Benny Bunter
Well-known member
It's very nice indeed, lots of lovely alliteration/assonance.
Read Serious Poetry with me & Corpsey
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Benny Bunter
Well-known member
First three lines set up the rest of it nicely. About war and death and that but written in a contradictory soft and swishy sort of style
sus
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Christina Rosetti never before mentioned on board
www.poetryfoundation.org
Goblin Market
Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpeck’d cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab-apples, dewberries,…
www.poetryfoundation.org
luka
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luka
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Stirrings Still
pragmatics is a politics of language
If genre is shattered, collapsed, erased, I wouldn't necessarily call that theory. It's not a stylistic decision any more. Look: you know it, poetry no longer works. That doesn't mean there is no poetry. It means that traditional poetic form has no use because, now, it stops words from functioning. Poetry works as form in a specific context, for example: Elizabethan drama, between the opening of the first theatres in the 1570s and the Civil War that closed them again in 1642. With Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster, Middleton and Rowley, words and form and social function and energy work as complementary instruments and forces towards perfect pitch, interaction, exactitude. And at the same time, for example, Tamburlaine still remains ferocious, repellent, compelling; is still useful beyond all measure (humanity as both aberration and source of beauty: that is eternal) but could not be written now.
As for the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg; he is merely an anachronism...
Stanza, rhyme scheme, metre, rhythm etc...: these formal aspects and residual arrangements constitute poetry as "craft" in the way that Pound defended pure verse. This craft is now akin to carving Love Spoons. It already was by the 1920s and Pound was the first to say so. If Pound still retained the idea of writing as a craft then you can see that the requirements and techniques had changed. Craft now, as it stood, was destructive: dismantle parts; or more actively, vividly, break them. At that point reconstruction began, and only at that point.
That was The Cantos' ambition: a process only thus begun. This now represents the pure form of poetry: a blueprint and manual. The formal potential contained within is infinite, and incomparable. Think of it not as drudgery but as a kind of dance.
Genre is not dispersed: it just feeds a reading market that feels and seems and is removed from writing and the use of words to translate or render or evoke. To write you cannot demand anything from writing, but you must demand as much as you can from words, dialects, grammar, syntax. And not even "demand" but forget all formal and thematic restriction and slide easily, silently, onto free space (an empty page to fill is different from a sentence to write, poem to compose, novel to construct).
And this is, in fact, a political choice. A politicised slant or route. The politics of writing (as in, far from simply political subject matter). So that Orwell can claim the most apolitical writer, Henry Miller, as more political and nuanced than self-conscious polemicists like the Auden-Spender coterie of Oxford Communists. Because of the force of one decision, and this is the decision to make, either way: "He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face towards the flames." (If you want that clarified then Inside the Whale is available from Oxfam for, usually, £1.50.)
Here's a political choice that can be made both outside of and in relation to (i.e. to go elsewhere, not recede) history and tradition: The reclamation of satire as untenable disgust and sickness, but not as (simply) nihilism or (sadly) cynicism. For example: Swift, Wyndham Lewis, Celine as effective and useful precedents. Or, actually, more important than that: the reclamation of irony from retreat, guise, disappearance, immunisation, or abdication. Irony should be the most responsibly used weapon. The fact that it is now used to forfeit responsibility itself is our great loss. Irony is not a smirk: it should be employed as an offensive strike. And that can be (as this is different again, and in a crucial way): irresponsibility as a deliberate option, like, in Orwell's terms, Henry Miller. Or, again, responsibility as a dangerous declaration of strength or defiance.
Either way, the moment you work and think as a singularity - a hopeless, helpless, formless voice seeking, trying or exploiting new forms and ways to express what you see and feel on a blank space. Irony can be used as a crucial tool at that exact moment. Whatever tools are used, that is when words work effectively, fully.
That involves any language, all aspects of language - any spatial or temporal arrangement or formation. Language constitutes elements, variables, devices, dynamics. Also: music, chromaticism. Metre and rhyme in constantly novel configurations. But: the eradication (the refusal) of stanza form, structural rhyme schemes (e.g. couplets), sonnets etc., proscribed as a rite, an ideal. Plus: not accepting the notion of free verse as an opposing tendency or "alternative" to structured norms; this should entail abandoning the idea of free verse altogether.
Apart from a politics of writing, there's the problem of writing about politics (outside of straight reporting). This is almost always reduction to opinions (or "commentary") which are even less useful than they seem. In fact, opinion is disingenuous, or outright duplicitous.
It should be the attempt to curate and collate paradox. Only then, if you can, carve out a position while retaining all complexities that exist and you have learned. This should take exceptional skill and courage. It should seem impossible until the moment you feel you have to choose - and even then that choice should remain open to challenge and change. That kind of responsibility (which is also, in a way, irresponsible) should always remain flexible, permeable. Because that is what distinguishes it from blind faith (i.e. abdication of responsibility to superstition, spiritual despotism). It's what makes it better (and that's my choice). Look, you can no longer be "left" or "right" - that's the fool's position; faith, as such, is inflexible and dangerous. It's the essence of jihad and Shining Path and the discursive root of Bush's "axis of evil" speech.
