (we can't seem to escape that hipster wastrel ). I'll follow it with some material commenting on Cage's writing methods. Then there will be a link to one of Jackson MacLow's spoken poetry pieces and finally (for this post) I'll include a link to a program that will generate poems using chance operations so that we too can be postmodern .

Code: Select all

          sAw
     themseLves   
           Looking for
      hipstErs

  starry dyNamo

         hiGh sat
        theIr 
      heaveN

           Saw
         puBlishing
         odEs on
           Rooms

   listeninG to the terror

         beArds returning through
           Laredo

         beLt
      for nEw york
          iN
        druGs
          wIth
  alcohol aNd
       ballS

           Blind
      in thE mind
       towaRd
illuminatinG
          dAwns
          bLinking
           Light

         thE
         wiNter
         liGht

  endless rIde

What's A Mesostic?

The American Composer John Cage invented what can only be described as a postmodern poetic form in his mesostics. These writings, though they started out as purely creative, eventually became poems generated by chance operations. The mesostics emerged as another product of Cage's exploration of indeterminacy. Some of Cage's works that included these poems are his Norton Lectures texts (also known as I-VI), Sixty-Two Mesostics Re: Merce Cunningham, and Roaratorio. Cage used chance operations for other forms of writing too. For example, his Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) used subway train schedules and other sources to decide on typefaces, the number of sections per day, margins, and a myriad of other characteristics.

In his early mesostics, Cage would simply write a word (usually a name) vertically down the page, with all the letters capitalized. Then, he would "fill in the blanks" and come up with a poem using the "spine" he had chosen. For Example (by the author):


the b Eautiful
o......Xen are
ro.....Aming
a......Mong us
op....Portunity is
be....Laboring
th.....Em

Cage dubbed these poems "acrostics" until Norman O. Brown pointed out that acrostics had their "spine" letters on the edges of the words, not down the middle. Cage renamed the poems "Mesostics", a word derived from "Acrostic", but with an indication that the vertical aspect is in the middle of the word.

According to Cage, in a "pure mesostic", there are no repeated lower case letters that match the previous or next upper-case letter in the poem. The words that surround the spine letters are taken from a selected source text read forwards, or by chance operations. The first letter to appear in any word is used to surround the corresponding spine letter. "Wing Words", or intermittent words placed in the text between spine words, may be selected by one's taste or through further chance operations. They must, however, obey the non-repeating letter rule.

It should be noted that Cage was not the first to write poetry using these methods. Acrostic poems were a favorite of Lewis Carroll, and Jackson MacLow apparently used Cage's chance music techniques to write poetry as early as 1950. MacLow's works, however, include what he dubbed "Diastics" - the spine word begins on the first letter of the first line, then moves to the second letter of the second line, and so on.

A critical view of such works might lead one to believe that these writings are meaningless, and simply a fast way of generating poetry quickly. The latter is true, but in reality they can be very complex. An examination of Cage's I-VI can be found in Marjorie Perloff's book Radical Artifice, where the author dissects the Norton Lectures Cage delievered and finds meaning within. Through his selection of source texts, Perloff writes, Cage was able to direct his writing to a particular subject matter. In many cases, meaning is discovered through the chance operations, and the writer of a mesostic can discover ideas of which he might not have been previously aware.

Here's an example of what a piece of Jackson MacLow's poetry sounds like (I'm not sure if this is actually one of his pieces though).

Here's a link to a program called eDiastic. You can input a text and a seed line that the program uses to generate a poem. Here's one that I did for Philip Larkin's 'Whitsun Weddings' using some lines from another poem of his 'Love Again' as the seed text. (I've edited it slightly to remove repeated words e.g. 'and and'.) Have a go yourself and post the result!

lincolnshire for waving something
all again seamy coming define
what saw funeral packed falling getting carriage
and at weddings sun
platforms larking passed that
time the foreheads jewellery mauves
and wedding to the fresh
under as houses breadth cattle
platforms larking mails grinning
leant time like funeral
died by past tower again sunlit shadowed nondescript curiously
success so women like london sitting someone
empty all cushions gone
fish level breadth tall carriage dismantled weddings
happening went girls
broad from the aboard girls bright windows
curve buttoned nondescript what
struck more time more shouting something shuffling happening something
that more different foreheads
wedding line fathers tighter
veils time broad uncle gloves bunting districts blackened
and like somewhere sunlit hedges
with cars days
building cast packed brakes
an one did
windows crossed slow then though
rest yes down aboard departing shared towards
a under side
or spread across being displaced station interest
end it the ochres coming gripping thought saturday

u.

