Fully Not There

Posted on May 22, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Stephen Cain in the introduction to an issue of Open Letter dedicated to Steve McCaffery “Breakthrough Nostalgia: Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now” (Fourteenth Series, Number 7) references Clint Burnham’s monograph Steve McCaffery and His Works (ECW, 1996) and points out that the book is “notable for the first queer reading of McCaffery’s poetry.” Curious?

Burnham’s ruminations occur in a section on “Lyric and Postlyric”. Queerness is an answer to a question.

What are we to make, then, of apparently “lyric” books by McCaffrey such as Intimate Distortions, Evoba, In England Now That Spring, and Knowledge Newer Knew? Significantly, what unites these various forays into the maligned poetic form is their continuing attention to a maligned social form: that is, these texts are concerned with queerness. Intimate Distortions is a mistranslation of the great lesbian poet Sappho’s lyrics; Evoba takes the homosexual philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s texts and reappropriates them; even In England Now That Spring, cowritten with Nichol, deals tangentially with the gay erotics of literary collaboration. (The Four Horseman were misrepresented over the years as a gay group.)

The Four Horsemen were a Canadian sound-poetry group consisting of bpNichol, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery and Rafael Barreto-Rivera, active from 1970 to 1988. I believe the dates reflect a certain historical moment important to the contexts of the parenthetical disavowal registered by Burnham.

I want to foreground the coming out move by Burnham which appears later in the piece and functions as a kind of undressing to McCaffery’s cross-dressing. Note its expression is triggered by the uttering of a question:

But in identifying certain formal strategies in McCaffery’s work, am I merely doing for poetry what Elaine Showalter claims Terry Eagleton and Jonathan Culler do for theory: cross-dressing to gain some political authority as it is being denied to straight, white, male authors?

But the semiotic cross-dressing rehearsed in McCaffery’s book, instead of gaining authority for the author or the text, calls into question sexual difference, seeing it as a textual effect in much the same way that the subject itself is an effect of “shifters.”

Earlier in the piece, Burnham presented an explication of a passage from McCaffery’s chapbook Shifters. It is worth examining at length for its play of before and after reordering of quotations (something i do myself) and how the passage and its explication plug into material from a review which takes the form of a set of quotations filled with lacunae. Watch for the holes.

As McCaffery notes in “A Note,” “shifters shift within a topography and topology of text where every ‘i’ is an ‘here’ every ‘you’ a ‘there’. poems then of openness and closure. semiotic bars and semiotic centres unfolding as tests of their own meanings” (n. pag.). But just before this is the sentence “a true subject is a barred subject.” What does this mean? Barred in the Saussurean sense, in which S/s is the doxological code for a century of linguistics and theory? Barred as in kept out — which also means kept in (within bars)? This last potential meaning is supported elsewhere in the text by lines such as “instants out of discourse” and “but you’re always outside / of what i’m in.”

In light of the consistent attention that McCaffery pays to the visual, the “bar” also brings to mind how the signifier (S) and signified (s) are separated. As Davies notes in “Steve/steve” (the title, of course, plays with the Saussurean diagram), “It’s troubling to me that the Signifier and signified have been made to assume the missionary position. … [M]eaning is inherent in discernible differences. … [T]he thesis seems homophobic in extremis” (57). He charges that the bar is that of conventional heterosexuality, which schematic is reproduced in Saussurean linguistics; Shifters, then, while formally akin to the gay strategies that Chadwick identifies, is still complicit with compulsory heterosexuality. Although the lyric is being deconstructed, the lyre is still powerful.

Sutures:

Burnham will go on in his career to explore Lacan (and not be so mystified by the references to barred subjects).

Alan Davies “Steve/steve” Review of McCaffrey’s Panopticon and North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973-1986. Writing 25 (1990) pp. 49-59.

Joseph Chadwick “Toward Gay Reading: Robert Glück’s ‘Reader'” in Easthope and Thompson Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory (1991) pp. 40-52.

And thanks to Stephen Cain for pointing out the site of queer content and in some regards queer style.

