Comments on: Kneejerk poetics

By: Galee

Galee — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 08:45:26 +0000

Poetry is a lover’s whine
Report this comment

By: Doodle

Doodle — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:12:36 +0000

Poetry is madness without the madman.
Report this comment

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:30:13 +0000

I digress from the original ironizing intent of this thread, lost weeks ago, anyhow, to address the quotation above from O.W., which happens to be one of my pettest peeves!
The following is from Mark Scroggins’ blog, Culture Industry:
-
… I quoted Oscar Wilde “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling” – which prompted a useful comment from Don Share: “I’m not sure if genuine feeling is the same as sentimentality, but of the latter, Richard Hugo said: ‘Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake.’” That’s a good observation, & deserves as follow-up a bit more of the context of Wilde’s remark (which gets quoted as if it were a free-standing aphorism, rather than a line from Gilbert in “The Critic as Artist”):
the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion. He does not first conceive an idea, and then say to himself, ‘I will put my idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines,’ but, realising the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he conceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, and the mere form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete. From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has ‘nothing to say.’ But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work. He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
To which Ernest replies: “I wonder do you really believe what you say?” A good question – one might argue, I suppose, that by this point in the dialogue Gilbert has become rather shall we say “carried away” by his own rhetoric on behalf of a formalist insincerity, a method for the artist to “multiply his personalities.”
The simplest thing to say is that “genuine feeling” – “sincerity” – is not enough to make good poetry (tho it’s great for voyeuristically interesting blogs), but that poetry can be a way of embodying such genuine feeling in form – a sincere regard for which (& here I follow Zukofsky, & suspect the Divine Oscar would agree) is a necessity for successful verse.
Report this comment

By: Chris Bock

Chris Bock — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:44:56 +0000

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling…”
-O.W.
“There is poetry when we realize we possess nothing”
-Cocteau
“it matters that great poems get written; it doesn’t matter a damn who writes them.”
–E.P.
“All our ingenuity is lavished on getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued.”
–R.F.
Report this comment

By: Jordan

Jordan — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:15:11 +0000

> Funny that modernism
It’s only funny until someone loses an I.
Report this comment

By: john

john — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:04:43 +0000

Pound’s old saw that an epic is “a poem including history.”
Funny that modernism is full of old saws.
Report this comment

By: Dwight Homer

Dwight Homer — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:13:21 +0000

“A poet must have a dry soul.” Howard Nemerov
Report this comment

By: Doodle

Doodle — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:18:38 +0000

“the politics in a poem has to do with how it / enters the world”
Report this comment

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:18:35 +0000

(Oh, I see, you mean what was Morrison’s source for the story. Sorry. I just woke up.)
Report this comment

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:13:54 +0000

John, the quotation tells you who Morrison is quoting. It’s the emperor Tching Tang, “the founder of the Shang dynasty.” He inscribed it on his bath tub (supposedly). But I think the veil of Maya might be onto something.
Report this comment

By: Doodle

Doodle — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:31:56 +0000

I want some of what Maya’s smokin’!
Report this comment

By: john

john — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 05:19:15 +0000

Thanks Michael.
So . . . maybe the source isn’t Confucius? I wonder what Morrison was quoting.
Idle curiosity.
Thanks again.
Report this comment

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:53:54 +0000

Luc Sante has a totes sweet collection of essays called Kill All Your Darlings. Rimbaud, Dylan, New York, cigarettes, the sadness of “show us yr tits,” New Year’s Eve, the octopus Victor Hugo, & heroin. And Ginsberg: “Was ‘Howl’ the last poem to hit the world with the impact of news & grip it with the tenacity of a pop song? … What was the poem about? For me, then, the title accounted for most of it. It stood for I Want to Be Free & We Are Multitudes & The Stars My Destination & incidentally Get Your Hands off Me.”
Report this comment

By: Maya

Maya — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:41:34 +0000

I remain sospechos that that gad-dumn Italian Pound was triangulating with Makaveli, qui aswert: “A new prince should make Everything New,” not in that princely tale but th’ book more Liv(el)y.
Report this comment

By: Marty Elwell

Marty Elwell — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:47:17 +0000

That’s it, “kill your darlings”. Thanks!
Mine was a bit more morbid, but it gets the job done.
Report this comment

