My fears rush by in a gust like crocodiles
Gushing tears, everything is smashed.
The pyramids were never tall enough.
Piece together the stained glass window
and the story will be revealed.

“Some delusions are better
than others…”
-C.B. Brightly

I am Everything, and Everything I am,
and I do not aim to please you, or your awful cronies,
Droning to the sound of your sweet, sweet chirp,
Lurking on my path of righteousness;
I am The Plan, The Sea, the soft dust blows over the plains
for me as I swoop by, for I command the winds
and the other elements, let them beware, I am Free!

Three characters I allow in my way read as follows:
Death’s Toll, Lingering Soul,
and the dream of another dying day,
Craving only what lies in the Saint’s Lair;
Everything I am stands not for time,
but for the measure of an hourglass
floating sideways in mid-air,
suspended indefinitely,
definitely preparing for a fall,
incongruous with the laws of science,
for I am Physics— not the science of law!

I am a hardened target for reproach, call me
The Lord of Jargon, for I approach
with a cloud of smoke at my coattails, disrupting
anything standing between me and 1,000,033;
Call me the Grand Master of all cerebral Beings,
Being for to Be, innovating, not prior to creating Me—
The Lord Premier; not wanting
Napoleon’s share of wealth,
or Genghis Khan’s claim of all,
or Shakespeare’s worldly, wordy health,
for they all fall to my will and I will not care
for your care, your love—
I am the Baron Nicholas van Ram,
You’re nothing in the face of everything I am!

Constructed around the basic foundation of our interactivity with the world – the five senses - this poem is really about how the poet senses the world. The eye is placed first in all these section, and gets the final say too – the poet doesn’t live the life through the lens, but acts as the lense himself. Archibald McLeish says “A poem should be equal to / Not true…A poem should not mean / but be” – it’s reveals nothing more than its own creation itself and this poem is about appreciating both the gift of the world, and the gift of poetry and the world it creates. The accompanying poem is “Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish.

Common Sense

- 28th January 2009

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

A poem should not mean
But be.

a stream of cars down the slopes of noon
I and the minutes, parts of clouds

the far-away phone rings November
these business suits still smell of rivers

shadows born from high buildings
all is peace in a busy day.

.

Nihilistic Poetry

limită a ceea ce vreau
crocodeal exotic în apele tale
revărsate dar nu pe schleau

In Melancholie versunken
sollte man nicht schreiben
- sage ich mir.

Denn ich will nicht
die Sonne ins Meer werfen,
sondern aus den Galaxien einen Kranz binden,
der hell leuchtet
- zu jeder Stunde.

Ich will nicht
die Erdkruste aufschürfen
und silberne Nachtwolken verglühen.

Ich will nicht
die Flüsse verdunsten,
das Wasser rauben
der blauen Blume,
die Novalis in unseren Seelen pflanzte.

Vielmehr reiße ich dem Himmel
den Kumulusmantel vom Leib
- und euch eure Scheuklappen,
damit ihr wieder
sehen
lernt
und nicht alles glaubt,
was man euch sagt.

(Karin Jugl)

“And then it came out that he was a biologist or biochemist; or psycho-biophysicist, which he liked best of all. Six universities had canned him for his strange ideas and refused to look at his experimental results. With all this scientific training he wasn’t going to be an infantry man. So he shipped, and this was his fifth voyage. At sea he could keep up his scientific work.

Why did I always have to fall among theoreticians!”

Because, Augie, theoreticians, sloganeers, jargoneers, quacks, men who spread their stiff nets of pedantry and dogma and all-swallowing hollowly elaborate non-language are exactly what so many novels seem to need in their quest for inner textures and the truly, darkly expressive — how badly the novel needs the men who have gone all outward, the wrong way, who possess what you might call an interiority only in the way that trumpets and other large brasses possess an interiority–whose speechiness generates the shining sounding deafening welter within which single voices, single minds, single beings huddle, shelter, turn inward and selve.

