Standardized Snoopy Poetry

Image: "Our Fortress" by Steve Harrington




For me, Fenollosa's ideas are--to use the most virtuosic term--a bummer. Though Fenollosa promotes English as a capable translator of Chinese, since the two share the genius of strong verb-based constructions, his depictions of Chinese ideographs make me feel like the poetry of English lies pretty lame by comparison. I feel like a kid with a water pistol, staring at the .22s.

Take the Chinese "I." No matter what I make the "I" do in English, I can't really change the sign, only dress it. We don't get the five I's of Chinese: "spear in the hand," "five and a mouth," "holding off a crowd by speaking," "cocoon," and a "mouth .. who takes pleasure in his own speaking" (375). I mean, we can get it: I can throw out all those examples and you can imagine them by translating the abstract signs and sounds into concepts and brain pictures, but the process is long and shoddy. It's metaphoric, not descriptive. All I can give is a map of coded directions to the thing. My map makes you know what I’m talking about, but only if you think about it, i.e. the truthiness instead of the truth. There is some sense that the feeling is lost along the way, the farther you get from the thing. Fenollosa constantly stresses this. Take "green," the color, which is "only a certain rapidity of vibration" (374), the light moving. Remember, all "things" are only what they "do." So the farther you get away from green, the less you feel that vibration: rock dropped in the lake, ripples slowing outward toward eventual dissipation. With the word green, you have to imagine the rock from the ripple that hits you, a meager and frustrating act of logic. To Fenollosa, of course, a language's logistic processes ruin its poetry.

English is full of processes, steps, coded directions. How do we ever get poetry? Imagism is one thing, but then you're sort of pretending that our verbs are as cool as ideographs. They're not. Even if they're short and punchy, onomatopoeic, whatever. Take the first three lines of Amy Lowell's "The Traveling Bear:"

Grass blades push up between the cobblestones
And catch the sun on their flat sides
Shooting it back,

Okay, so we've got "push" and "catch" and "shooting" (uh oh, there's that nasty implied "is" that Fenny hates so much). All very punchy. Were we to do the work, as we automatically do, we will sort of imagine all that stuff happening and imagine the grass and sun and stones and whatnot. But really. Really, wouldn't it be more tangible, more grass-y and sun-y, if there were three graphical symbols for "Grass catches sun" on the page, maybe with little dashes of cobblestone and squiggles of light? While still representational, wouldn't those symbols get us closer? When Wallace Stevens said (disparaging Imagism) "The problem is ... not all objects are equal," maybe he was thinking of the English word itself as an object, versus the objects our words try to depict. You're not getting "grass" with the word "grass." You're just not.

What's worse: it's not just objects. Remember the different concepts of I? We don't get those either, not without convoluted linguistic maps.

So what do we do? Well. I think (I hope!) we can still do a lot. Nature and its profound delivery of feelings is not the only ideal. Scabby little humans still run around, well, talking, so there's that. There is also the candy of verbal music, of anything that rhymes, even a little: okay potato, maybe she likes sherry. Word-sounds ringing in of and off of each other, which can produce what Fenollosa calls "a delicate and lucid harmony" (387). I wonder what we’re after here, when our brain says "ooo, that sounds nice." Just an indication that we’re still alive, still able to make connections?

Wait. I was reading Baudrillard's America, written in the '80s when Polaroids were really popular. He talks about how the Polaroid, with its instant capture of not Thingness but visual surface, takes us back to old Greek philosophy about a thing's appearance being a sheen dinstinct from its "essence." What Fenollosa might call the "soul’s mask." This is, physics-wise, wrong. But let's think about this. If all natural things are just do-ing stuff, transferring force (leaf vibrates its color, air rises and makes wind and sound of the leaf, etc), then things are already outside our comprehension. We are receiving their action. If all existence is acting, then all Others are audience. Even ideographs don't reproduce the action of the leaf (the action occurs for itself), only what we see of that action. Even visually oriented language that captures things super precisely still only "records." The important thing, maybe, is us, is recording itself.

When you shake a Polaroid, you don't actually make the image come faster, you just mess it up a little, at the bottom (Alex Burford). You get something interesting, something imaginative. When we record the world, no matter how swell our language, we're not going to recreate it exactly--so why not fuss it up a bit, realize that what we're doing is world making, use that imaginative power? Make the grass fondle the sun. Make the grass kneejerk the sun. Make the grass jimmy the sun. Try, sometimes, to make words actors for themselves, just like things in nature act for themselves. Make the linguistic map into a drawing of Snoopy, the way you used to subvert those standardized bubble tests (you little rebel, you). Use language not to see the world and what it does, a task at which it falls pretty short. Try, instead, to convey some of the world and break the rest, to see what’s not there, to dream the world cooler.

i do not have it all figured out. i am guilty too. this is more like "enough already" than "here is a well-researched powerpoint presentation."

