A
poetics piece dedicated to poet Sean Bonney, ‘Bad Poetry for Bad People!’
re-articulates many of the terms in this piece in a ‘forming action’ that drags
ideas in the wake of its forward trajectory. I come up with the term
‘manyfesto’ to distinguish its multiple unfinish from the ‘manifestos’ of art
(and politics). Written in response to Bonney’s talk about politics and poetry
at the same Edinburgh conference to which I presented a draft of ‘Form, Forms and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry’ (and
with the sounds of Bonney’s talk, my paper and the 2011 English riots ringing
in my ears), it brings together (and disperses) many of the themes of this
book, and demonstrates some of its concerns: it harbours (yet another) sonnet
in its midst, it contains a ‘poetry’ that cannot be paraphrased, it offers a
poetics that remains speculative, conjectural and provocative. It is a form
that thinks poetry. Read it here. It is also republished, revised, in my book Unfinish: see here.
It
begins (to give a taster):
i put myself in the scene i swerve new walls a mile high. An Investors in People plaque gleams
on the funeral director’s wall. Shadows cast us aside for evening’s soft
erasures, leave pencil shavings on paper. Political poetry will both say and
not say, modified by formal resistance. Commodified
a looted shop or Love on an impulse never
correct mistrust of getting some watches a clear Muse stream hash-tagged on
Twitter. This might be a way of approaching Adorno’s contention that the
unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as problems of form.
There’s….
Even a cursory
inspection of Charles Bernstein’s edited volume The Politics of Poetic Form (1990), a book that one might think pertinent to the theme of this
blogging, will reveal how little form
is actually referred to in any detail (by Rosmarie Waldrop alone as it happens
in the poetics piece ‘Alarms and Excursions’, examined in an earlier posting). It
is easier to talk politics, we might infer, than to interrogate form. I wish to
trace a politics of poetic form without losing sight of form as a vital force
of poesis. If poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities
through the means (meanings) of form – as I contend – then the investigation of
form itself is of paramount importance. It comes with a certain methodological
liberty and verve: ‘The vitality of reading for form is freedom from program
and manifesto, from any uniform discipline,’ (5) says leading new formalist
Susan J. Wolfson. Indeed, this formalism has been fighting against
instrumentalist readings of literature, ranging from the impositions of the New
Historicists to the quasi-sociology that passes for a lot of English teaching
still, particularly of poetry in schools, which often amounts to political
message unmediated by the effects of form. Wolfson counters this: ‘My deepest
claim is that language shaped by poetic form is not simply conscriptable as
information for other frameworks of analysis; the forms themselves demand a
specific kind of critical attention.’ (30)
I argue that the attention of any formal
study of contemporary poetry – for that is what I am currently writing – must
be dual. It must focus on form in the technical sense, on identifiable forms in play, the ones identified by
Veronica Forrest-Thomson in Poetic
Artifice as enjambment, line, rhythm, rhyme, etc., and on form in a general, more performative sense, that prioritises
acts of forming and our apprehension of their coming to form in our reading. Forms and forming I call this pair for ease. Associating one with the other,
Derek Attridge in The Singularity of
Literature argues that form is the force that stages a performance of any
text: we need to apprehend ‘the eventness of the literary work, which means
that form needs to be understood verbally – as ‘taking form”, of “forming”, or
even “loosing form”’(113), but he
insists that the devices of artifice ‘are precisely what call forth the
performative response’ of any engaged reader, directly connected to the event
of singularity which is the irruption of an inventive otherness in our
productive reading. (118)
Both types of form are capable of carrying a semantic or cognitive
charge, demonstrating that forms think. They contain or envelop meaning(s) of
knowledge(s) and might show how new meaning and (non-propositional) knowledge
might be formed and formulated. As such, aesthetic form carries a force operating
on the individual (or collective) reader or viewer, which – in the case of
poetry – means that the reader is the site where such meanings are staged by
form, so that reading is formulating form, and formulating it into fluxing
semantic and cognitive forms as a ‘performed mobility’. (111). Wolfson even
writes that literature lovers ‘respond to forms as a kind of content’. (Rawes
214) Formal considerations of both kinds (forms and forming) are engaged by active reading and enact meanings
that moderate, exacerbate, subvert (and on rare occasions reinforce) the kind
of extractable meaning that Forrest-Thomson and Attridge both decry as
‘paraphrase’. If apprehension of form is not, or not only, a matter of
collecting the devices of poetic artifice, of forms, but a question of entering into the process by which the
text finds form in our reading, as forming,
there can be, strictly, no paraphrase; indeed, paraphrase, a mode by which
meaning is supposedly skimmed off the surface of reading as a residue or even
an essence, or worse, a ‘political’ slogan, is a violation of the processes of
forms forming. Paraphrase is amnesia of form.
