|
Post by Kathy Florence on Jan 7, 2023 9:10:26 GMT -5
I tried to use "quote" to respond to posts by Will B and Lou. However, when I did so, my comments were erased, and only the quotation of their full comments got posted. Perhaps this was because I inserted my comments at the top rather than at the bottom?
-Paul K.
Here is how to respond using Quote: 1. Click Quote2. Edit the post being quoted to what you want displayed 3. Type your comments below the quoted post 4. Click Create Post
|
|
|
Post by jennifer on Jan 7, 2023 9:15:19 GMT -5
How do we construct that which cannot be grasped? But perhaps that's the point. To construct that which we do not yet know, that which is the dreaming; to be open to the dream, even if only sometimes. Because how can we change everything if we keep doing only what we know? lou Yes, yes,yes. This feels good. I clicked on 'quote' while in your post, then cut, then 'post' into the next blank space in which to make a post. Good luck - it didn't work first time.
|
|
|
Post by jennifer on Jan 7, 2023 9:34:59 GMT -5
deform, distort, contort, warp means to mar or spoil by or as if by twisting. deform may imply a change of shape through stress, injury, or accident of growth. (Merriam Webster). I love the phrase 'deform the musculature of the most determined smile' - the smile that itself has deformed the smiler's face. It would have been so much less effective had Retallack used 'unform'.
|
|
Will B
ModPo student
Posts: 19
|
Post by Will B on Jan 7, 2023 10:02:26 GMT -5
Joan's reading of her poem varies from the printed version Al has given us. I've transcribed it, for whatever illumination it gives. Punctuation is based on her pauses.
To be located in memories without precedent where so many syllables have been squandered in pliant affirmation. The more non-existent of the gods are the only ones counting your blunders. Even so, hard to forget what with recklessly yearning minds and thoughts that so intricately deform the musculature of a smile. The most worthwhile thought experiment I am currently aware of is to construct a logical space-time bracket in which all the animals are sometimes dreaming.
Here I offer notes of my own thoughts, usually based on comparing the two versions. I make the assumption that the printed version is the later, current version. Maybe later I can/will attempt a focused, coherent interpretation.
Interesting change in first sentence. "To be" has been struck. Change from "so many syllables have been squandered" to "fine stock of syllables not yet squandered." More hopeful.
Insertion of "Don't be scared." She is guiding us--yet raises the specter of being scared.
Original sentence starting "Even so" seems to imply that what is hard to forget are one's blunders. The later "Hard to forget what's never been known for sure" is more enigmatic. On its own, it is a bit of a Zen koan, like the first sentence's "memories without precedent." However, if we use the original as a guide, it may suggest that our blunders may not be blunders; we don't know for sure.
Compare:
Even so, hard to forget what with recklessly yearning minds and thoughts that so intricately deform the musculature of a smile.
Hard to forget what's never been known for sure. Yearning minds conjure thoughts bound to deform the musculature of the most determined smile.
1. The first feels more personal to me. Despite the use of plural "minds and thoughts", the read-aloud version seems more as if the poet is talking to herself about her own experience. The printed version's "Yearning minds conjure thoughts bound to deform" is more clearly addressed to all of us with yearning minds (which may remain reckless, though "reckless" was struck) who cannot help but deform the musculature of a smile. This sense of address builds on the guiding tone of "Don't be scared."
2. "conjure" links forward to "dreaming."
3. "thoughts bound to deform the musculature of the most determined smile." Is this the mark of our blunder, to have deformed a smile? Have we, in our yearning (for meaning?) minds, wiped away smiles of wonder or appreciation, naivete or determined optimism? Or is our musculature deformed in the direction, not of some critique or over-seriousness, but laughter? "pliant affirmation" (clearly a negative connotation) does or does not equal "the most determined smile"?
The sometimes dreamers have been expanded from "all the animals" to "all of us--animal, mineral, vegetable." Interesting choice to alter the traditional order of what must be declared at the beginning of a round of 20 questions: animal, vegetable or mineral. To more one step away from the playful reference to the children's game?