And so for day 891
22.05.2009

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Enlightened Ears

Posted on May 21, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Miriam Nichols in “Deep Convention and Radical Chance: The Two Postmodernisms of Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser” in W [dix] a Duncan Delirium published by the Kootenay School of Writing invites her reader to identify with humanism and become attuned to noise

As well, a 21st century humanism must grow ears for noise: by definition, there is no accommodating of incommensurability, there is only the listening for it, a willingness to suspend immediate judgement and to share planetary space despite unresolvable differences.

And a few days later I found myself engaged in reading the jointly published work of Stephen Cain and Jay MillAr Double Helix which is a book formed along the lines of an ABC with one strand going from A to Z and the other Z, Y, X and so on to A. The strands appear on facing pages until you hit upside down print: the helix is doubled for if you turn the book around and start at the other end you get the other author’s helix. Of course this poses interesting choices for reading, let alone for adequately quoting and attributing. It’s a version of formalist noise.

So back to listening for noise. In what I think is the Jay MillAr portion on page 11 at the entry “Distraction” I find this sentence: “The sound was of letters striking each other in that horrifying way we became so used to in the end.” This is a meditation on habituation for throughout the “Distractions” entry we have been treated to sounds appearing in reduplicated words: water striking water, stone striking stone, air striking air … laughter against laughter, leaf against leaf … paper striking paper. And if we pause, we become aware of the sound of page turning page and other noises that surround us. The text is maddening but not mad (“we became” is in the past and perhaps overcome — it’s not “we have become” continuing into the present). And it evokes for me some of what Nichols wants to evoke by the figure of “ears for noise”. I am of course making a link between noise and madness and literature. They call, each after their own fashion, for a suspending, for a time, judgement (that horrifying way we become used to it in the end foreclosed).

As you may have noticed, highly attuned as you are, that the piece I quoted from Nichols earlier comes from an enumerative context and now I deposit another quotation from just before the “as well” remark about growing sensitive ears:

We need a new humanism that expands and renovates enlightenment ideas of the free, rational, centered and responsible subject as a limit concept for what is an acceptable mode of human life.

It is a way that I believe must exhibit toleration to explore benign madness as a means to renovate free and rational subjects, especially as careful readers attuned to noise. And I’m mindful here of a tweet by Jim Bartley @bartleybabica who wrote “The mentally ill exist in and act within the preoccupations and structures of their society, with all its strengths & prejudices.” His context was in regards to an exchange about mass murders. But the statement is far more acute for me in the context of benign madness which calls upon society to be humane and to exhibit the tolerant virtues of a robust civic humanism. To listen.

And so for day 890
21.05.2009

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

OED versus OCR

Posted on May 20, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Paul Dutton, “Solitude,” from Horse d’oeuvres: Four Horsemen (Toronto: General Publishing 1975) is reproduced in Caroline Bayard’s The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism. It is a concrete poem that functions by substraction. [First line, middle, and last line are composed of the word “solitude” typed four times without breaks; the reader is invited to reassemble words from the spaces and letters that comprise the lines in between; only letters that occur in “solitude” are used.] I am intrigued by Bayard’s encounter with the poem. She writes:

All nouns, verbs, and adjectives in the poem are rigourously derived by subtraction from the original set of letters; nothing is added. The totality is self-contained, with the kernel term opening a wealth of signifieds and permutations to the initially sceptical eye of the viewer […] Those signifieds operate either as complete units (‘toil’ / ‘destitute’ / ‘old’ / ‘dust’ / ‘elude’ / ‘sole’ / ‘stud’ / ‘lust’ / ‘ode’ / ‘to’ / ‘dilute’) or as unfinished ones (‘desult’ calling forth desultory one can presume — and ‘dolus’ impossible for me to complete let alone identify). With the exception of ‘lit’ they are all identifiable within one language.

So a hunting we will go. “Desult” — could it lie in an other bed like “lit” which can be illuminated by either French or English? First “dolus” which is Latin for trick or ruse. Appropriate for this puzzle composed of jumping letters.

Could the “Desult” incorporate a leap? The spacing leaves room for such a possibility: des-u-lt [an “i” could be dropped in between the “des” and the “u”] So we go in search of “desiult” and it appears that it may be a legal term. And we find it in A General Abridgment Able Modern Determinations in the Courts of Law and Equity Being a Supplement to Viner’s Abridgement. By Several Gentlemen in the Respective Branches of the Law. Volume the Fourth. 1801. or a facsimile thereof. Because what through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been picked up as “desiult” is default [with a broken “a” to give the “i” and the “f” is interpreted as a long “s”]. We are far too clever. And are saved by the scan.

