Cosmopoetica

[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.

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[wow, this post got mangled somehow. I've fixed it. I think.]

I’m convinced that the variety of contemporary poetry scenes and the poems that emerge from them provide clear evidence that poetry is not only alive and well, but more vital than ever thanks to blogs and other forms of powerful personal publishing and social networks allowing poets to discover and connect with one another in ways a generation before couldn’t even dream of.

Despite the diversity, my own tastes remain largely mainstream. I can’t find a way in to many “post-avant” poems, which partially explains why I used to feel cheated by them. When I considered how *I* might write such poems, the best I could come up with was an intuitive assemblage, riffing on words, navigating by connotation alone. At worst I imagined these poems as the hermetic products of a wholly personal randomness, words unworked, their authors stopping at the point of “it means to me,” while I see the work of poetry as fashioning the gift– that can only be a gift if it can be given away, and that must begin wth the author giving that gift to me.

There’s an essential selfishness in my own assumptions. If I don’t understand a poem, eventually I start thinking of it as a sham, a ruse, a trick, rather than suppose the existence of a poetry I just don’t get. But if I accept that the atonal (relative to tradition) music of an avant garde jazz musician has something more behind and in it than the similar sounds made by a beginning saxophone player as I once was, even if I enjoy listening to it about as much, and even if the exact nature of the difference between the two is unclear and to some extent a matter of faith, then it’s not just charitable but more sensible– and perhaps obligatory– to assume that the lack of art I perceive lies not in the maker by in myself.

But how to find that way in? Surely everyone– except William Logan and a similar embittered few who have given in to the slight, reductive comforts of the committed curmudgeon– would rather discover the power of a piece of art than revel in (or resent) its ineffectiveness. I’m eager to find my way to the work, and willing to put my shoulder into doing so, but I don’t have the vocabulary or a handhold among the fundamentals of enough strength to pull myself along. Much of the poetry that continues to mystify me is made of the same materials as the poems I enjoy, but formed in some mysterious forge into an inexplicable stuff so other to me that my reading of it becomes like sustained reading in a foreign language without the benefit of a teacher, bilingual friend or Rosetta stone. a fraction of beautiful music might emerge occasionally from my interpretive butchery, but not enough…

Maybe I should get it and don’t, end of story. But I can’t help wishing I had some help. I clearly recognize the danger posed by thoughtless education and anthologizing, and the damage that can occur when a work of art is reduced to an object lesson, a few surface levels illuminated and the rest ignored until it’s frozen forever into the shape of a popularized, received reading serving as a cultural artifact (Frost anyone?). But someone who loves a poem can share something of that love without smothering either. That nothing approaching the whole, rich existence of a piece can’t be explicated for someone else doesn’t necessarily devalue what can be communicated. If anything it *heightens* the value of the small fraction that can be shared because of its rarity and it creates a currency the new reader can mine from poem to build creations of their own, be they in the shape of reading or writing or both.

Where are the teachers? To whom does a beginner bring his beginner’s mind to learn this new language? Many of the post-avant artists– exhibiting a trait of the avant-garde– are clear about, and take rightful pride in, the value of their part in creating something new and transformative. A significant part of that value derives from how (and how much) their work breaks with inherited conventions and where their work can be located on some mythical map of the poetry cosmos.

This means I need a lot more help finding my way inside the poetry of Bruce Smith and Clark Coolidge than I do Philip Levine or Jack Gilbert. I’ve plenty of handle on Charles Simic, but Jack Spicer remains somewhere beyond enigmatic. I need fewer people telling me who their poetic opposition is and what these new poetries aren’t, and don’t desire to do, and more willing to show me something of what they choose to do and what they are. The negative space around these poetries– whether a product of indifference or hostility or inattention– yields a poem’s position without definition, locates its body in a general relation to poems I understand without providing any clarity about what it is.

I know much can’t be taught. Some things that can be taught arguably shouldn’t be. And some things that can’t shouldn’t be attempted lest the poem end up as dead as Twain’s vivisected frog. But that leaves a lot of room for those who possess the gift of new poetry to give the gift of others in return. One of the greatest things about art is that appreciation, aesthetics and enjoyment are part of an economy of abundance without meaningful counterfeiting. Giving our gifts away increases the gifts we possess.

