Dear Christian,

I want to thank you, very much, for this eloquent, articulate, and well thought out post. I'm not sure that we disagree as much as you think we do, though we clearly have different viewpoints, but I greatly appreciate the fact that you have engaged what I actually wrote (which you restate at some points more elegantly than I did) and proposed a real, reasoned, inellectually based conversation that demonstrates that disagreement need not equal antagonism.

I suppose it is sad to have to say such a thing, but what you have written is miles above and away from most of the responses in the post's comment stream, so I am indeed grateful for this example of intelligent and reasonable debate. Would that more people could and would follow your example.

all best,

Reginald

"Post-avant" would be "after-before" which is the flatline death-hyphen "now." (Which was the poetic biz word of the 1970s.) Acting independent of time and space, any person as a being-in-space-and-time is their message. How history and others treat and interpret that message is an independent act of will. Language itself--nouns in particular become reified and deified as shown by Pinsky with his "thing" bit in Gulf Music--in this kind of argument is the elaborate confidence game we aging children play on ourselves--the addicted mark in the capitalist/materialist grift--whistling in the dark to comfort ourselves as we pass the cemetery. The trouble with being poetic is that is takes up all of your time. I like Hoover’s bit on “pan avant,” but feel more inclined to a “sans avant” in the sense of “without before.” I don’t know why, it just felt like fun to muster something up.

The old dogs love to quote Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

That strikes me first and foremost as a fancy-pants (rolled) way of a dog chasing its tail. It also points to a certain definition of celebrated insanity--doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. What have writers done for the most part than dramatize that very definition of insanity. We keep going to the empty well of the past to validate the present with a kind of pathological obsession with the future. It is bad physics at best. There is a kind of collective and persistent ill will and indignant displeasure with the past for being what the past had or was. We try to dress it up in different clothes, but it is all still rotten to the core inside. (Think of Norman Bates and his Mom.) That is where the critical theory folks get all that reification and fetishism business. Which make a good deal of common sense.

The Red Queen said, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Poetry is experiencing the effect of a Red Queen's arms race where the conditions are not being met for a Nash Equilibrium. Poet/professors or Poet/editors or Poet/critics evolving more effective means to seek notoriety while their notoriety rests in the hands of those who are after the same, evolve more effective means of evasion from those who would seek notoriety.

The ideal conditions would be:

1. The poets all will do their utmost to maximize their expected publications as described by the MFA program.
2. The poets are flawless in execution.
3. The poets have sufficient intelligence to deduce the solution.
4. There is common knowledge that all poets meet these conditions, including this one. So, not only must each poet know the other poets meet the conditions, but also they must know that they all know that they meet them, and know that they know that they know that they meet them, and so on.

The fourth criterion of common knowledge may not be met even if all poets do, in fact, meet all the other criteria. Poets wrongly distrusting each other's rationality may adopt counter-strategies to expected irrational play on their opponents’ behalf.

This all refers to a situation in which there is a competition for a shared resource and the contestants can choose either conciliation or conflict. Also known as the game of Chicken or, if you like nuclear war, mutually assured destruction.

Poetry is in a Nash equilibrium if no poet can do better by unilaterally changing his or her strategy. As a heuristic, one can imagine that each poet is told the poetics of the other poets. If any poet would want to do something different after being informed about the others' poetics, then that set of poetics is not a Nash equilibrium. If, however, the poet does not want to switch (or is indifferent between switching and not) then the set of poetics is a Nash equilibrium.

"[P]oetry must aspire to some kind of epistemological noteworthiness by conducting experiments in order to make discoveries about language itself."

Is this not akin to painter experimenting in order to make discoveries about paint? Or a musician experimenting to make discoveries about the nature of sound?

Not that artists don't make discoveries—often groundbreaking ones—about their media, but is that really the purpose of art?

Is that really an avenue to "significance"?

It seems to me that by extolling a mind-numbing reductionism, Mr. Bök, as usual, annihilates the very notion of significance. The idea that this approach represents some kind of desirable future for the art of poetry is—to put it charitably—a joke.

