So I am writing an "academic poem" for my writing studies class. It will be a very long poem/academic paper, although we don't really speak of epic poems anymore, since this won't really tell an epic kind of story. But it will include a lot of little stories about Cixous and Kristeva and Derrida and Barthes and many others. Here is the beginning of it, which is just kind of a riff for now.
Prologue: What is writing?
What is writing? Writing is everything. Writing is
communication, imagination, learning, history, memory, language, there is
nothing outside the text says Derrida, and I believe it and I don't there are moments,
says the artist Kiam Marcelo Junio, an artist from Chicago, says that there are moments
when we forget ourselves, they are only moments but they are perfect
moments when we forget ourselves drop our facades because writing although
it is expression is also an unnatural act . We do not naturally create texts – only now
we do. We do because it is all we know, so perhaps Derrida, loathe
as I am to admit it might be wait for it . . .
right. Maybe there is nothing outside the text because we can't remember
anything outside the text it's almost the way we can't remember
(according to the god people anyway) paradise eden there are
no perfect moments only text. But I digress . . .
Kiam Marcelo Junio . . . Chicago artist . . . says that there are moments when we forget ourselves
and lose our sense of self- consciousness and just exist
But writing is all the knowledge and creativity and creation and evolution and revolution and punk rock and heavy metal music and hymns and poems and treatises and manifestos and novels and academic articles and everything that we have learned and try to learn and strive to learn and know and catalogue and categorize and put into boxes marked kingdom phylum genre order class marxist proletariat species human and text and chora and Oedipus and his daddy Freud and his Mama Jocasta and Hamlet and Cleopatra the queen and the movie the woman(en) and the myth(s). How can you not be self-conscious with the weight of all that history upon you and all that knowledge and that was only half a paragraph or six stanzas if you will.
There is something outside the text. Unnamable feelings and joy and wild ecstatic movement and birds songs but the minute we identify it as anything at all, it moves inside the textual fence as it moves into consciousness from unconsciousness and there it sits until it becomes text and writing.
And so again, I will say, what is writing? Like Amiri Baraka once said, I think, of what use is
poetry? At least, a poet friend of mine in Minneapolis, J.
Otis Powell! With an exclamation point in his last name
used to recite a poem that he said was based upon Amiri Baraka's question of what
use is poetry ? Or as Paul McCartney, in the song Mrs. Vanderbilt,
(which is on the album Band on the Run) says “what's the use of anything?”
What's the use of the text? If we can't get outside of the text anymore,
then that makes the text a kind of . . . ideology since theory tell us
that it is impossible to get outside of our own ideologies, outside of our own heads, outside of
the text. Stupid Derrida. I hate it when he's right (write)(rite).
Death of the Author:
God and Mother
Think of the “death of the author” in terms of religion and childbirth,
which are not so far apart and which have been in the West,
uniquely masculine / feminine realms.
Death of the Author:
A Parable
In Christianity, Jesus (the author) must die and be resurrected so that believers (readers) can have safe passage to heaven (the text). This is the male-centered conception of the author as the all-knowing keeper of the text and of meaning. And in fact, Barthes speaks of “the ‘message’ of the Author-God” and says that “to refuse to fix its meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” .
Women, however, have historically had a different relationship to birth and death, with many medieval women dying in childbirth. In this model, the woman (author) dies so that her child (the reader) may be born, but that child will be orphaned, with no one to guide her through life (the text). There is a “death/not death,” a voluntary withdrawal that happens here that can be seen as Cixous’ metaphor for the author. In her manifesto “Coming to Writing,” there are extended passages that are about losing yourself in mad love (amour fou, as Andre Breton wrote of), to writing, to a feminine writing. This is not a nihilistic death, as might be seen in Foucault or Barthes, but a joyous celebration of what it is to write. “Text: not a detour, but the flesh at work in a labor of love” (42). As if she were taking the death of the author literally, then, she says “in the beginning, there can be only dying, the abyss, the first laugh” (41).
A Joyous Nonsense/Non-sense: The speech of schizophrenics
Jameson called Surrealism “schizophrenic speech.” Jameson, like Freud before him, was baffled by both Dada and Surrealism and their attempts at nonlinear thought and speech to express the unconscious and to get at the unconscious, to free us all, particularly from the confines of so-called rational scientific thought .
I want to write something meaningful about
Surrealism something academically valid not to make myself a known entity employable or a respected scholar but because surrealism is meaningful to me, it makes me happy and it makes me feel liberated and I want other(s), maybe even big Others to feel liberated and feel the healing hands of Hannah Hoch or Hugo Ball or Raoul Hausmann and some other Dadaist or Surrealist with an H name so I can get good aliteration at the same time, be poetic, while I also tell you some very smart things about Surrealism.
They say writing about Surrealism is like dancing about architecture except that once I looked it up on Google the actual quote is that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I could try to make the connection between music and Surrealism. They both work on an unconscious level. See, it didn't even take me long. But I am a lousy dancer and I don't know how to dance about architecture, although I know many good dancers and they tell me that dancing about architecture is actually a pretty good thing to do. I trust them.
Surrealist Doodle
This was used as the cover of Karawane in 2006 and I have included it in on a number of bags and postcards over the years. Someone on the subway asked me if it was a Miro. I was very flattered!
Friday, October 28, 2016
Friday, September 09, 2016
What is Writing? (Revisited)
What is writing?
Writing is a technology that people use to communicate with one other, which can include personal expression and creativity but also includes passing along information, which may include discussion, instructions, news reports, etc.
