A common thread through my poetry has been making music that is a distorted non-thing: at first to return to the reign of the senses; then as something I delay about the world; then as writing that does not belong. I’d hope this learning process in some sense makes the music alone grotesque.
I looked at Charles Bernstein’s recent LLM collection, enjoyed it, and I have been half thinking about the future of the art, in those terms. LLM is a statistical process, and I don’t think that sort of roughness is how poetry works, let alone how poets write it (however wrong we are).
If you look at The Waste Land and think what sets it apart as the greatest poem in the English language, that all – any way to approach that question, be that historical context or talent – rests on the logic of language. Just to get on with the metaphor: the true and false aspect of logical reasoning/syntax are similar to technique and ultimately disappears (if only for a time while we all catch up). Deliberately indeterminate.
And I reckon that vague statistical reasoning is the exact opposite not only of how poets learn to write poetry but also what it means (however it is curated or presented).
I am starting to read this 183 page book of poems. The title of the first poem. ‘THANK YOU FOR SAYING / YOU’RE WELCOME’ is presumably an allusion to these poetics, especially here
(though I have not read the link), as well as one assumes occupy, ‘utopia’, perhaps Bernstein himself, who hovers above or below all the writing here, usually to express remorse and perhaps incoherence (in this respect, I think the collections seems as good as early Language): I find myself wanting to make notes as I go (in this respect, it seems comparable to the Book of Disquiet – translated into English), and Berntstein is not – I think – showing off.
I expected to leave a short note on allusion, but the love and hate dynamic here is in fact more interesting to me than that; reading this I think that Bernstein’s hatred (love) of speech – and how it echoes within the collection – is reversed (do you promise?) by his hatred (love) of content, especially his own.
Here is a short poem dedicated to two Burmese poets he combines masterfully, even-though it may be musically distorted (so not a meglomaniac).
PASSING
p58
after Tin Moe and ko ko thett
stogie smoked
sun set
take me home
I was thinking of how seldom I am conscious of depth, when writing; usually, it is just surface, style, syntax, structure and shape, I explicitly think of expressively (and remember I shape to express the energy of speech that does not belong on the page), but there are many opportunities to generate both figuration and diction that draw from writing. Take them! In the following test, words 1 (Bunting), 4, 6 (similar sort of poorness) and 8 (a figure – I was thinking of beauty regimes as a butterfly – vaguely thinking of Olson, then aligning its tongue with ‘lashes). I need to read more!
Curved
For low abrupt flight
petal purchase, proboscis
tong.
I was trying a few different things on some of my little verses. Seems as if it is impossible to meaningfully shape these poems to express my own energy: then, it is as if absolutely arbitrary where to “chop up” the poem. Expression is a useful word, and difficult to get around, at least without random processes and kitsch. It makes sense, from what I understand about expressive processes in art in general, that expressing ones own energies is abstract enough to be meaningless (given one expresses affect, in general). Nevertheless, it’s the energy of the poem that should stand out, I feel.
That seems fairly self explanatory, if not “correct”, but it raises the question which to learn with, or from, first. I would suppose (2), with the goal of reaching (1), at which point expression might fall to the necessity of the world’s fragments (which is a fine enough means to restate my blog’s continued babble).
I have his collected poems, and I flick through it now and again, trying really just to stem my bafflement.
To utter the speech that belongs there
‘Blue Sonata’
making a poem fit to the occasion of its writing, literary and kitsch (Greenberg’s faked sensations): “To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass… And I am lost without you.” (‘They Dream Only of America’). Ashbery’s post modern use of high and low art is satisfying: it is not clear whom he is lost without, even-though each part of that short poem is perhaps disorientated, along with the allusions of the former line.
I’d suppose that the speech of my own poems belongs elsewhere, ideally to ideologically undo high and low orders.
I think that Ashbery’s poetry is great when America is kitsch (and his poetry folds that into the occasion), which might explain how he can even exist alongside LANGUAGE (poetics).
I was enjoying a lot about this collection, and I was going to remark that I was puzzled by the use of Blake and that perhaps Fisher was trying to link physics to Blake’s poems and heterodox religious views (even the music of Brixton to Blake’s art), but I got to here and the pun with ‘lead’ (gasoline) and then that all collapsed.
How they purchase will depend on their choice of food
Huge profits from ‘Landspeed’
Started with anecdote lead on conservative angst
Destruction of flora in a circle unexplained.
Splintered beauty
A kid hops the walkway,
says two elves can beat a wolf, and repeats it
Behind the front, a row of trees and flowers.
The italic quote is from Investors Chronicle (the book, ‘Gravity’, helpfully lists quotations), and while I still enjoy the use of syntactically coherent collage, I am very puzzled by how much it has lost me. Perhaps it’s something to do with neo-modernism’s relation to exclusion via parody, but that’s a random guess. But then I return to it, and though some of the materials seem forced, e.g. Pound quotations, there is an utmost tenderness to the language, so yes.
I am not reading (nor writing) enough to warrant keeping it, but hey.
These points don’t fit together obviously, but I guess that’s why the blog exists.
I was talking to a poet, about truth value, and he was saying that the truth value of e.g. an advert is who made it and how it sells (I paraphrase from memory). I would be more inclined to think of it as audience based (what needs it generates in you), though I might still ask if some audience is truly privileged: and maybe that second moment is what is meant? Who is this for?
Maybe that’s what the failure of critical theory is all about: being for the connoisseur is the only truth that exists.
Personally, I’d think – and hope – my poems incorporate the rejection of closure, rather than an attitude against my own confessional narrative, but it’s a close call. I plump for the former hopefully not because I’m mad but because I’d hope that its ghosts are not mine.
I guess that’d be where the truth gets in: a sort of turning inside out – into autonomy – of poetry for yourself.
So maybe everyone starts out writing for themselves, and then stuff happens, they have an audience or somehow revolt against that in whatever way, and that’s why we do it.
I think if they stand up musically then I can say it’s both an attitude and a rejection of narrative closure.
Red
For awkward cleft in
diadem moon gleams. She
partakes in blooming earth
with roots in dew.
Romantic, but awkwardly so and therefore distinctively in voice, but there are many ways to write the same poem. So then shaping for energy (which makes sense):
Moon
Gleams in awkward cleft to
diadem partakes in dew loose
earth roots bloom.
I would add that truth content, being negative, is a criticism of whom the artwork is for.
Leafe Press, a good small underground modernist press, are publishing a pamphlet of my poems, 1/, tests. I am pleased with it: don’t steal this (non) book!