poetry, love, beauty: notes

Notes on scoring poetry.



Barthes spoke of the pleasure of the text, la plaisir du texte. Of the leisures, the calms, the bon esprits of life, les belles du jour, lex tableaux* . . .
Everyone needs validation. What else is love but validation? The parents
Validate the child. The self validates the other. All of this occurs inside of
Contemporary internet poetry yet we don’t know how to contemplate it, how to relax in it.


----------------------------
*PARDON MY KITSCH FRENCH.



The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas - for my body does not have the same ideas I do. (Barthes, Pleasure, 17).


So, what causes this pleasure? Or are we in textual heaven, where the risk weighs lightest? Where we’re batting a thousand? Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" declared that

A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.

(148). Poetry is language freed and liberated from the pornography of nonpoetry expression. Poetry is language which is cleansed but not washed. So poetry is love, while prose is seduction, according to some theorists. But consider how sadly language is treated in the real world. Like pixels. What are pixels paid to do? What are all the pixels pimped-out to do?

To me the most impossibly beautiful writing on the world is by the universe, but it makes sense. If you love you should love words. But how our [SIC] pixels shuttled in the Wheel World? Marriott, Westin, and Hilton -- These major hotel chains all offer in-room X-rated movies delivered to the hotel by one of two major distribution companies, LodgeNet or On Command. Some analysts say these in-room sex movies generate more money for the hotel chains than revenue from the hotels' mini-bars. "The 5 percent or 10 percent of revenue that the hotel chain gets, that's pure profit to them because they have no cost," says Dennis McAlpine, an entertainment industry analyst. "They didn't put in the wiring system, they didn't supply the programming." “However, you must not make any moolah off this. For you are a Serious Writer. . .” Yoda leaps up, swings his light saber . . .


Is poetry love, are poems babies?
What is the relation between eros and beauty?



Sappho is an ancient example of beauty in poetry. One of the earliest western examples. From Greece, Isle of Lesbos. She apparently played a musical instrument, precursor to guitar, while she sang her poems-fables
That the townspeople loved, the women especially, they were full of limpid-clear descriptions of water droplets, of flowers, of black earth, of golden chariots, fair and quick doves, denseness of wing-whir, of:


----golden --- you came

yoking the chariot. And fair, swift
doves brought you over the black earth
dense wings whirring, from heaven down
through middle air.

Suddenly they arrived, and you, O Blessed One,
Smiling with your immortal countenance
Asked what hurt me, and for what
Now I cried out

See how contemporary this sounds.


And what do I want to happen most
In my crazy heart. "Whom then Persuasion
..............to bring to you, dearest? Who

Sappho hurts you?

(Sappho, from one of her few preserved poems, approx. 500 B.C.). The Sappho fragment I just quoted comes from the one surviving remnant from several volumes of Sappho's poetry which were circulating as late as the 8th c. A.D. Some of the Benedictine monks liked ‘em, thank god. . .

Risk is an aspect of poetic seduction. A batting average. In baseball a good batter hits 3/10ths of the time. That is how much risk that game can tolerate. In darts he hits the central bull’s eye once every dozenth throw -- is that enough for the game he’s playing? No, so he sits down. Only the ones shining in the achieved burning risk, flame fameward, so the story goes. The story of/is desire.

Failure is at every part of a poem. Holographically, logogrammatically, failure at leasts dusts the underedge coating of the middle struts of each e, slips and falls off the duck-back of d, falls into and drowns in the cracked black ice pond of the u the testube rather, Thee Container . . .

Failure is a part of every quantum of even the best poem. That is why even Shakespeare slowly recedes into Middle English, someday he will need to be translated to be understood. Because a next life doesn’t speak Tibetan/any more



People love to score poems. Score here has a double meaning. Perhaps they wish to score a lot of points, like a game player. Perhaps they want to score some respect with heaven, like a hip hop mogul. Maybe it is a blind and deaf man desperately trying still to score some peace with god before its too distant; maybe it’s the frail eternity of lovers intertwining on a bed. People love to score. In games you have these batting averages. How much of failure can the game take before the audience disperses.

Seduction is the process by which text makes us read it. Rilke’s poems are stuffed full of such examples. Almost every living breathing writing poet, at least in English, is subconsciously or consciously influenced by Rilke’s subterranean memes of subjectivity. he felt like he had the task of constructing a replacement to god. So he wrote of the sight of angels, their almost-abstract appearance:


Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.

