A Poetics

Marjorie Perloff just asked me on Facebook what makes texts she considers merely "lineated prose" eligible for the category of "poetry." She proposes "sound" as the singular marker of a "poem." As this is the same question asked me -- and generally speaking, the same "answer" offered to me -- by my students in the introductory creative writing courses I've taught over the years, I genuinely believe I've misunderstood Perloff's question. But several people have nevertheless messaged me on Facebook asking whether I have seriously discounted her question, or am I just avoiding it? I'm kind of a foolish person, no doubt, but I don't have much reputation for "avoiding things," so I figured, okay, I guess I do need to write a response to that question after all, even though this may or may not address what Perloff was actually getting at with her query. In the course of this essay, I also address my own "poetics" as a working poet.

First, I'm deeply disappointed in the Dove anthology, as is Perloff, and agree with most of what has been said about it by detractors. I also think, however, that it's intended for a high school audience, and there's an argument to be made (though not one I'd necessarily concur with) that at that age Kenneth Goldsmith's Day (or The Weather, which I've been theorizing in preparation for prelims) would simply turn off young people to poetry rather than open a door for them they'll tentatively and maybe one day confidently walk through in college or thereafter. (That said, the emphasis on the Romantics that we saw in high school curricula when I was a kid, in the early 1990s, was equally or even more damaging).

That aside, I'm surprised at the intimation that "sound" is (or could be) a singular marker for the sensation of "poemness" certain texts arouse in their readers. When I studied with Cole (Swensen), she often spoke of each poem having a different "engine" -- an element which, while not defining or circumscribing the whole, may nevertheless operate as either an origin-point for the poet herself or as an entry-point for the reader. Yes, sometimes that's a self-consciousness as to sonics that the average text in other genres -- if we pretend, for a moment, that all genres are on see-saws rather than a spectrum (which is naive of us) -- does not exhibit. But in broader terms what we're looking for is an internal rhetorical schemata that is evident, active, and self-aware -- essentially, what de Man hoped scholars would seek out and pursue in their scholarly criticism of texts is just the sort of work a poem has already begun to do in some fashion, though the same could be said of many of the foremost texts now denominated "experimental fiction."

Traditionally, that internal rhetorical schemata has been of the most literal sort -- the classical "lyric" is quite literally comprised of technical rhetorical gestures that presume the transparency of language and are in many instances thousands of years old. So while we find metaphor and simile in all kinds of texts, for instance, a text achieving the quality of "poemness" is likely to have made a system out of what otherwise might be merely gestural: The "poem" looks within itself, and is constantly speaking to itself, in a way that connects individual compositional elements traditionally associated with lyric speech in a potentially traceable schemata. That schemata might be sonic, or rhetorical, or image-based, or conceit-based, or syntactic, or any one of a number of schema that are evident, active, and self-aware wherever an author has placed a certain kind of pressure on language's capacities and incapacities which, when taken in context (a whole other consideration), aims beyond the colloquial.

So say the New Critics. Who (as I think Marjorie is suggesting is proper, which surprises me) absolutely refused to look outside the four corners of the page. But historicist readings, as just one example, permit the treatment as "poetry" of certain texts which, in their historical context, were either intended to be condensed artifacts of language producing "effects" associated with the lyric (like an emotion, or the experience of instrumental -- say, political -- persuasion) or which, in being named by their author as "poems," served some immediate or distant historical function which would not have been served if the document had been described (let's say in seventeenth-century England) as participating instead in the "libel" genre.

Conceptual poets would take yet another tack, and criticize the New Critics and historicists for uncritically treating Derridean "marks" (or collations of such marks) as entirely-reliable transparent language when taken in the aggregate. They would say that a "poem" is that which reifies a concept in the terms of its execution or (as with Goldsmith) its alleged non-execution. Tzara was a Conceptual poet inasmuch as the very refusal of his poems to engage in an internal conversation among and between their many elements -- in other words, their jubilant denial of all internal rhetorical schema -- was what made them a condensed, language-based statement of principle lying forever outside the bounds of traditional prose discourse. Tzara could have, of course, "described" his theory in prose, but the Conceptualists were right in the 1910s, and are right today, to note that we have to have some sort of term for the reification of a theory or value which is not expressed in demotic language -- and "poem" is as appropriate a term as any, though we could equally have come up with a different one (Duchamp, another Conceptualist, spoke of the "readymade" and the "readyfound"), so little do such exercises partake of any of the elements of the classical "lyric." That said, as I believe the definition of "poem" must change (and expand, and flex) to remain viable and generative, I am in no way whatsoever uncomfortable with calling Conceptual poetry "poetry." I wish some of it had appeared in Dove's anthology -- the twentieth-century variety of Conceptual poetry, I mean, which is larger in breadth and more provocative in execution that the tenth-wave Conceptual poetry we're getting now (but which, in any case, also deserves our attention). After all, if we merely call Duchamp's urinal a "poem" -- and I'm game -- we've already got Kenneth Goldsmith's Day, which would have been as or more effective (in reifying its first principle) re-envisioned as merely a newspaper tossed on the floor, a fact Perloff does not acknowledge. (Yes, Goldsmith's also interested in transcription and plagiarism, but given that all poetry which is not "the thing itself" -- in the most literal terms: a urinal; a newspaper -- is a form of transcription and plagiarism, I'm not sure how interesting I ultimately find this.)

