James Midgley on poetry and prayer
The poem, its language, is a prayer to a God of language. It is not, in fact, a letter at all: the letter may lie there, inert, un-invoked. The poem exists only in the act of invocation (which does not mean that it depends upon its readership) and, thus, convocation. The editor here asks that the poet consider whether his work can hold up under the scrutiny of God, which is to say, beware your linguistic sins. Just as the physical sins of the prayer may differ according to faith, location, etc, so will these linguistic sins. Again they are inextricably tied to landscape, to the poem’s way of gathering, and are decided upon by the interplay of languages that make up that landscape. This is a matter of connotation and allusion, by which the textual landscapes summon their readers, and are also summoned to one another. The manners of gathering that are innate to each landscape will be different, often only very slightly, but with the result that, gathered as they are, they overlap, and the poem’s own landscape must appease or else oppose them. The opposition might be called “originality”, and has something akin to Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence; and we might locate the will to appease in the advice given to new writers that they should imitate their predecessors.
*
from ‘déclaration/declaration’, one of Jee Leong Koh‘s many beautiful ghazals
Enclosed in the unstamped envelope of my skin
a seven-page essay typed last night on your skin.
*
Meet the Facebook poets
*
Gary Lehmann on the self in poetry
The act of writing poetry can be as personal as the poet wants to make it, but the act of sharing poetry with others involves reaching out to our shared heritage of emotions and experiences. That green farmland is where poetry grows, not the rarified oxygen-starved high mountain air of the summits of individuality.
Thank you to Rohith for sending me this link!
*
from a prose poem by Sarah Gambito
I had a canoe that took me into the forest I read about. It was fleet and I asked no questions. I saw the careless embroidery of the sky above me. I was small. I was embracing.
*
Christopher James on poetic collisions
Poetry is a search for the new: new ways of looking at things; new places in the mind no one has been to before. There’s a place for the mundane, but only when it’s offset by the extraordinary. The ear needs to be startled in the same way as the eye and the mind. Look at this line from Ian Duhig’s remarkable poem, “The Lammas Hireling”:
“Stark naked but for the fox-trap biting his ankle”
The line is as jagged as the trap itself, riddled with sharp ‘k’ sounds, while the shock comes from the fox-trap completing the image. The mind, eye and ear are expecting an item of clothing as the pay-off, not a gruesome lump of serrated metal. The surprise is doubled, then compounded, by the “biting” – whether intended or not, the image is a fox sinking its teeth into the tender flesh of the ankle. Different elements collide to create a startling and new image. Later in the same poem, we encounter another collision:
“His eyes rose like bread”
*
Sandra Beasley on online journals
The notion that Web-based journals are easily launched-and are therefore easily abandoned-is central to the reservations of many writers. No one wants her poem or story to be corrupted by spam or broken links. And we’ve all heard horror stories about a journal that has simply disappeared-and all of its content with it. But is it really any different from a print magazine that folds, leaving all its copies to molder in someone’s garage?
*
Catman
Click on the image to go to the artist's gallery.
I read James’ essay, “Poetry and Prayer,” on dA and frankly I found the entire thing to be a gigantic logical stretch, the sort of profound, academic, romantic thing poets just swoon over and drown in.
It was a good essay, though, I’ll say that. I can separate my opinion of the content from a piece’s objective merit.
Talk about poetry or beat your head against a wall, what’s the difference? Maybe if I hit it in just such a way no one’s hit it before, I’ll break through. Is that it? Leave the hypotheses and the observations to science. Art is for making, not bludgeoning and sterilizing. That’s as much as I’ll dare tete-a-tete with the wall.
@ Lane
Romantic, possibly. But I don’t think it’s a stretch. He argues his point very well.
And if the theoretical stuff isn’t appealing, there’s the slightly reductive, but practical idea of answering to a linguistic God.
@ Jon
I disagree.
