"Poetry should be at least as well written as prose." This statement is rather puzzling because poetry, as the putatatively superior mode, should be better written, not come up to some superior prose standard. I think what Pound was driving at was that since poetry ought to be better in the first place, we should reject poetry that doesn't even make it by prose standards. In other words, there is only ever writing, whether it's prose or verse. Bad writing in poetic form, padded verse and the like, is even less acceptable than bad prose, because the standard ought to be much higher. For example, this paragraph I am now writing is not very good prose. If a poem strikes you as less well written than this paragraph, then it isn't defensible.

The implicaton was that there was a lot of verse circulating that was not up to the standards of the best prose writers around at the time.

It's not that poetry should be good prose first, with some poetic value added on, but that it has to surpass the level of good prose to be even considered adequate.

Logopeia is intertextual. It depends on other uses of the word outside of the text. Not just the meaning of the word, but context where you'd expect to find it.

If somebody referred to a particular poet's logopoeia, I would think the reference was to--

Technical or specialized jargon of a particular field; antiquated or literary language, poetic diction; slang; regionalisms; neologisms; deliberate solecisms or grammatical errors; words used in their etymological sense; the creation of an individual poetic "idiolect" out of a particular selection of the available lexion; puns, verbal ambiguity; various types of verbal irony; proper names of a certain sort; syntactic figures (hyperbaton); unusual combinations of any of the above. Use of any of the above in unexpected ways.

So I don't get it when people think of Logopoeia as mostly a figure of "meaning," or the combination of meaning with sound and image. Logopoeia, I would like to think, is its own thing, not some derivative of other poetic devices. I like to think that people who don't accept my definition just don't respond to logopoeia in the first place, don't think it is important, for don't recognize that there are different kind of words.

It could be that my definition of logopoeia is mine alone. I don't think the concept is clear at all in Pound--

Logopoeia, 'the dance of the intellect among words,' that is to say, it employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes into count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play. It holds the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation...

It is not abstract ideas or intellectual content, because it cannot easily be translated. It is the poetic effect gotten from using a word in a particular way in relation to that word's normal or expected usage.

Think of the word "wastrel." Now think of its context, where you would be likely to find it. A Victorian novel? What other words would you be likely to find in its vicinity? (urchin, workhouse) Is it ambiguous? (Yes, it means either an abandoned child or a goodfornothing bum.) Other associations? (waste, waist?). What is the word's register? (archaic, literary, relatively unusual but not unheard of either). Now imagine it where it doesn't belong, its anti-context. Using it there would produce a logopoetic effect because it would clash with its surroundings, it would be used "in a particular way in relation to that word's normal or expected usage."

We can see that this effect is distinct from the visual image of a "wastrel," a word which for me frankly calls up no picture at all. (Ok, I'm lying: my visual analogue to this word is in fact a particular kind of drawing by Edward Gorey.) I can smell the word more than I can see it. It's also goes beyond the sound of the word, because it you didn't have those purely verbal associations this odor would not be produced. It's not a primarily melopoeic effect, then, but a mostly verbal one.

***

Also, by extension, other verbal figures of rhetoric that aren't particularly focussed on the "image" belong to logopoeia. Hyperbaton for example.

I think Creeley is strong in logopoeia. Hart Crane. Stein. Lowell. Donne and Stevens. Guillermo Carnero. Ashbery. I know it when I see it. Pound found it in Laforgue.

It is conspicuous in its absence in the mature poetry of Wright. (His earlier poetry, influenced by New Criticism, has more of it.) It is absent from many translations, and in fact its absence makes discourse sound "translated."

Here's a link to the Lorca translation that I mentioned about a week ago. Mark Statman writes that it should be out in January.

James Wright is a totally original poet. (A separate question from being a good poet or bad.) He doesn't resemble any precursors within American poetry (Roethke?). He certainly bears little resemblance to any European or Latin American sources that I know of (Neruda? I don't think so). His poetry would seem unoriginal if you didn't know that he was the first one to write like that. So whenever I start to write a poem entitled "Reading James Wright's Poem about Reading a Bad Book of Poetry and Wondering What Book it Was, and Whether it Was Really Bad, Then Closing my Eyes and Smelling the Rotten Wood," I have to stop myself.

However much we might claim we value orality and performance, the written text is still the thing. Imagine if most music consumers read scores every day and only once in a while listened to music or went to hear it played. If they heard music, if at all, played (indifferently) by the composer him or herself.

Some poets read well. Some read badly. But it is fair to say that few read well enough to make the experience of hearing that worth while. The average member of the poetry reading audience is a poet who can read aloud just about as well as the average poet reading. If the reader is not good, then every member of the audience is trying to image what the poem would sound like if read well.

Yet this same reader at home, even reading silently, can hear the wonderful music of poetry, noble accents and lucid inescapable rhythms, that are superior to all but the very best performances. Unheard melodies are in fact sweeter.

Only some very highly trained musicians can silently read a score and hear very much.

