Earlier
this year, I attempted to write a processual poetics piece, writing through
Joel Bettridge’s book. It was only a partial success. It didn’t end up generating
new ideas, as had happened with ‘Pulse’, now happily published in The
Necessity of Poetics, nor did it sustain acts of writing, as had ‘Poetics in
Anticipation’, also in The Necessity of Poetics, or the much more impacted
piece ‘My Own Crisis’, which was written in 2023, too late for The Necessity
of Poetics, whose contents had already been settled by that time, but is
available on FUTCH, here: https://www.futchpress.info/post/my-own-crisis. (More on it here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2023/12/my-poetics-piece-my-own-crisis-is.html) It's not clear how its ruminations will affect future writing, or may be affecting what I do now.
As a
parenthetical note in the piece says, one paragraph became the draft for the
back-cover blurb of The Necessity of Poetics, and parts of other
paragraphs, in a circuitous way, found their ways into a poem-sequence about Shakespeare’s poets (usually
minor or very minor characters). Also the piece fed off an earlier journal poetics-blogpost
which treated Bettridge’s book (which dealt with Kenneth Goldsmith and attacks on the avant-garde on racial grounds) and which may be read in full here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2023/11/from-poetics-journal-2023-notes-on-two.html
However, I think it is articulate in its own
terms (and time, pre-election) to be worth posting here. That it repeats older
ideas or is cannibalised for later texts shouldn’t detract from its use for
others, maybe. I am sure there are ideas I shall return to at a later date as well.
Abutting Avant-Garde Pieties by Joel Bettridge
You
can vote for a ceasefire but even that is mired in confusion and indefinition. Intellectualising
a hammer blow. You’re complicit but powerless, even in the practice of art, or
the practice of the poetics of art, but you carry on writing a new poem,
collecting another poetics together, because that is what you do. It brings you pleasure, if
nothing else, if not for someone else. You think with, and through, poems, as they
emerge – yours and others – and that thinking can swing off into
adjacent, and distant, domains. At best, this is communicative without
messaging, a communal commitment to whatever is embodied in that indefinition. This
isn’t activism, exactly, but it is active, acts and events implied in aesthetic
exchange.
*
A
friend’s thoughts become your thoughts, on loan; you test them out, a struggle
that is nevertheless more of a wriggling than agonistic dialectic. That’s what
friendship means. And now and then, a poem, as you read it, becomes a sort of
friend.
Talking
with ourselves, not to. Talking with friends not at.
How could you talk at a book in any case? At moments of our failure, friends
lift us, measure us, in the justice of exchange, and that includes aesthetic
exchange. Out there, in the world, the ex-deputy leader of the Conservative
Party broadcasts a racist slur on the hate-channel.
The
white reader jumped out of his skin and jumped back in again! Which is better I
suppose than what I wrote of Kenneth Goldsmith last year: He would sell his own
skin to save his body.
The
poet does not conduct a nudge unit.
The
manifestic stand of Goldsmith, which offers a teleology that fashions all of
avant-garde or modernist history into a precursor of uncreative writing or,
rather, of himself, as I put it, which, with his fall, could take us all with
him in an egregious, unquestionable case of joint enterprise.
I
feel I’d be re-inscribing the pain (I won’t mention that text about the
body) when I would prefer to focus on writerly and readerly pleasures. But if
you don’t believe Goldsmith’s self-serving teleology, the avant-garde work didn’t
die in 2015 (nobody told me in any case!): not all forms lead to Goldsmith. Some
years ago, I’d wagered 2015 as the year when the wheels would fall off the
conceptualist wagon: the concept of the concept would get rustier with each
mile of uncreative paper milling, without further acts of poetics. At that
moment, 2015, finishing The Meaning of Form, I was attempting to prove,
in part, that conceptual writing’s disavowal of form is not evidenced by the
form, forms and acts of forming involved in producing the events of the works
themselves, to use the vocabulary of Derek Attridge.
Possibility
implied in multiform activity.
*
I
have a feeling, which I’ve never expressed hitherto, that my poetry is written
by a sort of ‘implied author’ who is 10 years younger than myself I can’t
explain this.
The
insights of our time(s), and other times, and their blindness(es) too. They are
there for us to see, if we will. We need not defend previous
perspectives in order to accept responsibility for them, and to accept them for
what they were, when they were.
Perhaps
it is impossible, even unnecessary, to explore the relationship between the
poetry I am reading and how I will cast my vote. (As we are exhaustedly
reminded, this is an election year.)
