|
Post by afilreis on Jan 22, 2023 8:50:42 GMT -5
1. Joan is basically anti-transcendentalist. She’s interested in “what the best poetry can make happen on the page. To rise above the occasion is to miss it. The occasion in today’s world is an enormous, intricate entanglement of people and events.” (37)
2. Poethics in writing. “...an exploration of art’s significance as, not just about, a form of living in the world.” That is to say: ideally art is itself a form of living in the world, not just a description or observation of it. Art as world. (26)
3. An ethical art leaves much room for the reader/viewer. “In fact the artist shouldn’t attempt to go the whole distance.” “The work should not explain but show itself.” (41)
4. About writing she does NOT admire: “An aesthetic of persuasion. In which the reader must be made to feel what the author felt, must be convinced of the author’s omniscient perspective, must come to believe in the characters and the point (singular) of view…. The reader’s activity is not one of participatory invention but of figuring out. Figuring out what the auto as master creator means.” She says that this applies to “the lyric fictions of the I-poem” as much as to most conventional novels. (42)
5. She’s not fond of “paraphrasable literature.” Nor of writing that seeks “efficient transmission” of meaning. A “new, formally complex literature, music, art of any kind…is far less compressible than” mainstream art. (“Poethics of a Complex Realism,” p. 211 of the book The Poethical Wager)
6. “Complexity is the source of our freedom” (p. 214). “We live in a culture so driven to desperate simplifications.” She calls this a “flight” and says this flight has helped create something like a quick “media event.”
7. Repeatedly says she prefers “imagination” to “fantasy” in our art.
8. Seeks “a poethics of complex realism where active processes of mutability and multiplicity are valued over simpler, more stable illusions of expressive clarity.” (219)
9. “We live in a culture of literary institutions (and markets) that have constituent needs to erase difficulty.” (“The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein,” p. 147)
|
|
|
Post by kymminbarcelona on Jan 22, 2023 9:19:16 GMT -5
This is great, Al! In general, I do think there are two “arts”. What JR is advocating in the points you bring up is art as creation, from the artist POV. But it obviates the other art, art as beauty and comfort, from the recipient’s POV. I believe this might be why “people” think poetry is “hard.” And it is!! Even for the poetry lover, who is determined to understand its creativity as well as its beauty. I will say I have only been able to articulate this opinion thanks to JR and your guidance. TY again!
|
|
|
Post by siobhan on Jan 22, 2023 15:51:42 GMT -5
Yeah, that's what I said. What Al said (hehehehe).
|
|
|
Post by cat mccredie on Jan 22, 2023 19:06:34 GMT -5
Thank you, Al. I have some responses to this.
Unless I'm missing something ('unless' doing a lot of work here), JR seems to be persuading the reader towards an ethical method that eschews the notion of persuasion, which seems a bit contradictory (or quixotic, to steal from Jason G Luz).
On a few of the points:
4. About writing she does NOT admire: “An aesthetic of persuasion. In which the reader must be made to feel what the author felt, must be convinced of the author’s omniscient perspective, must come to believe in the characters and the point (singular) of view…. The reader’s activity is not one of participatory invention but of figuring out. Figuring out what the auto as master creator means.” She says that this applies to “the lyric fictions of the I-poem” as much as to most conventional novels.
I love this type of writing. For some reason, Hunter S. Thompson sprang to mind. I know what he thinks and what his point of view is, and I get taken on a wild ride from his perspective. An author's perspective is generally not a stable perspective anyway, since people are not trees but move around, take mind-bending drugs etc. I love it when an author (if I enjoy the author) tries to persuade me to their points of view.
'Must be convinced', 'must come to believe' -- who says? It is terrifying when writing has such power, as in some places where for instance expressing disbelief in certain written things can lead to death, but this is not the case in the US and doesn't apply to most literature.
I don't know of any successful author who claims to have an 'omniscient perspective' -- that sounds like someone with a God complex. The omniscient narrative voice is just a literary device that I also often enjoy -- I don't think anyone intends it to be interpreted literally. I fail to see how it's unethical, but admittedly I'm not very interested in ethics, which is possibly a huge problem when engaging with this work.
