Comments on: So Little Depends upon a Little Red Rooster!

By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:22:50 +0000

http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/CGA/Andal/BRKAndalusians.html
If the above link code doesn’t get you there where photos are,
try searching: Andalusian roosters. Andalusians come in
three colors.
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:54:00 +0000

Why do I suspect that Matt’s “real people” is himself?
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By: Patrick Gillespie

Patrick Gillespie — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:32:53 +0000

//but i don’t know how anyone is supposed to answer a question to someone who doesn’t accept any standard definition of the words new, adjective, narrative, emotional.//
I’m not saying I “don’t accept” standard definitions of words.
I’ll be blunt, so I’m hopefully not misunderstood. I’m saying that Seth has good, if not valuable and insightful ideas (I like his blog) but that he’s a poor writer who needlessly falls back on specialized vocabulary, linguistic obscurities, and jargonized language. It’s as much as saying that, at worst, he references the ideas of others without concisely and clearly expressing his own.
The sort of thing I’m pointing out was commented on by Edward Said, way back in 1993 – “Restoring Intellectual Coherence,” in MLANewsletter, Vol. 31, No. 1. He wrote: “…a new fragmentation, an often reckless abandonment of what could be a common intellectual pursuit in favor of highly specialized, exclusivist . . . approaches that destroy and undercut the historical as well as social bases of the humanities”
So…I leave it at that.
This isn’t the direction Don Share meant to go and for that I apologize.
It’s gist for another blog post I suppose.
As for accusations of piousness and un-serious thing… Grow up.
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By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:39:35 +0000

Yay. Yet another instance of plumbers being piously held up as symbols of “real people.”
The McCain campaign, Harriet commenters…same diff.
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By: james stotts

james stotts — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:59:41 +0000

the triadic model of signification is a peircean notion, a cornerstone of modern semiotic thought.
but i don’t know how anyone is supposed to answer a question to someone who doesn’t accept any standard definition of the words new, adjective, narrative, emotional.
seth abramson’s claim, about the difficulty/burden of overcoming the wide circumference of any given cliche, seems like a legitimate one, and it’s a shame that not everyone is willing to give it careful consideration.
what else is interesting is–it seems to me, given seth abramson’s concession-to/promotion-of the MFA culture in america–that a willingness to subject poetry to strident criticism and slow reading is necessary to keep MFAs from destroying poetry. that is, his skeptical approach is invaluable, if only because there has to be a strong answer to the thousand deleterious consequences of poetry institutions. it doesn’t seem likely to me that we will come out of this wholesale academic commodification of literary values intact, or that an MFA, especially as it is defined now, has anything to offer. but if i’m wrong, it’s because an approach like seth’s is able to withstand the system, not because the system in any way engenders it.
it’s a serious problem, being put in the hands of (if these streams are any indication) of unserious thinkers. i don’t necessarily agree with seth, but i do with what he’s trying to do.
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By: Patrick Gillespie

Patrick Gillespie — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:03:55 +0000

//Well, here’s another breathtakingly vast question: are poems written (and, separate question: should they be?) for what Patrick calls “the average reader?” What kind of generalization is “average” here?//
I’ll tell you what the average reader means (to me): my wife (algebra teacher); the builders I work with; the plumbers; the electricians; the farmers; the grocery store owner – readers who are not academically or professionally associated with poetry. A couple of weeks ago I went around asking them to name one poet from the latter half of the 20th century – only about 1 out of 10 could name someone. None could name a single poem let alone a line of verse. I then asked them if they could name someone from the first half. They all said, to a person, Robert Frost. More than half could name a poem or recall a line of verse from Frost’s poetry. (My apologies to anyone who has heard this unscientific survey elsewhere.)
I’m not saying my definition is the only one, but that’s what I mean when I say it – readers who don’t think in terms of genres, or “schools of” or “literature”. They simply like what they like because it inspires them, and remember it for the same reason.
As to whether poems *should* be written for the “average reader”. Poets should be true to themselves. By their own admission, many poets aren’t interested in writing for the readers I’ve described above. It all depends on how a poet wants to be remembered…
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By: Doodle

