I mentioned earlier that a lot of
mainstream poetry writing makes me feel ill, and I mean it viscerally: there
are moments in poetry readings when I lose the will to breath, feel a leaden
burden upon my genial spirits, as I listen to poetry so rhetorically
constricting of its subject matter, so batteringly apposite in its battery of
figurative language, so formally consistent and self-confirming, so air-tight
as to be suffocating. The lyric tradition, for me, contains enough of such
self-regarding artefacts (although they claim not to be artefacts). Yet it is
also full of its opposite. As Christopher Middleton wrote decades ago:
To recapture poetic reality in a tottering
world, we may have to revise, once more, the idea of a poem as an expression of
the “contents” of a subjectivity. Some poems, at least, and some types of
poetic language, constitute structures of a singularly radiant kind, where
“self-expression” has undergone a profound change of function. We experience
these structures, if not as revelations of being, then as apertures upon being.
We experience them as we experience nothing else. (Middleton 1990: 283)
Muriel Rukeyser, in her
poetics-poem, ‘Poem White Page White Page Poem’ announces that
something
is streaming out of the body in waves
something
is beginning from the fingertips
which asserts poetic rhythm as energy, waves, pulses,
surges, which engender life:
the small
waves bringing themselves to white paper
something
like light stands up and is alive (Rukeyser 1995: 268)
‘Announcing with the poem that we are about to change,’ as
she says, might be a way to stay with the feeling of it; its fluidity becomes
our fluidity. Its rhythms become our rhythms. (Rukeyser 1995or 4: XXX) The
thing is, as Robert Kaufman puts it in an aphorism that I have quoted before in
The Meaning of Form: ‘To make thought
sing and to make song think,’ (Kaufman 2005: 212) as I believe Maggie
O’Sullivan, Allen Fisher, Zoe Skoulding, Sean Bonney, Frances Kruk, Tom Jenks,
Geraldine Monk, Peter Hughes, Cathy
Weedon and Jeff Hilson, to
name ten very different poets do, in their work, some of which I’ve written
about critically, others I haven’t. What I’m not doing is identifying the elements
of poetic artifice that cause these effects, as I would do, and as I have done,
in critical discourse.
My most recent (possibly my last) critical book The Meaning of Form opens with an
aphorism of its own. I say: ‘Poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through
the means (meanings) of form.’ (Sheppard 2016: ?) I continue:
The pun upon ‘means’ is intended to enact the
supposition that if poetry does anything it does it chiefly through its formal
power and less through its content, though it also carries the further
suggestion that form is a modality of meaning in its own right. If we use the
term ‘formally investigative’ of this poetry, we are also suggesting that the
investigation of reality and the investigation of, experimentation with, form
and forms, are coterminous, equivalent, perhaps not, in the final analysis, to
be determined apart. (Sheppard 2016: ?)
I had best
not pursue the formalist trajectory of that book as it traces the way forms,
and acts of forming (and of losing form) operate in actual poems, following the
careful lead of Derek Attridge’s The
Singularity of Literature (a book I think all postgraduate students of
Creative Writing should read). My identification of poetic forms (technique-spotting!) grounds my apprehension of processes of
forming and meaning-formation, as they meet in an aesthetic
response which is a material engagement of reader and text, another act of
forming which is undertaken by the engaged reader. If there’s minimal engagement
it’s not reading (as we might tell our students).
I am going to read a 500 word statement of
intent that may be a statement of poetics, or may be a theory of poetry, I’m
not sure. I will display the 200 word version of the statement as I read it.Read the 200 word version of 'The Formal Splinter' here or here.
Read the 500 word version here.
All the thinking of The Meaning of Form may be accessed at the hub-post, one of the most accessed on this blog, HERE.
Read all parts of this draft of a keynote (or is it a Key
Chord?):
Keynote Part one here:
Keynote Part two here:
Keynote Part three:
Keynote Part four:
Keynote Part five:
