"these questions now pop up: What about the therapeutic value of poetry? What’s wrong with using poetry as a tool of self-exploration and an instrument of simple self-expression?
The poetry I wrote before I quit publishing was nearly always crudely self-expressive, and I moved on because my instincts told me that self-expression for a working writer was irrelevant. Then, perhaps ironically, I spent a full decade of the ensuing years that followed teaching prison inmates cultural literacy in various disguises—creative and technical writing, various history and English literature course. During those years, I came to see how fundamental the urge toward self expression is during periods of crisis. Whether the crises are private, legal/criminal, or global doesn’t seem to matter. Prison showed me how much more productive and safe life is for everyone when the urge to express oneself is trained and educated—however slightly we were able to accomplish that inside a jail. It made me change my mind about the uses of poetry as self-expression. there are a couple of questions left hanging, and which I need to answer: Is there anything genuine and valuable in the verse Biz? Are there substitutes for one who gives it up? Are there alternatives?The short answers seem to be: 1.) Yes; 2.) sure, but they don’t work very efficiently, and for me they don’t bring the same pleasures; 3.) no, I can’t think of any, but maybe you can.
Perhaps the vast majority of written verse today ought to be viewed as self-expressive therapy, and quietly treated not as art but as an important and effective kind of self-administered education that can bring order to the situationally confused or the chronically puzzled."--Brian Fawcett.
I like this passage quite a bit, especially the final sentence. It's nothing new, of course. Even the witheringly strict Ezra Pound said that most people (if they chose) should write verse for its therapeutic effect.
But there's doggerel. There're diary entries. There's verse. And then there's poetry. And Fawcett has made many assumptive conclusions about poetry which can be separated easily from what he's outlined above.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If verse is to survive, perhaps this is where and how it should do so: as a minor but useful cultural instrument for ameliorating human stupidity and the violence that springs from it. At its best, verse therapy will refine a few rough or confused minds. At very least, it will keep some savage beasts, perhaps temporarily, from maiming the people around them. As we used to say in jail, reflection is good, in and of itself, if only because it slows people down."--Brian Fawcett.
Again, I'm in sympathy with the argument, but there's an obvious danger, here, that in equating poetry with offhand verse, we diminish the former. Certainly as one (if one?) gains more knowledge about the craft and history of poetry, these hierarchical terms can be incorporated by the individual. But the teaching of poetry, at least as it's professed in grade school and at "self-expression" workshops, either has little or no knowledge of higher aims and attributes, or, worse, a disdain for them when an actual glancing acquaintanceship with Paradise Lost is suffered.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Yet in spite of everything I’ve said here about the state of poetry, I have an overpowering instinct that when I stopped publishing verse and thumbed my nose at the Biz, I gave up most of my access points to the essential life business that is poetry."--Brian Fawcett.
This is rather beside the point, is it not? The important issue is this: do you still read and write poetry? And if not, why not? Do you need "access points" to sit in a quiet room and seriously grapple with the creation and ordering and reworking of a poem? If the fire is no longer lit, then the rest -- the biz, the contacts, the networking, the funding, the public performance -- is moot.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"That being so, there are a couple of questions left hanging, and which I need to answer: Is there anything genuine and valuable in the verse Biz? Are there substitutes for one who gives it up? Are there alternatives?
The short answers seem to be: 1.) Yes; 2.) sure, but they don’t work very efficiently, and for me they don’t bring the same pleasures; 3.) no, I can’t think of any, but maybe you can."-- Brian Fawcett.
Again with "the Biz". Were Dickenson's efforts predicated on immediate audience response and plaudits? Did Stevens -- after working all day as the vice president of a major insurance company, and then coming home to read and write poems -- worry that he hadn't the time to schmooze and trade lines with his confreres in coffee houses till early morning? Was Larkin's audience unaware of his great poetry even though he shunned public performances of it, being shy by nature as well as suspicious of the set-up?
Cart before the horse, Brian. One writes because one wants to, even has to. Or because one wants the reflected glory at worst, or companionship at best.
There's nothing wrong with aggressively promoting your verse, with enjoying the company of, and knowledge from, other poets, with being concerned and initiatory in matters of making the public aware of your (and others') efforts. But I'm justifiably suspicious of your motivations as set out consistently in this long essay.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Substitutes? I guess I could learn to be a nicer guy and a more social one, and I could be more insistent about phoning my fiction/documentary writer friends and asking them about what they’re working on. Being a fly on the wall when I do this will entertaining because one could judge their impersonations of iguanas."-- Brian Fawcett.
I don't mean to be unneccessarily harsh here, but isn't this hypocritical in that you're the guy (in this case) on the street corner passing by the pitied masturbater that no one else, as well, notices? Here, the condom is on the other stub. If you want people to pay attention to your poetry, should you not also show a natural curiosity for the efforts of others?
This brings up one of the seven or so reasons of those supposedly ignoring your public performances that I mentioned I'd get to later (from my very first post). And it's in this quote:
"It therefore follows that it is incumbent upon poets to hang out, play the music, join the choir, if they are to exercise their faculties. I didn’t. I’ve been asking myself lately if I abandoned verse because I am, by nature, more solitary than the poets around me. Maybe I am, but I’m not less playful than the others of my generation. I do note that my play preference is for matters of cognition, not music, and that my early life did leave me with a number of performance disabilities I’ve never much wanted to get over." -- Brian Fawcett.
This is where one has to see things from the others' perspective. Even were you to read Shakespeare or Homer, if your face was plastered to paper, mumbling, ignoring the audience (or not even acknowledging its existence), all in glum tone, is it any wonder the audience was "sleepy"? The performance of your poetry is a poor reflector, a poor gauge, of the worth of it. Conversely, an engaged, confident, inflective reader may be applauded wildly, but the work on the page may be, indeed, comatose. That's like giving serial French kisses to one whose lungs are filled with water: life can't be manufactured.
I started this essay with my own reminiscinces of that reading. And I remember that Fawcett's recitation was solemn, eyes-to-page, and unengaged. But I was still interested in the words on that page. Transmission is always a distracting influence, for good or ill, and I confess to often having a hard time accessing a poem I'm unfamiliar with during the presentation of the speaker. Norm Sibum also gave an atrocious reading that night. His long narrative sea poem was painful (not in its composition, which was worthy) in its delivery. Sibum was exceedingly nervous (there were perhaps one hundred people there -- an unusually high number for a poetry reading -- in a benefit for the arson of MacLeod's bookstore) and that agitation was transferred to the audience. The only memorable author/reader was Stan Persky who, of course, is outgoing. But the verse was trifling: a "humorous" offering on the cliched God-bestowing-praise-on-His-favoured-football-team theme.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Finally, there’s the question that this particular investigation begs to have me ask: Is writing—in any form that makes it a cognitive investigation of the universe (as opposed to an exploitation of a limited opportunity or market—worth doing even when society doesn’t recognize it as valuable? And if it is, what are the best ways to proceed in the 21st Century?"--Brian Fawcett.
Writing is especially valuable because society may shun it. In fact, it should be obvious that as poetry acquires a popular buzz, it's invariably because it satisfies a middle-class complacent reflection, because it acts as a religiose sugared lozenge, or because it's a diverting entertainment.
