I still like William Carlos Williams’ dictionary definition
of the Objectivist movement, because it reflects this: ‘It recognises the poem,
apart from its meaning, to be an object to be dealt with as such. O. looks at
the poem with a special eye to its structural aspect, how it has been
constructed.’ The ocular metaphor suggests that the form as seen on the page
might be of some significance. But Williams ends with an appeal to the
intellect. ‘It arose as an aftermath of imagism … which the Objectivists felt
was not specific enough, and applied to any image that might be conceived. O.
concerned itself with an image more particularized yet broadened in its
significance. The mind rather than the unsupported eye entered the picture.’
(Williams 1974: 582) The confusion between the eye and the mind reflects the
tension in the poetics between the ‘thing’ itself (which Imagism was content
with) and the form of the poem-object that treats of this ‘objective – rays of
the object brought to a focus’ (Zukofsky 1981: 14), this ‘historical and
contemporary particular’ (Zukofksy 1981: 12), this novel way of treating content
and form.
Tim Woods recasts the objectification and sincerity binary
thus: ‘What this Objectivist poetics calls for, on the one hand, is a
phenomenological concentration in its insistence that poetry must get at the
object, at the thing itself, while on the other hand, it must remain “true” to
the object without any interference from the imperialist ego, dismissing any
essentialism and calling for the “wisdom” of love or sincerity.’ (Woods 2002:
5) As he later explains, the first involves an ‘ontological poetics’ while the
second involves an ‘ethical relation to the world’. (Woods 2002: 133; it is a
Levinasian reading.) Or again: ‘Sincerity is that aspect of aesthetic action that respects the
particulars of an object,’ reminding us again that ‘sincerity’ is not detached,
in this context, from the text and text-production, (my italics: 146), while ‘Objectification
… is the “formal” aspect, the poem as object-in-the-world.’ (146) Only
objectification can body forth ‘sincerity’.
Seed’s poetics hovers around the practice of two Objectivist
writers, Oppen for his lyric writing, and Reznikoff for his ‘conceptual’
pieces, but that sense of the separation (but relationship) of historical
particulars as being ‘sincerity’, and objectification being achieved through a
series of formal manipulations of those particulars is notably strong in his
conceptual works (from the newly re-discovered Manchester: August 16th & 17th 1819 to
the two recent volumes of Pictures from
Mayhew, and not forgetting ‘Transit Depots’ in between, which is another
story). See my posts on Manchester
Interestingly, Seed doesn’t go back to Zukofsky’s binary but, in the ‘Afterword’, reaches out to the master of binaries, Roland Barthes (and he is such a master of them he knows how to break them, as did Zukofsky). Searching for a way of describing that ‘something else’ that Seed seeks by his framing of historical particulars, to create ‘the sense of / another reality filtering through the language of historical documents,’ (Seed 2013: 52-3) he reaches for Barthes’ distinction between ‘studium’ and ‘punctum’ which he makes in Camera Lucida, but Seed only cites the latter, and indeed returns to the slippery notion of the elusive ‘something’ when he summarises Barthes’ theory: ‘Through the individual photograph something shoots out at the perceiver like an arrow, pierces and wounds him. This he calls the punctum.’ (Seed 2013: 55) He then quotes Barthes: ‘A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’. (Seed 2013: 55; also at Barthes 1984: 27) Seed’s question, ‘Can a poem have a punctum?’ is rendered rhetorical by two impressive fragments of Reznikoff. (55) Yes, we might agree.
It is worth examining this source in some detail (and it
suggests all kinds of usage as poetics for writers now, including myself;
perhaps it helps explain, or offers complexities to a poetics of multiform
unfinish that I have been constructing, the crane defiantly swinging above the
construction site).
Seed says nothing about ‘studium’. Barthes defines it as a
quality of reception (or perception of) photographs, one which is culturally
determined, and may even be responsible for one’s first interest in them, but
this may ‘require the rational intermediary of an ethical and political
culture. What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain
training.’ (Barthes 1984: 26) Never ‘delight or pain’, (28) it is a polite
interest, the name studium (which
auto-correct wishes to change to stadium every time I type it) suggests
‘study’, which Barthes doesn’t completely dismiss with his sense that this is
cultured acquisition, an education even, but more properly it indicates a
‘taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment … but without
special acuity’. (Barthes 1984: 26) It is not, as might be supposed,
indifference, and neither (we shall see) is its opposite shock and awe. Barthes
is offering a binary of ‘interests’ within the circle of appreciation, a range
from liking to loving. ‘Studium’ is the feeling we have when we declare a film,
play, poetry reading, musical performance ‘all right’. It doesn’t hit the spot
that gets you hot. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, we might
say. It’s not even ‘worthy but dull’. It’s better than that: it’s worthy and …
yes, we say: it was worthy. Full stop. We’re pleased but mildly disappointed at
the same time. Over to you Roland:
‘Punctum’ (‘Punk-tum’ I can’t help hearing) is defined as ‘the second element’ that ‘will break (or punctuate) the studium.’ (26) It is ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also the cast of a die’. (27) It is impolite, uncivil, but it is not necessarily surprise, (not punk, despite the pun). In terms of photography, it goes beyond a coded visuality, and beyond naming; it may involve a detail that manifests itself in an image, ‘a detail’ that ‘overwhelms the entirety of my reading’. (49) He uses the same generality as Seed: ‘This something has triggered me, has provoked a tiny shock,’ (49) but ironically, ‘whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.’ (55) Cognition becomes recognition in a moment that feels both inventive and inevitable; Barthes relates it to the non-developmental quiddity of the instantaneous poetics of the haiku, a poetic form with a clear relationship to the imagism-objectivist tradition in which Seed both stands and stands out.
