Poets I don't get

ishtat said:

I think of Ashbery as the Dali of poetry. And Dali when you analyse everything was essentially a conman.

A Lit poet I find 'hard to get' is Lauren Hynde. However, even though in her case I frequently remain mystified/confused, I still think she is well worth the effort. I read a stack of her stuff in the first year or two I was here, sometimes I gave up, but I also found that working hard on her poems helped a lot with other poets too.

Click to expand...

At least with Hynde I get a sense that she knows what she is writing about and is in a workshop meticulously crafting the pieces together. It doesn't come across as stream of consciousness bullshit.

Do I get Lauren? Not really from what I sampled thus far. I think there is a disconnect there - she's resigned to being accessible to a smaller audience. Either you get it or you don't - whatever, she's a mile down the road already having moved on to telling the next story.

Magnetron said:

At least with Hynde I get a sense that she knows what she is writing about and is in a workshop meticulously crafting the pieces together. It doesn't come across as stream of consciousness bullshit.

Do I get Lauren? Not really from what I sampled thus far. I think there is a disconnect there - she's resigned to being accessible to a smaller audience. Either you get it or you don't - whatever, she's a mile down the road already having moved on to telling the next story.

Click to expand...

Something I have noticed running around these parts is that poets like Lauren, or Liar, or Icngsugar (I know, older lit poets that don't post anymore, and I have never met) however I have re as all of their poetry, speak English as a second language, and so quite often they surprise the he'll out of you with word structures you don't see from native English speakers. It adds a brilliance and sometimes abstraction to their writes. However when you get one of their pieces, I mean really get it, you almost want to go outside and have a cigarette.

I get the strong impression from the Ashbery poems that the intended effect is similar to that of most 20th Century "art" music: the beholder feels alienated and disoriented, flailing about in vain, trying to find a thread of meaning to hold on to. My sense (YMMV) is that this approach is an outgrowth of existentialism, and it aggressively makes a statement that the universe is fundamentally incoherent and devoid of meaning. This hunch of mine is reinforced by the passage from Ashbery's bio that was quoted by Ange.

I think it is highly significant that purported art of this sort has been lauded and promoted during our lifetimes. In fact, the US government, via the Central Intelligence Agency, created a front group called the Congress For Cultural Freedom during the early days of the Cold War, specifically to foster the growth of this approach to art. The luminaries on the board of the CCF apparently believed that the worldview embodied in "modernism" was essential to stop the growth of communism. How do you suppose that they came to that conclusion?

AlwaysHungry said:

<snip>
The luminaries on the board of the CCF apparently believed that the worldview embodied in "modernism" was essential to stop the growth of communism. How do you suppose that they came to that conclusion?

Click to expand...

I vote for acid and tequila...

champagne1982 said:

I vote for acid and tequila...

Click to expand...

I wouldn't rule those out. Among the big shots that offered their support to the project were Franz Borkenau, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Ignazio Silone, James Burnham, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Bertrand Russell, Ernst Reuter, Raymond Aron, Alfred Ayer, Benedetto Croce, Arthur Koestler, Richard Löwenthal, Melvin J. Lasky, Tennessee Williams, Sidney Hook, and Irving Kristol.

champagne1982 said:

I vote for acid and tequila...

Click to expand...

Well now, where was my invite??

Magnetron said:

Com'on, com'on -
Kill me!
Do eet DO EET NOW!
Schwarzeneggar shouted at Predator

Click to expand...

This had me laughing so fucking hard. Seriously, like, ten minutes of crazed laughter.

I can't wait for the sequel: Get To Da Choppa!

AlwaysHungry said:

I wouldn't rule those out. Among the big shots that offered their support to the project were Franz Borkenau, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Ignazio Silone, James Burnham, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Bertrand Russell, Ernst Reuter, Raymond Aron, Alfred Ayer, Benedetto Croce, Arthur Koestler, Richard Löwenthal, Melvin J. Lasky, Tennessee Williams, Sidney Hook, and Irving Kristol.

Click to expand...

What is your point here, with this list, AH?

legerdemer said:

What is your point here, with this list, AH?

Click to expand...

I find it somewhat astonishing and enlightening to see the broad spectrum of different sorts of VIPs that aligned themselves with a government project to manipulate culture. Of course, I have no way of knowing how witting each individual was. All I really know is that they endorsed the general incoherent approach to art that GM was pondering among his poets that he doesn't get.

Magnetron said:

At least with Hynde I get a sense that she knows what she is writing about and is in a workshop meticulously crafting the pieces together. It doesn't come across as stream of consciousness bullshit.

Do I get Lauren? Not really from what I sampled thus far.

Click to expand...

