Perspicuity and/or Intensity

Leaving the question of whether it is the business of philosophers or poets to write them on the side, consider the way in which texts may be said to be perspicuous or intense. Wittgenstein, following Frege, strove for the "perspicuous presentation" of his remarks (PI§122), while Pound looked for the "first intensity" in his presentation of details (cf. Gaudier-Brzeska). We can choose to ignore Wittgenstein's fame as a philosopher and Pound's fame as a poet. We can then look at the operations that produce perspicuity and intensity in themselves, regardless of whether they make for essentially philosophical or poetical writing. I think we will find, however, that intensity in writing is characteristic of feelings that are contained by precise emotions and that clarity is characteristic of thoughts that are informed by precise concepts. (This is note quite as rigorous as I would like it to be: it makes it look like some writing "expresses feelings" when all it can really ever do is "present emotion". It is the experience of having one's feelings contained by these exceptionally precise emotions, duly noted in a good poem, that I am here calling "intensity" or, with Burke, "enthusiasm".)

Experience is intense and clear in proportion to the precision of our suffering.

In his treatise on the sublime, Edmund Burke proposed that there is a tradeoff between these two experiences and therefore a sort of economy in the allocation of resources to the operations that produce them in writing. Clarity is the enemy of enthusiasm, he said. A text can be either perspicuous or intense; it will be obscure in the degree to which it is intense, languid to the degree to which it is clear.

But nothing of course guarantees that a languid text will be clear. Burke's argument is that the introduction of clarity to a presentation will, all things being equal, work against whatever efforts one might be making to foster enthusiasm. In fact, I think a sober assessment of Wittgenstein's work will bear this point out. His remarks are crystalline in their clarity (for the most part), but there is nothing (besides the compulsion for clarity itself) that drives your reading forward. There is an enormous amount of languor in the Investigations. That is not say that there are no moments of intensity in that work, only that these are not, as it were, its defining moments.

With equal and opposite force, the same can be said of the Cantos. These are largely an obscure, intense reading experience. There is, to be sure, a characteristically "modern" intention in them, which would make itself clear. But again and again we see it subordinated to the first intensity (as was already the case with "In a Station of the Metro").

[For those who are keeping track at home: truth is the first virtue of belief; justice is the first virtue of desire; perspicuity is the first virtue of thought; intensity is the first virtue of feeling. The precision of objects fosters (but does not guarantee) truth; the precision of subjects fosters justice; the precision of concepts fosters clarity in suffering (perspicuity); the precision of emotions foster enthusiasm in suffering (intensity).]

It is important to keep in mind that we are here working with texts and the processes that produce them. Clarity is a virtue of text, but so is intensity, and you often end up having to choose. What you are choosing is basically whether you want the text to contribute to the precision of suffering in thought or in feeling.

Maybe this still divides experience too much into heart & head for some writers. It seems obvious to me that we sometimes use our heads, and sometimes our hearts. If we don't concentrate our efforts our compositions will suffer. And that's our job: to suffer precisely. That's my hunch, anyway.

The Essential Business of Texts

Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus on the premise that "the essential business of language is to assert and deny facts" (Russell's introduction). In §23 of the Investigations he makes a list of other things we can do with words, noting how "the multiplicity of the tools in language" compares with "what logicians have said about the structure of language" (including his own earlier effort).

A craftsman is defined by his tools.

As I said last weekend, I've come to see the ridiculousness of my concern with what might be called "the essential business of poetry". The coments I have received on this idea all seem to be a variation on Wittgenstein's §23, i.e., a note to that part of the mind that wants to get its ideas in order, assigning each faculty its own tidy little task.

But I think we have remember that this rage for order is only ridiculous within the language (the form of life) as a whole. I think it does make sense to say that there are varieties of "rhetoric": scientific, political, philosophical and poetic. These target different problems of living: the problem of belief, the problem of desire, the problem of thought, and the problem of feeling. In so far as they are textual exercises, they consists in "note taking", notation, each having its own theme to be noted: objects, subjects, concepts, and emotions. Mastery of notation is mastery of a craft. Different texts emerge under the auspices of each of these crafts.

My error has been to think that there might be a "pure" form of each text, and to suggest that the handiwork of the remaining crafts should be banished from each textual form. This would deform the life of the text, is what I think I hear people saying.

More later.

Languid Listening

If Lester Bangs were alive today, he'd know exactly
why Miles Davis used to call Branford Marsalis "the police".
Ron Silliman
(Comment to Silliman's blog, May 27, 2005)

Get the fuck off the stage.
Miles Davis to Wynton Marsalis, onstage at
the Vancouver Jazz Festival, 1986

I think Kasey gets it right about the lack of any genuine "pop" version of poetry, which makes us look (both in jazz and poetry) for mass-selling aberrations to identify the true "sell out". (In popular music this is a difficult category since selling out -- namely, the show -- is a respectable activity. As Kasey points out, you can't really make sales an embarrassment for U2 or the Stones.) This is where Kenny G and Billy C come up.

(For the record Kenny G=Billy Colllins.)*

I think also the idea that, on this logic, Ron Silliman is the Pat Metheny of poetry is at least an avenue to pursue. Though I'm well out of my depth here, it seems clear to me that Pat and Ron are better at their art (or "instrument") than Kenny and Billy. Ron and Pat also seem to be more technically knowledgeable, both in their real work and their online commentary (Metheny's remarks read a bit like Silliman's though they are obviously less carefully written). I have a lot to learn about how get them, however, because they're just so, well, inaccessible.

