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Reading some of her late work, Hermetic Defintion, three series of poems ‘Red Rose and a Beggar’ ‘Grove of the Academe’ and ‘Star of Day’. Her own work and that of her Modernist friends looms large, while her use of myth, like the poems themselves (“news that stays news”?), strikes me superficial, which I’m sure is deliberate and due to her style (notwithstanding how little I know about it), while presumbaly having depth. That last claim is not necessarily too snobbish of me, as I was struck by how – despite being an appealing song – the speaker appears quite roughly in places, only to smoothed down by finishing the poem, or the poem’s form. Here’s the ending of the 5th poem from the 2nd series

in the dry sand drift,
I need not turn my head

to assure myself of the sea-ledge,
it is indented like a shell;
I know this, since I came here

before everything was over,
and befopre I realised an intimacy
near as the air.

p29

I’m quite unsure how it achieves that wholism, but it could be, I suppose, a mastery of modernist technique and collage, one in which nothing much happens and everything appears to be on the surface. So I suppose what shatters is the poet – her self – herself.

I very much like how these poems sound, elegant, sculpted, though the collection has given me a bit of a headache, due to how the surface is where all the sensuous action lives/occurs (apparently her later works are linked to Plath, though you would never confuse – I’d guess – their poems, and HD comes off as so much more classical and less troubled).

Got a copy of this. From the earlier poems, I enjoyed the boredom

BOREDOM

This night too will pass

This moving solitude
tentative shadows of tram wires
on damp asphalt

I watch the big heads of the coachmen
half sleeping
totter

A later collection, ‘The Buried Harbour’ (I like the figure of himself as both “wretched boat / and the lecherous ocean”), written in the trenches is this translation’s centrepiece. I did not enjoy the only poem that Ungaretti edited in 1969 just before his death, which ends with the confession that “Now I am / universe-drunk”

His treatment of other soldiers is interesting; he seems to want to shatter the world so that he might make them cohere. My favourite poem (and in another he seems to tonally compare himself to a mirage – as what he needs for courage):

WEIGHT

That country soldier
trusts in his medal
of St. Anthony
and walks lightly

But I who have no mirage
carry my soul
alone and naked

I can’t read Italian, but the translation feels good. I would say that the appeal is a kind of heroic humility, one which could end up as bathetic, in that the mood, which is light, might be stilted (if you want to compare the Pisan Cantos and its comic treatment of Pound’s co-prisoners, and how without an empathic reading you might invert the two claims, at least for Pound’s less racist poetry). Anyway, a talented poet, but one whom I may not like.

A Greek word, and I would suppose that it is THE formal goal of art, meaning a suspension of action and belief (not “suspension of disbelief”, as wiki might want us to think). It seems to tie together a few things: dissolution of content (nothing to believe in); the necessity of language (retaining only the energy of writing); an everyday lifeworld; etc..

As to the metaphor of catalysis, I’d speculate that removing the sacrificial catalyst of habit might use up hermeticism (a difficult music with its subjectivity effaced and without authority) so that language no longer reacts and narrative may enact an epoche (form is postponed by the absence of content?).

Truth

Having undergone 
a strange feature of wrench, 
                lightly I,
very light, return; a stroll.

I suppose… I’m thinking that a language of objectivism and projectivism that does not contain them can be paralysed into becoming a meaningful poem

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.

I actually like most of the conceptual poetry I have read, and I think that if you take its claims seriously you might believe it, especially in Goldsmith’s unoriginal moment, may have spared us from the excesses of AI poetry, made that an empty zeitgeist, however newsworthy it all is. Grateful, and still hallucinating a post AI uptake on Barthes.

it’s imitation, rather than pastiche/parody, if I say it is.