Doodle — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:53:58 +0000

Well, here’s another breathtakingly vast question: are poems written (and, separate question: should they be?) for what Patrick calls “the average reader?” What kind of generalization is “average” here?
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By: Patrick Gillespie

Patrick Gillespie — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:48:48 +0000

//Patrick’s comment is… I was going to say vacuous, but actually it’s just insulting//
OK, Tom, you haven’t led by example, but maybe you have a point.
Maybe I’m just being insulting. Maybe not. Let’s take a look:
//Should poets write poems that describe things (like, say, this silly-looking rooster) … or not?//
As opposed to what? What is a poem that doesn’t describe? And what does describe mean?
//Traditional (i.e. fully-determined, fully-resolved, fully-bordered) narratives//
What is a traditional narrative? As defined by whom? What is “fully-determined? Fully-resolved? Fully-bordered? Who is defining these terms and in what context?
//have been regarded [...] as being inherently more emotional//
What does “emotional” mean? As opposed to what? Rational? Then what does rational mean? What is representative of these two ideas?
//(let us even say weighty, given Jason Guriel’s adjectival stylings,//
“Adjectival stylings” means what? According to who?
//The irony in this–in the continued near-religious belief, in short, in the adjective//
How is Jason or Seth defining adjective? In what context?
//–is that, whatever Jason may personally feel, many poetry readers are not particularly invested in hearing the sound a rooster makes described in the thousandth way//
According to who? What does “many poetry readers” mean? How many? Which readers? Readers of what poetry? On what evidence?
//…but is it truly powerful enough to overwrite all those intimate, hard-won, highly-personalized, highly-experiential associations I already have with the words “rooster” and “nail” and “wood”?//
Who knows? In what context? In what kind of poetry? Does it matter?
//I’m not personally interested in or invested in poetry concerned only with signs (LangPo), or referents (Imagism), or signifiers (the contemporary lyric)//
Who is defining signs? referents? signifiers? Based on what poets? By whom?
//what poetry can do to frustrate the relationships between these three elements of semiotics.//
What poets? How do you interpret the “three elements of semiotics”? Who is defining them? Rather than letting others do our thinking for us, how does Seth (or anyone here) define these “three elements of semiotics”?
//Writing is manifestly not equatable to “description”//
Says who? In this case, what is meant by writing? What is meant by description?
-//-not if one understands what the word “description” means, how narrow a concept that is. Indeed it is a narrow view of poetry that says its function is merely to reinforce (or just “spice up”) the reader’s pre-existing associations and worldviews;//
Again, says who? What are a reader’s “pre-existing associations and worldviews”? Which culture? What study?
//quite different complaint, which is that nothing new can be said about petals if the manner of speech (the method, not the content) is the same as it always has been since the epic poems of the Romans.//
What is meant by “new”? Who defines “new”? The poet? The reader? What is a “manner of speech?
//A lot of this involves the use of archetypes whose semantic content is, again, extra-rational and born of instinct rather than experience.//
Translate this Tom. What does extra-rational mean? What’s the difference between instinct and experience? Is it the sub-conscious? – by the way, there is no hard evidence that the sub-conscious or un-conscious even exists. What qualifies as archetype? Whose defining it and in what way.
So on and so on and so on…
My question: How does any of this help someone write a better poem – a poem that the average reader wants to read?
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By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:27:12 +0000

And that is why
so much depends
uopn
a left wheel
barrow
filled with drain
water
beside the right
chickens.
[ Note: This jiggered trespass
can mean whatever you want it to mean
but please don't lose your head over it. ]
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By: Tim Upperton

