Stephen Ellis
-from 2 letters
04.19.95
...diction, L. dictio, pp. of dicere, to say, orig. 'to point out in words' as a speaking.
not so fiercely opposed to grammar, i.e., 'the whole apparatus of literary study' but perhaps more the nimbus w/in these "confines". this 'speaking' seems a primary curriculum, an active term of study, back from Homer, say, to get the Arges again in full sail - the 'trial/trail' then the voyage thru the Speakable - the common - unrehearsed (!) - i.e., if there is NEED to 'rehearse' the common, how common can it BE? and where dies this put writing, vis-a-vis it being not so much a codification of that rehearsal? Olson (& Clarke - and Clark Coolidge, so some extent, say the whole LANGUAGE proposition, in part) still bears significantly on this issue. The issue being, the temporally formal. Writ has to remain a 'speakable voyage' if it is to have value - discussable - as in 'therapy' as exchange (from whence to understand HOW 'law' is this permanentized rather than (to get its BEAT) valorized....
The nature of this thing has...to do w/ accelerating TEXT past its most obvious definitions, and into the more primary question of method - how to sustain the necessary harmonics of relation, to encourage the fluid, the fluent (as Clarke got from 'analogy', or Olson, his (misunderstood) 'allegory'): to enact the questions ('speaking', again) so not to make any answer redundant. Any other seeking after 'plurality' is the burn-mark (brand-name) that remains enforcedly NATAL. Undiscovered/covered-the Childe enclosed (engulfed) in aeons of soft-sweet sadness, rather than simply, nakedly, availably THERE. in conflictis, yet valuably so, as Vincent Ferrini is currently in tremendous mastery of (alas, ignored)....
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05.16.95
Interesting implex, this diction business, as yr own 'word choice' extends, of course, as everything does, after the fact of itself, into, well, as it's guided in some sense, toward, health(?) - that's if learning has some practical application for other than to its own sake, as, the aesthetics of the body, corporeal life the embodiment of whatever estate one finds themselves within the limits (advantage!) of, as it makes itself known, to, and as, the forms of (its) feeling - 'things' that pass, a kind of counting that makes a visceral 'crowning', as to each evening its stars possible (meaningful) - each dictum a passing reference that leaves its interweaving trace as the floor the mind sets its favorite things out upon, 'as if' t'were indeed the 'dance' that it in actuality ever IS - a 'floor' sewn with 'seeds' - so (just maybe) there is in back of 'diction' just that stream of vision that produces same, and the question therefore points to one of actual value, especially in that (again, just maybe) the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group hasn't really been 'feeding' anyone, as per, look, just what ARE one's "favorite things?" [& how might they be proffered, primped by whatever 'pomp-and-circumstance' is necessary toward making them other than codified self-aggrandisement? (the whole 'problem of reference' is just the university ditty, "ding-dong the hitch is dead" - as if that could produce any thing that more than analogously [merely] an effort toward 'freedom' studded with the good fortune of 'tenure.']
diction, L dictio, a speaking pp. of L dicere, to point out in words
teach, ME techen OE taecan base of tacn, a sign, symbol (see
TOKEN); basic sense, to show, demonstrate, as in Ger zeigen
token, ME OE tacn, akin to Ger zeichen IE base *deik - to
point, show TEACH, TOE, DIGIT, DICTION -- a sign,
indication, symbol, sample, [syn., PLEDGE]
pledge, ME plegge OFr pleige ML plegium plevium, security
warranty, infl. by Frank *pligi. liability, akin to OS
plegen, to warrant, "the condition of being held or given as
security for a contract (or promise); also, a toast (of
allegiance)
digit: finger, toe, inch, orig. any of the numbers 0-9,
'cause all was counted 'pon one's own digits.
but the 'accounting' of that also implies "toe hold" - a 'digging in' (also 'toeing the mark') - even as it is our TOES wch, like the tails of dinosaurs, are one of the more important elements in keeping one's balance in the sheer 'accounting' of each step - i.e., that they (toes) are TELLING. thus, to bring it back to diction, telling of just what, exactly - TOES leave the likes of letters in the sand w/ each step (given that yr going' to the beach every weekend!) -- you count on yr fingers, but you remember w/ yr toes given that they are what most obviously are imbedded in the matter of the moment -- fingers are sensitive, toes are "of an more steady apprehension", the 'sounding' of wch keeps one in concert with precisely that sense of PLEDGE as a 'grip upon' "each forth along each their own trail", plurality for sure, not KULTURAL so much as to each individual in his/ her own ability to receive, the RATE (truly what diction might point out) of the common occurring profoundly within the locally possibly and fortunately small 'pledge' that counts anywhere between 0 and 9 - & each that, our own tithe, moment attached to moment as life's only true lineage, and thru wch diction's allowed to indentify, what shall we call it, The Family Name.....
