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MIPOesias Magazine ~ ISSN 1543-6063 Volume 15 ~ January to March 2004 |
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{Part 3} What
is the difference between poetry and prose anyway? If you think about
it, maybe the only difference between free verse poetry and prose is the
deliberate, irregular right-hand line break. But no, we tend to
associate certain things with the poetic mode of writing as opposed to
the prosaic: metaphor, lyrical focus on the moment, imagery,
strangeness, use of line- and stanza-break for pacing, etc. But still,
the internet calls into question what is poetry and what And about prose and poetry- well who is to say what is prose and what poetry? Me, personally, don't think there is a difference. Just good writing and not so good writing. That is all. And that too is debatable. The good and not good. And the debate (always, about anything) lies with me- y'know, between me and me, not you and me. You and you perhaps. Or she and she. he and he - but not you and me or he and she. It cant work like that - not about these things anyway. Poetry is just a word man. I use it as a name for the kind of writing we are doing. I use it as another name for nature or god. Everything depends on something or the other. Perhaps it is wise to remember that. I could call poetry shitcake for all it matters it won't make a difference. Y'know like- I write good shitcakes. hoo haa. A few months back, for me, poetry was a way to let myself know who and how I am. Now its about, well, something else. who knows what. Perhaps its about nothing at all. I think a healthy method is always changing. Process, flux, becoming, chaos - these are textual qualities enhanced by the internet. As Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher of chance and flux said, "Everything rests by changing." Furthermore "All thing are in flux." According to Plato, in his dialogue "Cratylus," Heraclitus once said that "all things are in process and nothing stays still, and likening existing things to the stream of a river he says that you would not step twice into the same river." There is no particular rule for poetry. There is no one particular method. All discussions of craft must reflect on this fact. Any particular craft-rule we try to come up with will someday be outdated, and may be so today. In a world of constant flux, change, becoming, childlike innocence, waywardness, chance - these are good qualities for a poet to have. Heraclitus says "Time is a child playing checkers, the kingly power is a child's." One must become like little children to be a fresh as flux. "Become what you are," said Nietzsche: some of this sense of mixed chaos and possibility is inherent to the present status of poetry on the internet today. Let me close here with some more musings from Ankush, that Buk would likely have agreed with: And like, I dunno man, I dunno what the fuck is craft? If it means sitting at your computer thinking for hours how to say something, then I've never done that. Sure, these days it takes me sometimes even two three hours to write a poem. But its mostly cuz I'm thinking where I wanna take the poem from where I am at, y'know, I usually never have an idea what I'm gonna talk about in my poem so most of the times I spend deliberating that but the whole sonic and aesthetics thing well, that just comes. I dunno, perhaps there is a sense to this. Every poem, every word has its own physical attraction and its own music. So like, when you are writing, you don't even think. It just falls. Obviously, in this text itself Ankush is providing a demonstration of his own poetics, much more digressive, non-elevated in tone, informal. Switch immediately from Ankush' text over to something from Eivaz and you can tangibly feel the shift in voicing and tone: i adore you because i can, because you tutor me in
the ways of adoration, unknowing. a
certain loss brings gain, (from Poem On Those Rare Occasions). What
I like about Ankush's text is its digressive freshness, the sound of an
unpretentious human mind thinking, wondering, and writing utterly
nakedly. What I like about Eivaz' text is, yes, the polish, the form,
the importation of gestures and motifs from pre-internet poetry writing.