‘Punctum’ (‘Punk-tum’ I can’t help hearing) is defined as ‘the second element’ that ‘will break (or punctuate) the studium.’ (26) It is ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also the cast of a die’. (27) It is impolite, uncivil, but it is not necessarily surprise, (not punk, despite the pun). In terms of photography, it goes beyond a coded visuality, and beyond naming; it may involve a detail that manifests itself in an image, ‘a detail’ that ‘overwhelms the entirety of my reading’. (49) He uses the same generality as Seed: ‘This something has triggered me, has provoked a tiny shock,’ (49) but ironically, ‘whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.’ (55) Cognition becomes recognition in a moment that feels both inventive and inevitable; Barthes relates it to the non-developmental quiddity of the instantaneous poetics of the haiku, a poetic form with a clear relationship to the imagism-objectivist tradition in which Seed both stands and stands out.
Barthes, by the time he wrote Camera Lucida was pretty much an aesthete, and he is content to
deal with his responses to certain photographic details (in a given photograph)
that puncture and punctuate his ‘reading’ (the folded arms of a black servant
or the co-presence of nuns and soldiers in a war photo, for example) without
feeling the need to generalise (and, to be fair, we don’t want him to).
However, I feel it might be useful to think of the abrupt enjambments of Seed’s
poems (which I have examined here, with reference to his ‘treatment’ of
Mayhew’s documentary voices) as a
punctuational punctum, as a way of
forcing the material to offer up its ghosts and their voices, as the trigger
that motivates that something into something else. (The original material,
interesting enough to attract Reznikoff or Seed, is purely the studium; the punctum is the call to form, to transformation.)
If, as Agamben says, ‘Poetry lives only in the tension and
difference (and hence in the virtual interference) between sound and sense’
(109) then ‘enjambement is the only
criterion which allows one to distinguish poetry from prose’, (100) which is
especially crucial when the process of composition is – as in Seed’s conceptual
pieces – to transform prose (or even speech) into poetry. It’s the only tool
and used well it is capable of rising to the imagistic and majestic intensity
of the punctum. As a very different
writer with a very different rhetoric, Frederike Mayröcker, puts it:
flesh of the poem, the
torments severe, I vanish in the
line-break (54).
(This was part of the poetics of René Van Valckenborch, at
least in his Walloon poems.)
Perhaps also with Pound’s dictum against breaking prose into
line-lengths ringing in our ears (how we let the Old Fascist bully us in our
youths, John!), Seed cautiously asserts (if you can do such a thing): ‘It could
be argued that merely breaking prose up into lines does something significant,
whether we call it poetry or not.’ (Seed 2013: 63) He then quotes the
sociologist and educationalist Basil Bernstein (as staple a read for Seed as
the student teacher he was in 1973 as was EP Thompson for him as a Marxist
historian) about a classroom experiment (not too different from Seed’s own as
outlined in my last post, here) to break up ‘continuous writing’ into sentences
‘like a poem. The piece took on a new and vital life.’ (quoted in Seed 2013:
63) Bernstein too apologises and says that this was ‘bad aesthetics’ but
calling this ‘the symbolic nature of space’ is a gift to the kinds of thinking
many of us have been trying to do with spatial elements of poetic artifice.
Like Pound and the Objectivists, Bernstein ‘became fascinated by condensation;
by the implicit’. (64) What happened? At length:
‘The space between the lines, the interval, allowed the symbols to reverberate against each other. The space between the lines was the listener or reader’s space out of which he (sic) created a unique, unspoken, personal meaning.’ (64) So:
‘The space between the lines, the interval, allowed the symbols to reverberate against each other. The space between the lines was the listener or reader’s space out of which he (sic) created a unique, unspoken, personal meaning.’ (64) So:
The space
between the lines, the
interval,
allowed the symbols to
reverberate
against each other. The space
between the lines was
the listener or reader’s space
out of which he
created a unique, unspoken,
personal meaning.
Or even:
the space
between the lines the
interval
allowed the symbols to
reverberate
against each other the space
between the lines was
the listener or reader’s space
out of which he
created a unique
unspoken
personal meaning
See? This strikes me as very good aesthetics indeed, and Seed
has been carrying this quote (from Bernstein’s masterpiece, Class, Codes and Control) around since
1971 when it was published. It was, he said, ‘enthusiastically marked’ in his
own copy. (64) The writer may vanish in the line-break, but this is where the
poem is born as the reader is born as a
reader, in the reading experience; it may result at least in the studium of the educative, but at most in
the punctum of delight. This is what
I would argue of the abrupt enjambments of Seed’s ‘Mayhew’ work (it is less
evident in the juvenilia of Manchester
Works Cited
Agamben, Georgio
Barthes, Roland. Camera
Lucida. London
Mayrocker, Feidereke,
Seed, John. (2013) Manchester London
Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions.
Berkeley : University of California
Williams, William Carlos, (1974): ‘Objectivism’, entry in Preminger,
Alex, ed. Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics. Basingstoke
and London