3. An ethical art leaves much room for the reader/viewer. “In fact the artist shouldn’t attempt to go the whole distance.”
I want Hunter S. Thompson to fill the page with his life force. If I want room from him I'll put the book down and make myself a cup of tea.
6. “Complexity is the source of our freedom” (p. 214).
Perhaps like Laura, I'm not at all convinced of this and think obfuscation is often used by bad actors. I'm more likely to look for liberation in simplicity. However, I also think simplicity and complexity are inextricable from each other (a drink of water is simple but also complex).
It's because our world is so complex and confounding that I value clarity and simplicity in communication (if it is conscious of its own limitations), and don't rely on just one text to convey an entire multiplicity of complexity, which again, seems quixotic if not chaotic.
All this said, I have found reading JR and participating in this course has improved my thinking/writing. Why? It beats me.
Do I get a "Fail" for lack of comprehension???
|
|
|
Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 22, 2023 21:58:09 GMT -5
I am able to thrill in the complexities of JR’s dissonant poetry without requiring a thesis about precisely what the poet is standpoint is - like some kind of traditional exegesis. That’s why it’s a thrilling ride and it’s mostly because we get to drive. Quite possibly the alternative would be insanity or depression in this world. Would it be possible to trace a strain of this right back to Emily’s dwelling in possibility?
I get that we should not be dwelling in exegesis in this kind of writing. We have to read it like we are writing it and let the complexity take us. But I do wonder about one aspect of this. If I think I see, for instance, how in the mechanics of a line how the dissonance is being exemplified am I in error in noticing this or even in taking some pleasure in noticing it? This is, after all, a sort of “analysis.” Where do you draw the line?
For the moment I may feel like I cannot imagine going back to reading or even taking pleasure reading anything pre-modernist. I even feel like this about music at the moment. But I think this is unlikely to last. Am I betraying anyone in also being able to take pleasure in pre-modern literature. (I think Al said somewhere that his favourite novel is ‘Moby Dick’. I just took a few lines from ‘Moby Dick’ for a nautical presentation I have to do.)
|
|
|
Post by jimlynch on Jan 23, 2023 2:04:55 GMT -5
Thanks for the discussion prompts, Al! And the chance to continue the conversation..........
1. Joan is basically anti-transcendentalist. She’s interested in “what the best poetry can make happen on the page. To rise above the occasion is to miss it. The occasion in today’s world is an enormous, intricate entanglement of people and events.” (37)
Certainly JR is “anti-transcendentalist” in one sense – that she is not looking to escape the world, or escape language and it's limitations – but rather to play within the parameters of the complex (because one recognizes it as such) world and language (and armed with the OED no doubt). So much complexity brought about by the evolution of culture and technology, from the mirror, telescope and microscope, to printing press and film and sound recording and computers, we have discovered the complexity that was always there but out of our perception, and have begun down the road of self-reflexivity that has no end but countless side roads and cul-de-sacs. Yet the world maybe no more complex than it ever was, just our investigation of it.
The real complexity of the world perhaps is transcendent – in that we may never know it, may never know what we do not and can not know – the “thing-in-itself”, the alien, the other, the plans and intentions of those who rule over us, the fourth and higher dimensions – but the attempt to penetrate the unintelligible is admirable and in the end it is the only way we can know anything. We are born to unintelligibility and wade our way through it, illusion taken for reality as we think ourselves into existence. Everything contingent, in need of constant revision, reimagining.
Yet in another sense JR is a transcendentalist: for instance, if language has an “oversoul” or aggregate power we are somewhat in thrall to, then procedural poetries and strategies of composition involving chance and accident can perhaps free us of its bonds just as they may free us from the subjective, lyrical I (which, of course, is really a complex plurality of I's) and it's desire to shape the world in it's own refracted self-images. We can learn about language as an “other” in this way.
