Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Of all the links I posted on Tuesday of last week, the most disturbing (to me) was not Paul Zukofsky’s sad thrashing about with regards to his father’s work & its potential to support the violinist in his old age, distressing as that is, but Ben Friedlander’s more subversive declaration that
For me, Marianne Moore is the center of modernism, not Eliot, or Pound, or Williams, and that means I can read Merrill and Ashbery with equal pleasure, while finding Lowell and Duncan — who drank too deeply of the Four Quartets — almost unbearable.
Ben’s rationale was that, as a scholar of the 19th century (dissertation I believe on Dickinson) & a poet who began his career in the 20th, he has different responsibilities with regards to each period.
For instance, the fact that I’m happy ignoring whole areas of activity in the later period, whereas, in the earlier, I’d like someday to have an understanding of the whole. In the later period, I’m even willing to ignore major figures (so-called), whereas, in the earlier, importance, however defined, serves perfectly well as a basis for paying attention.
He characterizes this as a distinction between reading like a scholar vs. reading like a poet, arguing that while he can led by whim & desire in each period, in the former he has a need to comprehend the larger panorama that is American poetry that is not needed in the latter.
Certainly, there is plenty of evidence that a thorough understanding of the field of writing is unnecessary in order to create great work. Nobody ever took Rimbaud for a scholar. And several of Friedlander’s implicit & explicit value judgments strike me as perfectly reasonable – Four Quartets is an unforgivably turgid, even stupid piece of writing, Joanne Kyger’s poetry will prove far “more lasting” than that of Robert Frost, Lowell is for the most part unbearable (and some of Duncan is likewise), YET dot dot dot
I don’t think this permits me as a poet to hallucinate a world in which “Marianne Moore is the center of modernism.” It is, I think, irresponsible – to ourselves, most of all – to simply wish the world is some way that it never was. Irresponsible to ourselves, because this is the literary equivalent of presuming that I can drive on the left side of the road in the United States just because I’d prefer to do so. There are consequences & they’re not all pretty.
I don’t think that Moore was the center of modernism any more than I do Olson or Oppen or Zukofsky or Stein. Each has a particular, and vital, role to play in the history of this period – which largely was over by the time I was born at the end of World War 2 (and well before Friedlander was born) – but which cannot responsibly be characterized as central. I do think that you could argue that Pound and/or Eliot was in fact central, particularly in the period between the start of the first & end of the second World Wars. Stevens, Williams, Crane, Frost all fall well outside that central (centering) dynamic – and the work of each is more interesting because of this, I think. Ditto Stein, ditto H.D., ditto Langston Hughes, ditto Marianne Moore.
Moore’s poetry places her closer to her friends among the imagists than anywhere else in the American poetic landscape, but her professional practice, in particular her work at The Dial, positions her elsewhere. More than any other poet of the period, she was the one who managed to stay in the good graces of both sides of the divide between anglophile conventionalists & the avant-garde. She was, for all extents & purposes, the Cole Swensen of her day, the perfect hybrid.
To declare her thus “the center of modernism” is to erase the historical shape & direction of this phenomenon altogether. I wonder about the consequences of this. Possibly it enables Ben to read what follows with more of an open mind, so that if he should decide that, say, Steve Jonas is a more interesting writer than W.S. Merwin, that doesn’t carry with it a host of repercussions that make it harder for him to appreciate George Starbuck or Gerald Stern, or force him to prefer Joel Oppenheimer to Thom Gunn. Just because you like Jack Spicer doesn’t mean you have to love Harold Dull or George Stanley. Liking Robert Duncan (as Ben apparently does not) doesn’t commit you to liking Helen Adam. Nor, for that matter, vice versa.
A history of recent writing that is idiosyncratic to the point of seeming arbitrary isn’t just to drive on the wrong side of the road, but to leave the road entirely, plowing through back yards & fields alike. It’s not illiteracy so much as it is a willful a-literacy that Friedlander seems to seek as a poet. With the presumptive advantage that it will be more useful to learn how best to read Donald Finkel than to dismiss him out of hand because he hung out with the wrong crowd.
Maybe a better analogy would be a walk in the woods, an experience that is entirely transformed if at some point in your life you become an active & moderately knowledgeable birdwatcher, or get to know the names of the flora & fauna. The difference between a salamander & a skink can transform an afternoon. Knowing the spiral-like call of Swainson’s thrush echoing through the trees gives shape to a forest it would not otherwise have, even if you never actually see the bird.
Friedlander’s position here is to organize his terrain along some axis of his own choosing, like determining that birds should be grouped not by genus, but perhaps by color, so that the flamingo, the cardinal & the rufus-sided towhee are of a “kind,” birds bearing red. The problem in this analogy is that Friedlander the poet is a bird in this terrain as well, just as is Moore. And a robin or swallow that can’t distinguish between a sparrow & a kestrel is going to lose its young to the latter.
Friedlander argues that his approach is necessary because so much recent poetry – from mid-century on, it would seem – “irritates” him. I’ve always thought that this was why he chose the 19th century as his specialization in the first place – he knew that Robert Lowell was at best a mediocre writer (albeit major, largely wasted, talent) but didn’t want to have to say so in public where it might offend those who are still picking through the carrion of the Boston Brahmins. Nobody is much offended if you say you like/don’t like any particular 19th century poet mostly because those bones have been picked clean.
The poet whose absence looms large in all this – the one who sits squarely between Pound & Eliot, provoking the former & giving some kind of permission to the worst impulses of the latter – is William Butler Yeats. A problematic case in that he was not American & is virtually the point at which the history of the two literatures (with Auden being the second, yet another instance of Marx’s adage about the first time as tragedy, the second farce) commingle. Is Yeats the first hint of modernism or the last whimper of Victorian literary values? He clearly is the source that enables The Four Quartets & the mushy overwriting that Duncan permitted himself, especially before his confrontation with Charles Olson at Black Mountain. (And if you want to see what the SF Renaissance, so-called, might have looked like without that blast from Olson – and with & thru him Pound, Zukofsky, Creeley – the one to read is the Canadian Louis Dudek. The Duncan of the years before Bending the Bow seems very much on Dudek’s wavelength, but after the impact of Olson it’s as tho Dudek & Duncan are of different generations altogether.)
Yeats was a Victorian through & through. There is nothing modernist in his work, nothing in his world that remained by the time I was born. Eliot’s quietism, implicit even in the great early works (he hates the modern world), is exactly where he wanted to be. Four Quartets is for him a real choice. Eliot’s modernism, we have known now for the past three decades, is almost entirely the consequence of Pound’s editing. As hateful as Pound was as a person, and as crazy as he got to be, any defintion of a center for American modernist poetry that doesn’t at least present him as one pole of what was going on, is a strange beast indeed. I can buy a version that sees it as a contest between Pound’s sense of modernity & the inherent conservatism of Eliot & the agrarians (and their New England protégé, Robert Lowell), tho a far more sensible one would be between Pound & an American-centric verse (largely the Objectivists) versus a more cosmopolitan & internationalist one centered around Stein & Paris, or even a push-pull phenomenon between all three poles. But Moore at best is the modernist wing of quietism, or vice versa, a domesticated variant on the Pound-Eliot collaboration/contestation.
But it’s precisely the disjunctions & cloudiness between these two sets of triumvirates – Pound, Eliot, Yeats being the first; Quietism, the Pound-WCW-Zukofsky complex & rue de Fleuris modernism being the second – that gives rise to so many bizarre interpretations of what “modernism” means in poetry. The two triads are not parallel, not equivalent. But they are active dynamics. To talk about a center in modernism – and modernism was perhaps the last aesthetic tendency to dream of such a thing¹ – entails accounting for the pull of each. The polished poetics of Marianne Moore, as hard-edged as any Jeff Koons rabbit, seems to me the very denial of this dynamic.
¹ Which is why abstract expressionists were modernists, not posties.
Labels: Ben Friedlander, Modernism, Schools of poetry
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You know, Ron, I actually think people today don't give Marianne Moore enough props. She was more important to the Modernist movement that most people realize; she was tremendously intelligent, and some of her phrasing just outstanding. She does things with syllables that I am still amazed by.
Finally, Ron, you seem to be coming to terms (FINALLY!) with the consequences--the dialectic!--which your historical analysis of form has all along implied.
Yes, Moore is the perfect "one who managed to stay [on] both sides of the divide"--but not, as you say "between anglophile conventionalists & the avant-garde" but between synthetic form, and the random quality of an a-historical content. You fail to see how your own formal approaches are more like her than any other Modernist writer. You are the inheritor of the tradition of which she is the progenitor--NOT Eliot, NOT Pound, NOT Zukofsky, NOT Stein, NOT the Objectivists.
This notion of needing to be "consistent" through the retroactive choice of antecedents is perfectly crazy. There is no reason to think that one "must" choose between Berryman's Dream Songs, Berrigan's Sonnets, and Spicer's Holy Grail. Or that by "preferring" Eliot over Stevens "limits" the possible choices of acceptable descendants.
In the end, we don't care whether Donald Finkel "hung out with the wrong crowd" or the right one--that's bullshit.
No creative writer has any ultimate responsibility to history. He/she is perfectly entitled to pick and discriminate uncritically amongst possible choices, and come up smelling like a rose. Critical thinkers have a different duty, defined by knowing (or not) the field of difference, and the important (and unimportant) examples--that's just knowing your field. But creative writing is not critical thinking. Don't mix the two up.
Modernism begins with Tender Buttons, The Waste Land, Cathay, Ulysses, Harmonium, Observations, Hemingway's In Our Time. One could add a dozen more, but these are the crucial texts.
You can't fault Eliot for all the weird things he did after he escaped from his first wife and the bank job. Just as you can't fault Pound's Personae for all the weird shit he did later, either. Or Marianne Moore's wearing her Nixon button. Or Wallace Stevens settling policies in Hartford. Or Gertrude collaborating with Nazis. Or Joyce punning himself like a pin-cushion. Or Hemingway shooting imaginary elephants in his personal zoo.
If it isn't possible to correctly, and conclusively, identify what Modernism is, and where it precisely originates, so be it.
Look at what Zukofsky wrote before he started A. He's obviously a post-Modernist writer, in every sense that matters. Without A-13-24, he's just a minor writer conjuring witty lyrics.