The
Necessity of Poetics,
the book, not the essay, that I have in proof form, marks the moves this poet-critic
has made around the notion of poetics in general, and the poetics of linguistically
innovative poetry (the ‘avant-garde’ here) in particular, and my poetics
as an offshoot of that. It traces those moves, but offers them to fellow poets,
critics, and (since I’ve been around so long) literary historians. It incites
and ignites and invites readers to identify poetics, to read poetics (as poetics,
not as limp literary criticism), to share poetics and, where appropriate, for
readers who are also writers, to create poetics of their own. (This could be a
blurb for the book; [in fact, I do use it as a blurb for the book. It’s
on the back cover, and elsewhere, just as some other statements of poetics in
this piece were cannibalised for my unpublished poem ‘Shakespeare and Company’.)
Poets
may change their poetics (by definition, my definition, that’s what poetics
must do, constantly, however slightly), but when it is dodges into ethics,
let’s distrust it, if only for a clarifying moment. (That was almost a
quotation from a Roy Fisher poem.)
If
the political only means one thing, it allows everything else to be claimed as
an apolitical cloud, and ressentiment Rages Against a Villain: the
sacrificial avant-gardist.
It’s
not (so much) what you believe: it’s how you believe. It’s not ‘you’ anyway; it’s
how we believe together. Democracy of a kind.
I
like ‘refusal’. We operate a refusal of our own, against the injury of ressentiment
and its identity shells, and against the generality that spreads a storm
of black dye across the pool of Goldsmith’s wrongs until it covers every bank
of avant-garde resistance.
Yesterday,
I fought against my own moralism without knowing it. I am no longer injured in
my inquiry, no longer offended by offence, am I?
Intergenerational
trigger warnings swallow the artwork, diminish its wholesome possibility
of harm rather than harmony. ‘Wholesome’ because the effect of art
cannot be regulated (though its effects are attenuated by its being, by its
being art). The engagement of adults can only be a genuine aesthetic exchange
so long as risk is present, however restrained.
Fighting
over words to plaster the insides of other people’s skulls, desecrating works
of art (the despised ‘person’ in the portrait is barely a trigger for its artifice)?
The meanings of words meaning in the poem are public.
*
Sometimes
it is a ritual to write a poem, to be sure, a magic of hope that may be
initiated but not controlled.
‘Realism’
in art and politics is a choice, a lifestyle choice, we might say. Experimental
practices (in art) prefigure the transformation of the world, a prefiguration
that might only be responded to by a few (or by many, but probably not all.) Aesthetic
reception is intersubjective but is never totally ‘social’, as words are.
Perhaps at what Sean Bonney calls ‘revolutionary moments’ art can operate as a
direct social catalysis: mostly it is a ghostly utopian hope. It cannot administer
the world – shouldn’t in fact!
*
Were
I to sit in the audience of Peter Barlow’s Cigarette today, I’d know that that
is where I’m meant to be, receiving the latest avant-garde messages from the
edge of futurity, that is, from today.
Even
our thoughts aren’t inside us, following a kind of conceptual version of the
theory of extended mind. They could also reside inside a poem, another
externalised object in all its linguistic materiality, and that’s where a poet knows
the world, in the poem that is already part of the world. Reading it back, to
oneself.
I’m
drawn into this activity (again): I’m turning over a sudden chance thought I
had, a chance prepared by hard thinking. The ideas don’t settle: and perhaps
the possible resultant poem won’t, either.
Hope, a single italicised word on the
page (or screen). We assert a plea for art to be art. Both mainstream and avant-garde
(these are not the terms I customarily use). There is a division between
the work of this year’s National Poetry Prize winner and Adrian Clarke’s new
book Walhalla from Veer Books. Has to be. However much they steal
‘strategies’ from us. That denies the multiform ‘tradition’ of the
avant-garde, as defined by Joel Bettridge in his suggestive Avant-Garde
Pieties, parts of which I have been stalking here, page by page.
The
pleasure of comingling philosophy and non-sense is not to be underestimated,
no. Likewise, the obligation to preserve art’s thinking against the latest grim
tweet from Conservative Central Office. Art’s epistemology against business ontology.
Writing’s vectors into the mess. Working the work once more.
February-April
2024
Further
Reading
Bettridge,
Joel. Avant-Garde Pieties: Aesthetics, Race, and the Renewal of Innovative
Poetics. Oxfordshire, New York: Routledge, 2018.
NOTE
The
Necessity of Poetics is
now available: https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-The-Necessity-of-Poetics-p661888958
I
write about it here, and the ways it reflects on poetics as a discipline, AND the
way I have assembled the best of the poetics of my own works for a wider public
: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-necessity-of-poetics-out-now.html