I have done every type of writing there is to do, including technical manuals, how-to instruction manuals, business reports, resumes and cover letters, creative writing, and of course academic writing. This is why I take the expansive view of writing and see writing within a context. For me to teach my professional writing or tech writing students to express themselves would be absurd and useless to them,
I do not take Derrida’s view that writing or text includes speech. I think that is a way of hedging your bets and saying that everything is writing. I understand the desire to bring non-literate societies, if that is his intention, into the realm of writing or to set writing beside speech.
The act of composing, whether through writing or speech, whether it is thought out and planned or spontaneous, is another matter. But being raised in a literate household within a literate society, I also am/have become someone who thinks by writing but who also rehearses and composes out loud, so the process is more symbiotic for me than privileging one over the other at this point.
I love Roland Barthes and I spent Monday frolicking through his writings, including revisiting Death of the Author, which I find somewhat more interesting and nuanced than Foucault’s “what is an author,” which was published almost a year later, and I also revisited from Work to Text. I like Barthes Death of the Author because with the death of the author comes the birth of the reader and I firmly believe that the reader is, as has been explained to me, “a co-creator of meaning with the author.” Barthes’ Death of the Author also then gives rise to reader-response theories as well, which I, being an aberrant reader of books, pieces of theory, and of all media, tend to appreciate. Foucault does not appear to make much of this birth of the reader, as far as I can tell. He is more focused on the “author function” and what makes up a body of work and whether the Author Function should include laundry lists, for example, from Nietzsche, which is now going to be the title of a book or poem that I will write in the near or not-so-near future.
Probably a poem as I have determined that I do not have the attention span to write a book, although I will have to ostensibly write one for my PhD. So, I have determined that when I write expressively, I do not have such a long attention span and that is why I write poetry and something like short stories that may possibly include creative non-fiction or possibly what Kirsten described to me as flash-nonfiction. But I digress. Which I often do when I am writing expressively rather than to communicate. The Dadaist, the Surrealist in me loves to digress. There are few things as gratifying as a good, well-placed digression in writing/on the page.
I read Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and I was somewhat surprised/somewhat not to “hear” him say that artistic impulses should not be subservient to political ideology. I think of Helene Lewis, author of Dada Turns Red who wrote that “The Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” Surrealism tried to align itself with the new Revolutionary Russian government, but was rejected by the Supreme Soviet as, ironically, bourgeois.
Finally, I disagreed with Trotsky’s rejection of Russian Formalism/Futurism. He is very critical of Eichenbaum, Jakobsen, Schlovksy, et al, dismissing their poetry as mere linguistics, but one idea from the Formalists that I truly like is Shklovskij’s definition of estrangement or defamiliarization. The point of literature is to defamiliarize language so that we can see things again as they really are. Trotsky would also prove to be historically wrong in his support for Italian Futurism, which directly supported Fascism.
In the end, though, I am somewhat catholic in my beliefs about writing. There is a split in me between the English teacher who believes that everyone can be taught to write reasonably well and teaches all kind of writing, and the poet/writer/theorist in me which is attracted to all kinds of theory and finds a little bit of truth in each one, who can be swayed by contradictory arguments, for “I am large and contain multitudes” and I can hold several different ideas about writing, speech composing, and text in mind at the same time.
Writing is a technology that people use to communicate with one other, which can include personal expression and creativity but also includes passing along information, which may include discussion, instructions, news reports, etc.
I have done every type of writing there is to do, including technical manuals, how-to instruction manuals, business reports, resumes and cover letters, creative writing, and of course academic writing. This is why I take the expansive view of writing and see writing within a context. For me to teach my professional writing or tech writing students to express themselves would be absurd and useless to them,
I do not take Derrida’s view that writing or text includes speech. I think that is a way of hedging your bets and saying that everything is writing. I understand the desire to bring non-literate societies, if that is his intention, into the realm of writing or to set writing beside speech.
The act of composing, whether through writing or speech, whether it is thought out and planned or spontaneous, is another matter. But being raised in a literate household within a literate society, I also am/have become someone who thinks by writing but who also rehearses and composes out loud, so the process is more symbiotic for me than privileging one over the other at this point.
I love Roland Barthes and I spent Monday frolicking through his writings, including revisiting Death of the Author, which I find somewhat more interesting and nuanced than Foucault’s “what is an author,” which was published almost a year later, and I also revisited from Work to Text. I like Barthes Death of the Author because with the death of the author comes the birth of the reader and I firmly believe that the reader is, as has been explained to me, “a co-creator of meaning with the author.” Barthes’ Death of the Author also then gives rise to reader-response theories as well, which I, being an aberrant reader of books, pieces of theory, and of all media, tend to appreciate. Foucault does not appear to make much of this birth of the reader, as far as I can tell. He is more focused on the “author function” and what makes up a body of work and whether the Author Function should include laundry lists, for example, from Nietzsche, which is now going to be the title of a book or poem that I will write in the near or not-so-near future.
Probably a poem as I have determined that I do not have the attention span to write a book, although I will have to ostensibly write one for my PhD. So, I have determined that when I write expressively, I do not have such a long attention span and that is why I write poetry and something like short stories that may possibly include creative non-fiction or possibly what Kirsten described to me as flash-nonfiction. But I digress. Which I often do when I am writing expressively rather than to communicate. The Dadaist, the Surrealist in me loves to digress. There are few things as gratifying as a good, well-placed digression in writing/on the page.
I read Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and I was somewhat surprised/somewhat not to “hear” him say that artistic impulses should not be subservient to political ideology. I think of Helene Lewis, author of Dada Turns Red who wrote that “The Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” Surrealism tried to align itself with the new Revolutionary Russian government, but was rejected by the Supreme Soviet as, ironically, bourgeois.