Yes, Moore is the perfect "one who managed to stay [on] both sides of the divide"--but not, as you say "between anglophile conventionalists & the avant-garde" but between synthetic form, and the random quality of an a-historical content. You fail to see how your own formal approaches are more like her than any other Modernist writer. You are the inheritor of the tradition of which she is the progenitor--NOT Eliot, NOT Pound, NOT Zukofsky, NOT Stein, NOT the Objectivists.
This notion of needing to be "consistent" through the retroactive choice of antecedents is perfectly crazy. There is no reason to think that one "must" choose between Berryman's Dream Songs, Berrigan's Sonnets, and Spicer's Holy Grail. Or that by "preferring" Eliot over Stevens "limits" the possible choices of acceptable descendants.
In the end, we don't care whether Donald Finkel "hung out with the wrong crowd" or the right one--that's bullshit.
No creative writer has any ultimate responsibility to history. He/she is perfectly entitled to pick and discriminate uncritically amongst possible choices, and come up smelling like a rose. Critical thinkers have a different duty, defined by knowing (or not) the field of difference, and the important (and unimportant) examples--that's just knowing your field. But creative writing is not critical thinking. Don't mix the two up.
Modernism begins with Tender Buttons, The Waste Land, Cathay, Ulysses, Harmonium, Observations, Hemingway's In Our Time. One could add a dozen more, but these are the crucial texts.
You can't fault Eliot for all the weird things he did after he escaped from his first wife and the bank job. Just as you can't fault Pound's Personae for all the weird shit he did later, either. Or Marianne Moore's wearing her Nixon button. Or Wallace Stevens settling policies in Hartford. Or Gertrude collaborating with Nazis. Or Joyce punning himself like a pin-cushion. Or Hemingway shooting imaginary elephants in his personal zoo.
If it isn't possible to correctly, and conclusively, identify what Modernism is, and where it precisely originates, so be it.
Look at what Zukofsky wrote before he started A. He's obviously a post-Modernist writer, in every sense that matters. Without A-13-24, he's just a minor writer conjuring witty lyrics.
Saying of Yeats that "there is nothing modernist in his work" - I think you may need to go back to The Tower and The Winding Stair.
And regarding the statement about Abstract Expressionism, I'm not sure there really is such a thing as a "postie" - maybe in a Lyotardian sense, sure, but not by what definition (ha!) conventional wisdom dictates. Everything was already there, to a greater or lesser degree, or there is a slow movement - no radical break or what have you. (this reminds me of one of my professors saying that he believed langpo was "the last gasp of modernism"). I wouldn't be surprised if the so called "pomo" moment - which already looks dated - comes to be seen as some kind of tail-end phenomenon.
And regarding the statement about Abstract Expressionism, I'm not sure there really is such a thing as a "postie" - maybe in a Lyotardian sense, sure, but not by what definition (ha!) conventional wisdom dictates. Everything was already there, to a greater or lesser degree, or there is a slow movement - no radical break or what have you. (this reminds me of one of my professors saying that he believed langpo was "the last gasp of modernism"). I wouldn't be surprised if the so called "pomo" moment - which already looks dated - comes to be seen as some kind of tail-end phenomenon.
I don't think any of these people represents what I call Modernism in Poetry, the closest thing I would say
to someone who sought to focus in on
the materiality of language itself
as the focus, that idea of Modernism
clarifying the mediums, AK was on that, plus, with his hand-written works and typefaces etc, pushes us right on into pomo, LANGUAGE, diy..
AK is the eye of the hurricane.
Look no further.
You squares can pick who you like,
but in this house
Its
Aleksei Kruchenykh
:)
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/kruch/lkrucht1.htm
to someone who sought to focus in on
the materiality of language itself
as the focus, that idea of Modernism
clarifying the mediums, AK was on that, plus, with his hand-written works and typefaces etc, pushes us right on into pomo, LANGUAGE, diy..
AK is the eye of the hurricane.
Look no further.
You squares can pick who you like,
but in this house
Its
Aleksei Kruchenykh
:)
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/kruch/lkrucht1.htm
I find the Paul Zukofsky more disturbing. & all of that all said, if it were to go twrd one I'd persinllie vote Williams as the center of american (lil a) Modernism. Either that or "Fantasy" by Frank O'Hara.
Ron, this strikes me as one of the best disquisitions on Modernism and poetics I've read, ever. By "best" I mean reasoned, evidenced, persuasive. I disagree about the Moore-Koons association; she's much more than that, and he much less: but that's a quibble. Many thanks for this. I dislike categorical thinking, as a rule (heh heh), but this was really quite wonderful.
well Ron, we all have our favourites >°)
best of bardic,
gwilym
__________________________________
I turn now
not to the Bible
but to Wallace Stevens
Insured against
everything but the muse
what has the word-wizard
to say? His adjectives
are the wand he waves
so language gets up
and dances under
a fastidious moon.
We walk a void world,
he implies for which
in the absence of the imagination,
there is no hope. Verbal bank-clerk,
acrobat walking a rhythmic tight-rope,
trapeze artist of the language
his was a kind of double-entry
poetics. He kept two columns
of thought going, balancing meaning
against his finances. His poetry
was his church and in it
curious marriages were conducted.
He burned his metaphors like incense,
so his syntax was as high
as his religion.
Blessings, Stevens;
I stand with my back to grammar
at an altar you never aspired
to, celebrating the sacrament
of the imagination whose high-priest
notwithstanding you are.
R S Thomas 1995 (No Truce with the Furies - Homage to Wallace Stevens)
best of bardic,
gwilym
__________________________________
I turn now
not to the Bible
but to Wallace Stevens
Insured against
everything but the muse
what has the word-wizard
to say? His adjectives
are the wand he waves
so language gets up
and dances under
a fastidious moon.
We walk a void world,
he implies for which
in the absence of the imagination,
there is no hope. Verbal bank-clerk,
acrobat walking a rhythmic tight-rope,
trapeze artist of the language
his was a kind of double-entry
poetics. He kept two columns
of thought going, balancing meaning
against his finances. His poetry
was his church and in it
curious marriages were conducted.
He burned his metaphors like incense,
so his syntax was as high
as his religion.
Blessings, Stevens;
I stand with my back to grammar
at an altar you never aspired
to, celebrating the sacrament
of the imagination whose high-priest
notwithstanding you are.
R S Thomas 1995 (No Truce with the Furies - Homage to Wallace Stevens)
nice nice you know-a-lot.
and
as Dudek "puts it" in his The Caged Tiger:
BEFORE THE FALL
As a young man I could not get angry, as an old man
I cannot control my rage.
The bread is stale, and the circuses are boring.
There can be no further decline.
well,
I began with Yeats (and the other's) and
just see WHERE T H A T
GOT ME!
and
as Dudek "puts it" in his The Caged Tiger:
BEFORE THE FALL
As a young man I could not get angry, as an old man
I cannot control my rage.
The bread is stale, and the circuses are boring.
There can be no further decline.
well,
I began with Yeats (and the other's) and
just see WHERE T H A T
GOT ME!
Ron,
thanks for the Dudek mention. We 'northerners' were doing some pretty heady experimentalist stuff back in the day (a la Objectivist Creeley, Olson), not to be confused with the more disastrous imitative junk going down in 60s Vancouver (bill bissett, bpNichol, etc). Dudek is important to me since he also mixed (in his theory and practice) experimentalism with respect for traditional Canadian poetics.
I wonder if Canada would have had a distinctly postmodern ("anti-Aesthetic", to use Foster's term) period if Olson,Duncan hadn't arrived) Blaser, of them all, had the most sangine effect on us.
thanks for the Dudek mention. We 'northerners' were doing some pretty heady experimentalist stuff back in the day (a la Objectivist Creeley, Olson), not to be confused with the more disastrous imitative junk going down in 60s Vancouver (bill bissett, bpNichol, etc). Dudek is important to me since he also mixed (in his theory and practice) experimentalism with respect for traditional Canadian poetics.
I wonder if Canada would have had a distinctly postmodern ("anti-Aesthetic", to use Foster's term) period if Olson,Duncan hadn't arrived) Blaser, of them all, had the most sangine effect on us.
Marianne Moore is the center of modernism. Immediacy, collage, renovation, unexpected (and previously underacknowledged) perspective, constant tone-shifts... what more do you want from her, lettrism?
Also, note that Ben calls her the center, and that this is at least as much a cartographical claim as a hierarchical one.
Also, note that Ben calls her the center, and that this is at least as much a cartographical claim as a hierarchical one.
Also, noting that you see Rae's Versed as the first book to be spoken as if from beyond the grave, I have to take your dismissal of Yeats with a grain of salt -- it sounds like you probably haven't read Yeats lately, and more than that you don't consider him a hinge figure of early modernism. Pound did. For most people, that would be enough to look into it.
Pound can't be the center because he's even more eccentric than the woman who wore a tricorn hat and lived with her mother until she was 60.
Pound can't be the center because he's even more eccentric than the woman who wore a tricorn hat and lived with her mother until she was 60.
Every generation chooses its progenitors just as every generation chooses its avatars.
Pound lost his grip when he moved to Italy, and took up the cause of Mussolini.
He's slipped ever since. Moore stood by him, and continued to visit him in St. Elizabeth's, and maintained contact with him, and helped him, but her sanity, and her contact, or perhaps contract, with a deeper and more lasting tradition (Protestantism), gives her a relevance that Pound hasn't got.
To put it another way, think of Tennyson's role among the Victorians. He was a big deal then, and now he's nothing. Meanwhile, Edward Lear, who was next to nothing, is a big deal now.
Lear is now considered a major writer since postmodernism, and Tennyson is just a speck who influences no one at all.
History lasts a long time to kind of quote Althusser, and influences change. Moore has of course gotten a boost from feminism (feminists have tried to draft her into their war on the male and on the male canon, and even though she probably wouldn't have wanted that, it hasn't hurt her reputation).
But there is also a quiet comical sanity in her work which I think means that she will be the Edward Lear of her generation, and Pound the Tennyson.
High seriousness doesn't wear well.
Pound lost his grip when he moved to Italy, and took up the cause of Mussolini.
He's slipped ever since. Moore stood by him, and continued to visit him in St. Elizabeth's, and maintained contact with him, and helped him, but her sanity, and her contact, or perhaps contract, with a deeper and more lasting tradition (Protestantism), gives her a relevance that Pound hasn't got.
To put it another way, think of Tennyson's role among the Victorians. He was a big deal then, and now he's nothing. Meanwhile, Edward Lear, who was next to nothing, is a big deal now.
Lear is now considered a major writer since postmodernism, and Tennyson is just a speck who influences no one at all.