I dated a woman some years ago who wasn't much into poetry (but was intelligent, and into wordplay) but who loved the efforts of Billy Collins. I had heard the name, but was unfamiliar with his work. Of course, he's one of a handful of poets who actually has a large number of readers. Impossible, I know. I perused two dozen of his best-known poems: accessible, flattering the reader's contemporary concerns, and with a wit and charm, an inoffensive warmth. I thought of him as an entertaining eighteenth-century wag, a harmless raconteur in the parentally-chaperoned drawing room. His popularity did not result from any sparkling originality in his verse, but rather from his personality (real or positioned) and his tapped-into subject matter. And I immediately understood that popularity.
Why do you want to satisfy society's standards? And (as to poetry) what are those standards? One writes for spiritual or poetic deities, for peers, for canonical forebears, and for a discriminating reader.
The best way to proceed is by reading, reflecting, and writing.
The End (finally).
Monday, June 2, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Brian Fawcett (Part Eight)
"At this point, I have a question of my own: Did the distinction I made in the 1980s between poetry and verse cause me to lose touch with an essential element of a writer’s craft?
I had a lot of it right in that 1980s essay—like Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear, I had seen the business. And, poetry is an essential mode of human thought."--Brian Fawcett.
An essential mode of human thought? What a chloroform-inducing statement. Most have lost whatever intrinsic artery to poetic expression they might once have been visited by. But even here, we're talking of the adjective, not the noun. Many people have a poetic flair, but have no clue of how to recognize, let alone think or write, the real stuff. Poetry is a concentrative craft, not a vague stylish tic or practical progressive technique.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Verse, on the other hand, is a temporary cultural expression of poetry, and one that has been in a state of cognitive arrest for nearly 80 years. .......It simply aggravates the general offense that verse is sometimes given an official dignity and grandeur that poets—outside of those war poets—have had no way of earning for it in 200 years." --Brian Fawcett.
Maybe it's because I'm descending after another long day of follow-up gum complications, but my faculties are still awake enough to intone ....WTF? I was going to write a lengthy rebuttal, but what's the use .... Verse, dead, for 80 years? Poetry moribund for two centuries?
Perhaps Brian can re-energize those dormant powers and come to the rescue even though we're a little late -- it's past eight years into the progressively ascending millenium.
I haven't viewed hyperbolic poetics like this since Marlon Brando (in an interview with the clueless Connie Chung) declared poetry and music dead after Shakespeare and Mozart.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Today it is hard for even the diehard partisans of verse to deny that the affective poetry of the late 20th century lies in the products of popular culture created by commercial technologists, popular musicians, film-makers and videographers. Popular culture being what it is, they have used the tools of poetry to sell consumer commodities, and intensify emotions, not to impart any sense of beauty or deliver crucial information"--Brian Fawcett.
Though the link to commercialism is correct, this has nothing to do with poetry, and everything to do with appropriation, co-opting, and cynical deployment of subliminal syntax and "poetic" buzzwords, and propelled by laryngeal violence, graphic sleight-of-eye, and typographic shotgun residue.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As an essential investigative tool and mode of thought poetry is in a state of disuse, misuse and disrepair that indirectly threatens the continued survival of the human species and of life itself."--Brian Fawcett.
Oh, for Krissakes, Brian, quit giving yourself frissons by watching Apocalypse Post-Blake.
Proportion is a wonderful quality to have, for poets and non-poets alike.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Unfortunately, I don’t have any practical suggestions about how to rectify this that won’t require several years and 2000 pages of prose to articulate."--Brian Fawcett.
Ahhahahaha! Compassion, I say! We need answers. Bereft of poetry for another millenium if not for Fawcett's pivotal-spigotal intervention.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More to follow ....
I had a lot of it right in that 1980s essay—like Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear, I had seen the business. And, poetry is an essential mode of human thought."--Brian Fawcett.
An essential mode of human thought? What a chloroform-inducing statement. Most have lost whatever intrinsic artery to poetic expression they might once have been visited by. But even here, we're talking of the adjective, not the noun. Many people have a poetic flair, but have no clue of how to recognize, let alone think or write, the real stuff. Poetry is a concentrative craft, not a vague stylish tic or practical progressive technique.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Verse, on the other hand, is a temporary cultural expression of poetry, and one that has been in a state of cognitive arrest for nearly 80 years. .......It simply aggravates the general offense that verse is sometimes given an official dignity and grandeur that poets—outside of those war poets—have had no way of earning for it in 200 years." --Brian Fawcett.
Maybe it's because I'm descending after another long day of follow-up gum complications, but my faculties are still awake enough to intone ....WTF? I was going to write a lengthy rebuttal, but what's the use .... Verse, dead, for 80 years? Poetry moribund for two centuries?
Perhaps Brian can re-energize those dormant powers and come to the rescue even though we're a little late -- it's past eight years into the progressively ascending millenium.
I haven't viewed hyperbolic poetics like this since Marlon Brando (in an interview with the clueless Connie Chung) declared poetry and music dead after Shakespeare and Mozart.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Today it is hard for even the diehard partisans of verse to deny that the affective poetry of the late 20th century lies in the products of popular culture created by commercial technologists, popular musicians, film-makers and videographers. Popular culture being what it is, they have used the tools of poetry to sell consumer commodities, and intensify emotions, not to impart any sense of beauty or deliver crucial information"--Brian Fawcett.
Though the link to commercialism is correct, this has nothing to do with poetry, and everything to do with appropriation, co-opting, and cynical deployment of subliminal syntax and "poetic" buzzwords, and propelled by laryngeal violence, graphic sleight-of-eye, and typographic shotgun residue.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As an essential investigative tool and mode of thought poetry is in a state of disuse, misuse and disrepair that indirectly threatens the continued survival of the human species and of life itself."--Brian Fawcett.
Oh, for Krissakes, Brian, quit giving yourself frissons by watching Apocalypse Post-Blake.
Proportion is a wonderful quality to have, for poets and non-poets alike.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Unfortunately, I don’t have any practical suggestions about how to rectify this that won’t require several years and 2000 pages of prose to articulate."--Brian Fawcett.
Ahhahahaha! Compassion, I say! We need answers. Bereft of poetry for another millenium if not for Fawcett's pivotal-spigotal intervention.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More to follow ....
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Brian Fawcett (Part Seven)
Verna just picked up the line-up for Bard On The Beach yesterday. King Lear, Titus Andronicus (yikes!), The Tempest, and Twelfth Night. The latter I've seen quite few times, and Titus is a truly awful play, the critics' consensus worst by S (though he only penned half of it or so), but it's easy to sell to an audience waiting for the unintentional parental cannibal scene. Looks like the tragic Lear gets the nod, though we may see Tempest as well. We caught Timon Of Athens last year, and the production was excellent.
===================================================================
"And yes, this legacy of reconciling incomprehensible violence inflicted on the sensible innocent remains the problem of poets working today, even though the world condition that made English lyric verse what it has been since the Great War have not existed for any Westerners for more than 50 years. First, the military conflicts since 1945 in which North Americans & Western Euros have been involved have not more than nominally involved our educated classes. Not even the Second World War, with its vast increases in civilian casualties over the Great War, saw anything close to the same degree of violence directed at the young and the educated. Vietnam, the war that captured and to some extent created the social imagination of my generation, was a war to which America sent mostly black kids and rednecks to do the dying."-- Brian Fawcett.
