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Ezra
pound:
Collage of different times and histories recast into a new knot
of patterened energies. Collage in search of origins. Age upon
age, vortex upon vortex. Like 2-ss! The cantos as collage to
the glut of knowledges that print had opened up to the modern
world and had then splintered into fragments.
Stopping
for a moment:
2-ss: 21st century Buddhist/Teilhardian cantos. It's a real
possibility. 2-ss: a glut of knowledges from the multi-media
opened up to the modern world. Collecting the fragments for
a new and bigger mandala.
Fernando Pessoa:
Four different writings under four distinct names. A search
for lost identity and a combination of literary uses. A step
towards an unknown. The " I " as obstacle.
Marcel
Duchamp:
Chance composition, word-play, and punning in a systematic displacement
of all known reality in order to release sleeping volcanic psychic
energies....
F.T.
Marinetti:
Poems that hurtle off the page and enter performance. Invented
language, simultaneous performances. Radio and film experiments.
Lines written in free words simultanaity, the short acted out
poem, the dramatized sensation, comic dialogue, the negative
act, the re-echoing line, xtra-logical discussion, synthetic
deformation, scientific outburts that clear the air.
Wallace
Stevens:
Surreal with the real. Creation is proceeding before one's eyes....
Joyce:
Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake move from the domain of novel into
an act of language that extends the means of poetry into radical
directions. Collage madness: drawing words and sentences from
the almost-narrative that follows to form with them a kind of
litany of voices, leifmotifs. The language then plays roles,
strikes postures, contorting itself into expressive patterns
which offer to clarify what's up and instead mislead. Dissonance
into stylistic decorum. Finnegan's wake: a full-blown dreamwork
and a work of language waiting only to be sounded.
W.C.
Williams:
Sharp use of the word materials. Prose and verse interplay.
The complex long poem....
D.H.
Lawrence:
Free verse of the instant moment. Occult lore totally possessed
in the poetry. Action poetry. Keep it moving, keeping in speed...
H.D.
Psychic explorations into old mediterranean mysteries. Invited
reality, melody of vowel tone and rime giving rise to image
and mythos.
T.S.
Eliot:
Huge collage techniques. Holding multiple experiences in the
mind as simultanaity or reoccurence of all poetries of all times.
The formation of alternative world images and how consciousness
clarified and re-interpreted them. Objective corelative: a set
of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the
formula for a particular emotion.
Osip Mandelstam:
Russian poetry in violent mutation with precision and hardness.
e.
e. cummings:
A major innovator in typography, lower case and innovative punctuation.
Complicated series and cycles....
Garcia Lorca:
Fusing old and new. Deep song and deeper modern image. Collage
and synchronicity. Spanish poetry and primitive song put into
modern form. Cool, quirky, playful mind music.
Antonon Artaud:
Unfinished poetry as ultimate performance....
Anna Akhmatova:
Sacred texts: Careful montage of seperate lyric pieces framed
and given weight by introductory and concluding sections in
verse and prose that break from smaller often nostalgic visions
of her earlier poems.
Brecht:
Recuperation of abandoned genres, religious hymns, ballads,
pop songs, children's rhymes, altering their uses by satiric
and polemeical means. Hard-nosed realism and an uncompleted
quality to his poems made them open and servicable.
Langston Hughes:
Rooting Black American poetry in ordinary language, spoken idioms,
as sources for music. Conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp
and impudent interjections, broken rythms, jam session passages,
popular song, punctuated by riffs, runs, breaks and distortions
of the music of a community in transition,
Neruda:
Quick jump-cuts and dream-like disjunctions. Finely stripped
lines and an extended virtual caressing of the object.
Gertrude Stein:
Root investigations of language and form, smashing all connotations
words ever had, cubism into language as an altered concept of
time, continuous present, systematic substraction, correlating
sight, sound, and sense and eliminating rythm, reordering thought
and exploring other forms of consciousness.
Hart Crane:
Searching for something inside. Poetic materials absorbed and
redirected towards an examination on the organic effects on
us of these materials. Mixed levels of language, extension of
Rimbaudian prose poems, pacing of the rythm of lines, syntax,
the intensely human tone of the punctuation. The prophetic stance....
1950-1990:
Jack
Spicer:
"
Poet as catcher, not pitcher...."
Vienna
Group:
Spontanaity and an impossible immediacy. Uncanny knack for uncovering
the comic potential in discrepencies between sound and spelling,
cliches, mispronounciations. Dialect as a reservoir of sounds
and expressions which can be submitted to formal manipulation.
Sentence and its hierarchy replaced with a spatial constellation,
a non-linear relation of elements which maybe words, syllables,
or even letters. All working on montages of " given "
material with the possibility of making language abstract: school
primers, catologues, technical manuels become non-referential
when lifted intact from their natural habitats and remounted
into new combinations. Reduction: restricted vocabularies sometimes
with single words manipulated to various kinds of manipulations,
optical, serial, and associative.