History lasts a long time to kind of quote Althusser, and influences change. Moore has of course gotten a boost from feminism (feminists have tried to draft her into their war on the male and on the male canon, and even though she probably wouldn't have wanted that, it hasn't hurt her reputation).
But there is also a quiet comical sanity in her work which I think means that she will be the Edward Lear of her generation, and Pound the Tennyson.
High seriousness doesn't wear well.
Nice post. Dismissing Duncan (especially for someone whose wife works on Laura Riding) is startling. Duncan was one of the first people to understand what I take to be Silliman's central concern here, the Blakean modernism that informs all counter-poetics after Laura Riding. Blake read, as Erdman & Frye point out, Milton, the Bible, and Swedenbourg (late in life, Dante). So for the Eliot axis, this made him a genius-not-classic, but he simply read the way Friedlander would prefer all poets read, and indeed they nearly all do. Was there a poet before Riding who made this counter-poetics a practice? You can't say Whitman-Dickinson; they weren't thoroughgoing enough.
Ron,
The assumption underpinning the argument here - that your model of modernism history is correct and objective, while Ben Friedlander's is subjective and perverse - seems to me fatally flawed and not a little arrogant. Can you really be sure that you have an infallible grasp on 'what it was', while Ben is merely 'hallucinating' and 'a-literate'? None of us were there and those you were all had their own 'take' anyway.
I personally find your model of modernism - especially in its dismissive approach to figures like Moore, Stevens, Frost, Yeats, Eliot (pre-Four Quartets at least - I agree: they are terrible) and Crane - every bit as partial and subjective as you find Ben's. Joanne Kyger is, in my opinion (and I like her work), NOT likely to be viewed as more important than Robert Frost in the future. But I'm willing to admit that that is just my opinion, and to listen to counter-arguments.
This doesn't mean that your version isn't significant and exciting: it's always relevant to know just how a poet views the recent (and not so recent) poetic past. However, you present your perspective as hard fact, as certain and irrefutable as the laws about driving on the right (right) side of the road....
The 'Pound Era' model of the modernist period is simply outdated and, while Ben may be exaggerating to put Moore at the very centre of things, it at least offers a fresh and thought-provoking alternative.
(I've always thought that an argument could be made that Moore's innovations in syllabics and Zukofsky's in quantative 'meter' are every bit as important and useful as Pound's in cadence and Williams' in line-break - but that's just me. There are many different possible perspectives on what was, after all, an incredibly rich and exciting - and complicated - period in literary creativity.)
Can you really be sure you're not using 'color' as your criteria too?
The assumption underpinning the argument here - that your model of modernism history is correct and objective, while Ben Friedlander's is subjective and perverse - seems to me fatally flawed and not a little arrogant. Can you really be sure that you have an infallible grasp on 'what it was', while Ben is merely 'hallucinating' and 'a-literate'? None of us were there and those you were all had their own 'take' anyway.
I personally find your model of modernism - especially in its dismissive approach to figures like Moore, Stevens, Frost, Yeats, Eliot (pre-Four Quartets at least - I agree: they are terrible) and Crane - every bit as partial and subjective as you find Ben's. Joanne Kyger is, in my opinion (and I like her work), NOT likely to be viewed as more important than Robert Frost in the future. But I'm willing to admit that that is just my opinion, and to listen to counter-arguments.
This doesn't mean that your version isn't significant and exciting: it's always relevant to know just how a poet views the recent (and not so recent) poetic past. However, you present your perspective as hard fact, as certain and irrefutable as the laws about driving on the right (right) side of the road....
The 'Pound Era' model of the modernist period is simply outdated and, while Ben may be exaggerating to put Moore at the very centre of things, it at least offers a fresh and thought-provoking alternative.
(I've always thought that an argument could be made that Moore's innovations in syllabics and Zukofsky's in quantative 'meter' are every bit as important and useful as Pound's in cadence and Williams' in line-break - but that's just me. There are many different possible perspectives on what was, after all, an incredibly rich and exciting - and complicated - period in literary creativity.)
Can you really be sure you're not using 'color' as your criteria too?
>[Moore] was, for all extents & purposes, the Cole Swensen of her day, the perfect hybrid.
Would someone who knows how to do it please Photoshop an image of Swensen in a tricornered hat?
Verbal analogies are exciting, Contradictions sublimated into lyrical hybridity that they are. But History, surely, becomes most self-aware when It can gaze back at the wild figures it throws up with Its own teleological eyes.
The prepositional phrase at the end is meant to be ambiguous.
Can anyone doubt Hegel would have used Photoshop if he'd had it?
Would someone who knows how to do it please Photoshop an image of Swensen in a tricornered hat?
Verbal analogies are exciting, Contradictions sublimated into lyrical hybridity that they are. But History, surely, becomes most self-aware when It can gaze back at the wild figures it throws up with Its own teleological eyes.
The prepositional phrase at the end is meant to be ambiguous.
Can anyone doubt Hegel would have used Photoshop if he'd had it?
Hi Ron,
You only discuss anglo-american "Modernists" here, when there was a slew of French poets who, in my humble opinion, constitute one of the major catalysts of Modernist poetry in English-speaking countries. For instance, Jules Laforgue, one of the first poets to write in free verse, was a major precursor to Eliot (Prufrock owes quite a lot to Laforgue...even down to the details of conversation and piano entering/exiting the poem). I'm not as knowledgable on German, Italian (Chinese?) poets who were also sparking the action, but maybe others can chime in on this.
You only discuss anglo-american "Modernists" here, when there was a slew of French poets who, in my humble opinion, constitute one of the major catalysts of Modernist poetry in English-speaking countries. For instance, Jules Laforgue, one of the first poets to write in free verse, was a major precursor to Eliot (Prufrock owes quite a lot to Laforgue...even down to the details of conversation and piano entering/exiting the poem). I'm not as knowledgable on German, Italian (Chinese?) poets who were also sparking the action, but maybe others can chime in on this.
I feel like it matters a great deal whether we're talking about Modernist poetry as the Modernists themselves understood it to be, or whether we look at Modernism through any number of revisionist historical lenses that are looking for different perspectives that might provide new enlightenment on the issue.
Ron, I think--although I agree that his take that Yeats is purely not modernist isn't right (I myself see Modernism more as a series of tensions and contradictions, rather than as a trajectory)--wants to defend the history of Modernist poetry and what followed as a history of Modernism as understood by poets themselves, particularly American Modernists and those who consciously took up their legacy. Ben, in a revisionist mode, may be looking more textually and noting features in the work of Moore that might put her at the center.
It's intriguing that Ron, who likes revisionist histories of, say, what he calls Quietism, isn't so fond of them when they're applied to a history to which he feels more closely connected. I think he has the right to do that, but I also think defending a single more authoritative history of Modernism doesn't mean that Modernism can't and won't be considered through other lenses. Ultimately I think there's no defense against revisionism in interpretation.
I've been wondering myself lately about a revisionist history of Modernism that posits Cesaire's Notes On A Return to the Native Land as a text that might have had the immediate centralizing/polarizing influence of The Waste Land--which of course it did, at least for some people. Wondering about that doesn't change historical facts about the dominance of The Waste Land, but it makes the history of Modernism look entirely different.
Ron, I think--although I agree that his take that Yeats is purely not modernist isn't right (I myself see Modernism more as a series of tensions and contradictions, rather than as a trajectory)--wants to defend the history of Modernist poetry and what followed as a history of Modernism as understood by poets themselves, particularly American Modernists and those who consciously took up their legacy. Ben, in a revisionist mode, may be looking more textually and noting features in the work of Moore that might put her at the center.
It's intriguing that Ron, who likes revisionist histories of, say, what he calls Quietism, isn't so fond of them when they're applied to a history to which he feels more closely connected. I think he has the right to do that, but I also think defending a single more authoritative history of Modernism doesn't mean that Modernism can't and won't be considered through other lenses. Ultimately I think there's no defense against revisionism in interpretation.
I've been wondering myself lately about a revisionist history of Modernism that posits Cesaire's Notes On A Return to the Native Land as a text that might have had the immediate centralizing/polarizing influence of The Waste Land--which of course it did, at least for some people. Wondering about that doesn't change historical facts about the dominance of The Waste Land, but it makes the history of Modernism look entirely different.
Well, I couldn't get the Tiepelo picture to read right with Cole, but here's a halloween ad for a lady pirate that worked okay.
Have no idea why Cole Swenson
would need to be spoofed, but then
I don't understand why no one has kept going with Ron's bird metaphors
which actually was pretty cool!
http://tinyurl.com/yf9rmh9
Have no idea why Cole Swenson
would need to be spoofed, but then
I don't understand why no one has kept going with Ron's bird metaphors
which actually was pretty cool!
http://tinyurl.com/yf9rmh9
I don't know if we can even really talk about a center any longer -- the idea of a map with one center doesn't make a lot of sense. Each person is in a different place, and what's central to them, is not necessarily what's central to another person.
It seemed that in the 1960s and 1970s when the Sexual Revolution was still big and the new diseases hadn't come out EE Cummings was more central for a lot of people. The bottom fell out for him.
WCW had a lot of sway for a while, but there's no ideological component.
Now that Protestantism is making such a huge comeback in poetics circles, Moore can hardly help but be central to that enterprise.
But I think centrality depends on one's place, and where's one heading.
Poets that are landmarks for one, may not be needed at all by another.
I don't need Ashbery for any reason. I don't need Zukofsky (and am quietly delighted by his nutty son's jinxing of his legacy).
I need Marianne Moore. She's not just central for modernism, but timelessly central, whether it's Central Time or Eastern Time, or Easter time.
Feminists might need her for yet another map that they've created of where they're going.
There can't be one map. All the modernists were also individuals with their own sense of where things were headed. What was Pound to Frost, for instance? E.A. Robinson was probably much more central to Frost.
It seemed that in the 1960s and 1970s when the Sexual Revolution was still big and the new diseases hadn't come out EE Cummings was more central for a lot of people. The bottom fell out for him.
WCW had a lot of sway for a while, but there's no ideological component.
Now that Protestantism is making such a huge comeback in poetics circles, Moore can hardly help but be central to that enterprise.
But I think centrality depends on one's place, and where's one heading.
Poets that are landmarks for one, may not be needed at all by another.
I don't need Ashbery for any reason. I don't need Zukofsky (and am quietly delighted by his nutty son's jinxing of his legacy).