We move off-line to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) and find the form “desult” !! [Yes the OED is online but search engines cannot penetrate its solitude.]

“Dolus” is not in the OED, alas.

And all this close reading reveals that /solidus/ could with wider spacing come out of the 4 times repeated “solitudesolitudesolitudesolitude”. And other jumps are prompted / / / / skipping along letters and sense.

And so for day 889
20.05.2009

Posted in Poetry, Reading | Leave a comment

Foot Work

Posted on May 19, 2009 by Francois Lachance

For a certain generation of gay men, we read with recollected pleasure set pieces that describe the collective and ecstatic experience of a night of dancing. Set pieces like the one below:

Twice so far that evening I’d arrived at that specific and desirable point in a night of hard dancing which I named “stepping into the box.” This was how Jeffrey and I had come to express that almost magical, seamingly impossible moment we’d both experienced and in search of which we drove ourselves onto the dance floor week after week. In laymen’s physics, it was that precisely perfect output of physical energy required to sustain a high degree of complex rhythm and motion without any apparent effort. In more Zen terms, it was the attaining of a certain point of mental and emotional abstraction and physical enervation in which our bodies ego-lessly, will-lessly, danced by themselves! Were danced! The effects were exhilarating, the intricate cross rhythms virtually levitating our bodies off the dance floor for periods of nine or ten seconds at a time. A friend had once filmed from the sidelines while we were in “stepping into the box,” and he reported that our feet did touch the dance floor, but only once for every six or seven times anyone else around us touched down.

From Felice Picano Like People in History (New York: Viking, 1995) pp. 338-339. I am totally with the Zen zone description where however the realism gives me pause is the levitation. Certainly the sense of soaring, of lifting and flying is resonant. But the never touching the floor for ten seconds at a time — trick of the film!? The aerial lightness just doesn’t jive for me with (the undescribed) pounding tramping beat. Still I want to believe that gravity somewhere is overcome even for a brief moment.

In another world (in a text published in 1982), a different, less exceptional view, makes the power of dance available to the reader — one that plays with the intertext of a children’s song (“Sur le pont d’Avignon”).

Dans un tel silence, on voit les ponts. C’est de nouveau relié: on sait que lire, c’est lier. On lit mieux encore: on voit que le pont est une trame de cordons infernaux. On voit la chaine aussi. On peut choisir de sauter, sauter, toujours plus haut, sur le pont, pour le défoncer.

Et quand ça défonce, on rit zen, on rit comme avant d’avoir oublié ce qu’est le rire. On tombe dans un autre étage du réel. On tourne, derviche tourneur, dans un autre monde.

From Yolande Villemaire Adrénaline as cited in Caroline Bayard The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism p. 92.

We are bound to the text by reading which in the French is related to binding (the anagrams “lier” and “lire” serve to underscore the point) and also to the simple notion (via etymology from the Latin lego) to a bringing together, a gathering, a collecting. So together we can jump ever higher (“sauter, toujours plus haut”) and once the bridge has been smashed we can accede to Zen laughter and twirl like dervishes.

And whirl we do… Almost like making the perfect liaison to thicken a sauce… It is reading as binding that brings me back to Picano remarking on a place in time.

None of us in the media, none of us in the so-called gay community that had developed in the decade since the Stonewall riot, seemed to have any real program for what we were doing. Naturally we had a public agenda: sodomy laws were to be repealed, discrimination was to be ended, all that. But in other, less defined, more ordinary, more social areas, we were experimenting with different things. This entire “gay” business was still so new, so unprecedented, how could we know what we were doing? We were just trying to do things right. Which meant not as heterosexuals did them, or perhaps not as our parents and teachers did them, and that sometimes meant being outrageous and sometimes meant being merely true to ourselves.

And now? Do we dance differently? Do we prepare sauces the traditional way? How is it that we are to read stomping and twirling and jumping and levitating? Beating and whisking?

