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| Two formal takes on a Picasso ceramic |
You can’t point to form. Form is
revealed in tracing forms on the page and in acts of reading as forming. The
critical function of the work of art is asserted by it being art, by it having
form at all. By being form. The poem doesn’t say: it participates, it criticises by operating a rigorous
critique of itself in self-reflection. Poems – critical in their forms and
forming – participate and criticise. Form operates as transfiguration and guilt
in the choice of certain materials and the rejection of others. Form may be
sedimented content but is not readable as such. This is not to be confused with
the overt content (or paraphrasable content), nor with the forms and formings
open to a subtle formalist engagement, with identifiable elements of poetic
artifice. That is to be distinguished from material or materials. Form
sediments content, subsumes mimesis, becomes material. Form is cognitive,
cognition embedded in the sedimentation and in the critical function that is
itself called into being by form (and its autonomy). The cognitive content is
not a paraphrase of the poem’s linguistic content. The autonomy of art enables
all of the above, but is itself predicated on the heteronomy of the work of
art. Its materials rather than its content derive from the latter, bequeath
its sedimented content as critical form to autonomy, as it were. The autonomous
and heteronomous interface results in artists restlessly displaying and
playing their formal impulse between three scenarios: art becomes life; life
becomes art; life and art exchange properties. None is settled upon and the
tension between them drives artistic practice, though not negatively. Dissensus
(rather than consensus, both socially and artistically, in relation to
hetereonomy as well as autonomy) produces the manifold devices of formally
investigative poetry (including that poetry now rather widely called linguistically
innovative): varieties of montage and de-montage emphasising disruption,
interruption, imperfect fit and unfinish, as well as transformation and
transposition, creative linkage in other words. They put disorder at the heart
of art’s order, while simultaneously putting order at the heart of its
disruption. Resisting signification within signification is the formal splinter
at, and in, the heart of the poem. The critical function of art is born in the
instant its form de-forms and re-forms in front of us as precisely a
representation of freedom. Political formally investigative poetry, will both say and not say,
modified by formal resistance and interruption. If form knows, if forms
know, anything - they know at least to do these things.
(For a further description of, and full listings of posts relating to, my The Meaning of Form project, click here.)
(For a further description of, and full listings of posts relating to, my The Meaning of Form project, click here.)
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