Finally, I disagreed with Trotsky’s rejection of Russian Formalism/Futurism. He is very critical of Eichenbaum, Jakobsen, Schlovksy, et al, dismissing their poetry as mere linguistics, but one idea from the Formalists that I truly like is Shklovskij’s definition of estrangement or defamiliarization. The point of literature is to defamiliarize language so that we can see things again as they really are. Trotsky would also prove to be historically wrong in his support for Italian Futurism, which directly supported Fascism.
In the end, though, I am somewhat catholic in my beliefs about writing. There is a split in me between the English teacher who believes that everyone can be taught to write reasonably well and teaches all kind of writing, and the poet/writer/theorist in me which is attracted to all kinds of theory and finds a little bit of truth in each one, who can be swayed by contradictory arguments, for “I am large and contain multitudes” and I can hold several different ideas about writing, speech composing, and text in mind at the same time.
Thursday, September 08, 2016
What is Writing?
Writing is a technology that people use to communicate with one other, which can include personal expression and creativity but also includes passing along information, which may include discussion, instructions, news reports, etc.
I have done every type of writing there is to do, including technical manuals, how-to instructions, business reports, resumes and cvs, creative writing, and of course academic writing. This is why I take the expansive view of writing and see writing within a context.
I do not take Derrida’s view that writing or text includes speech. I think that is a way of hedging your bets and saying that everything is writing. I understand the desire to bring non-literate societies, if that is his intention, into the realm of writing or to set writing beside speech.
The act of composing, whether through writing or speech, whether it is thought out and planned or spontaneous, is another matter.
But I don’t much care for Derrida. I can never tell if he is serious or not and I tend to think that when others think he is serious I think he is just messing with us and does not mean to be taken very seriously at all. I think I just knew too many pretentious English majors in the 80s running around and talking about Derrida.
I love Roland Barthes and I spent Monday frolicking through his writings, including revisiting Death of the Author, which I find somewhat more interesting and nuanced than Foucault’s what is an author, which was published almost a year later, and I also revisited from Work to Text. I like Barthes Death of the Author because with the death of the author comes the birth of the reader and I firmly believe that the reader is, as has been explained to me, “a co-creator of meaning with the author.”
Foucault does not appear to make much of this birth of the reader, as far as I can tell. He is more focused on the “author function” and what makes up a body of work and whether the Author Function should include laundry lists, for example, from Nietzsche, which is now going to be the title of a book or poem that I will write in the near or not-so-near future.
Probably a poem as I have determined that I do not have the attention span to write a book, although I will have to ostensibly write one for my PhD. So, I have determined that wheln I write expressively, I do not have such a long attention span and that is why I write poetry and something like short stories that may possibly include creative non-fiction or possibly what Kirsten described to me yesterday as flash-nonfiction. But I digress. When I often do when I am writing expressively rather than to communicate.
I read Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and I was somewhat surprised/somewhat not to “hear” him say that artistic impulses should not be subservient to political ideology. I think of Helene Lewis in Dada Turns Red who wrote that “The Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” Surrealism tried to align itself with the new Revolutionary Russian government, but was rejected by the Supreme Soviet as, ironically, bourgeois.
Finally, I disagreed with Trotsky’s rejection of Russian Formalism/Futurism. He is very critical of Eichenbaum, Jakobsen, Schlovksy, et al, dismissing their poetry as mere linguistics, but one idea from the Formalists that I truly like is Shklovskij’s definition of estrangement or defamiliarization. The point of literature is to defamiliarize language so that we can see things again as they really are. Trotsky would also prove to be historically wrong in his support for Italian Futurism, which directly supported Fascism.
In the end, though, I am somewhat catholic in my belies about writing. There is a split in me between the English teacher who believes that everyone can be taught to write reasonably well and teaches all kind of writing, and the poet/writer in me which is attracted to all kinds of theory and finds a little bit of truth in each one, who can be swayed by contradictory arguments, for “I am large and contain multitudes” and I can hold several different ideas about writing, speech composing, and text in mind at the same time.
I have done every type of writing there is to do, including technical manuals, how-to instructions, business reports, resumes and cvs, creative writing, and of course academic writing. This is why I take the expansive view of writing and see writing within a context.
I do not take Derrida’s view that writing or text includes speech. I think that is a way of hedging your bets and saying that everything is writing. I understand the desire to bring non-literate societies, if that is his intention, into the realm of writing or to set writing beside speech.
The act of composing, whether through writing or speech, whether it is thought out and planned or spontaneous, is another matter.
But I don’t much care for Derrida. I can never tell if he is serious or not and I tend to think that when others think he is serious I think he is just messing with us and does not mean to be taken very seriously at all. I think I just knew too many pretentious English majors in the 80s running around and talking about Derrida.
I love Roland Barthes and I spent Monday frolicking through his writings, including revisiting Death of the Author, which I find somewhat more interesting and nuanced than Foucault’s what is an author, which was published almost a year later, and I also revisited from Work to Text. I like Barthes Death of the Author because with the death of the author comes the birth of the reader and I firmly believe that the reader is, as has been explained to me, “a co-creator of meaning with the author.”
Foucault does not appear to make much of this birth of the reader, as far as I can tell. He is more focused on the “author function” and what makes up a body of work and whether the Author Function should include laundry lists, for example, from Nietzsche, which is now going to be the title of a book or poem that I will write in the near or not-so-near future.
Probably a poem as I have determined that I do not have the attention span to write a book, although I will have to ostensibly write one for my PhD. So, I have determined that wheln I write expressively, I do not have such a long attention span and that is why I write poetry and something like short stories that may possibly include creative non-fiction or possibly what Kirsten described to me yesterday as flash-nonfiction. But I digress. When I often do when I am writing expressively rather than to communicate.
