PROPOSITIONS
1987
1 There
are two general aims of the kind of poetry proposed:
1.1 The investigation and invention of poetic
forms to accommodate and inaugurate new modes of perception and expression.
1.11 This will have the additional effect of
extending the paradigm ‘poetry’.
1.2 Secondly, it frustrates the processes of
naturalisation: delays readers reducing the strangeness of poetic language to
paraphrase, to everyday language statements about the external world.
1.21 In a poem, it is only through the
operations of poetic artifice that the perceptions of the ordinary everyday
world are disrupted and criticised.
1.3 The concept of ‘poetry’ is entropic, and
ceases to break its own paradigm, through time.
1.4 It is only through the development of new
formal devices that both naturalisation and entropy can be delayed.
2 Such a poetry owes a general debt to
modernism; specifically it is a reading of its forgotten vitality.
2.1 It looks to the more extreme forms of
modernism (Spring and All not The Waste Land; Finnegans
Wake not Ulysses), those still
not wholly assimilated, and neutralised, by the Movement orthodoxy in British
Poetry.
2.11 This
paradoxical return can be called postmodernism.
2.111 It is broader in its use here than the simple
ludic metaphorisation which the Movement orthodoxy, with its anti-modernist streak, has also claimed
in its name.
2.12 It is also more precise and analytical than
‘postmodernism’ used as a tag to sell an apolitical product and consumer boom
in contemporary art.
2.2 There should be a better term, one that
is not itself a battleground, but there isn’t.
3 Postmodernism can be most usefully
used to designate a general philosophical worldview.
3.1 Knowledge is defined as a permanent
condition of exploratory and incomplete process.
3.2 Rules are not seen as normative
prescriptions, not necessarily as descriptions, but a parameters produced
co-terminously with the event or process they regulate.
3.3 Any activity is seen as unpredictable and
is constantly moving into the unknown, towards the creation of the new, not
returning always to the recognisable.
3.4 This worldview affects poetic knowledge,
production and regulation directly.
3.41 Writing’s only possible state is one of
change and development, a process of working towards new meanings hitherto
unuttered, not the formulation of a product from prior assumptions of meaning.
3.5 This worldview also affects the reception
of the literary text, which must be seen as an active process.
4 Indeterminacy and discontinuity are
central notions for this poetry of the open work, drawn from the vocabulary of
postmodern science.
4.1 Indeterminacy need not mean randomness,
but a process of working with contingency in a conscious fashion, a dialectic
of choice and chance.
4.2 Perception is an indeterminate process -
for the writer writing, for the reader reading.
4.3 The types of indeterminacy may change,
but they include:
4.31 Structural (and syntactic) indeterminacies
of poetic form (and of grammar and discourse):
4.32 Semantic indeterminacies of reference and
sense, multiple ambiguity;
4.33 Rhythmical indeterminacies of syllable and
line: developing, often, co-terminously with poetic activity.
4.331 This determinacy of rhythm sometimes erodes
the distinction between poetry and prose, sometimes mixes the forms.
4.4 Discontinuities could be similarly
listed.
4.5 The role of subjectivity in the text will
be indeterminate, the self/selves discontinuous.
4.51 Subjectivity becomes a question of
linguistic position, or of a discordant polyphony of voices, rather than one of
a single authorising presence, even of a ‘narrator’ or ‘persona’.
4.6 Indeterminacy de-emphasises the
authorising role of the writer in the creation of meaning.
4.61 It also activates the reader so that he or
she enters into the text to attempt to complete it.
4.7 Systemisation of any indeterminacy (as in
prescriptions for ‘free verse’) establishes norms for imitation which diminish
the de-automatising effects the devices will have upon the engaged reader.
4.71 Modes of indeterminacy and discontinuity
will necessarily alter through time.
4.711 Static formulations of openness will have to
be abandoned.
4.712 Determinate and continuous modes may also be
able to effect de-automatising devices for the reader.
