[Andrew Frisardi]

But Ed, I was sawbuck naked when I wrote that.

[John Whitworth]

Heidegger, someone said a while back. Do you mean to say there is someone here who understands Heidegger? Share your knowledge wih us do. And you can chuck in Husserl while yo'ure about it.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Andrew, I remember a review in which the male reviewer (whose name I have forgotten) criticized Alicia Stallings' poems for having no philosophy. I was shocked that he could not see that there is a humane, thoughtful, consistent world-view underpinning her work and that that is a philosophy, too, one that fits well with what poetry is trying to do. Too often the writers, usually male, who complain that there is no philosophy in a particular poet's work are looking for some kind of treatise on "the big issues" and not a poem at all. The great poems are a coming to terms with life in all of its complexity. Sometimes that coming to terms is expressed in ideas; sometimes the ideas are embodied in an experience or the poet's complicated response to it.

--Susan M.

I like a lot of kinds of poetry, Susan. Variety is the spice, etc., and this isn’t about rules or restrictions. But I find there is very little current poetry that creates the sort of “entire world” of altered consciousness that Nemo mentions in an earlier post on this thread. In my own writing, I myself rarely pull off a shred of it. It can’t be forced or contrived, so I slog along and look for it where I can get it.

You bring up the poetry of Alicia Stallings, and Julie brings up Rhina Espaillat, and I admit (bring on the fire and brimstone!) that I don’t find that quality in their work. Brilliant writing and striking insight, yes, but not that. I like it but it is not what I most want in poetry. If we are naming names, I will say that among the best-known “formalist” and anthologized poets who do it for me, David Mason in his lyrics probably comes closest. There are others too who are less well known.

You can turn it into a women’s issue, but here’s my five-word response to that: Hildegaard of Bingen. Emily Dickinson.

The neo-formalist aesthetic in general tends to downplay the visionary and hermetic for the practical and skeptical; it favors Larkin over Yeats. For me the priorities or criteria are reversed. Larkin was a good poet, but I’m not sure he knew the difference between Plato and Playdough, or metaphysics and Marmite.

Ok, I guess I’ve just committed Spheresy. Bring on the Inquisitors!


Meanwhile, I’m hoping that Bill Lantry has more to say on this: “Those are the two questions that most interest me: what can we say about beauty, and why are we so reluctant to say anything about it?” So far I draw a blank. But the questions are evocative.

[R. Nemo Hill]

John, I suspect you take so much delight in claiming not to understand Heidegger, that the gauntlet you've thrown down seems mostly a rhetorical flourish. But to my mind, no philosopher has rationally tackled the ineffabilities of poetry better than he. Read poetically, I think he is clear as a bell.


".....the exciting question: how can that which by its very nature remains hidden ever become a measure? For something that man measures himself by must after all impart itself, must appear. But if it appears, it is known. The god, however, is unknown, and he is the measure nonetheless. Not only this, but the god who remains unknown, must by showing himself as the one he is, appear as the one who remains unknown. God's manifestness—not only he himself—is mysterious.

A strange measure for ordinary and in particular for all merely scientific ideas, certainly not a palpable stick or rod but in truth simpler to handle than they, provided our hands do not abruptly grasp but are guided by gestures befitting the measure here to be taken. This is done by a taking which at no time clutches at the standard but rather takes it in a concentrated perception, a gathered taking-in, that remains a listening.

Martin Heidegger (trans, Albert Hofstadter)
Poetry, Language, Thought: "...Poetically Man Dwells


That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery.

Martin Heidegger (trans, John M. Anderson / E. Hans Freund)
Discourse On Thinking: Memorial Address


To write about something you must write with it, you must write/be in it: within it. Hence the poetic thinking of Heidegger. Oh, he had other political problems as well, but his writings on poetry (on Holderlin in particular) are exquisite and invaluable to me. He walks the rational as far as it can go, and if he needs to re-invent the lexical wheel near the far edge of thought where cerebration falters, then he merely proves himself as much poet as philosopher.

