Retallack #1: section 28 from "Western Civ Cont'd"

There's been a lot of discussion about the shape of the poem Rahana, but you pose a great question: “why is it a shape poem?” Not having seen any other pages in the book, and just going on this poem within it's own context, I'd say one purpose is just for added meaning, or possible meaning, to add to the multiplicity of meanings that the poem engenders.  Multiplicity and inclusiveness being key. Which I reckon both procedure and sampling found language amplify. And why is it a shape poem that fragments its own language – while the preface poem is written – more or less – in a metrical structure? How would you answer the question? Any one else?


      I like your notion of the “erasure” and the ignored in history, the “sheared and torn out” and your connecting it to the empty white spaces in the geography of the poem (not to mention how the words in middle section are broken off, fragmented) (and funny how “pi” stands alone as a complete fragment tho it is always incomplete, unending): maybe this is one of the purposes of the shape (whatever shape/shapes it is).


      Your relation of the breaks and lapses in DNA (and the later joining of them) to replication and to presence and absence seem especially pertinent here – and in the image of the swerve in DNA, and the notion of free will in the Lucretian swerve of atoms versus the notion that free will is illusion and we are all merely subject to genetics ( like the bees who are guided to the nectar by markings on a flower) - might all be in play here.

     Hey Vijaya, I love your “exegisis” of Z here – if only we could stop grazing in the sheep-pen maze and remove the glaze from our eyes we could raze Troy to the ground in a blaze of glory. Not crazy at all.

What is of interest to me in the second poem is the repeated pattern of human efforts to master the randomness of life and thought by creating systems of values that divide everything into definite categories. It is a spiral downward on the page and in spirit, becoming more and more depressing with the final blow being the classic division the elements of the world where all things active, light, etc., are attributed to men, while the opposite are attributed to women, a truly depressing, sexist world view. __ Lowell Murphree

The number 2 — and the out, back and out of the ‘z’ - not all images imply duality, but the 2 does just by it’s z-ness. A ‘one’ seems singular - one perspective. But the 2 or Z is like thesis, anti-thesis, new thesis from synthesis.

One funny thing about this talk about complex realism is how congruent it actually may be with the realism of the nineteenth century. Laura mentions Balzac who was a consummate writer, observer and chronicler of the human condition. His characters had a volition of their own based on their nature as they arose from the mind of the author in the act of their creation. This too may effectively be seen as a complex realism.

Another of the great ‘realists ‘ who did the same was Tolstoy, a man who held himself to the fires of his time, later spoke of all his works as a waste of time, and very much considered and was actively involved in the issues of his day on and off the pages of his fictions, which came to him I believe not beforehand as if by same pre planned mechanism but as process of thinking and writing them on the page, a conception of bringing art into being not so different from what Retallack is talking about.

Even the clever mixed fable tales of the tortoise and hare which Retallack devises and which evoke thoughts of the fabled ancient author of fables Aesop are likewise central to the ideas expounded in Tolstoys great novel War and Peace. Tolstoy was much taken to task by countless critics for mentioning this business midway in the novel, where he launches into a seemingly irrelevant to plot and character story of Achilles and the tortoise and how it’s said that Achilles cannot outrun the tortoise but only incrementally get closer, and from this metaphor Tolstoy crafts a narrative about the way he believes history itself works that is really not so different from Steins. Tolstoy seems to argue that history just happens as a somewhat organic evolving of of collective actions and really has very little to do with so called leaders. Tolstoy appears to have written the entire novel in an attempt to show what Stein effectively says in a sentence.

In another analogous way, the great nineteenth century painter Whistler ran afoul of the critics, chiefly Ruskin, for his series of nocturnes which could be seen as presaging the abstract expressionist aesthetics of the mid twentieth century.

     Are we uncertain of that??    - Jim