I need Marianne Moore. She's not just central for modernism, but timelessly central, whether it's Central Time or Eastern Time, or Easter time.
Feminists might need her for yet another map that they've created of where they're going.
There can't be one map. All the modernists were also individuals with their own sense of where things were headed. What was Pound to Frost, for instance? E.A. Robinson was probably much more central to Frost.
As for the rest of it,
I would say, that the
Futurist poets, the dada poets,
and all of the early Frenchies
like the Fumistes, the Hydropathes, etc, the ones who used drawing, and odd linguistic humour and sampling.
All of that stuff
is where we are today.
I think Moore, and Stein
are right there with those folks as well.
The poems are mostly short
and mostly furtive
What could be more furtive than flarf
or even new brutalism
remember that
but
people like Leftwich, Bennet
that whole stream
I think all of that kind of work goes back
to a sort of rawness
that comes out of things like
Expressionism
Expressionism was born alongside
dadaism and futurism
and all the writing that is good
and fun
and electric
comes out of those traditions
the sloth lyric
as i call it
the work that believes there is a meaning and that anyone has time
to identify with the poet
they can go back through
whoever
the material miracle
the supremem oddity
that is the world
and especially the contemporary world of art most pointedly
you'll find
comes from some reckoning
of a non-opaque understanding
of the grotesque
and the grotesk itself
was a kind of
sampling and archaeology accident
a true and truly
cross-temporal and cross-cultural
aleatory event.
Now Olson is almost onto this
with his goofy headed bumbling
around the maya
pound does it with the chinese ideogram
but basically
it is marks begetting marks
and the knoweldge that
marks are arc ie
in the brain
and also
as storage
the saint
or taint
of our age..
and ageless
generative oddity
and it happens
geometrically
metro
geo
poem
like apple
delta
nein
or what is changeless
is change
that is the fundamental
irronium
and irronium
is what fuels
the reactor
of culture.
I would say, that the
Futurist poets, the dada poets,
and all of the early Frenchies
like the Fumistes, the Hydropathes, etc, the ones who used drawing, and odd linguistic humour and sampling.
All of that stuff
is where we are today.
I think Moore, and Stein
are right there with those folks as well.
The poems are mostly short
and mostly furtive
What could be more furtive than flarf
or even new brutalism
remember that
but
people like Leftwich, Bennet
that whole stream
I think all of that kind of work goes back
to a sort of rawness
that comes out of things like
Expressionism
Expressionism was born alongside
dadaism and futurism
and all the writing that is good
and fun
and electric
comes out of those traditions
the sloth lyric
as i call it
the work that believes there is a meaning and that anyone has time
to identify with the poet
they can go back through
whoever
the material miracle
the supremem oddity
that is the world
and especially the contemporary world of art most pointedly
you'll find
comes from some reckoning
of a non-opaque understanding
of the grotesque
and the grotesk itself
was a kind of
sampling and archaeology accident
a true and truly
cross-temporal and cross-cultural
aleatory event.
Now Olson is almost onto this
with his goofy headed bumbling
around the maya
pound does it with the chinese ideogram
but basically
it is marks begetting marks
and the knoweldge that
marks are arc ie
in the brain
and also
as storage
the saint
or taint
of our age..
and ageless
generative oddity
and it happens
geometrically
metro
geo
poem
like apple
delta
nein
or what is changeless
is change
that is the fundamental
irronium
and irronium
is what fuels
the reactor
of culture.
The Center?
well (and then I wrote):
what if suddenly
you discovered that the
cen ter
had no circumference
)(a version of this is on (!#%^%$)) wall of fame)
and, why, the, neglecting, of
Stephan Vincent Benet?
,, or, for that matter, Me?
what AM I!... chopped-liver?
well (and then I wrote):
what if suddenly
you discovered that the
cen ter
had no circumference
)(a version of this is on (!#%^%$)) wall of fame)
and, why, the, neglecting, of
Stephan Vincent Benet?
,, or, for that matter, Me?
what AM I!... chopped-liver?
Oops - my slip-up: I WAS thinking of Zukofsky's line organised by word-count rather than syllable-count or stress-count, notably the 5-word line he uses in A-22, A-23 and 80 Flowers - hence the little scare marks round 'meter'. Quantitative (huh, "quantative"? - what's that?), you're right, isn't the right term at all....
The whole 'Pound Era' approach of Kenner and others was precisely one of these creative re-imaginings - cheerleading for Pound and Williams after years of critical over-focus on Eliot. The re-emphasizing of Stein as an important figure is another, later re-visioning in a similar vein. Doubtless, there'll be more such re-orientations to come. Bring 'em on, I say. If Pound, or Williams, or whomever has to suffer for a bit, is that really a problem? - they're gonna outlive most of us anyway....
I think I would still put Pound at the centre of my own map of modernism, but more because of his internationalist approach and tireless encouragement of so many other key figures, rather than just for his poetry. But, as Jordan suggests, this is merely cartographical and even then is just a mental 'place-holder' for my own benefit....
The whole 'Pound Era' approach of Kenner and others was precisely one of these creative re-imaginings - cheerleading for Pound and Williams after years of critical over-focus on Eliot. The re-emphasizing of Stein as an important figure is another, later re-visioning in a similar vein. Doubtless, there'll be more such re-orientations to come. Bring 'em on, I say. If Pound, or Williams, or whomever has to suffer for a bit, is that really a problem? - they're gonna outlive most of us anyway....
I think I would still put Pound at the centre of my own map of modernism, but more because of his internationalist approach and tireless encouragement of so many other key figures, rather than just for his poetry. But, as Jordan suggests, this is merely cartographical and even then is just a mental 'place-holder' for my own benefit....
Well, actually, at 15 Rimbaud took the first prize for Latin verse at the Concours Académique. So I suppose somebody once admired his scholarly abilities.
There seems a significant difference between creating one's own "canon" based on personal interests (a practice that, as an advocate of reading for pleasure, I fully support) and attempting to redefine literary history along the lines of those interests.
Friedlander's attempt to erase this distinction is, I think, unnecessary. I can understand how it arises out of a desire to reconcile personal taste with the construction of an overarching historical narratives, but again, I don't see the need for such a reconciliation.
For me, the most important post World War II English Language poet is probably Kenneth Koch. But if I wanted to turn that into a historical claim applicable not just to me, but to English language poetry as a whole, I know I'd have to think up some pretty heavyweight arguments - "'cause I like him" isn't going to cut it.
Friedlander's attempt to erase this distinction is, I think, unnecessary. I can understand how it arises out of a desire to reconcile personal taste with the construction of an overarching historical narratives, but again, I don't see the need for such a reconciliation.
For me, the most important post World War II English Language poet is probably Kenneth Koch. But if I wanted to turn that into a historical claim applicable not just to me, but to English language poetry as a whole, I know I'd have to think up some pretty heavyweight arguments - "'cause I like him" isn't going to cut it.
Silliman's statement on Yeats is absurd dilettante drollery; it is incompetent and misinformed, thereby negligent of relevant facts.
Yeats responds to the modern world. He is a "last Romantic" and a first early modernist. He clearly addresses modern themes, which whirl in the drift of the widening gyre, propel the falcon's unfettered flight, and motivate the dancer's dance. Pound's "Imagist" tenets and modernist manifestos echo terms of the "irrelevant" Yeats. If we bother to closely read WBY's poetry and his statements on images, symbolism, and language, then we can learn that modern poetry is indebted to his ideas. We still look to Yeats for examples on mechanics, grammar, content and form, and sound and rhythm. Eliot and Pound took lessons from him in these areas. Marianne Moore reviewed Yeats's style in awe; she was absorbed by his mastery, which is obvious in "The Steeple Jack," "The Hero," and "A Grave." WBY was indeed a modernist and an important precursor to many later poets, especially those of the "indomitable Irishry."
--Michael Colson
Yeats responds to the modern world. He is a "last Romantic" and a first early modernist. He clearly addresses modern themes, which whirl in the drift of the widening gyre, propel the falcon's unfettered flight, and motivate the dancer's dance. Pound's "Imagist" tenets and modernist manifestos echo terms of the "irrelevant" Yeats. If we bother to closely read WBY's poetry and his statements on images, symbolism, and language, then we can learn that modern poetry is indebted to his ideas. We still look to Yeats for examples on mechanics, grammar, content and form, and sound and rhythm. Eliot and Pound took lessons from him in these areas. Marianne Moore reviewed Yeats's style in awe; she was absorbed by his mastery, which is obvious in "The Steeple Jack," "The Hero," and "A Grave." WBY was indeed a modernist and an important precursor to many later poets, especially those of the "indomitable Irishry."
--Michael Colson
A literary history of Anglo-American poetry that does not place Trumbull Stickney at the center, is simply fraudulent.
Yeats was influenced by Pound and this moved him toward Modernism - he (and Auden) simply ARE a great poets - (Lowell was in his own way also) Modernism or not - as is Tennyson as is Eliot - and his 4 Quartets are among some of the greatest writing ever. Most of the literary world agree with that.
And if a poets or readers assert that these Quartets are not so - one wonders if such writers or readers (or would be such) have any ability or sense of the beauty and the mystery of language at all.
More relevant is Eliot's The Waste Land with its collage and borrowings and so on.
Moore is or was a major poet (she also borrowed and quoted endlessly, probably influenced by Eliot and Pound) and she was certainly innovative. But contra Yeats and Eliot she leaves me relatively unmoved, and she will remain I think a kind of oddity. For without deep emotion or passion all writing founders. And most her writing lacks that.
Much of Tennyson's and Yeat's poetry has it - as does Pound and Eliot.
For Modernism to move "forward" if that is what did...Stein was necessary. You might object she lacks "emotion" - perhaps - her power as, to a lesser extent, with Moore and also perhaps Stevens is the intricacy and power of her ideas which woven into poems, move us by their beauty.
WCWs has to be pretty central and we haven't got to the European and many other British poets yet... (Jones, MacDiamrid, Bunting, W S Graham, Geoffrey Hill, and many others.)
But there is no need to ditch Eliot. If so - out goes Ashbery and that great poet Schuyler.
Cole Swensen is wonderful - I also have a penchant for Robinson Jeffers - for my sins...
The problem is - how does one evaluate these writers?...Someone suggested that Tennyson is not important - that is nonsense - he will remain essential as will Browning.
It is just that it R S feels it fashionable or "correct" to attack Eliot because he doesn't fit in with Language poetry fomulae.
But there is no centre - poetry occupies a huge and roomy house.