‘An “artist” is someone who presents problems of forms,’ insists Lyotard
in ‘The Critical Function of the Work of Art’, using the plural of the word as
my study does, in alliance with, but distinct from its singular form. He
continues: ‘The essential element, the only decisive one, is form. Modifying
social reality is not important at all if it aims at putting back into place
something that will have the same form.’
(83 Driftworks Lyotard) As true as these two sentences might be, the analogy
that is suggested between the plastic forms of art practice, form as a decisive
category of aesthetics or poetics, and ‘form’ as social and political formation
in the service of an understated social ‘modification’, is an utopian one not
sustained beyond his textual practice of periodic juxtaposition and the
cognitive wilfulness of wishful thinking. It moves, as the arguments often do,
too quickly, from ‘form’ as I am tracing its adventure in my current study, to
social transformation as that is envisioned by radical politics. In the
transfer events of forms and acts of forming are ignored: form is lost.
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was
published in 1970, the same year as Lyotard’s post-1968 speculations, but takes
a more nuanced view of what is a long standing interaction in aesthetics,
beginning in Schiller, between the forms of life and the forms of art. ‘The
unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of
form,’ Adorno says, thus immediately aligning, but separating, politics and
form. (Adorno Theory: p. 6). The relationship between reality and form is
announced in a way which seems to settle the issue. Antagonisms that have been
resolved do not make their appearance, have historically played themselves out,
it seems. Those unhappily unresolved
antagonisms – of class one supposes – ‘return’ in artworks. They exist prior to
their appearance as form therefore. By this formulation, they could not arise in the artwork, certainly not as content
and only as form, or to be precise as ‘a problem of form’, whatever that might
mean, and as an immanent, intrinsic one at that. Both Lyotard and Adorno see
the artist presenting problems of
form or forms, rather than form or its forms (or indeed forming) themselves. To
continue with Adorno: the dynamic social forces of antagonism re-appear after
the event as problems (which presumably have possible solutions) in the very
substance of ‘the objective organisation within each artwork of what appears to
be bindingly eloquent’ (p. 143), to use one of Adorno’s multiple definitions of
form. For philosophy, an eloquent problem might be a forceful expression of its
ceaseless activity; for an artist, problems of form or forms may be questions
of poetics as I define it, as a speculative writerly discourse about the future
of his or her activity, of acts of forming. But that is to return to the primal
scene of poesis too hastily. Let us pursue Adorno’s definitions of form from a
social perspective: ‘Form is what is anti-barbaric in art; through form art
participates in the civilization that it criticizes by its very existence.’