What Andrew says about variety and spice holds true for me as well. In fact, despite all my comments here, I adore Alexander Pope. But I also do not lose sight of my poetic ideals; and these ideals would not be ideals if they were easily made manifest. One of the reasons I may seem to rail against light verse on these boards is because I think it is true that the so-called new formalism tends to elevate it at the expense of "the visionary and hermetic" and thus gives the impression that formal poetry lends itself better to the one that the other. I disagree with that, and feel it vital to take a stand now and again for the contemporary marriage of the formal and the visionary.

Nemo

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

neverminded

[Mary McLean]

Poems which explicitly address Big Philosophical Questions or weighty abstract nouns almost always strike me as pompous and dull. One of my favourite poems on poetry is Making a Meal of It, by Dick Davis, which contains the wonderful line:
“No point in calling up
vast, empty words like Fate –
the table’s set, sit down
and eat what’s on your plate.”

[Shaun J. Russell]

One of my favorite "philosophical" poems is by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. He wrote it as a grad student at Princeton, as I recall, and mentioned it in his memoirs:

I wonder why, I wonder why,
I wonder why I wonder;
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder.

Succinct and memorable.

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

Meanwhile, I’m hoping that Bill Lantry has more to say on this: “Those are the two questions that most interest me: what can we say about beauty, and why are we so reluctant to say anything about it?” So far I draw a blank. But the questions are evocative.

Forgive me, Andrew, for letting this sit so long. Things were overtaken by events, and then I got lost in research, which was ultimately unproductive.

The first question is still a mystery to me. Some don't like to put down their thoughts, out of concerns they'll change tomorrow. Others, like me, have entered into discussions with philosophers, and found my own thoughts cloudy, inexact, unsupportable. We all know so little about the history of aesthetics that it's easy to be bested in such discussions. Still others sincerely believe in Lao Tzu, and hold that those who know don't talk about it, and those who talk about it know little. I get really frustrated with that one.

On the issue at hand, what is beauty? Is it objective or subjective? Is it in the poem, or in the spirit of the reader? Can a poem possess qualities of beauty, which then stimulate the reader's mind? What kinds of poems are actually beautiful? Are poems beautiful in themselves, or only if they lead us to ethical action or intellectual insight? Does beauty lead us to other worthwhile things, and what is its relation to those things?

It seems to me these are the core questions of aesthetics, and the answers supplied are often unsatisfying. Take Diotima. Now, I'm rather fond of her. She says we should contemplate and study the bodies of those who we find physically attractive, and revel in the beauty of the loved one. Seems a worthy goal. But then she says this appreciation of physical beauty is simply preparation for appreciating other forms of beauty, intellectual beauty, the beauty of laws, etc. So I turn away, agreeing with Barthelme: 'I don't want to contemplate a silly red towel. I want to look at the beautiful Snow White arse itself!'

Plato is even less satisfying. Forms themselves are beautiful, but no poem can have real beauty (see under Emerson), since the most beautiful thing is objective truth, and no poem can fully possess that. This is why Keats' monism is so unsatisfying: one thing *is* the other, but we can't have either, since they only exist "out there" somewhere. All we can do is dimly remember a time when we existed in that pure realm of forms, and so poetry's only role is the equivalent of Proust's madeleine.

Now, Yeats says 'measurement began our might,' and so sides with the pythagoreans. Beauty comes from form and relationships, from numbers, and the best poets naturally embody such things without thinking (cf. Pope: I lisped in numbers for the numbers came). The people who point to the relations of music and mathematics must agree with this idea. And no-one's going to say Bach isn't beautiful. Still, after a little while, I admit to getting bored as he runs through all 16 progressions in sequence. It's like reading the Prelude: I want to throw the book across the room.

Before we leave the old people, there's one other idea they clung to: beauty is not truth, beauty is good. And by partaking of it... well, the poem is like syrup of ipecac: it purges the bad out of us. The most beautiful poem will make us throw up the most, and then we'll feel better: more balanced, more healthy. I shouldn't make fun of Aristotle this way, it's almost like heresy. But honestly...