This is an interesting point since there've been one or more wars waged for a greater period of recorded historical time than the total period of accumulated "peace". But one doesn't have to be on the front lines to write effectively on war (Shakespeare), or be a criminal to write a first-person narrative of a murderer (Dostoyevsky). Also, war can be approached more indirectly: time served away from the front; as a civilian digesting the news; and by surreal or metaphoric means where a specific war is not necessary for poetic creation. I also hasten to add that direct experience of war often doesn't necessarily result in better (grittier, more authentic) poetry: though I admire American poet Louis Simpson's work, I found it a tough slog getting through his WWII land-war verse. His front line position didn't enhance the vividness of his poetry, which is all that matters.
And of course it should go without saying that there are endless subjects fit for poetry that don't concern themselves with contemporary wars, or that may only employ war in an ancillary or background sense.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Yet the same larks appear above the blighted landscape in the poems of my generation as could be seen in the poems of the British war poets, except that the hell beneath the wings of today’s poets consists of incitements to purchase goods, eat mediocre pre-processed foods, and suck up other entertainments of the disarticulation of the public realm."-- Brian Fawcett.
I find much to agree with in the above quote. It's just an expansion on the meaning of "war". Madison Avenue sending volleys through the airwaves.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in the sense of beauty that is lyric poetry’s purest energy, but that I was suspicious of the darkness that placed it in chiaroscuro. What I perceived around me wasn’t so much dark as muddy. It held no residue of high explosives, and it did not stream with human blood and body parts. It was fouled with cigarette butts and the paper and Styrofoam debris of mass-produced hamburgers and milkshakes. My instinct was that such a world requires a catalogue less private and and idiosyncratic than Whitman’s body electric, and an emotional frame less prone to self-regard and sentimentality than Wilfred Owen’s pity"--Brian Fawcett.
More narrow definitions of what poetry "should" be.
Explosions and high rhetoric, personal shattering epiphanies and intense war drama are not the only moods and experiences of great canonical poetry.
I used to set these unaccepting strictures on poetic subject matter myself when I was in my twenties. How could Robert Frost write about couples drama and nature contemplation when Europe was in flames? I wondered, impatient. But Frost and others were writing of conflicts that could be seen as having a metaphysical structure much in tune with WWI. Journalism, reportage, direct engagement, aren't the only means of writing about seminal conflicts.
And again this equating of lyricism with beauty. Shelley wrote of oppressive governments as well as about skylarks.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part Eight (and hopefully concluding) next time.
===================================================================
"And yes, this legacy of reconciling incomprehensible violence inflicted on the sensible innocent remains the problem of poets working today, even though the world condition that made English lyric verse what it has been since the Great War have not existed for any Westerners for more than 50 years. First, the military conflicts since 1945 in which North Americans & Western Euros have been involved have not more than nominally involved our educated classes. Not even the Second World War, with its vast increases in civilian casualties over the Great War, saw anything close to the same degree of violence directed at the young and the educated. Vietnam, the war that captured and to some extent created the social imagination of my generation, was a war to which America sent mostly black kids and rednecks to do the dying."-- Brian Fawcett.
This is an interesting point since there've been one or more wars waged for a greater period of recorded historical time than the total period of accumulated "peace". But one doesn't have to be on the front lines to write effectively on war (Shakespeare), or be a criminal to write a first-person narrative of a murderer (Dostoyevsky). Also, war can be approached more indirectly: time served away from the front; as a civilian digesting the news; and by surreal or metaphoric means where a specific war is not necessary for poetic creation. I also hasten to add that direct experience of war often doesn't necessarily result in better (grittier, more authentic) poetry: though I admire American poet Louis Simpson's work, I found it a tough slog getting through his WWII land-war verse. His front line position didn't enhance the vividness of his poetry, which is all that matters.
And of course it should go without saying that there are endless subjects fit for poetry that don't concern themselves with contemporary wars, or that may only employ war in an ancillary or background sense.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Yet the same larks appear above the blighted landscape in the poems of my generation as could be seen in the poems of the British war poets, except that the hell beneath the wings of today’s poets consists of incitements to purchase goods, eat mediocre pre-processed foods, and suck up other entertainments of the disarticulation of the public realm."-- Brian Fawcett.
I find much to agree with in the above quote. It's just an expansion on the meaning of "war". Madison Avenue sending volleys through the airwaves.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in the sense of beauty that is lyric poetry’s purest energy, but that I was suspicious of the darkness that placed it in chiaroscuro. What I perceived around me wasn’t so much dark as muddy. It held no residue of high explosives, and it did not stream with human blood and body parts. It was fouled with cigarette butts and the paper and Styrofoam debris of mass-produced hamburgers and milkshakes. My instinct was that such a world requires a catalogue less private and and idiosyncratic than Whitman’s body electric, and an emotional frame less prone to self-regard and sentimentality than Wilfred Owen’s pity"--Brian Fawcett.
More narrow definitions of what poetry "should" be.
Explosions and high rhetoric, personal shattering epiphanies and intense war drama are not the only moods and experiences of great canonical poetry.
I used to set these unaccepting strictures on poetic subject matter myself when I was in my twenties. How could Robert Frost write about couples drama and nature contemplation when Europe was in flames? I wondered, impatient. But Frost and others were writing of conflicts that could be seen as having a metaphysical structure much in tune with WWI. Journalism, reportage, direct engagement, aren't the only means of writing about seminal conflicts.
And again this equating of lyricism with beauty. Shelley wrote of oppressive governments as well as about skylarks.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part Eight (and hopefully concluding) next time.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Brian Fawcett (Part Six)
"good writing is still valuable because it permits us to treat complex subject matters with conceptual precision and thus enhances our ability to think accurate, complex thoughts and to communicate them to others. More broadly, a society needs to be able to articulate complexities if it is to avoid social and interpersonal violence as a problem-solving device, or beyond that, to be just and healthily democratic." --Brian Fawcett.
"Subject matter" needs aesthetic delight and perspicacious ordering if it's to go beyond philosophical and worldly pretension. I should rather say that the latter attributes are brought out only if the words are presented with artistic aptness and felicity. But again, Fawcett downplays form (especially in poetry) if not misunderstanding it completely (note the tautology, which involved wayward thinking, doubling as ironical self-parody, oh doppelgangers of dour drought! Dotard shiverings of long-solemn somnolence!)
The last quoted sentence above ignores many historical precedents which contradict the inflated claim. Germany was the most educated and artistically realized country in continental Europe during the 1920s, but that didn't stop "social and interpersonal violence". The evil which is latent in every human heart is unpredictable as to its activation, having more to do with mysterious circumstance than "improvement" through metaphorical valuations. Art can civilize, but it's an individual undertaking, never graphed on a social line, much as the fact of spiritual enlightenment is always there (and here) but needs mysterious realization, only possible with an individual, and always vulnerable to social and political (and individual) mutability.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Beneath the changes brought on by the new media, clear language—specifically metaphor and rhetoric—remains the first instruments of both public and private clarity. Properly considered in isolation of its waning aesthetic value, poetry (if not verse and the Biz) has always acted as the janitorial service for metaphor and rhetoric, both of which require high degrees of maintenance to protect their vitality and their precisions" --Brian Fawcett.