5 By employing foregrounded artifice, by
laying bare its devices, the poem delays naturalisation.
5.1 Foregrounded artifice de-automatises the
reader’s responses.
5.2 It makes what might be falsely taken to
be ‘natural’ to appear truly as artificial.
5.3 It makes the familiar, presented in
poetic discourse, strange.
6 Poetry defamiliarises the social
world, the reality principle; it is not directly mimetic.
6.1 The subversive aspirations which surfaced
in the 1960s have moved from the political to the aesthetic dimension.
6.11 The attempt to aestheticise politics at
least politicised aesthetics.
6.12 The desire to change the world is not
simply exchanged for the desire to change the reader. For a poem, as it is being read, they are
slenderly identical.
6.13 This is to concede a powerful defeat: to
begin to change the desires of a reader.
6.2 Subversion, in the text, is effective
primarily at the level of form.
6.21 Aestheticism is not necessarily apolitical,
although it should not be complacently and autonomously closed.
7 Defamiliarisation and deformation are
subversive and transformative elements in the poetic text.
7.1 The objects of the world are liberated
from the reality principle in the formal autonomy of the poem, as is language,
free from reference.
7.11 The autonomy of art institutes its critical
function.
7.12 The aesthetic function animates the
critical function: the objects of the world and language are capable of
recombination.
7.13 The critical function is de-centred,
sceptical, anarchistic.
7.2 It is not a question of reproducing a
coherent utopian vision (or a consistent discourse) but of producing active
‘figures’ or ‘noise’ - depending upon one’s metaphor - which frustrate
natualisation and notions of social consistency.
8 The text must be constant in its
inconsistency, forever in a state of critical becoming.
8.1 The ethic of working for the poet is not
a work ethic. Working the work is his or
her state of becoming.
9 Reading the poem should be an active
education of desire, not a recognition, fulfilment and killing of desire.
9.1 The reader, producing the poem in his or
her reading, enters an incomplete, open realm of imaginative freedom,
recognises its formal autonomy.
9.2 This is the poem’s affirmative moment at
which its indeterminacy and discontinuity, or its foregrounded devices which
invite the reader to participate, co-extend with the reader’s act of reading.
9.3 The affirmative moment can never wholly
be divorced from the critical function: the cry of hope and the cry of despair
are heard together.
9.31 They can either be made to be heard in
harmony (offering utopic images or a programme).
9.32 Or they can be made to be heard in
dissonance (countering consistency).
9.321 Only this last combination can fully engage
the reader, educate desire.
9.4 In the act of constructing its meanings,
the readers share in the poem’s state of becoming.
9.41 In doing so, they should discover that it
is also what a text is made to do,
not merely what it is made to mean,
that is revolutionary.
9.42 At this point, the constant change of the postmodern condition
engages the future possibility of non-programmatic social change.
9.43 These meet, in the reader’s reading, not in
the writer’s writing, in changing the desires of a reader, at the moment of
affirmation.
10 The poem, as it is read, projects a
future in its very refusal to mean this
world.
10.1 This moment of affirmation, the turning
towards the future suggests that however much postmodern these propositions are, they are pre-something else, flashlights unwittingly signalling as yet
unreadable messages.
Sources: The material for these
propositions is found also in my Some Aspects of Contemporary British Poetry,
with particular reference to the works of Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood
(unpublished), ‘Pre-script’ (Pages
1-8, 1987), and ‘Working the Work’ (First
Offense 3, 1987). Beyond these, the
propositions are indebted (at least) to works by the following: P Ackroyd, TW
Adorno, R Barthes, A Easthope, U Eco, A Fisher, V Forrest-Thomson, S Fredman, Y
Lotman, J-F Lyotard, H Marcuse, M Merleau-Ponty, J Mukaéovskú,
M Perloff, V Shklovsky, EP Thompson and WC Williams
18 October 1987 Previously
unpublished
