IRENE CAESAR: POETRY MANIFESTO IN LETTERS #2

Sep 22, 2014 02:52



#2

To EE 8/20/01

ÖI wanted to add some afterthought to what I have written in my previous mes- sage. I believe that now there should be a change in the paradigm of vision -- from the Newtonian / Cartesian model to the model which was sketched by Einstein.

There is no lawfulness in nature -- there are only tendencies which change when the world changes. The laws of nature, which function now, inevitably will be different in time ñ so, strictly speaking, they are not laws at all. Each point in the universe can be a lawful viewpoint or fulcrum for a unique vision of the entire world, de- pendent exclusively on the particular locus of this point. This was first posited by Taoism in the East, and in the West, by Hellenistic Hermeticism and the Renais- sance philosophy, especially by Nicolas of Cusa.

This has a significant bearing on poetry as well, while this has nothing to do with the egocentrism of free-verse poetry -- but has everything to do with dialogical poetry. If there are no laws of nature, there cannot be the general or the universal notions

in our views of the world (Hegel called this ìabstract universalî). A group of people cannot posit some dogma and proclaim it a universally true generalization. One can only build for himself, from his unique standpoint, the links -- from the smallest to the biggest -- which will widen his horizon of vision to the most, existentially gener- alized, vision of the world (ìconcrete universalî in Hegelian terms, though I do not agree with him, because he objectified it too much).

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There cannot be any true or lawful clichÈ which can be significantly used by some group of people for individual expression. Any generic symbol is clichÈ, and is false and destructive. You will say that we are actually done with symbolic poetry. It is over. But I will reply to you that when the egocentric free-verse poet is using com- mon language words in the uncritical way of ordinary life -- it is the same subcon- scious use of clichÈ of the mass society, the old symbolism gone pop.

Auden, for example, was uncritically using every kind of clichÈ he could lay his hands on (the Venus' "slope" in his "Lay your sleeping head, my love", etc.). His distinction from Yeats is only in the fact that Yeats tried, for some time, to honestly create his own private mythology, while Auden's poetry was parasitical on any, half- dissolved in the mass consciousness, tokens of the half-dead culture, which got fro- zen between the group and the individual.

Auden's poetry is more bookish than that of Yeats, even if he is seemingly more spontaneous than Yeats in using a metaphor, because Yeats, at least, lived in his unique world, which was, nonetheless, very woodenly rigid to being blindly obsti- nate. Auden reminds me of an eternal school boy who keeps an admiration for the old and ugly stuff, which was taken literally out of the garbage, cleaned up and painted anew, and put into the shiny window of the antique store in Uptown (I worked for a while as an artist in the Restoration shop on the 5th Ave.). For exam- ple, he, as Wilde, admires Neoplatonism, while Plotinus is a really nasty guy, who spoiled Christianity, so that it became a catholic theatre of the two-worldly para- digm of the heavenly unachievable Aphrodite and the earthly achievable but harlot Aphrodite, with a human soul born as a result of the Fall.

But Ginsberg is a more striking example of a mass society clichÈ. I was not able to read his long poems, but I still remember one of his love poems, which goes ap- proximately like this: he describes how his male lover kisses his lips, then descends to his nipples, then to his groin, and penis. The main idea was that he, Ginsberg, a great cock-sucker (as he calls himself) was very excited. And that is all. I believe, in

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this so-called "disembodied" poem, he ecstatically celebrated the bare quality of lacking anything whatsoever in cultural symbols, or, rather, lacking anything what- soever in culture. Nonetheless, the "penis", "nipples" and "lips" are all clichÈs or symbols of the common language, while "cocks" and "cock-suckers" are clichÈs or symbols -- but not of the "high" culture -- of the mass x-rated culture. And in the direct uncritical use of these clichÈs, Ginsberg is more "symbolist", in the bad sense of this world, than the so-called symbolists, whom he, I believe, despised.