Out of curiosity I looked at some of her stuff on Lit. My sense is that she is ambitious but frequently stumbles. I enjoyed her poems more than the run-of-the-mill "Penthouse letters" genre of erotic poetry here at Lit. When I drew a blank, my sense was that she had failed to get across her idea -- as opposed to there being simply no idea to get across.

Also, she wrote a sonnet. It might be fun to discuss it at Tzara's sonnet thread.

AlwaysHungry said:

Out of curiosity I looked at some of her stuff on Lit. My sense is that she is ambitious but frequently stumbles. I enjoyed her poems more than the run-of-the-mill "Penthouse letters" genre of erotic poetry here at Lit. When I drew a blank, my sense was that she had failed to get across her idea -- as opposed to there being simply to idea to get across.

Also, she wrote a sonnet. It might be fun to discuss it at Tzara's sonnet thread.

Click to expand...

I agree with this assessment. Though, I don't know if I would use the word "frequently". I would say that she over-reaches sometimes, however.

Then again, I'm a nice guy. Ask my mom.

It may be dangerous - in the sense of lacking clarity - to fuse my responses to these two ideas that you've been discussing, AH.

I've said it elsewhere but I'll say it here to see what others think - a certain level of chaos, in my experience, has a much better chance of engendering new ideas than order and very linear approaches. Trial and error layered on top of experience will cause a lot of failed attempts, but phoenixes rise out of those ashes. This is almost a cliché by now, but a true one, IMHO (are all clichés true?).

I have no insight into what drew all those luminaries to the organization you mentioned, which is the first time I'd heard of it. As you suggest, not all nor even most may have known what or who was behind it. But having brought interesting and creative people together, I imagine, had good by-products.

I would say something else - that I am happy that people are willing to share their experiments without being too embarrassed about the consequences of being misunderstood or laughed at. It's hard to know when all your own experiments are successful without having someone else's critical and analytical eyes on them. This is the reason why JBJ's/NOIRTRASH's critiques were beside the point. People learn through failure as much or more as they learn through success, and when those experiments and failures are public, more people benefit.

On the other hand, were we all to try only to write a better sonnet, of whatever flavor, i think we--and poetry--would lose out in the end.

(Now that sounded truly pompous. *ducks tomatoes* )

AlwaysHungry said:

Out of curiosity I looked at some of her stuff on Lit. My sense is that she is ambitious but frequently stumbles. I enjoyed her poems more than the run-of-the-mill "Penthouse letters" genre of erotic poetry here at Lit. When I drew a blank, my sense was that she had failed to get across her idea -- as opposed to there being simply to idea to get across.

Also, she wrote a sonnet. It might be fun to discuss it at Tzara's sonnet thread.

Click to expand...

AlwaysHungry said:

I find it somewhat astonishing and enlightening to see the broad spectrum of different sorts of VIPs that aligned themselves with a government project to manipulate culture. Of course, I have no way of knowing how witting each individual was. All I really know is that they endorsed the general incoherent approach to art that GM was pondering among his poets that he doesn't get.

Click to expand...

legerdemer said:

I've said it elsewhere but I'll say it here to see what others think - a certain level of chaos, in my experience, has a much better chance of engendering new ideas than order and very linear approaches.

Click to expand...

This is a fascinating topic and we might produce a long thread in trying to sort it out. I don't think that either chaos or "very linear approaches" are particularly helpful. I think that the history of art closely parallels the history of science, in that progress is made by bold, but not arbitrary leaps -- the imagination is summoned to solve concrete problems. Beethoven coined a motto, "so streng wie frei": As rigorous as it is free.

Mer, I think that the key word in your sentiments above is "ideas". To borrow from Wendy's, but using the parlance of Lit, "Where's the bunny?" If the poet or other artist manages to produce something that is unintelligible to the reader, there is no bunny. The reader may feel something -- shock, disorientation, some kind of sensual impression -- but can there be art without ideas?

Some post-WWII thinkers argued that the requirement that art communicate some sort of idea was oppressive and/or repressive. Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School, which had much in common with the Congress For Cultural Freedom, seemed to argue for that POV. He said that “Every work of art is an uncommitted crime”, which I find a bit ambiguous, but I think it tends in this direction. Adorno resented Stravinsky for going "neo-classical" and partially retreating from his primitivism.

I think a closely related topic (which had its own thread here at Lit last year) is the purported link between creativity and mental illness. I suspect that some modernism in art actually attempts to mimic the dissociative effects of mental illness. The Ashbery poems that have been quoted here certainly strike me that way.

I'm a bit hesitant to abscond with gm's thread, but I hope he won't be shy about booting us out of here if we're annoying him.