Re: the Saul Williams/Oprah thing. This will make more sense if you view/read all of that before you read this.

(And yeah, Bryan, this is recent. I was confused. I thought, for some reason, I had already heard about Saul's letter a while ago, but I was wrong).

This is not so much about current 441 topics, but it is about the strange habits of those who control prevailing language, and the rest of us who indulge in the habits of old languages just because it feels good.

I think this is all very frustrating. This whole thing exposes the notion of "dialogue" as hollow and vague. I agree with both "sides," even though I'm not sure of the argument or where the sides diverge. I don't feel sorry for Russell Simmons or Common or any of the others onstage, or feel that they were unduly sabotaged, because whatever discomfort they might have felt is minuscule compared to the issues at play. I'm tired of the idea that the issue is "pointing fingers" or "saying on three that we acknowledge the problem" or any of that. This is not just for this talkshow, obviously, but for whenever things like this happen.

I'm tired of the idea that Russell Simmons can say he mentors rappers who are misogynistic and materialistic because they grew up in a culture of violence and fear--which is true, which is overwhelmingly true--and yet nothing ever really changes.

I'm not talking about what Saul Williams calls "backpack rap," rap that tries in earnest toward self-consciousness and self-examination.

I'm not saying this doesn't happen with, say, punk rock or country music, and their targeted demographics.

But I mean all these mainstream rap records that continue to come out with unexamined exploitation of the "block," of shock-jock flash and bang, deploying words of weight and sting with blinders on, pretending they are "just words," pretending these videos are just fantasies or whatever, or that the music is "just catchy," or that people don't, in some ways, listen to it because they like rollercoasters, because with every thong and "shit-I-shoot-em-if-i-hate-em" the listener from that environment will recognize how scary such things are in real life, will get a controlled prick that reminds them of the frightening reality. And this prick, this tiny twin reality that won't hurt them like the real reality, makes them feel a little wild and dangerous and out-of-control and paradoxically in control of their reality, but in an utterly inconsequential way.

So young white people like us can continue to make shock jokes of these words, these hot potato words, which are catchy because they are "not okay" in a vague and meaningless way (to us), the same way people like to eat things that are on fire.

So people in tenements of town or cities can feel in a logical manner that the whole solution is to be hardcore, that you can solve life by cartwheeling in an armored and aggressive way through all the fear of it, that if you buy a gun you can protect yourself from it, that if you have a yacht you can sail from it, that if you drink enough you can numb out of it, that if Men fuck enough and treat women as sexual doodads they can "Man" their way out of it, that if we all just hunker in and protect ourselves from all of it the all of it won't happen to us, to the me's and me's of us, which is the most important part. Not that the all of it exists and continues to exist—inevitability—to others.

Somebody on one of those blogs, I think, said that "Scott Joplin managed to write songs without talking about bitches and bling," which I think is the wrong idea. This is "avoiding" the issue, or trying to provoke Paradise by depicting Paradise, which doesn't work, which is still compartmentalizing the fear into some sort of abstract philosophy. No matter how much champagne and sex you have, you're still going to die, which is a truism that musn't be viewed in a calm, philosophical manner.

But instead a stern, systematic, loud, moral, pleading way to please stop just telling poor people back in your neighborhood that once you have enough money everything will be happy and hyphy all night long. That with enough money you will have cars that shine and sex without names, which will stimulate the entirety of your chemicals and therefore solve life.

This is untrue.

This is untrue.

If there is a rap artist mentoring session, I don't understand why it isn't just "Stop having goddamn parties in your videos." And then a rapid, stern, systematic explanation of why.

And I'm tired of Oprah looking at her ratings and recognizing in her brain that hundreds of thousands of people watch her show, people not in tenements, people with money set aside to send in envelopes, maybe, given the right whim, people with garages and spare chunks of time in which to do earnest, good things. Because most people, given a choice, are guilty or decent enough that they want to do a few earnest, good things. I'm tired of Oprah looking at those ratings and still holding these meaningless, self-preening, ineffectual summits.