Stopping for a moment:
Poetic investigation shedding light on the unknown enlarges
the unknown's dimensions announcing its depth and its extremity;
as if light was transforming itself into night crossing limits
into the unlimited.....
Tammuzi Poets:
Individual and internal struggle beneath the surface of a poem.
Simultaneous demands for revolution and tradition. Arabic literature
codified in 700's by Al-Khalil: 16 traditional meters, mono-rythms
fused with English romantic and French symbolist influences.
Free verse starts. A new present opens to a new past. Dispalcement:
a breaking away from the accepted and the known. Destroying
logical temporality and causality. At the boundaries between
open and closed verse.
Cobra:
Arts as instruments of even larger transformations. Neo-Dada:
not primitive, but open to world of children and insane. A rawness
and openess of form and more erasure of boundaries between arts.
Concrete Poetry:
A genuine global movement. A stripped down minimalist form:
a reduction of a poem to a sign eliminating syntax and even
words. Offering up of an image open to interpretation at a single
glance. Radical sound poetry and text-sound performances. A
re-duplication of verbal patterns. Poems merged with graphic
instruments and hard material like sculpture, buildings, and
gardens.
Beat poetry:
Public side of second great poetic revolt of the 20th century
in America and in the world. Dada and Beats disgusted with their
post-war worlds. Beats put forward the alternative of the vision
quest. Was brought to the forefront from the shadows. Denial
of literary and social convention. Improvised, unmediated writing,
" sketching, " wild form, spontaneous prose, bop prosody.
More in jazz improvization and action painting than automatic
writing as some critics claim. A return to speech rythms through
the disordering of conventional syntax, through lineation based
on the breath. An Americanization and democratization on a global
scale of the avante garde's central issues.
Stopping for a minute:
Yopis expand and deepen this quest to levels unheard of by the
Beats....Kerouac and Ginsberg have huge influence on 60's pilgrimage
ethos: Bob Dylan and Beatles.
Charles Olson:
One preception must immediately and directly lead to another
perception. Hipsterism and its black roots of rebellion. Out-cropping
into the great subculture which runs underground all through
history: Siberian shamanism, paleolithic cave painting, megaliths,
alchemy, and gnostics. Olson attacks the " cheapshit "
values of corporate America as he plunges back into Atlantean
times and begins to pre-signal old and new Noospheric influences.
One of the most mis-understood poets of the 20th century....
Oral Poets:
Poetries existing outside of literature and writing and that
are tied to the life of communities from which they come from.
Poetries not of our time with breakdown of hierarchies the poet
masters and writes with the knowledge that speech and song precede
the written poem. Complexity of poetry over the last century
is in part a corollary of multi-cultural convergences.
Post-war Japanese Poets:
Brevity and refinement turned on its head and brought into the
present. Less like Haiku and Tanaka. More like ghost theatre:
Noh and Butoh. A celebration in darkness which is at once weird
and refined, scatological, lofty, comic, and serious. Everyday
speech with new foreign vocabularies and imageries along with
a mix of class and gender usages ( long seperated into discreet
social levels ) and a violation of grammatical norms carried
to the point of linguistic rapine. A stripping-away of all the
customary decorations and embellishments of traditional Japanese
poetics towards a nakid language. A great freedom and variety
in the poetic line. Hiroshima as the huge dividing line: Japanese
poets forced to look through their individual fates and see
the the fate of the 20th century. A vision of extremity shared
with the world at large. The birth of the wasteland poets....
Neo-Avanguardia:
Out of post-war Italy a new emphasis on linguistic forms of
reality. Experimentation with distorted or fragmented syntax,
punctuation modification and unconventional word meanings to
create new language systems. A reduction of the " I's "
as producer of meaning and a corresponding versification released
from that now debased syllabic versification and its modern
camoflouges. To treat common language with the same intensity
as it were the poetic language of tradition and to have the
latter measured against contemporary life. To estrange language
from its semantic properties, tearing away at its syntactic
fabric, decomposing its harmony and reconstructing it in violently
synchronic provisional arrangements. A poetry that expresses
nothing and devotes itself instead to the asemantic assemblages
of signs.
Language Poets:
The 1970's began questioning language itself. Anti-bard and
highly linguistic. A deliberate flattening of tonal registar
and extensive use of non-sequitars. A neutral voice or multiple
voices. Language as a system with its own rules and operations.
" "Meaning " production. Rather than seeking
a language beyond rationality by purifying the words of the
tribe or by discovering new languages of irrationality. Language
poetry has now made its horizon the material form rationality
takes.
Misty Poets:
Cultural wars of poetry had a strange twist in China. Vernacular
( Bai Hua ) and surrealist imagery and altered forms of verse
began to be seen after 1930's. Yenan talks started repression
of art in China which climaxed with the Cultural Revolution
in the the 1960's. Grim realism and a clear projection of a
disillusioned mentality that attacked state-directed optimism.
An individual presence connected Misty Poets to truncated modern
Chinese poetry and global influences outside China.
Cyberpoetics:
A poem in the machine.....
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