Comments on: Champagne

By: John

John — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 04:37:07 +0000

Ange — thanks, I always forget about the Confessionals, even though you’d already mentioned them! A personal weakness. I don’t dislike them particularly, they just don’t register deeply with me, and I keep forgetting them. Maybe because they don’t register as “talking” in any way.
The liveliest slammers discover new structures while definitely presenting as “people talking” — or ranting, as the case may be.
The “new structures” quest is the modernist quest, a quest I have been deeply skeptical of but which I’m coming around to again. For romantic, subjectivist reasons! “I want that new structure to have my name on it!”
I understand that impulse.
So did Ozymandias. Sorry if that’s too obvious or sardonic a reference. I really do understand — and share — the impulse.
Thanks again.

By: Ange

Ange — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 22:48:34 +0000

Okay, “The Counterfeiters” is next in my library holds queue.
John, thanks for the kind words. I think that the “person talking” has been a limiting idea in American poetry for the past 50 years or so; personhood has become rather narrowly defined in sociological and psychological terms. So when Middleton suggests that our role as poets is to discover new structures – rather than express the contents of our subjectivities – then I think that is an enlargement of possibility, one that gets beyond merely looking and recording.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 19:09:02 +0000

Thank you, John! By the way, Kenner’s book has fascinating illustrations by Guy Davenport among its many delights!

By: john

john — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:27:59 +0000

Mr. Share, thanks for posting relevant quotes from “The Counterfeiters”! That is the book I was thinking of, a marvelous book, and a delight to read.
Ange, “apertures upon being” sounds like the function of a “consciousness observing” to me. The aperture is a window, and it seems to me that we’re hoping for a door; a way to Be in Being that is more involved, engaged, and shadow-throwing than mere picture-taking. But I plump for the “person talking” side of the binary, and I’m not sure why you feel it’s a bad binary.
By the way, thanks for the stimulating post. I just found your blogging here, via Ron Silliman, and I’m glad to have.

By: Ange

Ange — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:13:54 +0000

What good stuff this is! I misremembered Cowley — Kenner’s description immediately brought to mind “The Weeper,” but that’s Crashaw. I have to reread the Metaphysicals, and find a copy of that Kenner.
But what I’ve really been mulling over is this distinction between person talking vs. consciousness observing. We’re still conflicted — more than ever, actually, in the wake of Confessionalism. I think of the first paragraph of Christopher Middleton’s essay, “Reflections on a Viking Prow:”
“To recapture poetic reality in a tottering world, we may have to revise, once more, the idea of a poem as an expression of the ‘contents’ of a subjectivity. Some poems, at least, and some types of poetic language, constitute structures of a singularly radiant kind, where ’self-expression’ has undergone a profound change of function. We experience these structures, if not as revelations of being, then as apertures upon being.”
This is possibly, like all poetics, impossibly vague – but to me it is a way out of a bad binary (person vs. consciousness).

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 02:25:47 +0000

Kenner said (in The Counterfeiters, pp. 48-49): “Cowley is the last poet of the Metaphysical School and about the first to be bad comically, and therefore makes a convenient jumping-off point. Let us rewrite that sentence. ‘Cowley is the first poet of the Augustan School, of whose procedures a novel by-product is comic badness.’ Something happened late in the seventeenth century which made possible strikingly, comically, transcendentally bad verse. One would like to be able to say what this was…. If Cowley was the first poet to risk an enterprise in which all depends on sureness of taste, and did not always manifest that sureness, it was not because he was the last Metaphysical poet but because he was the first Augustan.” So Milton admired Cowley, he continues, yet Johnson found him ridiculous, discouraging us from seeing him as anything but a joke (C. is in the famous Stuffed Owl anthology of terrible verse) – and so we don’t read him. We don’t read him because we think of such writing as the kind in which the poet climbs onto a pedestal “so that we can tell he is writing poetry.”

By: john

john — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 18:57:38 +0000

Hugh Kenner argued that the way poets conceptualized the poem changed fundamentally in the 17th century, and that Abraham Cowley was the transitional figure.
Before Cowley, the poem represented a “person speaking.” Afterwards, the poem represented a “consciousness observing.”
I can’t reconstruct Kenner’s argument off the cuff, but it feels right to me, and it may be related to your observation that the words in Elizabethan poems throw shadows. The Elizabethan soliloquy was spoken aloud; in post-Baconian poetry — the stuff that began to try to account for the scientific method (and I don’t think that Kenner alluded to Bacon) — the soliloquy became an interior monologue. The poet imagined him- or herself to be a detached observer.
Detached observers imagine that they don’t throw shadows.
The Romantics sought to reconnect with the Elizabethans (and the Gothic!); hence, Keats’s increase in the sense of materiality-of-language, compared to the Augustans.
Post-Cowley, prosodic procedures firmed up considerably as well. It’s as if prosody became an ideal to aspire to, rather than a map to steer with that allowed for deviations.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 23:40:19 +0000

Yes! And then, too: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / are sweeter…” “O Attic shape! Fair attitude! … Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!”