The cultural interest of his poetry was a temporal special case of mass society when it was working out the more monolithic "generalized" template of vision. Ginsberg was inspired by the novelty of homoeroticism, drug-abuse and psychotic degrada- tion of a boy from a good family lost in the jungles of New York -- his seemingly voluntary use of language was indeed "the language" or "the symbols" of some group of aboriginals living in some villages in the Big Apple. And his disembodied poetry was a slang of communion within a congregation, it was an act of embodi- ment or transubstantiation forced by the nomination. Moreover, his poetry was an act of consumption by the mass society of these aboriginal villages, so that now his crusade is not actual and interesting anymore -- either homoeroticism as such, or drug hangovers, or free unsafe sex.

By the way, the most primitive cultures are the most symbolic, and the "cultural" symbolism of the Western modern society was arousing in the epochs of economic, political and cultural transitions, when the old views were discredited and so "primitive" while the new views were still infant and primitive as well, so that Yeats was actually believing in literally shamanistic stuff.

The mass culture, which destroys the unique continuums of the individual, makes his consciousness the most primitive, and Ginsberg reminds me of a naked illiterate Barbarian who is able to refer to the world only by the act of the simple ostension.

The composition of his poems is the infinite regress of his consciousness circling around cock-sucking while Ginsberg is chaotically going around and pointing his

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dirty cock-sucking finger at innocent things. Sorry for the bile.

My point is actually not cynical at all. I insist on the virginal innocence of things and the urge of the world to be newly born with every pronounced word. I want to achieve the intimate connection with these given things and these given unique peo- ple, I want to perform acts of love and become impregnated in the way that I will always know who is the father of my poetic childÖ

To EE 9/11/01

ÖI remember that in the first of these messages that I actually did not reply to when I was writing to you, you are concerned whether I consider language to be an objec- tive phenomenon (a social machine) or the subjective phenomenon (inner speech). I think that language is the constant struggle between the social machine of coding and a unique individual.

But I do not consider the social machine of language as being something "outside" the individual. As I tried to formulate before: I do not consider the subconscious- ness or any spontaneous inner speech to be more free than the socially stipulated external speech. Vice versa, I consider that the subconsciousness and especially the unconscious is much more machinelike than consciousness. It would be very hard to break through some mode of "experiencing" things, if this mode became auto- matic. Automatism means that an individual cannot be conscious of it -- one does not realize what one is doing. This has an important implication for language ñ in the automatic modes of inner speech, one cannot separate what is "his own" from what is alien in his inner speech -- the borders between the inner and the outer speech are erased. And the ego "thinks" of the most banal clichÈ, forced upon him

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by the outer "socio-dictated" speech, as his own revelations, discoveries and achievements arising from within his inner speech ñ or, in other words, he thinks automatically of his most intimate experiences in terms of clichÈ.

At the same time, as I stressed before, I consider that "uniqueness" of an individual is born in the social interaction, which should preserve the intimacy and virginity of relationships. Only the constant objectification of the inner speech and comparison within the cultural structures of language, grants an ability of the discernment be- tween what is culturally not yours and what is culturally only yours. Only the in- volvement in culture can guarantee the individuation (only when you know that there is something outside, you can realize your differences from others).

You ask whether the Ural singer was expressing his inner monologue or, vice versa, some "cultural construct". In the context of what I said, I believe that he perceived the idiosyncratic beauty of his world in the continuum of his small regional culture. And, probably, as his wife adds something "only hers" to the ancient recipe of cu- mis (the sour goat milk, the native "drink" of the Urals), so did he add his own and only his overtones to the local pattern of expression. My point of the globally dia- logical poetry was that the poet can and must drink and eat the blood and flesh of different and multiple cultures -- to be able to create something completely new in- stead of infinite forgetful repetitions.

Hence, language can be both an instrument of encoding (a machine) and an instru- ment of decoding (anti-automatic individuation) -- like in the Hegelian triad (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). It should oppose the existing routines of expression by nega- tives (Ginsberg reached only this stage), and then create a new positive in the union of the opposites. And what I tried to express regarding Ginsberg is that the oppo- sites of social involvement and social opposition are two opposites that do not exist one without another, and each one is the concealed form of the other, so that Gins- berg's nihilism of the 60's was just another form of the social integration and con- formism. Only when you are above both opposites, can you be free enough to be

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infinite in your formal and content symbols (while the conformism and opposition have only the limited scale of expression).