(143) This asserts, a sting sharp in its tail, a now familiar conception of the
critical function of the work of art, but which involves form as acts of
forming, as dynamic participants in critique. Another definition suggests how
the immanent problems reconfigure, how form mediates its critical function by
operating on the world through itself, by turning onto, or back to, itself: ‘Form
converges with critique. It is that through which artworks prove self-critical.’ (144: my emphasis) The
problems of form and forms offer the modalities of critique in acts of forming, at those moments
when form becomes visible. ‘If form is that in artworks by which they become
artworks,’ argues Adorno, a formalism with which we might concur, ‘it is
equivalent with their mediatedness, their objective reflectiveness into
themselves.’ (144) Reading
for form is allowing critical form to become critical function. Mediation to be
complete must involve the finding, making, or even losing of form by the user
of the artwork.
This has an art-historical aspect: ‘By its critical implication, form
annihilates practices and works of the past.’ (144) A chapter in progress (there’s
a version on Pages in 14 parts (of
course!) ‘The Innovative Sonnet Sequence’, it begins here, and ends here, and was posted daily for a fortnight) outlines the vicissitudes in the
history of the sonnet, the emergence of the innovative sonnet in one literary
milieu in response to the perceived redundancy of the traditional sonnet. Jeff
Hilson’s anthology The Reality Street
Book of Sonnets is a monument to formal annihilation, to form analysing
itself by fruitful exploration of the possible contemporary formal meanings of
the sonnet frame.
To repeat my self-consciously formalist thesis: Poetry is the investigation of complex
contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. But for Adorno
there is a further chain in the argument that forges the link between formal
introspection and political critique: ‘Form is the law of the transfiguration
of the existing, counter to which it represents freedom.’ (143) A
representation of freedom is not freedom itself, of course, and Adorno
characteristically sees the melancholy and guilt of the transfigurative situation
in that ‘form inevitably limits what is formed’, since ‘selecting, trimming,
renouncing’ must be a major part of poesis. ‘Without rejection there is no
form, and this prolongs guilty domination in artworks, of which they would like
to be free; form is their amorality.’ (144) I’m not sure this is experienced at
the level of poesis (chopping out an unnecessary simile or adjective, sweeping
away a passage of exposition in a piece of fiction, can be exhilarating), but
at an historical level (say, of rejecting traditional sonnet forms for
innovative ones) it might be felt as guilt. Indeed, this is not a million miles
away from WH Auden’s guilty realisation that ‘a poem which was really like a
political democracy would be formless’; a society organised like a good poem
(by Auden’s poetics) would be a totalitarian regime, a remark that has haunted
and stimulated my thinking for some decades. (quoted in Raban, p. 27) It certainly flowed into the formal
selections for writing my poem The Lores
in the mid-90s, where ‘the text’s poetic focus is the relationship of fascism
to micro-fascism and the matching resistances to that at both the Grand Level
and at ground level,’ is negotiated in part by the formal frame of ‘various
word counts for the poem [which] derive from Plato’s The Laws, in which
5040 is considered the ideal number of citizens for his second ,[more
repressive,] Republic because it is a number divisible by most numbers, and is
therefore useful for the raising of taxes and militia, and – doubtless – for
surveillance’ (Sheppard 2008: 383-4):
HISTORY MATERIALISES A
HALO OF EXTINCTION
X WHICH FLOATS
ABOVE YOU CLOCKS
RUST ON SHOP
FRONTS YOUR MUGSHOT
FLASH BETWEEN NEGATING
BARS THE DEFENCE
IMPLODES IN PROVISIONAL
MARGINS OF CODE
REVOLUTIONARY PLEASURE
STRUGGLES
WITHOUT HEROES WHILE
BLOCS OF SENSATION
PINCH THE EYE
MANACLES HOLD YOUR
HANDS IN AN
ATTITUDE OF PRAYER
AS THE POSTMAN
APPEARS FROM NOWHERE
DIASPORA-LINKAGE IN
THE CRUSH OF
YAWNING TURF-GRAVES
A SINGLE IMPACT
PEPPERS OUR GIFTS
STREET-COLLISION
FETISHES
MARKET THE ORDINARY
PRAYERS ETHICS FROZEN
IN CELESTIAL GUILT
DISPOSITIONS BEHIND LIMP
FLAG FRAMES A
NEWSREEL THE LIGHT
WHERE PERCEPTION BECOMES
ETHICAL TO REGIMENT
THE PARTY OF
A-TOPIA HE QUESTIONS
FROM CROUCHING GUN
POSITIONS ANSWERS WITH
BOHÈME IN YOUR
BOARDROOM DUST
GRAFFITIST
SERENADES THE VECTORS
BOOT SERMONS KICK
COMPETITIVE BARRICADES
The forms of life and the forms of art have been entangled since Romantic
aesthetics gave us the terms. ‘Form is the seal of social labour, fundamentally
different from the empirical process of making,’ (144) remarks Adorno, and this
is true, but the empirical process of making, poesis and its poetics, must lie
behind any presentation of the problems of form, and it is one I want to return
to as someone who presents problems of form(s) as poems. ‘Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It
was an activity of his nature,’ Marx commented, (Marx in Milton ed. Davies, p. 19) a little too easily,
but it does remind us that Schiller asserted, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) that ‘Man … is only wholly Man when he is playing’
and ‘he shall play only with Beauty.’