And if a poets or readers assert that these Quartets are not so - one wonders if such writers or readers (or would be such) have any ability or sense of the beauty and the mystery of language at all.
More relevant is Eliot's The Waste Land with its collage and borrowings and so on.
Moore is or was a major poet (she also borrowed and quoted endlessly, probably influenced by Eliot and Pound) and she was certainly innovative. But contra Yeats and Eliot she leaves me relatively unmoved, and she will remain I think a kind of oddity. For without deep emotion or passion all writing founders. And most her writing lacks that.
Much of Tennyson's and Yeat's poetry has it - as does Pound and Eliot.
For Modernism to move "forward" if that is what did...Stein was necessary. You might object she lacks "emotion" - perhaps - her power as, to a lesser extent, with Moore and also perhaps Stevens is the intricacy and power of her ideas which woven into poems, move us by their beauty.
WCWs has to be pretty central and we haven't got to the European and many other British poets yet... (Jones, MacDiamrid, Bunting, W S Graham, Geoffrey Hill, and many others.)
But there is no need to ditch Eliot. If so - out goes Ashbery and that great poet Schuyler.
Cole Swensen is wonderful - I also have a penchant for Robinson Jeffers - for my sins...
The problem is - how does one evaluate these writers?...Someone suggested that Tennyson is not important - that is nonsense - he will remain essential as will Browning.
It is just that it R S feels it fashionable or "correct" to attack Eliot because he doesn't fit in with Language poetry fomulae.
But there is no centre - poetry occupies a huge and roomy house.
I did like Ron's bird metaphors ('spiraling song' is great) and I like in general his passion for what he does, and for poetry itself. And we care about poetry which is one good thing, so that is why we will all often disagree or whatever...it is not antagonistic.
Certainly WCW's was said to be quite passionately anti-Eliot** - or the High Church of Eliot and I can understand that. Eliot came to seem to dominate the lit world in his time...and certainly he was very conservative and very Middle Ages - but he had a deep sense of poetry. The influence of Laforgue and probably Mallarme and so on perhaps should not be underrated. And even of surealism. And the 4Qs cant be said to be stupid*...well that is how I see it.
*Of course they can be as they were...and so we diverge. Yet I like Moore and Stein as well...
Obviously my liking the 4 Quartets doesn't cause the Universe to shudder and die...
** I realise it is not Eliot per see but his 4Qts and maybe his ideas about poetics that are more in question here. I assume the importance of The Waste Land is seen.
Certainly WCW's was said to be quite passionately anti-Eliot** - or the High Church of Eliot and I can understand that. Eliot came to seem to dominate the lit world in his time...and certainly he was very conservative and very Middle Ages - but he had a deep sense of poetry. The influence of Laforgue and probably Mallarme and so on perhaps should not be underrated. And even of surealism. And the 4Qs cant be said to be stupid*...well that is how I see it.
*Of course they can be as they were...and so we diverge. Yet I like Moore and Stein as well...
Obviously my liking the 4 Quartets doesn't cause the Universe to shudder and die...
** I realise it is not Eliot per see but his 4Qts and maybe his ideas about poetics that are more in question here. I assume the importance of The Waste Land is seen.
I can see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it. - MM
The centre of the bardic universe is too far blue shifted. - ME
Children left flowers,
seashells, stones and poems
on the stone of Josef Brodsky
and not on nearby Ezra
Pound. Only the brown lizard
I saw there.
The centre of the bardic universe is too far blue shifted. - ME
Children left flowers,
seashells, stones and poems
on the stone of Josef Brodsky
and not on nearby Ezra
Pound. Only the brown lizard
I saw there.
Maybe the whole notion of periodic categorization is incorrect. Sure, there's history, but it's not moving neatly and/or progressively. It jumps around.
You could as easily divide poets into big city and rural (Frost being rural).
Or you could divide poets into religious and secular.
I think Moore saw Herbert as in some sense contemporaneous with her. For the religious, there is a still center of timelessness.
For the secularists they have this Hegelian-Marxist notion of progress toward something and you are either with it or not. The whole notion of an avant-garde is suspect to a religious person like Moore unless you placed Christ as the center of that particular avant-garde, as he is depicted in the Last Supper by DaVinci.
English departments are organized by period (hiring is done by periods -- postmodernist, modernist, Victorian, Romantic, 18th, 17th, Elizabethan, medieval being the main names of job ads for English.
That's further broken down into genres: poetry and prose and drama.
These divisions are all somewhat artificial and don't hold up under inspection.
But they remain rough designations, with a few more pushing their way in now by way of race studies (African-American, Chicana, etc.), and now there are disability studies, and gender (Queer Studies and Women's Studies).
I suppose I'd try to push in poetry study via denomination (I think what a person believes is much more likely to influence what they write than what color they happen to be).
I'd probably also try to emphasize place more -- especially a big division between rural and city writers.
Marianne Moore is interesting because she lived in Carlisle until she was about 27, and then moved to a big city, but settled in an area of Brooklyn that still has a relatively small town feel. She knew her neighbors and went to the church next door.
People in that neighborhood still remember her, and call her Marianne as they talk about her -- a word filled with neighborly affection -- not just awe.
You could as easily divide poets into big city and rural (Frost being rural).
Or you could divide poets into religious and secular.
I think Moore saw Herbert as in some sense contemporaneous with her. For the religious, there is a still center of timelessness.
For the secularists they have this Hegelian-Marxist notion of progress toward something and you are either with it or not. The whole notion of an avant-garde is suspect to a religious person like Moore unless you placed Christ as the center of that particular avant-garde, as he is depicted in the Last Supper by DaVinci.
English departments are organized by period (hiring is done by periods -- postmodernist, modernist, Victorian, Romantic, 18th, 17th, Elizabethan, medieval being the main names of job ads for English.
That's further broken down into genres: poetry and prose and drama.
These divisions are all somewhat artificial and don't hold up under inspection.
But they remain rough designations, with a few more pushing their way in now by way of race studies (African-American, Chicana, etc.), and now there are disability studies, and gender (Queer Studies and Women's Studies).
I suppose I'd try to push in poetry study via denomination (I think what a person believes is much more likely to influence what they write than what color they happen to be).
I'd probably also try to emphasize place more -- especially a big division between rural and city writers.
Marianne Moore is interesting because she lived in Carlisle until she was about 27, and then moved to a big city, but settled in an area of Brooklyn that still has a relatively small town feel. She knew her neighbors and went to the church next door.
People in that neighborhood still remember her, and call her Marianne as they talk about her -- a word filled with neighborly affection -- not just awe.
Maybe all this taxonomy is for the birds, or should I say, for ornithologists. I was perfectly happy to read Moore without worrying whether she was a card-carrying modernist, and admiring Kyger without worrying about whether she would "outlast" Frost.
It's fairly clear that Ron doesn't know what he's talking about on WBY. Although I'm not sure that his comments on Moore, Pound, or Eliot are any better. Eliot's quietism? I know what means in regard to Wittgenstein but to TSE?? Sure, MM and TSE were friends and correspondents (as MM and W Stevens were), but I really don't see any poetic influence. For anyone to claim that she's the "center of modernism"--that's simply ridiculous. Really, why not WBY, Stevens, or Pound? The curious thing about the various comments here is that hardly anyone is sticking up for WBY--people simply aren't recognizing that he wasn't merely a Victorian and rather was an important modernist. And what's with this line of thinking: "Nothing in WBY's world remained in a world I was born into"? What crock! It's obvious that Ron hasn't read Yeats. But the true frustration is the tacit assumption that WBY is irrelevant to modernism-- what version of modernism is everyone commenting on then?
But OK, let's grant that WBY was merely a Victorian--in company with Arnold, Pater, and Carlyle. It's not true, but let's grant that statement for a moment. He still had a tremendous influence on modernist writers in ways that Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne--even Wilde--did not. And to this day he is a looming influence in Ireland: "Irish poets learn your trade." Most contemporary Irish poets feel that injunction personally. An Irish writer rarely puts pen to paper without considering WBY. No one mentions how influential WBY was on the so-called Irish modernist poets: Beckett, McGreevy (who corresponded with W Stevens and Georgie Yeats), Dennis Devlin, Patrick Kavanagh (sure, not much of a modernist), and Austin Clarke ... even Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney... his work is saturated with WBY... and contemporary poets, such as Maurice Scully and Trevor Joyce, to name a few...
If literature is news that stays news, as Pound says, then please let's get the facts right!
But OK, let's grant that WBY was merely a Victorian--in company with Arnold, Pater, and Carlyle. It's not true, but let's grant that statement for a moment. He still had a tremendous influence on modernist writers in ways that Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne--even Wilde--did not. And to this day he is a looming influence in Ireland: "Irish poets learn your trade." Most contemporary Irish poets feel that injunction personally. An Irish writer rarely puts pen to paper without considering WBY. No one mentions how influential WBY was on the so-called Irish modernist poets: Beckett, McGreevy (who corresponded with W Stevens and Georgie Yeats), Dennis Devlin, Patrick Kavanagh (sure, not much of a modernist), and Austin Clarke ... even Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney... his work is saturated with WBY... and contemporary poets, such as Maurice Scully and Trevor Joyce, to name a few...
If literature is news that stays news, as Pound says, then please let's get the facts right!
Eliot's Four Quartets were actually first conceived in the early-mid '30's, and occur in precise relation to Eliot's deliberate sequential development:
Prufrock
Gerontian
Waste Land
Hollow Men
Ash Wednesday
Four Quartets
--they actually belong to his early middle period, and are not "late". The whole last 20 years or so of Eliot's life was primarily devoted to resuscitating verse drama, which he believed deserved to be revived. He seems also to have lost interest in the formal issues of poetry, and thought more about "society" in general. At least that's where his work tended. Eliot's intellectual development stops somewhere in about 1915--he reads Fraser and Baudelaire and the French Symbolists, and that pretty much fixes him aesthetically for the rest of his life. Empson and the New Critics see in him the powerful persuasive measure of verse as a quasi-religious ceremony. The "religious" stuff gets mangled by everyone, and hence the earlier poems are all misunderstood and under-appreciated in consequence. Four Quartets isn't a bad work, just more relaxed and deliberate in feeling--amongst his admirers, it continues to hold a special place, and is one of the most popular of serious modern poems.
Would Ron rather he hadn't even written it?
Word verification: "rettyro" !!!