Also in your last message, you are concerned with my referring to science, which you say is general, meaning that (a) it always conforms to the views accepted by the entire society; and (b) aims at formulating regularity in the form of laws and rules, confirmed by mechanical observation and experiment. But what I was talking about was not empirical sciences per se, but the archetypes or paradigms of con- sciousness (I was talking not about sciences, but rather about the philosophy of sci- ence). I stressed that now we finally come to the point when uniqueness (particular- ity, viewed before as chaos) and pattern (universality or generality, viewed before as some lawfulness or design in nature) should be viewed not as inter-expelling oppo- sites, but as two sides of the same phenomenon. Laws of nature change themselves, and so every "law" or "the universal" is the particular itself.

It has an immediate bearing on poetry, or, in other words, positivism of the postin- dustrial society is imprinted in each niche of culture. The same things you said about positivist science can be said about the free-verse monological poetry: (a) it always conforms to the views accepted by the entire society; and (b) it aims at for- mulating regularity in the form of laws and rules, confirmed by mechanical obser- vation and experiment. We just need to reformulate these propositions. The first proposition will change to (a) it always expresses the social machine of expression accepted by the entire society or by some group of the society on such a level of automatism that it considers the most banal clichÈ to be its "individualistic" achievements. The second proposition will change to (b) it aims at direct expression of the empirical experience sensed individualistically, positing that the instinctual impulses of the ego are its true individuation.

Freudianism showed that everybody is coded by complexes (Freud) and archetypes (Jung) of the society. But for Freudians, the way of liberation was, strangely, just the realization of the fact that this is so. The most dialogical level, achieved by the

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monological poetry of the free-verse, is the skill of overlaying "templates" (Freudian or other) over direct sensual experience. In opposition to this "makeovers" of the social machine of language, I believe, as I said, that instincts of the unconscious and the templates of direct sense-data are machines themselves -- small copies of the huge social machine of expression. I vote for creating one's own continuums where things and people have dialogue between each other, and argue for their meanings.

To be listened to, poetry should listen, and only after that -- speak. If Freud would have listened to the world, he would not see Oedipus everywhere around.

To WK 5/7/02

ÖPlease consider my afterthoughts as an attachment to our meeting. And what I will formulate below can go for my ars poetica.

I do not accept free verse poetry for the same reasons Pound has rejected the con- ventional, or as you call it now -- antiquarian -- poetry of the metronome rhythm and ordered rhyme. He and I do not accept poetry which is not justified formally.

But finally, I do not accept Pound's formal justification for free verse poetry, be- cause I believe it to be just a historical turnabout -- the unilateral negation, a pa- thetic desire to go barefoot, where one can go only in shoes. And indeed his rejec- tion of rhyme is laughable -- rhyme is just one kind of alliteration. Regarding rhythm -- I can ask him why, for godís sake, he has this but not that rhythmical or- derliness in his free verse. And if there is no orderliness, then why, for the devilís sake, is there no orderliness whatsoever there? What does it say to me when there is no orderliness? If it does not say to me anything, or in other words, if it does not signify anything, then it is insignificant, and does not exist in the realm of poetry -- there is then nothing to talk about, and so, hence, indeed and therefore, there is no poetry there. Just the bare act of saying. But why should I be engaged with the say-

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ing by Pound rather than with the saying by Puond, or Pund, or Pond?

That is why when it comes to free poetry, I want to close my door, and when it be- comes too noisy, I want to yell as I yell at my neighbors, Pounds and Ponds, to shut the hell up their music.

This sluttish incontinence of free verse poetry is the reason for the disgust that the general public holds now toward poetry in general, and the reason of why poetry survives only in rock and bard music.

Pound, Williams and Eliot did their best to make poetry anti-art, non-skill and non- communicative. As if they took a virgin and just made a prostitute out of her or him, so that anyone could use her or him buying a condom at Barnes and Noble.