Billy and Kenny are very accessible. And I imagine much of this is about the sense in which their work makes for "easy" listening or reading. Kenny G's Classics in the Key of G (this is not made up) is what got stuck in Metheny's craw, just as Billy's 180 More got stuck in Ron's. Terry Wood's editorial review of Kenny G's efforts is polite until the last sentence. "Languid listening from start to finish." (Fast fact from Google: "languid listening" means (1) Willie Nelson and (2) Kenny G.)

Consider Collins' own compositional principle, which he offered in an inaugural interview with the Library of Congress:

I'm trying to modulate--I'm trying to mix serious poems with lighter poems. And I'm trying to create, you know, a mix of the two faucets. I don't want it to be just amusing and I don't want it to be too much gravitas. I'd say that really is a guiding principle for the way I compose poetry.

Billy Collins writes intentionally luke warm poems. I wonder if Wood meant it as a compliment? I'm sure Collins thinks he meant "standing firm in the middle" (Pound/Kung) but couldn't get his mind around a fitting image.

But there's still the Marsalis Bros. connection to think about. Let's say Robert Creeley is the Miles Davis of poetry. Whom would he call "the police"? Who would he tell to get the fuck of the stage?

Maybe this is all just barking up the wrong tree. Consider "Snow Day", "Portrait of the Reader at the Breakfast Table", "I Ask You". Billy Collins is the Bil Keane of poetry. Poems of suburban comfort. Meanwhile ...

Bono breathes into a microphone,
Outside, it's America
Outside, it's America

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*For an earlier version of this equation see Paul Stephen's "An Apology for Poetry, or, Why Bother with Billy Collins" (Drunken Boat #4,Spring 2002): "He is a very bad poet. At best, he is a very mediocre humorist.//Billy Collins is to good poetry what Kenny G is to Charlie Parker; what sunset paintings at the mall are to Jackson Pollock; what Rod McKuen is to Walt Whitman; what Tori Spelling is to Lana Turner; what the burkha is to lingerie; what the Backstreet Boys are to the Beatles; what George W. Bush is to the art of extemporaneous speech; what Osama bin Laden is to women’s liberation; what Dan Quayle is to spelling; Billy Collins is to poetry what the New Age/Mysticism section in the bookstore is to the Philosophy section, assuming that those two sections haven’t been conflated yet down at your local Barnes and Noble."

Billy C

Kasey and Jonathan are really on to something. Without committing myself to any particular homologies or analogies, note what happens when we replace "Kenny G" with "Billy Collins", "music" with "poetry", and "Pat Metheny" with "Ron Silliman" in this (registration required) very funny interview piece on "Mr. Gorelick" (his detractors seem to love calling him by his real name) by Mike Zwerin at Culture Kiosk.

Millions and millions of units sold. Collins' success gets a lot of poetry people mad. [Nobody really] come[s] close in sales. Collins can't really say what's different between his style and [everyone else's], but he does hint, accompanied by expressive eye-contact, that his poetry must be better than theirs because he sells more books than they do. I am not making this up.

An angry critique of Collins by the poet Ron Silliman has recently been widely circulated on the internet*. Silliman is correct but he wastes his time and energy. The poetry isn't good enough to deserve an intelligent analysis. There's nothing new about the success of dumb poetry. The fight against vulgar and dishonest poetry is long lost. Better to spend your time reading Goethe.

Critics describe his poetry as bland, sappy, shallow, soporific, and boring. Some people call it "yuppie poetry." Billy does not believe that yuppie is meant in a flattering way. It's not something he'd like to see on his tombstone. But it doesn't really bother him. Yuppies are people who are better educated getting those accounting firm jobs, the advertising firms and the lawyers. He's not saying they're better people, but they need to relax more than blue-collar people. It's fine either way. Nobody's better than anybody or anything but if it's true that yuppies are under more pressure, then his kind of poetry seems to relax them. It's just a theory he has. Might be 100 percent wrong. Probably is.

More later.

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* It is actually interesting to read Metheny's remarks about Kenny G. There are two longish statements to supplement his early formula "Kenny G sucks". It seems that the first came on Kenny G's 44th birthday on Metheny's own message board. Metheny spends a lot of time arguing for why hating G is actually a significant aesthetic stance, even a duty, and offers the following succinct critique of his style of playing: "lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up". In a follow up to this statement he takes up the "It's only Kenny G" objection to even talking about it, and puts it in perspective:

people's words and opinions about music, mine included ("stature" be damned), especially when jotted down, are largely for the pleasure of the language, they mostly have less to do with the music in question than the cultural point of view that they are offered in and usually intrinsically designed to illuminate/ castigate/ defend/ whatever.

Mutadis mutandis?

The Way of the Place (a callisthenic)

for Jay Thomas

The place we meet is the way we part. We find the place as we lose our way, losing our place as we find the way. This is because the way departs from the real just as the place recedes from the ideal. (The place has its horizon and the way its direction.) The way is always to come, is everywhere up ahead (that is what "now" means), just as the place never passes, is forever under foot (what "here" means). A place is an interrelation of things that determines an objective space. (Things themselves are in their places, occupying the space constituted by correlated objects.) A way is a personal disposition that determines a subjective time. (People themselves are on their way, passing the time constituted by situated subjects.) "It" is "thus" in space just as "I" become "myself" through time. The place is the "this" of spatial relation, just as the way is the "my" of temporal position. "Baby, I love your way (when you mind your place)." Suffering is the long space in the meantime (that is what "mean" means). The place disposes of the way (hides my tracks), relays time (now and then, the way passes through the place) and the way interpolates the place (finds its feet), poses space (here and there, the place gives way).

I am now on my way. Later, then I will rest.
It is here in this place. Elsewhere, there it will go.

Good morning.