And so for day 888
19.05.2009

Posted in Reading | Tagged | Leave a comment

Viscera

Posted on May 18, 2009 by Francois Lachance

As I was reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje I was struck by how one particular passage of hallucinated anatomical rendering was like the viscerally-inflected passages that one finds in Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. The one was published in 1970 and the translation of the other appeared in 1975. There is no question of influence. Confluence, perhaps.

Ondaatje remarks in a 2008 afterward that

one day I walked into Coach House Press and found some of the printers and designers there listening to a tape that the Vancouver artist Roy Kiyooka had made of himself reading one of the prose sections in the book. As I listened I was for the first time shocked at the violence of it, almost scared of it.

Part of the impact is the use of first person pronouns — creates an identificatory mechannism. Consider the scene recounted by Billy where after days of riding chained to a horse this happens — a hand is plunged through the body:

Down the long cool hand went scratching the freckles and warts in my throat breaking through veins like pieces of long glass tubing, touched my heart with his wrist, down he went the liquid yellow from my busted brain finally vanishing as it passed through soft warm stomach like a luscious blood wet oasis, weaving in and out of the red yellow blue green nerves moving uncertainly through wrong fissures ending pausing at cul de sacs of bone then retreating slow leaving the pain of suctions then down the proper path through pyramids of bone that were there when I was born, through grooves the fingers spanning the merging paths of medians of blue matter, the long cool hand going down brushing cobwebs of nerves the horizontal pain pits, lobules gyres notches arcs tracts fissures roots’ white insulation of dead seven year cells clinging things rubbing them off on the tracts of spine down the cool precise fingers went into the cistern of bladder down the last hundred miles in a jerk breaking through my sacs of sperm got my cock in the cool fingers pulled it back up and carried it pulling pulling flabby as smoke up the path his arm had rested in and widened.

And it goes on and our hero can claim, and does, to have been truly fucked.

And the Wittig, you wonder?

There are scenes of entrails wreathed around necks, devourings, flayings. But what I wanted to draw attention to here is the sections written out in all caps just like an ancient Roman inscription. These are made up of anatomical lists. Though all that they are is lists, the pilling on conveys the muchness of the body. Take this listing:

THE ARTERIAL BLOOD THE AORTIC
BLOOD THE VENULES THE
ARTERIOLES THE CAPILLARY VES-
SELS THE AORTA THE CAROTID
THE CEPHALIC THE JUGULAR THE
CORONARY THE OESOPHAGEAL
THE PULMONARY THE FACIAL THE
TEMPORAL THE SUBCLAVIAN THE
MAMMARY THE BRACHIAL THE
MESENTERIC THE RENAL THE LUM-
BAR THE ILIAC THE SACRAL THE
RADIAL THE SAPHENOUS THE
TIBIALS THE VENA CAVA THE
PORTAL VEIN THE PULMONARY
THE COAGULATION THE CLOTTING
THE CONCRETIONS THE CLOTS
THE SOLIDIFICATIONS

Anatomy becomes geography; territory conquered.

And so for day 887
18.05.2009

Posted in Poetry | Tagged | Leave a comment

Paratexts Entries Replicas Epitaphs

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Francois Lachance

No reprise. From the back of the box that houses a folding fan of text:

WHEN MY BROTHER DIED I MADE AN EPITAPH FOR
HIM IN THE FORM OF A BOOK. THIS IS A REPLICA
OF IT, AS CLOSE AS WE COULD GET.
— ANNE CARSON

I place the paratext from Anne Carson’s Nox alongside this excerpt from Paul Monette’s preface to Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog.

In the summer of 1984 Roger and I were in Greece together, and for both of us it was a peak experience that left us dazed and slightly giddy. We’d been together for ten years, and life was very sweet. On the high bluff of ancient Thera, looking out across the southern Aegean toward Africa, my hand grazed a white marble block covered edge to edge with Greek characters, line after precise line. The marble was tilted face up to the weather, its message slowly eroding in the rain. “I hope somebody’s recorded all this,” I said, realizing with a dull thrill of helplessness that this was the record, right here on the stone.

A kind of reprise. Another pointer to an attempt at translating some of the words from that preface. Displacements.

