re. 'Riddles of Form' - tentative first thoughts of ways to develop chapters. Here are two. Comments etc. invited!
Chapter: Beginnings
"you know you can always begin anywhere" (John Cage)
Where does the poem begin?
- linear models the only way to go?
- Big Bang theory
- Paradise-already-lost
- Plato & Wordsworth: anamnesis
- Emerson & Transcendentalism: born a know-it-all
- Derrida and the question of Origins
- Darwin & evolution
- Jacques Monod: chance and necessity
- Epicurus & Lucretius: the clinamen
Texts:
Hughes 'Thought Fox'
Heaney 'Digging'
O'Hara 'Talking to the Sun on Fire island'
Quotations:
Rilke on the 'inspiration' for the Duino Elegies
*
Chapter: Creative Fictions
Making the Uni-Verse
- King James Bible. opening pages of The Book of Genesis. Adamic naming & poetic naming. Christopher Smart.
- God-as-Artist-Poet
- Aboriginal Songlines (Chatwin)
- Milton, Paradise Lost
- Dogons
- Kabbalah
- Graves' White Goddess & tree lore
- African poetry: sowing rituals. Mancala games.
- DNA.
Texts:
Blake
Milton
John Donne
Philip K. Dick
Quotations:
Stockhausen on his days of the week opera - sound & creation
Zappa & The Big Note
Robert Fludd diagrams (divine chord)
*
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Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*. I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to ...
7 comments:
Wow. If I picked up a book in a bookshop with a Contents list like that I'd certainly buy it. Your text choices are deliberately, reassuringly Old School I take it, so as to poach readers from the mainstream? Or as Andrew Duncan puts it, "a comfortable, undemanding, safe majority taste" (as opposed to a "'difficult', minority taste"). I'm enjoying his book, btw. Here's a sample:
"There is no style-history within the mainstream of poetry because the mainstream resists change . . . There is a lack of public sensitivity to these delicate variations of poetic time, so that people who are expert in dating a film, a set of clothing, or a pop record, and in labelling something out of date, have difficulty in dating a poem . . . I am afraid this public insensitivity applies also to poets . . . The English fetish about tradition damages young poets' on-board navigational gear at a most sensitive moment. The relation, when the poet starts out, between self and poetic models is a source of energy and uncertainty; the poet either uses this strain to become conscious and brilliant at the elements of style which are his or her very own, or else becomes so confused at the dizzying posibilities that they suppress conscious thought and plump for something more or less helpless and derivative . . . Faced with thousands of decisions, the indecisive may have a nervous breakdown or fall silent. However, the ability to perceive formal elements as decisions rather than fixed rules still throws open the possibility of having a poetic career rather than writing the same poem over and over again."
W.
Yes, that's a thought-provoking quotation. I ought to follow up the book.
As for the text choices, I agree they're terribly obvious. I was jotting down the list during an exam and thinking about what we tend to serve up. I think that sort of poem should be included (partly to woo the mainstream audience, partly to dismantle this kind of text - or to set it within new contexts. I've always felt that Iain Sinclair and Ted Hughes are not so far apart when you start looking into Shamanistic ideas of poetry).
A broader question, though, is who the hell would pick the book up to read - let alone buy it? (yourself excluded, but thanks very much!)
How to talk about Derrida or Open Field poetry, for example, without either being patronizingly simplistic or cringingly 'trendy' and 'hey, kids, poetry's F-U-N!' And is the purpose to provide some kind of textbook - the kind of thing IB teachers tour ECIS conferences touting - or some spanner in the works? The kind of book that detonates from within - or a Deleuzean brick-book through the window?
These and other questions reamin to be answered ...
The C.
um ... for "reamin" read "remain".
Although it's a rather interesting typo ...
I've been thinking about how to answer this all day. So here goes nuthin'.