And further, often poets and artists rationalize their own methods whether to themselves or to others, partly to explain what it is they are doing, and partly to understand what it is they are doing. They believe in themselves – they are self-reliant in the Emersonian mode of 'believing what is true for them in their private hearts is true for everybody'. And I see JR as another heir of Emerson, especially in her determination to make a difference in the world (as a teacher), and to be so careful with language (to be in a “disquieted state of blended uncertainty, apprehension, and responsibility” toward it – Webster's), and to be so curious about the world of nature, science, mathematics, philosophy and the contemporary.
To rise above the “Habitus”, those often self-restricting and harmful beliefs and values we mistake for our own whose true source is the power structure, the “system” we were born into – and become independent of them - that's a transcendence worth pursuing!
|
|
lidia
ModPo student
Posts: 24
|
Post by lidia on Jan 23, 2023 3:48:06 GMT -5
Art as world.
I definitely got a sense of this in many of the readings but didn't comment on it because I didn't know how to. Everything seemed to be happening simultaneously. It was impossible to untangle the knots.
|
|
|
Post by Prithvijeet Sinha on Jan 23, 2023 5:15:16 GMT -5
All of these ideas put forward by Ms. Retallack here have a practical grasp of how not everything must be left as 'simplified beyond measure' because that sounds the death-knell for all creativity in the first place.
The implosion of making every poetic idea, functions of metaphors, symbols, personifications get watered down when the premise of 'easy and palatable' robs the very act of creation as imitable, able to be readily duplicated and seeming to be an antithesis to the exercising of intellectual powers.
I agree with her views because without complexity and effort, scholarship becomes an easy way out, a liquified subject without any merit of applying the grey cells to achieve breakthroughs.
|
|
|
Post by Prithvijeet Sinha on Jan 23, 2023 5:18:33 GMT -5
All of these ideas put forward by Ms. Retallack here have a practical grasp of how not everything must be left as 'simplified beyond measure' because that sounds the death-knell for all creativity in the first place. The implosion hence in such a fashion makes every poetic idea, functions of metaphors, symbols, personifications get watered down; the premise of 'easy and palatable' denigrates the very act of creation as imitable, able to be readily duplicated and seeming to be an antithesis to the exercising of intellectual powers. I agree with her views because without complexity and effort, scholarship becomes an easy way out, a liquified subject without any merit of applying the grey cells to achieve breakthroughs.
|
|
Adrian writing as adef
Guest
|
Post by Adrian writing as adef on Jan 23, 2023 13:13:19 GMT -5
Jim says: 'The real complexity of the world perhaps is transcendent'
He goes on to suggest that 'To rise above the “Habitus”, those often self-restricting and harmful beliefs and values we mistake for our own whose true source is the power structure, the “system” we were born into – and become independent of them - that's a transcendence worth pursuing!'
I am not sure that JR would agree with this. My understanding of what she has written is that by invoking the notion of transcendence we absolve ourselves of the responsibility of engaging with the world as complexity. Transcendence is a 'habitus' in itself.
How has transcendence become a way of understanding the world we might ask. We could then consider what questions or approaches it stops us having to ask about those features of complexity that mean there are things that are beyond our understanding because we have yet to understand what they are.
Deconstructing a habitus leads not to transcendence but knowledge. That knowledge is based on both rational thinking and emotional experience and on the outcomes of tensions between them. Engaging with the tensions is what 'poethics' is all about.