I read Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and I was somewhat surprised/somewhat not to “hear” him say that artistic impulses should not be subservient to political ideology. I think of Helene Lewis in Dada Turns Red who wrote that “The Surrealists, in their collective and anonymous art forms, succeeded in creating an anti-elitist art that acquired a new social meaning. Their belief that talent is irrelevant and that everyone has creative potential in his unconscious could be a perfect vehicle for a truly revolutionary art.” Surrealism tried to align itself with the new Revolutionary Russian government, but was rejected by the Supreme Soviet as, ironically, bourgeois.
Finally, I disagreed with Trotsky’s rejection of Russian Formalism/Futurism. He is very critical of Eichenbaum, Jakobsen, Schlovksy, et al, dismissing their poetry as mere linguistics, but one idea from the Formalists that I truly like is Shklovskij’s definition of estrangement or defamiliarization. The point of literature is to defamiliarize language so that we can see things again as they really are. Trotsky would also prove to be historically wrong in his support for Italian Futurism, which directly supported Fascism.
In the end, though, I am somewhat catholic in my belies about writing. There is a split in me between the English teacher who believes that everyone can be taught to write reasonably well and teaches all kind of writing, and the poet/writer in me which is attracted to all kinds of theory and finds a little bit of truth in each one, who can be swayed by contradictory arguments, for “I am large and contain multitudes” and I can hold several different ideas about writing, speech composing, and text in mind at the same time.
Sunday, July 31, 2016
This is a continuation of my thinking for my paper on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the avant-garde. This is a little incomplete and ragged right now, but I wanted to share some thoughts.
Language Play in Hopkins and the Coming Avant-Garde
“Patterns of play, when seen as a whole, illuminate both his art as a poet and his unique imagination. . . Playfulness touches almost everything Hopkins treats: God the saints, sacraments, himself, other people . . . When he plays, Hopkins’s preferred modes are whimsy, comedy and the incongruous, wit, light satire, and silliness.” (Feeney 173).
I am not really sure what other forms of play there are besides that list, so it might be said that Hopkins’ wordplay embraces much, if not all forms of play that are available. Feeney further describes some of Hopkins' more whimsical images in his poems.
[W]himsy includes imagining himself as a woodlark, buxom football, and a Welsh bard. The moon wraps herself in scarfs, and Welsh hills hug cow-clouds for rain-milk. A little square house is like a man with a toothache and a bright stormcloud like a shiny bland heard. Moonlight is a blue cobweb. God sits on a thunder-throne and creates with hewing axe and tricking water. Christ is a stage-actor and the Holy Ghost is a male who cheers on a fellow cricketer and a female who broods on her huge world-as-egg. Christ, Mary and the saints live in a lighted barn as Hopkins peeks through a knothole. Stars are fire-folk, citadels, diamond mines, elves’-eyes. A pocket watch is Hopkins’ “mate” and his poems are babies, a pile of linen and dirty Thames-water. Pixies, fairies, goblins, and witches grace hi pages. And he blows a kiss to the stars.
Feeney also cites “wordplay hyphenates, concepts, and sound play” as elements of Hopkins’ poetry. This is the stuff of the avant-garde as well, including avant-garde movements such as Dada and Surrealism, Oulipo, and the Language Poets. It must be said that Andre Breton and others who have come after him stress that Surrealism is not a product or a style, but an approach. Thus, there cannot be said to be any truly Surrealist literature that doesn’t emanate from the imagination, from the subconscious. You cannot “copy” surrealistic style. Furthermore, Breton maintained that Surrealism was first and foremost, a verbal, not a visual, art form. “Whoever says expression says, to begin with, language . . . you must not be surprised to see surrealism place itself first of all almost exclusively on the plane of language.” 2nd manifesto. Surrealist Mind p. 44
I am going to use Dada and Surrealism, which are very closely related and which had many of the same artists involved in both movements, to compare to Hokpins’ poetry for a number of reasons. First, because they are among the earliest manifestations of avant-garde activity and most avant-gardes that came after were reacting to them, either in the positive or reacting against them. Second, Andre Breton had published Hopkins and evidently held him in esteem. And third, and most important, because of the timing of Hopkins’ life and publication, which was very close in time to the historical moment that Dada and Surrealism had developed out of. Had Hopkins’ life gone on for another 20-40 years, into his 60s or even his 80s, he would have had direct knowledge of those movements. Whether or not he would have joined or affiliated himself with them is a matter of pure speculation. I will deal with the pros and cons here briefly before I move on. There are arguments for both sides.
Hopkins and (anti-) Clericalism
Notably, there was the anti-clericalism of Breton and many Surrealists. While it did not keep Breton from admiring Hopkins, it more than likely would have put Hopkins off and kept him from affiliating himself too closely with the movement. In fact, because the Surrealist movement was so heavily French, Spanish and German, most of the Surrealists were Catholic in upbringing and Benjamin Peret was one of the most anti-Catholic anti-clerical members of the surrealists (https://melbourneartcritic.com/2012/11/27/anti-catholicism-surrealism/). For someone who was not only a Jesuit priest in the Catholic Church, but had converted to Catholicism as an adult, this would likely have precluded Hopkins’ from participating fully within the Surrealist movement. Hopkins was a very devout Catholic. In fact, in 1888, his last year, he wrote:
I was a Christian from birth or baptism, later I was converted to the Catholic faith and am enlisted 20 years in the Society of Jesus. I am now 44. I do not waver in my allegiance, I never have since my conversion to the Church. (qtd in Harris, XV.)
Notwithstanding, Harris sees in Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets,” written in the final years of his life, something of a crisis of faith; certainly a different direction, which Hopkins called “inspirations unbidden and against my will . . . [that] revealed a deformed image of his own humankind and a violation of Christ’s body” (xiii). Harris talks about a shift in Hopkins’ poetry “that illustrates the grave anxieties the age experienced in seeking a sound basis for epistemology in the face of a metaphysics exploded by ocean empiricism and a Biblical authority devastated by Higher Criticism” (4). At the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, the crisis of faith suffered in the West corresponded in large part to the rise of science, as well as the horrors that were to come out of World War I. Hopkins was feeling the pull of the former and was decidedly trying not to let doubt overtake him.
