What is it about a book report? It automatically brings out this language: “It was interesting, but I didn’t like …” the main characters, the plot, the word choice, the form, the shape, the topic, the length, the poetics. I empathize with school children.

Trying to avoid writing a book report, but finding it difficult. Maybe I need to get out more. My objective is not to write reviews, but to develop a “poetics.” Whatever that means.

By the way, the wikipedia entry on poetics is not very interesting.

Surfing from Brenda Coultas to Barbara Henning, and was rewarded by a quote from Alice Notley.

THERE is too much of human material now everywhere: the world is covered with “the man-made.” None of our problems can be solved by making more of it, more of the material, including books. Shiny-covered, same-looking books everywhere. To go into a bookstore & be made sick by all the books there, is almost the same as to be made sick by all the dead cars in new Jersey, seen from the train window, early in the morning. All achievement, writerly & poetic achievement included, must become more invisible. The notion of “soul,” of the Invisible, must be taken up again. Alice Notley (”Homer’s Art”, v)

From the Fragment
A POETICS

edited & collected by
Barbara Henning

I spent all day half-thinking about how to become more invisible.

I saw him later, carrying around a strange sculpture difficult to describe, because there was no comparison to it in the natural world.

Brenda Coultas, “The Bowery Project,” page 24

Speaking of traits that shock us, human beings’ urban habitats and relations with things would be among the most shocking if they weren’t so familiar. I have to think of these human environments as “natural” because where else would they come from?

What Coultas’s piece offers is sustained attention. This is a natural history skill, and one readily applied by poets. It is good to direct the attention of language to surroundings that are generally scorned.

This piece is in the form of prose fragments. Fragments build up into something, just like a garbage dump does. They have a natural feel. There is a familiar use of language here.

I don’t find this piece exciting though. Is it because of the topic? or some other reason? It lacks luminosity (optimism?).

Surfing somehow from Alicia Cohen to the mythology of the Tongva, I was rewarded by an interesting quote from Alfred Kroeber (whom I think of as the father of Ursula LeGuin). It’s long and overly elaborate, but bears on the poetry questions at hand.

[Note : 118. Kroeber (1925: 625) gives a synopsis of this myth and uses it to illustrate the quality of the mythology of the tribes of Southern California. He says:

The ethical inconsistency of this story is marked to our feelings. The heroine certainly is blameworthy, but those who rid themselves of her, even more so. Hardly is sympathy aroused for her when she dispels it by dashing out her child's brains. Then she becomes beautiful once more, and elicits interest through the disgraceful treatment accorded her by her brother. But this hardly seems sufficient cause for suicide. Her brother, too, committed the offense unwittingly; and his fatal punishment by his father comes to us as a shock. That the old chief should cruelly revenge himself by his magical powers on the foreigners who had first attempted his daughter's destruction seems natural enough; but the focus of interest is suddenly shifted from his means of vengeance to the successful escape from it of the old woman and her grandchildren. Then these, brother and sister as they are, marry. Now it is the old lady who is abused but suddenly it is her granddaughter who is persecuted and finally slain; after which follows the episode in which the loving and grieving husband is the central character.

Nothing can be imagined farther from a plot according to the thoughts of civilized people than this one; it appears to revel in acmes of purposeless contradictions. And yet, this trait is undoubtedly the accompaniment of an effect that, however obscure to us, was sought for; since it reappears in traditions, following an entirely different thread, told by the Luiseño and Diegueño, and is marked in the long tales of the Mohave. This deliberate or artistic incoherence, both as regards personages and plot, is thus a definite quality of the mythology of the southern Californian tribes. It has some partial resemblances to the Southwest, but scarcely any in central or northern California except in the loosely composite coyote tales. In central California we have the well-defined hero and villain of the normal folk tale of the world over; and however much the oppressed endure, there is never any doubt as to who is good and who wicked, and that before the end is reached the wicked will be properly punished. That in the southern California traditions this simple and almost universal scheme is departed from, is of course not due to absence of aesthetic feeling, but rather an evidence of subtle refinement of emotion, of decorative overelaboration of some literary quality, to such a degree that the ordinary rules of satisfaction in balance and moral proportion become inconsequential. The traits that shock us ethically and artistically were the very ones, we may be sure, that gave the keenest satisfaction to the craftsmen that told these tales and the accustomed public that delighted to listen to them.

The Indians of Los Angeles County: Hugo Reid’s letters of 1852. Edited and annotated by Robert E. Heizer, page 68

Watch out for deliberate incoherence, acmes of purposeless contradictions, and decorative overelaboration. In our case, it’s not clear who is getting any satisfaction.

Robert Bringhurst’s Tree of Meaning covers similar territory. But it left me wanting more. I think what I want is to be among that delighted public.

The Elm said this like a wisper

Alicia Cohen, “Talking Forest,” ecopoetics 1, page 20

Like this a lot. Something about that word “wisper” is so attractive. What would a wisper be. I like the thought of constructing an Elm language. The poem has a mysterious marvelousness. I can’t figure it out, but I want to reread it. There is word play, sound play, grammar play, all in a loose unlabored way.

You couldn’t keep this up though. I don’t think a poet could populate a whole forest in this way. Now I see that we could talk forest or talk about a talking forest. There’s not much forest in here, actually more of bus and grass.

I am lost in the middle. There are turns of I and eye. There is irrational progression. It does not seem especially organic, just whimsical. But still attractive.

I take the name foul salmon

I even like this. I think it’s a great way to wrap it up. Foul salmon is something attractive to scavengers no doubt.

I like putting a wolf and bear in the last line. And the sprinkles of capitalization.

Article by Alicia Cohen, “Nature is a Haunted House—but Art—a House that tries to be haunted”: Los Angeles, Trauma, and Orphic Anxiety in the Work of Jack Spicer

More from the Editor’s Statement. (Eventually, I will get past the Editor’s Statement.)

Perhaps we will begin to revalue the “nature walk,” and to venerate the humble, empirical tasks of “natural history,” in ways that were lost to the technological hubris of the last century; but with radically different senses of “nature” and of “history,” from those with which the Victorian era charged this discipline.

This is intriguing. What would radically different senses of nature and history look like? When I imagine renovating natural history, I can only think of applying imagination. The details of scientific classification, collection, observation, and study seem so done.

I remember reading “Little Men” by Louisa May Alcott and being fascinated by the homemade museum of natural history. Little trail museums – “interpretive centers” – who is doing this interpretation? Is this familiar oldstyle natural history a way of separating from the environment – an environment that needs interpretation to be part of it?

In any case, transparent narratives of self-discovery, or solipsistic, self-expressive displays, seem ill-suited to the current crisis; art alive to the differentiating nature of its own materials may be better equipped.

I read this sentence over and over, but it doesn’t come clean. What are its own materials? How can the self be exempt?

It seems like you have to take an anti-solipsism oath to join this club. My philosophy – solipsism will take care of itself, we don’t need to worry. When the wind ripples the surface, the reflection is disturbed. Also, I am suspicious that these narratives or self-expressive displays are 1) always there and 2) undervalued. If you seek to examine the natural history of the human, there is probably no better place to look.

To be continued, looking for these themes in the work.