[EDIT: to add some drugs ]

[Vraith]

Heh...did you miss a line in that first one?
The second Allen Ginsberg seems be missing the string for its G.

[ussusimiel]

Yep, missed the drugs of all things

u.

[Vraith]

Yep, missed the drugs of all things

u.

Yea...but I bet you the U.S. debt hardly anyone would notice, far fewer would care, and only me, you, and some psycho would post about it.

Should we sing, weep, or both at once about that?

EDITED TO ADD::::::
BECAUSE I noticed it and was correct, and BECAUSE there was a joke in my response, you MUST admit I'm funny sometimes even if YOU don't laugh.

[ussusimiel]

EDITED TO ADD::::::
BECAUSE I noticed it and was correct, and BECAUSE there was a joke in my response, you MUST admit I'm funny sometimes even if YOU don't laugh.

Missed the attempted joke until you pointed it out. The defense rests, Your Honor!

I'm quite willing to admit that other people find you funny (you got 2 votes for Funniest Watcher, after all ). I'm also quite willing to accept that it is my own personal quirk that your 'humour' doesn't work for me. None of that, however, mitigates the experience for me one tiny bit

It's a bit like being soaked in salt water after being dragged backwards through a thicket of nettles and brambles, all the while an orchestra of cats plays the 1812 Overture on blackboards with their claws

It won't kill me but it is far from pleasant!

u.

[Vraith]

I think it's time to retire the "believe/see/I swear I'm funny" stuff...
it's feeling rather dessicated and corpse-like.

But, closer to the topic--well, in the same general space anyway--
I pretty sure...not positive, that David Bowie used a randomizing/generating program for lyrics in some way. It THINK I recall hearing that sometime shortly after "Let's Dance" came out...

I have a problem with Cage...
I think he has sometimes brilliant seeds/sparks/notions...
But the work generally bores me...

[ussusimiel]

I have a problem with Cage...
I think he has sometimes brilliant seeds/sparks/notions...
But the work generally bores me...

I think that this is one my general problems with postmodernism in art; because it is so deliberately intellectual it often feels like the concept is brilliant but that the experience of the work is boring. IMO, when you succeed in removing the human from the work, the risk is that the inhuman all feels the same and so becomes boring very quickly.

However, there are a couple of things that, for me, make the effort of engaging with such work worthwhile. The first is the heightening of my awareness of how central the subject is in lyric poetry (and thus questioning that centrality). The second is the dedication of the people involved in creating the work. They love and are immersed in language to little gain for themselves and, as you might say yourself, that is something worth singing and weeping over!

u.

[Avatar]

I think that this is one my general problems with postmodernism in art; because it is so deliberately intellectual it often feels like the concept is brilliant but that the experience of the work is boring.

I don't think it's about removing the human from the work...I think the problem is that they are focused more on their intent, (trying to force a specific message/whatever) than they are on the work itself. That is what makes it boring.

The medium is sacrificed to the message.

--A

[ussusimiel]

Here're some more 'chance operation' people:

Jena Osman: "The title of this programs is 'Finding the Words.' Every day I look in the newspapers. I keep sensing the presence of what's not being told... 'Help me come up with a strategy to get through this white noise.' I don't have that strategy, except to call attention to components of that white noise so we can hear it for what it is. In the spirit of Marianne Moore, who often incorporated what she was reading into her poems, I'm going to read a piece made of words I found when I read transcripts of press conferences given by Bush, Ridge, Rumsfeld, and Cheney in the last few days. I read the transcripts, printed them out, I tore them up, and then I stood on a chair, and then I bombed my office floor with them as if they were leaflets and the leaflets told me what to do. So this piece is called 'Dropping Leaflets.'"

