Facetweet

actually, i was being half glib, paul, just pronunciating, and implying that muteness and non-responsiveness (seeing as that’s what the thread’s being knocked on the head for) is poetry too, blahblah. because i agree with you above. what should we be talking about? and why is ‘talk’ only significant exchange? because, expressing a general feeling in relation to the overall thread or zeroing in on some part you liked – as has been done here so far – is expressive in itself. i’m seeing people relate to positions, they’re saying things. it isn’t discursive but it’s certainly communicative. i’m getting a sense of what people like and don’t like. so, anyhow, i’m going to amend my little annunciation. actually, i think poetry should should be more tone-deaf and less ‘successful’. i want to read more poems that feel like a mashed fender gnarled up in the fender of a different car, splashed with blood, and brain. or more poems that are like a bomb that failed to go off. that is to say, relevant but not rendered. somehow failed. this is only a personal wish though, not a big statement as to what’s wrong with poetry or what poetry should be. i just want more ugly weak poetry that makes something out of its ugliness and its weakness.

December 30th, 2009 / 5:25 am darby—

we shouldnt be talking about anything, but we have to keep talking

December 30th, 2009 / 5:27 am Paul—

“and why is ‘talk’ only significant exchange?”

i agree. i felt the lack of comments was speaking volumes. not giving a shit is still an indirect form of communicating one’s feelings or overall impression.

also, some seemingly “ugly” poetry is, in fact, quite beautiful. i’m in love with aase berg.

December 30th, 2009 / 5:36 am darby—

i dont know if you can make the assumption that no comment = no shit giving. i give shits to my toilet everyday but i don’t talk to my toilet do i. i mean, i give a shit about things i am indifferent to or feel something toward and would rather not comment about for whatever because i feel like it who are you. fewer words the better, as is per poytree ought, seh?

obscure everything. ive had enough scure.

December 30th, 2009 / 5:42 am Paul—

have another beer darby

your toilet says it’s on the house

December 30th, 2009 / 5:50 am darby—

thanks

this happens every night cuz im on the westcoast and all the happenings are on the eastcoast and everyones asleep in the east now. shh.

December 30th, 2009 / 5:54 am Paul—

i’m on the east coast. it’s only 12:53 AM here.

don’t shh me. haha

December 30th, 2009 / 5:55 am darby—

on every reply here, does it say 1:55am or so? what time zone is that?

December 30th, 2009 / 5:57 am Paul—

yeah. i have no idea. it’s not my time zone.

do you think blake butler is sleeping right now?

December 30th, 2009 / 5:58 am darby—

no i think he has insomnia or something

December 30th, 2009 / 6:00 am Paul—

i think i have insomnia too.

i think ryan manning is sleeping with a hooker right now.

i think ken baumann is avoiding me.

December 30th, 2009 / 6:27 am gena—

ahhhhhhahaha!

December 30th, 2009 / 6:28 am gena—

the time on here always fucks me up.

December 30th, 2009 / 6:29 am Ken Baumann—

not obscure enough.

December 30th, 2009 / 6:30 am gena—

for some reason i imagine paul and darby whispering their above comments to each other. it’s cool.

December 30th, 2009 / 6:38 am Paul—

we’re practicing for our big camping trip next weekend

December 30th, 2009 / 2:39 am Paul—

hi ken.

December 30th, 2009 / 6:42 am Mimi Vaquer—

My 8th grade students think that accessible poetry “doesn’t count.” They’re programmed to think that poetry requires 10 readings to glean any meaning whatsoever, and thus most of them are completely turned off by it. When I assign poetry that they actually understand upon first reading, they give me baffled looks and seem to think that their previous teachers have somehow been subjecting them to gratuitous torture.

Poetry doesn’t have to be a word game that leads a reader to through a labyrinth of dead ends. I often find inaccessible poetry fairly amateurish — as though the writer feels that the abstract is key and gives no concrete keyhole through which to climb. It seems like these folks define poetry by what they were handed in school. They remember obscurity and think this is what the reader is looking for.

December 30th, 2009 / 6:46 am shaun—

poetry needs to be more METAL and more inTENSE

December 30th, 2009 / 7:22 am james yeh—

fuck poets

December 30th, 2009 / 7:52 am mjm—

yes. fuck us, please. we’re good lays.

December 30th, 2009 / 10:08 am Merzmensch—

Thesis: To make poetry accessible means to destroy poetry.
Antithesis: If poetry is accessible, it’s… ehm… accessible.
Synthesis: …fill out this form…

December 30th, 2009 / 1:20 pm frank donald goodish—

nice, mimi. inacessible fiction and poetry makes me feel small and sad, like i’m back in elementary school and no one will tell me why i should be seeing things like everyone else.

December 30th, 2009 / 1:26 pm Sean—

Poetry is basically clouds. Read the clouds.

December 30th, 2009 / 2:47 pm Matt Jasper—

I love Sean’s definition:”Poetry is basically clouds. Read the clouds.”

