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It’s obvious to readers of this blog that I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately. I have a funny relationship with poetry. I have published a little in Canadian journals, but nothing for 10 years or so now. I have been involved in the Canadian literary scene, on the margins, as an associate editor of ARC magazine for a couple of issues, through which I stumbled around the Ottawa literary scene.

I haven’t written much poetry for a few years, although lately I have been writing a little more.

But mostly, I have been reading, and with few exceptions, I have read poetry from most of my adult life. So it’s no surprise that I should find many nuggets of beauty that propel this blog along in the world of poetry.

And, in what amounts to a real life synchronicity that is usually reserved for surfing the web, I had an interesting revelation about poetics.

I was reading the introduction to Poems for the Millennium, a fantastic compendium of poetic style and evolution over the twentieth century. In the introduction, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris write about how the turbulence and ideological struggles of the twentieth century have informed the poetics and the practice of poetry around the world. Advances in form closely mirror revolutions in social and political thought.

And then I had this thought, which at the time I recorded in verse:

Simplicity – the tyranny of simplicity
demands not chaos, not unrelented destruction
for indeed that is what it leads to –
the smoothed out forms of jungle and desert
as canvases upon which the poetry of
the century has played out.

When simplicity reduces depth to span
spreading out in all directions, free
of depth or anything left to interpret
then analysis is rendered superfluous
or, more exactly, dangerous
because it implies that there is something
left to read.

Is there nothing left to read?
Or is history now laid bare for us to re-examine?
Is everything not new now open for a second glance?
That which we glossed over before
comes to light with the sharpened gaze
Now imploring us to read?

In fact, one might wonder at all that
is new. Who could write new things
when there is so much we have missed
skimmed over and forgotten? Ticked it off the list
without ever seeing it
noted it as received without it ever arriving.

Calls that arose in time of deliberate confusion
Now seem to me to be ripe to hear.
The gift and the warning that was buried
in the time capsules of prior effort
speak to this time when depth is
melting away, filled in, paved over and closed.

So this modern context, this 21st century seems to me to be dominated by a public poetics of simplification, where we are sold a bill of good that makes it easy for domineering agendas to skate across our field of view. It seems to me that these times demand a poetry of depth and multiplicity so that we as readers don’t lose the faculty that the 20th century poets hammered into us: to recognize that there is more here than meets the eye.

It also seems that these times require us to look at old things, like the Bible, Buddhist suttas, pre-modern poetry and so on with a view to imagining the complexities that each of these things embody. There must be something else going on below the surface. To see things as they are is to accede to the kind of seeing and reading that will anchor us to the agendas of over simplification being sold to us every day.

Rothenberg and Joris quote Blake: “poetry fettr’d, fetters the human race.” They recast this observation noting that “poetry set free can free or open up the human mind.”

So all of this is running through my head, and I surf from Rothenberg and Joris to Blake, taking a turn at Bernstein and end up reading Ron Silliman’s blog where he seems to be chasing the same cat up the tree:

The underlying problem is not that certainty is the opposite of doubt, but rather that certainty is the opposite of complexity. I sometimes think that the political spectrum today runs not on a left-right axis, but rather on a simple-complex one. That’s why opposing the Rush Limbaughs of the world with leftward radio ranting never works – while it may counter the reactionaries at one level, it functionally concurs with them on a deeper, in some ways more profound one, insisting that the world is simple. Just pick the red team or the blue team…

[snip]

In practice, Duncan & Olson are both interested in a poetry that is exploratory, almost – especially in Olson’s case – as a mode of investigative thinking prior to (& really quite apart from) any interest in the text as a made or finished art object. Thus doubt, or Doubt, is a primary ingredient for each. This isn’t at all far from Charles Bernstein’s concept of poetry as the active aspect of philosophy. And one can find approximate parallels in all manner of other art forms, from the films of Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Henry Hills or Abigail Childs, to the music of Cecil Taylor, John Zorn or Anthony Braxton. Think of Harry Partch, whose music required him not only to compose it, especially those songs derived from graffiti and the letters of hobos (an amazing use of found language given how very early on it is), and to invent his own instruments on which to perform these strange compositions, & finally even to invent his own 72-tone scale in which to hear it. In order to take responsibility like that for every single element that enters into his art, Partch has to put into question anything he might have “learned” about music. That seems to me a very clear demonstration of how an artist doubts.