I also appreciate the careful clarity of this post.

I have a problem with the substitution of "experiment", to designate what a poet is up to, for the more modest "art" or "craft" (or "goofing around").

Also, I disagree with what seems to be a very classic Modern/Saussurian objectification and fetishization of "language" as both the means and end of the poet's task. To follow this road - as both the New Critics and the Language Poets did - tends to lead poetry into a sort of Russian-doll labyrinth of solipsism.

Aristotle - and the Chicago Critics - suggest, on the other hand, that poetry is an art of affective/intellectual GESTURE : and that the verbal texture itself is only one part of a larger, & more (critically) elusive, aesthetic whole.

Joseph, what are the specific affects of the reductionism that you're talking about? How does it annihilate significance? Also, what do you think represents the future of poetry?

* * *

Henry, can you describe your problem with the use of "experiment?"

Poetry seems, perhaps more so than other arts, to be intimately involved with language. How do you, personally, determine when concern with language becomes too much? By what means is the aesthetic whole you refer to incorporated within / represented by poetry?

Thanks,
Michael

Michael,

I'd say both scientists and artists rely to some extent on cognitive activity over which they have little control. Hunches, inspired guesses - inventive combinations and solutions which appear, so to speak, during sleep. But they apply this generative conceptual stuff in different ways : the scientist through experiment, in order to confirm hypotheses; the artist through composition, in order to complete an incipient aeshetic form.

Loosely stated, I believe "experiment" is primarily a rational activity; artistic composition tends more toward a untiy of intellectual and emotional, conceptual and sensible. (This is not to deny that there is an important element of artistic composition which is ALSO very rational, strategic, etc...)

I'm sure Christian and others can come up with creative ways to defend "experiment" as an adequate description of poetic composition.... but it just doesn't appeal to me, for the reasons stated.

For a partial answer to your 2nd question, please see my essay here -
http://hgessrev.blogspot.com/2005/10/note-on-r.html
- and related essays at that site.

Henry, it is possible for a poet to lay out a series of goals in regard to a work and then have a critic determine whether a work is successful (or not) in terms of those goals? That is, is there no discernible rationality to the movement within (and reception of) a poem? What are the aspects of a poem that make it "work"? Can those aspects be positioned within a rational framework?

The essay referenced brings up Aristotle's notion of looking at the poem as an ends to itself. When do you know if you are enjoying a poem on its terms? How much attention should be paid to the sense of the poem versus the sound of it?

Besides the essay, are you able to more fully respond to the original second set of questions? Can you define a limit to the attention given to the language in a poem? As an example, at what point would the difference between using "purple" versus "violet" matter in a poem?

Well, then, Michael, try this essay :

http://hgessrev.blogspot.com/2005/10/quick-nod-in-words-fifty-years-ago.html

R.S. Crane's re-presentation of Aristotle argues that the 20th-cent. critical focus on poem-as-linguistic-discourse is misplaced. Christian Bok's emphasis, on the poem as linguistic research and language game, seems to be an example of that focus carried to a logical conclusion.

I am suggesting, to the contrary, that the language of the poem is always the shadow or carapace of a larger, unspoken (because literally unspeakable) aesthetic form or impression - something like the conceptual/affective impression harbored by people returning home from the theater. We receive a similar impression, an image of completeness, from lyric poems, albeit on a smaller scale. The lasting effect of the work of art is not simply the experimental result of the language per se, but is an effect of this unspoken gesture - toward or away from meaning, toward or away from feeling, toward or away from the reader in person.

It seems to me that poetic language, curiously, makes an inward turn toward this state of muteness or mime (mimesis), toward the inexplicable - and this turning itself is what radiates poetry's uncanny magnetism.

As cognitive linguistics and the cognitive sciences push into ever new territories (the arts, social and art theory, etc.) might we not expect a young bunch of C=O=G=N=I=T=I=O=N Poets? What do they look like?

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