“Patterns of play, when seen as a whole, illuminate both his art as a poet and his unique imagination. . . Playfulness touches almost everything Hopkins treats: God the saints, sacraments, himself, other people . . . When he plays, Hopkins’s preferred modes are whimsy, comedy and the incongruous, wit, light satire, and silliness.” (Feeney 173).
I am not really sure what other forms of play there are besides that list, so it might be said that Hopkins’ wordplay embraces much, if not all forms of play that are available. Feeney further describes some of Hopkins' more whimsical images in his poems.
[W]himsy includes imagining himself as a woodlark, buxom football, and a Welsh bard. The moon wraps herself in scarfs, and Welsh hills hug cow-clouds for rain-milk. A little square house is like a man with a toothache and a bright stormcloud like a shiny bland heard. Moonlight is a blue cobweb. God sits on a thunder-throne and creates with hewing axe and tricking water. Christ is a stage-actor and the Holy Ghost is a male who cheers on a fellow cricketer and a female who broods on her huge world-as-egg. Christ, Mary and the saints live in a lighted barn as Hopkins peeks through a knothole. Stars are fire-folk, citadels, diamond mines, elves’-eyes. A pocket watch is Hopkins’ “mate” and his poems are babies, a pile of linen and dirty Thames-water. Pixies, fairies, goblins, and witches grace hi pages. And he blows a kiss to the stars.
Feeney also cites “wordplay hyphenates, concepts, and sound play” as elements of Hopkins’ poetry. This is the stuff of the avant-garde as well, including avant-garde movements such as Dada and Surrealism, Oulipo, and the Language Poets. It must be said that Andre Breton and others who have come after him stress that Surrealism is not a product or a style, but an approach. Thus, there cannot be said to be any truly Surrealist literature that doesn’t emanate from the imagination, from the subconscious. You cannot “copy” surrealistic style. Furthermore, Breton maintained that Surrealism was first and foremost, a verbal, not a visual, art form. “Whoever says expression says, to begin with, language . . . you must not be surprised to see surrealism place itself first of all almost exclusively on the plane of language.” 2nd manifesto. Surrealist Mind p. 44
I am going to use Dada and Surrealism, which are very closely related and which had many of the same artists involved in both movements, to compare to Hokpins’ poetry for a number of reasons. First, because they are among the earliest manifestations of avant-garde activity and most avant-gardes that came after were reacting to them, either in the positive or reacting against them. Second, Andre Breton had published Hopkins and evidently held him in esteem. And third, and most important, because of the timing of Hopkins’ life and publication, which was very close in time to the historical moment that Dada and Surrealism had developed out of. Had Hopkins’ life gone on for another 20-40 years, into his 60s or even his 80s, he would have had direct knowledge of those movements. Whether or not he would have joined or affiliated himself with them is a matter of pure speculation. I will deal with the pros and cons here briefly before I move on. There are arguments for both sides.
Hopkins and (anti-) Clericalism
Notably, there was the anti-clericalism of Breton and many Surrealists. While it did not keep Breton from admiring Hopkins, it more than likely would have put Hopkins off and kept him from affiliating himself too closely with the movement. In fact, because the Surrealist movement was so heavily French, Spanish and German, most of the Surrealists were Catholic in upbringing and Benjamin Peret was one of the most anti-Catholic anti-clerical members of the surrealists (https://melbourneartcritic.com/2012/11/27/anti-catholicism-surrealism/). For someone who was not only a Jesuit priest in the Catholic Church, but had converted to Catholicism as an adult, this would likely have precluded Hopkins’ from participating fully within the Surrealist movement. Hopkins was a very devout Catholic. In fact, in 1888, his last year, he wrote:
I was a Christian from birth or baptism, later I was converted to the Catholic faith and am enlisted 20 years in the Society of Jesus. I am now 44. I do not waver in my allegiance, I never have since my conversion to the Church. (qtd in Harris, XV.)
Notwithstanding, Harris sees in Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets,” written in the final years of his life, something of a crisis of faith; certainly a different direction, which Hopkins called “inspirations unbidden and against my will . . . [that] revealed a deformed image of his own humankind and a violation of Christ’s body” (xiii). Harris talks about a shift in Hopkins’ poetry “that illustrates the grave anxieties the age experienced in seeking a sound basis for epistemology in the face of a metaphysics exploded by ocean empiricism and a Biblical authority devastated by Higher Criticism” (4). At the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, the crisis of faith suffered in the West corresponded in large part to the rise of science, as well as the horrors that were to come out of World War I. Hopkins was feeling the pull of the former and was decidedly trying not to let doubt overtake him.
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Avant Garde (a draft)
There is some confusion about where to place Hopkins and some people have a desire to place Hopkins within the avant-garde due to his playfulness and experimentation with language. Christopher Wilson writes that Hopkins doesn’t have “a comfortable place in literary history” (137) due to his idosyncracies and “unusual style” (137) placing him both before and after his time, a kind of harbinger and throwback, but other crtcis “are quite certain that Hopkins belonds to the Victorian age, even though they find his literary style difficult to trace” (137). Tom Zaniello describes Hopkins as “a Victorian poet but also a forerunner of modernist poetics”(4) Meredith Martin, likewise, writes “construed by critics as “always obscure” and “on the whole disappointing; . . . too often needlessly obscure, harsh, and perverse” (qtd. in Roberts 89, 111), the first edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems, published in 1918, baffled more readers than it converted.”
