[lit-ideas] Re: Clarity in Poetry
- From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 15:40:42 -0400
Eric: We seem to be hung up on the word "clear."
Donal: You started it mate, you brought it up, I only mentioned it
because you etc..
Eric: I'm glad I brought it up, especially given your generous
reply. Don't get me wrong here. I do not object to learning new
things or being challenged.
>> Poetic clarity is the effect of compressed, integrative verbal
>> energy.
Donal: This is none too clear . . . .Is poetic use of language
necessarily more "integrative" than other kinds - say, a science
paper or a legal document? And is the poetic kind of clarity any
more compressed than other kinds - particularly as Eric seems below
to concede that a poem may use redundancy and diffuseness of
meaning (yet somehow its doing so, Eric seems to suggest, is it
being concise and clear. Hm).
This is what I fear lies behind Eric's approach: a kind of
essentialism as to the "poetic effect" or what constitutes 'poetic
quality'.
Eric: Yes, you've got it. I am advancing a type of aesthetic
essentialism. Sometimes redundancy and diffuseness is the most clear
path to the desired poetic effect. Depends on the poem. You would
not expect these effects from a haiku, but you might from something
by Wallace Stevens. Poems are integrative in a way that totally
binds: take out a line of a successful sonnet and you kill the
sonnet; take out a line of a sports journalist report and you get a
typo. They are different worlds with different rules.
>>Sibelius played an early recording of his Fourth Symphony to a
>> critic friend. When it was over, the critic asked, "What does it
>> mean?" Sibelius held up his index finger and played the
recording again.
Donal: If we take 'meaning' to mean 'content' we may say,
somewhat tautologically, that the content of the object is the
object, just as the object may be said to be (or to be constituted
by) the content of the object. But in another sense it is false: the
'meaning' of an object may not be given by the object but may
involve a process of interaction between our mental appreciation
[World 2] and the content of the object [World 3], and indeed an
interaction involving the contents of other World 3 objects which
create a context for extracting the 'meaning' of a given object.
Eric: Aesthetic meaning dissolves the boundaries between these
worlds, and in fact this process has been the subject of many poems.
Aesthetic meaning is not just content, but also the form of the
work, the way it is produced or performed, the entire context in
which it is received--the total experience from soup to nuts.
As for different performances of a work of art, they become the work
of art. The best performers of music, for example, try to bring out
the composer and do not merely exploit their relationship to their
instrument. People can speak well of "Schnabel's Beethoven," not
because it brings out Schnabel, but because Schnabel brought out
more Beethoven.
Donal: So what is the point of suggesting that the content of ... a
poem or a symphony, is the "most clear, concise, thorough
expression" of that object?
Eric: The point is to assert that something like Hart Crane's
"Atlantis" could not be more clearly expressed by any other
formulation that was still "Atlantis." Again, we might have to go
back to the word "clear" and see what can be said about it. In poems
we're dealing with a kind of heightened language that redefines what
is meant by "clear," something more powerful than, and resistant to,
analysis.
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