|
Mia:
In your Essay, “The Hollow Men” you wrote an apologia
regarding your long held admiration of Eliot’s work and why
it would not qualify for logopoetry:
“I admit most readers today need help in appreciating
Eliot and likewise admit that Eliot’s poems, especially
his pre-Christian works, are more difficult than poetry ought
to be….
“My antidote for this [the declining popularity
of poetry and fear of its academic mystique] is, quite simply,
that poetry should be intelligible without footnotes, explanations
of technique or other intermediary bells and whistles.
"The first concern of logopoetry is that art
be intelligible. By this I mean a poem should be comprehensible
enough on first reading to yield a sense. Practically, this means
that after one reading the audience should be able to say, ‘The
poem was about this or that" and have some general agreement.’"
Later, in "Logopoetry IV," I expanded
my definition:
"I recently saw the need to raise the threshold
for logopoetry, that is to say, make room for the secondary and
tertiary cognition many pieces require. This need for widening
of the definition of intelligibility (the first principle of logopoetry)
was triggered by a remark from Mark Strand, writing as an editor:
‘In cases where I had to choose from many poems of the same
length, as in the sonnet sequence of Spenser or Shakespeare, or
in the poems of Emily Dickinson, it was difficult, and the determining
factor became the relative accessibility of the particular poem
on a first or second reading’" (Preface to the Golden
Ecco Anthology, 100 Great Poems of the English Language, edited
by Mark Strand).”
Mia (cont’d): Ah, here is one
of the most interesting approaches to reading. Reading Eliot is
like reading the Bible—there is something so inherently beautiful
about Eliot’s work in every aspect: substance, form, feeling
and meaning—I am alluding to the Mandala of Balance discussed
in Logopoetry III and IV—that even if one doesn’t understand
it at the “moment” it comes to a reader later in small
epiphanies as one experiences more life and matures. In other words,
read the Bible, read Eliot now and understand it many successive
reads later. You admit as much by supporting Eliot’s Objective
Correlative:
However, his principle of "the objective correlative"
and his statement, "Genuine poetry can communicate before
it is understood"….
Mia: Now here is where I have a slight
conflict with your argument regarding Eliot. In your apologia, you
also wrote:
“These statements (see above) beg the question
as to why I am so enamored of a poet who, excluding his plays,
would not qualify for my ideal until his Four Quartets (4Q).
“To this I reply that in what Eliot considered
his Meisterwerke, 4Q, he reverts to the rational use of language,
even mocks his own poetic flourishes, abandoning, for the most
part, his earlier allusive method. Thus I think it fair to say
that Eliot grew toward my ideal although he began at a point distant
from it.”
Mia, cont’d.: Blame it on the
failure of the reader, but Eliot’s Four Quartets for me are
not rational use of language. Perhaps what you mean is that he uses
rational language to confront abstract concepts and that makes it
for difficult reading; or, perhaps you mean to say that Eliot doesn’t
lean as heavy on allusions and footnotes as he did in “The
Hollow Men” or “The Waste Land.” I don’t
know what to say excepting that I agree, his Four Quartets are some
of the most beautiful poems written in the English Language and
the fact that they were written at different times over a period
of six(?) years makes me admire it all the more; but, not more than
say his “Ash Wednesday.”
CE: I must (respectfully) disagree
with your description of 4Q as “not a rational use of language.”
Here’s a passage from “East Coker’ which mocks
traditional lyricism (while performing it) then moves to direct
address. If this is difficult, Ashbery and Graham are insufferable.
II
What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to
us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
I mean, could Eliot be any clearer here? Sure, the
thoughts are deep but the explanation outstanding. I love “Ash
Wednesday,” too, but in AW Eliot had not yet departed from
his earlier techniques to the degree we see above in “East
Coker.”
Mia: There was one line where you
advise, “write because you have to,” and I want to add
to that bit of wisdom that I think one should write when they have
something to say. You say basically the same thing in your essay,
“Towards a new Direction
for Poetry”
“As I have said of MFA programs, presently
estimated to turn out some 20,000 “professional poets”
a year, their tragicomedy is teaching students how to say something
before they have something worth saying.”
But do you truly believe that a thirty-year-old poet
has nothing worth to say to poets/readers over forty, or fifty for
example? At the very least they have something to say to thirty-year-olds,
but not much of a lasting value to get through life’s lessons?
CE: Ah, my view has been contaminated
as a dishwasher, bus boy, Fuller Brush salesman, oil field hand,
shoe salesman, housepainter, phlebotomist, working musician, family
doctor, psychiatrist, and especially as a father of four very different
children. I wrote some good poems in my 20s as do many other poets.
Remember that Keats, the best of twenty-something poets, was a pharmacist’s
apprentice dying of tuberculosis (at 26). It’s not the years,
it’s the miles. Experience cannot be granted in an academic
greenhouse. You must live first and write poetry second. Shakespeare
was an ambitious businessman, social, apparently well-liked, an
actor who made acute observations of his fellows, who loved and
lost and likely had an unhappy marriage. No one can read Shakespeare
and say, “This man did not live.” But one might say
that about Shelley, perhaps even Wallace Stevens. It’s not
the years, it’s the engagement. It won’t come through
MFA programs, though they may admit someone with the requisite experience
to become a good poet. Look at Wordsworth, for instance, who walked
and talked with all kinds of queer people beneath his class in the
Lake Country in order to gain the human experience necessary for
art.
Top
Copyright © 2004 Tryst3.com/CE Chaffin
|