What I’m saying is: Augie, you need your Basteshaws and Einhorns like Bovary needed Homais.

PS: Mad props to Hopkins for coining the verb ‘to selve.’

Qualsevol que segueixi les novetats literàries de la temporada, que estigui atent a les opinions crítiques, que freqüenti converses sobre el que es porta o sobre el que s’imposa, tard o d’hora —si és que el seu interès per la literatura no està condicionat per imperatius professional— acaba fent-se, fins i tot en públic, aquesta pregunta: per què no llegir els clàssics? Pregunta que és l’última d’una llarga sèrie d’interrogants que, per la impolidesa que impliquen, se solen fer en la intimitat: com és que hi ha celebritats que ignoren la sintaxi? com és que autors d’imatge pública interessant són incapaços de despertar cap interès pel que escriuen? com és que un temps tan convuls com el nostre no és suficient a despertar un mínim de reflexió i un punt de tensió creativa?… O sigui: els clàssics com a refugi. Perquè llegir els clàssics significa principalment estar-se de romanços, i això implica alhora un rebuig i una esperança. És un rebuig de la novetat, en la convicció que qualsevol proposta que el mercat ofereixi no serà suficient a captivar-nos, no tindrà prou valor perquè abandonem el recer on retem culte als nostres immortals. Convençut que la vida és massa breu per les dimensions de l’art, l’home de seny és avar de temps, i tem dilapidat en el soroll i la fúria dels diletants les hores que li han estat donades. És també, paradoxalment —incapaços d’assolir cap certesa, totes les nostres reflexions estan abocades a la paradoxa—, una esperança, perquè les èpoques més consistents de la història de la creació han estat les que apareixen vinculades a una recuperació dels ensenyaments dels mestres antics, a una represa del que va ser i va caducar, fins i tot si es comença amb una imitació entusiasta despreocupada de tota originalitat. No hi ha avantguarda que no s’endugui el vent, mentre que les ruïnes de l’Hèllade encara es poden evocar de lluny amb un crit d’alegria. Aquesta esperança i aquell rebuig són, no cal dir-ho, el fruit d’un temps de desorientació, i sobretot d’inseguretat. Què busca el lector de clàssics? Uns fonaments més sòlids, per fer més alta i més forta la casa. Encara que no ho digui, encara que potser ho ignori, el que s’aparta del que està de moda, de la modernitat, i explora el que no necessita estar de moda per ser valuós, tot el que, així ho creu, durarà per sempre, vol que en el seu temps, perquè valgui la pena viure’l, hi hagi creadors que li donin sentit; per això abomina una cultura installada en la crisi. No és una nostàlgia de les troballes d’altres segles sinó una ambició de plenitud. O sigui, no les creacions dels clàssics com a model, sinó els clàssics com a model de creació. Tanmateix, per més que en reclami i en proclami la validesa, la freqüentació dels clàssics és una pràctica solitària. En aquest cas l’automedicació és l’únic mètode vàlid. Tot bon lector té a la memòria autors, obres, passatges que voldria proposar a la consideració universal com a exemples imprescriptibles, en els quals hauria de fundar-se tota obra que vulgui perdurar, tot i complaure’s també en l’exemplar estrany, d’una raresa irrepetible. En la mesura en què una cultura és un procés de conquesta, d’incorporació de novetats, d’assimilació d’exotismes, que acaba en una frontera més enllà de la qual campen els bàrbars, l’àmbit primer d’exploració és el dels qui han fabricat la pròpia llengua —probablement una immersió en l’incommensurable Llull o en les procelloses Cròniques faria més bé a la indigent prosa catalana, massa alimentada de traduccions de i a altres llengües, que planar en cerca de la gratuïtat— a fi d’entendre quin és el sistema en què ens movem. I, tot seguit, no sabrem res de nosaltres sense entendre que parlem un dialecte del llatí i que, per exemple, encara estimem segons les pautes dels poetes lírics romans. Súbdits desemparats d’aquell imperi, hem de recordar que el pensament va néixer a Grècia i que la seva conclusió més important, la llibertat, encara ens hi remet, i emparats per un Altre que no és d’aquest món, l’antologia de tots els gèneres que és la Bíblia és inevitable per assimilar la història de poder i de glòria, d’errors i de misèria que hi ha darrere nostre.

Publicat en la Revista de Girona, nº 163, març-abril 1994.

este perpendiculară în raport cu
balerina care se visează copilă
dar paralelismul lor discret
congruent poate fi
angelic solar

Please sing, I ask my lips.

Dry. Nothing.

No water nor wine

rouses them. No hum.

They are honeybees in winter,

hibernating in their frozen hive.

I walk to the river.

Sing, I beg it.

Silence in its chillfull mouth.

Silence in my lungs.

I’d do anything

to hear the voice

beneath the waves today—

I wade in naked. Linger.

No boat. No birds. No song.

In the hive,

the workers wait

around the drowsy queen.

Weary of laying,

she snuggles deeper

in the frigid comb.

komoly vöröseltolódást állapított meg s. úr, az aurafotós. “jesszus, kommunista vagyok?” á, dehogy, ez nem politikai, kedves, ez merő ezotéria! “aha. értem. azaz dehogy értem! kérem mondja meg, mit tegyek?” izaura kedves, semmit sem mondhatok, tanácsot nem adhatok, hiszen rabszolgák vagyunk mindahányan… magas a vérnyomása netalán, kisasszonykám? “kutyabajom, tényfékész uram, pilóta vérnyomásom, mindenem a helyén, makkegészségben”. aha. értem. verset ír? “bevallom, igen.” na, itt van a kutya elásva! miért nem ír tanulmányt? esetleg lehurrogós botránycikket? az majd kizöldíti az auráját egykettőre. “köszönöm, várok tavaszig”.

No painted sky of the human theater for him, but always on the outside toward the diamond-drop true sky by means of the long, star-crawling clear fog of the medulla and brain, a copy of the Milky Way.

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at this loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

-      La locuzione latina Ut pictura poësis, formulata dal poeta Quinto Orazio Flacco, tradotta letteralmente significa “Come nella pittura così nella poesia” (Orazio, A. Pisone, 361). Come dire quindi “la poesia è come un quadro” o “un quadro è come una poesia”. Il Poeta spiega che esiste un tipo di poesia che piace maggiormente se vista da vicino, ed un’altra che piace solamente se guardata da lontano, o riosservata una seconda volta, o analizzata con un occhio critico, come avviene per la pittura. Fin dagli antichi il legame fra la poesia e la pittura è sempre stato dibattuto. Orazio con la sua “Ars Poetica” (“L’Epistola ai Pisoni”, uno dei testi di riferimento fondamentali per tutto il discorso filosofico e storico sull’Estetica, fino ai giorni nostri) vuole mettere in risalto come in poesia e in arte esistano opere immediatamente comprensibili, lampanti, ed altre meno.

–      La pittura è come la poesia. Questa è una frase di Ovidio che fa riferimento ad una tradizione fortissima che risale a Simonide di Cleo. C´è un aneddoto, che riguarda l’arte della memoria (su questo un lungo e magnifico articolo dello storico francese Jacques Le Goff) :

–      http://legoff.provincia.parma.it/allegato.asp?ID=81971 :

“ C’è una  riunione a cui Simonide ha partecipato. C’è stato un terremoto, sono morti tutti. Simonide, però, due minuti prima era stato chiamato per risolvere un problema, cosi è uscito dalla riunione, per cui è l’unico che si è salvato. Siccome il terremoto era stato molto forte non si sapeva più dove  erano i corpi deli presenti mortii. Simonide che aveva una memoria meravigliosa si è ricordata l’immagine dove erano seduti tutti e cosi, con il suo aiuto si è ricostruito dove erano sedute le persone, permettendo las loro identificazione e la loro sepoltura.”

 - Sul filosofo rinascimentale italiano Giordano Bruno esiste un libro molto bello: L’arte della memoria e Giordano Bruno e la tradizione ermetica, la cui autrice è Francis Yates

- Pico della Mirandola (1500- Firenze]: sapeva La Divina Commedia a memoria al contrario .  A quell’epoca era molto importante dominare la retorica e la stampa era molto recente, quindi la memoria era fondamentale.

 L´arte della memoria:  http://www.airesis.net/IlGiardinoDeiMagi/Giardino%201/La%20Porta%20_memoriae.htm

Basata sulla convinzione della maggiore potenza della memoria visiva rispetto a quella concettuale, consisteva nel potenziare la facoltà immaginativa di coloro i quali iniziavano ad apprenderla. Lo studente doveva cominciare ad imprimersi nella memoria alcune immagini familiari (ad esempio la propria stanza da letto) per passare poi a quelle di luoghi meno noti, esterni, come piazze, oppure facciate di cattedrali (spesso costruite per servire da immagini memorizzabili, come sostiene F. Yates in Arte della Memoria). Una volta fatta propria questa facoltà, lo studente immaginava scene non reali, ma inventate, purché ricche di particolari avvincenti, facilmente imprimibili. Ad ogni immagine, perfettamente memorizzata, veniva poi associato un concetto (oppure anche una parola) da ricordare. In questo modo, allorché si doveva rammentare un discorso,oppure un tema od altro, si tornava con la mente alla figura memorizzata, riandando visivamente mente ai suoi particolari. Richiamando il ricordo del particolare, riaffiorava anche il concetto (o la parola) che ad esso era stato accostato. Dovendo fissare molti concetti, si ricorreva ad una serie ordinata di immagini, tale da poter essere rivisitata in avanti o indietro con facilità. Si poteva, ad esempio, scegliere l’interno di una chiesa perfettamente nota in ogni suo particolare e quindi, scorrendone con la mente le pareti in modo ordinato, associare a ciascuno di tali particolari (una statua, un altare, un, capitello) uno dei concetti da memorizzare. E evidente che una maggiore quantità di figure a disposizione rendeva più dilatabile la possibilità del retore di ricordare. Lullo, Scaligero, Della Porta, e soprattutto Giordano Bruno, avevano creato infinite possibilità combinatorie di immagini, rendendo parimenti vasta la potenzialità concettuale.

Antica xilografia con figura mnemonica legata al vangelo di Matteo. Fermando nella memoria visiva questa immagine con i suoi simboli, era possibile ricordare il contenuto dell’intero Vangelo.

La Grammatica come immagine di memoria (da J, Romberch, Congestorium artificiosae memoriae, 1553)

Sistema di memoria basato sull’interno di un’abbazia
(da J, Romberch, Congestorium artificiosae memoriae, 1553)

- Nella tradizioni abbiamo due aspetti, uno greco e uno cristiano, una di questa tradizioni privilegia la visione. La concezione della coscienza, nella tradizione ocidentale, è legata alla visione ( all´estetica).

  Il verbo vedere viene da una radice indoeuropea WHEID (“ IO HO VISTO E QUINDI SO”), cioè, indica che la coscienza della tradizione occidentale viene dall’immagine. Ossia è importante l’immagine e non la lettera. Da questo si arriva a Platone che rifiuta la scrittura a favore dell’immagine.      (In principio noi leggiamo:  l’arte trasmette il modello della scrittura) 

- C’è un condizionamento della persona al modello della creazione, cioè, la decodificazione dell’arte è legata alla identificazione di modelli culturali scritti, ossia, è la scrittura che fa da modello.

 Platone Fedro

Perché, o Fedro, questo ha di terribile la scrittura, simile per la verità, alla pittura: infatti, le creature della pittura ti stanno di fronte come se fossero vive, ma se domandi loro qualcosa, se ne restano zitte, chiuse in un solenne silenzio; e così fanno anche i discorsi. Tu crederesti che parlino pensando essi stessi qualcosa, ma se, volendo capire bene, domandi loro qualcosa di quello che hanno detto, continuano a ripetere una sola e medesima cosa. E una volta che un discorso sia scritto, rotola da per tutto, nelle mani di coloro che se ne intendono e così pure nelle mani di coloro ai quali non importa nulla, e non sa a chi deve parlare e a chi no. E se gli recano offesa e a torto lo oltraggiano, ha sempre bisogno del padre, perché non è capace di difendersi e di aiutarsi da solo.

 -  Come è che possiamo definire l’interpretazione sul concetto di bello di un quadro? — La questione sul concetto di cos`è bello e cos´ è brutto varia nei secoli,ossia, è il contesto, la moda, la norma, il canone che cambiano nel corso della storia.

 - Come si possono analizzare l´insieme degli elementi che si osservano in una pittura? — Anche questa analisi cambia con il tempo. Ad esempio, il cubismo (ossia – Picasso – futurismo italiano ecc.) rifiutanno la tradizione, la prospettiva.

Ad esempio, questo è un quadro di Giotto (Colle Vespignano, 1266 — 1337), Ognissanti Madonna(1310-15), La Madonna è molto grande, perché la sua importanza è considerata maggiore: in questa pittura c´è una “prospettiva” simbolica. Come la Madonna è particolarmente importante, deve essere rappresentata grande e al centro. Questa costruzione della “prospettiva” simbolica era considerata usuale fino al sec. XIII, poi è stata sostituita dalla prospettiva che noi conosciamo, introdotta nel Rinascimento. La valutazione sul bello con il tempo cambia, come il ponto di vista.

 - In principio la poesia e la letteratura sono frutto di una lettura di un insieme della cultura e di un conflitto con indentificasione con una soluzione creativa, vuol dire, incorporazione della tradizione e suo superamento (soluzione creativa).

-( Il problema)  Letteratura e poesia sono frutto di un conflito con le norme ( la tradizione). Perchè? Nella tradizione ocidentale c’è una seconda vertente che è quella che biblica (ebraica)  che si basa sul testo senza imagine. La tradizione biblica (ebraica) esalta la scrittura alfabetica, condana l’imagine – é tutto l’oposto di Platone -  alla cui l’origine c’è Giotto, è un esempio tra scritura e poesia. “Il giudizio universale”(alla destra). Lui é considerato un precursore di “Il trionfo della Morte” di Buffalmaco.Giotto è n esempio della nuova discusioni tra pintura e poesia.

Giotto è un vero antagonista di Boccaccio, c’è una novela che parla di Gotto, secondo Boccaccio lui è grande perchè sa parlare e non disegnare.

Remember

when we met

by that corner of a disguise

talking with the stillness

   that is common to oil

it was an early October blizzard

that trapped us before

we’ve identified our inertia

locked in that cold

with a bottle of vodka and

        letters from Rilke

we drank the last drop

     of our nihilism

ready to die there

    or live on perpetually

with no sense at all.

Nihilist Poet

a continuation of my poetic love affair with Ellen Bryant Voigt

and because it makes me think, hard, about how language works

Nouns are the strongest parts of speech; without nouns, there is no poem, maybe no language: if language points to or names, then the nomen is language. The noun is the source of the image—a verb needs an agent. Nouns collapse the distance between language and the external world, and carry tremendous syntactical power.

Adjectives, on the other hand, can be weak, dispensable, hollow or predictable. If you consider an apple, are not all the usual adjectives assigned to already part of your image? Red (maybe yellow), crisp, sweet, tart, juicy—listing these adds nothing to our understanding of apple-ness. Discussing Robert Haas’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Voigt explains:

After all, “tender” is more amorphous than tenderness, “thirsty” less commanding than thirst, wonder more solemn and convincing that “wonderful,” despair a good deal more respectable than “desperate.” The debasement of adjectives is more widespread now than at the turn of the century, their descriptive prowess weakened by the direct image of photography, film, and television, their value judgments grown suspect in the sake of advertising’s unsupported claims. Anything, it would seem, can be GREAT! WONDERFUL! SPLENDID! if we say it is, whereas most people probably still wish to believe that “greatness,” “wonder,” and “splendor” have some objective standards, some specific denotations, even if we can’t agree on what they are.

But adjectives can be much more than this, can define more than they describe. Because adjectives can be subjective, not fixed, they can become vital to a poem’s tone and meaning. The lyric, in particular, needs adjectives, just as discursive poems need nouns and narrative poems need verbs. From Plath’s “Ariel,” for example, come these: substanceless blue, brown arc, dark hooks, black sweet blood mouthfuls, red eye. This list alone is the feeling, the tone, of the poem.

Adjectives can also reverse or alter the surface meaning of the poem. Voigt’s explanation of this, in a poem I love, is the string of three adjectives at the end of William Carlos Williams:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

And which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Without that last sentence, there is no poem. In a brilliant arrogance, the final assertions—delicious/so sweet/and so cold—both justify and undercut “Forgive me.” Pleasure first, virtue second, oh surely you understand.

Adjectives can describe, they can limit, they can serve precision. They can contradict, correct, or amplify the possible meanings within the noun. More than that, adjectives restore the eye, and the “I,” to the poem: they supply tone, the context without which nouns can be imprecise, incomplete or misleading.

In short, adjectives not only annex precision and clarity, for more exact meaning, and add nuance and resonance, for evocation of emotion; in their amplifications of tone they acknowledge the poet’s subjective presence in the poem. [...] Adjectives moderate between nominal fixity (the world’s facts) and mutability (change enacted on them); they strengthen the noun by adding response to fact, by limiting or expanding the noun, and by admitting into the poem the human sensibility that is apart from the world, thereby putting the yearning self in alignment with the world.

and

If music is both sound and feeling, then adjectives are a crucial source of music in our poems, meditative or narrative or lyric. [...] Because of its subjective nature its presence in the poem is the hardest to earn; craft does not put it there so much as vision, intuition, temperament, perhaps even character.

dadaismul este un lux rezervat bărbaților. femeile trebuie să fie nunuiste, adică rezonabile în orice-mprejurare. tristane, îmi placi. în nici un caz însă nu vei fi un exemplu pentru mine, zise izolda, inspirată de gîndurile condeierei. a, da: la sisif în supermarket sînt importante reduceri la absurd, aflu de la holicica. am zis.

Missa pro defunctis…

La slujba pro defunctis, ma duc cernit, plecat, umil, sters, desfiintat… ma duc plutind usor ca un firicel de fum de Viata Risipita in Zadar…  Te nasti, traiesti si mori singur… Plata pentru descreierarea din decembrie 1989, o depunem acum pe masa RECVIEMULUI pentru 22 de milioane de Inimi Neterminate… In ierarhia universala Nimic nu ramine Neplatit, Nimic nu ramine Uitat, Nimic nu ramine Necintarit…Necintat, Neingropat…

Masura cu care am inteles schimbarea unui regim cu altul calcind in picioare singe si oase sfinte, ne-a adus unde sintem… In cheia in care  ne-am compus MAREA TRECERE, in aceeasi cheie am pus bazele primei partituri, care astazi incheie maiestuos Sunetul RECVIEMULUI pentru 22 de Milioane de INIMI NETERMINATE…

mentális bicskájával merészen belevág mindenbe: ami antik, ócska, ami csorba, törött, vagy ami új meg ép, nagyképű egók hasát felszaggatni, egy empatikus harakiriő.