Art and science are interchangeable now. Probably, always have been. Structures, theories, practice, language, technology, ideas are all fluid. Shapeshifting. Hence, a superficial binary (divisions, whatizits) may not exist. If we can listen to an electron’s tenor (we did a few weeks ago) then the difference has almost, but, dissolved.
Very intriguing post. Slightly unrelated to this is a little anecdote. Ruth Stone once said that her poems would “come” to her from a space far beyond her being – The Universe, The Greater Beyond, God (?). As a girl she would chase after whatevers in the fields and something would strike her from the skies. One inhabited by a God outside. She would then get a poem. Sometimes, even backwards. Because she’d spent too much time and it had flown through her body (and soul). And she would chase after these poems when they passed through her, she’d hold them by the tail and pull them towards herself. She ended up writing the whole poem end to beginning!
I don’t quite know if I am right but it almost seems like the reverse of offering a poem as a prayer, this process of hers. As though the prayer came to her as a poem.
I agree to the extent that art may be approached scientifically and science may be conducted artfully. I don’t think they’re strictly interchangeable because one is a give, the other a take. Art is about creating, externalizing. Science is about understanding creation, internalizing.
It’s all well and good to observe it in life and in action–for clarity’s sake, I should earlier have said extensive hypotheses and observations–but at some point it becomes dissection. At that point I lose interest. Too much microscope, not enough panorama. To each his own.
The science I am exposed to is as much about creation as it’s observation. (Cell engineering, e.g.). Some people we know of have designed a cartoon strip of their experiment cultivating bacteria that function as a kidney (part of the stem cell research group in Japan featured on TED). So, now even “pop-art” is a part and parcel of the riff-raff tap. In fact, in my limited understanding of it, most science is roughly some percentage sharing between creating and observing? Not necessarily in any particular order. Poetry for me, (and mine), is about observation mostly. So, like I said. It changes shape frequently. Tractatus LP, for instance, invokes the whole linguistic expression can be seen as a form of geometric projection spiel. Interchangeable again.
Science does dissect minutely but so does deliciously intense literature. Niether science nor art considers the general and the specific to be mutually exclusive. Mostly.
A crummy example would be the much drummed difference between anthrolopology and psychology. Very rare do anthrolopologists buy psycho-analysis. It makes their discipline inconvenient. They take the same dimensions but create a different kind of object. (Or take the same object but trace it to different dimensions. Heh!)
Okie. I will not spam the good poet’s lovely blog nomore.
I say Rap above science and art.
anthropologists* (Drunk, drunk me!)
Hm, I guess what I mean is science isn’t a medium. But you’re right, it does encompass engineering, which is. Beyond that there are the printed test tube kidneys, the robotic flies, the cheetah foot prosthetics, etc. That’s where I’d stop calling it an interchange and start calling it a meeting, even a procreation of media into something previously unknown or at least vastly unexplored. (Which is hugely exciting, whatever name it has when we smell it.)
Also I mean dissecting the artistic process, and (not exactly on point but also) the sort of criticism which is all glare and scalpel, no style or art of its own. It would be ludicrous to say poetry should not observe.
*a medium for expression, I should say. Also, yes! Rap.
On art and science: There is an obvious analogy between the two to a certain extent, e.g. in the way both are carried out (as Scherezade asserted), but to suggest that they are one and the same or “interchangeable” is absurd. I’m not asserting the dominance or importance of one over the other, nor am I implying that they are entirely unrelated; I am merely warning that all those metaphors and poetic devices may be getting to you.
For any poet, his work is at once extremely personal yet public. The very art of writing, be it poetry or fiction, goes on to elucidate the seed of a writer’s thought. It is an avenue of expression, which every person on the planet requires. Some do it with music, some with art while many by the mundane (picking a color for the walls of the house, choosing of curios or even by the act of arranging their furniture). A poet does it with words and its effect is very immediate – people can read, understand and then discuss about the meaning behind it.
The strength of the debate is based entirely on the distance that the poet maintains from his readers. For example, the work of Charles Bukowski is more literal and visceral while a Charles Wright is a little more reserved and open to some interpretation. Both the poets appear to the reader, but the distance of this vision is determined by the verse.
