Poetry as harmonized "signal/noise" package...

In a search for something else entirely I tripped across this post in a blog called GrandTextAuto that entertains the metaphor of written communication as signal/noise ratio where signal is the message sent and noise the references that modify that signal in the course of its transmission.

The meaning of a given message, in other words, includes not only information (the message actually sent) but whatever modifies that message, whatever references become relevant, in the course of its transmission. In information theory, the term for such modification is “noise.” In William Paulson’s words, “Noise may . . . be the interruption of a signal, the pure and simple suppression of elements of a message, or it may be the introduction of elements of an extraneous message . . . or it may be the introduction of elements that are purely random.” The poetic function, in this scheme of things, subordinates the informational axis (language used as a pure instrument of efficient communication) to what we might call the axis of redundancy, “meanings” now being created by all those elements of reference that go beyond the quantifiable communication of data from A to B.

Paulson’s argument that literary, as opposed to ordinary, “communication assumes its noise as a constitutive factor of itself” is, of course, no more than a fancy and “scientific” version of Wittgenstein’s theorem, cited in chapter 1, “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”

Poetry, in other words, employs language not just as a means to convey information, but an end in itself -- an indivisable aesthetic creation.  In the successful poem, the "noise" is harmonized into a melliflous and resonant whole.  The successful reception of the signal/noise package that is the poem -- that is, appreciation of the poem -- depends, of course, on the culture and sensibilities of the reader as much as the writer.  The times we live in can also introduce definite, extraneous "noise" that can alter the appreciation of the poem in unintended ways.  A contemporary reader of Dylan Thomas's Fern Hill, for instance, would have to exercise some conscious mental effort to keep a connotation of homosexuality from the line, "and honoured among foxes and peasants by the gay house".   This, of course, is unfortunate.  Interesting considerations.

The Four Tribes of Art

Got the link to this article from Peter Pereira, who in turn got it from C Dale. Typologies are always fascinating. Good ones yield a lot of insight, even if they leave questions unanswered. I would place myself somewhere in the upper right, near the centre line. I do, though, make forays into the other three camps. Where would you place yourself?

"Unwritten" Poetry Rules

Mary Biddinger asks whether we have any "unwritten" poetry rules we either always adhere to or think very carefully about before transgressing. Greg Rappeleye has an interesting list. I guess it was late in the evening: I included not just some personal rules but ideals and priorities regarding poetry. It became a bit of a manifesto. Anyway, here it is:

1. Poetry must engage and stimulate as much of the being of the writer and reader as possible – emotions, intuition, the senses, intellect, bodily rhythm and feeling. Emotion is primary: Poetry that fails to move fails as poetry. The most reliable gateway for such powerful, multi-leveled expression is through the image.

2. Many strategies are possible, but it’s most effective to put your poem in a three dimensional context – either deftly indicated or vividly described. Otherwise, what you’re likely to end up with are abstract ravings (OK, mumblings, musings) of a disembodied mind. Today’s world is definitely overpopulated – but it is even more overrun by disembodied minds.

3. Commentary distracts. Don’t just say how you feel, evoke it through imagery, metaphor, or your treatment of the subject – a variation on the old chestnut “show, don’t tell”. Poetry, like all forms of verbal expression, is a “coming to terms” – so those dear, clever abstract expressions that may have even brought on the poem serve as scaffolding that can be knocked away when the building is strong enough to stand on its own. (Here's a case in point from my own writing.)

There are masters, however, for whom commentary is essential to their aesthetic. Rilke and Wordsworth wrote whole stretches of “philosophic song” that make for fine reading. This is because those passages are original, profoundly thought out, stand up to intellectual scrutiny, and (of course) superbly expressed. But those passages are also sustained by others that pack powerful images and sensation.

4. Whatever you write, may it be “soundful.” ( Poetry “soundfulness” is a coinage, I believe, of my friend Mick Burrs… although a quick Google search reveals that Osho (aka Rajneesh) and others use the term in the context of meditation.) Rhythmic free-verse with slant or internal rhymes are current reliable mainstays. I firmly believe, though, that any poet worth his salt ought to be an absolute master of fixed forms, especially if he lives in the eighteenth century. End-stopped rhymes are the cat’s meow, again, if you live in the eighteenth century. In regard to fixed forms, I feel like the proverbial child playing with one or two pebbles on a vast beach.

5. More about fixed forms (clearly, I’m thinking about them more than doing them): they shouldn’t be too fixed (or they’ll fix you, like the vet fixed my cat). They’re a flexible framework – a skeleton of a moving body, as someone else put it -- not a pidgeonhole.