|
|
|
Post by jimlynch on Jan 23, 2023 20:01:20 GMT -5
Jim says: 'The real complexity of the world perhaps is transcendent' He goes on to suggest that 'To rise above the “Habitus”, those often self-restricting and harmful beliefs and values we mistake for our own whose true source is the power structure, the “system” we were born into – and become independent of them - that's a transcendence worth pursuing!' I am not sure that JR would agree with this. My understanding of what she has written is that by invoking the notion of transcendence we absolve ourselves of the responsibility of engaging with the world as complexity. Transcendence is a 'habitus' in itself. How has transcendence become a way of understanding the world we might ask. We could then consider what questions or approaches it stops us having to ask about those features of complexity that mean there are things that are beyond our understanding because we have yet to understand what they are. Deconstructing a habitus leads not to transcendence but knowledge. That knowledge is based on both rational thinking and emotional experience and on the outcomes of tensions between them. Engaging with the tensions is what 'poethics' is all about. Hi Adrian – thanks for your comments! The words transcend/transcendence/transcendental/transcendentalist have a variety of shades of meaning both in everyday language and in philosophy – and transcendence can be somewhat of a relative term, more or less so, general or specific. I was attempting in my post to address it in its various uses as I understand it. When I suggested that rising above or transcending our habitus would be a good thing (as opposed to rising “to the occasion” as QS puts it) I meant it in the sense that rising above poverty is a good thing, that rising above poor health is a good thing, that rising above ignorance is a good thing – when we come of age and begin to question the beliefs and values we were taught when younger (what's the saying – “It took me twenty years to get an education – and the rest of my life to unlearn everything they taught me”), there comes a point when one has to take responsibility for one's own knowledge and one's actions in the world based upon that knowledge, to not rely on the experts or what we are told, but to think critically and evaluate everything. And reevaluate it, hone and sharpen our understanding. I think that JR is addressing the transcendence that is a retreat from the world that ignores and disregards problems, difficulties, complexities – the most common form being “My reward is in Heaven” (I will suffer through this vale of tears and be compensated for it) or just getting lost in mysticism at the expense of ignoring the everyday world – whether the cause is laziness, fear, ignorance or any myriad and/or combination of reasons. And there's no judgement here, she just thinks that to meet the world head on is a better way to live life. And this is the sense of transcendence that I think you address in your second paragraph. “Transcendence is a 'habitus' itself” - I like that! And maybe it's even inborn, ingrained in us, not necessarily even learned. Maybe it's just natural to look for a higher authority for answers – or even to blame a higher authority for our problems, or the world's problems. And so really I don't think we're disagreeing here. I've enjoyed reading your posts throughout the session – esp the one on Counterpoint – and the Judith Butler quotes and thanks too (to you & Lou) for the link to the “anthropocene” essay! It's on the top of my reading stack of pdfs for dog walks! - Jim
|
|
|
Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 23, 2023 21:28:51 GMT -5
What I have to say here is most directly related to Al’s points about JR being an anti-transcendentalist practicing an ethical art that leaves much room for the reader/viewer. And I take “anti-transcendentalist” to refer to someone who does not believe that they have a direct unmediated access to the truth. That is to say, an access that need not take account of any relativity of perception.
In elementary physics there is something called the “uncertainty principle”. I don’t want to insult anyone by implying that we must depend upon science to tell us what poetry is doing. Both poetry and physics in their own ways are both trying to describe experience. I find the similarities in their controversies regarding the relationship of the observer to the observed quite interesting. But I don’t know if everyone would find it helpful.
The uncertainty principle states that the closer one observes a sub-atomic particle the less certain is the accuracy of it’s measurement. There is some debate about whether this is due to the fact that the act of measurement unavoidably alters the thing being measured or that indeterminacy is itself a constituent feature of objects themselves. But both sides of the argument agree that observation demonstrates that the uncertainty is a feature of everything we observe at that level.
This uncertainty is undeniable in the measurement of something at the scale of a photon. As we try to be more accurate about it’s momentum, the less accurate it is possible to be about it’s position. But if we try to measure the momentum and position of something at the scale of a car we do not have the same problem. In fact, it doesn’t make much practical sense to doubt it.
I think JR is working in a literary mode equivalent the sub-atomic one in physics. The effect of the reader upon the poem has to be taken into account in a truthful representation of reality. For another poet working in a mode equivalent to the macroscopic one in physics, an omniscient narrative would make more sense. Thank goodness we can be diverted by different modes. It doesn’t necessarily mean we are on the wrong track.
|
|
|
Post by afilreis on Jan 23, 2023 21:31:43 GMT -5
Thank you, Al. I have some responses to this.Unless I'm missing something ('unless' doing a lot of work here), JR seems to be persuading the reader towards an ethical method that eschews the notion of persuasion, which seems a bit contradictory (or quixotic, to steal from Jason G Luz).