A 'behavior' and 'a method' are productive contradistinctively as to what their confluence 'dictates', we're in the realm of counting here, say, the rungs of the ladder that must then be climbed - though not to emphasize duality - 'up' and 'down', as either way, as you call it 'the rush' is what overtakes the moment at any rung (& there's your 'constancy'!) - 'that which exists through yourself' - such that a composition is located essentially 'beyond itself' (like in the song just came o'er the radio, "Stuck In The Middle With You") at the outset, and that the apprehension of that 'place' cognitively is 'a result of' the strengthening action that both makes the soul 'dry' and the 'construction' (of it) on foundations that are thus sufficient to supporting it - the presence of 'the mysterious' itself essentially what is 'outside' the parameters of the construction of 'the temple' (Gr: "back of head") materially, yet is referred to precisely as such construction's extent. Diction is thus forwarded as the 'sound construction' (the projective)that alone is able of producing the 'tokens' that mark the whirlpool whence 'behavior' and 'methodology' commingle - the litral 'ark' of Utnapishtim which not only was not necessarily 'a ship', but also was a stone - either of which was 'square[d]' - and both of which were meant to 'excite the waters' whilst keeping them 'at bay' such that the literal 'source' of materials on which to work also defined its limits as Bellerophon's invocation via Poseidon of a 'flood' against Iobates contradictionedly loosed from within Iobates' temple (the equivalent 'object' of Bellerophon's quest against Iobates' 'ingratitudes') the Xanthian women, who hoisted their skirts above their waists, and rushed Bellerophon butt-first, offering themselves to him if he would only relent. Bellerophon turned tail and fled, as this wasn't the 'flood' he'd had in mind - an object lesson of the invocatory 'power' position is capable of, i.e., the 'undescribable' IS described 'elsewhere' - (as behavior come incidentally to 'instruct' the former restrictions of the methodology that unwittingly encouraged it.) So, sure, the 'journey' as you say, is 'it', though only insofar as you do admit there be actual 'beads' to string on its 'thread' - beads as word-choice, and word-choice made 'new' only by reference to that which in actuality has been so felt - the 'innate', including the extent to which the person of it does deliver his/her excursion' of it (that 'innate') through to the aeration of - the 'playing' - the 'leading ledger' (first blurts) of - the con(ed) from which might lilies rise. The unexpected whose 'ground' has yet been thoroughly laid - the group ensemble and solo work, unhedged, that the best of 'head arrangements' allows - and includes maximal possibility of 'dishin' on so-and-so', making the whole time' a rune-bridge, dictated across as epaoide, 'to lay a trip on', & as "precision abiding in passion to 1st powers' / invocation, flooding amor, cor, flor / by analogy, no mere repeating of the magic / words, but making mum to an act shimmer" - diction as that sound(ing) knot.
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Ivor Winters (in Defense of Reason)
...The poem, to be perfect, should likewise be a new word in the same sense, a word of which the line, as we have defined it*, is merely a syllable. Such a word is, of course, composed of much more than he sum of its words (as one normally uses the term) and its syntax. It is composed of an almost fluid complex, if the adjective and the noun are not too nearly contradictory, of relationships between words (in the normal sense of the term), a relationship involving rational content, cadences, rhymes, juxtapositions, literary and other connotations, inversions, and so on, almost indefinitely. These relationships, it should be obvious, extend the poet's vocabulary incalculably. They partake of the fluidity and unpredictability of experience and so provide a means of treating experience with precision and freedom. If the poet does not wish, as, actually, he seldom does, to reproduce a given experience with approximate exactitude, he can employ the experience as a basis for a new experience that will be just as real, in the sense of being particular, and perhaps more valuable.
