The essay appears in Joan Retallack's The Poethical Wager, possibly my favorite book of the last several years. On page 128 at bottom begins a paragraph, "Beyond the vanishing point lie shocking scenes: exposed negatives reveal a domimatrix with polymorphous perverse appetites and ambitions wreaking havoc in the popular maxiseries, "Civlization and Miss Content." It ends on 129, "To what extent have women been complicit in the substitution of the image of the female for the transgressive experimental feminine?" The whole paragraph is heavily boxed in with ink and marked with three ***, my symbol for "OH THIS IS GOOD."
The marginalia says, "archery, extreme freeze tag, dresses, roses, poking slugs with sticks // that vitality and curiosity in love, sex, work, sleep // enthusiastically living in the world lets us find out // --> 132."
Down the page a bit is this passage: " But the symbolic is not the only logical or associative order of meaning. There is metonymy, as well as metaphor; there are complex dynamic systems and fluidly interactive models, as well as equivalences. The phallus, like the romantic genius and strong poet and symbolic logic it props up, has got to go; the penis may get on quite well without it."
Amusing to me is this: my marginalia here makes a romantic/Romantic appeal to the polymorphous pleasures of my own childhood, and while that vitality is part of Retallack's project, the implied innocence is most certainly not.
See 132: "Perhaps we can canel our ad nauseam encores as ambiguously smiling, subtextual female repressed. Perhaps we can assume the active textual project of entertaining multiple, complex possibilities/improbabilities/unintelligabilities in our languages and lives."
This crossroads of the postmodern and the romantic/utopian never ceases to fascinate.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Exam Question: History of Aesthetics III -- by PMRSC
All Exam Questions have a closed audience (a prof, a class) and a closed system of reference (the content of the course). In this exam, the students were instructed to spend no more than 30 minutes on a response, and to think of responses as little position papers. I offer it as the first post in this project because it's the kind of partial and possibly wrong-headed thing you are encouraged to post here. Since, after all, had the class been discussing Pound's shorter poems, or Stein's "Lifting Belly" or her book How to Write and Pounds ABC's of Reading, this might have been a very different response.
3. “Pound and Stein are phases of the same thing.”
Thesis: Um, respectfully, no.
If you are William Carlos Williams, and you are right next to Stein-Pound, the two poets could seem to be doing the same thing, on some levels. Ideologically, Stein and Pound both reject WCW’s preference for the regional and the American. Stylistically, Stein and Pound both violate English syntax. Historically, Stein and Pound are both related in their experiments to Mallarmé and the Symbolists, who had the unfortunate habit of writing ideas but not things. Both Stein and Pound demonstrated in their poetry a preoccupation with language qua language. WCW wanted (1) lines that made sense (whether or not the poem ‘coheres’ is another question), (2) images that put one in mind of contemporary objects and situations, and (3)an absence of any sort of comparison (similes, metaphors, etc.) Stein and Pound might deliver 2 and 3, but 1 they took for an option.
But this similarity doesn’t seem to go as far as WCW claims it does. Their aesthetic commitments differ in both method and ideology. Stein, methodologically, strips the world away from language as completely as she can in poems like "Tender Buttons." There are nouns and verbs and some adjectives, and the syntax will not get you to sense, and the images will not get you to a recognizable world. These poems are a world, a very sensual one, unto themselves. Further, the poems refuse to invent a world for the reader. In her prose, Stein works with a method of repetition and a slow accretion or revelation of ‘meaning’ that seems to wobble long like time and evolution itself. Pound, on the other hand, used refrains, not repetition, to punctuate poems which violated syntax mostly by mixing languages and historical moments of languages. As much of a collage as Pounds poems are, they are not Stein’s confetti. The language still gestures to the world, but to so much of it that finding one’s place in it is difficult. And, most different of all, Pound is trying to create a world. Stein avoids tropes, Pound feeds on them. Pound, ideologically, is committed to remaking the world in his image, an image of ‘total’ learning and totally coherent order which must be wrested both from history and from the current seats of power. He’s a classicist, mannerist, militarist, fascist. The Cantos is the instruction book for leading this new world order. Stein, on the other hand, sees the militarist fascist tendencies in classicism and other vagaries of the tradition and wants all that to melt away.
"Tender Buttons" is the disordered juxtaposition of objects (read: persons, contexts, aesthetics) which might coexist joyfully once Pound’s axiologies are surrendered (which is an axiological move on her part, yes, yes.) They do similar things in dissimilar ways for opposite reasons.
3. “Pound and Stein are phases of the same thing.”
Thesis: Um, respectfully, no.
If you are William Carlos Williams, and you are right next to Stein-Pound, the two poets could seem to be doing the same thing, on some levels. Ideologically, Stein and Pound both reject WCW’s preference for the regional and the American. Stylistically, Stein and Pound both violate English syntax. Historically, Stein and Pound are both related in their experiments to Mallarmé and the Symbolists, who had the unfortunate habit of writing ideas but not things. Both Stein and Pound demonstrated in their poetry a preoccupation with language qua language. WCW wanted (1) lines that made sense (whether or not the poem ‘coheres’ is another question), (2) images that put one in mind of contemporary objects and situations, and (3)an absence of any sort of comparison (similes, metaphors, etc.) Stein and Pound might deliver 2 and 3, but 1 they took for an option.
But this similarity doesn’t seem to go as far as WCW claims it does. Their aesthetic commitments differ in both method and ideology. Stein, methodologically, strips the world away from language as completely as she can in poems like "Tender Buttons." There are nouns and verbs and some adjectives, and the syntax will not get you to sense, and the images will not get you to a recognizable world. These poems are a world, a very sensual one, unto themselves. Further, the poems refuse to invent a world for the reader. In her prose, Stein works with a method of repetition and a slow accretion or revelation of ‘meaning’ that seems to wobble long like time and evolution itself. Pound, on the other hand, used refrains, not repetition, to punctuate poems which violated syntax mostly by mixing languages and historical moments of languages. As much of a collage as Pounds poems are, they are not Stein’s confetti. The language still gestures to the world, but to so much of it that finding one’s place in it is difficult. And, most different of all, Pound is trying to create a world. Stein avoids tropes, Pound feeds on them. Pound, ideologically, is committed to remaking the world in his image, an image of ‘total’ learning and totally coherent order which must be wrested both from history and from the current seats of power. He’s a classicist, mannerist, militarist, fascist. The Cantos is the instruction book for leading this new world order. Stein, on the other hand, sees the militarist fascist tendencies in classicism and other vagaries of the tradition and wants all that to melt away.
"Tender Buttons" is the disordered juxtaposition of objects (read: persons, contexts, aesthetics) which might coexist joyfully once Pound’s axiologies are surrendered (which is an axiological move on her part, yes, yes.) They do similar things in dissimilar ways for opposite reasons.
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