Some reflections on the 'Sentence': or why Virginia Woolf would have made a great poet.

Nothing produces greater culture shock, one felt straight to the literary innards, than reading a good Victorian or even modern classic novel. Wilkie Collins & Virginia Woolf both happen to be authors I've lately read and, frankly, they couldn't have come at a better time. Just when I thought Berger and Pynchon had killed it Collins reinstates my belief in expert narrative skill, &Woolf, well, nobody's been able to match the great Virginia Woolf for phrasal brilliance and control (Here's a Youtube sample, the only recording of her available). But I'm not interested in the novel genre so much as the benefits for poetry to be found in language expertly executed by the masters. Joseph Hutchison has recently commented on Stanley Fish's latest book How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, inspiring some good 'comments' discussion about the state of the sentence today. The idea's occurred to me since that perhaps poets owe a great debt of gratitude to the novelist: perhaps more than they'd care to admit.

The great literary stylists, in fact, seem preeminently qualified to reveal the more egregious language difficulties in which poets find themselves today, & which John Latta in a recent "Isola di Rifiuti post has likened to a comically absurd sort of self-display. The novelist's control of language materials, one almost always amounting to a pure poetic utterance, can be seen as a kind of generic Sentence representing the best literary qualities of the novelist and her sources. In contradistinction to Ron Silliman's 'new sentence' whose "interior poetic structures" are expected to lead to desirable "ambiguity and polysemy" (Silliman, The New Sentence, 90), as if verses were pulled out of the rarefied air of poetry alone, I maintain the great novelists can write exquisitely well-crafted prose & offer it as an exemplar for all types of writing, including poetry. Literary language and the Sentence become practically interchangeable. Using a Flaubertian insight, I'll say that there's no inherent distinction to be made between the poetic & prosaic in the very finest writings.

And they do that always through the most insightful juxtapositions & contrasts (never just connections) between the human condition and a readily available language of passion & death. In short, the more feelingly they write, the greater the need for an almost 'revelatory' medium, a style always sensitively attuned to the life-narrative's most difficult moments and always expertly composed to render them to the imagination in as vivid a way as possible. Woolf never forgets this. The refined medium of language that results in the hands of the great novelist is, in my view, what almost makes it inseparable from poetry, and that type of poetry has a real stake in the way things are. I'll take two examples from Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.

The intensity of an early lesbian love and the very conditions for its emergence in the reminiscences of the aging Clarissa Dalloway (through whose limited omniscient viewpoint a significant part of the story of a single sultry day in London, 1942 is told) couldn't have merged more perfectly. Only Woolf's novelistic talents could have brought together withering reality and the passion associated with the remarkable Sally Seton. Only the perfect Sentence could have achieved it. In expertly (and sensitively) cadenced & sharply registered sentiments the unhappy 52-year old wife of a London MP, who normally passes through wave after wave (almost surrealistic) of faux nostalgia, regret and a heightened sense of the absurdity of lamenting lost possibilities with a former lover, can relocate rapture in the gathering ennui of her life in London. Prose turns into Sapphic verses almost in an instant:

The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up. It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally's...Absurd, she was—very absurd. But the charm was overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember standing in her bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her hands and saying aloud, 'She is beneath this roof... She is beneath this roof!' (28 in the Oxford edition)

The reader doesn't need to impart to this passage any sort of narrative impetus that isn't already there, its lyrical force somehow to be released from the cage of classical prose through the imposition of literary theory. None of Language's wooden exercises here and the detached sentences they produce. Woolf's passage, wonderfully stylized and lived as a literary event on its own, could happily make the switch from prose to poetry with the aid of diction, rhythms and even perhaps the nascent Modernist insights it already bears. I could try rearranging the lines to make strophes out of sentences & still leave intact the original purity. Nothing would be easier:

On looking back, the purity, the integrity of Sally,
like one's feelings for a man:
disinterested & existing between women only,
between women grown up,
protective,
sprung from a sense of being in league together,
& a presentiment of something that was bound
to part them

Absurd,
but the charm was so overpowering
she could say,
in her bedroom, at the top of the house—
'She is beneath this roof
 She is beneath this roof'

