Incandescence
If you've nothing nice to say, come sit with me.
Epic Novelist
Gender: 
Age: 18
Joined: 22 Nov 2004
Posts: 3018
Reviews: 901
Country: USA
392 Points
|
 Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 6:44 am Post subject: Condemnation of Grammatical Poetry |
 |
|
In Neruda's 1971 Nobel lecture, he said the following:
| Quote: |
| ...if we succeed in creating the fetish of the incomprehensible (or the fetish of that which is comprehensible only to a few), the fetish of the exclusive and the secret, if we exclude reality and its realistic degenerations, then we find ourselves suddenly surrounded by an impossible country, a quagmire of leaves, of mud, of cloud, where our feet sink in and we are stifled by the impossibility of communicating. |
The quote sounds nice, but in the end, what does it mean?
When we read poetry, the poem may communicate something to us quite at odds with the author's intention. I think the case can be made that good poetry provides an incentive for us to communicate with that part of ourselves that lies beyond commonplace consciousness.
What does it mean to say that music, sculpture and painting communicate? In what sense is the communication of poetry unique? What is it that makes poetic communication (whatever it is) so valuable?
The issue of "communication" goes beyond "difficulty". What's at issue is our bland assumption that we all know what "communication" is and that we have a common understanding of what it means to communicate.
Consider WCW's red wheelbarrow. Is it difficult? Does it communicate? Does it communicate in the way that WCW intended?
Just as paleontologists cull marvelously extrapolative assumptions from a tiny universe of recovered bones, there is much more to Poetry than meets the written page. It’s no accident that so many poems circle the subject matter of bones, dead leaves, elegies, Fall, Winter, snow and death. Poems are Poetry’s fossilized record, or at least that part to which Poetry has deigned a poetic approach. A T-Rex could traverse the space between most poems and Poetry. Miswriting is the norm.
Philosophical engagements aside, allow me three observations about the current state of poetry on the YWS:
Proposition 1: There is an increased demand for "grammar," for punctuated verse.
Lemma 1: There is an increased homogenization of styles and lyrical voices. From one poet to the next, the verse seems pre-ordained by some higher being and never to sprout from an individual's pen.
Lemma 2: There is a decreased amount of user involvement in the Poetry forums.
Regarding (P1), almost every piece I have read through has a comment somewhere requesting punctuation. The examples are numerous, though the requesters often fail to present proof of any advancement of poetic technique by performing such mundane operations. Towards (L1), I attribute the effects of (P1) and youth. Lastly, (L2) is the direct result of (L1). I do not speak of simply traffic amongst the poetry forums (surely this has doubtless witnessed an increase), but rather sustained inquiry with poetry. That is to say, what we might be accumulating in quantity, we are losing in quality. To speak of gains and losses in this context is perhaps too loose a correlative, though I think you can pardon my frivolity.
Hold (P1) to be self-evident and return to the question of communication originally posited. If language is the roads of communication, then grammar is surely the direction and signal markers along this superhighway. Historically, then, grammar is, literally, what has regulated our understanding of each other--sometimes perhaps to our detriment, but mostly to alleviate whatever burden of interpretation the original orator or writer put on us as readers of his or her text. Indeed, grammar has been institutionalized to such a large extent precisely because it extracts interpretation from the reading procedure. Thus, when I read your work, I do not have to question what subject is doing what verb, or where a particular thought has ended and another begun. But is this such a great thing?
For those who would prefer an easy read to a rewarding and difficult one, it surely is. When we do not wish to question the very basis of our understanding of communication (it's tiring, after a while!), we simply dismiss anything that does not lay out its intent. But difficulty in this way is not directly related to communication. When we say a text is "difficult," we are really speaking to the way in which that text utilizes language and grammar--nothing more, nothing less--and, since difficulty is assessed on the part of reader, our own intelligence. When one claims something to be difficult, it is thus not so much reflective on the object of reflection as on who is doing the reflecting. So, in this way, we can see difficulty as a subset of communication; it is more of a property or characteristic of a specific communication than something which confers on the whole of all communication a defining rendition.
When we think of writers such as Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Danielewski, or Alain Badiou, what strikes us about their work is not the grammar but their use of language. If one could construct a unified literary project of the 20th century, it was the following: to rid language of grammar. Cummings' work does not use grammar as a form of signposts and waymarkers, but rather as a tool of language itself. Dickinson's use of punctuation functions more as words than as reading regulators. This is the value of poetic communication: it is not bound up in the power games of everyday fiction and speech. Artistic communication demonstrates that, in fact, such power games are really meaningless when it comes to anything remotely human. Who among us has not experienced a love or hate so powerful it defies language--who among us has sat down in an attempt to capture a feeling so raw and powerful it constipates our keyboards? Such is the fate of grammar...
This double-jeopardy of communication/noncommunication it could surely be argued is not worth risking. That is to say, at the risk of otherwise being totally incommunicable, use grammar--just to make sure we "get" you. This is a faulty syllogism of the highest order as it is often abused to abdicate the reader of using the slightest of his or her cognitive processes. What I argue for here is the abandonment of grammar as a writer pleases: those who hark for the good days of rigorous sentence structures and subject/verb alignment can find their contemporaries among the graves. For those of us in the present, however, we must perpetrate the stake of distaste for rules set out by our forefathers. We must redefine the system of language to our liking, and in that sense, we must move the system closer to something more primal and human than ever before.
