[New-Poetry] What is Poetry?

[Jeff Newberry]

Jim,

I hadn't considered Jeffers' relationship to mystery.  Thanks for pointing
that out.

Jeffers is an interesting case.  Here are a couple of quotes from Jeffers'
scant prose (from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Tim Hunt, ed.):

" . . . poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent things and
the permanent aspects of life [ . . . ] poetry must deal with things that a
reader two thousand years away could understand and be moved by."

This quote skirts close to Faulkner's "old verities."   Jeffers goes to to
clarify his meaning:

"This [emphasis on the permanent] excludes much of the circumstances of
modern life, especially in cities.  Fashions, forms of machinery, the more
complex social, financial, political adjustments, and so forth, are all
ephemeral, exceptional; they exist but will never exist again.  Poetry must
concern itself with (relatively) permanent things.  These have poetic value;
the ephemeral have only news-value."

I'm reminded, of course, of Pound's pithy dictum:  "Poetry is news that
stays news."  However, I don't know that Jeffers really means what he says:
hasn't human society always had "complex social, financial, [and] political
adjustments?" (not sure what adjustments means in this context, btw).  Is
Jeffers arguing that a "real poem" (my loaded term) would never feature an
airplane, say?  Or an ATM machine?

Just a few thoughts.

Jeff Newberry

On 7/2/07, jforjames at aol.com <jforjames at aol.com> wrote:
>
> Jackson's quote is a good one...though it's like so many quotes that have
> some "certainty" in their saying.
> He's framing the battle for poetry's soul as 'either/or' or 'zero sum'
> matter. That poetry can live with unceartainty
> and indeterminancy should be pretty well established by now. It seems to
> me that's much the fashion
> of poetry these days, particular post-avant poetry. Personally, I wouldn't
> want to avoid a poetry strove,
> at times, for fixity and exactness. I think a poet is capable of finding
> the stil-point amid the welter.
>
> It's curious that Jackson uses the verb 'illumine'...which means to shed
> light, and more generally, to show cleary.
> So we 'illumine' what is obscure (mysterious, inscrutable, etc.). The
> 'walls of mystery' made me think of Plato's wall
> within the cave. And living with 'doubt and uncertainty' is a notion close
> to Socrates' notion of 'aphoria'. Then
> Jackson seems to veer off at end this quote with almost a nod to someone
> like Robinson Jeffers (or eco-poetics),
> 'with a return to elemental awe and wonder'. (Jeffers' sonnet "Return, e.g
> .).
>
> No answers here...only observations.
> Finnegan
>
>
> It's the Negative Capability letter. To his brothers.
>
> *several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what
> quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and
> which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that
> is, /when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,
> without any irritable reaching after fact and reason/-Coleridge, for
> instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the
> Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with
> half-knowledge. *
>
> The thing is, poetry is kinda different from life. In life, we probably
> have to reach after fact and reason pretty early on. In poetry, we allow
> ourselves a little more time. We can be of three minds, like a tree in which
> there are three blackbirds.
>
> I've asked this before, but since we're back to it again...what is Keats
> saying about Coleridge? The conventional wisdom seems to be that he's
> criticizing for a limitation -- I think he's praising him for a superior
> quality. I suppose that to try and answer this question might constitute an
> */irritable reaching after fact and reason/, *but what the hey.
>
> Jeff Newberry wrote:
> > It's funny that you mention Keats, Mole. I've been reading through > his
> letters. I'll try to track down the passage you reference. I'm > pretty sure
> that I know what you're talking about.
> >
> > Jeff Newberry
> >
> > On 7/1/07, *TheOldMole* <Opus40-01 at opus40.org > <
> mailto:Opus40-01 at opus40.org <Opus40-01 at opus40.org?>>> wrote:
> >
> > Keats kinda said the same thing.
> >
> > Jeff Newberry wrote:
> > > " . . . one of poetry's chief aims is to illumine the walls of
> > > mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable. I think poetry ought to be
> > > taught not as an engine of meaning but as an opportunity to learn to
> > > live in doubt and uncertainty, as a means of claiming indeterminacy.
> > > Our species is deeply defined by its great surges of reason, but I
> > > think it high time we return to elemental awe and wonder."
> > >
> > > --Major Jackson, "Does Poetry Have a Social Function," Poetry,
> > January
> > > 2007
>
>
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-- 
"Memory believes before knowing remembers.  Believes longer than recollects,
longer than knowing even wonders."
—William Faulkner, Light in August


http://museoffireblog.blogspot.com
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