Riddles of Form – Twelve

Week Nine – Questions and Considerations

It dawned on me over the weekend that the presiding spirit over this whole ‘project’ has been Gilles Deleuze. And there’s a kind of logic at work – it was reading Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus in the mid-80s which played a large part in me abandoning a thesis. Twenty or so years on, I’m returning to ideas that had been shelved and finding ways that make them breathe.

Thinking aloud then ...

i. There is no Big Theory to impart. It’s really a matter of turning on to poetry – and finding you’re turned on by poetry. Ignition. Brake off. Drive. Go some place. Discover.

ii. Despite appearances, there is no Hidden Truth to be revealed. (I accept that the general development of my readings so far has had an Indiana Jones in the crypt feel. Bad habit.)

iii. What point is there in writing yet another student handbook, a key facts, a Cheat’s Guide to Poetry? Worse still, something that packages poetry as something cosy, ressuring, user-friendly. ‘John Ashbery for Beginners’. ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry for Dummies’. No.

iv. Poetry doesn’t make you a ‘better person’ (if that means all the class-based, moral-finger wagging, preening narcissism, Sensitive Soulism that accompanies such a phrase). But I do believe poetry has the capacity to transform your life.

v. Even while using the words ‘Poetry’ and ‘Poem’ I’ll admit to not knowing what it/they is/are. Perhaps that is a key dimension of the project: to discover what a poem could be?

vi. Blake (William, this time – but Quentin is good, too!) as another presiding spirit. The Holiness of the Imagination. And all that implies – and transforms.

vii. Reading the poem is itself a creative act. The ultimate reading of a poem is another poem. (Bloom). A basic premise of the project: sooner or later you start writing yourself. Writing informs the reading.

viii. Poem as constellation (Zukofsky). We receive the light that has been travelling but which will continue to travel making all the time new conjunctions. The implications of this for any ‘definitive’ reading.

ix. Likewise, the reader – the so-called ‘I’ – in a perpetual state of transformation. Reading changes you. (And yet the poem remains there on the page. A mystery).

x. The Eternal Return (Nietzsche) as a way of conceiving the creative act and a possible (im-possible?) way of living. The most difficult lesson?

xi. As a necessary consequence, the literature we most value has ENERGY. (Which is not to say it has to be violent, rabble-rousing, screaming. Think H.D.’s early poems. Emily Dickinson).

xii. To be ‘true’ to this writing seems – implicitly – to come into conflict with professional academic institutions and approaches. The English Department of the Soul (Spicer). How to resolve this? If this project is to be a book - how to conceive of a book which embodies its own ideas? Would anyone read it? Would anyone publish it? 

xiii. Poems are not written for examination purposes.

xiv. The fundamental poetry of the everyday. Of the everyday word. Of every word. (Nietzsche. Emerson. Duncan). The very move to language is a move towards metaphor.

xv. Haunted by all the old systems of thought. Ghosts, Sefiroth, angels, White Goddess, The Word, Logos.

xvi. If photography is to painting, then what is the ‘X’ to poetry? And that poetry has to struggle against?

xvii. The power of language to affect. Intensities. (Deleuze)

xviii. Poetry forces us to rethink Time and the Line (Derrida)

xix. Difficulty. The Opaque. The poem as a challenge – what we cannot predict, have not learned how to read, dis-locates. Reading then becomes. Reading as becoming.

xx. How to then transfer this to actual teaching practice?

xxi. How to break with ingrained attitudes of ‘elitism’, ‘cleverness’, ‘nerdy’, ‘weird’, ‘good grades’?

xxii. What is at work in the poem? What works in the poem? What can the poem do? Poem as machine (W.C. Williams).

All this. And more.