6. If you find yourself piling on two or three metaphors to describe/evoke one thing, it’s because you are still “coming to terms” – haven’t settled on the right metaphor. Beware too of adjectives, connectives, prepositional phrases, and other stuff like that. ;) More about that here.

7. Like Mary Biddinger, I don’t like poetry about poetry, writing about writing – although I’ve done it. Even though as she points out there are great ars poetica, writing about your writing as you write – however cleverly you do it – indicates you are running dry.

8. I don't like to use the word "love". The word has been so over- and insincerely used that it smacks of triteness and manipulation. I follow Rule #3 with this one. (Same goes in my personal life: sometimes my partner, Jocelyne, has problems with that!)

9. I'm really sparing with exclamation marks, using them, if ever, with great reluctance. Funny, I don't usually mind it when poets from other eras -- i.e. Shelley or Coleridge -- use them. Sometimes I even find myself applauding those guys for their emotional directness. For me, though, in this day and age, it's practically always trite and silly. Same for other noise-makers like caps and emphatic italics. Some day I'll write a poem where every word is capitalized and followed by an (!) just to get over my hangup.

10. First person present simple has been called the person/tense default of contemporary poetry, and for good reasons: immediacy, authenticity (although of course first person has its own subterfuges.) Speaking of persons: 2nd person – particularly the impersonal you – is perhaps the weakest person, hard to sustain over a long period: the reader is likely to say, “Hey, that’s not me you’re talking about!” 2nd person plural can be quite obnoxious, spreading the blame, as it were – and how many of us are we, pray tell? See for instance this Timothy Steele poem. 3rd person singular is evasive: although there was a period where I exclusively wrote clever poems featuring what I called a 3rd-person “characterette”, I was also studiously avoiding some personal issues at the time. 3rd person plural, well, they can have it. I have yet to write in the 4th person. If and when I do, I’ll share the results immediately: I’m sure they will be spectacular beyond belief.

11. If you’ve heard an expression or phrase once, beware. If twice, it’s probably a cliché. What you do with that cliché will show the kind of poet you are.

12. Most revision is deletion. The most likely candidates for striking out, even though they may "appear" necessary: those lines at the end of a draft that purport to sum things up, or return to beginnings. Sometimes those summary statements begin a poem. Robert Bly calls them false heads and false tails.

The editor at Salt has an amusing list of fifty do's and don'ts for submission. Here's one of my favourites:

Poems on the wonderful nature of God’s creation aren’t.

So: what are yours?

Was it ever thus...

"But if a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane companions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman."

Plato, Phaedrus 245

CONTEXT

I don't like poems that seem to say, "Guess what I mean." And I don't much like symbolist poems, in which people and things are standing in for the real subjects, who for some reason are absent. I also don't care for surreal or impressionist poems that assume a reader wants to help interpret the poet's dreams.

This is not to say that I think everything in a poem should be on the surface. Not at all. It's simply to say that there should be a surface, a place for a reader to stand. Young journalists used to be taught to answer the questions who, what, where, when and why in the first compressed paragraph of a story. I would go so far as to say that the first four of these ought to be answered in a single reading of most poems.

-- Miller Williams, in Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems

I quote this not because I like it, but because I generally agree with it; with the second paragraph I exclaimed, "Yes!". (Strange confluence of attitudes...) I suppose I would say poems that keep you guessing too long. I find the first paragraph a bit reactionary for my liking. But the journalist questions, which I've never thought to apply to poetry, provide an interesting criterion to assess accessibility, even reader/writerly fulfillment. Generally, I don't feel satisfied with poems I write unless they communicate clearly on most if not all of these basic levels. But such a stricture makes me want to see what I can get away with and still feel satisfied with the effect of the poem... e.g. a poem that clearly answers the question who, but not what, where, and when, or what but not who, where, and when. Maybe such a poem would achieve a greater universality than one that clearly demarcates its where and when.

Another good poetry quote

This thanks to Peter:

From an interview with Michael Ondaatje:

"One of the things about poetry is that you are more suggestive, I think," he said. "You don't say 100 percent. You say 70 percent, or something like that, so that the reader also participates in the story. Now, in the poem, the minute you say too much, it dies. So reader and writer are in a simultaneous location making the final poem.

"I want to bring that into fiction. When I turned from poetry to fiction I thought, 'Well, I wonder if you can do that, too.'

"So you are being more suggestive, you are being very tight with words, very precise with words as opposed to poetic, which sometimes people think is too romantic. . . . And I think the forms of poetry, as the forms of modern art, are more radical perhaps than some of the forms of the novel."