"Janitorial service", haha! Janitors, by definition, erase and throw out. Metaphoric elimination? Janitors don't replace what they "clean". ("Clean", here, has a particularly ominous meaning in light of the previous "interpersonal violence" concern.) What inapt and inept metaphors, Brian.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All of these latter things I would have agreed with in 1970 if I’d recognized their presence. But I’ve also changed my mind about is the role the self plays in the operation of poetry, and the degree to which sublimating—or even suppressing—the self is necessary to achieve relevant accuracy in the use of poetic language. Partly, the change is a consequence of having my testosterone levels drop low enough that I can occasionally think through something without erotic and biomission intrusions fogging up my glasses, but the change is also partly the product of recognizing that there are no stable pathways from the self into the world. In 1970, I believed that the road to poetic accuracy ran right through the most rubble-littered intersections of the self. That was the fatuous Zeitgeist of the 70s: Any world cleanup must be preceded by spiritual self-cleansing. Now I understand that it is the world that creates the paths, not the self." --Brian Fawcett.
I've dealt with some head-shakers throughout this essay, but this passage is the Grouse mountain of grouses (so far), the Heimlich of Himalayas, the un-cleverness of Everests.
"Suppressing the self": what is this but the final crossing curb of the dead end street of T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative"? Again, we have an extremely narrow-minded reading of what is and isn't poetry. Great poems, long established in the canon, and still inspiring awe and freshness after centuries, have been written out of emotionally charged personal confusion or transcendence, and they have also been written from a more distancing "objectivity". Examples unscrolled would take up cubed fortnights just to list, and it would be pedantic to do so. But Fawcett wants to obliterate one worthy avenue of poetic mood and mode entirely, from an ironically emotional reaction to his and others' efforts in this vein as well as a ludicrous and grandiose wish to alter the direction of present and future poetic composition. (Note, again, the metaphors: "suppress", "cleanup", "intrusions".)
It may come as a shock to paradox-challenged Fawcett, but it's possible to use poetic voice as (on the surface) agitated, seemingly self-obsessed, yet, through that device, create an optative effect of cold irony, clarity, declaration. The "I" of the poem is sometimes the "I" of the poet, yet more often is only a small part, an amalgam, has little to do with the author's personality, or is even antithetical to it. In other words, each voice is unique, and the context of the entire poem has to be taken into account. It's embarassingly elementary to have to delineate this; it's obvious, but obviously not obvious to all. (Which tautology is Waldo hiding behind?)
"No stable pathways from the self into the world". Haha! This statement is now my favourite from the essay to date.
There is no other way to assimilate stability other than through one's self. The soi disant objectivity Fawcett kneels before is a sham; everything is filtered through individual discrimination. I'd rather trust a hot-reactive decision or feeling from an experienced, intelligent, adaptible person than one from a reflective, cooled-down, obtuse, association-bereft one. "The world creates the paths". Ha. What is this "world" of which you speak? The world is nothing other than individuals making (wait for the tautology) individual decisions, one after another, and by their subjective appraisals.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Twentieth Century history intrudes here, and mightily. Lyric poetry, as we who write in English know it and practice it, is the product of the Great War of 1914-1918."--Brian Fawcett.
Yikes! He keeps topping himself. The sensibilties of present-day poets are informed by the mysterious sotto voce remembrances of poets from before Beowulf to Bach to Beckett to Babstock. Throw in bingo-callers and barroom hustlers and bank exec belchers and bubblehead bimbos and ....
I think it safe to assume that Fawcett is setting out the less-than-original literary history position which declared Romantic poetry (i.e. Fawcett's narrow and misunderstood definition of lyricism) dead upon the advent of WWI. But it takes a quick perusal through late-Romantic literature and music to see that this is a more complex issue than it may seem from those who look for easily assailable bogeymen. Far from being a cut-and-dried, simplistic wrenching away of self-regarding innocence, WWI's metaphysical confusion of horrors were predated by a queasy premonition and energy. Read Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"; read Nietzsche; listen to Mahler. Fawcett denies the prophetic function of poetry, but these late nineteenth-century men (among other artists) predicted and understood the metaphysical upheavals in our darkest century better than most of those confused men in the trenches, and better, even, than the unretrospective ninnies who think history means colourful stories in college books while they click the power button on the boob tube.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Great War therefore created a compelling frame that verse in English had not, in 1970, ventured much beyond save in the attempts to widen the field that are Ezra Pound’s Cantos, William Carlos Williams Paterson, and perhaps Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems." --Brian Fawcett.
I've omitted the off-topic descent into political rhetoric which precedes this quote. The link to lyric poetry is specious. I've talked about it above a bit, but I'll just add that crises, throughout history, have always added a sense of urgency amongst artists, engendering in them not dry themes but necessitous energy to record and express their outrage, tenderness, heightened appreciation for life. WWI wasn't the first epochal event to help usher in new forms and sensibilities of poetic composition, and it won't be the last.
And Fawcett's understanding of political history is further compromised by a like misunderstanding of literary history: Pound, Williams, and Olson (gawd! does anyone still read that Blackstained Mountain fraud?) are not the only "seminal" names in modern lyricism. Lowell, Berryman, Layton, MacNeice, Plath .... but, again, why go on? Fawcett puts the horse blinkers on after the solemnly intoned names of his heroes are trotted out, and so "history" is frozen in one jar, set and unable for cross-pollination.
I realize that Fawcett specifically stated "verse in English", but it may escape his notice that those same writers have also incorportaed the moods and rhythms of other cultures and languages into their own work. Cesar Vallejo wrote about himself quite a bit. And he expressed his profound spiritual sadness in many of his poems. (Self-obsessed? Not transcending his lyric insularity, or rather using his personal history as deft examples of a reverse objective correlative?) I'll let Brian check out when he wrote his first two books, and where he ended up.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part Seven to follow ....
"Subject matter" needs aesthetic delight and perspicacious ordering if it's to go beyond philosophical and worldly pretension. I should rather say that the latter attributes are brought out only if the words are presented with artistic aptness and felicity. But again, Fawcett downplays form (especially in poetry) if not misunderstanding it completely (note the tautology, which involved wayward thinking, doubling as ironical self-parody, oh doppelgangers of dour drought! Dotard shiverings of long-solemn somnolence!)
The last quoted sentence above ignores many historical precedents which contradict the inflated claim. Germany was the most educated and artistically realized country in continental Europe during the 1920s, but that didn't stop "social and interpersonal violence". The evil which is latent in every human heart is unpredictable as to its activation, having more to do with mysterious circumstance than "improvement" through metaphorical valuations. Art can civilize, but it's an individual undertaking, never graphed on a social line, much as the fact of spiritual enlightenment is always there (and here) but needs mysterious realization, only possible with an individual, and always vulnerable to social and political (and individual) mutability.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Beneath the changes brought on by the new media, clear language—specifically metaphor and rhetoric—remains the first instruments of both public and private clarity. Properly considered in isolation of its waning aesthetic value, poetry (if not verse and the Biz) has always acted as the janitorial service for metaphor and rhetoric, both of which require high degrees of maintenance to protect their vitality and their precisions" --Brian Fawcett.