*...the poetic line...should be a functioning part of the larger complex, or poem. This is, imagine, what Mallarme should have had in mind when he demanded that the poetic line be a new word, not found in any dictionary, and partaking of the nature of incantation (that is, having the power to materialize, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, being, a new experience).
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style is psychoactive
Suddenly there is no cultural history. Maybe it snuck up on us, but I perfer to think of it as a coincidence of critical mass and a cumulative effect of the past 20 years of media-glut. There are I suppose some consequences of the post ww2 turnaround. Not only the death of the image, flattening the canvas to a two dimensional phenomenology but the cumulative effect of surrealism moving from cult of secrecy to basic fare from the ads, this rendering of a intentionally & privately obscure code to common discourse ("It was Surreal, man.") An ironic success for the for the Surreal, to create a world in its own image. But the flattening of the epoch into an oppressive immediacy bears some examination. First of all, the audience has become frighteningly literate, at a nonverbal level, it is Hip. It responds primitively to a sophisticated set of signals or messages, but you can't fool it (all of the time...); but the main consequence of this immediacy, what makes us "hostage to the moment", is a subsequent flattening of all doctrines whereby none has any ascendency--it is an entirely democratic situation in which each school of thought has its direction discretion and nobody is right. In fact "being right" seems to have nothing to do with anything. Nor being wrong, for that matter, every man has the right to be whatever kind of fool he wants to be.
What this means to poetry is the same was what it means to everyone else--if nobody is right and nobody is wrong, or, rather, if it doesn't make any difference, how do you talk about things. It used to be you'd compare an item, a poem, say, to the existing canon and see if it came up short, succeeded, or, perhaps, lead the way to something new. Here in the third generation of "do your own thing" there is no established canon, and the elitists who act as if there were one are, uh, cute. I don't buy too much of this. There is a future, of course, and we all have a place in it. It's fine to talk about the past, but all those fine writers we get compared with are dead and we're the only game in town. That seems important to me when talking about the basically closed shop that seems to exist at present.
Times change and with them and with that change what was once disallowed becomes the rule, or gets its fifteen minutes, whatever. Measuring a poetics against itself, however, is a different matter. We are hostage to the moment because we want it that way, we wanted to imbed ourselves in the cultural immediacy of being present in the present, after all, one of the mystical goals of self effacement. Poetry is, after all, a progressive series of seizures on the part of the practitioner, and the cumulative effect of those seizures is that one develops and improves or else one stagnates and withers on the vine like yesterday's eggplant. This vitality is manifested and measured by the feel of the work, how it strikes you living in your own present, and to that extent, yes, indeed, syntax is psychoactive, you get a little thrill after you've weeded your way through a complicated transmission and arrived at the end with a sense of completion, of the 'passing beyond.' And of course it is the poet's task to take you there, into the beyond, by hooking you onto his little red pony and pushing through the fog into the next room. That's the job.
There is also the statement from Gertrude in What Are Masterpieces.... to the effect that each of us lives in our own time, of course, and when it comes around to voicing what and who we are we do so in the character of the moment in which we find ourselves, for we can do nothing else. To do otherwise, that is, to write a complicated poetry from another time, is, well, nostalgic and vital, but it does nothing to advance the cause. I'm sure this will piss somebody off, but now that the avant garde is just another school of thought, embedded in the soul of the academy as tomorrow's salvation, where then is the so-called leading edge, why is it invisible and where is it going and how do know when you've bit into an olive? By its taste? Hence the focus on Diction, it being an examination of the smaller units of the poem to discover what kind of glue holds them together and whether the current crisis which is much epistemological as it is anything is getting anywhere.
Of course, criticism and theory have done little but confuse the issue by competing with the poem for primacy in the cultural dialog. If in the present where all arguments are reduced to the same platform where none is right and none is wrong, all you get is your fifteen minutes on the soapbox and it's time for the next one. This is what bothers so many people about the Slam, not that it's competetive, but that it reduces to mob rule the ivory towered moment of purity and grace; nonetheless, what rises to the surface is usually what is permitted to do so by the relative buoyancy of the medium itself. So it seems to me that what has been there, so-called Language Poetry, got the center stage because it was safe, it involved a celebration of consciousness without any of the messy, spiritual stuff which usually accompanies that venue. LangPo really worked over a lot of territory which actually precedes the poem, issues of resemblance and repetition, issues of consistency and sense, the vague feeling that one was being lied to, or at least that the deeply true and private self of the writer either did not exist (a currently attractive notion = there Is no self), or that if it did it was all a game to get five pounds into a four pound bag.