I agree with Saul Williams that men need to outgrow their ideals of jealousy and anger if misogyny is to degrade. Especially those with the education to self-analyze and realize such an ideal exists. I am tired, more or less, of those people using rhetoric and scorn and humor and out-of-context logic to elude such a change, simply because they want to indulge in their habits. To say things like "That commercial wasn't offensive to gay people. Gay people should get a sense of humor. I have a roommate who is gay and he laughed at that commercial. I'm not a bigot: I hate everybody equally (ha ha)." I am tired of men who are smart enough to understand the fossilized biology underlying their abstract notions of manhood--how irrelevant that biology is inside a supermarket, for instance, or anywhere in today's society--and yet insist on "acting like a man" and "not being queer." Blowing up Coke bottles, or lifting weights so they can be a better professional boxer, or writing a book about the "poetry of boxing" if their muscles are small, or taking off their shirt when it's not really that hot outside, or shooting deer for fun, or believing in Fight Club, or acting wounded in a fake and childish manner (but trying to drum up a "mature" and intelligent-sounding rhetoric) when subjected to the truth that they can't handle "powerful women."

These are all okay ways to act if you are thirteen.

Otherwise you're just being an asshole because it's easy and feels good.

I am tired of smart people using their intelligence to justify ignoring things. Or to justify acting like they're thirteen because they like to stimulate the entirety of their chemicals all the time and feel as if they are solving life. I am tired of intelligence and rhetoric and "dialogue" toward justification instead of toward legitimate change.

It is all very frustrating.

self promotion elephant smell

Speaking of Robert Grenier's Sentences, I copied that idea one time and wrote/programmed a poem generator/machine/game/doodad. The lines are more litanous (is that a word? to resemble litany?)--I am mimicking probably Ginsberg via Ashbery's "He" more than Grenier--so the connections are less full of tumbles and interesting electricity, but the way stanzas get assembled can sometimes be rather provocative and cool or something.

BlazeVOX featured it here.

Maybe you will find it fun.

even the wind follows rules

On my other blog, I am trying to do a poem-a-day for NaPoWriMo. Part of my plan is to gather rules or constraints. Without these, a poem-a-day gets pretty tedious and terrifying. Now that I've run out of constraints, actually, the tedium creepeth ever closer. Please help me. Comment me some rules. Thank you.

Handy Syllables

"For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance ..."

While Olson isn't much fun, what with all the SHOUTING, I did dig a little on his devotion to syllabic weight. Syllabic history even. With apologies to Minola Prep, this is a pretty cool concept.

Olson talks about how "is" comes from an Aryan root "to breathe," how "be" comes from a root "to grow." These things suggest that we should respect syllabic connotations, that even the smallest utterance can carry this dense array of ideas. As others have pointed out, Olson isn't a linguistics guru, missing as he does the concept of phonemes. Though one syllable, "be" isn't the simplest construction: it's made of two phonemes. Still. What Olson misses isn't of much concern, since the reader is probably going to miss it all anyway, right? You have to ask: how would the poet's knowledge of syllabic history or reverence of syllables affect a reader who doesn't share that knowledge?

This gets us into the Minola Prep thing. You run, you impress with your display, your instinct. Not your history. But where O'Hara's flippancy is obviously funny--and I want to have a little farm with O'Hara somewhere on a brownstone roof, a roof farm full of quiche and fedoras--I wonder about its validity. Don't you hone instinct through experience? Let's say I understand and respect the smallest contortions of my calves and whatnot, allow that understanding to enhance my running. You can't see my fussing, but you sure as hell feel it when I escape your attempts to rob and bludgeon me.

Please stop trying to rob and bludgeon me. You are bordering on antisocial. You.

So this is what interests me: the mystical syllable. The syllable that does its work simply through effect. If I say "be," you with the evolution of language intact in your chemicals somehow hear "to grow." Here, I think, I'm getting at Olson's zealous froth, his !!! and devotion to Poetry's supernatural power. As I think Trisha pointed out, far less practical than we should probably be.

But it's still fun to imagine an intricate puzzle of syllables, crafted with a lore-heavy intention but designed to remove any lame-ass resonance of knowledge for knowledge's sake. Sheer effect. Effect due to history.

And then I think of something like a human scenic sublime. Some of my favorite poems are quite sublime, totally mysterious, lacking any "show of power" and still managing to pluck me in the hardest ways. Maybe it's because they're rooted in mythos and language so old that I feel the punch of that lineage? I imagine the poetry of Joseph Ceravolo or Frank Stanford bound up in this sort of thing. Is this obnoxious as that deep image shit?

I don't know. It seems sort of different than the concept of sublime as "never before seen, oh my god, i don't even know what to say, oh my god oh my god." One of my favorite examples of that type is from the movie Gummo, where the kid eats spaghetti in a bathtub. It's beyond beautiful or horrific: it's something I never imagined imagining.