"Janitorial service", haha! Janitors, by definition, erase and throw out. Metaphoric elimination? Janitors don't replace what they "clean". ("Clean", here, has a particularly ominous meaning in light of the previous "interpersonal violence" concern.) What inapt and inept metaphors, Brian.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All of these latter things I would have agreed with in 1970 if I’d recognized their presence. But I’ve also changed my mind about is the role the self plays in the operation of poetry, and the degree to which sublimating—or even suppressing—the self is necessary to achieve relevant accuracy in the use of poetic language. Partly, the change is a consequence of having my testosterone levels drop low enough that I can occasionally think through something without erotic and biomission intrusions fogging up my glasses, but the change is also partly the product of recognizing that there are no stable pathways from the self into the world. In 1970, I believed that the road to poetic accuracy ran right through the most rubble-littered intersections of the self. That was the fatuous Zeitgeist of the 70s: Any world cleanup must be preceded by spiritual self-cleansing. Now I understand that it is the world that creates the paths, not the self." --Brian Fawcett.
I've dealt with some head-shakers throughout this essay, but this passage is the Grouse mountain of grouses (so far), the Heimlich of Himalayas, the un-cleverness of Everests.
"Suppressing the self": what is this but the final crossing curb of the dead end street of T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative"? Again, we have an extremely narrow-minded reading of what is and isn't poetry. Great poems, long established in the canon, and still inspiring awe and freshness after centuries, have been written out of emotionally charged personal confusion or transcendence, and they have also been written from a more distancing "objectivity". Examples unscrolled would take up cubed fortnights just to list, and it would be pedantic to do so. But Fawcett wants to obliterate one worthy avenue of poetic mood and mode entirely, from an ironically emotional reaction to his and others' efforts in this vein as well as a ludicrous and grandiose wish to alter the direction of present and future poetic composition. (Note, again, the metaphors: "suppress", "cleanup", "intrusions".)
It may come as a shock to paradox-challenged Fawcett, but it's possible to use poetic voice as (on the surface) agitated, seemingly self-obsessed, yet, through that device, create an optative effect of cold irony, clarity, declaration. The "I" of the poem is sometimes the "I" of the poet, yet more often is only a small part, an amalgam, has little to do with the author's personality, or is even antithetical to it. In other words, each voice is unique, and the context of the entire poem has to be taken into account. It's embarassingly elementary to have to delineate this; it's obvious, but obviously not obvious to all. (Which tautology is Waldo hiding behind?)
"No stable pathways from the self into the world". Haha! This statement is now my favourite from the essay to date.
There is no other way to assimilate stability other than through one's self. The soi disant objectivity Fawcett kneels before is a sham; everything is filtered through individual discrimination. I'd rather trust a hot-reactive decision or feeling from an experienced, intelligent, adaptible person than one from a reflective, cooled-down, obtuse, association-bereft one. "The world creates the paths". Ha. What is this "world" of which you speak? The world is nothing other than individuals making (wait for the tautology) individual decisions, one after another, and by their subjective appraisals.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Twentieth Century history intrudes here, and mightily. Lyric poetry, as we who write in English know it and practice it, is the product of the Great War of 1914-1918."--Brian Fawcett.
Yikes! He keeps topping himself. The sensibilties of present-day poets are informed by the mysterious sotto voce remembrances of poets from before Beowulf to Bach to Beckett to Babstock. Throw in bingo-callers and barroom hustlers and bank exec belchers and bubblehead bimbos and ....
I think it safe to assume that Fawcett is setting out the less-than-original literary history position which declared Romantic poetry (i.e. Fawcett's narrow and misunderstood definition of lyricism) dead upon the advent of WWI. But it takes a quick perusal through late-Romantic literature and music to see that this is a more complex issue than it may seem from those who look for easily assailable bogeymen. Far from being a cut-and-dried, simplistic wrenching away of self-regarding innocence, WWI's metaphysical confusion of horrors were predated by a queasy premonition and energy. Read Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"; read Nietzsche; listen to Mahler. Fawcett denies the prophetic function of poetry, but these late nineteenth-century men (among other artists) predicted and understood the metaphysical upheavals in our darkest century better than most of those confused men in the trenches, and better, even, than the unretrospective ninnies who think history means colourful stories in college books while they click the power button on the boob tube.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Great War therefore created a compelling frame that verse in English had not, in 1970, ventured much beyond save in the attempts to widen the field that are Ezra Pound’s Cantos, William Carlos Williams Paterson, and perhaps Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems." --Brian Fawcett.
I've omitted the off-topic descent into political rhetoric which precedes this quote. The link to lyric poetry is specious. I've talked about it above a bit, but I'll just add that crises, throughout history, have always added a sense of urgency amongst artists, engendering in them not dry themes but necessitous energy to record and express their outrage, tenderness, heightened appreciation for life. WWI wasn't the first epochal event to help usher in new forms and sensibilities of poetic composition, and it won't be the last.
And Fawcett's understanding of political history is further compromised by a like misunderstanding of literary history: Pound, Williams, and Olson (gawd! does anyone still read that Blackstained Mountain fraud?) are not the only "seminal" names in modern lyricism. Lowell, Berryman, Layton, MacNeice, Plath .... but, again, why go on? Fawcett puts the horse blinkers on after the solemnly intoned names of his heroes are trotted out, and so "history" is frozen in one jar, set and unable for cross-pollination.
I realize that Fawcett specifically stated "verse in English", but it may escape his notice that those same writers have also incorportaed the moods and rhythms of other cultures and languages into their own work. Cesar Vallejo wrote about himself quite a bit. And he expressed his profound spiritual sadness in many of his poems. (Self-obsessed? Not transcending his lyric insularity, or rather using his personal history as deft examples of a reverse objective correlative?) I'll let Brian check out when he wrote his first two books, and where he ended up.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part Seven to follow ....
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Brian Fawcett (Part Five)
Thanks to editor Zach Wells for the organization of the Jailbreaks book launch last night, and to him and other contributors and readers. The volume is attractive, the poems I've read so far are various and fascinating, and the idea is an excellent one: I've always enjoyed a good sonnet, and the choices and evolutions in this book are well-researched and worthy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In 1970, such ostensibly technical and mundane insights didn’t seem like something I could transform into poetry, while chewing the cosmic and/or human scenery did." -- Brian Fawcett
Why the silly need to choose one over the other?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Too bad. If I’d pursued some of the practical messages that episode tried to deliver to (or was it from?) my teeming brain, I might have produced a piece of readable writing." --Brian Fawcett
Ahh, yes, "practical messages". And that's what poetry is all about, no? A tidy moral. A ten-step rule of "right living". A way of "getting ahead" and doing something "serious" with one's life.
There are a lot of fuck-ups in the history of world poetry, fuck-ups who wrote timeless lines without which the world would be a lot sorrier place in which to schlepp around. Dentists, economic advisors, peak oil grass roots organizers, horse racing analysts, and spiritual adepts, and others, give me needed and valuable insights, but they would be the first to admit they know shit about poetry.
The "bigger" his statement is, the worse it gets.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This time, I did get the implicit lesson: It is what people accept as authentic that matters, not how the authenticity is produced."--Brian Fawcett.
Bullshit. People accept all sorts of crazy things, en masse, as authentic: organized religion; white bread; TV commercials selling cars where the model couple, smiling suggestively to one another, glide over a mountain pass while eagles dive athwart the golden shafts of the setting sun as reflected from the inside of the side windows.
The "how" is everything. If someone tells me something, what does it matter if it's not an organic and deep realization already encoded in their spiritual DNA? If someone else can create something ( a poem, a meal, a table, a worthy gathering) through a mysterious and artful process of accumulated careful understanding, then that's what matters. I want an intuitive authority (not authoritarianism, which is completely different), not a rule-setting, facile declaimer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Too bad it didn’t occur to me to apply this to writing poetry or to my personal life, because it pointed straight at my best talents as a writer and as a human being: I was and remain a late-in-the-game fabricator of apparently inappropriate and disparate materials, a rectifier—partially and perhaps inexactly—of major foul-ups, fuck-ups, errors-in-judgment, slapstick mistakes, and so forth." --Brian Fawcett.
Great. Self-knowledge. But now he wants it both ways. Or, rather, he's negating everything he said originally about the "narcissism of the lyric mode", because he's still concentrating on himself, only in a different way: rather than a loopy romantic, he'll be an "objective reporter". That it's regarding his learned life lessons means nothing: the focus is still on him, so where's the new, supposedly superior focus on something "bigger" than the personal?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don’t foresee the future any better than John Naismith, Charles Olson, or NORAD and CNN, but then art and artists are with us to let us know what’s on the end of those forks we’re putting in our mouths, not to predict the future."--Brian Fawcett.
More gross misunderstanding.
Poetry lets us know what we're currectly ingesting (and digesting) as well as what the future will be like. The prophetic force is a major and serious value of high poetry. It's often pooh-poohed, but it's not as high-falutin' as it always appears to the superficially-minded: poetry (and other arts, done well), in intuiting what is happening now, therefore by definition understands what will happen in the future, since what we do today is planting the proverbial specific seeds. When I say "what will happen in the future", I don't mean predicting certain, exact events, but a broad outline or paradigm, if you will, where those events will be a natural match waiting to fire with the inevitable sulphuric trigger points.
But, Fawcett, despite his "big picture" focus, seems content to rehash his boring beach "farce" for the un-universal non-appeal of his readers.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What art—alone of all the human mental crafts—does well is what I managed to do that day: read a messy situation and act on it accurately enough to bring some small part of it, alive, laughing and whole, through to the other side of the ongoing fuck-up called the human condition. For posterity, or for itself, or for the sheer joy of the human dance. Doesn’t matter."--Brian Fawcett.
Well, here's something, finally, I agree with. Let's end it (for the eve) with a "Kum-baya, my Lord!" Can I get an amen?
Part Six to follow .....
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In 1970, such ostensibly technical and mundane insights didn’t seem like something I could transform into poetry, while chewing the cosmic and/or human scenery did." -- Brian Fawcett
Why the silly need to choose one over the other?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Too bad. If I’d pursued some of the practical messages that episode tried to deliver to (or was it from?) my teeming brain, I might have produced a piece of readable writing." --Brian Fawcett
Ahh, yes, "practical messages". And that's what poetry is all about, no? A tidy moral. A ten-step rule of "right living". A way of "getting ahead" and doing something "serious" with one's life.
There are a lot of fuck-ups in the history of world poetry, fuck-ups who wrote timeless lines without which the world would be a lot sorrier place in which to schlepp around. Dentists, economic advisors, peak oil grass roots organizers, horse racing analysts, and spiritual adepts, and others, give me needed and valuable insights, but they would be the first to admit they know shit about poetry.
The "bigger" his statement is, the worse it gets.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This time, I did get the implicit lesson: It is what people accept as authentic that matters, not how the authenticity is produced."--Brian Fawcett.
Bullshit. People accept all sorts of crazy things, en masse, as authentic: organized religion; white bread; TV commercials selling cars where the model couple, smiling suggestively to one another, glide over a mountain pass while eagles dive athwart the golden shafts of the setting sun as reflected from the inside of the side windows.
The "how" is everything. If someone tells me something, what does it matter if it's not an organic and deep realization already encoded in their spiritual DNA? If someone else can create something ( a poem, a meal, a table, a worthy gathering) through a mysterious and artful process of accumulated careful understanding, then that's what matters. I want an intuitive authority (not authoritarianism, which is completely different), not a rule-setting, facile declaimer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Too bad it didn’t occur to me to apply this to writing poetry or to my personal life, because it pointed straight at my best talents as a writer and as a human being: I was and remain a late-in-the-game fabricator of apparently inappropriate and disparate materials, a rectifier—partially and perhaps inexactly—of major foul-ups, fuck-ups, errors-in-judgment, slapstick mistakes, and so forth." --Brian Fawcett.
Great. Self-knowledge. But now he wants it both ways. Or, rather, he's negating everything he said originally about the "narcissism of the lyric mode", because he's still concentrating on himself, only in a different way: rather than a loopy romantic, he'll be an "objective reporter". That it's regarding his learned life lessons means nothing: the focus is still on him, so where's the new, supposedly superior focus on something "bigger" than the personal?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I don’t foresee the future any better than John Naismith, Charles Olson, or NORAD and CNN, but then art and artists are with us to let us know what’s on the end of those forks we’re putting in our mouths, not to predict the future."--Brian Fawcett.
More gross misunderstanding.
Poetry lets us know what we're currectly ingesting (and digesting) as well as what the future will be like. The prophetic force is a major and serious value of high poetry. It's often pooh-poohed, but it's not as high-falutin' as it always appears to the superficially-minded: poetry (and other arts, done well), in intuiting what is happening now, therefore by definition understands what will happen in the future, since what we do today is planting the proverbial specific seeds. When I say "what will happen in the future", I don't mean predicting certain, exact events, but a broad outline or paradigm, if you will, where those events will be a natural match waiting to fire with the inevitable sulphuric trigger points.
But, Fawcett, despite his "big picture" focus, seems content to rehash his boring beach "farce" for the un-universal non-appeal of his readers.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What art—alone of all the human mental crafts—does well is what I managed to do that day: read a messy situation and act on it accurately enough to bring some small part of it, alive, laughing and whole, through to the other side of the ongoing fuck-up called the human condition. For posterity, or for itself, or for the sheer joy of the human dance. Doesn’t matter."--Brian Fawcett.
Well, here's something, finally, I agree with. Let's end it (for the eve) with a "Kum-baya, my Lord!" Can I get an amen?
Part Six to follow .....
Monday, April 28, 2008
Brian Fawcett (Part Four)
"The insights I might have gleaned from the slapstick had profound (and for me, permanently relevant) implications: They are, from the specific to the general: 1.) If one is going out into the big world to make the world’s first quadraphonic audio taping of surf, one ought to take some competent technicians along if one doesn’t want to risk a.) catastrophic failure and b.) the destruction of expensive equipment;" --Brian Fawcett.
The fable is a little unclear: writing depends on the knowledge of successful antecedents? (Good.) Or technicians in the way of writing content are not only preferable to, but make laughingly irrelevant, the enthusiasms of "emotional" impetus? (Nonsense.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"2.) The tides are caused by the moon’s gravity, not by ours;"--Brian Fawcett.
Since this terse edict is the header for the essay, I would assume it has particular import for its author. Let's explore it, then, in some detail.
Don't fight nature. It can be terrifying, dwarfing human pretention, powerful in its indifference to human desire. This is how I translate it in less oblique fashion.
So how does this relate to what he's previously written on modern poetry, his own efforts as well as the relevance and effect of poetry on the reader of today?