As long as we're making fun of people, let's make fun of Shelley, shall we? Mount Blanc is literally awesome (yes, he's stealing this stuff from Kant) it's so big, it fills us with a sense of wonder precisely because it's beyond us. It takes away our puny thoughts, and leaves our mind empty, the way an overwhelming orgasm does. Cynics would say it no longer counts, because we now have enough explosives to blow up the whole mountain. But we can't blow up the universe, and contemplating its vastness leads to that same sense of awe. Under this idea, the deep space images Hubble sends back are the most beautiful things we have. Maybe.

But it sounds like we're going up in a balloon. Back on earth, some say beauty is conflict, or arises out of conflict and juxtaposition. Nabokov would hate the idea he's repeating Hegel and Nietzsche, but he does exactly that. Beauty becomes synthetic, you need two things for the synthesis to happen, and as soon as you achieve equilibrium, the new conflict leads to imbalance. This is why new poems have to be written. Adorno was wrong, we shouldn't stop writing poetry, the problem is that the world had gotten out of balance, and the only way to rectify the world is to write new poems to restore the harmony. Very hard to argue with that one, in spite of all the misreadings of Auden.

We haven't mentioned spiritual aesthetics, and I admit to being put off by them. Take Christianity: you're supposed to do two things - contemplate the cross, and contemplate the eucharist. Remember Diotima: contemplation leads us towards the beatific vision, and what could be more important than that? And it's like looking at Mount Blanc: we're so over-awed, our minds become empty, allowing room for something else to flow into us. The idea isn't unique to spirituality: when I first went out with Kate, we went for coffee. She seemed so beautiful I lost all my words, I couldn't even talk. W.C. Williams says the same thing: "Shaken by her beauty." The moment was transformational, it changed my life. This is the justification for beauty in poetry: a truly beautiful poem leaves us speechless, and changes us in a deep way. Music and painting can do the same - they're not simply objects (this is the mistake the New Critics made), they are truly transformative, real agents in our lives.

But why and how? We've just gone past halloween, a pale imitation of the Samhain my ancestors celebrated. They believed that, on this one evening, the barriers that separate the various realms became a little less solid, and movement between them became possible. It's a nice idea. Should we accept it?

For a long time, I didn't. Then one day, I went to one of Kate's concerts. There were all kinds of people there, rich and poor, educated and unlettered, young and old. I happened to be sitting next to a couple of 80 year old nuns. And when they heard her singing, after just a little while, they started to weep, not tears of sadness, but of joy. I've seen her have the same effect at funerals: people transformed from mourning to joyous peace. It's striking, and perhaps unbelievable until one experiences it. Accept, for a moment, the effect is real. But again, why and how?

The only answer I can come up with is the beauty of her voice. It has nothing to do with the words, or with numbers, or proportions, or study, or ethics, or Truth. When she's able to open herself completely, the beauty of her voice itself opens us, empties us, the barriers between realms come down, and something flows into us, which brings us peace and joy, such incredible joy we begin weeping.

That's the poem I want to write, a poem that can do that. If I were a painter, I'd want to paint an image which can do that. Is there some secret golden chord, some transformative line of poetry? Would I even recognize it if I accidentally wrote it? I have no idea. And if it worked on me, would it work on a reader?

I've already gone on too long, and I have to go feed the chickens and gather the eggs. I can hear them clucking outside my window. If you've gotten this far, thank you for your patience. I really wish I could solve this problem.

Best,

Bill

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

I wonder as if the problem is the wish to "solve" beauty by dissecting the eyes or spinning the blood of the image into its separate parts so you can find the right proportion of salt to iron in a fair curve.

Maybe you don't mean that sort of thing but it sounds like it sometimes.

I hope beauty remains an untrackable, undefinable nonsense just barely making it across the rope of translation, barefoot, no net below. Forever.

[Ed Shacklee]

If you meet beauty on the road, kill it.

Best,

Ed