Prufrock
Gerontian
Waste Land
Hollow Men
Ash Wednesday
Four Quartets
--they actually belong to his early middle period, and are not "late". The whole last 20 years or so of Eliot's life was primarily devoted to resuscitating verse drama, which he believed deserved to be revived. He seems also to have lost interest in the formal issues of poetry, and thought more about "society" in general. At least that's where his work tended. Eliot's intellectual development stops somewhere in about 1915--he reads Fraser and Baudelaire and the French Symbolists, and that pretty much fixes him aesthetically for the rest of his life. Empson and the New Critics see in him the powerful persuasive measure of verse as a quasi-religious ceremony. The "religious" stuff gets mangled by everyone, and hence the earlier poems are all misunderstood and under-appreciated in consequence. Four Quartets isn't a bad work, just more relaxed and deliberate in feeling--amongst his admirers, it continues to hold a special place, and is one of the most popular of serious modern poems.
Would Ron rather he hadn't even written it?
Word verification: "rettyro" !!!
The reason I called attention to Ron's Ornithological gambit is because of its relation to the iconology of folly and fools.
A nice example is in Jacob Jordaens "Folly" where he depicts a fool with a feather in his cap, which is further reiterated in subsequent engravings with braided goose necks etc.
if you take
the word bird
and perform the jester's trick upon it you can break the baguette,
or rather braguette in this case,
as a fool's bird is most commonly "the cock"~ right about here:
b ird
here's where it gets fun.
what's in this fool's sceptre?
being heard?
being among the herd?
No, I think Ron, has made fools of us all, Well, I was already an idiot, idiot comes from idiotes
which in greek means
private person.
But
B ird
or being erd
erd: [OE. eard masc. is cogn. w. OS. ard masc. ‘dwelling’, OHG. art fem. ‘ploughing’, ON. örð fem. ‘harvest’:—OTeut. *ardu-z, ardâ, prob. f. WAryan root *ar to plough. For the sense cf. OE. búan to cultivate, inhabit.]
1. The land where one dwells; native land, home; a region, country.
2. In OE.: ? State, condition. Hence (in ME.), disposition, temper.
With the ME. use cf. MHG. art masc., fem., mod.G. art fem. ‘manner, disposition’, which, however, Kluge regards as prob. of distinct etymology.
Now. Erd is related to Art and Is
through Earth or Arth and B as
Be.
Look.
The Bird, is an iconological grotesque of pleonasm.
b. 2 sing. art (A;t, @t, (@)t). [= ON. est, after 12th c. ert, Goth. is, Skr. ási, Gr. “rri (Žrr¬, eµ|, eµ), L. es; in Eng., as in later ON., s of the stem has become r: the final t is a pleonastic addition of the 2nd pers. pron., not found in Goth., nor outside Teut.] Forms: 1–2 eart, 1 Merc. earð, North. arð, 2–3 ært, (eært, æart, hart, ard), Orm. arrt, 2–5 ert, 2– art, capable of contraction, 6– thou'rt. Negative 1–5 neart, nert, nart. Art-thou appears 1–2 eartu, earðu, arðu, 2–5 ertu, artu, artow; in poet. and dial. use, the pron. is now sometimes omitted, as in ‘What art doing?’ (northern es, is: see 3rd sing.)
Bird, is a kind of pleonasmic holarchic key to the interface between culture and nature, the rational as a construct, and hence,
all constructs as rationales, as assemblages.
Be earth, be dirt.
Being is Ard
being is hard.
It's hjard to be heard, when you're in a herd.
Herding Earth, and I mean us, its too hard to get them to hear with their ears, whatever dust one uses to fuse the hard word to the earth
is no match for the nature between their ears, even if nature is for the birds, its
hard to be a bard on earth
when all the birds
who heard the sod
are simply
a single strangeness
being odd
and another thing
the Latins used BS
until they finally
switched to the Greek Psi.
Psi (uppercase Ψ, lowercase ψ; pronounced sigh) is the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and has a numeric value of 700. In both Classical and Modern Greek, the letter indicates the combination /ps/ (like in English "lapse"). The letter was adopted into the Old Italic alphabet, and its shape is continued into the Algiz rune of the Elder Futhark. Psi was also adopted into the early Cyrillic alphabet as Ѱ. In Greek loanwords in Latin and modern languages with Latin alphabets, Psi is usually transliterated as "ps". In English, due to phonotactic constraints, its pronunciation is usually simplified to /s/.
The letter psi is commonly used in physics for representing a wavefunction in quantum mechanics, particularly with the Schrödinger equation and bra-ket notation: \langle\phi|\psi\rangle. It is also used to represent the (generalized) positional states of a qubit in a quantum computer.
Do you get it yet, says the fool?
It's all waves of bullshit.
As Minne doth tary here,
so too, doeth the Minotaur
that monster
of desire, forgiveness,
and sacrifice, and most of all
secrecy,
as in secretion
and Is creation?
A nice example is in Jacob Jordaens "Folly" where he depicts a fool with a feather in his cap, which is further reiterated in subsequent engravings with braided goose necks etc.
if you take
the word bird
and perform the jester's trick upon it you can break the baguette,
or rather braguette in this case,
as a fool's bird is most commonly "the cock"~ right about here:
b ird
here's where it gets fun.
what's in this fool's sceptre?
being heard?
being among the herd?
No, I think Ron, has made fools of us all, Well, I was already an idiot, idiot comes from idiotes
which in greek means
private person.
But
B ird
or being erd
erd: [OE. eard masc. is cogn. w. OS. ard masc. ‘dwelling’, OHG. art fem. ‘ploughing’, ON. örð fem. ‘harvest’:—OTeut. *ardu-z, ardâ, prob. f. WAryan root *ar to plough. For the sense cf. OE. búan to cultivate, inhabit.]
1. The land where one dwells; native land, home; a region, country.
2. In OE.: ? State, condition. Hence (in ME.), disposition, temper.
With the ME. use cf. MHG. art masc., fem., mod.G. art fem. ‘manner, disposition’, which, however, Kluge regards as prob. of distinct etymology.
Now. Erd is related to Art and Is
through Earth or Arth and B as
Be.
Look.
The Bird, is an iconological grotesque of pleonasm.
b. 2 sing. art (A;t, @t, (@)t). [= ON. est, after 12th c. ert, Goth. is, Skr. ási, Gr. “rri (Žrr¬, eµ|, eµ), L. es; in Eng., as in later ON., s of the stem has become r: the final t is a pleonastic addition of the 2nd pers. pron., not found in Goth., nor outside Teut.] Forms: 1–2 eart, 1 Merc. earð, North. arð, 2–3 ært, (eært, æart, hart, ard), Orm. arrt, 2–5 ert, 2– art, capable of contraction, 6– thou'rt. Negative 1–5 neart, nert, nart. Art-thou appears 1–2 eartu, earðu, arðu, 2–5 ertu, artu, artow; in poet. and dial. use, the pron. is now sometimes omitted, as in ‘What art doing?’ (northern es, is: see 3rd sing.)
Bird, is a kind of pleonasmic holarchic key to the interface between culture and nature, the rational as a construct, and hence,
all constructs as rationales, as assemblages.
Be earth, be dirt.
Being is Ard
being is hard.
It's hjard to be heard, when you're in a herd.
Herding Earth, and I mean us, its too hard to get them to hear with their ears, whatever dust one uses to fuse the hard word to the earth
is no match for the nature between their ears, even if nature is for the birds, its
hard to be a bard on earth
when all the birds
who heard the sod
are simply
a single strangeness
being odd
and another thing
the Latins used BS
until they finally
switched to the Greek Psi.
Psi (uppercase Ψ, lowercase ψ; pronounced sigh) is the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and has a numeric value of 700. In both Classical and Modern Greek, the letter indicates the combination /ps/ (like in English "lapse"). The letter was adopted into the Old Italic alphabet, and its shape is continued into the Algiz rune of the Elder Futhark. Psi was also adopted into the early Cyrillic alphabet as Ѱ. In Greek loanwords in Latin and modern languages with Latin alphabets, Psi is usually transliterated as "ps". In English, due to phonotactic constraints, its pronunciation is usually simplified to /s/.
The letter psi is commonly used in physics for representing a wavefunction in quantum mechanics, particularly with the Schrödinger equation and bra-ket notation: \langle\phi|\psi\rangle. It is also used to represent the (generalized) positional states of a qubit in a quantum computer.
Do you get it yet, says the fool?
It's all waves of bullshit.
As Minne doth tary here,
so too, doeth the Minotaur
that monster
of desire, forgiveness,
and sacrifice, and most of all
secrecy,
as in secretion
and Is creation?
Modernism does not begin with 'Tender Buttons' nor does it begin in any English speaking country.
I was going to say, if anything it started with Baudelaire, but thought better, but then went to Wikipedia and looked it up, and more or less, Wikipedia agrees with me. For poetry, Wikipedia lists Baudelaire as sort of the beginnings of Modernism in Poetry.
And the Russian boys were well under way when the English hodads
came on the scene..
That the West and the East has dropped the memory of the Futurist and Dada poets, that so many early Modernist writers are left to languish attests to our modern squareness, or rather
THE SQUARENESS OF LITARARY FOLK!
Why did the artists grow their beards and start wearing shaggy old cotton Bahneens and happily mispelling, while the writers all prissed up, put on bow-ties and started arguing what color milk is when it comes out the nipple?
THAT IS THE QUESTION!
Game in Hell (in collaboration with V. Khlebnikov). M, 1912.
Old love. M, 1912.
Mirskontsa (co-authored with V. Khlebnikov). M, 1912.
Half-dead. M, 1913.
Hermit. M, 1913.
Lipstick. M, 1913.
The word as such (in collaboration with V. Khlebnikov). M, 1913.
Buch Lesin (co-authored with V. Khlebnikov). P, 1913.
Declaration of the word as such. P, 1913.
Vozropschem. P, 1913.
Vzorval. P, 1913, 1914.
Piglets (co-authored with Zina B.). P, 1913, 1914.
Mayakovsky. P, 1913.
Devil and Speech-creators. P, 1913, 1914.
Victory over the Sun. P, 1913. (Prologue written Khlebnikov).
Duck nest of bad words. P, 1914. Two editions.
Te-li-LE (co-authored with V. Khlebnikov). P, 1914.
Own stories and drawings of children. P, 1914.
I was going to say, if anything it started with Baudelaire, but thought better, but then went to Wikipedia and looked it up, and more or less, Wikipedia agrees with me. For poetry, Wikipedia lists Baudelaire as sort of the beginnings of Modernism in Poetry.
