tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post3569976002787322357..comments2023-12-04T09:59:55.778-08:00Comments on the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica: Dorothea Lasky’s ProjectSteven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-10516977537074811682010-07-28T13:55:51.510-07:002010-07-28T13:55:51.510-07:00steve--
great post, i like what you're doing ...steve--<br /><br />great post, i like what you're doing here, i agree with much of what you say about projects and the value of them... just checked out david jones' anathemata -- talk about a project -- can't wait to dig in.<br /><br />please backchannel to me and i'd be happy to get you my own title on sardines press, as well as current issues of kadar koli and habenicht press stuff. cheers.<br /><br />dhadbawnik@gmail.comD Hadbawnikhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15888169593780246502noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-73620643669487235742010-07-28T07:45:21.740-07:002010-07-28T07:45:21.740-07:00steven
great post. i've recently picked up an...steven<br /><br />great post. i've recently picked up anathemata by david jones and can't wait to dig in. talk about a project!<br /><br />any project can become stale if there's no flexibility, creativity, willingness to deviate as you go along... the anonymous project that lasky describes just sounds like ekphrasis with no real plan. no surprise it turned out badly.<br /><br /><br />the bottom line is that no project, lack of project, adherence to this or that 'ism' can save you from the disease of simply not being a good poet!D Hadbawnikhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15888169593780246502noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-14008794792856213772010-07-24T10:39:59.251-07:002010-07-24T10:39:59.251-07:00Curtis,
Voice is a vexed thing I suppose, but I k...Curtis,<br /><br />Voice is a vexed thing I suppose, but I know the exact moment when I started to write in my voice, and it was a discovery. I don't know whether it's constructed or not, but it is the sound i hear speaking when I write poetry, and my best poetry is in that voice. I'm a novelist too, but my experience with voice in fiction is a little different. I know artists have different experiences of themselves, different explanations, and also different agendas (not in a negative sense). The problem would be insisting that what is an individual experience is universal, or necessary. I think there are purposes and strategies, and aside from voice, as an artist you challenge and destroy and alter, engage with tradition, to make a space for yourself. Now, that procedure is much criticized as being romantic and bourgeois etc to the extant that involves a belief in a true entity called the self, the voice. That stance is useful as a way of challenging convention, but the challenge is ongoing, and art is a moving target. I guess i half agree with you. And the paradox of self or the paradoxes of consciousness, provoke and fuel the process of creation. It should not be mere ego and navel gazing, and the constant bleat of 'me, mine, my and I' can be infantile and infuriating. Still, we live in an time of extreme alienation and lack of individuality. I would like there to be a genuine 'we' that 'I' can speak of, and i want to know and be known. The self has been thoroughly deconstructed, and it's still there. i like your post by the by, and like Dorothea Lasky too. She read in Ithaca and I was fortunate to see her. I felt she was challenging in a powerful way avant-garde conventions. she's unafraid of lyrical beauty, of invoking god, of passion. she's also funny as hell. thanks for replying to my reply.Jonhttp://lastbender,comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-64357135571043906942010-07-23T06:56:52.395-07:002010-07-23T06:56:52.395-07:00Jon:
This is kind of a paradox.
When I was at Io...Jon:<br /><br />This is kind of a paradox.<br /><br />When I was at Iowa, I complained often to Marvin Bell that my chief difficulty as an aspiring poet was in finding (constructing) a voice, a characteristic, familiar "sound" or style through which I could define myself.<br /><br />He would respond, "Look, that's just a by-product of the struggle to make poems that work. You can't avoid sounding like yourself. You may even start out in slavish imitation, but eventually you can't help but create a unique style, so don't worry about it." <br /><br />Of course, when I wrote poems of the kind that Bell liked, he'd say I was "finding my voice" but when I wrote other kinds he'd say I was getting distracted, off the track.Curtis Favillehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06213075853354387634noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-60552779829760571352010-07-22T10:42:13.890-07:002010-07-22T10:42:13.890-07:00Lasky is trying to differentiate herself from '...Lasky is trying to differentiate herself from 'post-avant' or Language Poetry without being buttonholed as 'conservative' (politically conservative). The experimental wing of american poetry is now institutionalized and dogmatic, so every poet bored by these now old-fashioned projects is faced with the same difficulties. I would rather find a person in a poem than a theory or a philosophy, much less an ideology or a politics. In finding a person I may encounter all of these, but I want to hear a voice, not an argument that a voice does not exist, etc.jonhttp://lastbender.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-7341822887764826172010-07-21T11:46:04.228-07:002010-07-21T11:46:04.228-07:00The relation between the subject-matter of a poem,...The relation between the subject-matter of a poem, its form, and how we respond to that combination, is what constitutes the poetic experience. The intersection of these three things involves the appropriation of some kind of structure--<br /><br />structure of the medium--page, recording, etc.<br /><br />structure of the language--grammar, word-choice<br /><br />structure of the context--private experience, audience, culture, temporality<br /><br />Assigning an artificial form, a priori, to a given experience, severely limits the degree of appropriation of the poet's intimate reaction to and apprehension of that experience, through the form.<br /><br />This is why The Alphabet and Progress seem so constrained and limiting in their application. They're worse than sonnet-sequences, in this respect. Everything the form can say is accomplished within a couple of pages. Because the mediation between form and content has been set aside, in favor of a formula. That formula can be verified--proven, replicated--but it has no flexibility. The law of unintended consequences is denied.Curtis Favillehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06213075853354387634noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-86988769759322549562010-07-21T10:42:47.692-07:002010-07-21T10:42:47.692-07:00I've always had the same problem with the Lang...I've always had the same problem with the Language poets, but haven't the mental acuity or, perhaps, intellectualism to identify where they bother me. Curtis' comment comes very close to the mark. If I don't have some kind of emotional / cognitive response, it is like observing a building which architects say is very significant but for whatever reason, I have no gut level reaction to it. I guess that I assume that it's the architects/poets responsibility to try to communicate on the gut level rather than the intellectual level. Not to say that the form of the poem isn't important, but more important than the form is the meaning. <br /><br />For example, Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" has a lot of philosophical implications related to Nietzsche, modern ethics, and so on. Yet it would not be the great novel that it is if its narrative suspense and intensity were absent. It is the combination of all these elements that make it a great novel. Likewise, poetry that tries through structural and poetic theory to communicate to a narrow intellectual group doesn't appeal to me, though it may be "great poetry" it is lacking what I enjoy in poetry.xenopoetahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02445979562956581155noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-2566570152645131172010-07-21T05:45:01.601-07:002010-07-21T05:45:01.601-07:00You are so very right about this.
