The Flavour of Poetics
I want to focus on three well-known texts to give a flavour of
poetics and to suggest that it is not the preserve of the avant-garde (although
I will add some flavours from that area too). The first is an example of the
revelation of poetics in literary criticism. TS Eliot’s essay ‘The Metaphysical
Poets’ (1921) contains this memorable passage that describes the multifaceted
complexity he located in John Donne, but in terms which are obviously
constructing the poetics of The Waste Land, which he was then composing.
The slippage from Donne to typewriter is a giveaway.
A thought to Donne was an
experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly
equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the
ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls
in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with
each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the
mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. (Eliot 1975:
64)
This is only one revealing example in Eliot’s work, as JCC Mays
has pointed out: ‘When he writes about tradition and the individual talent, he
described how his allusive method works; when he wrote about a dissociation of
sensibility taking place in the seventeenth-century mind he described the
subject of his own poetry; when he wrote of the objective correlative in Hamlet,
he defined its method.’ (Mays: 115)
While
my critical and writerly focus is upon the poetics of poetry, the existence of
poetics for other genres may be exemplified by my next two examples. Samuel
Beckett’s ‘Three Dialogues’ (1949) looks like a carefully orchestrated Socratic
exchange on aesthetics, apparently on visual art, but it contains what looks
more like a credo for the rest of Beckett’s novelistic, dramatic and poetic
career – he was already writing the trilogy – a new art premised upon ‘the
expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express,
nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express,
together with the obligation to express’. (Esslin 1965: 17).
Salman Rushdie’s speech (originally
delivered ventrioloquially by Pinter) ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’ (1990) carves out a
space for the novel in terms reminiscent of Henry James’ poetics of the house
of fiction, as well as Bakhtin’s sense of polyphony, whilst integrating
Lyotard, Foucault and Rorty into his poetics, all delivered with the brio
of Lawrence: ‘Literature is the one place in any society where, within the
secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in
every possible way’. (Rushdie 1991: 429)
Two prominent examples of poetics in
my own research area of American language poetry and British linguistically
innovative poetry are Allen Fisher’s Necessary Business (1985) and
Charles Bernstein’s ‘The Artifice of Absorption’ (1986) (Bernstein 1992: 9-89).
Without repeating a comparative analysis available elsewhere (Sheppard 1999b, and on this blog, here),
these two formally hybrid texts constitute exemplary poetics. Fisher’s text is
an essay collaged into interviews with poets. In it, or rather, through it, he
manufactures a poetics for himself, one that others may use and develop (See
Sheppard 1999a and the long account in Thurston 2002). Similarly Bernstein, who
presents a verse-essay, plays off the conventions of the essay (footnotes and
quotations) against the conventions of poetry (chiefly line breaks) to produce
an oddly associational and playful ‘patapoetics’. It refuses to settle the
arguments it presents, chiefly through a monstrous proliferation of new
critical terms and manifold examples. It is also comic! Both documents keep the
arguments open by their dispositions in form. They refuse the essay discourse
they approximate and, most importantly, they demonstrate and embody
their two authors’ poetic practices, the collage of Fisher and the playful
mixture of discourses found in most poems by Bernstein.
Bernstein himself provides a
further model that it is worth acknowledging. After two decades of consciously
producing poetics outside of the academy he fronted the Poetics Program at the
State University of New York at Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center
*
Return to part one (and an index to all parts of The
Necessity of Poetics) here.