Disruptions of syntax, or the development of the Disjunkt into an ascendant style is cause for alarm if one is lodged there. Thus the progress of styles is seen to be a progress in the direction of self improvement if not self effacement. The disjunkt is just that, an admixture of styles which declares all states equal in the range of their attributes and succession of their operations into a new whole. Nonetheless it arises from a hopeless state of confusion. It's like trying to make a decision when you're having a nervous breakdown, all possibilities seem to have equal value and one vacilates from one choice to its opposite in a continual disarray of decision or growth. I mean, it's amazing how an invented style, as Lang Po was invented, can be proposed and run through an entire gamut of acquisitions and disarmaments to become ensconced in the academy in less than 20 years, is suspect to say the least; it smacks of manipulation. However, it just, uh, happened...it was all that could get through, this dry, non-musical, definitely non-sappy stuff. It makes you feel like your skin is covered with words, you almost want to wash them off.
I write the disjunkt with uncommon fervor, it's easy and fun, its a head trip, it sometimes carries the force of intense personal experience, and to an extent, it's the way i started writing when i got loose of the trial and error of imitation and flattery which characterizes beginning writing. It's a game and a fantasy, but it came naturally, fulfilling Gertrude's announcement. And carrying without music or what's called prosody, technical practices exiled without ceremony, the celebratory and hypnotic trance-dance only language can create effaced to a set of simpler operations which held the creation of trance states to be somewhat illegitimate; nonetheless, the sustaining of the disjunkt into a major style is a little like making schizophrenia legal, and haven't we?
And so along with Foucault's loosing of the lunatics into the twentieth century and the hero worship that followed him around, the notion that A Stle Is Also A Behavior needs exploration. We are, after all, selling little trips in our poems, and if it feels good, one will let it in, and that's where syntax is psychoactive, you can tell how it fits and feels and you let it in, and that teaches you to lower your guard and let new information in, this is the messaging of the poem, how it Feels in a phenomenological state: i mean, now that the criteria for judgement are all reduced to equals, all that's left is for me to note how the poem makes me feel, and if i assume the writer is being sincere, not always a good guess, as i hope we can note later, i alter my inner mood and go with the writer as long as i can trust the intent of the message, then i sign off. and the relevant features here also need to be described in terms of presssure, release, time and space perceptions, what sort of state the writer is communicating in his non-verbal arrangements. It is no longer a matter of opening the door to let the cat out, we have to decipher a strange set of signals and scan them for sincerity. I think the language with which we talk about poems is up for review--how the poem works as an organic, phenomenological enterprise, part of My experiencing, enables us to discuss poems as events, events which open and close according to what is in them, what specific phlogiston enables the phrases and units themselves to imply a cosmos, for that's what is happening, each unit becomes the bearer of the dna of its message, and if the speaker is not at rest, then, too, his/her message is not at rest.
This is the morality of what we are doing, what cannot be expunged from the enterprise at all. If a style is also a behavior, and it is, that one cannot hide what he is in what he is doing, we are that transparent. Then, too, we must consider what we are about as people, we are obviously trying to grow and become more complete individuals, more in synch with the world in which we write, and that is also expressed, we look at the poem as a sample of what a person actually is in relation to all of these assumptions we make about life, that, for instance, we are writing to get somewhere, to explore this unknown we have blundered into, that we are mapping out an area that is strange to us and we are returning these reports to share with the others, to lead into areas where no man has gone before, as it were, V GER to our self. This we share in our fragments. Remember Archilocus' [In fucking...one discovers...that] the total frag.