Similarly in the case of Septimus's worsening condition (and Woolf purposely pairs Septimus and Clarissa as types of the same neurasthenic, a condition equally attributable to suppressed passion) only a poet's language of dark idiom and rhythms could soften its most insidious aspects, & make it even seem whimsical and charmingly eccentric. The War memories of Septimus Warren Smith, unlike Clarissa's own, don't revitalize depressed spirits even if they sometimes hover round his beloved Evans: they seem, despite his physician's cheery prognoses, to hurry more inexorably both patient and post-traumatic distresses to the inevitable suicide. The novelist leaves the verdict of death hanging by a thread (a favourite image of Woolf's), a verdict liable to go one way or the other, as if something else not tied to a simple inquiry into causes were ultimately responsible. The almost Dickensian quality of physician-patient interaction is ghoulishly set against the fact of human savagery in the world, and the patient is certainly lucid enough to attribute a good deal of his own misery to some despicable wartime conduct:  

So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed; that was worst; but all the other crimes raised their heads and shook their fingers and jeered and sneered over the rail of the bed in the early hours of the morning at the prostrate body which lay realizing its degradation; how he had married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her; outraged Miss Isabel Pole, and was so pocked and marked with vice that women shuddered when they saw him in the street. The verdict of human nature on such a wretch was death. (77)

The poetry that ensues is necessarily dark and yet the verse, because of the flawless Sentence it comes from ,wouldn't cast an entirely gloomy, bodiless light, retaining the moral and existential ambivalence of the original. Again, the transition to poetry is perfectly natural:

Whatever the excuse, the sin for which he's condemned,
& that he didn't feel,
like Evans who'd been killed,
his crimes raised their heads, shook their fingers,
jeering, snorting,
at his prostrate body: the verdict was death

Even how he'd married
without love,
and seduced and even outraged Miss Isabel Pole
and was so pocked & marked with vice
all the women shuddered-
whatever the excuse, the verdict was death. 

For Hieronymous Anonymous: my most loyal monster critic

Hieronymous Anonymous is a personified figure who is all too real: the nasty critic whose comments, though appearing in my inbox every so often, never make it past the moderation screen. Of course, he appears always as "Anonymous", afraid to affix a name to the monster. So I'll give it one. The name "Hieronymous" (not to be confused with "Hieronymus") is suitable because of the way it shakes deep in the jawbone, when pronounced.

Anonymous, you've just been invented.

Then just now, more fluxed
  than I'd ever been,
  more appalled,
I wrote, dropped it, wrote
(as if there were some smug space left,
                                  still)
  and suffered:
why do we do it, then?

A whole semi-blank word may absolutely
  pain me as it falls,
  constricting the heart,
  wringing the flesh

Why pausing here between the glyph
  and the page,
  sitting here ready
  in my cage,
  do I go on?

                    No!
Beside you who wouldn't look good!

And beside everything else—
  my chair,
  mounted keyboard,
  detestable guts lying at
                                  my feet!—
who wouldn't want to write write write

As I stoop to read you, in the space left
  gripping the keys,
                          again,
  and now
  feeling glad-hearted,
                          again,
  I hear you stiffen

Sir Paul

The coolest guy in the world...

"Art this time"

They who love, sitting in fern,
   to live
and speak ‘cause they can,
  do the Art;

they who rise at the sign of light
  may die,
succumbing to the Tree's slow
  regrettable leaf—

Look, there's heart & (always last
  to the comfy lakes)
the davidic and faithful deer,
  living low

and then the sky fuming over you,
  full of geese
who know it, too & will die
  doing the Art 

Karl Kempton's essay: a brief history of visual poetry that goes a long, long way

Nothing delights the reading eye more than information that comes from enlightened & impassioned sources. When Ed Baker introduced me to Karl Kempton's essay entitled "Visual Poetry: A Brief History of Ancestral Roots and Modern Traditions" ["VP"], & especially when I saw the detail and academic richness, the historical breadth and faithfulness to Vispo aesthetics, I knew it was going to be a significant read. And whether the poet is sympathetic to this particular style, and tradition, or not, there is no reason whatsoever for ignoring it. As in law so in poetry: ignorance is no defense.

Serving as a primer and guidebook, I've found myself dipping into it if only to acquire a vocabulary (or a feel, at least) for the technique & ancestry of a poetics that's becoming increasingly popular (especially in online communities). In my opinion, the best, and most interesting, and also the most controversial work being done today is in visual poetry, and Kempton is right to characterize it in general as a product of a "lineage of recognized influences." ("VP" 2)  One gathers from his survey distinct focal points, attached to recognizable practices and names, but also a fluidity ("borderblur") that marks visual (concrete) poetry in any one epoch as a living witness to what's gone before. Kempton himself is both visual poet and historian: distinguished member of a historical project begun by Bob Cobbing, Peter Mayer and Dick Higgins.