(Schiller p. 80; italics his) The
shaping of beauty can only be facilitated by the ‘play impulse’ but the ‘object
of the form impulse’ is ‘shape… a
concept which includes all formal qualities of things and all their relations
to the intellectual faculties’ (p. 76, italics his). This is in distinction to
its reciprocatory antagonist, the ‘sense impulse’, whose object is ‘life’ to the wholeness of Man. (76: but see also
p. 118) Art and life are separate until brought together. Schiller leaves us in
no doubt that the Man who is wholly himself in play and sense becomes adequate
to realities beyond himself by becoming a man of form, as it were: ‘When … the
formal impulse holds sway, and the pure object acts within us, there is the
highest expansion of being, all barriers disappear, and from being the unit of
magnitude to which the needy sense confined him, Man has risen to a unit of idea embracing the whole realm
of phenomena.’ (Schiller: 67; his italics.)
Jacques Rancière, in his 2002 essay ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its
Outcomes’ points to Schiller’s equation of these drives and summarises: ‘There
exists a specific sensory experience that holds the promise of both a new world
of Art and a new life for individuals and the community, namely the aesthetic.’ The Romantic
breakthrough of which Schiller was part is ‘one that reframes the division of
the forms of our experience to this day’, he claims. (Dis: 115 ranc) This
results in ‘three major scenarios’ concerning this relationship, similar to the
triad established by Schiller: ‘Art can become life. Life can become art. And
art and life can change their properties.’ (119) One of Rancière’s ‘scenarios’
(the last, in effect that art and life can change and perhaps exchange their
properties) is particularly seductive but dangerous for the contemporary artist
in Rancière’s attractive description. ‘The prose of everyday life becomes a
huge fantastic poem’ sounds inviting (particularly to poets!), the poet
becoming ‘not only a naturalist or an archaeologist, … he also becomes … a
symptomologist, delving into the dark underside … to decipher the messages engraved in the very
flesh of ordinary things’, but this is to run the risk of making the
extraordinary ordinary, and results (‘taken to its extreme’) in the vapid ‘political’
art of ‘exhibitions of re-cycled commodities’: ‘denunciation … becomes part of
the game’. (126-7) How I think of certain exhibitions at the Liverpool
Biennial, but the textual equivalent might be a work such as Alexandra Nemerov’s
‘First My Motorola’ which ‘is a list of every brand she touched over the course
of a day’, and is an exemplar of uncreative writing in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing published in
2011. (457-62):
First, My Motorola
Then my Frette
Then my Sonia Rykiel
Then my Bulgari
Then my Asprey …. (457)
until
And finally, my Motorola (462)
Nemerov’s text attempts
to trace the multiple signatures of late capitalism, but does nothing with those
traces; from a formal point of view this text fails to transform the phenomena it frames (unlike,
say, Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day or
Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts). It
is unadorned product placement that ‘my’ of the circularity of the diurnal
return to ‘And finally’ hardly ironises enough (for this reader). Art and life change
their properties, perhaps, and in the act de-value both; exchange is not, after
all, transformation.1
However, between these three scenarios that Rancière describes (the other
two entropic ‘vanishing points’ are art becoming life and life becoming art,
remember) creative artists inevitably ‘shuttle … playing one linkage with art
and non-art against another such linkage’. (132) The artist buzzes like a fly
between the three planes of his or her conceptual prison. This places the poet