Li-Young Lee on Poetry

The Summer 2004 issue of Rattle contains a wonderful interview with Li-Young Lee. Among the gems is this passage about wholeness:

...what I really love when I read a poem is the visceral experience of a sense of wholeness ... every poem is a portrait of the speaker, right? So if my experience of that speaker is a kind of integrated, a deeply integrated but at the same time highly differentiated psyche ... then I get a real sense of satisfaction, a sense somehow that in the poem the intellectual function is informed of the emotional function and they are both informed of the erotic function and the erotic function is informed of the spiritual function. Sometimes I have a problem when I read a poem that's just the mental function, it seems uninformed of the physical functions or the emotional functions or the spiritual functions. Or even a poem that is just the spiritual function working overtime but uninformed of the other functions. So what I love is a poem that somehow posits, proposes, a condition of wholeness.

I too subscribe to a notion that a poem ought to express as much as possible a poet's entire being, but seriously doubt I could articulate that notion better than Li-Young Lee does here. Thanks to Robert Peake for sharing this. I love Li-Young Lee's poetry. For more on him in this blog (inc. links to poems and interviews), click on the label below.

The Unstated Cliché

The following is from a lengthy mini-essay on effective uses of cliché, in the Dictionary of Poetic Terms:

The Unstated Cliché

Sometimes a poem will have a cliché as its unstated theme. In the following poem by Thomas James, there lurks in the background the aphorism “Silence is Golden”, but the way in which James expresses this clichéd statement is utterly new and beautiful.

LETTER TO A MUTE

If I could reach you now, in any way
At all, I would say this to you:
This afternoon I walked into a thicket

Of gold flowers that had no idea
What they were after. They couldn’t hear a thing.
I walked among a million, small, deaf ears

Breaking their gold into the afternoon.
I think they were like you, golden, golden,
Unable to express a single thing.

I walked among them, thinking of you,
Thinking of what it would be like
To be completely solitary. Once I was alone like that.

All the field was humming, brimming
With some brazen kind of song, and I
Thought that somehow I could disappear

Into the empty hall of your right ear.
Wandering through the slender bones of you.
But I know that I could never let you know

That it is late summer here, that I
Can hear the crickets every evening
Hollowing out the darkness at my window

That you have vanished into a dark tunnel
Where I have tried to reach you with my mouth
Till my mouth ran gold, spilling over everything.

Tonight I looked into your face, tenderly,
Tenderly, but I could never find you there.
I could only touch your quiet lips.

If I could stick my pen into your tongue,
Making it run with gold, making
It speak entirely to me, letting the truth

Slide out of it, I could not be alone.
I wouldn’t even touch you, for I know
How you are locked away from me forever.

Tonight I go out looking for you everywhere
As the moon slips out, a slender petal
Offering all its gold to me for nothing.

Oh yeah...

Wouldn't limericks classify as escapist poetry? Wouldn't doggerel and/or much of so-called light verse? Oh yeah, forgot about that. I guess because I don't read much of it (I guess 'cause it's forgettable. Duh. Scratch o' the head.)

A propos...

Whatever “unreal”, “fictional” elements it consists of – whether it takes us on a journey, is woven together with dialogue, hyperbole, astonishing juxtapositions, the tissue of myth – poetry situates itself in the reality we live, is a direct interpretation of that reality. It is portrait, emblem, not a parallel world. Hence there is no such thing as escapist poetry. Poetry is real; it is the ultimate non-fiction.

"The Poets of Poetry"

Robert Duncan: Warp & Woof

Last weekend, besides seeing Marie Chouinard Dance Company go through its paces at La Place des Arts in Montreal (see post below), I also attended a lecture by Robert Duncan at Naropa College in Boulder, Colerado. It was pleasant being part of the audience, people around me caughing and shuffling their feet, rising to ask barely audible questions, or laughing at his jokes (sometimes I chuckled too). A fair number of these people are probably dead, as is, of course, the lecturer. Occasionally cars purred by that have long since been to the junkyard, and I think I heard a plane, possibly heading to Denver -- the windows were open, so it must have been some time in early Fall or late Spring. Attending a lecture of 25 or 30 years ago is one of those things, of course, you can easily do nowadays via a medium that Duncan, eminent spiritualist though he was, could never have possibly imagined. Like the University student I haven't been for decades, I kept assiduous notes -- this time, not on a notepad but on a computer screen.