An insistence...You are so very right about this. <br /><br />An insistence on no project at all is a project. A trajectory of chaos proceeding towards a new order in and of itself.<br /><br />Perhaps she should have thought it over a bit more...the instant and disposable culture of modern poetry...produced in a matter of seconds and then published (guilty) within a few more...is manifested here.<br /><br />If it were me...and I had decided to talk this issue over with myself with or without an audience, I'd have chosen the necessity of veiling the project, making it invisible. That's what poems should do in my estimation but in that, I give all my secrets away...or at least some of them. Heh.Carmenisacathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11023871171456340729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-46293684175936948022010-07-20T08:40:31.809-07:002010-07-20T08:40:31.809-07:00Hi Coffee Philosopher:
Your questions and the lik...Hi Coffee Philosopher:<br /><br />Your questions and the like are in sync with mine. Such questions and concerns are just about exactly why I wish, and double-wish, Lasky had used some (or even just one) real example to illustrate her views.Steven Famahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13733977161680651117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-12270899622824245082010-07-20T08:17:41.856-07:002010-07-20T08:17:41.856-07:00Also, I think one risks a slippery slope.
I don&#...Also, I think one risks a slippery slope.<br /><br />I don't write poetry that rhymes, myself, but have quite a fondness for "Childe Harold" - but isn't all rhymes a "project?" Poetry confined by artificial limits? And what about poetry whose "project" is a narrative?<br /><br />And is all ekphrastic poetry to be dismissed as "project" poetry?<br /><br />Obviously, I am responding only to a summary - but where does she draw the line?the coffee phillosopherhttp://www.coffeephilosopher.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-35357195221885393572010-07-14T22:35:50.176-07:002010-07-14T22:35:50.176-07:00Curtis, you've much stuff in your comment, whi...Curtis, you've much stuff in your comment, which I thank you for sharing, but I disagree with your claim about "parlor games." You seem there to be stuck in a rationalist, positivist world-view. But no matter the view that gives rise to it, I can't agree. Lunacy and chance and nonsense and the absurd and the rigorously pre-planned (see the Mac Low mentioned in the post) speak and point to truths too. <br /><br />P.S. Perec's novel (in English, <i>A Void</i>) was written (in French, and then again -- miracle!) in the English translation -- with the letter "e".Steven Famahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13733977161680651117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-35239689089717753382010-07-14T11:10:33.233-07:002010-07-14T11:10:33.233-07:00Steven:
I did a blog along these lines some month...Steven:<br /><br />I did a blog along these lines some months back, comparing the formalist experiments of Moore, to the synthetic formal poems The Alphabet and Progress (Watten).<br /><br />Canonical post-Modernism (if I may use that phrase) is expressed through two fairly contradictory thematic streams:<br /><br />1) The idea that form should never be more than an extension of content (from Olson's Projective Verse). This idea privileges subject and narrative and content over form, which must stretch and mutate to accommodate content.<br /><br />2) The imposition of an artificial formal structure, antecedent to content. As post-Modernism's answer to the constriction of traditional forms, it merely replaces them with new ones. <br /><br />What is more artificial than setting arbitrary limits and constraints, using "content" to "fill" in the blanks? <br /><br />Williams's great contribution to literature was the demonstration of making expedient, invented form follow the demands of each unique poetic instance. Crucially, Silliman references his reading of late Williams--the Williams of The Desert Music, Journey to Love and Pictures From Brueghel--in which Williams sought to codify the spread tercet as something he called the "shifting American foot"--a reduction of the poetic process to a formal limitation as confining as anything he'd ever done since his earliest experiments with the sonnet. <br /><br />The idea that you could say anything meaningful about anything, by starting out before-hand with, say, a requirement that every sentence be unrelated to every other sentence, or that every fourth line should end in three dots (ellipsis), etc., is manifestly absurd. <br /><br />Perec's attempt to write a novel without using the letter 'a'--<br /><br />These kinds of feats mean nothing in terms of the world. They're parlor games.<br /><br />Yet Moore was able to show how an arbitrary form could be responsibly adapted to express meaningful relationships between the world, knowledge, experience, language, and perception. I see very little evidence of this labor-intensive work in the Language School. Rae Armantrout, however, seems to be doing it. <br /><br />If I understand the "poetry project" issue you're discussing here, it may be Lasky's point is related to this problem.Curtis Favillehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06213075853354387634noreply@blogger.com