Lost in the concrete jungles of Manhattan,
epicenter of the world, the pearl within the shell,
is where I’ll be amongst the wide-eyed streetwalkers of
Times Square, or hiding with the hybrid hipkids
in Greenwich hoping to be aware of the next big happening;
the Suits racing through Wall Street could care less,
as they sit at the Seat of Empire, ruling all the world

Take me back to Central Park,
and let me walk through its oasis of
winding paths; darkened streets won’t
penetrate the life amongst these trees,
Take me back to Columbia in
‘48 so I can finally hang with the beat,
Kerouac, in all his glory, heading to his home,
the open road, surely thinking,
“New York City is the only place for me”

So I had no idea that Ellen Bryant Voigt would become a major mentor of mine, but I just keep finding her critical/analytical writing to be what I need when I need it. One of my many writing struggles this fall has been using image; my poems have been flat, narrative, discursive, two-dimensional, with not nearly enough emotional sparks between me, the page, and the reader. So I went looking for good writing about image, what it is, how it is used, and found Voigt’s essay “Image” (no need to search for a topic sentence with that title!) in the anthology Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World.

She has a very complicated argument/thesis going on in this long essay, which I could only reproduce by scanning in the whole thing. But I can summarize what matters to me, what, I hope, will inform the re-writes of those flat flat poems and make them better. If you are intrigued, go buy the book and dig into this yourself.

1. Traditionally, there were two ways of thinking about images in poems. The “art-as-mirror” crowd understood images as “pictures made out of words,” with the emphasis on the concrete not the abstract, on sensation not idea, and on perception rather than concept. As Voigt writes:

When one assigns the primary allegiance of poetry to the world beyond poet and poem, the value of the image is its representational power—its ability to create in the mind a color, say, which is an “ostensible copy or replica of the objective color itself” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry).

2. The second traditional way of understanding image, the lamp as opposed to the mirror, in Abram’s terms, is as “expressive.” This is the heart of the Romantic movement, the idea that poetry, figurative language, is the spontaneous product of feeling, and that the job of poetry is to convey the emotions and personal perceptions of the poet. Poetry is not to be true to an object, but to the human emotion. Descriptions, images, figurative language, serves the function of conveying the writer’s symbolic vision; “objects signified by a poem [were] no more than a projected equivalent for the poet’s inner state of mind.” (Abrams)

3. Eliot’s theory of “objective correlative” grew from this understanding, with some personal twists. I am in love with Ellen Bryant Voigt for many reasons, not the least of which is her summary of Eliot and his theory:

As is often the case with poets who undertake essays and lectures on poetics, Eliot was both justifying and camouflaging his own poetic practice: specifically, he seems busy erasing any tracks back to the mind/psyche/internal conflict of the poet as originating source and primary allegiance for his work.

4. The tension between these two understandings is the difference between an insistence that image must serve the ways the “passionate are naturally inclined to amplification” or that the image owes allegiance to external fact. Voigt reconciles/wrestles/straddles/bull rides these by building a different understanding. These are not opposite ends of a line, she says, but points on a circle. The image, she says, can be totem, both honestly itself and the way that poetry mediates emotional reality between the poet and the reader.

The idiosyncrasy of the figures does not necessarily make them decorative or indulgent: they are the weight-bearing walls of the lyric structure. If the poem succeeds, it is because what might otherwise be abstract or in accessible or private or alien—the [poet's emotion]—floats between us and the “relict” in our minds [of the real object] like a cluster of eye-motes.

5. Now, add some more recent critical ideas to the mix. Thom Gunn, reviewing Christopher Isherwood, created a description of Isherwood’s “objective perception.” He discussed Isherwood’s statement “I am a camera,” drawing out and challenging that understanding of poetry-as-direct-recording. A camera is not a bad thing to emulate, Gunn says, because cameras do record how one thing resembles another, and cameras have a faithfulness to physical imagery through which we learn about the appearance of the world outside of us. And, he said, given the fact that humans are creatures of almost uncontrollable bias, understanding our work as being camera-like can help us escape the singleness of our minds which, if lived in exclusively, become prisons.

6. Describing this idea, Voigt writes that, while this harkens back to the understanding of poetry-as-mirror, it here becomes a moral issue of trying to find clarity in the face of human bias. She writes:

The primary virtues and functions of the image remain the same: recording the dependable concrete nouns of our common reality, uncovering the congruence among them. But one expects the fog of the individual sensibility settling inexorably on the lens.