DROPPING LEAFLETS

........................Help me come up with a strategy to get
........................through this white noise. -- U.S.
.........................Representative Cynthia McKinney,
.........................November 2001

Are we on the ground now? Ally cells and I said operations.
We cleared 50% of a wonderful friend and enduring opposition.
Take the solid.
Louder.
We clearly are loud. We are the postal system.
No evidence has been information.
Attacking the caves. Are you on the ground enduring?
A wonderful friend ramped it up.
You ought to open your mail.
Opposition element: the air. The talents work with precision.
84%. The population attacking the caves, the talents work with the
caves and tunnels.
Hiding in caves, wavering in caves and hiding in mosques.
A wonderful friend on the ground.
Freedom I said: the enduring ally cells.
Interested in the view, in our aid sensitivities.
50% to the front of our effort adding that 80% are willing to play.
Independent oper-oppo-sition forces that are rosy.
So make assumptions on the ground. Are we on the ground now?
Scraps of information work from opposition.
Can be more than air. The target. The air liaison.
Campaign with the bombing and entirely happy.
Attacking the leaflets.
We keep working hiding in hiding in caves
and cowering in cowering in cowering in caves
and I could say confidential areas.
The mosques and rest efforts are mad.
Execution in the targeting of democracy.
Those risks culti-targeting to minimize the individual.
An obligation to the spirit of enterprise.
A war of roundup freezing worldwide, and proceeding on course.
Training facilities, proceeding on course, freezing their guided
munitions.
A population is tons of struggle against evil.
A civilized world of innocents in the mud, an enemy that's on the
ground for there is no neutral ever. No neutral homeland.
For the first time first time first time in history
ordinary busi-security bioterror
to defend enemies with the no-ness of life.
Confident in destruction / complete and cause / certain of the rightness
of this time / in the right / man the victories / to comment for a freer
world history / committee of evil / defeat the forces / we will fight and
great coalition wherever they are an era of over flight right against
terror basing global terror the global trade and lives of our world improve /
the modern alliance / I like citizens / but rather than the dust settle it
could mean / as acknowledged /the carpet bombs precision bombs / as
long as 23 months and I said go to America on alert / get a softball to
school if you work / take your child / game this afternoon / game or a
soccer to the president's going to the game / the fight / our new
baseball game / to help us in our task / force will sign terrorists tracking
American citizens / to protect level warriors / the decibel from these
shadows / open your mail louder

The next poem was generated by Retallack taking the first and last lines of books that she was throwing out and arranging them to suit her purpose.

Not A Cage
by Joan Retallack

Scientific inquiry, seen in a very broad perspective may

see Foot 1957, also Wetermarck 1906, Ch. XIII

To man (sic) the world is twofold, in accordance with

that witness is now or in the future

It wasn't until the waitress brought her Benedictine and she

Villandry, "Les Douves" par Azay le Rideau

mine. Yours, CYNTHIA.

Not a building, this earth, not a cage,

The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless

a forgery: Opus loannes Bellini

We named you I thought the earth

is possible I could not tell

to make live and conscious history in common

and wake you find yourself among

and wake up deep in the fruit

Did you get the money we sent?

I smell fire

AT FULL VOLUME. STAGE DARK]

1. Russia, 1927

God, say your prayers.

You were begotten in a vague war

sidelong into your brain.

In Letter Three & Four (as earlier) the narrator is

North Dakota Portugal Moorhead, Minnesota

The lights go down, the curtain opens: the first thing we

gun, Veronica wrote, the end.

'Wittgenstein'

Tomorrow she would be in America.

Over forty years ago

a tense, cunningly moving tale by the Hunga-

Then he moved on and I went close behind.

Interviewers: What drew a woman from Ohio

to study in Tübingen? American Readers

with this issue former subscribers to Marxist Perspectives

The shadow of the coup continues to hover over Spain

In the ordinary way of summer

girls were still singing

like a saguaro cactus from any desert wayfarer can draw

as is Mr. Fox, but in literature

Twenty five years have gone by
Ya se dijeron las cosas mas oscuras
The most obscure things have already been said

u.