(Rilke, beginning of First Duino Elegy). What is happening here is seduction of memes by the word. Stated naively, a walk in the park, something utterly innocuous. Rilke’s poems are so emotionally subtle that they are like weird strings that play beautifully upon the breezes of your moods, no matter what age you are, what time you live in. and yet faintly death-inflected. Am I right on this? Just a bit, faintly, too proximate to death, almost too infatuated with it, one might say? No, Rilke was subtler than that, in his poems -- though not in his letters -- consider garbage like:


Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate—?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

(from Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet). I just don’t trust him. The biography says he stole his kid’s inheritance. Until that biographical mystery is cleared up, I won’t entirely believe him. I worry about his elitism. The way he protected himself, insulated by rich people. Insulated by the crepe party crocus of those smiles, of the duchess who put him up in the little “castle,” the Tower of Duino, so he could peer his white oval face out from in the dark shadow under the door, looking like a middle-aged Harry Potter,
Or Professor Snape, or the like . . . But he did write poems of great seductive truth and who knows, he may be a lover after all (the following is not by Rilke, do you know who it's by? I'm am using as an example of a poet who loves Rilke):

In this blue light
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
seen through to. This
is my house,

my section of Etruscan
wall, my neighbor's
lemontrees, and, just below
the lower church,
the airplane factory.
A rooster

See how differently handled than Bishop's rooster.

crows all day from mist
outside the walls.
There's milk on the air,
ice on the oily
lemonskins. How clean
the mind is,

(Jorie Graham, from “San Sepolcro”). You can see the Rilke derivation there in Graham, as also in Gluck:

It is a form
of suffering: then always the transparent page
raised to the window until its veins emerge
as words finally filled with ink.

And I am meant to understand
what binds them together
or to the gray house held firmly in place by dusk

because I must enter their lives:
it is spring, the pear tree
filming with weak, white blossoms.

(Louise Gluck, part of “Poem,” from House on the Marshland (Ecco Press, 1975)).


Some of us seek to seduce meaning to come out of its frail shell, through the use of wordless music:

El Culo de Bettie

-- All I know about that title is that it’s foreign. There’s something sleek, sassy about this. Jenni and I argued tonight about writing styles. She wants me to revise more. I think it’s OK to experiment sloppy self-indulgent and weird, just because I’ve been writing for so long and have grown jaded. (I’ve written twenty years and basically unknown). Poems like these help me

--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

(Keats, last lines of “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”). how closely Keats approached a weird contemporary Buddhism, from inside his british mindspace:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Thought is of the essence for him, not eros, since he is dying a virgin. (Just my interpretation, could be wrong).

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

(Full Text, “When I Have Fears . . .”). This is truest eros in poetry. But there are many others that are also truest. I do not know for what reason, but in recent days I have been sensing an exquisite attunement to basic sensation -- I want to say, “as if a lover’s touch lurked behind it,” but nobody sets or knows the rules here, of what can and cannot be illustrated in poetry. I think me and Jenni are just going through a resurgence of our relationship again. When I'm in love the sky is pink, you know the drill. So my half-decent mood colors all I read.


This seems well-formed in a way that has Rilkean seductive force:


O, what is the point of speaking
in anything but tongues?
There are too many
throw pillows in this room . . .

(Emily Lloyd, “El Culo de Bettie”). Do you hear it? A sort of breathless dislocation of language, among each line. Lines 1 and 2: she can’t speak in any way but after mask. Lines 3-4: She must recite trivialities, to calm herself. She is subject to domestic upset, like Dickinson, like Bishop. Something’s harnessed here: we’ve sensed it before, yet inside a different hearing, a different voicing, one slightly older:

Hauls me through air --
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel --
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Think of how she thought of her children. Two of them.

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

(Plath, “Ariel”). Compare:

back into me, back that
into me, let me
make your eyes change color

(Lloyd). Do you hear it? This is a thick sensual flush. It is a dreamspace quite different from Sylvia’s lovelornness. This speaker is receiving love, can press it, sense it press into her, “back into me,” this much is patent. So to me, her poem, and some of the other poems I have seen on the boards, seems to channel a Rilkean force of rhetorical seductiveness. . . which works some days, doesn't work others (the batting average). Let us continue skimming:


O beat me, beat me, beat me
at air hockey.

-- whoa! Did you feel that in your neck?