in an interestingly nuanced and unstable position: ‘Aesthetic art promises a
political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity,’
says Rancière, quite positively. (133) The forms of life and the forms of art
touch and partly re-negotiate their relationship, perhaps continually. Rancière
calls this process ‘dissensus’: ‘If there exists a connection between art and
politics, it should be cast in terms of dissensus, the very kernel of the
aesthetic regime: artworks can produce effects of dissensus precisely because
they neither give lessons nor have any destination’. (140) Dissensus is defined
in contradistinction to the manufacture of ‘democratic’ consensus as ‘a
political process that resists juridical litigation and creates a fissure in
the sensible order by confronting the established framework of perception,
thought and action with the “inadmissible”’. (in Glossary in The Politics of Aesthetics: p. 85)
Forces of subjectivation are energised by its rupture of reality. Its politics operate much like the approved
model of the aesthetic in Rancière’s thought.2
‘The dream of a suitable political work of art,’ Rancière says elsewhere
in an interview, ‘is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between
the visible, the sayable and thinkable’ – the three essential regimes of his
thinking – ‘without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle’, like
Nemerov; instead producing ‘meanings in the form of a rupture with the very
logic of meaningful situations.’ (Polit 63) In effect, a dissensual rupture. Rupture
– which I interpret, or at least envisage, as a formal activity –is inherently meaningful.
As Benjamin comments: ‘Interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all
structuring.’ (Benjamin: 58?)
Rancière, writing in 2003, issued a minatory corrective to the purely
technical comprehension of poesis, and reminds us of a certain entropy of
technique, in formal actitivity that is not, or is no longer, effective,
because complicit with social and political processes, in the case of collage
or ‘meanings in the form of a rupture’ to use his expression:
Linking anything with everything whatsoever, which yesterday passed for
subversive, is today increasingly homogeneous with the reign of journalistic anything contains everything and the
subject-hopping of advertising. We therefore need … to put some disorder back into montage.
(Rancière 2007: 51)
To me, this last corrective is a brilliant description of the ethics, if
not politics, of form in late Tom Raworth (as I’ve written elsewhere and won’t
repeat here, in both The Poetry of Saying
and in When Bad Times Made for Good
Poetry). ‘Suitable political art would ensure … the production of a double
effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or
perceptual shock caused … by the uncanny, by that which resists signification’.
(63 of The Politics of Aesthetics) Although this is not, like Adorno’s, a
strictly formalist reading, it is difficult for me to see how a ‘sensible or
perceptual shock’ might be achieved without formally investigative operations,
such as in a re-vitalised montage that suggests dissensual rupture rather than
connection; but I fail to see why the fashionable ‘uncanny’ should be the only
means available to achieve this. The double effect can only occur in moments of
forming, when the text takes form before our eyes in our actual interaction
with the text. The critical function of art is born in the instant its form
de-forms and re-forms in front of us as precisely the representation of freedom
that Adorno describes. If forms know anything they know at least to do this.
In my first
presentation of this chapter as a paper at the Conversify Conference in Edinburgh in October 2011,
I ended here on this formalist flourish but I’d like to share the original
ending because it points to certain difficulties I’ve had with my poetics of
form and my formalist poetics.