Tim Upperton — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:12:39 +0000

In The Art of Attention, Donald Revell notes that “Language purports to fill a need. But what if, as the eye can see, there is no need? Why represent what is surely present?” Good questions, I think, for poets of every stripe, and the answers, of course, are various and by no means exhausted.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:38:40 +0000

Berryman seems to talk about these things (albeit obliquely) in his characteristically quirky defense of Pound’s poetry, published in Partisan Review ca. 1949; he quotes Edward Thomas saying of EP’s “In Praise of Ysolt” that the poem’s “beauty” is that of its “intensity” – not that “of beautiful words and images and suggestions . . . . the thought dominates the words and is greater than they are.” Could be that in this day and age, however, the words are supposed to dominate…
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By: Tom Harr

Tom Harr — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:53:49 +0000

Patrick’s comment is… I was going to say vacuous, but actually it’s just insulting. If the question is too general and Seth’s remarks are too “wordy,” then why not say something constructive yourself?
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By: mearl

mearl — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:33:32 +0000

Don,
From Peter Cole’s first book Rift…
Not a rooster, rather a pigeon:
unfortunately we lose Peter’s lineation, which is part of the meaning-making of the poem:
I stood, watching
the-pigeon-
incredibly-jerking-its-
head-
back–and-
forth
as it walked.
Neither
ox nor
lion:
no whale;
not
hawk not anyone’s
eagle.
Pigeon: simpleton.
The poem, “Rift”, with the correct lineation is republished in What is Doubled, Poems 1981 – 1998, Shearsman Books.
Martin
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By: Patrick Gillespie

Patrick Gillespie — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:56:39 +0000

Don,
The question you ask and the assertions that Seth makes are so general as to be vacuous. (The texts of Seth’s phenomenally over-wordy arguments remind me of nothing more than Alan Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity “.)
//Should poets write poems that describe things (like, say, this silly-looking rooster) … or not?//
I guess there can only be one answer to such a breathtakingly general question:
It depends.
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:56:00 +0000

Interesting that Keats made the complaint that Clare described too much. Not numerically, but proportionally, Clare does describe more than Keats-=- in the sense that description more than self-expression seems usually to be Clare’s underlying point.
Of course, a huge difference between Clare and Bishop is Bishop’s self-conscious irony. Irony is such a central force in Bishop’s poems that it seems to take the driving role that yearning does in Keats or Shelley. Irony being, in turn, such a major force in the shaping of late twentieth century thought and art, many would say this in itself qualifies her as a major poet,
The wider point to be taken from this, it seems to me, is that the appropriateness and value of certain strategies to poetry is hard to discuss in a historical vacuum, since it is so highly determined by the historical/cultural context.
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:29:35 +0000

Zach,
Do you speak of the Well Wrought Internal Combustion Engine?
When did Clare and Bishop become major poets? To speak of Poetry is to speak of What is Best in Poetry and How that Best is Best acheived; to do otherwise betrays us into a giggly, teenage realm of ‘Oh, I like that!’
Evaluation of the sort our discussion warrants demands a certain sobriety; if carried aloft by a bauble by Bishop, how are we to reason ourselves into any depth whatsoever?
Bishop was an inspired amateur, not a master. “Bight” has a slight charm; its descriptive qualities are ponderous and clumsy, as if a teacher had planted a student in view of a harbor and, as an exercise, said, “Now describe everything you see!” The poem’s charm mostly lies in the similarity of ‘awful’ and ‘cheerful’and the overall ‘inspired amateur’ vibe previously mentioned. The reference to Baudelaire is too self-conscious by half. The poem is no supporting document in our quest.
If ‘description’ is its only virtue, “Bight” collapses. And no, ‘Bight’ does not transcend description. My critique is a radical one.
I suppose the whole thing could be summed up this way. Who would make a better poet? An illiterate naturalist with 20/20 vision or a highly literate blind person who mostly stays indoors?
Thomas
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By: Zachariah Wells

Zachariah Wells — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:12:25 +0000