I do not see any formal achievements here. Is it an achievement that Williams de- scribes in plain English how he twists his naked ass in front of the mirror, when some persons, his wife, nanny for his children -- my gosh, who cares! -- are sleeping -- who cares again?! Or is there any formal achievement when Marianne Moore makes poetry as if constructing "registers" or "lists" and, finally, to remain "reti- cent"... Or is there any formal achievement in the celebrated Eliot's Waste Land wasting it all away in the scraps of stolen citations, and manipulating with manne- quins inside the artificially constructed "social boxes"? Some of postmoderns still preserve alliteration, but mainly their poetry is mechanical in its insignificance of saying. What are they saying -- to whom -- why?

In free verse poetry, the incontinence and indifference of the form is just the reflec- tion of poetry becoming monological -- as you said yourself at the talk you gave last year. The listener is not wanted! And hence any saying to oneself becomes just the stream of consciousness, without a beginning and an end -- an infinite regress, or circling around the immediate urgencies of ego. Or, at best, it is just a cocktail party chat. Or kindergarten kid pointing a dirty finger at toys. Do they really need

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to say what they say?

That is why I stick to the antiquarian mold. Because I just do not see any significant reason for destroying it. By the way, a lot of Americans crave antiques -- to such a degree, that fine artists of postmodernism simulate the appearance of canvas surface being old, literally crumpling all away. But I have other reasons too. I make my poetry look as simple, sometimes seemingly, as possible -- to be as similar to a song as possible, because this is a guarantee of its being remembered. Rather like, you know, those motifs from Rossini or Mozart, which you cannot help whistling to yourself.

I even insist on dividing my poem into 3 strophe, or quatrains, because one's mind to remember would have to do it anyway. This is, by the way, one of the reasons why Shakespeare's sonnets are so memorable and lovable. The simplicity of the ex- ternal form makes a fine counterpoint to the complicated syntactical and semantic structure (the inner form) -- like the 4th symphony of Tchaikovsky, built on the primitive Russian folk-song about some birch standing on the meadow, and which repeats melodically the same line "some birch is standing on the meadow" all over and over again (but both by bass and treble ñ in polyphony).

I try to create a new syntactical structure and alliteration for my every poem. My poems have pretty sophisticated alliteration as well. The simple layout of my poems allows for the syntactical structure to be clear enough. Free verse poetry mostly imitates conversational speech, and this is considered to be enough for being mod- ern in "sensitivity and ear", but conversations can be of infinite variety in tone and intention, while free verse poetry is always and only the conversation with oneself or monologue and so only "fakes" free live speech, which in reality is never aimed at oneself, but at another person, with monologue being a preparation and conserva- tion of the verbal association with another human being. That is why tonal variety of free verse poetry is confined to the tonal variety of a monologue, which is indeed

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just a pale reflection or a shadow of real conversations with other people.

Hence my secret of weirdly beautiful lines and very beautiful metaphors (your words) is that I write dialogical poetry -- I never write for myself. Everything I write I write to a given, unique person, and I always hand my poem to this person.

(I did not get the impression that the chosen one got bored from monotony). This actually narrows the content of my poems -- to one stable feeling about this person, but you can reprimand Shakespeare or Petrarch for the same thing. But can you really? -- can you reprimand undereducated Petrarch for being tonally and musi- cally monotonous, if the only thing that poor Petrarch did was to express his most intimate feelings one stanza after another? And can you say to him that he can just say it all in one poem, giving it some colorful title? That is why, actually, I do not give my poems titles -- a title locks a poem in some closed continuum, it makes it stay beyond and over the live person, whom I write to. Would you give titles to your intimate letters?

Now I would like to explain to you why I do not get "specific". I told you I have written poetry since the age of 13, and really have some experience doing this.

