is bounced to be occurrence, itself.
Paul Celan was described (I can’t remember the source of this interpretation) as being essentially conflicted (just in written—or in spoken word also?) in his own language, German being the language of the nation (his own) that had exterminated his people. (His written language was) articulation within the language that is seen to be oppression/to be separation from that which one loves.
The dichotomy is impermanence/separation; a distinction made, for example, by Bob Perelman, between writing based in the “experiential” (thus without authority or as the ‘authority’ of the bogus self only)—
and writing that is articulation of/and as social polemic (the writing of which is then regarded as not being “narrative”—the word “narrative” used as if that were anecdotal per se). Yet in the distinction there is an equivalence drawn between ‘anecdotal’ and formal innovation itself.
Two sentences from Bob Perelman’s talk at the Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire: “This equation of social power, or say social intelligibility—the familiar—and poetic value challenges much of our poetics.” “The equation is less clear in any positive sense, i.e., that social marginality produces good poetry.”
The conception of a normative language as being dominant perspective (conception that there is such a dominant perspective; and that such is or should be determining) is hierarchical conception per se. I think that power is the poetic issue or narrative of this period. An aspect of the conflict broached in that narrative is: the continual transmogrification of gesture, making something into an intellectual concept that can’t simply exist there, only the concept of the gesture respected.
In academic terminology, for example, there is now a category spoken of as “other,” the assumption being that we are not that and therefore this area cannot be rendered, or even broached except from a distance. As if ‘we’ are of the world that articulates. The implication even is that if one is “other”—while a recipient of sympathy and elucidation, or lip-service—one being outside (as minorities, or lower class, at any rate experientially) has no repute or credibility, cannot speak. The assumption is that language be polemical or discursive exposition as it/one has no (or exposes there being no) intrinsic relation to the subject “other.”
Yet that is one.
Distinction as ‘doctrine’ and ‘experience’ is the conventional social separation here; that is, it is the way our experience is culturally described. The other side of this coin (the camp of “emotion”) bolsters the same view of reality but with an opposing allegiance: that is, the ‘opposite’ view (opposite from: ideology as basis) is that emotion/narrative/experience are aspects of “self” that, being viewed ‘inherently,’ appear not to be the same as (appear not to have any relation to) outside events. The personal, the confessional, is an “expression” of an inherent self as if that self were the cause (of events, of cognition), thus (in my view, and in that also of Perelman presumably) mistaking the nature of self in reality.
Yet either causal agent (self-scrutinizing ‘conceptualization’ or ‘concept of personal self’) are inaccurate as revelation of events—events’ natures and relation to each other. “Stillness of that order, perhaps a node peculiar to the mind alone.”3 They are aspects of hierarchical categorization that merely duplicate that categorization.
Giving a reading from As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen—(Deer Night), which is an intricate interweave, I included a passage, an overlay itself of seeing an impression (image) of blue dye on the surface of the eye only, dye that in fact in the circumstance is infused within the left side of the body of the person who thrashes being turned on a table.
A man speaking to me afterward referred only to the reference, in the writing, to the dye: “that sounds like something that happened to you,” with the implication tonally as well as in mentioning only that point in the writing, it is thus inferior
or that its happening explains the whole away.
it invalidates it by being experience
Bob Perelman argued (in his talk at the Assembling Alternatives symposium—attended by poets and professors from United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, China, and elsewhere—at the University of New Hampshire, 1996) that contemporary poets working in ‘experimentalist’ modes have failed because their writing, by being its formal medium—(that is, cognition being changed by its articulation)—does not have “social power” (in that poetry does not communicate with large numbers of the public).
His argument and his own writing practice imply a writing based on the use of social stereotype as a polemical device—which thus eschews one’s ‘interior’ thought/shape/motions articulated as motions/shape in syntax.
“Life opens into conceptless perspectives. Language surrounds chaos.”4 In an exchange in the Los Angeles Times between John Ashbery and reviewer Alexander Theroux, Theroux declares:
I am unaware of shooting at any bêtes noires in my review of his [Ashbery’s] books other than those [Pound, Stein, Olson, Zukofsky] who practice the crapulous and farcically self-defeating act of offering bad or half-made work under the guise of serious poetry to be pondered, when it remains in fact impossible to be understood…. Obscurantism is morally wrong precisely for the lie it tells in the pretense of coming forward with the truth it simultaneously—and always posturingly—refuses to divulge…. How can a poet of such byzantine contrivances miss my homely truth? Who should know better than he the moral and aesthetic bankruptcy of calling gibberish “poetry” or nonsense “modernist”? We have evidence he is able to write a simple line. What kind of modernist mind do we need to understand “Once I let a guy blow me …”
The notion of “communication,” articulated as synonymous with power and as if a product with a normative format, is a slogan now at the same time that the schools and education are being contracted/denuded, to offer—to those who are not wealthy—curricula limited in informative, let alone exploratory, investigative content (such as history), that which is subject to conjecture.
Poetry in this time and nation is doing the work of philosophy—it is writing that is conjecture.
‘Obscurantism’ is related to the market notion of ‘current history’ (the effect—the ‘social’—has already occurred supposedly) as cost-effective; the effect (of social power, or lack thereof) being assessed in present-time unrelated to the substance of occurrence.
Thought or apprehension—in this conception of utility—is not (to be) in relation to action which occurs (or as it occurs) outside.
All demonstrations (as writing or speaking) are sidetracked by being defined as a category. There’s no answer to one as that would admit of something other into the conversation.
At a time when bookstores are closing, the market argument is that books are not needed because they won’t sell. Barnes & Noble is receiving manuscripts from publishers to guide editors as to which manuscripts should be published based on projected sales. Big chains crush other bookstores, as well as publishing companies (Barnes & Noble’s market advantages, and its selection against non-format books). “And the diluted formalism of the academy (the formal culture of the U.S.) is anemic & fraught with incompetence & unreality.”5
The notion of defining ‘the life’ narrative as inferior is also defining what ‘the life’ is.
Defining is conceptualizing that
