[CC image by Hljod.Huskona]
So that’s what the post-avant poets are doing—engaging in “cognitive poetics?” If, as I do on good days, those poets are being intellectually honest, then Travis Nichols’ article makes sense. An excerpt:
Memory–and the wonder and terror it inspires–has generated great poems from Simonides, famous for eulogizing ancient Greek nobility, to Coleridge, who longed for his faraway friends in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," to the contemporary poets writing an "experiment in collective autobiography," The Grand Piano. These poets–Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout,Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman among them–have spent their careers using poetry to prod the brain in other areas besides just the comfortable spot where (to paraphrase Wordsworth) emotion is recollected in tranquility.
Poetry in this tradition–one that is less interested in telling stories and more interested in exploring how story-language works–attempts to make the emotion present in the reading experience. Tranquility can come later. They’re not re-telling memories in a poem (like the memory recounted in William Stafford’s much-anthologized "Traveling Through the Dark"), but rather using word combinations, sound patterns, and different types of sentences to engage a reader’s brain while he or she is reading (Bernadette Mayer‘s writing is a great example of this kind of thing). To varying degrees, these poets have delved into what literary critic Reuven Tsur has called Cognitive Poetics, a field of study that has taken "reader-response" theory to a whole other level.
Sadly, the “messy failures that achieve nothing at all besides piles of linguistic gobbeldy-goo” (as Travis puts it) seem to be the rule, not the exception… and they wear me down quickly.
Yeah, but the desire to create art that “attempts to make the emotion present in the reading experience” is a respectable one, I think, but again summons up comparisons with best possible experiences with abstract or nonrepresentational visual art. This comparison is one I’ve made many times, and yet am still somewhat reluctant to embrace it wholeheartedly in poetry.
I wonder why Mr. Nichols assumes that “Traveling Through the Dark” recounts an actual memory. And I wonder why he misrepresents Wordsworth (with his sneering use of “tranquility”), whose definition of poetry had nothing to do with “telling stories”; Wordsworth claimed that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquillity.” Emotions, not “memories” and not “stories.” The fact is that all poetry is cognitive. The question is whether or not it’s boring. Silliman & Co. are mostly awfully boring.
Joseph– you predicted my own response. All poetry is cognitive… and traditional and mainstream poetry already attempt to make the emotion present in the reading experience, regardless of the level of abstraction. And I’m with you: most post-avant poetry fails miserably on this very score.