[New-Poetry] Bob

[Bob Grumman]

Alex, I think who in poetry is the first to use some innovation is 
important for literary historians.  More important is who first uses it 
effectively.  It's not important for the literary critic.  For the 
literary critic what's important is whether or not a given poet is using 
innovations, and--if so--how effectively.  They needn't be the poet's 
innovations, just devices or whatever which have not yet become 
standard--e.g., taught by academics, used in poems published in /The New 
Yorker/, given entries in encyclopedias, and so forth.  The effectually 
new, not the absolutely new.

I would go on to say that to be major a poet needs, among other things, 
to use innovations OR repeat the conventions of his time at the highest 
level--that is, at a level that too few poets have gotten to for what's 
being done there to have become commonplace, and therefore boring.  I 
don't know of any other way but would welcome being told of one.

To very roughly illustrate my beliefs, let me say a few words about 
haiku.  They have been an important variety of poetry in the West for 
about a century now--although not widely composed in this country until 
1950 or so (my guess is).  Until then the haiku was innovative because a 
significantly different form of poetry practiced by an insignificant 
number of people (and rarely done well).  It was also innovative for (1) 
its compactness; (2) its being all imagery; (3) its being wholly 
objective; (4) its focus on the use of everyday language about the 
quotidian.  Much of this got absorbed by imagism, and a little by other 
related kinds of poetry, so partially lost its newness in the process.

By the 1960s the haiku was no longer new in any meaningful way.  It was 
taught in elementary schools, and many people were composing it.  
Consequently, poets who admired the form but found most haiku too 
predictable began introducing innovations.  An early one was to ignore 
the convention that a haiku had to have 17 syllables arranged in three 
lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables, respectively.  Another was a change in 
the shape of haiku--no longer necessarily three lines, but maybe one 
line, or 17 lines, one syllable to a line.  These may strike some as 
hardly innovations, and certainly not important.  All I can say is that 
they were both innovations and important.  Most people composing haiku 
fought against them like their cultural ancestors had fought against 
free verse. 

Eventually, innovations of length and shape became too familiar to 
freshen haiku for the most sensitive engagents of them.  So, all sorts 
of innovations, still in use and still innovations today, became part of 
the haiku-composers' tool-kits: the visual treatment of the typography 
of haiku, for instance; the addition of graphic elements; the addition 
of mathematical symbols and operations; encrypted texts; surrealism; 
infraverbality; extreme miniaturization; various language poetry 
devices.  There have also been innovations in the choice of subject 
matter.  My book, /From Haiku To Lyriku/ goes in depth into all this. 

In 1966 I did a collection of visual haiku--not because I was bored with 
the conventional haiku, which was still fairly new to me, but because I 
admired the work of E. E. Cummings and saw that adding some of his 
visual poetry techniques to conventional haiku  might produce something 
interesting.  In a few cases, it did, as far as I'm concerned.  Later, I 
began making conventional haiku, mainly to get published.  I had 
something like forty published in haiku magazines.  By then it had 
become practically physically impossible for me to make more: I couldn't 
see how I could make one that wasn't predictable.  I stopped making 
them.  I think that around that time, I made my first mathematical 
haiku, then two or three more--inspired by a mathematical passage in 
Louis Zukofsky's /A/ (I think).  For several years after that I made no 
haiku of any kind.  I continued to respect the field but, frankly, felt 
I had outgrown it.  More accurately, I didn't have the ability to 
improve on the conventions.

Eventually, I became serious about mathematical haiku, and they became a 
specialty of mine.  They were the only way I had to make interesting 
haiku--although I would never deny that some people were still making 
effective conventional haiku.  My use of mathematics in haiku was 
innovative, and remains so since hardly anyone else is doing it.  
Actually, I'm not doing it, anymore, my mathematical poems having grown 
too much in size and complexity to be considered haiku, although I 
maintain that they still have a lot of haikuity in them.  But my 
innovations no longer are innovations for me.  So I'm in a slump.

Dunno how clarifying that turned out to be, Alex--but it'll do for one 
of my blog entries.

urp, Bob

Alexander Dickow wrote:
> Hm, if I may. Interesting issue as always, this problem of "innovation" and how to parse it, but when I'm wearing my critic's hat (it's a huit-reflets, a gibus c1911), I tend to find the category problematic, to the extent that it seems to lead to battles of priority: ie, "X did Y before Z did." Example: Blaise Cendrars wrote "Easter in New York" before Apollinaire wrote "Zone" (or vice-versa). Or: "Easter in New York" is a "more important", because "more new" or "more fresh" (or some variation on this) than "Zone" (or vice-versa). 
> Someone eventually comes along and says they both stole it all from Andre Salmon's Marmeladoff anyhow. 
> One by one, people reach back through time, looking for the actual or potential origins of a technique, combination of techniques or some such *specific* innovation. 
> Example: Free-verse in France originated with Gustave Kahn in the 1870s. Nope! wrong, it started with Marie Krysinska, in the 1860s. Nope! wrong, Ronsard (16th Century!!) used free verse in one of his weird little monsters hardly anyone knows about. 
> But then someone pipes up and says: gee, but Ronsard's really not using this technique for the same reasons/in the same way/in the same context/with the same significance at all, for x, y and z reasons. Which means we can't postulate him as the origin of free verse, unless we refine what that category covers, and decide either to exclude Ronsard's "version", or not (and eventually, this tactic looks rather arbitrary). You can stalemate this move by shoring up the categories in various ways: affirming their timeless nature, or excluding context as a relevant definition for the poetic technique in question (the latter option, which Bob might or might not choose, seems to me to end up watering down the category, reducing its usefulness by excluding and ignoring crucial differences in favor of inessential similarities - I can elaborate if need be).
> Step The Next is to recover a notion of ineffable Lyric Particularity: the newness of a poem cannot be reduced to techniques, nor truly replicated; the New becomes unlocatable.
> Then Bob comes back and says, no, that's all wrong, we should reintroduce a set of more refined and careful categories, and We're All Back to Square One.
> That's all well and good, but I like interpreting what on earth the poems might be trying to say and do a lot better than worrying about what "newness" is. There are lots of ways to show why a poem is important, rhetorically speaking, and I don't know that slippery notions like this one are necessarily the best: but Bob knows that, too, since he's engaged in very fine readings of many kinds of poems that he thinks are important.
> So I ain't pickin' on Bob, either, darn it. Or anyone else, blarg.
> Amicalement,
> Alex
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