And move on to quote from Carson on the nature of translation. From Nox [no pagination]
No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I never arrived at the translation […] Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
There follows this which is also a comment on the form of the folded/screen text:

Take
the
word
“entry”
as
used
of
the
arrangement
of
the
contents
of
a
lexicon.

And a few leaves latter it all returns to play with the thought that there is no exit from entries: “In one sense it is a room I can never leave, perhaps dreadful for that. At the same time, a place composed entirely of entries.” And what an appropriate image for a replica of an epitaph.

And so for day 886
17.05.2009

Posted in Poetry, Translations | Leave a comment

Asymptotes

Posted on May 16, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Reprise from my tripping over the gap between teaching and l earning:

What is shown is open to imitation. What is sown without coercion is adopted without compunction. And sometimes not immediately. And sometimes not at all. It’s the difference between teaching and learning.

And to connect this take on teaching-learning gap I bring this description from an article by Fadi Abou-Rihan (appearing in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature Special Issue on “Deleuze, Guattari, and the Philosophy of Expression” Volume XXIV, Number 3, September 1997):

it must require a shift away from the customary archaeological model of knowledge as an endless pursuit of depths, precedents, fixed itineraries, and hierarchical truths to a geographical or topographical one emphasizing surfaces, movements, disguises, production, and play.

Of course, I have cheated a little — the referent of “it” in the above quotation is not a gap between teaching and learning but “queer theory”. But I found it difficult to resist the appropriation because of the appeal to disguise and to play found in this article (“Queer Sites: Tools, Terrains, Theories”). The “it” kind of floats on the page.

However inappropriate the rapprochement, I do think the appeal to Deleuze is useful in thinking about the teacher-learner gap (yes, I have refigured it as a distance between persons or actants). The teacher is never quite sure how much or what has been conveyed to the learner; conversely the learner is never sure on just how much there is to receive from a given teacher — if all there is has indeed been received. The communication between persons is imperfect; there is always a residue which is here figured as a gap.

These ruminations call to mind for me, the characterization given by Richard Fleming of Stanley Cavell (as part of an afterward to Cavell’s Bucknell Lectures). It amounts to a not finding the philosopher in the words:

Hence a problem encountered in continuing to read and search for Cavell is that the text’s thoughts and voices are neither exactly Cavell’s nor not Cavell’s. In their state of, say, repressed thoughts, they represent his further, next, unattained but attainable, self. To think otherwise, is to attribute the origin of his thoughts simply to the other, thoughts which are then, as it were, implanted in him by let us say some Wittgenstein or Emerson or Thoreau, which is to lose the self, lose Cavell, not acknowledge the confession he is making. […] All my words are someone else’s. What but philosophy, of a certain kind, would tolerate the thought?

It is a nice way to think about the teaching-learning gap: to place the figure of an “attainable self” at the centre of the pedagogical enterprise. And around it all the play of disguise and production.

And so for day 885
16.05.2009

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Manners

Posted on May 15, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Reprise from my own meditations on quotations:

Quotations, too, participate in various genres. Some are illustrative, some are authoritative, some are epigraphs. And like drawings, quotations often need to be accompanied by words.

This leads me to an example. For the longest time, I resisted A.S. Neill’s contention in Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing that manners could not be taught. This opening to the chapter on “Manners” buckled against my experience and the wise practice of my parents who inculcated in me not only a sympathy for etiquette but also a moral value in treating everyone with dignity and respect. I sincerely thought that I was taught this. Neill tells it otherwise:

To have good manners means to think of others, no — to feel for others. One must be group-conscious, have the gift of putting oneself in the other man’s shoes. Manners prohibit the wounding of anyone. To be mannerly is to have genuine good taste. Manners cannot be taught, for they belong to the unconscious.

Well. For ages, I just thought this was wrong. Until it dawned upon me that we have different meanings of “to teach”. I now recall from the movies the line that proceed a wallop of a whipping: “I’m gonna teach ya a lesson.” Teaching for me is less about pounding points into some one as seducing through mimesis: modelling discrete elements that are readily imitated and encouraging repetition with variation to make what is acquired innate.