In fact, in a letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins wrote of his own work:
“No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more baanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, a design, pattern, or what I am in this habit of calling 'inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped” (qtd in Milroy 6)
Thus, Hopkins knew that his work was odd, that it was influenced by the science of the day, and that he was out of time. His desire was not necessarily to move poetry forward to a new place for a new time, but to be part of the tradition of poetry that had come before him. In this way, as a poet he has much more of the English attitude than the French.
William Donald Harvey’s dissertation at the University of Toronto, written in 1999, discusses Appolinaire, Mallarme, and Hopkins. But two of those writers came out of the French tradition rather than Victorian England and while Hopkins spoke French, he also associated “Parnaissanism” to describe competent but uninspired poetry. He identified this trend particularly with the work of Alfred Tennyson, citing the poem "Enoch Arden" as an example[citation needed].[1] Thus there is little evidence to suggest that Hopkins was influences by any kind of proto-avant-garde activity in France, despite the fact that Hopkins; own life was wthin 20 years of the beginning of avant-garde activity in France. The Chat Noir the bohemian parisien cabaret, started in 1881. Stephen Mallarme, who was considered a precursor to the avant garde, was writing in France from until his own death in 1898. Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889, so it is entirely conceivable that he was aware of these goings on. Whether or not he found them significant or paid them any mind is another question. A very cursory glance shows that in the 19th century France was still dealing with the after-effects of revolution, internal strife, and certainly anti-clericalism, which would continue to dominate into the early 20th century of the avant-garde as well.
In fact, The pull between tradition and advance, which would be part of Hopkins’ struggle, that would mark him as somewhat different than avant-gardists, especially of the French, as they rushed forward to embrace the new and impending technology, as evidenced from the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists, who embraced newness. Hopkins found himself caught, trapped, by Victorianism, which in poetry, resulted in trying to deal with, manage, the increasing onslaught of industrialization and in many cases, to retreat back into nature.
In fact, in a letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins wrote of his own work:
“No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more baanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, a design, pattern, or what I am in this habit of calling 'inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped” (qtd in Milroy 6)
Thus, Hopkins knew that his work was odd, that it was influenced by the science of the day, and that he was out of time. His desire was not necessarily to move poetry forward to a new place for a new time, but to be part of the tradition of poetry that had come before him. In this way, as a poet he has much more of the English attitude than the French.
William Donald Harvey’s dissertation at the University of Toronto, written in 1999, discusses Appolinaire, Mallarme, and Hopkins. But two of those writers came out of the French tradition rather than Victorian England and while Hopkins spoke French, he also associated “Parnaissanism” to describe competent but uninspired poetry. He identified this trend particularly with the work of Alfred Tennyson, citing the poem "Enoch Arden" as an example[citation needed].[1] Thus there is little evidence to suggest that Hopkins was influences by any kind of proto-avant-garde activity in France, despite the fact that Hopkins; own life was wthin 20 years of the beginning of avant-garde activity in France. The Chat Noir the bohemian parisien cabaret, started in 1881. Stephen Mallarme, who was considered a precursor to the avant garde, was writing in France from until his own death in 1898. Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889, so it is entirely conceivable that he was aware of these goings on. Whether or not he found them significant or paid them any mind is another question. A very cursory glance shows that in the 19th century France was still dealing with the after-effects of revolution, internal strife, and certainly anti-clericalism, which would continue to dominate into the early 20th century of the avant-garde as well.
In fact, The pull between tradition and advance, which would be part of Hopkins’ struggle, that would mark him as somewhat different than avant-gardists, especially of the French, as they rushed forward to embrace the new and impending technology, as evidenced from the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists, who embraced newness. Hopkins found himself caught, trapped, by Victorianism, which in poetry, resulted in trying to deal with, manage, the increasing onslaught of industrialization and in many cases, to retreat back into nature.
Friday, July 08, 2016
41 - for Diallo
This is a poem I wrote nearly 15 years ago after the Diallo verdict in NY. Amadou Diallo was an African immigrant who was unarmed. He reached for his wallet to pull out an ID and was shot 41 times in the crossfire of NYC police. All 4 police officers were acquitted on charges of excessive force.
I wish this poem were more dated, that this was all over with, not escalating more and more. It's kind of like Bono saying that Sunday, Bloody Sunday was not relevant, and then finding that it was, that it had new resonances that he hadn't anticipated when he wrote it.
This is now dedicated to Philando Castile in Minnesota, and to everyone who has lost their lives to excessive force and overreaction by the police.
Many people say that we need to feel sorry for the police, but that is their JOB. Their job is to put themselves in the line of fire. That is what they signed on for and if you can't take the stress without killing people, without bullying, without excessive force. then turn in your gun and GET A DIFFERENT JOB.
Driving down the street should not be putting yourself in the line of fire. Being mentally ill, homeless, young, old, etc. should not put you in the line of fire. Those things are not the same as signing up to be a police officer, getting paid to carry a gun, and knowing that you are putting yourself at risk when you leave the house. Castile, like Diallo and myriad others between them, did not realize that by leaving their homes they were putting themselves in danger.
I also don't think cops should be on the beat as long as they are. They get a warped view of humanity when they spend 10, 15, 20 years on the beat. They learn to see everyone as a criminal and a threat.
And then there's the militarization of our police forces and our entire society. We as a society have become too militarized. This is what 15 years of perpetual war has done to us, of bringing the war home, of making everyone identify themselves as citizen soldiers in so-called homeland security.
All of this needs to be taken down by many many many notches.
Click on the number/title 41 to hear the audio clip as you read it.
41
For Diallo
Someone must have mistaken you for the Devil,
the monster outside the door that could not be killed with mortal means.