I would suggest you aim for an undergraduate audience + intelligent general reader. I suppose my ideal model to follow (ideal in the sense that it was so successful it must have answered a need) is Terry Eagleton's LITERARY THEORY, which I imagine is still selling strong every year to yet another intake of eager young EngLit students.
Eagleton's book is, in essence, 5 long essays, an Intro + a Conclusion, plus Notes. Forget about providing texts (Faber would charge an arm + a leg anyway). Instead, think about 5 key things you want to say about (modern) poetry. (I'd maybe even go so far as to do a word count + work out how many words, on average, each Eagleton chapter is, to give yourself some end point to aim for.)
I think an undergraduate readership rather than anything younger because they'll have a grounding in the basics ("The Bloody Thought Fox", &c) but will be ripe for turning -- i.e. you'll be giving them ammunition to annoy their tutors.
The book should ideally give them grounds to reassess the literary tradition they've inherited + simultaneously broaden their horizon, at least as far as poetry in English is concerned.
It will gradually dawn on them that Larkin is not a dominant figure in postwar poetry but that he is actually writing against the grain of what was going on. They will learn that Charles Olson, for instance, often described as the father of postmodern poetry (he used the word “postmodern” as early as 1951) was actually 12 years OLDER than Larkin, yet light years ahead in his approach to what poetry can do (“I have really very little interest in poetry in the abstract. I have never lectured about it, or even written about it to any extent” -- Larkin).
They will learn that of the other leading lights in postmodern American poetry, Robert Duncan was only three years older than Larkin; Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg were all four years younger, while John Ashbery, the last surviving member of this rich alternative seam of American poetry, is only five years younger than Larkin.
In short, they will gain PERSPECTIVE.
Walrus
Yes, thanks for that. The Eagleton was such a key text once upon time - and maybe still is (or has it been ousted by a swathe of Routledge Crit. Theory texts?). I remember attending seminars led by one or other of his disciples and the reverential atmosphere when Terry walked in. I never bought into the Wadham Marxist set - Valentine Cunningham was more playful, wittier, inspiring (and talked about jazz). And Peter Conrad - when he was around - was dazzling (there's someone who went some way to address the balance with US literature).
As for other 'models' - d'you remember Bernard Sharratt's book 'Reading Relations'? That was another book which seemed pathbreaking at the time.
However, I come back to this idea of a text which would in some way embody a different way of reading - the way John Cage's books do: experimentation with typeface and layout, blocks of quotation. I'm thinking, too, about Nietzsche, Benjamin and Adorno - working by dense paragraph blocks rather than the chapter-as-essay model.
There's also W.C. Williams' 'Spring and All' - interspersing prose with poems. And maybe one could also explore the essay itself - i.e. the way Charles Bernstein blurs the line between 'critical'/'creative' writing (I suppose the whole L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E approach).
In a way I'd quite like to include readings of certain poems - with extensions to creative writing. Here I'm thinking of Kenneth Koch's books and Bernadette Meyer's Writing Exercises.
As I'm typing this I realise how each option entails so many exclusions in terms of potential audiences. And the sheer number of hours to develop the project.
Monday, Tuesday I see myself working through my e-mails with Lisa - there's loads of stuff in there. Then maybe just going into Kerouac mode and writing flat out and seeing what turns up.
So easy to say ... will it happen?
we will see ...
The C
Yup. You sound like you know where you're going with this. The Eagleton model is far too conservative for what you want to do...
Incidentally, a friend of mine raves about Bernadette Mayer's Writing Exercises -- but where can one get hold of a copy?
More power to your elbow!
Walrus
re. Bernadette Mayer
I found this link for the exercises
http://languageisavirus.com/articles/
articles.php?
subaction=showcomments&id=1099111106
and
http://writing.upenn.edu/library/
Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html
and Charles Bernstein is good too:
http://writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/
experiments.html
Otherwise, I found the exercises in the Bernadette Mayer Reader which is still available (I think). It's terrific by the way!
As for me knowing where this is going ... um, I'm not so sure! We'll see what next week brings and whether I get down to it.
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