"logical space-time bracket... dreaming." Another paradox/koan. Except, of course, logic, logos, is word; and what do poets do?
- Paul
This is really helpful and thought-provoking. Thanks, Paul.
|
|
Marti
ModPo student
Posts: 11
|
Post by Marti on Jan 7, 2023 10:07:22 GMT -5
My response to the 'sentences following' of this prose poem was that it seemed as if she were conducting her own experiment in a logical space-time bracket. Compared to the poem I read of hers before, her sentences seem to follow a more strict, formal style that felt more like instruction than relating a memory of when she was a youngster. Her bound thoughts, when younger, would interrupt her yearning mind and the determined smile would fade as other unsettling memories returned. This is what I mean when I said that she seemed to be conducting her own experiment in logical space-time bracket, she doesn't go into the mind of her child self, and remember nostalgic details such as the wind, or the warmth of the sun, or the smell of the greenerie after fresh fallen rain, at least on paper, just her realization that dreams needed to fit into a logical space-time bracket. Two sentence/line that resembled prose poetry for me were 'Located in memories without precedent' and 'The more non-existent of the gods are the only ones counting your blunders', the rest of the prose poem sounded like more like advice to anyone that wanted to follow the path she had lead. This philosophical piece, however, elicited a memory of my own, hiding anything I wrote in fear it being found.
|
|
|
Post by afilreis on Jan 7, 2023 10:34:17 GMT -5
How do we construct that which cannot be grasped? But perhaps that's the point. To construct that which we do not yet know, that which is the dreaming; to be open to the dream, even if only sometimes. Because how can we change everything if we keep doing only what we know? lou Yes, yes,yes. This feels good. I clicked on 'quote' while in your post, then cut, then 'post' into the next blank space in which to make a post. Good luck - it didn't work first time.
Lou asks such a good Retallatckesque question here!
|
|
|
Post by Alan Toltzis on Jan 7, 2023 13:59:45 GMT -5
As for Al’s question about whether or not this is a poem, it feels closest to me to being a theory that offers a proposal for where poems come from. They are birthed in a unique area of the brain where there are “memories without precedent.” There’s plenty of syllables to choose from there but they too are unique as they have never been wasted on “pliant affirmation.” JR has room for one kind of poetry: unique and never wishy-washy. It’s odd to me that the place where poems are birthed has memories we can’t possibly remember and sounds never uttered, at least not in a submissive sort of way. I don’t know what makes this a poem and not more of an intro to a philosophical notion or scientific theory on how poetry comes about that seems interesting but unsupported.
|
|
|
Post by vijaya on Jan 7, 2023 15:08:05 GMT -5
Philosophical prose like this is certainly poetic, in the sense of distillation of complex ideas into succinct images. There’s so much contained in “Hard to forget what’s never been known for sure,” for example. I think the poem can engage the reader in a way that the essay doesn’t. The essay makes a case, whereas the poem invites the reader to explore the situation. In this poem, Retallack invites us to conduct a thought experiment (she doesn’t demand it or say it’s the only or right way—she just says it’s the only worthwhile one she currently knows about). And that invitation is consistent with her claim elsewhere (writing about essays) that experiments like this bring the writer and reader together. A lot of philosophical prose, on the other hand, aims to draw lines in the sand that separate believers from nonbelievers. Inquiring minds want to know, and the thoughts produced by yearning to know can generate consternation and erode even the smuggest, most “knowing” smiles of the official knowers. What might those thoughts look like (the thought experiment asks) if we and everything around us occasionally lapsed into dreaming? I wondered how I might even go about constructing anything logical under illogical conditions (dreaming minerals?). Is this even possible? I’ll never know until I try, I think she says, and few of us have the courage even to try. Does the title ("None Too Soon") suggest that the need to undertake this experiment (or one like it) is especially timely? Or urge us to do so before it’s too late? Can we ever know for sure? I don’t have good answers to any of these. [For me, it’s nearly impossible not to read this poem in the context of having recently viewed the PoemTalk on JR’s The Poethical Wager. Here, especially, “Radical unknowability is the only constant.” But we still need to muster the courage “to forge on, to launch our hopes into the unknown—the future—by engaging positively with otherness and unintelligibility.”] Will, you have said what I thought of 'yearning minds' so well. I had not connected dreaming with yearning but then poets who engage with the world around them with their Imagination are dreamers. We are losing the ability to dream because we are force-fed easily palatable pieces of information in the form of popular culture or different ideologies to lull us into a kind of passive living.