Whether Ed Baker's STONE GIRL rock art, Geof Huth's pwoermd and asemic writing & Bob Grumman's mathemaku, contemporary visual poetry would be inconceivable without a common ancestry, a clearly delineated continuum from  rock to stele to illuminated manuscripts from which it draws inspiration & materials. In Kempton's own words, "it is probably safe to say that all approaches to the visual poem after 1900 can be found somewhere in the past from rock art to proto-writing and ideogrammatic, hieroglyphic and alphabetical writing on fixed and portable objects" ("VP" 1). All the types of visual (concrete) poetry in both pre-1900 and contemporary forms (such as Cubism, Collage, Italian Futurism, Fluxus, Minimalism, Orphism etc) are traceable to these "ancestral roots". This is the work's major premise from which everything else falls into remarkably neat classifications according to historical lineage, types & modes of artistic production.

"from rock art to proto-writing"

What seemed to guide the post-1900 visual poetries was a desire to free the word from standard syntax and especially the usual left-to-right horizontal, & up-down vertical, page arrangements, a sort of literary revolution in which avant-gardists strove for a radical reworking of the very materials and space of artistic work, even going so far as to espouse principles of "nihilism, materialization and violence" (16). Nowhere was this radically new textual configuration more intensely developed than in Italy, Brasil, Russia, England, Canada and America: where the best efforts were associated with a "collective by consensus" (20) ideal that brooked no destructive egoism. Visual poetry is by essence community & the freest expression of artistic principles consonant with literary & typographical experimentation done for its own pleasurable sake.

Kempton privileges the names of Apollinaire, Mallarmé, & especially E. E. Cummings ("the father figure of American English Visual Poetry"), considering them rightly as founders of visual poetry's most characteristic forms, certainly the standard-bearers for the artistic developments in the 50s and 60s, such as Fluxus, Concrete Poetry & Visual Poetry, with which we're much more familiar. Avant-garde poetry at this period was nothing if not fluid, adaptive & transnational: as Kempton whimsically says,

American English Concrete believed its cement bag with printed directions came from a moderate measure of Mallarmé mayonnaise & cubic centimeters of calligrammes and cummings crumbs & dishes of dada dashes & Rhine River Valley cement dust bundled and barged Brasil bound after stopping for a handful of England syllable grids and Scotland stone scribed syllables & shipped back north to the East Coast with rain forest Brasilian nut wood frames and Amazon River water & to be fanned dry by Japanese ideogram links and winks.(23)

Among other early American visual & concrete poets, almost as significant as Cummings and who would most likely have gone unnoticed were it not for strong publishers, were Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen. It's regrettable that even in egalitarian America Concrete poetry was somewhat institutionalized and roughly separated from an emerging Visual Poetry movement (26-28), the concrete anthologies of the day (such as Klaus Peter Dencker's Text-Builder: Visuelle Poesie international and Robert Altman's TECKEN: Lettres, Signes, Ecritures ) showcasing the works of only a favoured few.


E. E. Cummings, "father figure"

Kempton's essay is a good beginning as well as a perennially welcome resource for readers & critics (of which I am certainly one). And as the author's indicated in many places, there are many opportunities still for exploring the papers, influences & research materials of scores of untold stories. I'm particularly struck by the presence of so many artists who've been all but ignored or forgotten. The footnotes, works cited, & timelines here are an excellent starting-point for any future studies in the origin & development of visual poetry. Computer technologies, and all the multimedia creations they produce, can only be an even greater spur to more sustained & creative advancement of experimentalist poetries.

"Towards a blog poetics": cont'd

The January 6 to 12 blognoscenti posts generated the following sentences, ready to be added to our "Towards a blog poetics" text (see below). I'm beginning to see the sort of tongue-in-cheek reception of experimental poetry everywhere the primary document is turning into, with perhaps a further discussion in the works of the blog as the only hospitable place for it.

Again, I'm aiming for a standard 10-page long 'Intoduction', with about 12-13 sentences per page (or an Introduction of roughly 130 sentences or so).
___________________________

January 6 "I [We] alone can be grateful that genre, subject and individual poems are just a means of presentation, as if we're first witnessing the successful artist, poet and writer from several inconceivable points of view."

7 "The poet's arable couplet, minimalist and at bottom a mash-up, can still be entertaining."

8 "Perhaps the best known poem there is (or isn't) is, yes, a confession & if it'd wanted to try to get it right could follow the whole poem closely as an "End of the World" or the "Goddammit" type & continue to do so."

9 "Free to clear the tone or style of the intelligibles, you can go to the fields, the birds, like a deadbeat poet."

10 "Like faces on a canvas, stories and words that mean too many things & don't emanate from the village hearth, lie dead, even in early spring."