On a few of the points:4. About writing she does NOT admire: “An aesthetic of persuasion. In which the reader must be made to feel what the author felt, must be convinced of the author’s omniscient perspective, must come to believe in the characters and the point (singular) of view…. The reader’s activity is not one of participatory invention but of figuring out. Figuring out what the auto as master creator means.” She says that this applies to “the lyric fictions of the I-poem” as much as to most conventional novels. I love this type of writing. For some reason, Hunter S. Thompson sprang to mind. I know what he thinks and what his point of view is, and I get taken on a wild ride from his perspective. An author's perspective is generally not a stable perspective anyway, since people are not trees but move around, take mind-bending drugs etc. I love it when an author (if I enjoy the author) tries to persuade me to their points of view.
'Must be convinced', 'must come to believe' -- who says? It is terrifying when writing has such power, as in some places where for instance expressing disbelief in certain written things can lead to death, but this is not the case in the US and doesn't apply to most literature.
I don't know of any successful author who claims to have an 'omniscient perspective' -- that sounds like someone with a God complex. The omniscient narrative voice is just a literary device that I also often enjoy -- I don't think anyone intends it to be interpreted literally. I fail to see how it's unethical, but admittedly I'm not very interested in ethics, which is possibly a huge problem when engaging with this work. 3. An ethical art leaves much room for the reader/viewer. “In fact the artist shouldn’t attempt to go the whole distance.” I want Hunter S. Thompson to fill the page with his life force. If I want room from him I'll put the book down and make myself a cup of tea.6. “Complexity is the source of our freedom” (p. 214).Perhaps like Laura, I'm not at all convinced of this and think obfuscation is often used by bad actors. I'm more likely to look for liberation in simplicity. However, I also think simplicity and complexity are inextricable from each other (a drink of water is simple but also complex).
It's because our world is so complex and confounding that I value clarity and simplicity in communication (if it is conscious of its own limitations), and don't rely on just one text to convey an entire multiplicity of complexity, which again, seems quixotic if not chaotic.
All this said, I have found reading JR and participating in this course has improved my thinking/writing. Why? It beats me. Do I get a "Fail" for lack of comprehension??? '3. An ethical art leaves much room for the reader/viewer. “In fact the artist shouldn’t attempt to go the whole distance.” I want Hunter S. Thompson to fill the page with his life force. If I want room from him I'll put the book down and make myself a cup of tea.'
***
This (the above) is so witty! - Al
|
|
|
Post by jimlynch on Jan 24, 2023 1:51:08 GMT -5
Some tentative, half-assed explorations of the theme in Retallack of “An ethical art [that] leaves much room for the reader/viewer.”
I can see her point of view if she's talking about letting language speak somewhat for itself by using procedures, chance operations, found language, collage etc – like many of the Language Poets I've read, the texts created by these methods certainly leave room for the reader to create meaning, that is to “complete” the text (in the manner of the Duchampian and Cagean “belief that the work of art is completed by the viewer.” (41) And these methods will definitely produce texts that the author would never have arrived at by the usual (or more traditional) methods. They can bring new life to language, new humor, even new terrors. New juxtapositions of words that surprise, bring pleasure and an atmosphere of play and anything goes.
But on the other hand, to state that a work of art is completed by the viewer isn't exactly breaking new ground in either epistemology or in common sense. If the Mona Lisa slipped and fell in a museum and there was no one there to see it, would she lose her smile? What's art without an audience?
And isn't most great poetry left to be completed by the audience? I've been reading Keats for years, and reading biographies and criticism – and the only sure thing about his poetry is that there is no end to vastly intelligent and completely different interpretations of it. Mine have changed over the years. And isn't this one of the points of ModPo, the main curriculum, to engage with a poem and over the years to revisit it and gain new perspectives and insights from that same poem?