Thomas,
Engines have fan belts and radiators, but they’re not what propel the car forward. The prime motive force of “The Bight” is description. Without it, all the little qualifications and asides–some of which are highly descriptive–you’ve snipped out are pointless, as are “awful” and “cheerful.” Does one need to point out that these are ADJECTIVES and that their grammatical role is to DESCRIBE the activity in the bight? Granted, a description in abstract terms and one that seems to point to the speaker’s state of mind, but a description naetheless. You can say that Bishop’s description, like Clare’s, transcends mere description. You can say that mere description ain’t poetry. But this is tautologous. And it ain’t what you said.
Z
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By: Thomas Brady

Thomas Brady — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:03:22 +0000

I’ve always thought of Lowell/Bishop as looser, anecdotalized, watered-down Auden, and Bishop’s ‘chattiness-disguised-as-description’ style (a nice style, don’t get me wrong) comes right out of Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts, which is THE 20th century poem, in my opinion, a poem that manages to sum up Eliot, Pound, Williams, Larkin, Bishop, and Ashbery, etc etc. The entire 20th century canon whirls about “Musee des Beaux Arts,” a hub-poem on a Northern European late Renaissance painting. Auden, and a bunch of others ‘got it’: poetry tells; it does not describe.
Thomas
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:54:32 +0000

Zach,
Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Bight’ is a great example, thanks. It SEEMS to be a descriptive poem, but it’s not; listen to how CHATTY it is:
“like this”
“how sheer”
“and the boats”
“dry as matches”
“rather than being absorbed”
“if one were Baudelaire one could probably hear”
“it seems to me”
“There is a fence”
The poem’s best feature? The WORD-COMBO “awful” and “cheerful” at the end.
“Description” is the least of what this poem actually does.
Thomas
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By: Seth Abramson

Seth Abramson — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:18:21 +0000

Henry,
I think providing the best approximation of what I mean would send us back to Tristes Tropiques by CLS; his accounts of shamanic healing suggest that there are narratives whose force resides almost entirely in connotative meaning, narratives which even when they do not entirely cohere for a particular listener (one example given is a woman struggling with a difficult childbirth) nevertheless call upon such powerful and sub-/semi-conscious associations that they can actually beneficially affect the biology of the subject/audience. All of this is related to the semantic content of medieval heraldry, Yeats, Apollinaire, Symbolism/Aestheticism, maybe even Donovan Leitch’s believe in the “natural high,” but as to methods and temperaments moreso than ends: “art for art’s sake” (the Decadent battle-cry) is about as far from what I mean as possible (which instead is probably much closer to “art for people’s sake”). Deep Image poetry and surrealism are not quite right either–they create diffusion, not singularity.
I guess the question is, how is it that what Barthes called “writerly” literature, which often evokes moreso than describes, does *not* always lead to a plurality of readings but to one? How can many disparate readers “complete” or find comfort and solace in a single fractured or non-cohesive narrative? Campbell had ideas on this, and good ones, yet to take Campbell at face value would lead us to over-determined, mapped-out texts (as Propp’s work was dedicated to delineating with numbers), essentially “readerly” texts which would, like much metaphoric writing, merely make of the audience a spectator (or worse, a sign-accountant) and lead only to an inarticulable/non-participatory sense of peace/well-bring. Easily won, and thus useless.
I think there are ways to simultaneously a) force the participation of each individual reader, while b) bringing many disparate, participatory readers to the same reading of the text and the same experience of their own humanness. In the first part of this equation lies “implied narrative”–a device both “mainstream” and “experimental” writers are equally hostile toward, as one group says it goes too far and the other not far enough, so that neither sees its utility or purpose (i.e., it’s in everyone’s aesthetic blind-spot)–and the latter portion is the “universal.” Iconology, biosemiotics, all of it probably has something to say about why a lion on a banner connotes courage, when there’s no literal reason or basis for the connection whatsoever. In other cultures it may not be a lion, but an otter, or an antelope, but whatever it is it represents a unique language for that group which is a) instinctive, b) inarticulable, c) non-literal (extra-descriptive), and d) *intensely* persuasive in the way the most advanced rhetorical techniques are persuasive.
In both requiring the reader’s instincts and frustrating his/her context-dependent cognitive processes, in simultaneously suggesting structure (narrative) but also disjunction (narrative-by-implication) and using decontextualization/defamiliarization (universality) at the same time as emotionality (through the familiar oral devices native to both rhetoric and storytelling, the same reason talented attorneys win jury trials and that Campbell’s “monomyth” is an emotional experience as well as a metaphysical one), an implied universal narrative (or universal implied narrative) can alter our time-and-space-dependent (context dependent) modes of thought.
A lot of this involves the use of archetypes whose semantic content is, again, extra-rational and born of instinct rather than experience. In the Amazonian river basin, these were such a powerful natural/non-pharmaceutical narcotic that they could actually bring new life into the world which otherwise might have perished. This is tapping into a force far more potent than the merely descriptive.
I don’t agree with whoever said, above, that metaphors help us to “remember what we’re forgot,” as–as a matter of craft–a metaphor fails if it addresses a comparison we make only unconsciously, because metaphors as rhetorical devices attempt to persuade us at the chakra (to steal from a Hoagland essay I actually largely disagree with) of the head, not the gut. Thus the metaphor only helps us see what we already think we know, but better, and does not get to the primal. But (again) this isn’t a Deep Image rant, as I strongly believe head-oriented craft devices like rhetoric and rhythm and sound and narrative and metaphysics can be used to access the primal. Head-and-gut poetry, I’m speaking of here, not merely one or the other. A poetry which, consequently, maps itself atop the entire semiotic chain of referent-signifier-signified, and not just one piece of it.
I think a “third-way poetics” is in there somewhere, honestly I do, and one day someone will “find” it.
S.
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By: Zachariah Wells