Literature as we know it is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship. And this is even truer of prose than of verse...The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
Orwell
Consider the market as the new orthodoxy: its own rigorous strictures and demands. Life is becoming...more harsh and direct, less opaque, in many ways. The 90s moral and semantic fog is actually lifting (or has lifted). War has clarified things, even if it cannot clarify its own dimensions. 9/11 drew up clear sides for the first time since the Cold War (if not completely, re: Saudi Arabia, at least more clearly since then). And even Baudrillard can see that: he said it first, the events strike is off. Except he's also wrong, because his (correctly) predicted return to Gulf War syndrome can never effectively reverse that. The dilution and co-option of journalism (see the fate of the BBC; pervasive "tabloidisation"; last year's editorial scandal at the New York Times; the tragic suicide of Sky News reporter James Forlong) is the great danger that writers face: this is the front line of a fight for the use-value of language (spin is as damaging in this respect as totalitarian jargon; r.e. the Clinton administration: "it is possible that acts of genocide may have occurred in Rwanda"). That's a political fight. On the other hand, the terminal condition (or: the end) of traditional literary form and genre (poetry, theatre, the novel...) offers a clean slate for those capable of and inclined to liberate and exploit language (in all its manifestations) and make it work again as poetry. That's a political fight, also.
luka
Well-known member
Useful writers, then:
There is no limit to voice or text, except formal limitations as harness, frame or leash. Like, do not abandon poetic form if used to exploit particular sound, symmetry, or rhythm - again, use-value, as in exploitation, application, not utility. Poetic form as a set of potential devices or hybrids or voices. And: slangs, patois, dialects, urban variations, jargons, professional and technical languages, secret languages, lyrics, signs, headlines...
As already cited: Ezra Pound; The Cantos. So, no, don't be cowed by aggressive erudition, deliberate intimidation or elitism - you can, after all, track down all allusions and references if you care or worry enough about it. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions, 1970) is a final arrangement of fragments to be used - like their condensed cousin, The Wasteland - for the strategies they invent and evolve. They are the most useful (for poetry and prose): the most applicable and evocative. I say "use" because language is, after all, a technology; words, grammar and structure are cogs, bolts, mechanisms, circuits.
The Cantos respond to, or stem from, World War I and its aftershocks: the immolation of nation states, laissez faire capitalism and Empire; the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, the Soviets; the wake of the Wall Street Crash, and the Great Depression. It is a number of tendencies, strategies, and dominant voices: the American emigre immersed in European culture and history, Asia and the Ancients; the poet breaking up language into variable particles, incorporating Chinese characters, ancient Greek, diagrams, drawings, sheet music, hieroglyphics etc; the privileged male breaking away from his position of security, up into voices from the Roman Empire, the Orient, fascist Italy, the feminine, etc. This one singularity forced to confront and contain (an explosive rupture) all potential voices, cries, quakes, escapes. Any other singularity invariably takes the same course: The Cantos provide a principle workbook for a contemporary inscription of voices. That potential often glimpsed in those who follow this route: T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Anna Akhmatova, Basil Bunting, Frank O' Hara, for example.
Pierre Guyotat; Tomb for 500, 000 Soldiers and Eden, Eden, Eden mount a fierce offensive on the Novel and on political discourse. The Cantos are a product of conditions of breakdown and malaise that result from World War I, but Guyotat's novels are like projectiles shot straight out of the Algerian War and into the white heat of Paris, 1968. Guyotat writes in one tense: the present. In Eden... this is taken to an extreme horizon: the text is comprised solely of clauses, or the pure phrase, what Roland Barthes calls the "substance of speech, with the qualities of a fine cloth or a foodstuff, a single sentence which never ends, whose beauty comes not from what it refers to...but from its breath, cut short, repeated." Guyotat's scope and reference is intensive (Pound's extensive) but elemental: sex, violence, language; Catholicism and War. The politics of writing (and the writing of the political) are at their most intimate and indissoluble: Guyotat's texts weave all strands with a ferocious, basic, rough-hewn felicity.
All coordinates are lost and therefore inherited strategies are worthless and you are forced back on your own resources and your own reserves and your wit and your nerve. Once you stop accepting then accepted order breaks up, or just evaporates, almost magically, like when a population suddenly refuses the will of a tyrant.
Samuel Beckett; prose works. Beckett is the central prose stylist of the 20th Century after Joyce. His novels and prose fragments are in some part Ulysses satellites, but more poised, condensed, artful, and ironic. Interior logic, micro-perceptions, and the claustrophobia of limitation come out in dry, thin, ironic, cruel, allusive, slow, keen, gentle, hesitant, beautiful, wise and weakened voices. Each voice is written, in the way you seem to see the shape of a word in your mind; a combination of letters, phonemes and physical, emotive or any associations: a packet of ghosts. The mind's focus when observed in splendid isolation so; insular workings, markings, tendencies, and obsessions. Reduced to a few elements - physical, mental, linguistic - that can sustain a paradoxically parched but inexhaustible poetry.
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