[New-Poetry] subject matters

[jforjames at aol.com]

Hal, I know you're fond of playing the angles in certain debates, and that's
a good thing. I bristle at a contemporary poetics which has trouble
with content, actual ideas and thinking or narrative elements.
(The other bete noir of contemporary theorists is 'truth/sincerity' in poetry.)

I normally agree with Langer, but the quote below seems wrong to me.
Sure language and painting make use of?representation. But some, not all, art 
depends on the writer-reader?or?artist-viewer entering into a tacit contract,
to agree without overt negotiation that what is being said or shown has some 
actual content, is meant to convey a particular notion or view of the world...
that what?it represents has a reality that both parties can and do?recognize and 
understand. 

Berkeley has?his famous quip: "What is mind? Never matter. What is?matter? Never mind."
It's a circle. The only way to break it is for the artist and viewer to agree
(instantly) that a real peach exists like the?one in the dish. And it would taste good,
if it could be lifted out of the matrix of chroma and brushstrokes that it is really
and really be put to one's mouth.
Finnegan

-----Original Message-----
From: Halvard Johnson <halvard at earthlink.net>
Bcc: jforjames at aol.com
Sent: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 4:44 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] subject matters


Well, as I said before, I don't think poems need to have subject,
though sometimes they may indeed have subjects, and often they

may seem to have subjects. The point of my quip was that poems

do not need to be "about" anything. Which is to say, they don't

need to be discursive, in the way prose usually is.?




I might have to agree with Skip, though, that poems are "about"

subjects such as words, phrases, sentences, sounds, images, even

ideas. Which?is something like saying playgrounds are "about"?

knees and shins?and muscles and lungs, not to mention kids and?

au pairs.




Hal





"Poetic statements are no more actual statements

?than the peaches visible in a still life are actual dessert."

--Susanne K. Langer




Halvard Johnson

================

halvard at earthlink.net

http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html

http://entropyandme.blogspot.com?

http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html





On Sep 6, 2007, at 3:34 PM, jforjames at aol.com wrote:



Nice quip, but wouldn't that make the reader's mind into something like a 
scanner with OCR technology? A machine that recognizes the?text but 
doesn't read it per se. If reading is an active engagement with the text, 
it seems to me that no aspect of the poem is offlimits to the reader's delving. 
If you can analyze the sounds, why not the subject matter? If you can 
discuss the vocabulary/lexicon employed, why not the subject matter? And 
so on...


A reader should avoid irritable reaching after (pace Keats), but few good 
poems can get away without even a hint of being about something, except
maybe that...


There are dadaist and language poetries that have scrupulously evaded
content (although not always as successfully as they think they have)
or used odd bits & pieces of words/language that don't fit together
in a way that makes communication or a communion of minds possible.
But that's more of a subset of the artform we call poetry, and like
visual poetry (sorry, Bob) and sound poetry,it's not the core of 
what gets practised/made.


Then in certain poems there are those flights and fits of pure poetry 
here & there. Often inside poems that one would otherwise say are about 
something. Yet it's generally not something sustained over more than 
a passage or a half page. 


Wouldn't it be better to take up whistling and to avoid words altogether
if you so much wanted to avoid being understood?
Finnnegan

nal Message-----
From: Halvard Johnson <halvard at earthlink.net>
Bcc: jforjames at aol.com
Sent: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 12:56 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] subject matters



Seems to me that the best answer when someone asks?
"What's this poem about?" would be, say, "Oh, about?
fourteen lines long."?
?
Q: How long do one's legs have to be??
A: Long enough to reach the ground when?
? you're standing or walking.?
?
Hal?
?
"

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