This tests my limits of badness in another way--



This time, I have left my body behind me, crying

In its dark thorns.

Still,

There are good things in this world.

It is dusk.

It is the good darkness

Of women's hands that touch loaves.

The spirit of a tree begins to move.

I touch leaves.

I close my eyes and think of water.

--James Wright, "Trying to Pray"

This kind of poem was such a stylistic influence on so many people when I myself first began writing, the decade of the 70s. This epoch was also the heyday of kahlil Gibran, and some of the language comes uncomfortably close to that. The particular kind of speaker of this poem is found in many others of the period, by everyone from Simic to Orr and Kuzma. There's something oddly unidiomatic, "translated," in the tone, as if the speaker were not native speaker of English. Nobody talks like that: "I touch leaves." "It is the good darkness."

So there are aspects of the poem that come up against my own ideas of "acceptability." Its sententiousness and simplified language, for example. This badness is potentially interesting, but only if I conclude that it's not wholly on the side of badness. Otherwise there would be no limit testing at all. It's a very beatiful poem in some ways. You can see why this particular mode became influential, and remains so to this day.

Went to a poetry reading by Tony Trigilio tonight. Haven't done that in a while. Julie Dill was there. Steven Schroeder, recently moved to St. Louis. Aaron Belz, needless to say.

If unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way, then shouldn't bad poetry be more interesting?

Or do we follow Pound who stated that mediocre poetry of whatever time and place resembled other mediocre poetry?

"That poetry often hides its light in a bushel of serviceable prose ligatures is something we tend less to forget than work at banishing from our minds intentionally. Just as to some, the writings of an Ammons or an Ashbery offend by thrusting the sentence, already fronting the poet’s insensate thought, further along toward its proscenium’s edge, at times by adopting the hectoring tone of a lecturer and at others by simply extending lines from the page’s far-left margin all the way to the far right. We easily lose sight of how near to the fourteener’s margin of errancy much traditional verse routinely strays, and that does not exclude poems in which metrical regularity is not so much a disguise as the formal donning of a masque (no, that’s not a spelling error) by other means."

To which I say "huh"? From the awkward syllepsis of the "we tend less to forget than work..." construction, to the sentence fragment that follows (which we don't know is a sentence fragment until the end, when we don't find the end to the "just as..." simile); to the inept metaphor of traditional verse straying "near" to the "margin of errancy" of the fourteener--this passage has about as many stylistic flaws as you could fit in 50 or 75 words.

What does this mean? What's the difference between "the formal donning of a masque" and "a disguise." Can one "don" a "masque" as easily as a mask?

I don't get the "to some...offend" construction either. You don't "offend to" someone in English.

Who the fuck is offended by a margin? I've never seen it happen.

In what sense does a sentence "front" a poet's thought? Does it adjoin it, or advance it money, or cover up an illegitimate business? What is the "it" of "its proscenium's edge"? The sentence, the thought? I get that the page is a stage, metaphorically, but I don't know why having a hectoring tone pushes one toward the edge of this stage.

Where are this writer's "serviceable prose ligatures"? Under what bushel are they hidden? (I'm trying to picture a bushel of ligatures.) Why should someone who can't pass freshman English be qualified to write about "prose," let alone verse?

Sorry this does not deserve a link.

Ultimately I'm only interested in a poetry that tests my own limits of acceptability. So it's not a question of blandly accepting everything in a particular school. Take Kerouac. Not a poet I have an easy time accepting--

"I've T S Elioted all the fogs, / Faulknered all the stone, / Balanced nothing gainst something, / Played solitaire, smoked..." ("Desolation Blues")--

Just when you're getting ready to explain why it's bad, you realize that it is very good indeed. Think of all the poets who've never written a line as good as "Faulknered all the stone." (Probably you and most certainly I have never done so.) It's like being 14 all over again and reading "The houses are haunted / by white nightgowns" for the first time. It's a jolt. The window opens again and you realize what it's all about.

This constant testing of limits implies that aesthetic judgment is never suspended, even as its boundaries remain malleable. That is, the threat of the bad, that which cannot be accepted, remains ever present. It is a heightened sense of alertness. Maybe I'm the only one who reads like this, but this is my spin of the implications of Kasey's statement that "If there weren't people who 'didn't get it,' poetry would have no way to identify itself." Usually the one who isn't getting it, in a given situation, is me. Or only partially and skeptically getting it, even with some of my favorite poets.

That's not a criterion for good poetry, just the opposite. Every reader has zones of acceptability, and every interesting poet has zones where certain readers will feel discomfort. Put those two factors together and you have a lot of amazing things happening.

(link here to Kasey's post)

I've gone 35 days now without "breaking the chain." It works better than i could ever have expected.

Lorca Trivia

Robert Motherwell's series of painting "Elegy to the Spanish Republic" started out as an image to which he gave the title "At five in the Afternoon," after Lorca.

Lorca Trivia

Diane Wakoski wrote a poem which recounts a dream: Lorca rides by on a horse and entrusts her with the safekeeping of every gold objects in the world.