There’s a sort of purity to dispensing with the front-loading & framing that signals and orients a reader with cues to enter the poem here, see it this way, get to the obvious poetic climax, congratulate yourself on “getting” a meaning so damned spelled out and literal that it hasn’t sent its needle through any fabric at all. There are of course similar cues and nods toward prevailing styles that help a thing be seen. Some framing seems helpful yet I think the bulk of what’s out there will collapse around whatever core it had, if any.

Frameless construction is different than willful obscurity or solipsistic spewings yet it is often dismissed because a quick look declares it senseless or not up to prevailing standards. By pre-collapsing itself it is a response to the overwhelming multiplicity of life–an internalization, a sort of pinhole camera at work inside some dark canister.

I’ve condemned a few fine writers by not seeing what the hell they were up to. I’ve been accused of obscurity and inaccessibility by people too conventionally habituated to see that I am writing about obscurity and inaccessibility with an isomorphism required by the topic (more specifically, the obsessive and private worlds of schizophrenia).

Who have you condemned to hell and then drawn back up to perch upon your angelic shoulder? Who is the most apparently or actually senseless writer you’ve read?

December 30th, 2009 / 2:56 pm Matt Cozart—

yikes

December 30th, 2009 / 3:02 pm Matt Jasper—

(“I often find inaccessible poetry fairly amateurish — as though the writer feels that the abstract is key and gives no concrete keyhole”)

I’m glad the word “often” qualifies the above (which I can agree with in many but not all contexts) as it is easy to go too far in this direction and declare a dead end at the limits of the reader’s comprehension. Much of what is considered inaccessible is not abstract, but actually at a level of specificity that is so strewn with realia that the objects and content take on a meaning much more specific than language is capable of in less broken down forms.

December 30th, 2009 / 3:59 pm Lincoln—

I see what you did there

December 30th, 2009 / 4:04 pm Joseph Young—

does the argument presuppose a poet has any choice in being obscure or not?

December 30th, 2009 / 4:51 pm keith n b—

can you elaborate on the idea of ‘frameless construction’, and secondly how that relates to what you call ‘pre-collapsing’?

December 30th, 2009 / 6:48 pm Daniel—

Just read it if you like it. And if you don’t, stop reading.

December 31st, 2009 / 12:58 am Matt Jasper—

My men will type out a four page lucubration and send it to you via postal mail. They were being kind of silly above but probably meant capturing and being the described to such an extent that self-forgetfulness blurs the line between authorship and animism or a living language–just leaves the writing to do as it will without as much reference to a purely human scale of meaning as a reader might like. To pre-collapse is to see that everything has already died and been raptured into a kaleidoscopic collage that replaces individuality with a self of selves so complicated that simple assertions and literal truth are met by the figurative and living underpinnings. The reductive logic that allows naming is gutted as in this Hart Crane poem:

A Name for All

by Hart Crane
Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page
And still wing on, untarnished of the name
We pinion to your bodies to assuage
Our envy of your freedom—we must maim

Because we are usurpers, and chagrined—
And take the wing and scar it in the hand.
Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;
But we must die, as you, to understand.

I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang
As only they can praise, who build their days
With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang
Struck free and holy in one Name always.

That poem is built not by individual components stacked, yet by a bleeding of all into all that is just as smashed as it is reassembled. The interdependence of reference and connectedness makes each part a microcosm of the whole so an odd unity arises that is beyond the logic or sense of the poem. The construction method attains something like that of a hologram. You can break the etched glass of a hologram to bits and slant any one part of what remains to see the entire picture once again. The drive for this type of interdependence and indestructibility can arise from paranoia, loss, real contemplation of and immersion in what unity means etc. Because we will crumble along with our frames of reference, much of what endures will have passed through an eyelet that smashes more obvious structures yet allows embedded, formed (as in “form”) , and seemingly senseless things to endure. The above poem is a fine example of this, as is Scorch Atlas. They fit through the eyelet. This means that dead people can read them too.

December 31st, 2009 / 3:01 pm keith n b—

yes, but reductive logic can also be a procreative logic by enabling the movement from pre-differentiation to multiplicity, from a formless mass of seething flux into a kaleidoscopic crystallization of pattern-emerging forms. the error of the reductive i believe is to then equate the multiplicity (as neatly stacked in their tupperware self-containments) with the fullness of being that approaches the holographic nature you mention. whereas the error of the cosmic-eyed (as expressed by hart crane) is one of a romantic throwback to a pre-rational innocence, which i think never existed in the first place. but perhaps your ‘self of selves’ goes beyond what i consider to be crane’s romantic regression to something else, as you say, approaching a transrational intricacy that involves not mere dissolution of self but a two-way prismatization of selves, in which the specturm and the whole light co-exist each with their identities intact and, even to a certain extent, superimosed.

i’m really digging your articulations (although i feel a cleaner delineation of the mystical from the applicable might be possible) and very much look forward to your hand-held lucubrations.

92 Comments

Archives

Meta