And it's here where I have to bring up the common analagous fallacy, hard to recognize if one is impressed with the associative leaps (ala poetic shaping). His long insertion of the "slapstick" failure of recording sound on the beach (left out of quotes here, but available on the link in part one of this on my blog) is supposed to impress upon us the futility of an earnest overreaching of personal, emotional investment in the object of our focus. Of course, in and of itself, this is nonsense. Emotional involvement is the sine qua non of poetry. Without it, it becomes ...... well, an essay. A prose arguement. A logical, detached elevated perusal of the object (or issue, to be more exact). There is nothing wrong with detaching oneself from the object in poetry (if an "object" or person can be said to be the sole focus), but in order for the detachment to have contrasting meaning, there first has to be a concern, a desire-- an attachment (unless you're a "spiritual" writer. But, then, what's the point of writing poetry when everything is in equanimous agreement?). Fawcett sets up a fallacious analagous anecdote, and then strikes at the ghostly strawman. One can write objective and subjective poetry (realizing that there's a large measure of subjectivity in all of it).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"3.)Don’t run in the surf if you’re not prepared to get wet;"-- Brian Fawcett.
Don't publish poetry if you're afraid of being that masturbator on the busy street corner whom no one notices.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"4.) Don’t be stargazing unless you’re in a warm, dry location;" --Brian Fawcett.
Don't show emotion and idealism unless you're prepared for turmoil and suffering.
Can one get any more patronizing?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"5.) There is more safety in foresight and planning than in trusting to technology."--Brian Fawcett.
And how does this relate to poetic composition? There is more effort, planning, reworking, and technical knowhow and employment in the creation of a good (lyric) poem than there is in the essayistic obtuseness of what passes for "important" thematic salvos and ponderous pulpit-pounding.
Part Five to follow ....
The fable is a little unclear: writing depends on the knowledge of successful antecedents? (Good.) Or technicians in the way of writing content are not only preferable to, but make laughingly irrelevant, the enthusiasms of "emotional" impetus? (Nonsense.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"2.) The tides are caused by the moon’s gravity, not by ours;"--Brian Fawcett.
Since this terse edict is the header for the essay, I would assume it has particular import for its author. Let's explore it, then, in some detail.
Don't fight nature. It can be terrifying, dwarfing human pretention, powerful in its indifference to human desire. This is how I translate it in less oblique fashion.
So how does this relate to what he's previously written on modern poetry, his own efforts as well as the relevance and effect of poetry on the reader of today?
And it's here where I have to bring up the common analagous fallacy, hard to recognize if one is impressed with the associative leaps (ala poetic shaping). His long insertion of the "slapstick" failure of recording sound on the beach (left out of quotes here, but available on the link in part one of this on my blog) is supposed to impress upon us the futility of an earnest overreaching of personal, emotional investment in the object of our focus. Of course, in and of itself, this is nonsense. Emotional involvement is the sine qua non of poetry. Without it, it becomes ...... well, an essay. A prose arguement. A logical, detached elevated perusal of the object (or issue, to be more exact). There is nothing wrong with detaching oneself from the object in poetry (if an "object" or person can be said to be the sole focus), but in order for the detachment to have contrasting meaning, there first has to be a concern, a desire-- an attachment (unless you're a "spiritual" writer. But, then, what's the point of writing poetry when everything is in equanimous agreement?). Fawcett sets up a fallacious analagous anecdote, and then strikes at the ghostly strawman. One can write objective and subjective poetry (realizing that there's a large measure of subjectivity in all of it).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"3.)Don’t run in the surf if you’re not prepared to get wet;"-- Brian Fawcett.
Don't publish poetry if you're afraid of being that masturbator on the busy street corner whom no one notices.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"4.) Don’t be stargazing unless you’re in a warm, dry location;" --Brian Fawcett.
Don't show emotion and idealism unless you're prepared for turmoil and suffering.
Can one get any more patronizing?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"5.) There is more safety in foresight and planning than in trusting to technology."--Brian Fawcett.
And how does this relate to poetic composition? There is more effort, planning, reworking, and technical knowhow and employment in the creation of a good (lyric) poem than there is in the essayistic obtuseness of what passes for "important" thematic salvos and ponderous pulpit-pounding.
Part Five to follow ....
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Brian Fawcett (Part Three)
"But it wasn’t until I said I was going to take a ten year raincheck on the business of publishing poetry, and then made a deadly serious proposition that other poets do likewise, that I got myself into serious trouble." -- Brian Fawcett.
So the publishing or performance or communal sharing of poetry can easily be preordered to conform to a (dubious) goal, whatever the motivation. It reminds me of those earnest scribblers who maintain the opposite pact with their anti-Muse, the workmanlike teeth-gritting setting-down of lines every single day for ten (or more) years into complete "poems" in order to keep the sensibilities alive. At least I can sympathize with the latter; but what, other than arrogance and a kind of petulant self-righteousness, is the reason for promising to forego any public poetry for any length of time? It results from a reverse "look at me" emotional reaction.
But, really, what can one say of someone who has the out-of-touch arrogance to also propose that other poets do likewise? Brian, if you want to be a martyr or spokesman for the "anti-lyric" age, you're free. Others have good reasons to fight the forces of published superficial factoids, however. And I know of no better way this can be done than by the crafted, imaginative powers of good poetry. The lyric mode has always been the predominant one, and (in a good or great poetic age) always will be.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The business I was making sport of, you see, really is a biz, within which moderately lucrative and very secure teaching careers can be wrought, money made, and absurd quantities of over-distilled self regard bottled for the decline. Entrepreneurs even leave their silver trails across the walls and ceilings of the temples of contemporary verse, just like in the real world." --Brian Fawcett.
He has it backwards, of course. Academics first secure their teaching careers, gain tenure, and then proceed to indulge in their poetic "vice". They make their sponduliks from teaching, and although a poetic "impression" and track record certainly helps with the creative writing industry, most academics have initial careers in teaching, no different in enumeration or process than a poetic non-practitioner.
And I have to give an offhand subdued chuckle at the assertion of poetic "entrepreneurs" greasing their pockets with filthy lucre. It's a poor career choice to invest the necessary time and
effort towards the writing, promoting, and performing of one's own poetry (not to mention the endless reading of others' verse, and the organic human connections made) if the focus is the gathering of fast loonies.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When the essay was published, "the Biz" simply disappeared me. I can’t recall a single publishing poet who has acknowledged the existence of that essay since it was published, and only one or two academics who have gone beyond rolling their eyes and tsk, tsking me about it." --Brian Fawcett.
Could be they were annoyed at your not "playing the game". Or it could have been that your reasoning lacks proportion, nuance, and personal credibility, (as I've already suggested), and that those few who did read your essay responded in kind.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I got on with my writing life. I’d pretty much mined out my youthful lyric vein anyway, and had already begun the process of learning that human life is not quite about my feelings—and that the "I" part of it was the one I have the least shot at articulating accurately. The years started passing, swiftly and pretty happily, and I ended up in different parts of the geographical, human and literary universes." --Brian Fawcett.