And the Russian boys were well under way when the English hodads
came on the scene..
That the West and the East has dropped the memory of the Futurist and Dada poets, that so many early Modernist writers are left to languish attests to our modern squareness, or rather
THE SQUARENESS OF LITARARY FOLK!
Why did the artists grow their beards and start wearing shaggy old cotton Bahneens and happily mispelling, while the writers all prissed up, put on bow-ties and started arguing what color milk is when it comes out the nipple?
THAT IS THE QUESTION!
Game in Hell (in collaboration with V. Khlebnikov). M, 1912.
Old love. M, 1912.
Mirskontsa (co-authored with V. Khlebnikov). M, 1912.
Half-dead. M, 1913.
Hermit. M, 1913.
Lipstick. M, 1913.
The word as such (in collaboration with V. Khlebnikov). M, 1913.
Buch Lesin (co-authored with V. Khlebnikov). P, 1913.
Declaration of the word as such. P, 1913.
Vozropschem. P, 1913.
Vzorval. P, 1913, 1914.
Piglets (co-authored with Zina B.). P, 1913, 1914.
Mayakovsky. P, 1913.
Devil and Speech-creators. P, 1913, 1914.
Victory over the Sun. P, 1913. (Prologue written Khlebnikov).
Duck nest of bad words. P, 1914. Two editions.
Te-li-LE (co-authored with V. Khlebnikov). P, 1914.
Own stories and drawings of children. P, 1914.
WHO CARE ABOUT YEATS?!
Yeats was a Hodad who couldn't even swing enough to get into Crowley's coven in Transylvania..
[SHEESH]
Pound is twack, but has a decent
CROWLEYESQUE voice, but I like CROWLEY better because he's at least A WITCH!
Here's a list of some folks, but I must say, that Curtis does make a good point about Marianne Moore in terms of Process, but the whole paradox of Modernism
and it is a paradox
is that in the midst of the rediscovery of folk culture
which is at the root of Modernism
IN RUSSIA
IN YEATS
IN POUND
you get this weird ass
geometric abstraction coming out
and that abstractionism
is the fundamental difference
and the levels of abstraction
now what we are leaving out
is the folk grotesque and early modern grotesque associated with expressionism
which reaches right across 'romanticism' to join up with a much older tradition.
In the arts, the veiled disintegration of the pictorial space into vivid abstraction
is essentially the redefinition
of the grotesque tradition
If we look at Boecklin,
what has dissolved is reality
ushering in symbolism
but the symbolists
usher in both
a flattening
and
a new version
a hightened and ascendent version
of mannerism
Modernism
in all its vestiges
is completely
traceable back to
Mannerism
and to the Renaissance discovery
of the Fourth style of Roman painting found in the
The Domus Aurea (Latin for "Golden House")
And what was it they found?
Hmm.
Continuous variation in ornament from the animal to the vegetal to the architectonic orders produced in an exceedingly eloquent manifestation of spatial arrangement.
The cultural energeum of the Renaissance was caused more or less
by the revelation of ornament
and more importantly
ornament
as
revelation
Then if we go to Kayser's text on the grotesque and follow
the links from the 19th century grotesque to the 20th
and nowhere is "romanticism" discussed except as the style of clothes rich people wore.
The Grotesque is the single progenitor of Modernism
with its immediate parent
being Renaissance Mannerism
and the acceptance of personal stylistics.
The Early Moderns are not only in the company of 'Victorians'
no, they are in the company of people like
Jean Paul, ETA Hoffmann, Vischer, Tieck, Eberhard, Krause, Kostlin, Carriere, Lemcke, Uberhorst.
And then there is the whole infusion of Indian art in there as well.
Baudelaire himself
IS A CHARACTER OUT OF ETA HOFFMANN!
And Dadaism and Futurism picked up
the grotesque, because what the grotesque is able to do
is protest,
and what does it protest?
It protests
the single narrative, more or less
and pushes forward a form of complexity that includes
overlapping frames of reference and paradox,
and when the paradox of the surface
of the pictorial transforms into the paradox of the surface of the page, you get Joyces, and Moores
and Pounds, but Pound is too stupid
to know
he's failed the Sphinxes riddle
and Yeats is just a square
sniffing ghost ass
Here is a line
even Curtis can follow
Brueghel
to Hogarth
to
Baudelaire.
It isn't any person, RON, BEN,
THE CENTER OF MODERNISM
IS THE ANCIENT TRADITION
OF THE GROTESQUE.
Even Crowley knew that...
[Sheesh]..
Yeats was a Hodad who couldn't even swing enough to get into Crowley's coven in Transylvania..
[SHEESH]
Pound is twack, but has a decent
CROWLEYESQUE voice, but I like CROWLEY better because he's at least A WITCH!
Here's a list of some folks, but I must say, that Curtis does make a good point about Marianne Moore in terms of Process, but the whole paradox of Modernism
and it is a paradox
is that in the midst of the rediscovery of folk culture
which is at the root of Modernism
IN RUSSIA
IN YEATS
IN POUND
you get this weird ass
geometric abstraction coming out
and that abstractionism
is the fundamental difference
and the levels of abstraction
now what we are leaving out
is the folk grotesque and early modern grotesque associated with expressionism
which reaches right across 'romanticism' to join up with a much older tradition.
In the arts, the veiled disintegration of the pictorial space into vivid abstraction
is essentially the redefinition
of the grotesque tradition
If we look at Boecklin,
what has dissolved is reality
ushering in symbolism
but the symbolists
usher in both
a flattening
and
a new version
a hightened and ascendent version
of mannerism
Modernism
in all its vestiges
is completely
traceable back to
Mannerism
and to the Renaissance discovery
of the Fourth style of Roman painting found in the
The Domus Aurea (Latin for "Golden House")
And what was it they found?
Hmm.
Continuous variation in ornament from the animal to the vegetal to the architectonic orders produced in an exceedingly eloquent manifestation of spatial arrangement.
The cultural energeum of the Renaissance was caused more or less
by the revelation of ornament
and more importantly
ornament
as
revelation
Then if we go to Kayser's text on the grotesque and follow
the links from the 19th century grotesque to the 20th
and nowhere is "romanticism" discussed except as the style of clothes rich people wore.
The Grotesque is the single progenitor of Modernism
with its immediate parent
being Renaissance Mannerism
and the acceptance of personal stylistics.
The Early Moderns are not only in the company of 'Victorians'
no, they are in the company of people like
Jean Paul, ETA Hoffmann, Vischer, Tieck, Eberhard, Krause, Kostlin, Carriere, Lemcke, Uberhorst.
And then there is the whole infusion of Indian art in there as well.
Baudelaire himself
IS A CHARACTER OUT OF ETA HOFFMANN!
And Dadaism and Futurism picked up
the grotesque, because what the grotesque is able to do
is protest,
and what does it protest?
It protests
the single narrative, more or less
and pushes forward a form of complexity that includes
overlapping frames of reference and paradox,
and when the paradox of the surface
of the pictorial transforms into the paradox of the surface of the page, you get Joyces, and Moores
and Pounds, but Pound is too stupid
to know
he's failed the Sphinxes riddle
and Yeats is just a square
sniffing ghost ass
Here is a line
even Curtis can follow
Brueghel
to Hogarth
to
Baudelaire.
It isn't any person, RON, BEN,
THE CENTER OF MODERNISM
IS THE ANCIENT TRADITION
OF THE GROTESQUE.
Even Crowley knew that...
[Sheesh]..
and before I forget, the thread I left hanging was geometric abstraction.
That fundamental iconology
of Modernism is shattered
[I think] by Cesar Paternosto's
work _The Stone and The Thread: The Andean Roots of Abstract Art_
which still follows the paradox of Modernism coming out of historical and ancient folk traditions.
He shows conclusively that Albers lifted many of his mural designs from the Zapotec ruins at Mitla.
And just so you won't think I'm really taking myself seriously.
There is an essay in Hal Foster's book _The Anti-Aesthetic_ by Jurgen Habermas, another hodad of the "hodiemos" called "Modernity, an Incomplete Project" who says that scholars have traditionally considered the Renaissance as the origin of the Modern, but then goes onto say, that hey, the word is from like 500-600 ad so alot of people thought of themselves as "Modern".. but what I find interesting
is that in 1980 at the birth of what we call Post-Modern critics were griping about Antimodernism,
and bringing up something called
posthistory
now to me
that is just a fancy way of saying
trans-historical
Modernism was, like they all are, a trans-historical process
flowing more or less out of various sources and into various practices, and from then on
its the rhetoric and thumb wrestling of the copula wranglers.
I will say look at something like MM's poem
Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns
and I would say
that is definitely about
the whole
grotesque thing I am on about
as well as the Renais. roots of Modernism, or really the creative moment of the general contemporary epoch of being able to utilize trans-historicity in any meaningful way.
even the first line
is highly suggestive
lion meaning "line" in my reading
with their respective lions-
"mighty monoceroses with immeasured tayles"-
I think nobody could really have said it better!
MM may be the Center of Modernism,
but SHE HAS THE SAME MESSAGE AS ME!
HA!
That fundamental iconology
of Modernism is shattered
[I think] by Cesar Paternosto's
work _The Stone and The Thread: The Andean Roots of Abstract Art_
which still follows the paradox of Modernism coming out of historical and ancient folk traditions.
He shows conclusively that Albers lifted many of his mural designs from the Zapotec ruins at Mitla.
And just so you won't think I'm really taking myself seriously.
There is an essay in Hal Foster's book _The Anti-Aesthetic_ by Jurgen Habermas, another hodad of the "hodiemos" called "Modernity, an Incomplete Project" who says that scholars have traditionally considered the Renaissance as the origin of the Modern, but then goes onto say, that hey, the word is from like 500-600 ad so alot of people thought of themselves as "Modern".. but what I find interesting
is that in 1980 at the birth of what we call Post-Modern critics were griping about Antimodernism,
and bringing up something called
posthistory
now to me
that is just a fancy way of saying
trans-historical
Modernism was, like they all are, a trans-historical process
flowing more or less out of various sources and into various practices, and from then on
its the rhetoric and thumb wrestling of the copula wranglers.
I will say look at something like MM's poem
Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns
and I would say
that is definitely about
the whole
grotesque thing I am on about
as well as the Renais. roots of Modernism, or really the creative moment of the general contemporary epoch of being able to utilize trans-historicity in any meaningful way.
even the first line
is highly suggestive
lion meaning "line" in my reading
with their respective lions-
"mighty monoceroses with immeasured tayles"-
I think nobody could really have said it better!
