Month: July 2023

Joking about Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ and Zukofsky’s ‘Anew 10’ I got”:

the memory of this song that made no sense –
patterns of strained pretence.

So I edited it using my odd open grotesque intuitive take on distortion:

my memory conveys some song 
that had no sense –
a pattern to love’s pretence.

Fun, if I can run with that.

“If grotesque effectively means that something is generatively distorted” then we might ask what has been distorted and by what sort of thing (and I am objectively meaningless).

The idea of music distorted by narrative may be good, but what does that mean for fragmentation?

An aesthetic judgment, that the poem has the right distance, or amplification, relative to its language, might be one way of deciding when writing (as what matters – makes language necessary and “music”) contains something of the world.

So reading does not find flaws in writing but its tensile strengths, qualities that – even if they don’t reappear – are too consistent, compact, to be prised apart into incoherence: language is paralysed as the world shatters.

Ear

We’ve compared seldom
lyric conscious to a mutable
task, to cut a stone,
that the vestibule
sits with, awkward tomb.

A small (3×4 inches) chapbook by Alan Baker (whom I know fairly well) on Red Ceiling Press. There’s lots of formal surface appeal to it: a knowing urbanity; sense of language drawing you in; how the short lines add up as if saying nothing further; the clever use of lists/ampersand; a consistently hardworking diction; strong use of environmental science; etc.. Yet I was – so it turned out – non-plussed by the figuration. From the second “ode”, I do just want to “shrug”, which must not be the desired reading:

There are six odes, same as Keats, which directly relates the book – in an indeterminate kind of way – to some recent poems of Sheppard. Like Keats, the sixth one is the odd one out; he wrote his in Autumn, this was written listening to music. I dislike the “ode”. If not for that, I might have considered this more successful than the rest of his work I’ve read. I have no formal knowledge of music, so it’s not that I disagree with his descriptions, but lines like the first one (“an echo of an electron”) read as if Baker has lost control of the their sounds, and – I won’t argue for it – I don’t think in a suitable way.

I’ve read a very little bit of Adorno. Usually, I think of his aesthetic theory as primarily involving a consciousness of social whole (capital and culture) and the most progressive forces (techniques) of the art in question – is that fatuous of me? I think the value of art in general cannot be stated without critical theory and ‘determinate negation’. In poetry, the first example I worked out was Olson’s work with ‘breath’: after the prosaic modernism of Pound and Eliot, because prose is speech, due to the lack of lineation, it was necessary to internally negate or advance that tension between poetry and its form: “projective verse”. It left something out, same as so called “objectivism” did, and how language poetry was – I would argue – necessary to miss that double blind. Are expressions, in verse, of statements of this sort a determinate negation? That would involve cookie cutter criticism from me, to say “yes”. Though I just did.