But there is no denying that poetry is as personal as it gets. A Gregory Orr writes because of the cathartic experience it evokes in him and some of the writings of Plath mirrored her state of emotional turmoil during the latter part of her life. Poetry is a celebration of living, a way of sharing experiences that are universal and reaching out to others in the hopes that even if you cannot plumb to the bottom of your heart, perhaps you can unclog that tiny drain in the heart of the other.
Thanks for all the discussion, and keep it going, if you can.
@ Scherezade
You are incapable of spam.
@ Jon
I will stay out of the art/science debate, but I’m still curious about your dislike for criticism/theory. The word “dissecting” reflects that — it’s an unpleasant word and suggests that what will be revealed after the dissection is a pile of guts. Not pretty at all.
But you can’t really dissect the artistic process. Few have attempted to do so. However, explorations of it do exist, and often they’re quite revelatory. I’ve read a couple of personal essays on creative processes for MFA/MA theses.
What is the sort of criticism that is all glare and scalpel with no style or art of its own? I know it’s out there, but I need an example.
Right, then. Criticism is not the peeling of an onion until there are no layers left. Because, you see, the layers are the onion. Once all the layers are gone, there is no onion. This atomization of literary output results in very little tangible benefit, because most of what comes out cannot be replicated, and in most cases, is not even tangible enough to replicate. This deconstruction of creative process seems to be little more than a self-indulgent waste of time perpetrated by academics with a grant to earn and burn.
At this point, I should probably apologize for my strong position, since it’s out of sync with the tone of the remaining comments. I should also add that I found James’s essay tedious and quite pompous.
A note on the art of science, though: Original scientific endeavour is a process that is rife with creativity. It is the process of extremely inventive and selective destruction with an aim to study what remains, in order to design equally inventive construction towards a productive goal. Speaking of dissection, a scientific study can observe start and end, but never the process. At best, one can identify checkpoints in a process, but the actual process itself is left to conjecture, and theories that present a picture that is consistent with what has been observed.
It is very similar with art as well. All you can do is observe checkpoints. The difficult part is assigning process to something that has no fixed path. It is not productive to do so, either, for it would result in templatization of creativity, at which point it would negate the very concept of creativity, which is to expand the scope of behaviours beyond the template.
It is probably also wise to add here that my ideas are considered to be ‘hack theories’ by some, so I hope you have a salt dispenser handy.
interesting discussion and blog! i hope you don’t mind me sticking my oar in. =) i guess it seems to me the non-creative criticism vs creative scientific analysis might come about from a lack of familiarity with criticism in general, not to say i’m an expert or anything. that dissection of artistic processes is a part of criticism, sure, but at this point artistic, cultural, philosophical, and linguistic areas of study have become so much part of the same thing that inquiry into one of them crosses various boundaries and is difficult to pin down. for me criticism at its best is very much creative—many of the best pieces are as rewarding to me as a good story might be for someone else. what i look for is a chance to see things a little differently. just pulling apart a bit of writing to see how it ticks is hardly the stuff of really good criticism anyway, and doesn’t really seem to be what’s going on in the links (to me, at least). maybe there’s a bit of it in the lehmann article but i have to say i think i enjoyed that one most—i’m always a sucker for personal viewpoints. so, different strokes…
Hi George,
Welcome to my blog. : )
“for me criticism at its best is very much creative—many of the best pieces are as rewarding to me as a good story might be for someone else. what i look for is a chance to see things a little differently.”
I think those are pretty good criteria for criticism/theory, although we may differ on what is creative or what allows us to see things differently.
“I should also add that I found James’s essay tedious and quite pompous.”
Heavens, that’s strong.
In other news that “catman” thing is pretty cool.
Haha, that’s Sumant for you.
I love that picture. Sometimes you can find really spectacular things on the DD page.
I am niether of science nor of art but of filo-fishy – the social equaivalent of hand grenades. (We are *taught* to see things as interachangeable.)
I stick to my original blah blah.