Zachariah Wells — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:04:22 +0000

I think Annie Finch raises an interesting question. It’s not just post-Romantics who have raised such objections. John Clare didn’t like the way that Keats used the nightingale as a trope. Keats’ complaint about Clare, funnily enough, was that Clare described too much…
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:12:04 +0000

I wonder if Seth’s objection to metaphor is related to the objection many critics have made to Romantic poetics, on the grounds that it appropriates and objectifies the external world, simply to reify and express the poet’s emotions.
Don, that’s a subtle way to involve EB that she probably would have loved.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:49:01 +0000

Seth writes :
“yet what comforts me more, and many others besides, is the sort of metonymic thinking which allows–importantly, through decontextualization, not contextualization–the referents of my world to be defamiliarized in a way that empowers rather than alienates me. For me, the notion of a universal implied narrative moves toward this end.”
Seth, would you mind elaborating a little on what you mean by “a universal implied narrative”?
For me this relates to the tendency of mid-20th cent. Chicago critics like RS Crane, who rejected the strictly verbal fixations of the New Criticism, and went back to Aristotle to ground poetry in a concept of mimesis. By this they (& Aristotle) meant something other than “realism”. Rather they argued that the “substantial”, structuring form of poetry resided not in the surface elements of the verse form or the diction, but in the plot – with which the listener identified on some level, emotionally & intellectually.
For me this also rhymes in a curious way with D. Chiasson’s essay on Cavafy in the current New Yorker, where he contrasts Pound’s poem CONTAINING history, with Cavafy’s sense of LIVING IN history – of people defined by a “universal narrative” which is not past, but inescapably present, personal & transpersonal.
But maybe you have another sense of this entirely.
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By: Krishna K. Bista

Krishna K. Bista — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:39:01 +0000

wow, poem about the whole roster. That will be a real big poem. Why don’t you think about composing one only on leg or wing or any other part. That’s lovely nice bird with so much creativity–each of us let us write something on………………….
A poet can see what I can not see! You could be that…
Krishna Bista
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By: Zachariah Wells

