Yes, whatever flaws

Two things in the Kaffeeklatsch ‘manifesto’ which particularly appeal to me: 1) the suggestion that poetry, to be good, must bear some significant relationship to the world. It must describe things (“with the caveat that”, as Ashbery awesomely points out in response to Williams’ phrase “No ideas but in things” — “that ideas are also things”); and 2) more obscurely, that the essential value of a poem can’t be ruined by flaws in the writing. Even if – as many would offer in argument with this – poetry is more about the way in which language can be used to put across a point than the point itself, a certain unpolished looseness or scrappiness of language can always be read as mimetic of a scrappiness of mind, a looseness of world. The poem’s metrical or conceptual flaws can read as a formal embodiment of the scappy, tarnished nature of what’s being discussed, depicted, or dissected in the poem.

As an interesting witness to this point, I’d like to call Edwin Morgan to the stand.

In his most excellent introduction to Sovpoems, his collection of translations from communist poets — Tsvetayeva, Neruda, Brecht, Pasternak, and so on — Morgan makes a fairly convincing argument for the imperative, for poetry and art, to deal with “human relations, confidence” — so that value in poetry lies in “the relation of a poet to the world he is living in.” And not, as Morgan sees it, in mere experiment, theory, abstraction and self-consciousness. And although Morgan might occasionally misfire in his choices of poets who fail to hold a satisfactory relationship to the world (Larkin, Eliot…), he does have an exceptionally satisfying idea of where this relationship can be found, and what literature needs to do to constitute it:

without the one big thing [...] – interest, care, and positive confidence in and for man and society – there is too little to build on, and the arts become a sort of fascinating marginal fantasy, where talent and effort (and money) are devoted to convincing a sceptical world that the materials used are more interesting than the mind that shapes them or the end it shapes them to.

Well then: experiment if you like, but love the world. If you hear the record of Kerouac reading his ‘October in the Railroad Earth’, you know that the answer is Yes, whatever faults the writing has; if you read Tomlinson’s book Seeing is Believing you know that the answer must be No, whatever virtues the writing has.

Yes. It isn’t often, these days, it’s possible to enjoy Kerouac so much, let alone embed a video of him in your blog. Thanks Edwin.

—

(it’s also satisfying how firmly Morgan’s Sovpoems preface agrees with the parts of our manifesto about the intrinsic politicalness of good poetry, and also the value of translation. Perhaps we should adopt him as some sort of patron saint?)

(love, Joey)

Read Full Post »

Chaos!

Has anyone else seen Antichrist, the (vaguely) recent Lars Von Trier film? Well,  I have, and without wanting to come across like a clumsy animatronic fox: when you really think about it, doesn’t everything always seem really chaotic and confusing? The internet, for example and especially, the sheer amount and the absolute jumble of it. Isn’t it bewildering sometimes to think about (just as, I’ve heard it said, is being alive in this modernity)? Does that-all sound trite? It does, but I’d just like to dwell on it for long enough, hopefully, to unpick some of the triteness of the claim. There’s just so much happening, the argument goes, so much raw narrative, so many fragments of probably-much-bigger things, that we’re subjected to such a mess of incompletes that our hope of sense-making is painfully small. And, even before all that, we have so much chaos to overcome. As DH Lawrence knew decades ago, of course. Here he is to lend his usual, quieting, clarifying hand on things (hah):

Man, and the animals, and the flower, all live within a strange and forever surging chaos. The chaos which we have got used to, we call a cosmos. The unspeakable inner chaos of which we are composed we call consciousness, and mind, and even civilization. But it is, ultimately, chaos, lit up by visions. Just as the rainbow may or may not light up the storm. And, like the rainbow, the vision perisheth.

I’m quoting from his (crazy and brilliant, as per) introduction to an old book of poetry I’ve never heard of (is it even poetry? who knows? who the hell even cares?). The important thing for our purposes here, though, is that he preceeds the above comment by saying “The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and ‘discovers’ a new world within the known world”. The “inner chaos” which is the rush and clatter of drives and half-worked-out beliefs and supressed desires – that “inner chaos”, Lawrence reckons, is “unspeakable”. The actual strange and surging chaos of ourselves and the world just won’t go gently into words, won’t be easily tamed by our sense-making tool of language. Poetry, maybe, seems uniquely suited to this ongoing project we’re all pressed into of organsing hugely various pieces of language and sight into something coherant, something nice.

And so, at aching-long-last, I get at what I’m getting at: that if the Mesopotamian festival of Zagmuk is the struggle between chaos and sense, and language is our best sense-making tool, then isn’t poetry just like Zagmuk?! Now: why is this point worth making? I’m not positive. But I love the idea of a carnival-esque riot in which language does its valiant best to forge something new – a new world, a new year – out of the baseless maelstrom which makes up our surroundings, understood as raw-sense-data, or the-fragmented-perceptions-of-modern-city-life, or the-multiplicity-of-drives-which-make-up-the-split-subject-of-ourselves, or however.

Might it feel a little like this (“You look away: the new love! / You look back,–the new love!”!), Ashbery’s translation of one of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations? Where “a tap of your finger” (hauling a bit of Ashbery-interpretation-method over to bear on Rimbaud) represents every little movement, every little tapping of self against world? And such little tappings produce “all sounds”, and begin the work towards harmonising them: every minute action of ours throws us amid the whole of the world and reflects a little organising, harmonising, a little sense-making attempt. The poem is addressed ‘To A Reason’; is concerned with both ‘a reason’ as in ‘a cause’, and ‘a reason’ as in ‘a rationality’ (the French ‘raison’ has both meanings too, it looks like, happily) — things are because they’re rationalised as such. The reason for things being as they is the way in which they’re reasoned; which allows the lightest whim of our rational minds – the lightest tap – to explode into song and world-swinging new loves and arrivals and destinations.

Just a thought. But I’ll leave you back there with Ashbery, in Ashbery’s capable hands, in Rimbaud’s capable hands, in the capable hands of all this messiness.

Love,

Joey Connolly

Read Full Post »