Duncan was a fascinating and entertaining lecturer, whose nervous stuttering staccato could barely keep up with rapid-fire associations in his head. Frequently, almost willy-nilly, he went on tangents, but the theme and direction were nearly always clear. Today I touched up my notes, added paraphrases here and there to make them at least somewhat intelligible. Since the lecture, entitled Warp & Woof, Part 1 (I was unable to find Part 2) is more than an hour and a half long, I thought you dear readers might benefit by scanning this synopsis of most of his main ideas, as well as a number of thought-provoking curiosities that came out along the way:

Imagine a warp and woof, as of a fabric -- imagine it going throughout the universe
The warp & woof of the "true" and fabricated universe
The word poetry: Greek word for making something up
"Song" -- canto -- entirely other origin, aspect
Semitic community (Judeo-Christian & Moslem world) was in for quite a shock when it came in contact with this decadent Greek idea of a made-up world
Greece had doctrine of inspiration
Semitic world, on the contrary, was opposed to graven images, making things up. In that tradition, one should not "make a poem", but speak with a poem that comes from your voice, heart. Prophetic, vatic voice.
Duncan himself: a product of the Celtic and Jewish trads. + Greek idea of making up.
Sappho
Christian world: felt there was something profoundly wrong about making up things & persons. Only in Rennaissance was "making up" returned to prominence
Shakespeare (Tempest): Universe a stage. A master maker.
The germanic word for poet is maker too.
Story tellers thought of themselves as makers; talk about weaving a tale. (Goes along with weaving cloth): story you tell as you weave cloth. Minotaur; maze.

In happy Jung land: you aren’t making things up once again. Psychoanalysis: archetypes: not made up. Lady Macbeth’s archetypal standing less interesting than the made-up aspect.

Duncan suggests (jokingly) an alternative to the Oedipus complex: the Jocasta complex: mother aint’ going to leave the son alone.

An ecclesiastical work is not "a making up"; it is a vision of what is there.

Homer: Penelope: every day weaving a design of a plot; all a work

In our own Judeo-C world, word “craft” is even yet filled with apprehension: as in crafty
Craft is a cunning little animal: one you tame so it won’t bite you

Ezra Pound: all human spirit is identical, consubstantial. All times contemporaneous. We evoke a presentation.
Cocteau: Pound is the last rower on the sacred river of Arabus.
Lowest rung of heaven is hell.
Limbo is the conventional world, a world world where love is good, war is bad; the world of the mother’s day poem (platitudes)

We don’t have such a thing as imagining, without being recharged by understanding.
(Psychoanalysis: fantasy is called making things up)

We’re in a fabric of time and space. People 40 yrs. from now will not be buzzed by the same buzzes of now.

Celtic traditon of the bard – keeping alive the identity of the tribe. Now bardically, the poet must keep alive our identity in the universe.
We leave an imprint. We devise a design in a poem, but it is like a footprint out of which you extrapolate an entire dinosaur.

Conventional dictum “Write with your true voice.” Don’t come on like an immitation Robert Browning. But if you do immitate well, you are yourself anyway. Imprint.

“What do you think of this” = will you think about this for me.

No matter what I think I say, the words say other things: storehouse of impressions.
You cannot take a thing you feel and put it into language.

Say Cow – that’s my cow, but not really your cow.

One of our communities is language.

Everybody has this notion of emptiness. Language has a term: nothing. Language tells us we’re individuals. That’s not our idea. We discover ourselves in commonality.

Idea that archetype is in you, nothing like the idea that it’s in language.

You’re in the hands of the peril of the universe when you are in health. Being sick: getting with the program, as it were.

Eripides not in the web; Shakespeare is. E. limited by notion of catharsis. S. creates a world; gives eloquence to all virtues and vices in the web.

Creely poems frequently have no images. Shakespeare: no images in “To be or not to be”
What was an image? Nexus of when a person... (forgot to finish my note here)

We are not warp nor woof – we are holes (between warp & woof).

We think of Whitman as "big superdaddy poet", not as leaves of grass, one of millions, which was his view, ultimately.

A love song with language rather than notes.

Writing a sonnet – doesn’t require faith. Playing tennis with the net up (Frost). But being is a different game – hard to know when you are playing being.

Loyalty is not faith.

There’s a flow – because there’s a language and going on in our heads all the time -- continuously of poems – an artesian well of sorts – but the art of poetry is actually a structure to prevent us from being plunged into the absolutely everlasting generative field that language is. It is of high magic field, it is a form of evocation. You get inside a pentagon – because you don’t want to be swamped by the whole spiritual world. A sonnet (or any other poem) like making a little garden inside the language. In the sonnet, love and the erotic brought close together in a relation. This is the grand attraction of magic: bringing things together in a circumscribed area. In the grand web (warp & woof) of the universe : love and sex not even related much of the time. We’re back to leaves of grass. We don’t mourn the loss of one leaf. Rationality, too, is a grand magic, which makes sure all its own demons remain present while the rest are consigned to the realm of the “irrational.”

