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Posted by on Sep 3, 2009 in Blogh | 0 comments

Inane Dogma

Here are some sentences from the beginning of an essay by Philip Lamantia, reprinted in Surrealist Subversions editied by Ron Sakolsky, published by Autonomedia, 2002 www.autonomedia.org.  I enjoy any use of the word imbecile, especially when applied to Chas Olson et al

“A concerted abandonment of fixed forms (from sonnets to free verse), rhyme and metrical references cannot be considered anything but a formal change unless it is intrinsically correlative to a high degree of deformation, the term suggested by Gaston Bachelard in order to do away with the mistaken notion of “image making” or “image building” which conventional thought has ascribed to the word imagination. I cannot help agreeing with Bachelard that the imaginative faculty must be understood as freeing us from the immediate images of perception and in his words ‘without an unexpected union of images, there is no imagination, no imaginative action.’ He suggests the word ‘corresponding to imagination is not image, but imaginary….that the value of an image is measured by the extent of its imaginary radiance.’ Now, it is incontrovertible (in accordance with Hegel’s findings in The Philosophy of Fine Art) that the ‘unfettered imagination’ is the basis for poetry, ‘imaginary content’ its objectivity. Rigorously, imaginary power is central to poetic materialization which surrealism locates  as a conduit for thought, speech being no more than a meditational instrument that imaginary thought transforms by the deforming of imagery.

          “But most American poets have mistakenly subordinated the imaginative faculty to the predominance of perception conjoining a slavish reduction of language to ‘speech patterns’ and pragmatic usages….

          “The literary practitioners of the ‘post-Olson generation’ (as some promoters now label it) have been to a hopeless degree failures on the imaginative and lyrical planes of true poetry, preoccupied as they are with a self-conscious acquiescence to the debasement of language characterizing its reification by technicians and mind-managers of latter day capitalism. This direction is glorified specifically by in those false poets who pride themselves on a formalized ‘handling’ of ‘ordinary American speech’ which is, in effect, nothing other than rhetorical camouflage for the betrayal of poetic exigencies in the service of cultural chauvinism and the oppressive ‘reality principle,’ reflecting a pitiful need to be recognized by socially conditioned imbecility. Instead of poetry conceived as a disinterested means of  emancipation—tending toward the realization of the objects of desire—we have Charles Olson, with misappropriated scientific jargon, reducing ‘the poem’ to unqualified abstractions, ‘energy’ and  ‘energy discharge,’ and pontificating the following inane dogma: ‘one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.’

 

OK, the Hegel and the Marx stuff is annoying, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend! And he at least believes in true poetry and isn’t afraid to say so.

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