When I was young, I was writing very socially tuned poetry -- I was creating social portraits and social scenes. For example, describing how, very early in the morning, on the empty streets of a working class neighborhood, I met a drunk guy who that night, lost his eye in a fight. He was led by his senile mother through the morning dusk ñ by his hand, as if he was no longer a grown up big and jagged man, but again, a small boy. / His other hand was covering his bleeding empty eye hole. / His mother was sobbing almost without making any sound, in despair which became almost automatic, and so onÖ But I will not write this kind of poetry again, ever.

If you know that early poem by Williams, where he describes a working class woman, with her head bare, who takes a nail out of her shoe. Here we get "achieve- ments" of postmodernism -- he does not say, he just shows, in detail, oh yeah, soup cans, condoms, Pepsi Cola and Monroe grim. I heard somebody wondering, in a

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ing, in a spirit of Freudianism, whether a nail designates a penis. But does it? Maybe, it is a nail of crucifixionÖ We would never know, because this woman of

Williams does not have a recognizable face -- she does not have a personality, she does not have an intimate story. This nail does not signify anything personal in her life beyond either (1) routine social clichÈ of futurists, or (2) just a pretty insignifi- cant occasion in her life when her smelly foot got pricked by the rotten shoe nail. So no signification -- no significance. You can successfully place this woman into Nike advertising.

I got hurt by writing a poetical advertising to a Nike customer about Nike nails. I am afraid of having sex with plastic and vibrating nails, and or being crucified in Nike sneakers.

I write to somebody, and I create beauty for this somebody. These are the only two aims of poetry that I accept. If the poetry says something vitally important just to some, one person, there is a guarantee that it will say something to someone in the future. But one cannot write poetry just to write "postmodern" free verse to some statistical "postmodern" reader (you said once, poetry should be fashionableÖ).

This, pardon me, reminds me of masturbation while staring at the page of Playboy magazine. But you yourself called this kind of poetry the masturbational side of cul- ture.

Another point of mine is how to remain very intimate and at the same time not dis- closive, but I am quite a success in this, as you say. The reason is simple -- I just do not want to disclose too much. I want twilight when having sex. Probably, it is fun to have sex in the office of oneís young communist organization in the Philosophy Department, with the bright office lights showing up every crap around, as I did once, but it cannot last.

The other side of being not too disclosive is that it is just elementary continence and neatness. I do not want to force on strangers too much of my sweat and saliva.

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And one can be really rewarded for this -- because it is much easier to relate to this kind of poetry, which remains half-veiled, than to poetry like that one of Morrell or Lowell, I always mess them up -- that one who was gay. He writes about his house- keeper -- for godís sake, who cares?! and about his grocery -- get out of here!

Being half-disclosive, or being extremely universal in being extremely intimate, is one reason that Shakespeare's Sonnets are so popular.

A poem is a sign, a symbol and it should be unique in its symbolization. I never write about something that really happened -- in the three-dimensional space, while I always write about the intimate happening in my feeling. I make the world speak for myself. When things speak for you, you have a chance of being heardÖ

To EE May 2002

ÖThank you for your words of encouragement. I completely agree with you on the point that the form should be justified. And that ìirony is impossible to avoid in reading conventional poetryî ñ if its form is not justified. But I would like to add that free verse has already become enough and even too traditional, that one can also say about it: "Irony is impossible to avoid in reading free verse poetry," if its form is not justifiedÖ

To CC Spring 2004

ÖYou said that every epoch has its primary genre, and now it is fictional prose. It seems to me that contemporary poetry is not just internalized prose, but has gotten

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devoured by the dominant genre of prose. There is no such thing as free verse po- etry as soon as "free verse" gets confined in its conventionality or its own quasi- dogmatic formalism. You said you are interested in what would come nextÖ

