Heard Ward

Over at Cahiers de Corey Josh has a post about poetry that just depresses the hell out of me, though maybe it’s just the jolly season that has me so down. He seems to suggest that a poetry stripped of beautiful language, that is aesthetically distrustful of the poetic itself, is more honest, or at least (given the impossibility of being honest), aesthetically more acceptable than the alternatives, the vestiges of ‘traditional’ poet effect and affect that still reside in experimental poetry. I might say Serious Poetry since Josh, in his less charitable moods implies with his condescension that poetics other than the one he professes are intellectually inferior, politically and morally suspect, or just plain weak, not serious. I realize I am being harsh here and I don’t mean it as a personal criticism. But the poetry being proposed and advocated here seems to be a poetry that moves further into the mind, totally cut off from the body, as opposed to a poetry of the spiritualized body, of the imagination. This is poetry of words, of letters and syllables to be observed by the eye and related to concepts, a poetry to be analyzed and categorized or manipulated like a mathematical formula, or tested like an hypothesis. It is a poetry without odor, without glandular secretions, a poetry without an asshole. There is no spittle or breath in the words, no snot in the beard. Where is the smell of garbage on a hot day, the shriek of children playing on the sidewalk, the feel of light rain soaking into leaves and dripping on your head?  Where is the dog shit steaming in the snow, the sore tooth, the constipated old man knocking his knees together on the toilet in a cold bathroom, drug dealers plying their product on the corner? I don’t feel my tongue in my mouth when I read these words. It is a poetry without sensuality, without the senses, a Puritanical, reactionary poetry, a sexless poetry, a poetry devoid of energy. Now, he refers to his friend’s poetry as being scatological, which would seem to contradict the above. And Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook is certainly tactile and over long stretches, interesting, engaged with the world. It is not pretentious or academic. Perhaps we are all in a mood of exasperation. But I don’t believe what I am suggesting here is scatology or obscenity or Objectivist. These are the words of outsiders, attempting to describe a world they know through the mind, a world they have reached by means of theory, as if they have lost the primary relation of self to world and somehow must recover it through a ratiocinating strategy. I would like to know what Josh and Gabriel mean by moving away from rhetorical beauty. And what disturbs me is not the poems in Rhode Island Notebook, but the idea that poetry is to be distrusted. Poetry is one of the few things I trust.

 

It is a fitting coincidence that on the same day I read this post my friend William showed me a link he had posted on his Face Book page: Word Horde. The OED is expunging words from its children’s dictionaries to make them more relevant. They contend that the traditional, Christian, monarchical vocabulary of England and the word horde associated with nature, the naming of Eden, are not relevant to a multicultural, multi-religious society. As if Hindus and Moslems had not the same need to know about Christianity as Christians, Jews and Atheists have a need to know about Islam and Hinduism. As if Pakistanis, Indians and Nigerians had not the same need to know about English history as English students have a need to know about the histories of the countries their forebears conquered. They’ve removed words like ‘aisle’, as if the former Colonials did not have aisles in their mosques and temples, or their buses and planes. But look at the list of words being eliminated and compare it to the words being added:

 

Words taken out:

Carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe

Dwarf, elf, goblin

Abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar

Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch, decade

adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

Acorn, allotment, almond, apricot, ash, bacon, beech, beetroot, blackberry, blacksmith, bloom, bluebell, bramble, bran, bray, bridle, brook, buttercup, canary, canter, carnation, catkin, cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker, county, cowslip, crocus, dandelion, diesel, fern, fungus, gooseberry, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, holly, horse chestnut, ivy, lavender, leek, liquorice, manger, marzipan, melon, minnow, mint, nectar, nectarine, oats, pansy, parsnip, pasture, poppy, porridge, poultry, primrose, prune, radish, rhubarb, sheaf, spinach, sycamore, tulip, turnip, vine, violet, walnut, willow

Words put in:

Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue

Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro

Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph

The list of axed words is full of juicy syllables, it is concrete, beautiful, pert. These are words with swollen lips and erect nipples. They are tactile and odoriferous. They are scaled and iridescent, or shimmering and smooth, nacreous. Adder, Ass, Beaver, Boar. Chestnut, Clover, Conker. Tulip, Turnip, Vine, Violet, Walnut, Willow. You can taste and smell and feel these words. These words exist on a continuum from the diaghram, through the esophagus, the vocal cords, the tongue, the lips, the teeth. They sink down from the brain through the brainstem to the tailbone. They race from the finger tips and the nostrils into the head and out the mouth accreting along the way custom and concept. But most of all these are words that are vanishing from our lives because they are vanishing from reality. When we knew these words and knew these things we knew they were part of us. We are immersed in the world, of a piece with it. When it dies, we die with it. And what’s left behind after the purge is a list of abstract, technical, and I assume, already known, words. I’m not saying the new list doesn’t belong in a dictionary or that they aren’t an important part of our world. But I am saying Terrapin is a word they will need to know and don’t, just as they will need to know the word Pangolin to read Marianne Moore. I am all for incisors, block graphs and idioms. I like Brainy, boisterous cautionary tales such as Chaucer tells. We are interdependent with creeps and we must negotiate celebrity and childhood, we must have common sense to debate and be tolerant. But a world without bridals and brooks, with voicemail and no porridge, is a dyslexic world of committees, a compulsory world to which I am allergic.

 

Josh suggests that what is being proposed is a poetry that stands in a clearer, starker relation to the actual world, without as much distortion. And this is fine, in that it identifies rhetoric as a false beauty, an imposition of an order that is oppressive or non-existent. Perhaps he and his friends are after an unadorned purity. Yet the drift of his thought is always towards the electrical and away from the turbine. Poetry always must renew itself of course. Yesterday’s beautiful language is today’s empty rhetoric. Stripping back, stripping clean, destroying what is false is a necessary impulse. But it can’t come at the expense of desire, of the flame that illuminates the meaning of existence, of the symbol that explodes with reality. The strategy is seduction, the way we are seduced by apples to eat and plant them. There is no life without a heart beat, without respiration, without breath and blood. And there is no poetry without pleasure.