…it is impossible to say anything because it is impossible to say everything at the same time, as John Cage pointed out, Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot...
...modern poetry, according to Marjorie Perloff can be traced back to Rimbaud, who serves as a kind of rock in the stream…
rimbaud divides the poetry flow that ran from Romanticism through Symbolism & poured into 20th century modernism on one side stand poets like W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and their many heirs—a kind of poetry that has dominated the scene up to the present day over-determined, explicable, governed by a coherent symbol-system "closed" inasmuch as any utterance can be it's a domination, however, that has never thankfully entirely shaken off its evil twin its incoherent shadow
Perloff takes up the cause of this shadow tradition in modern poetics, the tradition that remained true to Rimbaud's vision at the expense of Symbolism—she follows the line of Rimbaud from the early modernists—Pound, the younger William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein to Samuel Beckett and Ashbery and finally to the writings of John Cage and "talk-poet" David Antin…and by implication contemporary avant-garde writers like Craig Dworkin, Susan Howe, and Kenneth Goldsmith the primary characteristic of this "other tradition" is an indeterminacy of meaning, a teasing ambiguity that says what cannot be said by not-quite-saying it, leaving the text open for possible interpretation and reinterpretation this "other tradition" denies closure, denies symbolic systems where images point to larger inexpressible "truths" beyond the poems this is writing that denies in some sense the ability of writing "to say" anything definitive a writing that becomes more than anything else the gesture of trying to say something
—words, in this other tradition, have a substance, a concreteness, an object-ness in themselves they have shape, volume, and color…using words in this way, a text becomes a material thing independent of semantic meaning; words, considered in this way are analogous to the revolution in painting, where the paint itself, not what is depicted, becomes the artist's subject.
—what is really "easy," writes Perloff,is to write little epiphany poems in free verse, detailing a "meaningful" experience. I am walking, let us say, in the snow and I notice strange footprints: I am reminded of the day when…
…this is sort of narrative, reality-based, practical poetry that has held center-stage for a damn long time, as long as I can remember and I've always loathed it short stories broken up into staggered lines, is what i thought of them in school, and what i think of them now
as a graduate student all my classmates were writing this kind of poetry it was the poetry that dominated all the literary magazines and it still does it is poetry at the lowest common denominator
easily understandable, supermarket poetry, prime-time TV poetry what James Patterson is to literary fiction this poetry is to well, maybe that's overstating the case let's just say it's poetry suited for a tenuous poetry audience that is already almost non-existent sitting in class i couldn't count how many poems i heard read about mothers dying of cancer, aunts dying of cancer, uncles, brothers, dogs dying of cancer...poems about watching dad shave in the mirror, family vacations on the beach, old photographs found in a dusty attic grandmas visited baby brothers and sisters being born and always some pithy touching universal lesson learned these were poets wracked with epiphanies like the rest of us get hiccups every laundromat held a revelation no trip to the 7-11 for a pack of cigarettes was complete without a flashback and an acompanying vision of eternal truth lurking somewhere between the checkout and the snack food aisle
—these were poems that despite their prosaic nature i could hardly believe were accounts of real lives although they were undoubtedly more real at least they were more possibly "real" as reality is understood by general consensus certainly more real than the dreamy surreal enigmatic word-pictures that i was busily constructing
one thing was certain i couldn't write this kind of poetry because i didn't live the kind of life these people insisted they were living in their poetry my life my past up to that point had none of these tenderly tragic/magic retrospective revelatory moments my memory was a wasteland of huge blank spaces scorched lifeless that i can only assume were the scenes of horrific nuclear traumas i was fortunate not to remember these blacked-out places surrounded the lesser horrific traumas that i could remember
how many poems could you write about that kind of life how many poems can you write about being blinded, struck mute & paralyzed by terror the fact was everything in my experience told me that life was indeterminate, nothing made sense, no one, least of all, ones parents, told the truth, conversations were not what they seemed to be or what they seemed to be about, you had to interpret everything and these interpretations were always subjective and subject to re-interpretations, there was no key to any of the symbols, because there weren't any symbols, there was no plot, no moral, no point, nothing added up…