I see. Lyrical poetry somehow equates to a selfish interest in the workings of one's own tortured soul. It's non-transcendent, then, by nature. The personal never meets the universal, and the personal "I' in the poem is always (and exclusively) the I of the poet. I'm glad that's been illuminated for me. I hope others are reading, as well. The information on the poetic process in this essay is necessary and educative. Too bad Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, and many other "personal obsessives" hadn't come across these words before their untimely demises. We might have been spared the lyrical irrelevance of such pieces as "A Severed Head", "Dockery And Son", and the like.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I’d been in my late 20s when I wrote those poems, and it hadn’t been a happy time for me. I’d begun to get a dark inkling that my first wife and I might not make it, and that neither would a lot of other things that had once seemed pure and sure. This quite naturally got into the poems I wrote, and it made them embarrassingly personal and coded, whiny elegiacs of how hard and complicated adult life was. I should have been making thorough and precise registrations of the things around me or trying to figure out what I might be able to do to save my marriage and make my life more satisfying and interesting. Alas, I was more compelled by the Virgilian gloom I detected at the edges of everything, and I couldn’t see that most of it was emanating from inside my own dopey head." --Brian Fawcett.
This is confusing the (agreed) self-indulgent outpourings of emotivity (not emotion) for the shaping of nuanced and meaningful verse, often reflective, mature, and revelatory for more than the elliptical situation of the writer. The latter can turn out to be timeless poetry; more examples are legion -- and superfluous.
It's obvious, though, that Fawcett has a mixed stated emotional response to the rereading of his earlier verse: he can't help but give a muted congratulatory kudo or three for his "technical brilliance" (how very Canadian-- the "muted" modifier, that is); but he also groans at any emotion which is personal, and doesn't amplify itself with the more "serious" concerns of how it's supposedly shaped by society, by one or more communal belief systems, and by intermeshed world politics. This blather is the rampant Atwoodian nonsense: in her theme-polemic Survival, the macro arguement is historical Canadian literature; in Fawcett it tends to be provincial news-headline politics, where his "victims" are chess pieces to be queened off the board. But poetry, as anyone with a small sampling of grey-matter perspective can conclude, has to do with idiosyncratic detail, with people who emote with disdainful off-the-tracks sparks towards anything suggesting "theme", "positional historicity", "political metaphor", and "colonial hardwiring".
It's entirely possible (and commonplace) to write of "big themes" in a bland and illegitimate way, also from "inside [one's] own dopey head".
Part Four to follow ....
So the publishing or performance or communal sharing of poetry can easily be preordered to conform to a (dubious) goal, whatever the motivation. It reminds me of those earnest scribblers who maintain the opposite pact with their anti-Muse, the workmanlike teeth-gritting setting-down of lines every single day for ten (or more) years into complete "poems" in order to keep the sensibilities alive. At least I can sympathize with the latter; but what, other than arrogance and a kind of petulant self-righteousness, is the reason for promising to forego any public poetry for any length of time? It results from a reverse "look at me" emotional reaction.
But, really, what can one say of someone who has the out-of-touch arrogance to also propose that other poets do likewise? Brian, if you want to be a martyr or spokesman for the "anti-lyric" age, you're free. Others have good reasons to fight the forces of published superficial factoids, however. And I know of no better way this can be done than by the crafted, imaginative powers of good poetry. The lyric mode has always been the predominant one, and (in a good or great poetic age) always will be.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The business I was making sport of, you see, really is a biz, within which moderately lucrative and very secure teaching careers can be wrought, money made, and absurd quantities of over-distilled self regard bottled for the decline. Entrepreneurs even leave their silver trails across the walls and ceilings of the temples of contemporary verse, just like in the real world." --Brian Fawcett.
He has it backwards, of course. Academics first secure their teaching careers, gain tenure, and then proceed to indulge in their poetic "vice". They make their sponduliks from teaching, and although a poetic "impression" and track record certainly helps with the creative writing industry, most academics have initial careers in teaching, no different in enumeration or process than a poetic non-practitioner.
And I have to give an offhand subdued chuckle at the assertion of poetic "entrepreneurs" greasing their pockets with filthy lucre. It's a poor career choice to invest the necessary time and
effort towards the writing, promoting, and performing of one's own poetry (not to mention the endless reading of others' verse, and the organic human connections made) if the focus is the gathering of fast loonies.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When the essay was published, "the Biz" simply disappeared me. I can’t recall a single publishing poet who has acknowledged the existence of that essay since it was published, and only one or two academics who have gone beyond rolling their eyes and tsk, tsking me about it." --Brian Fawcett.
Could be they were annoyed at your not "playing the game". Or it could have been that your reasoning lacks proportion, nuance, and personal credibility, (as I've already suggested), and that those few who did read your essay responded in kind.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I got on with my writing life. I’d pretty much mined out my youthful lyric vein anyway, and had already begun the process of learning that human life is not quite about my feelings—and that the "I" part of it was the one I have the least shot at articulating accurately. The years started passing, swiftly and pretty happily, and I ended up in different parts of the geographical, human and literary universes." --Brian Fawcett.
I see. Lyrical poetry somehow equates to a selfish interest in the workings of one's own tortured soul. It's non-transcendent, then, by nature. The personal never meets the universal, and the personal "I' in the poem is always (and exclusively) the I of the poet. I'm glad that's been illuminated for me. I hope others are reading, as well. The information on the poetic process in this essay is necessary and educative. Too bad Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, and many other "personal obsessives" hadn't come across these words before their untimely demises. We might have been spared the lyrical irrelevance of such pieces as "A Severed Head", "Dockery And Son", and the like.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I’d been in my late 20s when I wrote those poems, and it hadn’t been a happy time for me. I’d begun to get a dark inkling that my first wife and I might not make it, and that neither would a lot of other things that had once seemed pure and sure. This quite naturally got into the poems I wrote, and it made them embarrassingly personal and coded, whiny elegiacs of how hard and complicated adult life was. I should have been making thorough and precise registrations of the things around me or trying to figure out what I might be able to do to save my marriage and make my life more satisfying and interesting. Alas, I was more compelled by the Virgilian gloom I detected at the edges of everything, and I couldn’t see that most of it was emanating from inside my own dopey head." --Brian Fawcett.
This is confusing the (agreed) self-indulgent outpourings of emotivity (not emotion) for the shaping of nuanced and meaningful verse, often reflective, mature, and revelatory for more than the elliptical situation of the writer. The latter can turn out to be timeless poetry; more examples are legion -- and superfluous.
It's obvious, though, that Fawcett has a mixed stated emotional response to the rereading of his earlier verse: he can't help but give a muted congratulatory kudo or three for his "technical brilliance" (how very Canadian-- the "muted" modifier, that is); but he also groans at any emotion which is personal, and doesn't amplify itself with the more "serious" concerns of how it's supposedly shaped by society, by one or more communal belief systems, and by intermeshed world politics. This blather is the rampant Atwoodian nonsense: in her theme-polemic Survival, the macro arguement is historical Canadian literature; in Fawcett it tends to be provincial news-headline politics, where his "victims" are chess pieces to be queened off the board. But poetry, as anyone with a small sampling of grey-matter perspective can conclude, has to do with idiosyncratic detail, with people who emote with disdainful off-the-tracks sparks towards anything suggesting "theme", "positional historicity", "political metaphor", and "colonial hardwiring".
It's entirely possible (and commonplace) to write of "big themes" in a bland and illegitimate way, also from "inside [one's] own dopey head".
Part Four to follow ....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