Why grammar homogenizes a batch of aspiring writers is the following: poetry is not a logical sequence of causality. It is a cascade of tangents, and, as such, it can not possibly be subject to the rules of ordinary language. If we must always think causality, then we will miss the greatest portion of our world. Cultures past respected the supernatural, that which "bumped in the night," and took great care to respect phenomena which seemed to them nonlinear. Today, however, we are not spooked by the unnatural, by the supernatural. We "know better" than to believe in vampires or zombies or werewolves--we trust in our sciences that the world is a deterministic process. Even the religious succumb to the false idea that the world can be explained away when things don't make sense to us--"I don't know why there is a green light out above the fog, but it must be some chemical reaction taking place in the atmosphere," for example. If we think like this--forced into cause-effect as we are--then the world is not a very interesting place for those who yearn to ascend to a level above that of an encyclopedia. Poetry, sculpture, painting, et al--the arts--this is how they communicate. Not in a world which is rigorously mandated by those grammaticists among us but by free association and loose play. Most human associations are bound together by a weird stew of pathologies, and poets and authors are no different. I'm a basket-case, you're a basket-case. Here's a box of chocolates. Be my basket-case.
To illustrate how the apparently obvious "cause-effect" fails, make a list of the five most damaging people in your own life. How many were perfect strangers? Surely your friends and family members outnumber the casual acquaintances? By now, your orders should be clear. Boycott the next family barbecue or invite a bunch of strangers. It’s high time blank looks and vacant stares received the credit they’re due. As if diverting us from the real, slow menace at hand, movies prefer to mine the lore of aloof snipers and serial killers. Bang! Perhaps we see the dark hand of God at play in the seemingly capricious death-by-tragic-and-random-circumstance. We shake our heads, muttering: "as fate would have it, she took a different route home from work that day."
At least snipers give us religion during the brief tenure of their reigns. We hunker down like re-acquainted sinners averting ex deus projectilus. Snipers are plain crazy anyway. How else to explain this utter disdain for perfect strangers? In fact, most strangers are perfectly harmless and perfect scapegoats all at once. To kill a stranger requires the audacity of a god or a madman. No stable person would attempt it. We reasonably normal sorts take odd comfort from our strangers. In their specters, we bury our fears, harbor our demons and redouble our efforts towards the poignant, deadly task of loving our loved ones. This somehow seems in stark contrast to our usual thought: that our loved ones are to be trusted, such is, after all, why we love them. But the reality of this relationship is such that this is far from the truth--it is very far from causality ("I love you, you love me, therefore we won't hurt each other").
Returning to Neruda's original statement, when he speaks to excluding actual reality and its degenerations, he is attesting to the way in which nonlinearities are not permitted in the rigor of self-satisfied, presumptuous writings of the past. As bearers of the future, it is our responsibility--indeed, as writers it is perhaps our very call to arms--to abandon grammatical structures and language barriers. Why write a novel totally in English if it is not sufficient to express your ideas?--surely Nabokov saw the value in such struggle. Thus, there should be less demand for grammatical regularity in poetry here: it stifles not only poetic expression and development, but forces us into a backwards-perspective of devolved authors and less-than-thrilling debutantes. We are the heirs of a rich literary legacy. Let's not let those of us unwilling to go the extra mile and figure out what it means when grammar is absent (it's so "difficult" to do, and we wouldn't to stretch our minds any more than education already demands, would we?) stop us from furthering our literary history. |
|
|
Incandescence
If you've nothing nice to say, come sit with me.
Epic Novelist
Gender:
Age: 18
Joined: 22 Nov 2004
Posts: 3018
Reviews: 901
Country: USA
392 Points
|
| Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 4:17 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Misty--
This would go to explaining why I never comment on grammar--I don't think it's a necessary component of poetic communication, except as a poet might will it so.
re: scrap this
Praise, to my mind, speaks to the overall quality of the poem and its effect upon the reader. One can easily praise poems that contain multiple imperfections and fail to address any one of these problems. With all the self-indulgent narcissm that often passes for poetry today, there's a lot to be said for the tough love approach. But I suppose it's a thin line.
I applaud anyone who embarks upon the journey just as I can appreciate the motivations of those who chastise others for treading on the new carpet with muddy boots (myself being one, I suppose). Somewhere there's a middle ground between showing reverence to the art and nurturing fresh new flames --not always an easy demarcation to find. On a bad day, the protectors of the art can come across savoring their task with a little too much relish and malevolent glee. Then too, most beginning poets think they're much better than they really are. There is a popular romantic notion that the poet's pen is some kind of magic conduit running from God-to-scribe. For the Elect Few, criticism is a sort of sacrilege. But this begs the question, why post to a WORKSHOP if you're just wrested a holy relic from the ether? Why not found a religion instead? I find many beginning poets possess this manna-from-heaven notion in abundance, much to the detriment of their craft and personal development. In fact I think most seasoned poets would agree that good poetry is all about fits, starts, edits, i.e. exertion and perspiration.
Difficulty, again, becomes central to the progression of the poet.
Best,
Brad |
|
|