I am Russian (though now I hesitate in my self-attribution), and so come from a completely different cultural context than the contemporary poetry of America. I wrote a thesis on Bakhtin a long while ago, and recently applied his ideas to aesthet- ics. I completely share his conviction that, in its modern form, poetry lost its impact on inter-personal relations and culture in general. That is why I never write to the anonymous recipient -- I always write to a specific addressee and hand a piece to him/her. I have written poetry for some 25 or so years, and have finally realized that the very same feeling about some event or person, when expressed to different people, sounds and get expressed differently. So in a sense, my revolution in poetry consists in returning to the source -- to the oral culture, with its immediate necessity and true (not meta) application to real life. This was, as I believe, the gist of the Bakhtin's idea of a dialogue. And then, if poetry can do this -- realize the dialogue, and realize it to a higher degree than a novel, to more immediacy, vitality, and ne- cessity of a speech-act, and hence more meaningfulness -- then, Bakhtin was indeed wrong, and poetry can survive in its competition with the fictional proseÖ

To CC Spring 2004

Ö.I do not feel myself being congenial to contemporary American poetry, while I have definitely departed from the paradigmatic Russian poetry. Russian poetry has been developing under oppressive political-social-and-cultural conditions for the last two centuries, being totalitarian either of the Russian Orthodox or Communist or Oligarchic type, and this caused its elaborated Aesopian poetics. Nothing truly essential for the life of a human could and can be said in Russian poetry in the straight colloquial way of American poetry. That is why Russian poetry is not just

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essentially metaphorical -- in its exemplars, it is of the quality of an aphorism, which one does not say but pronounces as if on a death bed.

American imagism was precursed by Russian acmeism of Mandelshtam, Akhma- tova and Tsvetaeva; and Russian acmeism was a step toward transrealism rather than pop-art which became a logical consequence of Pound's imagism. To show rather than to say bears quite a different meaning in the context of Russian poetics. Even the Americanized Brodsky -- who was a poetical conformist number one -- was not able to overstep this Russian quality of iconic vision, which in acmeism acquired the unique singularity of every symbol. His holding on to the rhymed versification is a consequence of this rhymed vision, not vice versa.

Pop-art just shows an angular vision of an ego opposed to the world and other egos. Contrary to this, transrealism of any kind does not know both spatial and temporal limitations, as well as historical: Ovid is a transrealist planting seeds of everything in everything, as Moscow is a third Rome. The transrealist does not imagine a per- sonal separation from the world which is created and recreated by a personified creator. Transrealism, in its spherical vision of everything through everything, is essentially transpersonal, rather than ego-syntonic. Surrealism is just a tiny part of this transreal global substitution and displacement of epithets. The entire world, the polyphony of metahistory, the oecumenical chorus --the infinite number of things, people, events and phenomena -- are engaged in expressing this specific in- tent of a poet. Only if many things, one after another, or in a chorus, sing your theme, have you a chance of being heard.

And this has an important implication -- if every poet has this access -- to say any- thing through anything, then in this universal communion, what matters is every unique moment of it. It appears to be meaningless to claim and proclaim your pro- prietary rights to the world, if it belongs to you anyway by your right of a creator. It is more important to really possess. And not just this piece of land and real es- tate, this soup can, and this photograph of Marilyn Monroe, this slang, and this

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huah-word of a khaki-youth. It is important to spell the cosmos your own way -- the way that cannot be in principle spilled out by any prose, and especially a newspaper report. Only when a soup can will be placed into the universal context focused in a personally charged, vitally important continuum of this specific individual, only then a soup can has a right to the poet's vision.

It is crucial that it is not pop-art, but this universal vision of the world which forces a poet to become as particular in his saying as his strength of personality admits -- to become unique in the unique moments of his unique encounters with unique peo- ple and events. The whole drive of pop-art looks funny in this view. What is the point of dragging into the oil and pigment or the grammar and syntax the real dirty hair, or the crumbs of pop-corn, a condom, or a nauseous Campbell Soup can? Why this soup can and not the other one? Why pop-corn and not oat cereal? Why does Gingsberg in one of his poems just say how he lowers his lips down to nipples and then, penis of his lover, if the same thing, straight in the same very words, can be said by the drunk truck driver, though the lover would rather be female.

It is funny but I feel that when I approach American poetics I start losing my ability of this conjuring -- transmuting things at a will to fit them into a poem.

