From Aristotle to Nomadic Poetics: Some Examples
(The original un-updated version of this list of examples may be read in the earlier version of The Necessity of Poetics here.)
Poetics has a long history: from Aristotle, through Horace, into
(in English anyway) Sidney, Puttenham, Campion, Dryden and Pope (both in
verse), onto Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’, Coleridge’s Biographia, the
assertions of Shelley’s Defence, some of Keats’ letters. Onto: Henry
James’ essays and Prefaces, and DH Lawrence’s spirited defences of both
free verse poetry and the modern novel – to summarise the contents page of a
possible volume of historical poetics (My rough chronology of these and other
documents may be found online.) 7
In the twentieth century the
discourse of poetics proliferated. The intense artistic innovation of the era
demanded such a discourse, not least in the manifestoes and documents of the
great modernist and post-modernist movements from Dada to Situationism, from
Negritude to Neo-HooDoo, from Stein’s ‘Lectures’ to DuPlessis’ feminist
poetics, to take a few examples from the two volumes of Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre
Joris (Rothenberg and Joris 1995 and 1998).
A well-known collection such as
Allen and Tallman’s The Poetics of The New American Poetry (1973)
collected documents ranging from Pound’s group manifestoes to Frank O’Hara’s
patapoetical one man movement statement ‘Personism’, from Lorca’s essay on
‘duende’ to Olson’s influential ‘Projectivist Verse’ essay. America Britain
However, one of the most prolific
examples of twentieth century poetics comes from the British
Isles . In 1944, Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid published parts of a
long associative list poem – he called it a ‘testament’ (MacDiarmid 1985: 1030)
– written in the late 1930s, entitled
‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’ as the backbone of a chapter of his intellectual autobiography
Lucky Poet, in order to argue for a
poetry of fact and wonder, ‘a poetry full of erudition, expertise, and
ecstasy’, as he put it (MacDiarmid 1985: 1019). Politically it is ‘a poetry
that stands for production, use, and life,/ As opposed to property, profits and
death’ (MacDiarmid 1985: 1023), and for the development of a modern
consciousness of ‘super-individuality … to assimilate, utilize, override, and
fuse/ All our individual divergences’, a fusion that would represent a
technological, artistic, scientific, and political synthesis of World Thought –
Eastern as well as Western, folk and popular as well as high cultural, with
MacDiarmid’s international Communism perfectly counterpointing his Scottish
Nationalism. (MacDiarmid 1985: 1004-5)
This example makes me wonder
whether there is something essentially ‘English’ about a refusal to theorize
in poetics, as in other areas? Does philosophical empiricism rule the day (which
matches the continuing lyric empiricism of the dominant post-Movement orthodoxy
itself) – or is it the geopolitical centrality of the English imagination, and
its refusals of the necessity of poetics, the defensive and normative
restrictive practices of the colonial centre? It may well be that a declaration
of independence (cultural or poetic) generates more necessity than an act of
union!
One exception (and to remember that
poetics pertains to all genres) is a collection by Malcolm Bradbury, a pioneer
of creative writing teaching at the University of East Anglia, who saw the value
of poetics, though I do not remember him using the word when I was a student of
his, nor was even ‘commentary’ a requirement of the MA I studied. His anthology The Novel Today (1977)
still constitutes an important sourcebook for the poetics of fiction: from
Doris Lessing’s influential Preface to The Golden Notebook, to the
in-the-thick-of-it ‘Notes on an Unfinished Novel’ by John Fowles, which are
preliminary studies for The French Lieutenant’s Woman, along with
some American and continental poetics, such as pieces by John Barth and
Robbe-Grillet.
With respect to the more adventurous
British poetry, Eric Mottram, in his still-uncollected essays, delineated a
poetics deriving from the American modernist inheritance, although his polemics
often obscured its positive aspects. However, he did coax poetics out of dozens
of recalcitrant poets in his interviews, chiefly in the context of ‘Poetry
Information’ evenings at the ICA during the 1960s and at the Poetry Society
during the 1970s, which, transcribed, were mostly published in the important
magazine Poetry Information. One such
interview, with Roy Fisher, also forms part of one of the few British Poetry
Revival publications to rival the American collections of interviews with single
poets. Roy Fisher’s Interviews Through
Time and Selected Prose (2000) includes 90 pages of various interviews
garnered at various times, by various methods ranging from face to face to
email exchange. There have also been valuable interviews spread among the pages
of little magazines, and some of these are collected, and augmented by
especially commissioned interviews, in Tim Allen and Andrew Duncan’s Don’t Start Me Talking: Interviews with
Contemporary Poets (2006) with British and Irish poets ranging from
so-called Cambridge poets Andrew Crozier and David Chaloner to younger poets
such as Sean Bonney and Peter Manson, as well as independent voices such as
R.F. Langley and Elisabeth Bletsoe.
One pioneering example of British
poetics is Denise Riley’s 1992 edited volume Poets on Writing, which
contains a rare number of essays of poetics as well as a selection from
Veronica-Forrest Thomson’s important Poetic Artifice. But tellingly, Tom
Raworth provides a selection of (presumably) his most recent poems from Eternal
Sections under the inviting banner: ‘The State of Poetry Today
The only reason to make
a poetics public is to share with others, either collectively as a manifesto,
or agonistically as position statement – in both cases it is a social fact, and
implies at least community of exchange or risk. These have not been the
favoured British options; there is little explicit work (although it doubtless
exists, implicitly, as private meditation and notebook jottings, etc...). This
is one reason why the pedagogy of creative writing seems central to me,
particularly as the advocate of a particular poetics myself (and again the
evidence of creative writing is seen in Loydell’s collection). 8
***
After I had written the above I catalogued every item of poetics I could find and they may be read here, in four brutally compacted parts:
*
***
After I had written the above I catalogued every item of poetics I could find and they may be read here, in four brutally compacted parts:
Part One: Poetics and Proto-Poetics
http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/robert-sheppard-poetics-1-poetics-and.html
Part Two: Through and after Modernism
http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/robert-sheppard-poetics-2.html
Part Three: North American Poetics
http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-north-american-poetics.html
Part Four: Some British Poetics
http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-poetics-4-some-british.html)*
Return to part one (and an index to all parts of The
Necessity of Poetics) here.