Eivaz is more disciplined, formed, cunning-crafting than Ankush. Which
one is better? It depends on what you're in the mood for. In the
gigantitude of the net, there's room for both. Anyway, making these
kinds of critical judgments and determinations is all in the realm of
knowing. Knowledge is a form of control. With
no-mind the flower invites the butterfly. And elsewhere: Too
lazy to be ambitious, John E's poems are good an invoking a defined subject matter, setting, place and time. He uses imagistic physical detail to set the scene, and then spin off into gentle riffs and reciprocities of musing emotion: The
fish taco was familiar (from Neither There Nor There). He balances clear description of the scene against slightly skewed musings such as the riff on "familiar" and the movement from the "tall young girl" on the outside to the "she" on the inside in his dreams. Precise imagistic detail gives the reader a firm footing in the poem, so that when Eivaz tosses an aphoristic riff at us, for example "amused into comfort," this does not overly destabilize the fabric of the poem. The result is that we think of our own times waiting around fatigued in an airport or elsewhere thinking of a girl, and the objective presentation of little details like the fish taco lays a solid groundwork so that the meditative insight of "would she / be amused into comfort?" really resonates with us, it resembles how we ourselves might feel musing about a distant lover. He uses his own psychological vulnerability to his advantage; he has a poet's courage about exhibiting his emotional openness, worry, even weakness. Let me give you some more excerpts from Eivaz' poetry that will show you his efficiency at laying a groundwork, setting a scene, painting, in a few clear imagistic words, an effective tableau within and upon which something real can happen: a
wall lamp dusts a desk (from Stopover). why
not something (from Sanctuary). Look
there: a lamplit street (from "Even Street"). the
sugar in my coffee (from A Mood). As he plays with sounds he is always also playing with setting: burritos
the thing (Untitled fragment). You can also see him thinking, see the actual process of thinking and metamorphic shift in thought, right there in his poem-text: one
day as summer turned to fall, (from Moth). The beat poet and Zen abbot Philip Whalen once said that "poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving" and that poetry "is a world body being here and now which is history . . . and you." In other words, one thing the poem can enact and show is the movement of the mind's own vitality, as it thinks and wonders and changes thoughts and zips and spins onward. Unlike a painting, which is tied to the eye, the poem, using words, which are the mind's own code for thought, can show and reveal the inside of the mind, can paint the mind-interior itself, as opposed to slavery to some external subject matter. Thus describing Whalen's work, Leslie Scalapino once said that "It's not 'about' something - rather, the writing is the mind's operations per se." In the following wonderful piece of rhythmical writing, we get a sense of the mind's interior drift: whispers she would not repeat
have (from Song For A Few Voices). The rhythmic movement here is an apt simulacra for the mind's own musing. A fugal effect is set up by the interspersed repetitions, and the mood moves loosely along from one line to another, with the building and dissolving repetition gradually bringing each new line into focus. He achieves very delicate declinations of mood through formal cunning. An entirely different sort of "graph of a mind moving" is achieved here: there
is no soul but in New England (from Long Way Home). Compare that to Whalen at his most disjunctively thought-charty: YOU
DON'T LOVE ME LIKE YOU USED TO The
sun has failed entirely WU! (An ingrown toenail?) WU! (A
harvest of bats??) (A row of pink potted geraniums///???) smashed
flat!!! You
knows you got to pay for the motherfucker The
bells have stopped (Philip Whalen The Slop Barrel: Slices of the Paideuma for All Sentient Beings). The plus, or positive aspect, of this approach is ever-shifting freshness of perspective, as well as mimetic accuracy to the mind's own skittering movements. The minus/negative aspect is a certain loss of unity, of sensible meaningful progression. Sometimes we want the poem to be more together and organized than the everyday waking mind is - we enjoy the poem precisely because it is different from our everyday mind, it is more elevated and integral. Thus, poets like Whalen and Eivaz vary their approach, and sometimes they will make their poem work in a much more unified, smooth, non-randomized way: I
can't live in this world The
dill plant lives, the airplane I
shall be myself -- Like Yellowstone National Park. (Whalen, Further Notice). Let me end this essay with three quotes, one from an Eivaz poem, one from Robert Duncan whom Eivaz quoted in one of his poems, and finally one from nasty old Ted Hughes, all going toward the human passionate warm crafted sometimes desperate weird thought-chart heart of poetry: Still
often enough becomes too bright, (Eivaz, Mood For Bright Lemons). a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. (Robert Duncan) [Poems]
are the only way I can unburden myself of the excess which . . (Ted Hughes).
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Tres by Jack © Jack
Hughes 2004. |
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