Most ironically, in my copy of Summerhill I had copied onto a yellow sticky a listing of virtues from the foreword by Eric Fromm and remarked how they aligned with the traditional cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude). And marvellously when I returned to the context, I found the important characterization of teaching as non-violent. See:

Neill shows uncompromising respect for life and freedom and a radical negation of the use of force. Children reared by such methods will develop within themselves the qualities of reason, love, integrity, and courage, which are the goals of Western humanistic tradition.

What is shown is open to imitation. What is sown without coercion is adopted without compunction. And sometimes not immediately. And sometimes not at all. It’s the difference between teaching and learning.

And so for day 884
15.05.2009

Posted in Introductions | Tagged | Leave a comment

Clashes

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Reprise from Clint Burnham The only poetry that matters: reading the Kootenay School of Writing:

[T]he work we do as critics, as teachers, as readers, turns out to have implications for our everyday lives, as well as for the social world that we inhabit.

And in his poetry we come across this:

a hardhat over a turban
isn’t anywhere so funny
as a sheet over a suit

Quite apart from the content which gives an “odd” inflection to the meaning of “funny”, there is something here akin to a sketch, a drawing awaiting some further elaboration (these three lines are set off in their own stanza before the poem “Betty” appearing in Buddyland resumes).

This is the type of poetry that suggests (here a human rights case over Sikh headgear above a hint of Klansman drapery) and this is why I want to bring this type of verbal manifestation into the orbit of “drawing”, especially drawing considered as a “vehicle for exploration and invention”. I am quoting Peter Campbell on a show at the British Museum (London Review of Books, 27.05.2010).

If this were an exhibition of paintings, they would be easier to label. With drawings you need words to describe uses and degrees of finish: ‘scribble’, ‘sketch’, ‘cartoon’, ‘study’, ‘design’, ‘contract drawing’. Some drawings, made as ends in themselves, can be called ‘presentation drawings’, others may have been made as part of a painter’s education. Some seem to have no purpose other than to please the maker. In Leonardo’s red chalk profiles of an old and a young man, young beauty and crumpled age are so well represented in the young man’s ringlets and the old man’s wrinkled skin that pleasure in mastery is reason enough for their existence.

Notice how genre is key in approaching drawing. Similarly the verbal artefact and its reception are imbricated in questions of genre. It is of course interesting to extend these meditations on genre to the matter of citation. Quotations, too, participate in various genres. Some are illustrative, some are authoritative, some are epigraphs. And like drawings, quotations often need to be accompanied by words.

And so for day 883
14.05.2009

Posted in Poetry | Leave a comment

Detritus

Posted on May 13, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Reprise from Touch by Gabriel Josipovici:

For it is never possible to tell in advance where the boundaries will be or even if they exist.

Which resonates nicely with this opening line from “The Surprises of the Superhuman” by Wallace Stevens:

The palais de justice of the chambermaids

The straining after sense is a habit hard to break; it keeps one reading even in the allusive style but elusive syntax offered up by Clint Burnham in this excerpt from Buddyland which frustrates as much as it rewards:

under each when man gut daschshund
Handel man, he’s the greatest
take the money and run has an approval
I sit known no emerald city

This is writing that is enticing and stand offish — it’s whorish. The delivery depends on what you pay: sit city become sin city or arisen out of it. Similarly counting Stevens among the whorish poets may seem like a rebuke but it is not — it is an acknowledgement of its reeling you in to make you pay more: attention to what has been cast off or what would be valued less (but not valueless). [JUST try and make sense of the two stanzas that compose the classic “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” — see how the lines from the first (“Let be the finale of seem.”) comment in some sort of foreshadowing upon the corresponding line in the second (“Let the lamp affix its beam”).]

If poetry resists understanding it is for a purpose. Or so the critic leads us to believe. Even if that purpose is a Kantian repurposing of the purposeless. Ends for themselves.

And to conclude with prose! And a paean to work…

If the canon turns out to be subversive, and a slogan turns out to be literature, then the work we do as critics, as teachers, as readers, turns out to have implications for our everyday lives, as well as for the social world that we inhabit.

From Clint Burnham The only poetry that matters: reading the Kootenay School of Writing.

And so for day 882
13.05.2009

Posted in Poetry, Reading | Leave a comment