7. In a move too complicated to summarize, Voigt then moves from the image of poetry-as-using-a-camera to poetry as using a movie camera, adding motion, time, and sound to how image is recorded and shared. This, she says, is a move in modern poetry towards dramatization, a “discerning, active eye” to quote Susanne Langer. Image in poetry records not merely the objects of the world but those objects seen, touched, heard, smelled, tasted: rendered with a halo of human response. Instead of seeing poets as only the descriptive eye or the expressive I (hey, I just made that phrase up, and I’m loving it!!), Voigt asserts:

…the image is the crucial mimetic device, essential for its power to enact not only what the writer-as-scientist has uncovered in the empirical world, or what the writer-as-ecstatic has isolated and articulated from the whirl of the individual psyche, but the moment when both are fused.

8. Which means, and here’s where I get nearly unbearably excited, that we’re talking about a new way of understanding language, poetry, our brains, and ourselves. There is no mind/body split, for “the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. The abstractions made by the ear and the eye—the forms of direct perception….are genuine symbolic materials, by whose office we apprehend a world of things, and of events that are the histories of things.” (Langer again) In short, the mind is body, sense organs and cerebrum. The mind is physical, delivering simultaneously the concrete and the abstract, the objective and the subjective, the representational and the expressive, the empirical and the assumed.”

9. Yeah, no more need to have the stupid debate about the mind/body split!

10. In Voigt’s words, then, image can reproduce both what the poet sees and how the poet sees it, eliminating the need to choose either the mirror or the lamp. Image is capable simultaneously of the “representational” and the “expressive,” and is the chief agent for mimesis in a poem written for the page. (Poems performed can add voice, timing, etc as essential elements of mimesis)

11. She seems to be suggesting four different types of/roles for images:
1. pure detail (those concrete nouns from the “poem as camera” folks)
2.description (nouns with describing words that make them unique, specific to the poem)
3.figure (figurative language, such as a description of Medusa having “hissing hair”)
4. dramatic – images that carry and move the emotional weight of the poem, that create its dramatic structure, that make the connection between mind and body)

12. Wow, typing all that out really helped my embodied mind make more sense of what she was saying/arguing/defending. In Voigt-world, of which I am increasingly fond, image is THE way for contemporary poets to make meaning; syntax is the flow, rhythm, and tension of how we convey image; and lyric the structure. (I think, anyway; I’m just about to launch into her book about Lyric). Now my challenge is taking all this and trying to apply it to make my rabbit and sea lion poems better. We shall see…

Lately at night I’ve been retreating to bed with Emily Dickinson (a lovely fat Faber collected poems, kindly given me by my brother, for my birthday–he even wrote cutely in the front of it!). Sitting there, by my lamp, reading aloud, is my antidote to these days–these last days of the thesis. During the day, it isn’t Dickinson, but Millay who is taken up for pleasure when the writing and editing gets too much.

Once more into my arid days like dew,
Like wind from an oasis, or the sound
Of cold sweet water bubbling underground,
A treacherous messenger, the thought of you
Comes to destroy me; once more I renew
Firm faith in your abundance, whom I found
Long since to be but just one other mound
Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew.
And once again, and wiser in no wise,
I chase your coloured phantom on the air,
And sob and curse and fall and weep and rise
And stumble pitifully on to where,
Miserable and lost with stinging eyes,
Once more I clasp, –and there is nothing there.

I’ve taken up residence in my mum’s study, with the built-in-bookcases that make me feel studious, and the deep wooden desk with brass handles, and the ashes of my grandmother. To my right, the leaves of the magnolia; to my left, a cabinet of china cats. This used to be my bedroom. I wonder, looking at the key in the french doors that has not been turned since I slept beneath, whether that is why I come here now: lonely with writing.

The sky is darkening. The floorboards are popping, as they used to. The parents have returned from a weekend away, with a pink cupcake for me, no less. Hehe.

exceptés: mon chat et mes livres

heureusement il y a un précédent

st. jerome was a cat lady too