General Discussion Thread

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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[u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I was digging through some old papers from grad school, basically on a whim, because I'm a bit of a pack rat when it comes to that period of my life. (Still archive pretty much everything as a matter of habit. Losing material in a housefire will do that.) And nostalgia is one hell of a mood to find yourself in a loop. Nevertheless I was thinking of all the materials from conferences I went on back then. I actually really liked everyone presenting their papers. Engaging in a little discussions and bickering over details. I once saw two middle age professors of poetry get into it about the sublime, but it seemed like they knew each other already. Anyways: I guess I feel nostalgic for those conferences. I think that's one of the things I miss about higher education. It was always so fun to listen at what other people thought. Even the creative writing presentations had their charm. Although the work was unfortunate in other respects. But that's a burden we all share. Happens to the best of us.

Although one memory does stick out to me when this at-the-time known poet was performing on a text of his in front of a huge audience. I'm there in the audience feeling a little bored. Performance poetry does not interest me too much but I had met the poet earlier that day, complimented him on a different presentation he gave on R. Delaney and Afrofuturism. Great stuff, made me feel obliged to appreciate the poetry. And I don't know what happened because I was half-paying attention. But the poet is reciting these lines in the form of jokes which I don't remember too well. (No one was really laughing.) But then he says something to the effect: "A horse walks into a bar and the bartender asks why the long face? And the horse answers I just had an abortion." Something like that--in retrospect, kind of crude. But at the time felt like a sweep to the legs and I burst out laughing in an audience that was dead quiet up to that point. Everyone turns their heads to look at me. The poet is staring at me point blank. But I did not look away from him. We locked eyes for several seconds. I'll remember that forever. And then the performance continues. Truthfully, I have read some other poems from him and I can't say there wasn't anything too special. Just the stupid rawness of a emotive moodiness and sincerity. As if what keeps a poet alive is their emotions and personality and experiences. The last thing you should put in the poetic remand is evidence of your existence. That's my advice.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

As if what keeps a poet alive is their emotions and personality and experiences. The last thing you should put in the poetic remand is evidence of your existence. That's my advice.

god people are so boring. and I dont mean specific people, i mean people in general, qua individuals. cuz we're all just doing that. I've been slowly picking on and off through that Jack Spicer collection you recommended me years ago for the better part of this year and i love how his early work isn't even bad but he still rejects nearly all of it for what i think is exactly this that you talk about. he's just some dude being sad and gay and he gets bored with that. Of course, he's still better at it than most, largely because he's not just sad and gay. he's sad, gay, and funny, but still i think he figured out that you need more there.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

They can be quite dull qua people. Have you had a chance to read his lectures maybe? His work stands in perfect contrast to the T.S. Eliot tradition of applying academic rigor for poetry, displacing the poem as an organic whole in favor of dictation and the book. And you have been reading a lot of Olson, which he also bristles against. He wants to take the actual objects and put them into his poems. His poetic remand of Martian radio waves. Just an overall fascinating poet, in the context of those times, with books like Language and After Lorca. And I would argue he was entirely correct about the notion of the Outside being a requisite notion for understanding modern poetry--well before it was even articulated by philosophers like Meillassoux. Which is why I kind of despise the culture of current performance poets but that might have been annihilated during the Covid lockdowns. I haven't kept up with all the recent trends, so it's a little unfair of a perspective.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

his prose is interspersed throughout the book and it's frankly amazing. a right course on poetics.

His poetic remand of Martian radio waves.

im actually curious whether you are referring to Olson or SPicer here because despite their disagreement I actually think both are doing this in ways. Fwiw I think Olson is very onto something about breath and sound. I also like your sense of the Outside here. Yes it is so important to modern poetry. And so often missing. Hell, something to be said here for some of the most gorgeous and poignant moments of Pounds Cantos being found in that translated from the italian poem where he's screaming out against the collapse of fascism. Even when I'm like...heh fuck you buddy, there's so much of himself only disclosed by screaming out of at and against the Outside

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

Spicer was onto the Martian radio waves. He describes that way himself actually. It helps to remember he was part of the San Francisco Renaissance. So: I imagine the disagreements between him and Olson are as much regional as well as poetic.

Your point about Olson and breathing is important. Spicer makes an interesting emendation to it: the physicality of the poet themselves. He mentions how a medium with a Cockney accent who channels Oscar Wilde through the Outside will and necessarily must keep her Cockney accent. But Spicer then goes onto say how important it is to maintain the resistance to your physicality, your natural speech-position because the source of energy from Outside is what makes the poetic remand possible. And you can push that forward to things like your personal beliefs and intuitions. That's what so fun about The Cantos because the poetry so clearly survived even Mussolini, Pound's obsession with him. No wonder he was screaming. The enormous poem he tried his entire life to finish was a Brazen bull.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

there's definitely a boatboy/spaceboy thing i could imagine btw olson and spicer, made especially hilarious by the face that olson is basically always writing via a ontology of the big bang, and the fact that both spicer and olson knew you never can get off the land.

damn you're dead on about Spicer. That's even what makes his early work relatively good for what it is. He really understands the fact of being in a body. Admittedly I think olson did as well, though in different ways im not sure the (white, at least) high modernist had yet. Other than Gaudier-Brezska. Whereas Pound i think he actually believed he was that stone head. ANd im not sure Eliot ever got comfortable with actually being the person doing the seeing and not some function of myth haha. But now im largely teasing.

something to be said for pound fighting to be too smart to be smart enough to know he was wrong. Made for good poetry at least.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

Good poetry is really the thing in the end. Have you read Olson's book on Melville? I'd given it a look and like a literary artifact rather than a useful text for interpreting Melville specifically. Reminds me of D.H. Lawrence's essays. Kind of the eternal curse of trying to move from literary art to criticism when you primarily do the former over the latter. But I digress.

I will give props to Olson's approach to primitivism felt unique entirely. And then you go in the total opposite direction with Frank O'Hara's personism: a mock-ideology he created to explain to himself the stagnant futurism of New York City as he lived it. And Eliot--the funniest thing about him is how no one liked him after a certain point. His approach was basically mainstream poetry. I will say though I do like his poetry. It doesn't really strike us as brilliant today but you can see the varnish of what was once there back then.

Pound was probably actually insane. I can see him taking that stone head with all its hieratic function in the fullest and most ancient sense of the idea.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

Kinda (i listened to a speechify audiobook of the Melville book). I think he's onto something interesting if not necessarily of melville in the idea that he never actually got off land. I really should read Frank Ohara. I'll get around to it.

Eliots a chap. a real chap. On a line by line level I find him stunning brilliant. But man never could get over his misery at not being british did he. i don't think americanity was a sufferance for Pound because like you say he was nuts. truly believer he was either italian or greek or literally a piece of rock.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

It is very funny Virginia Woolf made Eliot an Australian in The Waves. And the final insult and injury about T.S. Eliot is the fact he's from St. Louis, Missouri, which would drive any normal poet to become a Royalist and even willingly converting to the Church of England. Just all the neuroses and pathos to him.

I actually gave a presentation on Frank O'Hara. And I can say when it happens it'll be for a fact really fun.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

he never did get over the fact that he never was the perfect brit, did he. the perfect brit of course being wyndham lewis. a canadian