I bathed in the river of dead fish;
beside the park a cacophony:
children pointing fingers in a chanting circle.
Beneath my feet the dusty bones of ancestors murdered
in my own myths vanquished
to make me whole.
Although we live like children, these are not games we play.
Absent fathers do not sweep under the bed for monsters after dark.
41 holes in a trembling effigy now tucks us in at night the undertakers
will wax a smile upon your lips as you leave behind an island nation of
inmates to sit upon your throne of honor.
I walked through the skeletal hallway, my joints disconnected my bones
falling away beside me my seams unraveling.
Who brings you into the light at this moment? The flashlight in your face, the steam off your skin, El Diablo, someone must have thought.
____
41 tasks I gave you and the stables remain unclean.
41 days from the deluge/first drop and already you forget how to swim.
41 winks - you will not wake from this sleep.
I bathed in the river of dead fish to rinse you from my skin.
These are not games that we play we run home dusty and
sunburnt expecting someone to tuck us in.
Friday, June 24, 2016
At the Midwest Writing Center Conference Writing Triolets
The Midwest Writing Center in Davenport Iowa is having its annual conference. It is really good for me because it has gotten me out of the house and also spurred some creativity. Because I got a grant to publish Karawane here in the QC, it also gets me out and meeting people and doing some very necessary networking.
Today in the workshop we were dealing with writing in form, writing with limits or obstructions, and exquisite corpses, although the workshop leader did not call it exquisite corpse.
Here are three triolets that I created today. The first two were using lines suggested by someone else and the third was from my own lines.
The Last Remaining Housepet
Throughout my life I had many pets
but now I have only one cat.
She roams the house, for friends she frets.
Throughout my life I had many pets.
Lonely for companions she gets,
She lies around alone becoming fat.
Throughout my life I had many pets
but now I have only one cat.
Schedules
Today, almost like all the time, slips,
then night comes, and I look at my list.
I am gymnast, doing cartwheels and backflips.
Today, almost like all the time, slips.
For everyone, my spouse and boss and kids,
for all except myself done with a twist,
today, almost like all the time, slips,
then night comes, and I look at my list.
And here is the one that is purely mine:
Triolet to childhood
When the skies were blue and trees were green,
they played together every afternoon.
In every game they lived a dream,
when the skies were blue and trees were green.
Pirates! And damsels! The king and his queen!
Would build, race, and like lovers swoon,
when the skies were blue and trees were green.
They played together every afternoon.
Not bad for just 20 minutes of writing.
Today in the workshop we were dealing with writing in form, writing with limits or obstructions, and exquisite corpses, although the workshop leader did not call it exquisite corpse.
Here are three triolets that I created today. The first two were using lines suggested by someone else and the third was from my own lines.
The Last Remaining Housepet
Throughout my life I had many pets
but now I have only one cat.
She roams the house, for friends she frets.
Throughout my life I had many pets.
Lonely for companions she gets,
She lies around alone becoming fat.
Throughout my life I had many pets
but now I have only one cat.
Schedules
Today, almost like all the time, slips,
then night comes, and I look at my list.
I am gymnast, doing cartwheels and backflips.
Today, almost like all the time, slips.
For everyone, my spouse and boss and kids,
for all except myself done with a twist,
today, almost like all the time, slips,
then night comes, and I look at my list.
And here is the one that is purely mine:
Triolet to childhood
When the skies were blue and trees were green,
they played together every afternoon.
In every game they lived a dream,
when the skies were blue and trees were green.
Pirates! And damsels! The king and his queen!
Would build, race, and like lovers swoon,
when the skies were blue and trees were green.
They played together every afternoon.
Not bad for just 20 minutes of writing.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
This is a little something I am working on that will be part of a big something--ie, a 20-25 page paper--on GMH and the avant garde. This is just a modest beginning. Hope you like it.
Modernist writings in English, particularly those of the avant-garde have two particular threads to them: interiority and language, threads that frequently come together in work. Andre Breton wrote in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, “Whoever says expression says, to begin with, language . . . you must not be surprised to see Surrealism place itself first of all almost exclusively on the plane of language.” While they all come at the subject with different perspectives and approaches, it is safe to say that 1ll poets are concerned with language, just as all poets are concerned with imagery and even with the question “what is the good life?” All avant-gardes begin somewhere. Breton traces Surrealism back to fairy tales and even back to the cave paintings of ancient times. Moreover, we can look to the generation that came immediately before Surrealism and contemporary avant gardes, to see their more recent influences. One such influence is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Many theorists agree that Hopkins' own use of language and his theories of language put him ahead of his time while his nature imagery and his own deism make him very much a product of Victorian England. It seems not too coincidental that Hopkins didn't not have a complete collection of his own poetry published in his lifetime, but rather his collection of poetry was not published until 1918, a time when Surrealism in France was taking over the stage from Dada, with both movements having a desire to use language to spur different types and ways of thinking, to scramble the ordinary ways of thinking that lead to ruts and worse, for the Russian Futurists, familiarity. Even now, Hopkins and his use of language remains an engima to many literary critics who seek a box to place him in, as either a religious poet, a Victorian poet, or even an abstruse poet. Hopkins defied all of the expectations of his day with his writings and his theories of the inscape and the instress as well as with the religious themes of his work, which were not nearly as orthodox as a Catholic writer of the 21st century. In fact, there are movements within the contemporary Catholic Church to bring Hopkins' view more in line with the orthodoxy of the faith than there was in Hopkins' own day.
