[New-Poetry] What is Poetry?

[Skip Fox]

Interesting question. I know that now, as always (I just didn't always know
it), my first question confronting a work of art is: How was it for you?
And, of course, good art gives testimony, even if it is fantastic, baldly
wrong, etc. Perhaps that's too simple.

 

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From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
[mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of jforjames at aol.com
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 9:07 AM
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Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] What is Poetry?

 

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 <mailto: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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