And so in the body language of the poem, an entire aesthetic and its cosmos are described, defined, given holographic presence for a fraction of a second, and when my attention is down for that fraction of a second, i'm receptive to a degree of reprogramming, to a resettling of my own vocabulary to receive something somewhat new or different from what i'm used to. The didactic. And so styles must evolve or the message becomes stagnated and the style empty and safe, a haven for the insecure and stodgy, and while the most wildly associative stuff may come out, it may be seen as being guided by a kind of safety, a reveling in what is disjunkt for its own sake, for the comfort of being somewhere at all. No matter, the jobs are all gone. We're getting along ok without you. In fact, I'm close to retiring, then i can sit and write all day long, like i used to, 24-hour poems, short ones, too. After a while, you just do. Those incipient questions no longer nag you, it just doesn't matter; and when you do what you do, that's enough, returned to the realm of play, returned to the realm of just happening, poems occurring as naturally as the leaves sprouting from the tree, spontaneous extensions of who you are.
A sentence is infact a transfer of energy from subject to verb. As experienced. The poem is in fact an encoded experiential diagram interposed between you and your literacy and the raw bleeding fantasm of the present moment, terrifying in its narrowness, if you've ever been mad enough to be "in and of the moment", it's no high, it's hell, it's prison, it's the smallest kind of two-dimensional space; and so we have this agreement not to go Too far, and so you give me your trust and we go through a gradual dropping of your guard, one word at a time, one new, disjunktive disconnection after another, i gradually open up to you and Slam, you get to communicate with me, and you know it, and you give what you have to give whether you want to or now, transparent as you are, a poem is an event and thus subject to laws and descriptions of events as they are and events do not occur in a vacuum they occur in a cosmos which itself is event and as you grow into it you come to see that event as life itself and gradually become the event, you become the event, you become the poem, you become the cosmos. That's the drill.
And so if we are all speaking private languages, getting the message involves decoding, involves reading the unspoken cues which are cosmic within what one feels of the choices of the words made and not made, in the so-called diction of the moment are you revealed to me, you are so transparent i can read you where you stand, and you me, and that is what we shy away from, at least in the diction of shared symbols one can hide behind the meter of the moment, you see, it is all time and space manipulation, that in that small amount of territory i have allowed you to have there is a time and a space and you create it in the variations of your syntax and the referents of your words themselves, how they relate to eachother in their own moment; and so you create your rhythm (the trance dance) which spins out a psychological space, we are actually experiencing something together, getting into synch as it were, two becoming one in a confusing momentary exchanging of places and then slam back again into the me of me and the you of you, it is that event that takes place in the reading of the word, the word made flesh. But if that context doesn't exist, if it is words set against nothingness, how then can there be anything but lists and diagrams? If there's nobody home out there, there's no reason to leave this solipsistic emptiness of a hollow echoing ringing in whatever the memory of man is, three generations they say, then it is all myth....
But memory is cued too in manipulations of time and space, in order for the message to get through, in order for you to leave your forbidden solitude for a moment, in order for there to Be an ancient residue for you to encounter, the laying down of arms must occur; confronted as we are by head trips and mysto macho, what are we to do? It is time for poetry to get off its ass and get real, as they say, become a force in the dialog which is now becoming rather desparate about the future of man, since all the evidence for extinction is there and as "antennae of the race" (Man, you can Feel it) all you have to do is go psycho, or as they used to say "sensitive", and you can hear the howls of the future. There is such a vacuum in the here and now--all ideologies have fallen away. It is dark and quiet in the moments preceding the next millennium, a moment which usually sparks the deepest kinds of thinking about man and his planet; surely, it is the moment of The Poem, a moment when the poet is called upon to step forward and give us the benefit of his ability to see into the future...
And so the encodings are carried unconsciously and spontaneously, you reveal yourself in accident when you let the shield of your own style droop for a second and, uh, make a mistake. I think that's why Tzara & Co. went on the 24 hour automatic writing marathons, to see if in moments of exhaustion something real from "the other side" would peak through, or whether some ancient residue would growl up from within you in mescaline trance there beside the fire in the middle of the night. Poetry deprived of its context must ask for beg for explanations and so the poem comes with an introductory text, is the poem a text or is the text a poem, and where do they meet.