I think the Language writers took yet another tack to develop an "engine" for poetic texts, that being that they determined (per Derrida) that the subject of all written or oral speech must necessarily be language itself -- there is no avoiding it, the thinking goes, as it lies between us and transparent "meaning" and thus all texts definitionally must deal with that element of human communication first and foremost. It's a valid theory. And it permits any text whose primary "subject" is language itself -- not in the topical sense, but in the sense of granting "materiality" and "immanence" to language and its many incapacities -- to be considered a poem. And I'm on board with that view of "poemness" also. There should have been a lot of Language writing in Dove's anthology, no doubt.

Like any poet worth his salt -- or any critic worth her salt -- I don't restrict my sense of how the epistemological phenomenon known as "poemness" can be invoked or evoked to how I myself write. In fact, as a poet (someone self-tasked with producing such phenomena) I'm not at all satisfied with any of the above technologies.

What I'm more interested in is pre-Aristotlean thought -- i.e., the Sophists and the Monists -- than a view of rhetoric which falsely states that the only purpose of language is to illuminate truth (be it the New Critics' truths or the Language writers' anti-truths), and that language deployed to any other purpose is pernicious. I disagree, moreover, with Adorno: I don't think poetry is either "instrumental" (i.e., Aristotlean speech) or "autonomous" (the boogeyman known as "art for art's sake"). And that's because I believe, instead, that the oldest tradition in human communication is a belief in (a non-spiritual, non-New Agey) philosophical Oneness, in a Singularity that creates and destroys all -- e.g., to use the best-known example, Zeno's paradox both "creates" such a Monistic "singularity" while also destroying, implicitly, all matter now extant by declaring it indistinguishable from all/anything else. Yet it's not merely Zeno's thought experiment that tells us that Monism ought still have some contemporary purchase; the Judeo-Christian tradition, as intermingled with modern physics, tells us that all matter came from a Singularity and that all matter will return to a Singularity. We see this as much in God speaking from the mountain to the Israelites and saying merely a single Word -- "I" -- as we do in the theory that the universe is still expanding (presumably, into a singular nothingness where physics definitionally does not and cannot reign, thus raising the possibly that if there is a Supernatural it is there, running away from us) and will eventually collapse in upon itself, leaving once more that Singularity which preceded us before the Big Bang, and in which physics does not and cannot reside, and which therefore (possibly) is where the Supernatural can and does reside.

As to Adorno, we could see Singularity in a combination of his terms "instrumental" and "autonomous"; as presently constituted, that dialectic leaves no room for autonomous persuasion -- an idea I developed that the original purpose of poetry, just like the original purpose of God speaking from a mountain and speaking only the first-personal singular, is simply to persuade a listener that he or she is experiencing the feeling of persuasion. Not persuasion "to" something, or "of" something, but simply of the fact that we live in a world in which the spirit can be aroused to a desire for action even when it hasn't yet figured out the universe and therefore doesn't know which actions are wise or possible or "real." The Voice of God -- and I say this as an agnostic more interested in theorizing God than worshiping a god -- is the great Singularity I believe poetry was meant to emulate, and this would still be understood and accepted if Aristotle had not slandered the Sophists right out of the history-books.

So when I write poetry, I'm thinking (small-m) "monistically" and (in a non-Aristotlean, non-lyric poetry way) "rhetorically" -- i.e., about Jung, and Campbell, and legal terminology, and classical rhetorical structures, and creation myths, and that special (now lost) tense certain pre-Greek civilizations had which was considered to contain within it the power to compel. None of the poetry in Dove's anthology speaks to my poetics; nor does Kenneth Goldsmith turning poetry into a conversation-piece little different than a new vase. Nor does the quaint obsession of Language poets with human language, when the only language that pre-exists us, or will post-exist us, is a language defined not by physics or culture or Derrida's deconstructive technologies or even by Judeo-Christian theology but the simple fact that the spaces in the universe in which physics does not reign are much larger than those in which it does -- because what, after all, is the universe presently expanding into if not such spaces; what was the universe in the beginning if not this; what will it be in the end if not this; is not everything between Beginning and End something humans have already witnessed or "know" in some cellular way, and therefore is not all such matter and content and process unworthy of our repetition or deconstruction in poetry? -- which means, then, that our job as poets ought to be the exploration of something entirely Unknown to anyone: the Voice of Singularity. That's why I write almost entirely without metaphors, similes, received forms, or any kind of description: Those uses of language don't interest me, because they're no longer (if ever they were) traceably operative speech-acts.

The best compliments I've ever received with respect to my poems are these: "I was entranced by it, but I can't seem to figure out why"; "I was moved by it, but I didn't fully understand it"; "It was compellingly familiar, even if I can't point to its influences." Those sorts of reader-response paradoxes are what I write for, but in this I'm no different from any other poet: We develop a poetics and we hope that, in time, we will see the receipt of that poetics in our readers and audiences even when/where a full understanding of that poetics has not been offered by the poet or digested by the reader or discussed by academics or acknowledged by anthologists or rewarded by prize tribunals or condoned by any college hiring committee. There are many poetries, of course, and thus many ways of identifying when a reader or audience member has experienced (or when a reader or audience member has otherwise acknowledged, even against their better judgment) the sensation of "poemness." That's what I think.

But hey, I have an MFA, so I don't even know what poetics is, right?