Month: October 2022

His phrase “mature artists steal”…

I was thinking that “a mature artist” understands not just the life of other poets’ poems, but the life of their own poem (so I suppose in e.g. doggerel there is no composed energy to understand), an order or control the mature poet can critically engage, when busy with acts of writing, to other works of art, and that this is theft, not imitative (which always seems humorous whenever I try to act on), because every word, phrase and line has hermetic use (you can fill that in with theory easily), is stolen from its author. This is actually meant as a how to on relating reading to writing: ‘control over expression’ is the key unit of creativity in so called “mature work” (Pam Ayres or not). So, locate that and (with whatever depth you can manage) don’t let go, because imitative verse, like a well told joke, is naturally disappointing.

How does that link to ‘paralysis of language’? I would reckon it’s key to work what is repulsive into a therapy for others, and that this can be done by finding creative maturity not in, e.g., spontaneity and confession, but your own individual repetitions, rhythms (stress being the most basic element). So, opposing ‘language’ to a grotesque variation of original etc. ideas.

How does that link to any claim that a poem cannot name itself? Maybe a grotesque variation of an original idea is, by necessity, formally bivalent, double, in any mature work.

Pain

A halo joins humanity in syrupy

peace. Bless Unity for 

an English weather “crickets sing” 

“hedge crickets sing”,

but in interior lark move 

elegant pliant path.

I can’t quite enjoy these drafts (77-95), and I don’t know if I’ll finish them (that’s ok, they’re necessarily incomplete “drafts”). DuPlessis is clearly a talented poet with strong allusive / hermetic skill. But everything just flashes momentary and then dies, as something meaningless, as soon as I treat the unit (be that a line, phrase, word, whatever) as anything more than a fragment. I am not sure if she’s aware that we might respond like that, or not

S/one stalks those sprechstimme blues.

Yeah, it’s noise that stays noise, nous saying news…

Everything here seems for me to get dragged into this sense of totalising nothingness. I suspect I’ll enjoy this collection if / when finished, which is a strange response to a radically incomplete sequence.

I suppose this response I have is from the sense of writing in which a central feature becomes a marginal note – rather than vice versa, what I’m trying to return to and rework, ideally into evaporating etc. (leaving a meaningful “poem”).

An inverse switching, of margin to centre, may be the case here for some, even-though prima facie it isn’t in its act of composition.

Duplessis has a large feminist catalogue that includes a lot of criticism / scholarship into e.g. Objectivism, so I’ll stop thinking now.

Maybe the entire “thing” here is shaping poems to recover the language I was trying to write but was too repulsed from: any such absence from drafts is a non-enactment (a failure for a poem to be about its own poetic except grotesquely) of the meaning of poetry (the inability of a poem to name itself as a poem). That sounds a bit overblown though, and explaining why I think that may involve some post modern graphs eh.

Short chapbook, 2011, by Tim Allen. Sense of muted humour (at his sanity?), dynamic allusion (4Qs e.g., maybe through a Stevens seam), and ecological interest. I didn’t get the repetition, what was being referred to each time. Liked the overt reference to musical instruments. Claims he was a surrealist (little sense of – some sorts anyway – irony there), “if they can do it / anyone can” (‘they’ being rock formations or bats, unsure which):

though I hope it will be enough

to distact

your attention

from every other poem

in the world

So, at turns hyperactive then rhetorical. It is the more beautiful collection. Suppose that in this act of self identification (Rimbaud?) the personality is integrated, then my question was / is that meaningful? Dispose of the poem but not poetry. When the surrealist’s personality is obliterated by nature etc., is the poem then arbitrary but meaningful?

This poem alone exists