indeterminacy wasn't poetic theory for me it was a state of reality with no outside world i could safely connect to i retreated inward i spoke in code because the world presented itself to me in code the world was a fearsome mystery words didn't mean what they meant to others or what others pretended they meant even if they convinced themselves they meant them and that they understood & believed what they heard words didn't connect in sentences except by convention
weren't units of communication at all
nothing was ever really communicated words were more akin to blocks of color to arrange they were something to use to decorate the mental equivalent of a room
...in the middle of the semester a well-known poet was invited to sit in on our writing workshop
everyone was excited on that day the work of two student poets would be discussed i was one of the poets chosen & at first i took it as an honor but as the class proceeded i realized why my poetry was chosen & that was because my poems were written in a style in direct contradiction of those of the other student poet who'd been chosen and who in every way was representative of the class as a whole, of the dominant poetic paradigm, and of the professional poet's own work after reading my poems out loud before the class, Mr. W. cleared his throat, and, looking bemused said, well, when the poet decides she wants to be understood there will be something to say about her work it was the verbal equivalent to a smack in the face, the kind i was familiar with as a child, which came out of nowhere, shocking, sudden, and for which you could never link with any reasonable cause because i thought thought what thought that the poems though not understandable logically were nonetheless beautiful as objects, as images without relation to each other or to anything else outside themselves but communicating the way a painting communicates words-clusters that were being used on a the canvas of a sheet of paper it wouldn't have flown even if i'd tried anyway the rules of the workshop prohibited a poet from rising to the defense of their work during a critique they had to sit there silent and absorb the criticism, hopefully constructive, but usually peevish, jealous, picayune, defensive & in this case i felt thoroughly humiliated voiceless in more ways than the usual i sat there fuming and outraged at the same time it was a good thing i couldn't talk i would have sputtered incoherently if i had
no doubt Mr. W was defensive defending his own position in poetry as all poets do from this mute hermetically sealed young student challenging albeit silently ineffectually like a powerless petulant child with no other weapon but stubborn mute disobedience to oppose his hegemony
now his reaction makes sense but back then being younger and more idealistic his attitude shocked me i thought poets were all in the same boat together
i didn't realize they wouldn't hesitate to throw each other overboard until just a select few remained the ones who all agreed to row in the same direction that the way they figured it survival was limited okay, i didn't understand how the world worked then i didn't understand that the evening wine & cheese parties customarily given for the visiting literary celebrities were the best opportunity for a young unknown poet to get a boost up in the all-important world of publication the straight visiting profs cruising the parties for girls to sleep with, the gay one's boys and i was too virginal, too prudish too principled too inexperienced to play along although i would play along now if i knew then what i do now because i do understand something of the world, disgusting as it is i'm not saying Mr. W did this on the night of his reception i don't know i didn't go i was too embarrassed to show up
no as a poet i don't blame him for his attitude as a teacher, though, i can't help but feel that he owed it to me, to the class, to at least point out that another kind of poetry did exist and that people like Marjorie Perloff intelligently defended it and the irony is that if Marjorie Perloff
whose work i didn't know at the time wasn't this why i was going to graduate school in the first place? why was i going to school if Marjorie Perloff had been invited to the class to critique our work instead of Mr. W she would almost certainly have seen straight off what i was doing what "tradition" i was following and she might have been just as dismissive to the kind of poetry that my classmates wrote and that Mr. W himself wrote as Mr. W was to my poetry because i was heavily influenced by Lautreamont & Rimbaud and the Surrealists and i believed then as now that poetry or fiction or nonfiction is not meant to be primarily linear or narrative or logical or symbolic that it is not meant to drag consciousness along behind it banging out meanings the way one bangs out a birdhouse but that language is meant to unfold as a process in as close to real time as possible to follow thought to begin again and again trying to say what cannot quite be said
that at its best writing is not so much as a finished thought as it is the record of having a thought that is always elusive a thought that is no bird that would ever deign to occupy a house built by a man
in other words
as David Antin says, in the dark all cats are black
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