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ru david winters claims that for lish composition cuts across ontology not only aesthetics italics in original winters goes on to compare the cut of consecution to of all things the clinamen of lucretius consecution may be less a methodology than a metaphysic a miraculating agent an instance of spirit or pneuma submerged in the world in lucretius the force of composition is described as a clinamen our world is born from a swerving of atoms in their fall from heaven such is the purpose served by peru s perpetual swerving rhyming and recursion each consecutive swerve steps closer toward a total curvature an arc that delimits the work as a world apart each lishian sentence is its own world its own monad in which the universe of the story is contained without being merely represented it s a mimesis beyond mimesis the immanent transcendence of representation the reader encounters the story as a sufficiency as a world to be explored rather than as something presented it s an essentially modernist rather than postmodernist technique the lishian cut the lucretian swerve these are comfortably poetic concepts for me reminiscent as they are of the volta or turn that is central to the operations of verse the more than semantic physical cut in language of the volta is what charges a poem with energy unsupplied by subject matter poems cannot completely evade subject matter words never can but they come much closer to such evasions and can entangle a reader in themselves with a more intensively minimal mimesis than can fiction and this perhaps is why yeats can say that poetry makes nothing happen but rather survives a way of happening a mouth fiction is also a way of happening and yet to be fiction something has to happen to write it there has to be story but there s a problem with the lishian ontological sentence it s too definitive and determinate it says things a happening is an event in a recent essay on the novel as event cooper levey baker seems to mean something less eventlike than the scene of events way of happening something like architecture or ambient music touchstones for his piece include an artwork by anish kapoor creator of chicago s beloved bean aka cloud gate and the collaborations of filmmaker béla tarr and novelist lászló krasznahorkai levey baker seems interested in recapturing a particular dimension of modernism the challenge to the reader or viewer to encounter the artwork a film or a novel so as to make its silence audible often to the point of discomfort the unpleasures of boredom the very long shots without cuts in tarr s film version of krasznahorkai s satantango are the equivalent of the novel s very long sentences which endlessly defer answers to the audience s questions about what exactly is going on as at a poetry reading or leafing through one of ashbery s longer works one s mind wanders without ever losing the sense of being in the presence of something an environment in which the figure ground relation is rendered ambiguous if not threatening boredom levey baker claims is the last refuge of the avant garde the one affect that cannot be recuperated by the entertainment industrial complex long sentences in their excessiveness their accumulation and angular momentum do not have to be boring but they do tend to be far more open than short sentences in their attenuated hypotaxis the extension and interaction of dependent and independent clauses begin to overwrite each other to introduce a dubiety room for interpretation the past master of this is of course the master himself henry james here s a sentence chosen more or less at random from the golden bowl he remembered to have read as a boy a wonderful tale by allan poe his prospective wife s countryman which was a thing to show by the way what imagination americans could have the story of the shipwrecked gordon pym who drifting in a small boat further toward the north pole or was it the south than anyone had ever done found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light concealing as darkness conceals yet of the colour of milk or of snow this is not unstraightforward and yet its dart backward toward an impugnation of the american imagination its dart sideways into poe and its ambiguous image of the white mist of others motivations concealing the future of our hero lend an astonishing multiplicity to the sentence s mimesis of what is supposedly happening in prince amerigo s mind james is famous for his psychology but thanks to his brother william s work we know how close psychology is to philosophy which is to say the art of disclosing the real reality as william james teaches us is perspectival the activity required of the reader of a jamesian sentence sends her grasping in and through language for a meaning one cannot help but be conscious of creating james is also capable of lishian sentence pairs as in the following beautifully asymmetrical chiasmus he was taken seriously lost there in the white mist was the seriousness in them that made them so take him the reader leaps from stone to stone the cut is there but it s the longer sentences that makes james james and that suggest for me a possible fiction an immanent mimesis the paragraph environment story in language posted by unknown at 10 56 pm no comments thursday december 12 2013 the recruit one of my back burner projects for the past couple of years is a memoir or a series of linked autobiographical essays about my years of quiet desperation trying to be a writer while living in new orleans in the mid 90s green mountains review has just published some excerpts in their online edition read them here posted by unknown at 8 32 am no comments saturday november 23 2013 fragment what a pen can make lines the sea sees nothing the computer heats up rendering what was given to henry james names makes a world they were neither of them saints him especially but also especially her but what makes a saint to have stood for something and to have suffered for it isn t that enough isn t that at least something the artist chooses his constraints that is his freedom but the philosopher is she not obligated simply to the truth and thus is the least free of all the philosopher does not invent even when she does invent a voice a character a concept the philosopher constructs a discourse an elaborate machine for unearthing what she discovers in the day or night she lives in the brilliant aftermath of intuition posted by unknown at 11 18 am no comments wednesday november 20 2013 moths it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true 1 begin again in a new spirit of pragmatism asking not why i am interested in vital materialism in modernist poetics in the dialectic of innocence and experience in the phenomenological and ecological implications of taking language and the imagination as things that obtain that exist accepting that i am interested in these things that they are a matter of my temperament its line or lines of flight asking instead what this assemblage of interests can do the idea has come to me that i want to do now is to saturate every atom i mean to eliminate all waste deadness superfluity to give the moment whole whatever it includes 2 in my own poetry this assemblage empowers a new practice a practical poetics to be lived with and explored such a poetics undermines the impulse toward the made and returns one s attention to making to be always beginning again