No doubt there are even more complexities to deal with and more work for the reader in poems like “How To Do Things With Words” - more difficulties in Stein than Steinbeck – and graphic difficulties as in some of Susan Howe's work – and how many people would have the patience with David Melnick's Pcoet (available online in the Electronic Poetry Center library) or similar works? One reason I admire Frost (besides his innovations in meter and meaning) is his desire and ability to reach a wide audience. Pablo Neruda, not unlike other poets outside of America, would fill football stadiums when giving a reading. What's ethical about being obscure?
I do love language poetry (and its ilk) tho – and maybe it will take time for a wider audience to catch up to it (ModPo is helping there I believe)- but I don't support any claims made for exclusivity or superiority. But I don't think Retallack is doing anything other than discussing ideas, exploring them and opening up a conversation about that which she holds dear to her heart and mind – and creating an intellectual framework for her poetry (and in a more general sense, other experimental poetry).
Her Poethical Wager I find fascinating and I'll reread it more carefully – but a lot in there I agree with already. I enjoy other kinds of criticism too – and I pay more attention to criticism I don't agree with but am nonetheless impressed with – like Yvor Winters books on Modernist Poetry collected together in In Defense of Reason.
Her poetry I find to be a goldmine of pleasure and exploration of the world, language and our ever-growing and ever-changing relationship to it. And I've learned a lot by engaging with it these past weeks, and in reading others responses to it. So once again, thanks to Al for the opportunity to read in community and thanks to everyone who participated in this exploration.
|
|
|
Post by cat mccredie on Jan 24, 2023 3:30:15 GMT -5
What I have to say here is most directly related to Al’s points about JR being an anti-transcendentalist practicing an ethical art that leaves much room for the reader/viewer. And I take “anti-transcendentalist” to refer to someone who does not believe that they have a direct unmediated access to the truth. That is to say, an access that need not take account of any relativity of perception. In elementary physics there is something called the “uncertainty principle”. I don’t want to insult anyone by implying that we must depend upon science to tell us what poetry is doing. Both poetry and physics in their own ways are both trying to describe experience. I find the similarities in their controversies regarding the relationship of the observer to the observed quite interesting. But I don’t know if everyone would find it helpful. The uncertainty principle states that the closer one observes a sub-atomic particle the less certain is the accuracy of it’s measurement. There is some debate about whether this is due to the fact that the act of measurement unavoidably alters the thing being measured or that indeterminacy is itself a constituent feature of objects themselves. But both sides of the argument agree that observation demonstrates that the uncertainty is a feature of everything we observe at that level. This uncertainty is undeniable in the measurement of something at the scale of a photon. As we try to be more accurate about it’s momentum, the less accurate it is possible to be about it’s position. But if we try to measure the momentum and position of something at the scale of a car we do not have the same problem. In fact, it doesn’t make much practical sense to doubt it. I think JR is working in a literary mode equivalent the sub-atomic one in physics. The effect of the reader upon the poem has to be taken into account in a truthful representation of reality. For another poet working in a mode equivalent to the macroscopic one in physics, an omniscient narrative would make more sense. Thank goodness we can be diverted by different modes. It doesn’t necessarily mean we are on the wrong track. Ray, this makes so much sense to me. I think (tho have no real clue) you're onto something, and am curious to know if JR would agree with you that she is working in the literary equivalent of the subatomic field. Or maybe, since she's interested in fractals, she's constantly oscillating between micro (down to subatomic level) and macro. Framed this way, her work seems like a wonderful, novel, experimental act of creation, and this is the impression of her work I think I'm left with. I remember now Al contrasting JR's work with the Beats, who are surely artists who 'attempt to go the whole distance.' JR's statements are true for her at the moment of writing as a kind of manifesto -- but can't be universally true, because yes! to different modes -- and not just for diversion but also for curiosity, education, joy, elucidation, inspiration, shock, pleasure, revelation, guidance, spiritual/intellectual nourishment etc.
|
|