11 "More a contest for the best minds than a poem, a peep show of perpetual sequences and good only for fools, the experimental may be the most gorgeous jellyfish I've seen. "

12  "How often does the act of getting something down, and poetry in general, like an elf clutching at a book in a bookstore, depend on the Judge's ruling—Gad!—, even setting rules to muddle things a bit."


                                        Towards a blog poetics: Introduction
                                                     

A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a retrievable and complex one. A refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since the world is read during the moment and then inventoried into rare books.If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted  between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

We alone can be grateful that genre, subject and individual poems are just a means of presentation, as if we're first witnessing the successful artist, poet and writer from several inconceivable points of view.The poet's arable couplet, minimalist and at bottom a mash-up, can still be entertaining. Perhaps the best known poem there is (or isn't) is, yes, a confession & if it'd wanted to try to get it right could follow the whole poem closely as an "End of the World" or the "Goddammit" type & continue to do so. Free to clear the tone or style of the intelligibles, you can go to the fields & birds, like a deadbeat poet. Like faces on a canvas, stories and words that mean too many things & don't emanate from the village hearth, lie dead, even in early spring. More a contest for the best minds than a poem, a peep show of perpetual sequences and good only for fools, the experimental may be the most gorgeous jellyfish I've seen.

How often does the act of getting something down, and poetry in general, like an elf clutching at a book in a bookstore, depend on the Judge's ruling—Gad!—, even setting rules to muddle things a bit?

Thank you, John, again. Poetry when I needed it.

lighting
a candle

& blowing
it out

lighting
a candle

& blowing
it out

lighting
a candle

& blowing
it out

trying
to

under
stand

                      (thinking of robert lax)

Just when I'm about to get caught up again in the gnawing irritations of politics and people, & feeling more creative energies wasted on chimeras, a poet, and a poetry, suddenly comes my way & tries to set things right (or so it seemed). Today I received a gift of poetry from John Martone, in the form of a lovely 7.5" X 11.5" papier-mâché, delicately leaf-inlaid & stapled work entitled a lamp. The title's a little wisp of a label that, unless roughly handled, will just barely hang on. A work that oughtn't be read at a sitting but opened at random, as required, the eye always resting on the first piece it sees, the hand never to keep a page open longer than necessary. How else to see through to it?

here - there -
straw - caught
in ice -

Almost too entirely self-enclosed to be treated casually in this way yet that's just what it needs to work (for me anyways): a kind of restive sweep of the eye and hand. The drawings that outnumber the kanji lie scattered or they seem to mingle too quietly with the text. An eye that can stand to be jostled and halted in its search for patterns (of politics, art and argument, and of everything that's sorrowful) will stay here. Sometimes foreign script and hand-drawings, wishing to appear altogether unforeign, merge to create appropriately random meanings. I can be grateful for the way the imagination looking for release can move here into more than one language (as in a visual poem), more than one world. I do need an alternate world to step into at times.

legs wanting to walk - the late hour

I am thankful to John, too, for the gift of the scamp-guru who teaches not as he walks but by walking: a walking meditation. I'd like to try walking with him a few pages at a time. It's actually a quality of the text that appeals to my own current fidgetiness & yet one that also makes my nervous energies odious. Ed Baker's recently alerted me to Cid Corman's "The Tortoise" where we find: "Always//the feeling is of/terrible slowness/overtaking haste." Mine's the motion of one who can't sit still (of whom it cannot said that "rocking/his chair/doesnt"). If sitting is a problem, what about the rest? And the trailer parks, dumpsters, & sleeping bags, never good enough for my landscape, lie just as scattered over and between the pages as script and drawings do, & entice with their own connect-the-dots unfolding.

blizzard outside
   but even this
      glue is white

As I write and read this (& Geof Huth is right: writing is "a version of reading"), it is snowing outside, & its sorrowfulness is keenly felt. The poetry could not have been timed more perfectly! The storm outside (as I didn't understand til now) isn't really separable from the glue whiteness in which I'm really seeing it on the page. The interminable drudgery of snow, and icy stars and even the passing of another year: none of it could be tolerable were it not for the 'pure land' that's one moment "grass stems", the next "snow falling/quieter/than yr pulse." From "group homes" thru trailers to snow (as along so many other paths in John's remarkable text) is a type of interior journeying I've been too fidgety too long for.

And so I think many more incongruities between text & language, page and sky would've been lost on me but for John's gift, and the sage's ambling gait and the storm that's gathering outside my window, faintly visible through the darkness.

open
the blinds
squinting