AlwaysHungry said:

This is a fascinating topic and we might produce a long thread in trying to sort it out. I don't think that either chaos or "very linear approaches" are particularly helpful. I think that the history of art closely parallels the history of science, in that progress is made by bold, but not arbitrary leaps -- the imagination is summoned to solve concrete problems. Beethoven coined a motto, "so streng wie frei": As rigorous as it is free.

Mer, I think that the key word in your sentiments above is "ideas". To borrow from Wendy's, but using the parlance of Lit, "Where's the bunny?" If the poet or other artist manages to produce something that is unintelligible to the reader, there is no bunny. The reader may feel something -- shock, disorientation, some kind of sensual impression -- but can there be art without ideas?

Some post-WWII thinkers argued that the requirement that art communicate some sort of idea was oppressive and/or repressive. Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School, which had much in common with the Congress For Cultural Freedom, seemed to argue for that POV. He said that “Every work of art is an uncommitted crime”, which I find a bit ambiguous, but I think it tends in this direction. Adorno resented Stravinsky for going "neo-classical" and partially retreating from his primitivism.

I think a closely related topic (which had its own thread here at Lit last year) is the purported link between creativity and mental illness. I suspect that some modernism in art actually attempts to mimic the dissociative effects of mental illness. The Ashbery poems that have been quoted here certainly strike me that way.

Click to expand...

Ideas don't have to be universally understood, particularly at the time of their inception. Relativity wasn't. And often the steps that were taken between one stage to another are so diffuse, so unclear, that there is no "parent-child" relationship between one idea and another, particularly when one idea builds on parts or extensions of many previous ideas, brings together many different strands, even from different areas of thought. I'll try to think of a good example - but don't have a perfect one here. I also suffer from a lack of sufficient humanities education to have the cultural or art history background to pull one out at will. Relativity probably serves as a fairly good example.

In science, some progress is made by many minuscule steps, frequently derided - often rightly so - as incremental. That's not where the big progress generally comes from. The latter frequently occurs in saltatory steps (as in proceeding by leaps rather than gradual transitions). In retrospect people might see a very logical progression, but when it first occurred, that relationship was at best subliminal.

Anyway, looking at an Ashbery poem, I might even see a single image or get a feeling that will send me into a different direction than I was heading, inspired not by the concreteness of his example, but by a much more subtle trigger.

I am very much not a linear thinker. It may be the reason why this stuff doesn't repel me as much. Your mileage must very much differ.

legerdemer said:

Ideas don't have to be universally understood, particularly at the time of their inception. Relativity wasn't.

Click to expand...

I agree, of course. That's why we need metaphor. There is no name for a genuinely new idea. It must be described indirectly, by indicating a sort of "family relationship" to nameable ideas.

But being an idea, it is inherently susceptible to communication. The joy in "getting it" may sometimes be proportional to how much work you have to invest in it. I often find this to be so with poetry.

My objection to Modernism is the tendency to dispense with ideas altogether, and replace them with "special effects."

I'm not repelled by the Ashbery poem excerpt GM posted. I'm mystified by it and will remain so because he chose to write the way most people think: we hop around from thought to thought, some thoughts we follow, others we leave hanging--sometimes never to return to them. He does that and does not connect the dots. He tells us this is what he intends when he states:

I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.

Obviously whether we choose to believe that or not, whether we see him as someone on a mission that few will understand or a poetic huckster is a choice. Connecting with a given poem is always a choice. Some poems speak to us; others not so much. And it's undeniable that Ashbery's poetry did speak to many readers given his place (yes, he has one) in the modern American canon and given his influence on other, later poets who went on to absorb something of his style into their own, more accessible poetry.

My sense is that Harry's take on him is the right way to perceive him (assuming one is willing to read him). There are lines and phrases that connect and appeal and then you go down another rabbit hole, but that doesn't mean you dismiss outright what does work or condemn him for being different. His "ideas" might not be narrative or linear but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Maybe his "ideas" are coming from a more existential place that doesn't fit neatly into lines. Poetry is not always easy and some poetry is clearly not intended to be so or is not concerned with being accessible. That may fly in the face of what we humans expect from communication, but the world of poetry is a big tent. There's room for all sorts of crazy experimental stuff. And of course that will repel some (or many) readers.

Don't get me wrong. I said at the outset I find him really confusing and I still do though if I consider his writing through a somewhat different lens, I can connect to parts of it. Some people find the Beat poets childish, too self-involved but you can argue that their style of writing reflects a zeitgeist of time and place and that tone and rhetorical style communicates as much as the words. It's poetry, not a set of instructions. And the great thing is that if it doesn't appeal, you can always find something else that does.