Because the transreal vision is not ordinary, colloquial, common-language, it re- quires its own compositional mode. It is rightfully claimed by some in the philoso- phy of language that the compositionality of language is semantically charged. If one fails to appreciate the compositional mode of a linguistic unit, he/she fails to un- derstand its meaning. It is not enough to claim that language can be reduced to translatibility, meaning that auditory signals just get translated into the semantic units in the brain.

It appears that in the spirit of deconstructivism, American poetry decomposed the compositional mode of poetical units, or at least, made them primitive -- it left only the artificial division of lines into something remotely reminding one of a versed

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rhythmical poetry. It is precisely pop-art -- one takes some thing -- a can, a coat, pop-corn, Pepsi-Cola bottle, a face, a newspaper sentence, etc. -- and places it within some limited art space. In order to force anybody to have this as an artifact, the art- ist/poet needs to buy off this limited space, to place a sign: ìA Galleryî, or a title: ìCollected Poemsî. He needs to label every piece as: A Bottle #5; or a poem on such a page, or under such a title. He needs many people, who like living in a stuffed space, to write an explanation why this bottle or this newspaper sentence is not a bottle or a newspaper sentence but indeed an artifact. But is it enough for making poetry to take a Kenneth Koch fishing manual, publishable in a Fishing Daily, and just split its lines into the angularly looking text? Is it enough for making love just to rehearse with your lover, in a kitchen tone and subway language, the manual for making love? Would it be a cruel joke if one would not just rehearse this manual instead of making love, but would rehearse it making some of the movements of making love instead of really making love and claiming that it is all that it takes?

I do not really know that I can call it grotesque -- probably, the pop-art quality of American poetry is just a cartoon...

That is why when Gingberg claimed to see the world in its entirety, while Dickinson, in his words, just contemplated her garden, what he really saw was the entire world disappearing in the hat of a pop-art magician. Because when he placed all com- monalities, all these cocks and cock-suckers, weed and weed-smokers -- all as it is into his privileged space of a Howl Gallery -- and labeled these objects "art", he just denied these objects their place in the real world via giving them some non-existent place on a neat Random-house-or-what-ever shelf under a fluorescent lamp -- the space which is way-too small and inadequate to host these things. To do this -- to take the world and move it into the 12 lines of an Akhmatova verse, or into a few inches of an El Greco piece, one would have to be a Biblical prophet, not a pop-art magician. And to be a Biblical prophet, one should have a real agenda -- something which is urgent for him to say, vital, necessary, immediate in this specific place, time and circumstance of his own Noahís ArkÖ

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To CC Spring 2004

ÖDid you have time to take a look at my Leonardo paper? What do you think about it? I think that it gives an interesting example of introverted or inverted per- ception. Here is a painting of a certain woman with an animal on her lap, but be- cause you look through a very strong conceptual lens, what you see is much more, and perceptually something completely different, even opposite. This is what I meant when I said that those lines in the Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock about lonely men in windows do not designate perception, or that the hero of the poem did not really see the lonely men in the windows. It is not only that the poem gives a clear indication of "I saw it all infinite number of times", and hence anything in this poem tends to be a generalized, "collective" or "collected" image -- a representation of introspection, rather than just a sense perception (an impres- sion), which is always unique and time/space/circumstance specified. He walked these streets too many times to remember a unique moment, and that is why he can- not start in this specific unique moment of a present speech-act. Had Eliot de- scribed it in the cognitive mode of perception, like Bishop in her At the Fishhouses, he would have said: I saw a man in this window, a woman in another one, and no- body in the third -- or one person in one window (the friend of my father), two in another one, etc... He would see that one window has these fake Y-shaped cracks like in Yale, and another window is illuminated with a candle light, and the third one has a piano music, thrown out with accords to the street and mixing with yellow fog. Is it very surprising that he saw only lonely men, and only this kind of lonely men? Or that he remembers that he saw only lonely men, and only this kind of them? The whole business reminds me of Magritte -- silhouettes of people cut out of one's mind with the conceptual scissors -- intrascapes, rather than landscapes. This poem shows nicely that the perceptual quality of postmoderns is deceptive (and self- deceptive). One cannot just take a picture with a camera without transforming a

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fact into an opinion (Richard Avedonís words)Ö To say ìI see redî would not necessarily mean that one sees red. And to say ìI seeî would not necessarily mean that one ìseesî rather than not.