I dream too of a dream anthology with a true selection from the contemporary scene, even as a I recognize that by definition such an anthology could never be truly contemporaneous. I can go to any library or bookstore and find numerous examples of anthologies of mainstream works up to the present day, but scouring the web with my best Google-fu comes to nothing. For the initiated, the web of poetry blogs and innovative publications is a vast anthology, but for the uninitiated it’s a bewildering array objects trapped behind the clearest glass.

Years ago I asked Ron Silliman what he thought should be in a dream anthology of the post-avant and friends, one from which wandering fools like myself could read and from the knowing be taught. He responded quickly that it was an interesting idea he would have to think about. I guess he’s still thinking. I’m certainly still waiting.

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Jared asks:

“Is modern poetry so concerned with meaning that form is seen as trimmings?”

The irony is that one of the more vital strands of living poetry is the “post-avant” which–to the extent anything can be said about such a diverse group–veers even more sharply away from meaning in the sense of denotation, narrative and story (I gnawed with my poetry teeth on John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean which remains a stellar introduction to poetry and a foray into what most post-avant poetry is not. Whatever the post-avant is, Cummings and the imagists are certainly involved as early participants and influencers. I don’t even know how to read a good portion of the poetry coming out of that assemblage…and I really have tried. I’ve just not been very luck that way. So far.

But sometimes I come across something that resonates as strongly with me as the best poetry from the mainstream (or, as some on the post-avant “side” like to call it “The School of Quietude” (SoQ).

For instance, a few snippets of Lance Phillips that I blogged about some time ago (in fact, back when I was reading hard, trying to “get” some post-avant poetry):

The acts   I’ve immediate acts
Cloud full with hand then mouth’s
a lightning of mercury   of hair’s memorable lust

–from “Portion’s sweetest root”

and

Secularist, am says head
says diagram from I
bulks poppy

–from ”The how”

There’s all manner of fascinating (and sometimes incomprehensible) stuff grouped together under the rubric of the post-avant. Most who live and work in that space appear to consider the work of a poet like Cummings to be as naive as the readers who cite Cummings’ poetry as an example of a concrete and visual poetry given the number of changes since then. The diversity of the post-avant can be found in the work of individual poets like Tony Tost, who has published in all the right post avant places (Jacket, Fence, Coconut) and who I sometimes don’t understand at all, but who writes powerful poems, including a poem I’ve never been able to get out of my head:

“Swans of Local Waters”

Their color is not a product of the water’s
depth; their quiet is not the lake’s. These
are accidents floating in simple water,
taking in nature calmly, in little sips; actions
which, like literal swans and lakes, are
sometimes scattered. What the swans look
like: white, with feathers. It’s getting cold.
Someone has made a fire. A flame’s identity
depends upon what it burns — identity is
like a swan for it comes and goes as it pleases.

I don’t know how to talk about my father,
so I am going to describe the lake: it’s blue,
with swans. I can film it. There’s still a fire
by the lake. The swans are safe in the water.
It’s getting cold. Almost dark. I have a list
of things that get more definite at night.

1) The shape of fire.
2)

–from Invisible Bride

(not-so-incidentally, if you scroll to the second full comment on this post by Ron Silliman, you can read an assessment of the whole SoQ/post-avant friction that I’m only now coming to fully appreciate).

But I want to come back to Cummings. Jared notes the darkness in “maggie, molly, milly and may” and asks:

…what is the “horrible thing / which raced sideways while blowing bubbles?”

In some tangled way deep in my aesthetic nether regions, Cummings description invokes something of the same horror–and I use that word deliberately and without overstating the case–that I feel when I read Eliot’s:

ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Cummings could indeed mix the morose and the joyful, though my favorite Cummings poems are unambiguous and don’t perform much of that mixing:

“Buffalo Bill’s”

Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus

he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

And, of course, we can’t forget poor Olaf, glad and big…

Finally, Cummings could write heart-breakingly beautiful poems… I almost suspect he wrote a few of these just to show he could, to lay a few emotional cards on the table. I’ve performed three wedding ceremonies in my life–including marrying my ex-wife to her second husband–but the most exciting was my friend Sean’s wedding, because I not only wrote a complete custom ceremony that managed to please all the various religious and non-religious and bleeding-blue police and mystical-hippy factions, but in which I included the most beautiful poem Cummings wrote: “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond.”

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