By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 13:15:50 +0000

I’ve enjoyed thinking about the use of Swift in this post, and it helps me realize just how old – even quaint – it is to employ [psuedo?]-scientific metaphors to express ideas about the production of poetry. Steve Burt, I believe, has commented on this in another thread here, and Jane has nicely called this a para-fable.
But what’s fascinating is that we still seem to be particularly tethered to late 19th-century and early 20th century positivist ideas about technology and metaphor, e.g., Pound’s view (ca. 1910) that poetry is (as Patricia Hutchins put it) “a kind of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations,” etc. EP would come to see the poet as “steam gauge, voltometer, a set of pipes for thermometric and barometric divination.” In writing about the troubadours, he even refers to “hyper-scientific precision as a touchstone.”
Eliot, as everyone is tired of hearing, employed the incorectly formulated figure of the chemical “catalyst” at around the same time:
“When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged.”
Etc. Whether his chemistry holds up or not I’ll leave to others, but I can’t think the analogy expressed in these particular words means much to anyone now.
These (in)famous examples, and there must be others you all can mention here, show that nothing dates more quickly than the scientific, especially in the clutches of poets who, forgivably enough, do not have the training to understand it properly in the first place. That’s the price we pay for buying into what seems, at a given moment, to be “modern.” This does not mean that poets (or anyone else) ought to ignore or be ignorant of science, and I’m no “Luddite” (I wish there were a more up-to-date moniker for the backward!); quite the opposite, yet I suppose even the more enlightened among us will continue to talk about the sun setting when they’re waxing metaphorical.

By: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:52:47 +0000

I’ve been alternately annoyed and amused by Bök’s past postings, but now I see that I’m meant to be only amused. It—his blog, I mean—is all Swiftian satire!
What a relief to discover this. Now I don’t have to get exercised over his fuzzy language. In the past, his bizarre statement that we readers today judge poems on the “stateliness” of their expression, while future readers might judge them on “uncanniness of … production,” might have driven me to distraction. But knowing it’s all a joke keeps my blood pressure under control. And when he impishly shifts this past/future construct into the present—”no longer can the reader ask,” etc.—I no longer need to grind my teeth at his irrational rhetoric: I can simply muster a wry smile.
The best aspect of my discovery is that I’m prepared for his next foray into pseudo-intellectual humor. If, as seems likely, he next imagines the inventor of a machine that eats Irish children and claims that this—somehow—is the next step in poetic evolution, I won’t be repulsed or angered: I’ll grant him the wink and the nod he seems to be looking for.
Thanks for all the fish, Christian!

Comments on: Poetic Machines 06

By: Don Share

By: Joseph Hutchison