|
|
|
Post by kymminbarcelona on Jan 7, 2023 15:50:18 GMT -5
"The more non-existent of the gods are the only ones counting your blunders." This sentence speaks to me, personally, and in doing so among the sentences that surround it (and I love each of them separately, and as they play off of each other) it makes the paragraph become a poem. At least that is what poetry means to me. A "poem" that rhymes but doesn't speak to me at all, is just a bunch of rhyming sentences. And why not philosophy in poetry? Emily D??? Honestly, I could spend the entire SloPo just sitting here thinking about that one phrase. And when I think I've thought it all out, I can go back to the whole poem and think about it again within that context.
|
|
|
Post by Jason Luz on Jan 7, 2023 17:29:36 GMT -5
The sentences somehow sound so calmly convincing and reassuring, that I can’t help but give my own pliant assent and affirmation. And only on closer reading do I begin to notice how gnomic these lines are. The way they seem to unbraid themselves. A memory withour precedent--Is that a planted memory or is it questioning the fixity of memory and thought itself, from one moment to the next and to the next and even now. And what is a sentence if not a fine stock of syllables plied to some statement, or maybe this is gesturing to the rollicking syllables of Stein’s continuous present. This is definitely poetry as philosophical proposition, the way all poems—at least the most stridently open ones—are interrogative, both phenomenologically and ontologically.
Those yearning minds and their thoughts unnerving those confident smiles—those thoughts must be splinters swerved! And what does a mind do but yearn, desiring, thinking, dreaming, as if that were the essence of time: desire. None too soon—as if to say Just in time. In time and of time. We are just the precipitates of spacetime. So the only worthwhile thought experiment is maybe something like Stevens’ Supreme Fiction—trying to yoke the world of our desires and our syllabics to the embodied a posteori world—perhaps the geometries that encircle or warp our own geometries of attention. What we see/say when we see/say how we see/say. The thickness of describing.
|
|
|
Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 7, 2023 19:30:39 GMT -5
For a start I think I will just try to make a first response to Al’s questions without reading any of the other comments. After all, the poem says not to be afraid!
1. It’s as if each sentence follows the one preceding it none too soon. One expects one sentence to follow one from another in a linked train of thought. It’s like, yes I have said this, but you need to hear this as well. And then this. The poem seems to be going through the same process of deciding what to say as the one she “conjures” for the reader.
2. I take the thought experiments to be thinking about what to do, or to say, or to think. A meditation if you will. A means of making a decision about these things. How do you avoid making a mistake and how long should you hesitate about it.
3. To yearn is to be bound to disappointment. You will never know anything for sure but you cannot help trying to know. It’s described as a yearning as in an impulse that is built into you as an instinct in the same way that your musculature determines how you smile.
