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Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Poetics and Problematics - or - The Engineer Knows the Worst Truth About the Valve
I’ve completed what I hope is the final version of my chess/Nabokov essay, now entitled (at nnyhav’s good suggestion) “Poetics and Problematics”. Maybe you saw the draft, which was about 5,000 words but lacked a conclusion. Predictably, making up this deficit caused the production to bloat to 10,000 words. I reduced it to a lean, mean, 6,500 by playing “Gonna Fly Now” on iTunes and pouring a glass of raw eggs in the disk drive. (Mileage may vary on your system.) If you would like to read the final version, just email - jholbo at mac dot com - and I’ll send you a download link. It’s location is not exactly secret, but I generally don’t post what I hope are final drafts before offering them to journal editors. (Is that a wise policy?) I’m sending this to “Philosophy and Literature” in a couple days and final comments would be appreciated. My main concern is that I’ve weakened comprehensibility through excessive cuts.
Now, something to amuse ...
Ray’s highly enriching bad poetry/cutting edge science poetry post reminded me of something I got from Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters (coming back into print!). The book contains many small gems, such as: “You could understand how a thing worked by looking at it. A locomotive, a steam shovel, Calvin Coolidge, hid nothing from the mind; they did not require to be explained as all subsequent technology has required explanation.” But what really appeals to me is this bad science poetry, courtesy of Abraham Cowley:
Coy Nature, (which remain’d, though aged grown,
A Beauteous virgin still, injoy’d by none,
Nor seen unveil’d by any one)
When Harveys violent passion she did see,
Began to tremble, and to flee,
Took Sanctuary like Daphne in a tree:
There Daphnes lover stop’t, and thought it much
The very Leaves of her to touch,
But Harvey our Apollo, stopt not so,
Into the Bark, and root he after her did goe:
No smallest Fibres of a Plant,
For which the eiebeams Point doth sharpness want,
His passage after her withstood.
What should she do? through all the moving wood
Of Lives indow’d with sense she took her flight,
Harvey persues, and keeps her still in sight.
But as the Deer long-hunted takes a flood,
She leap’t at last into the winding streams of blood;
Of mans Meander all the Purple reaches made,
Till at the heart she stay’d,
Where turning head, and at a Bay,
Thus, by well-purged ears, was she o’re-heard to say.
Here sure shall I be safe (said she)
None will be able sure to see
This my retreat, but only He
Who made both it and me.
The heart of Man, what Art can e’re reveal?
A wall impervious between
Divides the very Parts within,
And doth the Heart of man ev’n from its self conceal.
She spoke, but e’re she was aware,
Harvey was with her there ...
Harvey, the engineer, knows the worst truth about the valve!
Kenner is very eloquent on the world-historical significance of Cowley’s badness, and mysterious self-oblivion to his badness. Of the latter quality: “Let us postulate that the bad verse of such a poet is verse which has been published by mistake. It has deceived it author, whose mind, fixed on some other quality, supposed it good, and it has continued to deceive him throughout the process of revision, of reading his composition to friends, of sending it to the printer, of reading proof, and inspecting the finished volume.” (As James Kenneth Stephen might have poetized: Cowley sucked for our sake, and uttered no complaint.) Regarding the former quality, Kenner points out that the poem made it into the Lewis and Lee edited anthology, The Stuffed Owl
Unfortunately, its editors were less interested in their subject than in stylish sublimations of their impulse to snigger, so that what they were really documenting is seldom noticed. Their hidden subject was one of the must curious phenomena in the history of literature, the emergence of a new style so radical in its assumptions that it brought with it out of the void from which it came a wholly new way for poetry to fail, so that failure becomes a kind of positive quality. This is transcedental: it is as if someone could invent a new sin.
The editors of The Stuffed Owl came tantalizingly close to formulating this event; to read their preface is like watching Galileo fail to discover gravitation.
Kenner’s theme is the inconvenience to poetry of the tyranny of Fact. How to strike the proper tone? How to assume a bardic stance in the face of a body of data without artfully sinking into undignified, mock-heroic absurdity. At this point, a history of science fiction stylistics should conclude this post. Utterly incapable, I’ll just mention that I was made very curious last year when Matt Cheney posted about SF poetry here and here. There are anthologies and an association. But I never really looked into it.
Comments
I’d quite like to see the revision, but must request here as work precludes direct access.
Tangentially (via NABOKV-L, but 1st-ranked for googlin’ “Poem Problem"): I’ve long considered central to Nabokov themes of expropriation, usurpation, and exile, so I get a special kick out of these monkeyshines. YMMV.
In “Culture and Value”, Wittgenstein reflected on the dilemma of Mahler, who produced conpletely worthless music (in W’s estimation) that only a very talented, dedicated musician could have produced. He asks himself what Mahler’s ethical obligations were in this case.
Not realizing his works worthlessness was his real sin, but suppose he had become aware of it, what should he have done? Wittgenstein considers, but rejects, the possibility that Wittgenstein should have killed himself.
Should one mention the ever-astonishing poetic works of Erasmus Darwin here? A finer collection of decent didactic purpose and appalling versification it would be hard to find.
Some of the earliest works in Brazilian Portuguese poetry are scientific reports about the geography and exotic flora and fauna. I don’t have them around any more but the excerpts I read were fun.
I actually find Cowley’s attempt (have you seen Bunuel’s Phantom of Liberty? The aunt in its inset incest story reminds me of Cowley’s Nature) affecting in a way—a more-or-less Hugh Kenner way, I suppose. The fascination of what’s difficult lured Wile E. Coyote just as much as Will B. Yeats, and I think we occasionally find Yeats plastered against a painted tunnel. In a more explicitly self-aware vein, such lapses lead to Ulysses. (Critics tend to focus on Stephen Hero’s other epiphanies but I most often think of Joyce’s horrified fascination with “Art thou real, my Ideal?") In a more ambiguously self-aware vein, they lead to much fine nineteenth and twentieth century poetry. I made a first attempt at thinking through the phenomenom in “My Funny Valentine" with particular reference to Zukofsky.
I wonder if Marcel Duchamp’s, Iannis Xenakis’s, and Jackson Mac Low’s form-generating uses of science seem less alien (to some of us, anyway) than Cowley’s content-generation just because they’re more ignorable. Anyway, I see no reason to prefer the country house poem as a sub-genre.
What kills most “science fiction poetry” is the “fiction” part: the genre-markers have to be trite to be recognizable in a short space, and the music is, if such a thing is imaginable, sub-New-Yorker. That’s not to say that my favorite contemporary poetry may not share some effects with my favorite contemporary fiction, but my favorite contemporary fiction doesn’t tend to show up in Analog, and virtually all the explicitly sf poetry I’ve read has been Analog quality.
Beautiful essay, but I feel a severe lack of Pierre Menard - It makes, in my mind, an absolute, indisputable case for descriptive intentionalism, and plants the seeds for Barthesque normative formalism. It almost can be said to have anticipated *and* resolved the entire dialectics in advanced.
Than again, I also tend to believe that Parable Of Cervantes And The Quixote contains all worthwhile theory of literary evolution, so I’m not the most reliable commentator.
Another nice addition the the dialogue could have been C. S Lewis’ conception of Myth-
A narrative whose effect is not dependent upon the means of it’s representation (It’s actually a tad more complicated than that: in Myth the effect is independent not only of representational mediums such as language, but of concrete and specific mimetic details as well, and is essentially in the Aristotelian Logos – but that also fits very nicely with the idea of the purity of Blind Chess, although with a metaphoric stretch of some concepts).
(I am talking about the Poetics And Problematics essay-draft, obviously)