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:24:11 +0000

“Kill all yr darlings” is Faulkner; “Kill yr idols” is SY.
Report this comment

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:56:02 +0000

“From the ‘Notes by a Very Ignorant Man’ which he added to the Fenollosa reprint we find that we was searching with sporadic success through the leisurely entries in Morrison’s multi-volume dictionary (1815-22), where he found for instance the character [gives Chinese character] the founder of the Shang dynasty (1766 B.C.) inscribed on his bathtub: Make It New. ‘Renouvelle-toi complèment chaque jour; fais-le de nouveau, encore de nouveau, et toujours de nouveau.’ In ‘the American language,’ 1928, this had yielded ‘Renovate, dod gast you, renovate,’ but Morrison’s was ampler: ‘From hatchet, to erect, and wood. To cut down wood. Fresh, new; to renovate; to renew or improve the state of; to restore or to increase what is good, applied to persons increasing in virtue; and to the daily increase of plants.’ The axe is at the right of the character, a tree at the bottom left. The full maxim repeats the character twice, with the day sign (sun) twice between; in Canto 53 we find,
Tching prayed on the mountain and
wrote MAKE IT NEW
on his bath tub
Day by day make it new
cut underbrush
pile the logs
keep it growing.”
– Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era [Chinese characters & lineation regrettably unrepresentable here]
Report this comment

By: Marty Elwell

Marty Elwell — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:43:51 +0000

- Sometimes you have to kill your babies… (revision)
- There’s a difference between the poem you set out to write and the poem you got.
I’m pretty sure I heard each of these from Steven Cramer.
- Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt. Poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. – da Vinci
Report this comment

By: john

john — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:59:25 +0000

Ah! Pneumatic — got it now. I missed the ref. Too new! Or, stuck in logopoeia, missing the melopoeia! In other words, I pun-ted.
I’ve heard Pound got it from The Analects, but I’m curious to know Where in the Analects, to compare with how Waley, say, or some other tranlator put it. Lazy — trying to avoid reading the whole Waley!
Report this comment

By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:27:23 +0000

I think he said he got it from the emperor Tching Tang (something about a bathtub).
& I already wrote in this thread: make it pneumatic!
Report this comment

By: john

john — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:35:16 +0000

“Go in fear of abstractions.”
(Well, I might consider it, if that sentence weren’t so scary!)
And, oh yeah, can’t believe nobody’s mentioned it:
MAKE IT NEW.
and . . .
News that stays news.
(p.s. Does anybody have the Confucian citation wherewhat Pound supposedly translated “Make it new” from?)
Report this comment

By: Steve S

Steve S — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:48:34 +0000

No ideas but in things…
Report this comment

By: mwschmeer

mwschmeer — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:36:58 +0000

A poem is an artifact of language.
Poetry is what happens in the space between words.
Report this comment

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:58:17 +0000

Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
Beckett
Report this comment

By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:41:16 +0000

To go along with Jon Anderson,
this from another poet:
“Poetry is the theory of heartbreak.”
-
Now from me:
Because of Michael Robbins,
“All that is poetic. . . .” might be
cotton candy or ice cream.
Poetry is that which.
Poetry is a can of worms.
Poetry is a prime number.
Whoever defines poetry/
destroys the universe.
Report this comment

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:58:30 +0000

Good poetry can be cruel – check out Fred Seidel – & bad poetry is often honest – check out Ted Kooser or Sharon Olds.
Report this comment

By: Laurel

Laurel — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:47:13 +0000

Noted.
This is a great post.
Poetry is…
what I think, but cannot speak.
Write, but fail to accurately record.
Report this comment

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:15:15 +0000

Laurel, look closely. That quote was provided by Ashley, not me.
Report this comment

By: drippingmind

drippingmind — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:44:38 +0000

Poetry is freedom for a soul-driven mind.
Report this comment

By: Laurel

Laurel — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:08:33 +0000

Matt-
Your quote: “The secret of poetry is cruelty.” –Jon Anderson
Makes me cringe and reminds of what the Pope recently said, “The Proof of God Is Beauty.”
I suppose bad poetry is cruel, good poetry is honest and sublime. Unless, Anderson means the progenitor to poetry- then yes, I agree. Cruelty is fuel.
Report this comment