with the reader asking what it is in the moment that poems do say that the moment is a combination of thought sensation the voice of the sea 3 poetry is a practice of magic of incantation a matter of disturbance entrance and passion rather than abracadabra 4 a speech in which the speaker is fully embedded fully committed a voice committed to the moment to creating and being created by the otherness of what the poem includes waste deadness come from the inclusion of things that don t belong to the moment this appalling narrative business of the realist getting on from lunch to dinner it is false unreal merely conventional 5 it is false unreal merely conventional this business of the realist how some poetry and much scholarship encases and thwarts experience in their insistent proprieties they obscure our vision of the actual what william james called pure experience 6 the actual may be a poem it may be the western black rhino declared extinct last week it may be my daughter it may be a feeling or a lure for feeling we lose the actual when we lose the adventure of imagination the world of wonders is limited at last to the parent s will for will prospers where imagination is thwarted intellectual appetites become no more than ambitions curious minds become consciences love hatred affection and cruelty cease to be responses and become convictions and the adventure of life becomes a self improvement course 7 we can in other words know nothing in advance the poem lies before us we are implicated if we write it if we read it we are willing subjects in the wrong there is a stone chair on a dais seeing it is the king s chair or even in some dreamings of this dream finding myself a lonely king in that chair there is no one rightly there a wave of fear seizes me all things have gone wrong and i am in the wrong great doors break from their bars and hinges and under pressure a wall of water floods the cavern 8 i am interested in noir in a noir narrative the protagonist who is usually some sort of detective plunges confidently into the heart of an expanding darkness only to discover that the darkness is inside himself that he may even be its origin this is the story of oedipus and the story of chinatown noir reverses the dialectic of innocence and experience the experienced detective is undone by his adventure confronted with his own complicity in evil he detects himself a terrible innocence is born this terrible moment the moment at the very end of the noir narrative is ours i discover myself on the verge of the usual mistake 9 but we can bear in imagining the darkness rather than willing it medicine can cure the body but soul poetry is capable of living in longing for choosing illness only the most fanatic researcher upon cancer could share with the poet the concept that cancer is a flower an adventure an intrigue with life 10 ecological politics has a noir form timothy morton writes we start by thinking we can save something called the world over there but end up realizing that we ourselves are implicated this is the solution to beautiful soul syndrome reframing our field of activity as one for which we ourselves are formally responsible even guilty 11 we are or ought to be fanatic cancer researchers and the cancer is in us is us we are caught up in the anthropocene we are caught up in an intrigue with life why admit anything to literature that is not poetry by which i mean saturated is that not my grudge against novelists that they select nothing 12 i have written a novel called beautiful soul an american elegy it is a sentimental title for a narrative that struggles to emerge on the other side of sentimentality as the protagonist in her struggle with the past that composes her tries to survive her own innocence of that past the phrase beautiful soul is hegelian schöne seele the beautiful soul maintains a split between self and world an irresolvable chasm created by the call of conscience it cannot see that the evil it condemns is intrinsic to its existence indeed its very form as pure subjectivity is this evil 13 the poets succeeding by simplifying practically everything is left out 14 poems are not mimetic they do not represent they show nothing of states of affairs or states of mind poetry is the by product of what karen barad calls intra action the mutual constitution of entangled agencies the notion of intra action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede but rather emerge through their intra action 15 the poet is one agent entangled with innumerable other agents black rhinos congressional republicans tornadoes john keats hay fever words the particular moment of entanglement is the poet s experience the record of that experience is the poem liable as ezra pound said of the cantos to carry the defects inherent in a record of struggle 16 the poet s role is not to oppose evil but to imagine it what if shakespeare had opposed iago or dostoyevsky opposed raskolnikov the vital thing is that they created iago and raskolnikov 17 the poem itself is not mimetic but the struggle to produce it is microcosmic as whitehead says each task of creation is a social effort employing the whole universe the defects of the poem mark its suffering of incompatible facts insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil whitehead follows this claim with a gimcrack theodicy assuring us that in the advance of the world particular evil facts are finally transcended 18 one can accept this only in the spirit of kafka s mordant remark that there is plenty of hope for god but not for us yet what keats calls the poetical character must participate this hope if is not to be overwhelmed or to retreat to the guilty noncommitment of the beautiful soul it is not itself it has no self it is every thing and nothing it has no character it enjoys life and shade it lives in gusto be it foul or fair high or low rich or poor mean or elevated it has as much delight in conceiving an iago as an imogen 19 poetic practice is a pragmatism of impure subjectivity the poem s i is embedded in produces and is produced by what it sees environment does not exist there is a vibration and an overlapping and a revision the poem ends but the adventure does not if the adventurer encounters evil he tarries with it and becomes it for a while this thing of darkness i acknowledge mine 20 that is his obedience to the struggle a poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence because he has no identity he is continually in for and filling some other body the sun the moon the sea and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute the poet has none no identity he is certainly the most unpoetical of all god s creatures 21 keats is wrong about the unchangeable attributes of things since all things are themselves entangled and intra acting agents he is right that a poet is willing to enter consciously and of his own free will into the contract of intra action that binds the rest of us all unwilling since we are blind to it that blindness is what makes us poetical creatures of impulse the poet s vision makes blindness palpable what duncan called a little endarkenment 22 i want to put practically everything in yet to saturate that is what i want to do in the moths it must include nonsense fact sordidity but made transparent 23 moths are nocturnal insects except when they are not there is nothing so strange nor seemingly nonsensical as the luna moth which molts five times i...