4. Maybe what is prosey about this poem is the way it poses or brackets a philosophical problem. It sort of lays out the problem like a mathematical construct - a bracketing of a space-time hypothetical. But it poetically uses different exposures like a photographer would in both over and under exposing in different views so that the desired exposure is obtained. And I suppose that would be the dream. And there is no need to be “afraid” because nothing you do can happen too soon and everything you do will be just in time
|
|
|
Post by Barry Moffatt on Jan 7, 2023 21:26:19 GMT -5
What sort of 'thought experiment' is Joan Retallack proposing with 'None Too Soon'? Al's question, not mine! I read it as suggestions for 'making it new' as Ezra Pound said it. We yearn to be original in some sense, here with writing, but perhaps elsewhere too. We have the basic stuff and shouldn't be 'scared' of our thoughts: those who count our 'blunders' have little to offer themselves, almost 'non-existent' as they are. The world's a cloud of uncertainties, there is room for more, even if they disrupt the knowing 'smiles' of those who always know better. And, perhaps a surprise, what 'thought experiment' is 'worthwhile'? For Retallack it is to build a natural room in a cloud of dreams. It is there that we may construct thoughts not worth 'squandering'.
|
|
Ross
ModPo student
Posts: 5
|
Post by Ross on Jan 8, 2023 0:59:29 GMT -5
The sentences in None Too Soon give me a greater sense than most poems that the poet is trying to make a point; that the purpose of the poem is to express an idea or make an argument. But I would consider it poetic nonetheless, because the order of the sentences and the language choices are crafted carefully, with nuance, and are open to interpretation.
I connect with this poem, because my interpretation is that it comments on how our language, emotions, and thoughts have been, at least to a great degree, captured and cheapened by a materialist, advertising-dominated culture. This culture is represented by the pliant affirmation and the determined smile. So often, the language that makes us nostalgic, makes us cry, makes us proud, is all manufactured, coaxed, and manipulated. Whether the problem is our political divisions or various elements of our social fracturing, the core problem is one of language. We simply don't have the words (and thus the thoughts) to solve things.
But the poem is not entirely pessimistic, because somewhere, located in dreams and memories without precedent, there is hope. There is power in the fact that thoughts can deform, and that there remains a stock of syllables not yet squandered.
In calling to memories without precedent, the poem alludes to a Jungian-like collective unconscious, almost as if there answers (or at least value) to be found in connecting to forgotten languages and human experience though dreams. So I think this poem is advocating those who sense this problem (the yearning minds) to dream of new language that can construct a new intellectual and linguistic musculature.
The most puzzling yet interesting part of the poem is the suggestion that minerals, vegetables, and all animals might participate in this thought experiment. It's possible the poet is suggesting something fairly radical: that there is value not only in the forgotten language and experience of humans (the memories without precedent) but in yearning to grasp (and dream) about how plants, rocks, and other animals communicate and perceive the world. I could be entirely off-base on that part, but it's fun to think about.
Ross D'Emanuele
|
|
|
Post by cat mccredie on Jan 8, 2023 8:17:24 GMT -5
Ok, I'm tackling this one. The idea of a finite resource of syllables that could be squandered brings to mind Macbeth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time
This links to the sense of ending that the None too Soon title conjures. I'm also thinking of the way Western Civ has used up finite resources and is on this kind of doomed trajectory.
The 'smile' also feels Shakespearean, 'there's daggers in men's smiles', 'one may smile and smile and be a villain'.
***
I feel troubled by Retallack's 'thought experiment'. The Dreaming is the term in English most commonly used now to describe certain Aboriginal cosmologies en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreaming. This concept used to be known as the Dreamtime, but that term became so loaded with racist preconceptions and ignorance that it has become virtually unusable.
Almost all Indigenous cosmologies throughout the world are animist. Retallack seems to me to be proposing a 'sometimes' animist 'thought experiment' as though this has no reference to anything outside an amusing academic context. It's unclear to me whether or not she is using the term 'dreaming' deliberately, but either way it doesn't sit well with me. Maybe I am channeling one of the more non-existent gods.
|
|
|
Post by afilreis on Jan 8, 2023 8:25:31 GMT -5
In “None Too Soon,” what sort of concept of memory can be discerned from this: “Located in memories without precedent, fine stock of syllabus not yet squandered in pliant affirmation”? And this: “Hard to forget what’s never been known for sure.”
|
|