MM may be the Center of Modernism,
but SHE HAS THE SAME MESSAGE AS ME!
HA!
Most of these entries are pretentious and absurd beyond words. Are you people serious? Do you actually know what gibberish you're saying? I hope you're not teaching some of these ridiculous statements in the classroom. Moore as the center of modernism? Who are you kidding? She's a literary footnote. Why focus mainly on American writers? Because American poetry is touted at U Buffalo and on the East Coast? Modernism is not a unique American phenomenon. WBY as a Victorian? As not a modernist? Utter nonsense! That's simply uninformed and misguided. 'On the Boiler' isn't proof of such a claim any more than 'A Vision' is. The former is an old man's bitter ravings, which critics don't take very seriously, and the latter is mainly esoteric occult symbolism. Here's a suggestion: take a few undergraduate survey courses in British and Irish literature, actually learn about such matters prior to writing about them, and then return to the question of WBY's presumed irrelevance to modernism. In other words, get a clue. Otherwise, uninformed opinions simply make us all dumb and dumber.
One of the odd things about poetry is that if it's good, it outlasts its own historical era, metamorphoses in the new sensibilities of future times.
This is the main reason these shoot-from-the-hip critical assessments start to sound like subjective blueberry jam.
You have to try to be both objective, on the one hand, about the relative impact & importance of various poets upon the times in which they flourished, & upon later developments, yet also recognize, on the other hand, that new readers will find new things in old bokes, & influence & reputations are consequently morphing & changing all the time.
*
I'm kind of surprised that Ron, a bonafide postmodernist post-language post-avant writer, is so concerned about defining a "center". I thought centers did not exist for true-blue postmodernism.
*
Of course, the true center of 20th-century modernism is :
OSIP MANDELSTAM !!! with SAMUEL GREENBERG running a close second !!!
This is the main reason these shoot-from-the-hip critical assessments start to sound like subjective blueberry jam.
You have to try to be both objective, on the one hand, about the relative impact & importance of various poets upon the times in which they flourished, & upon later developments, yet also recognize, on the other hand, that new readers will find new things in old bokes, & influence & reputations are consequently morphing & changing all the time.
*
I'm kind of surprised that Ron, a bonafide postmodernist post-language post-avant writer, is so concerned about defining a "center". I thought centers did not exist for true-blue postmodernism.
*
Of course, the true center of 20th-century modernism is :
OSIP MANDELSTAM !!! with SAMUEL GREENBERG running a close second !!!
Yeats may be a special case. His career begins towards the end of the 19th Century, but spans well into the mid-20th Century. His style and approach to his craft underwent significant changes over time. Socked into the Irish mists in his youth, by middle age he was addressing nationalism and violence. He got consistently better. Few poets do this. Most either repeat themselves, or just peter out after early promise. The Tower is probably his best book, published when he was 63. Yeats is both old-fashioned, and modern. His strangeness is probably the result of his self-conscious Irish folkway culture, as much as his 19th century vocabulary and linguistic bearing. Once you accept the framework of his thought, his work is transparent and straighforward. Nonetheless, I find much of his writing dull, especially the dramatic writing. I'm unclear how it sounds to "English" ears.
Lanny - good w the trans-historical.
McCaffery's work there (and, as with the Haabermas you cite, re-modernizing - if that is the word - the so-called pre modern) is great... though you probably know that.
{WV: battiv}
McCaffery's work there (and, as with the Haabermas you cite, re-modernizing - if that is the word - the so-called pre modern) is great... though you probably know that.
{WV: battiv}
Thanks Ross! I stand by my assertion
that the Grotesque tradition is at the center of Modernism, but, I can see how Romanticism feeds into Modernism in a more direct way,
in terms of formalist subjectivities.
I do still think that people like Paternosto have drawn out important references, and it's very common to see shows like "The Primitive Roots of Modernism" and you have things like pictures of Freud's office with primitive statuary or Kandinsky's Atelier.
Klee started out completey grotesque. There's a wonderful text called Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque which centralizes the grotesque tradition
among the arts, and the reason this works well is because both realist and anit-realist traditions are both subsumed by the grotesque, and the hybrid is the result, people like Raymond Roussel, De Chirico's book Hebdomeros, Those books look backward to works like the Polyphilos. The Neue Gallery in NY did a wonderful book called
Comic Grotesque, wit and mockery in German Art 1870-1940
and during that period if you look at German poetry, people like Trakl, Else Lasker Schuler, Morgenstern, Stramm, Rilke's poem
Gong
gale in the pillar?
That's not realist, that's weird.
THe entire period is infused with odd exultation and dark deformation
culminating in the first world war.
And the folkic roots and misinterpretations of the early modern period give us things like
occultic nordicism combining with fascism, vegetarianism, organic agriculture and nudism. That is what Nazism was.
Now Yeats was occultic in his early period, and then you have people like Alexandra David-Neel
going to Tibet and actually seeing
monks melt the water out of frozen robes while controlling their own body temperatures. things like that. or maybe she heard stories.
been years ago.
Or look at Leger. He's using modernist-inspried technique
in the early period, but protraying
folkic subjects like street musicians, and really surrealist painting is just a continuation of symbolism, and realism is actually symbolic most of the time
in fact that's an ancient chinese japanese poetry trope is a kind of standardized symbolism for various natural elements.. I tell you what,
one of the most sexually frank documents I've come across is Charles Henri Ford's journal Water From a Bucket. Now compare that to Marianne Moore's collected letters
Now look at where MM was in 1949
versus CHF
CHF is at a dinner
looking at a painting by Balthus
and MM is writing to Pound
and has Giraffe Bronchitis
and had stamps given to her bu Dudek.
Balthus was related to that author of Erotic literature whose name reminds me of
Ouspensky the Gurdjieff scholar..
Whatever the hell is going on,
its packed with diversity and weirdness.
that the Grotesque tradition is at the center of Modernism, but, I can see how Romanticism feeds into Modernism in a more direct way,
in terms of formalist subjectivities.
I do still think that people like Paternosto have drawn out important references, and it's very common to see shows like "The Primitive Roots of Modernism" and you have things like pictures of Freud's office with primitive statuary or Kandinsky's Atelier.
Klee started out completey grotesque. There's a wonderful text called Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque which centralizes the grotesque tradition
among the arts, and the reason this works well is because both realist and anit-realist traditions are both subsumed by the grotesque, and the hybrid is the result, people like Raymond Roussel, De Chirico's book Hebdomeros, Those books look backward to works like the Polyphilos. The Neue Gallery in NY did a wonderful book called
Comic Grotesque, wit and mockery in German Art 1870-1940
and during that period if you look at German poetry, people like Trakl, Else Lasker Schuler, Morgenstern, Stramm, Rilke's poem
Gong
gale in the pillar?
That's not realist, that's weird.
THe entire period is infused with odd exultation and dark deformation
culminating in the first world war.
And the folkic roots and misinterpretations of the early modern period give us things like
occultic nordicism combining with fascism, vegetarianism, organic agriculture and nudism. That is what Nazism was.
Now Yeats was occultic in his early period, and then you have people like Alexandra David-Neel
going to Tibet and actually seeing
monks melt the water out of frozen robes while controlling their own body temperatures. things like that. or maybe she heard stories.
been years ago.
Or look at Leger. He's using modernist-inspried technique
in the early period, but protraying
folkic subjects like street musicians, and really surrealist painting is just a continuation of symbolism, and realism is actually symbolic most of the time
in fact that's an ancient chinese japanese poetry trope is a kind of standardized symbolism for various natural elements.. I tell you what,
one of the most sexually frank documents I've come across is Charles Henri Ford's journal Water From a Bucket. Now compare that to Marianne Moore's collected letters
Now look at where MM was in 1949
versus CHF
CHF is at a dinner
looking at a painting by Balthus
and MM is writing to Pound
and has Giraffe Bronchitis
and had stamps given to her bu Dudek.
Balthus was related to that author of Erotic literature whose name reminds me of
Ouspensky the Gurdjieff scholar..
Whatever the hell is going on,
its packed with diversity and weirdness.
Yeah, I totally agree re: wierdness and diversity - these attempt to centralize and create a structurally sound narrative simply act as a reterritorializarion -
There is always something(s) that is (are) anomolous; there is always alterity.
The bits do not fall together - rather than a jigsaw puzzle it's one of Schwitters' Merzbilder.
There is always something(s) that is (are) anomolous; there is always alterity.
The bits do not fall together - rather than a jigsaw puzzle it's one of Schwitters' Merzbilder.
Poets of different sorts (different colors, even different languages!) can interbreed and produce fertile offspring - even when they are of the same sex - which is something that robins and thrushes don't do.
i dont know why moore cant be one of the centres of modernism .. we dont all have to shop there .. (tho i have in the past) .. generally i find shopping modernisms a bit tiring & prefer smaller shops
//Joanne Kyger’s poetry will prove far “more lasting” than that of Robert Frost...//
It is certainly in your interest to hope so.
Unfortunately (and so far) history doesn't bode well for your poetic legacy, or hers.
It is certainly in your interest to hope so.
Unfortunately (and so far) history doesn't bode well for your poetic legacy, or hers.
"History doesn't bode well for your poetic legacy, or hers."
A BBC publication "The Nations Favourite Poems" foreword by Griff Rhys Jones (1996 - BBC Worldwide - reprinted 21 times between 1996 and 1998 and probably many more times since)features 100 poems voted as the "nations favourite poems" by BBC listeners.
Only 9 of the 100 poems were by a living poet. Most were from the 18th and 19th century. The "poetic legacy" scenario is bleaker than the summit of Tennyson Down (which at least has the merit of a bit of bracing air from Europe and America) if the current situation in Britain is anything to go by. A brief legacy you might get. But it'll be soon locked in a forgotten cupboard.
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A BBC publication "The Nations Favourite Poems" foreword by Griff Rhys Jones (1996 - BBC Worldwide - reprinted 21 times between 1996 and 1998 and probably many more times since)features 100 poems voted as the "nations favourite poems" by BBC listeners.
Only 9 of the 100 poems were by a living poet. Most were from the 18th and 19th century. The "poetic legacy" scenario is bleaker than the summit of Tennyson Down (which at least has the merit of a bit of bracing air from Europe and America) if the current situation in Britain is anything to go by. A brief legacy you might get. But it'll be soon locked in a forgotten cupboard.
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