Yet I feel the same thing from this Frank Stanford poem, even though maybe it's because of a rich linguistic (syllabic?) history, all these sounds and words and all their connotations:

Tale
--Frank Stanford

The maid used to pull the drapes
So I could see dust

When it didn't rain
I bought gum and worked in the boat
There was a locked up shack down the road
With a stack of records in the bedroom

We could tell when strangers were around
From what they drank

The girls waited in the orchards
There was no need to lie

***

I don't know. At some point, in poetry, in the best poetry, you hit something, you're unanchored, not unanchored like that boring Billy Collins quote about the cornfield, but you (you) are a little like that scene in the movie Labyrinth with David Bowie, when the girl falls down the hole and gets caught by the helping hands: these waves of disembodied, white-gloved hands, suddenly appearing and stretching out in all directions. All these hands! Where did they come from, who have they touched, which fingers have been burned, palms and knuckles, why are they linked, clasping you maybe, maybe just brushing--and you fall for a few seconds past all these hands. And then you're back again. And not sure what you saw, only that you saw through a field of hands that never seemed to start or end, a sort of temporary forever of hands.

Unify in a Uniform

"The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist."

"Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order ... they are ... the founders of civil society ... "

Out of all the words, all this fuss about prophecy, Shelley goes with legislators. After our discussion about elitism and corn dogs, I started to think about this latent theme in Defence of Poetry, one that tends to make me balk, but one that Shelley presumes underneath everything: poet as social contributor.

In the first page, Shelley talks about how "The savage"—the pre-society individual—"expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects" and "his apprehension of them." By "apprehension," Shelley simply means understanding, but I misread it and applied apprehension's connotations of anxiety and doubt. To me, it seemed corny for Shelley to say that only once we enter society do we lose our fear of objects. Only once we live in harmony do we develop the skill to comprehend objects in harmony. Or something.. Shelley isn't belittling the savage like this, of course. But the whole thing seemed sort of silly, skeptical as I am of "Order" as a universal, snotty as I am to call society's order an abstract human construction.

So then I realized: it's my lack of imagination. I simply can't imagine what Shelley seems to have: utter faith in society as a concept.

He seems to say (or presume we already know) that without society, the poet is nothing. Without fellows with whom to share linguistic prophecy, what good is it? Even further than that, if poets have no society, they don't develop the love of harmony. All this assuming that harmony discovery is really poetry's goal. When Shelley's poets apprehend and perpetuate new apprehensions, they "gather a sort of reduplication from that community." Almost as if such transmissions (poet's mega super gee —> the others) need Society (big sweaty beast) not only as a conveyer belt but also as a generator.

So here's the jump. Is it not too far out to assume that Shelley isn't thinking in elitist terms, but thinking of a well-oiled society where everyone has their particular contribution? The order, the order. I mean, he uses phrases like "legislator," the "delicately organized" poet, and even "the cultivation of poetry," as if poems were plucked and piled into SYSCO trucks. How utterly at odds with the poet as anti-social figure, eh? How not the poem as loudmouthed bobble, shouting about the room full of corn dogs. Let's even say that the shouting were supposed to "save everybody." That scene is still pretty disharmonious. Unless, of course, the shouting engenders a "revolution of opinion" and not just social discord.

Sure Shelley might be stroking with a straight face when he likens poets to priests. Calls them hierophants, maybe even more divine than straight-up priests. But if we jump outside the vertical system we had in mind—charges of "elitism" or elevation, "base" as the actual base—we might figure that priest as another cog in a big, messy plane of social contributors. Poets haul that formatted wind to the ears of their brethren. That's their job. Nothing elite about it. Just fitting. Premium on functionality in this system, so who cares how many Slim Jims or American Idols you scarf while you're formatting the wind? So long as you don't "neglect to observe the circumstances," i.e. neglect your most basic task, your (duh duh DUM!) role.

No doubt: this theory is way more serene than it should be. Capitalism, class-consciousness —sort of sullies it. And Shelley still says thinks like "when the poet becomes a man" as if "he" weren't already. But when he calls "patriotism" an emotion, I realize that I'm way outside my comprehension range. We're post-blahblah fractured selves and all that, so it's hard to imagine how something like poetry could tie into idealistic social goals.

You know that paperwork where you fill in your Occupation? Even if poetry occupies the hell out of us, we joke and slither around actually writing "Poet." We slither around saying it. To be a poet is supposedly impossible, self-indulgent, ridiculous, subversive, etc. But one definition of employment is sort of "how we're folded into things." Shelley definitely wants the fabric of society intact—not doubted or poked at, no more than you would poke any sacred thing. He's writing "Poet" for sure. He's getting a badge.

not my shelley response

base desires

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TULIP

I found my thumbpick in a vase.