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I was thinking of open form etc. as the torquing of the page and composition by background knowledge and belief. Tried that, and then edited as I previously was (so, to bring out what I feel repulsed from, etc.). I found to be a curious kind of inversion. The texture becomes quite euphonic, and it felt like that ordered the poem’s shape. I hope, maybe irrationally, that this works then like background music, setting the mood for the poem’s figures, so that the poem as a whole expresses the emotion latent in the metaphor.

If I was going to link that to my earlier statements about the grotesque, I would suggest that Olson’s anti-egoic “self” cannot make music taboo, suppress it into non-music, and that – in this incoherent non-poetic – the music reappears not, this time, as Wordsworthian non-poems, but a simple tunefulness. Here are three very short examples/experiments in this:

Nerves

My breath’s candour as light 

puzzle to voice I shift a single 

pip.

By Stannard. You can read a much better on-line review from Loydell. I only like the first and last postcards, except for the line beginning all but the first poem “Crack of dawn swam in / ” (which is then followed by “ocean Frolicked on sand Sent postcard to Ma”), and not in the last poem. Perhaps it raises expectations too high with its simplicity, as all but the first and last poem etc. seem composed of meaninglessness. The 11 pages of poetry are then followed by 5 empty pages and a picture of someone (not Stannard!) with a walking stick.

I find it difficult to stomach in places. Postcards remind me of mail art (though Stannard seems unconcerned with the poetry underground) and conceptual art works in general. I suppose it’s post language poetry, because I think he asserts that the poems mean only their words and what they say; there’s nothing else it could be about.

I suppose I would quite like to read it as post conceptual poetry (I just mean where we are after conceptual poetry), in which case it might be an slightly incoherent allegory on his kitsch precedents and subsequents (“Arrived safely… returning home to Ma”, starts and ends the chapbook), which I find satisfying – i.e. useful to how I felt – but doesn’t help me enjoy the rest of it. I have read next to nothing about that.

Alternatively, read it to enjoy the humour / seriousness of it.

Published 1969.

As a whole, I have a sense that he, Prynne, wants to fall asleep and dream, to drift off, and see hope again, and to transform the energy of capitalist accumulation into a new community. So I have a sense of Prynne needing to return.

Via the line, his heart has gone out into the world, and he is trying to write it back in, but needs a new alternative to melopeia; the image is there, but he is dissolving it.

Instead, the poems seem most meaningfully composed of other people, especially a dichotomy of ‘loyalty’ and ‘hope’. But. while the writer is nomadic, no-one speaks (The nomad is perfect / but the pure motion which has no track is / utterly lost; even the Esquimaus look for sled / markings, though on meeting they may not speak): Prynne seems predominately to be writing about how “we / you / I” love. For me, the collection is oddly conversational (perhaps oddly, the last poem reminded me of Williams and ‘no ideas but in things’), and the line as a fragment constructs for each poem a unique chatty diction (e.g. ‘Lashed to the mast’ seems to me mock heroic). In turn, that worked out into a sense of gradually feeling closer to – but no more intimate with – someone, until this alienating dialogue meant I identified with an image. 

In that act of sympathetic identification, free of sensuality, I think there is a new sublime language (“The / mower works now, related to nothing but the hand and purpose…”) that shocks and dissolves the listener by asserting dynamic / destabalising change and reflects on the frustrated need to be at home and reconciled with nature outside human agency and domination.

Rightly or wrongly, I associate the author/s here with Olson studies. The most striking line, which I also felt was somewhat out of place

sharp bursts from the full throat

The surface shimmers with a selection of I would argue fragmentary appeals: archival work; place/landscape; visual images and sketches; concrete shaping; its protagonists (historical and contemporary); science and mathematics (“the language of the unseen relations of things” Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron); etc..

These qualities find a felt unity for me in the life of Lovelace.

There’s a startling quietness to the poetry here, and a sense of beginning again and again despite our mistakes. How good is the poetry? It’d definitely be out of place – if amusing – in less innovative work. And it carries itself energetically. It’d be foolish – ultimately a dishonest exercise – to assess its worth, in terms of the above, without studying Lovelace (or at least a serious interest in the meaning of her father for her): which I mean as definite praise for the collection.

Reading these today. I don’t find them especially memorable, despite some appealing qualities. What is odd about them for me is how the surface (the sonnet form) seems to pick up the more annoying features, let’s say inertness, while still being composed of something emotive, let’s say insincerity. The last line of sonnet XXXIV

Tell me now, again, who I am

The results disappoint me, and they seem to rely on looseness not of the ‘sonnet’ but himself.

I wouldn’t say the surface features of a poem are important per se. I got the word ‘surface’ from Silliman’s analysis of Jack Spicer, in the new sentence. Here, it is claimed that the surface is constructed from a deeper inability to make sense of what is happening in the poem except how quickly reading works: “a dizzying… sequence of such negations”, even if that surface seems quite dull except under analysis. My point is that it is the interplay of surface and depth (here, reading and thinking / sonnet and insincerity) which makes a poem. So, going back to ‘lowbrow’, perhaps acts of forming can only have (relatively) lowbrow content, and a poem has form only when how it is written is in some way concealed by a surface appeal. In which case arguably both poets I have mentioned fail.

A collaboration in litter

https://www.littermagazine.com/2023/01/tim-allen-and-luke-emmett-collaborative.html

Along with some other poems

https://www.littermagazine.com/2023/01/luke-emmett-five-poems.html

Another to do… “involuntary fit” to unoriginal use.

It’s formally double, if at all, because the world of past literature is contained along with its antithesis (radical departure from the mundane, and nothing of the sort). Nothing to disagree with!

But so what? Radical poetic practices, obvious ones like Sound Poetry, extend “technique” in a much more exciting way, as a poetic practice rather than new ways of forming.

You speculate on the essence of poetry and find a way to work with it so that your writing is not out of date… but you’re still doing the same thing as anyone else.

Call it an abstraction.

Decided I was totally wrong in my approach of “Pitch’, and that these poems are completely epic and comparable to e.g. Fisher’s ‘Place’ (which I did not finish but is probably less accessible). I suppose it can be worked through via ‘everyday’ work and leisure, capitalist reproduction etc.. Not that I like reading it that much: its intensities are not immediate / striking enough for my taste. But yeah. Draft 81 ends

So many pebbles had been put on headstones

That it looked like the graves were piled with rubble.

It reads like a promise, that she, they, are writing for us, both the Modernists and the international working class, which I actually believe is true, even if it is too weighted to the former (RE my comment about immediacy), not, I suppose you could say, quite new enough (they were written around the turn of the decade before last).

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.