In a 2003 article entitled “Poetry: A Prognosis,” critic Dick Davis cites the poets Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins as difficult-to-read eccentrics who are responsible for the problems faced by contemporary poetry. He describes Hopkins as an “odd-ball poet whose work is hard to paraphrase and to scan” (28). Davis states that the notion of a poem that can't be paraphrased would have been completely alien to anyone before 1800 (29). Apparently Hamlet's soliloquies could have been neatly summed up, with no attention to language or detail. Davis blames poets like Hopkins for causing poetry to lose its vernacular audience (30). Those darned odd-ball poets. If only they would write more accessible poetry, rather than being concerned with language and the stuff of poetry. I perceive this, ironically, as a peculiarly modernist critique of poetry. Is it that modern poetry, let's say starting from the mid- to late-19th century is more obscure and more difficult to understand? Or maybe readers and audiences of poetry are more sophisticated, having come to expect more from poetry? Did the rise of the novel kill interest in poetry? Or did it free poetry to be able to be more focused on language and form and less focused on communicating a point to people? What about film, radio, television, popular music? There seem to be many more options available than just poetry that would cause people to turn away from it than just blaming a few poets for being odd-ball and making poetry “too difficult.”
TBC . . .
Modernist writings in English, particularly those of the avant-garde have two particular threads to them: interiority and language, threads that frequently come together in work. Andre Breton wrote in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, “Whoever says expression says, to begin with, language . . . you must not be surprised to see Surrealism place itself first of all almost exclusively on the plane of language.” While they all come at the subject with different perspectives and approaches, it is safe to say that 1ll poets are concerned with language, just as all poets are concerned with imagery and even with the question “what is the good life?” All avant-gardes begin somewhere. Breton traces Surrealism back to fairy tales and even back to the cave paintings of ancient times. Moreover, we can look to the generation that came immediately before Surrealism and contemporary avant gardes, to see their more recent influences. One such influence is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Many theorists agree that Hopkins' own use of language and his theories of language put him ahead of his time while his nature imagery and his own deism make him very much a product of Victorian England. It seems not too coincidental that Hopkins didn't not have a complete collection of his own poetry published in his lifetime, but rather his collection of poetry was not published until 1918, a time when Surrealism in France was taking over the stage from Dada, with both movements having a desire to use language to spur different types and ways of thinking, to scramble the ordinary ways of thinking that lead to ruts and worse, for the Russian Futurists, familiarity. Even now, Hopkins and his use of language remains an engima to many literary critics who seek a box to place him in, as either a religious poet, a Victorian poet, or even an abstruse poet. Hopkins defied all of the expectations of his day with his writings and his theories of the inscape and the instress as well as with the religious themes of his work, which were not nearly as orthodox as a Catholic writer of the 21st century. In fact, there are movements within the contemporary Catholic Church to bring Hopkins' view more in line with the orthodoxy of the faith than there was in Hopkins' own day.
In a 2003 article entitled “Poetry: A Prognosis,” critic Dick Davis cites the poets Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins as difficult-to-read eccentrics who are responsible for the problems faced by contemporary poetry. He describes Hopkins as an “odd-ball poet whose work is hard to paraphrase and to scan” (28). Davis states that the notion of a poem that can't be paraphrased would have been completely alien to anyone before 1800 (29). Apparently Hamlet's soliloquies could have been neatly summed up, with no attention to language or detail. Davis blames poets like Hopkins for causing poetry to lose its vernacular audience (30). Those darned odd-ball poets. If only they would write more accessible poetry, rather than being concerned with language and the stuff of poetry. I perceive this, ironically, as a peculiarly modernist critique of poetry. Is it that modern poetry, let's say starting from the mid- to late-19th century is more obscure and more difficult to understand? Or maybe readers and audiences of poetry are more sophisticated, having come to expect more from poetry? Did the rise of the novel kill interest in poetry? Or did it free poetry to be able to be more focused on language and form and less focused on communicating a point to people? What about film, radio, television, popular music? There seem to be many more options available than just poetry that would cause people to turn away from it than just blaming a few poets for being odd-ball and making poetry “too difficult.”
TBC . . .
Monday, March 07, 2016
Iron Pen Poetry Submission
For what it's worth, this was my poetry submission to the Midwest Writing Center's Iron Pen Contest this past month.
Universe
She played with trucks and dolls dressing
them in khaki and in pink interchangeable because
the world was “mine” to define and she the
center of al solar systems, blind, everything
made for her desires and when she grew
older and played with books and
paper-flimsy ideas the universe and
its many suns did not change she moved
around other planets that orbited each
other and in riddles laughed and pictures they spoke that
no one could enter but time and tide as it is said, took
their lives over to
kids and lovers payments they owed to live in
cars and houses the small offices brown and cubed but she
stayed the same her orbit around her own small suns growing smaller
no one else left to riddle and battle the dark holes filling the spaces left
when she was utterly
alone only her paper flimsy books to protect her
from the swirling world opened their pictures and her riddles to
her they were there when all of the other planets had grown distant
and uninhabited to her explorations unable to hear or respond
to her transmissions.
They hung in there, even when she was broke, alone, and sorry.
Universe
She played with trucks and dolls dressing
them in khaki and in pink interchangeable because
the world was “mine” to define and she the
center of al solar systems, blind, everything
made for her desires and when she grew
older and played with books and
paper-flimsy ideas the universe and
its many suns did not change she moved
around other planets that orbited each
other and in riddles laughed and pictures they spoke that
no one could enter but time and tide as it is said, took
their lives over to
kids and lovers payments they owed to live in
cars and houses the small offices brown and cubed but she
stayed the same her orbit around her own small suns growing smaller
no one else left to riddle and battle the dark holes filling the spaces left
when she was utterly
alone only her paper flimsy books to protect her
from the swirling world opened their pictures and her riddles to
her they were there when all of the other planets had grown distant
and uninhabited to her explorations unable to hear or respond
to her transmissions.
They hung in there, even when she was broke, alone, and sorry.
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