Zachariah Wells — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:17:18 +0000

Thomas Brady,
Just so I know where you stand on this, would you say that Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Bight” is not “good poetry”?
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:20:25 +0000

Michael Robbins, you wrote:
“Description: who needs it, I know, right, the world’s been so perfectly described already. Bah.”
It isn’t that the ‘world’s been so perfectly described already,’ it’s that it will NEVER be described to our satisfaction. And this is why we write poetry–which has nothing to do with description, which is an escape from description. The “Greek army” in your example is powerfully NOT THERE. This is the point, I suppose, on which we can all agree.
Description implies lack, since description is the attempt to replace, or re-make, what is absent. Description never replaces; it clumsily re-makes, and often does so with errors, and poetry gains importance precisely because the descriptive task is so wanting.
I’m reminded of Hegel and his explanation of “this.” When we say “this,” we think we are being specific (descriptive) when actually we are being as general as can be; the tree, “this,” is really the forest, “this.”
The same applies to our rooster friend.
Between ‘strutting male,’ ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ and ‘Gallus domesticus,’ abysses yawn from which we shall never return.
Description is a cul-de-sac we meet when running from cliche.
Good poetry has nothing to do with it.
Thomas
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By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:49:17 +0000

Seth, that clears some things up but gets my position backwards: clearly what you call “sign-fetishistic” systems are concerned to undermine referentiality, at least in the sense I intend. De Man goes so far as to speak of the absolute random nature of language as meaning-making. I am, rather, interested in the way signs describe things, not how they fail to do so. That is to say, when I say I am not interested in the rooster, I mean I am more interested in what the adequacy or newness of description tells me about language’s relation to the world, about how language can illuminate or obscure the world, than I am about whether it teaches me something about roosters. I am excited by Whitman’s “The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, / The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree” because he has managed to express the familiar in a way (what strikes me as a beautiful or aesthetically compelling way, which is harder to talk about) that reminds me of its strangeness — but this is not a matter of being excited that my associations are overridden as much as it is an excitement that words can be put together in ways I did not expect to tell me what I already knew but had forgotten to know was very strange indeed. I suppose I am a formalist in the Shklovskian sense: “in considering the feeling one must consider it from the point of view of composition” (& yes, I could discuss the drawbacks of this model, or of “Art as Device” or formalism in general, but I am talking about how I respond as a reader). As for metaphor, it is not necessary for description except in the sense that all language is metaphorical — of course the two often coincide, but even then I am taken by Donald Davidson’s thesis that metaphors are literal: they are not deliberately false but mean exactly what they say.
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By: LH

LH — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:38:53 +0000

Joseph, Bill, Henry, Bill, Thomas, Henry, Thomas, Bill, Michael, Michael, Annie
oh, Annie!
Bill, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas….
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By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:07:08 +0000

i agree with what Michael Robbins says above . . .
isn’t it the artist’s task, per Shklovsky, to make the rooster roostery?
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:49:52 +0000

Meanwhile, look at what prose-writers do with roosters. This is from Chicago’s own Maude Hutchins’ novel, Victorine; after getting tipsy on communion wine in church, our narrator stumbles upon a hen and rooster mating (top the simile herein, poetry-writing smarty-pantses!):
“Poor Victorine, it looked as if her whole Sunday was used up preparing her for a sexual act and it had taken place in the barnyard, played by very minor stage-hands. Well, the greedy ardor and the final mounting disgust can sure be described as merely physical like too much lobster, and no harm has been done by the extraneous to her soul. A good and dreamless sleep in which she plays no part at all, the sleep of the young and the good and the exhausted, will purify her heart and give her strength for other daylight nightmares – the big exaggeration of real life that does seem to the very young like a king-sized, out-of-drawing and hypnagogic bad dream, as if the lenses in their eyes were borrowed from colts and fillies, and the very size of the extravaganza, the enormity of it, implied hostility.”
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