Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Open question
What counts as poetry now? Is it still a viable art form? Given that stylistically, almost all boundaries have been crossed, what should contemporary poetry look like, what should it aim for?
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The same could be asked of theatre, opera, and other "old" art forms.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to literature, I'm more of a traditionalist, I think. For me, it's much more interesting to see what a talented writer can do within a given form or structure, rather than trying to do what is, in essence, easiest: going "beyond" all structures. Given the notion of formal limitation, the most evidently related idea is unlimitation; I've never understood why free verse -- at least when it isn't substituting classical form for another kind, like rhythm, "beat," or "slam" -- is poetic, rather than prosaic. Then again, I'm rather ignorant when it comes to poetry.
Transgression is far too facile, in my opinion. My attention is much more rapt when I feel that an author is managing to transgress while remaining within the bounds of a given structure; or, when he or she is either stretching that structure to its limits or presenting it in a previously unimagined manner. When it comes down to it, no literature transgresses any boundary: if it did, then it would be fundamentally incommunicable. On some level, it is adhering to a form. The question becomes one of moving about within this form in an engaging and novel way.
We should consider meaning as well as form. True: the old styles of meter and syntax are delightful, and there is almost nothing as pleasant as a well-turned phrase in rhyme. But poetry is an end-user proposition, and if the language communicates a poignant message to the reader, then the poem has done its job.
ReplyDeleteAaron, your point — that a writer's skill is best displayed when working within the confines a well established form — is well taken, but you could logically extend it ab asurdum by arbitrarily selecting any form you're fond of and declaring it to be superior to all the rest. Then it would be fair game to criticize Shakespeare for not writing in haiku, if that were, in your mind, a purer form.
Ultimately, good writers select a form (or no form) because it best serves the meaning of their work. If a poem you do not like is in free verse, you cannot think it would be made better just by re-writing in in a more familiar form. Perhaps the poem just stinks.
Now maybe what you're driving at is that you've never heard a poem in free verse or unconventional meter that you've liked. I cannot defend every unconventional style or every attempt at novelty or poetic mischief, but I am happy to defend experimentation in writing in the hopes that one day, I, you, anyone, will encounter some unfamiliar form and, without thinking, experience "that ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night."
Ben: I cannot answer your question by prescribing a set of rules. I hope traditional poems will still be written. I hope newfangled, unreadable things are written. I hope long stretches of supermarket novels, selected automatically (by Google algorithm) are re-assembled into lullabies for robots and played aloud on NPR. Really, all I want in a poem is a feeling.
"Really all I want in a poem is a feeling" -- I couldn't agree more, and I think form has passed beyond the margins of possibility. If everything is allowed so be it, all poetry asks is the evocation of a moment that could once have spoken to transcendence and perhaps could still.
ReplyDeleteBut speak to whom? None of us is Emily Dick-inson. To whom does poetry speak now? To whom should it speak? Is the glorification and hagiographicization of certain poets an inevitable result of capitalism or is poetry still relevant outside the academy?
Good to see you again, Matt.
ReplyDelete:: But poetry is an end-user proposition, and if the language communicates a poignant message to the reader, then the poem has done its job. ::
While I tend to agree, I'm uncomfortable with introducing a utility aspect to an art form; I don't think that a work of art need consider an end user. As Sartre writes in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (What Is Literature?), "poets are men who refuse to use language... he has chosen once and for all the poetic attitude that considers words as things and not as signs." There is an important difference between poetry and prose, and I think that this describes a part of it: poetry employs language as sculpting employs marble, and a marble statue needn't have communicable utility. Communication occurs -- in the broad sense that there is a connection between the observed and the observer, the heard and the hearer, etc. -- but does it have to have a message? Or, can it be completely self-referential?
(At the same time, I do enjoy some political poetry, which obviously attempts at communicating a message, and which evidently has utility. But the politicization of art is another question altogether; it does freaky things.)
I don't think that I suggested that one form needs to be preferred over another, but rather proposed that it doesn't make sense to think of art without form. Form is needed for there to be some kind of communication on some level; there can be no meaning without form (whether or not that meaning is a "message" or has utility). The question is not one of which form is better than another (a question purely of taste), but rather how well a given author has managed to perform within a given form, consciously or not (a critical question).
:: Ultimately, good writers select a form (or no form) because it best serves the meaning of their work. ::
But it could also be argued that a yet more talented writer is able to communicate his or her meaning within any given form; the form can be selected even before a meaning has been determined. Meaning and form are incessantly adapting to and altering one another -- but you can't have form without meaning, just as you can't have meaning without form.
:: I hope traditional poems will still be written. I hope newfangled, unreadable things are written. I hope long stretches of supermarket novels, selected automatically (by Google algorithm) are re-assembled into lullabies for robots and played aloud on NPR. Really, all I want in a poem is a feeling. ::
Agreed.
I'll have to think about Ben's questions a bit more.
An interesting question. One notion perhaps overlooked thus far in this discussion is the consideration that any attempt whatsoever art form inherently indicates some need to communicate by the artist. Can art exist for art's sake alone? (or simply to satisfy the artist in isolation?) I would argue that it cannot. You cannot express a "feeling" without the confines of a path of communication (be it language, images, voice, sculpture, etc.) for feeling does not exist without a pathway of communication to exist on. Similar to how thought can not tangibly exist without language, feeling must be intractably connected with communication.
ReplyDeleteNow, there are those who could not accept this idea. Franz Kafka, for example, instructed a colleague to burn all of his writing upon his death. While his motives for this demand may not be clear, it certainly suggests he resisted that twisted connection between feeling and communication, tying himself forever to a tortured existence. Ironically earlier in his life, in a letter to a friend, he suggested the greatest literature was meant to "wound us and stab us, to unlock the frozen seas inside."
Some have also argued that Earnest Hemmingway's suicide was due to his inability to connect the his profounder artistic inclinations to his toady public. Such theorists have pointed to his "Old Man and the Sea" as an allegory in which he was the old man attempting to bring back a trophy fish from the sea, only to have it ripped apart in the shark infested waters(critics) to drag the exhausted bones of greatness up on shore to an underwhelmed public. He shot himself shortly after.
However, there have been a breed of more psychologically successful artists to negotiate the two seemingly opposing modes. Walt Whitman embraced the practice of announcing his feelings freely to the world. As he summed up in his poem, "Shut Not Your Doors," "The Words of my book are nothing, but the drift of it everything/ A Book separate, not link'd with the rest, nor felt by the intellect..." Whitman relished in the opportunity to announce himself to the public in his ultra-free form. He was not diminished by it, but rather augmented, perhaps due to his stubborn listlessness. And yet this was in a pre-modern era, one before before media, one when "the public" meant those in your church, where you could smoke a joint and not be banned from the olympics by outraged "fans," citing their poor innocent traumatized children.
Perhaps we can no longer frame communication in our own terms, as Whitman once did, due to the shrinking lines of custom (including formulaic poetry), the increasing entropy of language and interaction. What effect will the tyrannical and pervasive opinion of "the public" have on art, and in turn, on feeling? Will our need for "progress" and sophistication eventually lead us to a borg-like consciousness fixed on function? Or will our individual sentiments of resistance keep pace with the demands of communication in a perpetual battle for meaning? As much of our current world, including capitalist America, is built on greed, I have faith that the individual will continue to thrive in the future, and thus so will art. In fact, a negotiation between feeling and communication is necessary to our survival. Without it, we must accept the consciousness of a entirely meaningless existence.