There [I might
have said]: I’ve rattled on so long, reached the outer limits of my current
critical thinking, and not left enough time for examples. I’m meant to be
talking about Barry MacSweeney, and want to write about his particular forms in
my book on form. My original abstract promised: ‘I test the political
implications of this [my notions of form] by an examination of Barry
MacSweeney’s varied use of form, from the impaction of ‘Odes’ to the political
transparency of a number of his ‘State of the Nation Addresses’, from the
lyricism of the ‘Pearl’ poems to the anger of the late mythologizing poems of
alcoholic disintegration.’ Even then I realised: ‘While I will be unable to
cover all of this in a paper I focus upon events of forming as central to
reading and question how the political operates within readerly forming and within
the forms of poems. This might be a more productive way of approaching Adorno’s
contention that “The unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as
immanent problems of form.”’ I believe this to have been the case. However, in
another way I’ve written myself into a corner. But it’s an interesting one. And
one I’ve been in before, where, like now, I was caught between literary
critical concepts, the speculative discourse of my poetics, and literary
creation. The moment was the mid 1990s and the concept was not form but
‘creative linkage’ as a specific description of the ‘accelerated collage’ at
work in Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher, Ulli Freer and Adrian Clarke. This resulted
in a personal poetics of creative linkage and a literary work, The Lores, which put that theory of textual
impaction into poetic practice. Using quite other materials, the thinking of
Adorno and Rancière, and the whole league of ‘new’ formalist critics, nevertheless
leads me back to the knot where criticism, poetics and poetry meet. Writing
this one week after rioting occured about half a mile from where I’m sitting, I
feel impelled to re-visit the angry core of The
Lores and figure out what might be my contemporary version of Ranciere’s
‘double effect: the readability of a political signification’ – nobody is
saying the poem isn’t saying – against ‘a sensible or perceptual shock caused …
by that which resists signification’.
The time capsule’s
contract with the
future, the Eugenics’
Court with its
injections, co-ops us
to a selective
history: as soon
as the population
is trafficking clatters
the shutters down
the laws of
motion beyond its
jurisdiction, unceased husks
in lightning streaks
Flicks to see
who flinches empty
me from your
circumference, accommodations of
space an abacus
for millions who
stand beside us
pure result with
no contest empty
microphones and dead
amplifiers inside each
rule if she
moves any slower
she’s our commodity
Political poetry will both say and not say, modified by formal
resistance and interruption. (See a condensed version of this piece, with additions, here.) Check out all my posts concerning form 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
1. Is Alexandra Nemerov a relative of
Alex Nemerov (male), a wonderful academic I met in Amsterdam? We realised both of our fathers
had been in the RAF. Poetry readers should be able to work out who his was.
2. Guattari also uses the term in his
suggestive late The Three Ecologies to
contrast ‘a stupefying and infantalizing consensus’ with ‘the singular
production of existence’ from micro-political groups operating in short term
autonomous activism.’ (50: Guattari.)
Works Cited
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Adorno, G., Tiedemann, R., trans. Hullot-Kentor, R., Aesthetic Theory, London: New York: Continuum,
2002.
Benjamin,
Walter. Illuminations. Fontana, 1970.
Dworkin, Craig,
and Goldsmith, Kenneth, eds. Against
Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2011.
Guattari, Félix.
The Three Ecologies. London
and New Brunswick:
The Athlone Press, 2000.
Lyotard,
Jean-Francois. Driftworks. New York: Semiotexte,
1984.
Milton, John.
ed. Davies, Tony. Selected Shorter Poems
and Prose. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.
Raban, Jonathan.
The Society of the Poem. London: Harrap, 1971.
Rancière,
Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London and New
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Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. London and New York: Verso, 2007.
Rancière,
Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and
Aesthetics. London and New York: Continuum, 2010.
Rawes, Alan, ed.
Romanticism and Form. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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Sheppard, Robert. The Lores. London: Reality Street, 2003.
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Twentieth Century Blues. Cambridge:
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