Some passing thoughts...

There must be a "surprise quotient" to poetry. A surprising juxtaposition, transition, metaphor -- would it be, as a minimum, every other line? Three lines? Yet-- apt. Apt. Gotta be apt. Apt, happily. Happily apt.

Here I am, trying to quantify the (perhaps) unquantifiable. What's behind this urge to quantify? Eliminate surprise? Why do that? Isn't surprise what I want to celebrate? Imagine reading -- or writing -- with a surprise meter! Measuring surprises.

How boring! How positively boring!!!

(Isn't that the same as... negatively interesting? Perhaps....)

REFLECTIONS ON CHARLES OLSON'S PROJECTIVE VERSE

An excerpt from my reply to the letter in the previous post (this was dated June 7, 2004):

Hi Allen,
The best American anthology I have is the old 1960 Grove Press THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY edited by Donald M. Allen. Have been reading it lately -- Olson, Duncan, Ginsburg, etc. Love those statements on poetics. Has there been any real groundbreaker in that area since Olson's PROJECTIVE VERSE? (i.e. linelengths = breathlengths, the page as field...) It seems to me that pretty well all the formal possibilities within the static typewriter/typeface world of Olson's day (and pretty much our day) were outlined there. As we become digitalized, of course, we have juxtapositional possibilities of words and image or even wallpaper background that you could only dream of as you evolved your scissors-and-tape TV (text-visual) series a decade or two ago. Not to forget accompanying soundbites, as poetry enters the domain of multimedia. Even within the restrictive realm of print, variety of fonts and colours available to us -- consider these EXPRESSIVE POSSIBILITIES -- would have been unimaginable in Olson's day. Master a program like Flash and you can have those words going any direction you want, spiralling around, etc. All these are ways we can expand, slickly and seamlessly, on Olson's notions.

I've since acquired the Strand anthology Allen talks about below -- ordered it used from a Virginia bookstore through Amazon.ca for all of $3 (well, with shipping, $7 Canadian.)

Funny, without knowing it at the time, Allen and I were talking about what could be seen as the two key anthologies of post-war American poetry. (If there were others that may be considered key, I just don't know of them.) Between these two, the eleven poets they have in common -- John Ashbery, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Edward Field, Allen Ginsburg, Le Roi Jones, Kenneth Kotch, Denise Levertov, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder -- would suggest a considerable overlap, but both are big anthologies: the Strand anthology comprises 92 poets, and the Allen anthology 44. And indeed, the contrast in tone and argument couldn't be greater. The Strand anthology includes chiefly lyric poets, a lot of them celebrated professor poets that published with big "mainstream" presses and that Ron Silliman lumps into the SoQ (for those who don't know, School of Quietude), including AR Ammons, John Berryman, Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Hall, Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht, Robert Lowell, Adrianne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, James Tate, Richard Wilber, and Mark Strand himself. The Allen anthology includes a number of wilder shrubs like Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Jack Spicer. The Allen anthology is a conceptually bolder and more powerful anthology, delineating for the first time groupings or "milieus" that -- however arbitrary and, as Allen himself put it, "for the most part more historical than actual" -- have remained sharply etched in our mental geography: the Black Mountain group, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, the New York Poets. With its essays on poetics -- including that benchmark essay by Olson -- it is definitely a precursor of Lang Po. The Strand anthology is a pretty typical good-poems -written-by-poets-in-alphabetical-order selection. Globally more inclusive than the Allen anthology, it draws a far diffuser picture. Even the poems selected in the Strand anthology of poets also in the Allen are, are formally speaking, the more conservative poems, or at least look more conservative within the constraints of the shorter selection (i.e. 1-3 poems for most poets) and smaller page size: these poets just don't stand out alongside the Hugos and Wilbers as they could. If anything would argue for the validity of the distinction Ron makes between the SoQ and Avant/post-avant, it would be these two anthologies -- however much he rankles by his obsessive harping on it (and however much I disagree with the way he flings that derogatory term - SoQ - around.)

-- a little post script: funny how much we can overlook in the heat of writing, i.e. when I wrote on that hot June day that "pretty well all the formal possibilities... within the typeface world" were outlined by Olson's essay. What about Concrete poetry? What about -- taking a step "backwards" a moment -- poetic forms or the so-called New Formalism? Actually, what I was referring to was a certain scope of free verse possibility that Olson had opened up for for me over the previous few years...