On the more insidious side, we are kept in check by a host of mutually acceptable (the social contract) devices, of which language is the most resonant and universal aspect. Who controls language controls control. And if the universally accepted style of communication is subject->object, then the way of the renegade is to create a language of secrecy or an encoded, secret language which seeks to supplant, even if by subterfuge (ie., lying), the existing, outer-directed authoritarian language response with an object->subject language of association, a parallel language as it were which lives within the accepted symbology long enough to replace it, as "good money drives out bad", so, too, a more efficient style of communication replaces or at least discredits the existing, totalitarian symbology. We create this schizophrenic set of awarenesses almost militantly, daring the reader to let go and come along. This freeing of the individual into himself for the creation of his own, inner-directed being, is generally unacceptable to the controlling mechanism, and so poetry is constantly being stomped out or made acceptable in non-threatening media (rock and roll or advertising) (entertainment, basically, or what is regarded as such).
Of course, this is my movie, i am only activating these pronouns within myself and you are the witness. if you approve of my automanipulations as far as how much you have to risk and where we get in terms of the "passing beyond", part of the contract we make in course of reading the poem.
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criticism should be at least as well written as poetry.
1
sometimes unwilling filth, filled by despair, no wrong in seeking
butt held and firm, the flash forward indicates compression
you'd been heard again, but not the rest resting then Seems
to call ahead, no matter in the fever sings her praises
down among the land forgotten, another time seems best begotttn
you'd at the harder signs, no masking of anything left outside
but the schemer in the mists, a liar to boot, and not much
else left aside for tallying hooks or beginning to seem
the program from Dryden for god's sake to include text & crit.
what seems to be the end of time, when you have plenty of it,
marks no more the dialog between pressures where you must submit
or mark your collar with indistinction in the phalluses of others
lining goat gout the meeker sustaining arches interpedulated
six no cow the meter's running, and here plenty to nucleate deals
in the scope what's sent her (center) marks encodes belittle
the rescuer nixed plattitudes nor holds hope out beyond here
to flux review the poorer lines becalm no doubt but your own
these at the arrow doom, nor calm portend, at textual grip
the later dues not said nor even hinted at bills protrude
and scores not paid for their sentences; piece work sucks.
i'm not rised surprised, but heated coded encoiled within
your own particular syntax a reminder of the bills unpaid
or your history a parallax insider with no more credit
than who'd benign or flex them sinister attributes quicker
no sound unowned, but copyright a plenty dude, his honor
sucked upwards in the spin of golden haloes unremuted
by their own dictive absolute the emptier hours remind
what works evener hucks upon the table babbled out life
her down. at leaps the froward collapse encentered global
heals you signing out no more doubt the light within
blinded heats the darker side exposed exploded narcs
no-car teat, but then a future favored forward replumes
astride the mooner tangle, this empty sack my own luck
enflamed boot, a diner tangle belies this web my own
particular disturbance moot to outer scans bethreaded
heads into the particular disarray without a paddle.
2
nor what flood out from inner sphere the dot the dot
where such tenor tenuous take on the with-held domain
innert pliance substant, nor make moon the skin's air
nor arc nor any other flame might deal this spinner
from late no pleasure in the seeming after lightning
then what follows is laid up, made aback nor flamered
butt held and firm, the saying goes, and goes far enough
to flame the dictum that what says goes aloft, or his
"donkey crying mist" which deserves to be shredded out
is it flame enhanced or a doubter's musk, that you ask,
afar fixated but the nonce declaring here's the gumbo
doc, and fixer yourself you brought her, tha's enuf;
in the delay you've called ahead for salvation's mark
the bleeding shrine discovers you shivering toward
the later bloom, her single tusk belated you downer
and into the appearance of meaning, good as the real.
narfed plutod: astir pressures keep you from the goal
and hears science itself beginning to beg for mercy
where you'd benign nor plenty, here's the mark for you
to flake, to score the muted signal, to flood the park
So you'd see the appearance of structure become the thing
itself a meter on the unknown at least in terms of time
or how long it takes to barter from this stat to the plain
and mark sensation into its proper sphere within acts;
mark ascension the swifter means what'd bin there
affirms astar in your own imagining made plain and
simple, how you are met here again along what's made.
this'd dick out, mark the door your own and hold
Doctored on the bin, tie not dictum into layering,
mark the sides your own and measure out directly,
skinning the outer marks without sensation or angle,
but leaving the center bare for others to fill in
heed these aching roofs their own location in the air
or headed into something reminiscent of other lives
they still have their density as something special
in the plenty to which you have given yourself again
and sharp these final signs their own destination in
the arc and center of the act, where they are made
again into seeming and sustenance, another claim
against time bears out along the lighter path.