Hence Bishop in her Fishhouses starts with particulars, but finishes her poem with likening a particular (water) to the universal (knowledge). You sounded as if this ending is a kind of break-trough. But in James Schuyler, almost every poem starts with tedious counting the particulars, and then at the very end, the poem suddenly represents a sudden generalization, a few lines pretending to the significance of a proverb or an aphorism, like: ìLaugh and / the world laughs with you.î / Die, and you die aloneî; or: ìGive my love to, oh, anybodyî. And the shock of the ending is created precisely by the abrupt and unsuspected nature of morals, which is attached to the rest of the poem the same way a fortune cookie is attached to a dinner at a Chinese eatery. You can give away your fortune cookie with a light heart -- to your kid, or your partnerÖ

That is why, notwithstanding the sweetness of a cookie, the casual, colloquial tone of Schuyler turns out to have a machine-like, frightening quality. Poetry functions as a machine, a camera which for a moment opens a lens and exposes a film to the im- mediate chaos of things outside. Then it closes as suddenly as it opened and a label gets attached to the image ñ this label does not influence the poem structurally or functionally. The cookies -- the only significant lines in a poem -- do not transcend the level of clichÈ, because they are easily detachable from the poem itself and can be easily shifted around from poem to poem. They present you a revelation in the same way a fortune cookie presents to you a revelation ñ giving you only an illusion of a saying which is intimately significant for the given situation. The machine, the camera is not really concerned, cannot be concerned with the cookies of meanings.

But the camera of Bishop, or Eliot, or Schuyler is not really concerned with all these preambles to the cookie as well: all these lines and lines counting, describing and simply mentioning particulars ñ all these fishhouses and madhouses, fishmen and

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madmen ñ all the food in a Chinese Buffet (ìeat as much as you canî). All these in- finite but-ends and coffee-spoonsÖ Yes, postmoderns are really good at showing the alienated, insignificant, horrifying, in its routine, nature of the world given away only to sense datum. That is why the perceptual quality of postmoderns is in reality the inability or maybe unwillingness to see, to see a unique moment. The so called perceptual poems can be cut into pieces and lines that can be shifted around from poem to poem the same way the fortune cookie of an alienated meaning dropped here and there can be shifted from poem to poem. Contrary to this proclaimed per- ceptual truth-making of the postmodern poetry, vision is conceptual. You should know what you see in front of you, in order to see it. That is why meanings are con- textual (and hence spontaneously metaphorical) ñ fishhouses and madhouses can bear different meanings depending on the intentional intonation of a poet address- ing the specific addressee in a specific time and place and circumstance. Thus a fishhouse can be at the specific moment of life seen as a madhouse, and a madhouse can be seen as a fishhouseÖ To claim that the significance of poetry can be born by the literal showing of the insignificance of life can have fatal consequences for the meaningfulness of poetry.

For the poet who is stuck with fortune cookies, things remain in-themselves, they do not bear any meaningful relation to the poet. He is an outsider, a patient, homeless anywhere in the world (his ìfilmî is hidden in the camera to preserve its artificial sensitivity to light). It is not really that the world and people in the world are so cruel that they do not want to host the poet (Schuyler lived on his friendsí money almost his entire life). But the fortune cookie poet builds up on his own the walls of the mental institute around himself. He is a voluntary exile in himself: lost in him- self to such a degree that he becomes for himself an unknown-in-principle thing-in- itself. To break through this indifferent pleura of things-in-themselves, he needs a drug ñ mental illness in the form of poetry ñ to stimulate himself for livingÖ A de- pression for Eliot, a mental institute for Schuyler, and maybe PlathÖ Probably, Plato was right when he claimed that there are two kinds of madness ñ a right one, which includes poetical madness, and a wrong oneÖ

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irene caesar, ирина цезарь

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