thanks, juliana. right. I think that circles right back to the ideas about escapism being an act of protest.
Let me add another one, also from Menocal, that's referenced in yr introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century.
"When the world all around is calling for clear distinctions, loyalties to Self and hatred of others, and, most of all, belief in the public and legal discourses of single languages and single states--smooth narratives--what greater threat exists than the voice which rejects such easy orthodoxies with their readily understood rhetoric and urges, instead, the most difficult readings, those that embrace the painfully impossible in the human heart?"
I don't have my head wrapped around this introduction yet, but here I go fumbling toward some ideas. I'm trying to understand the question of why, say, Jorie Graham and Lyn Hejinian might produce work that appears to share much in the way of aesthetics, but who are doing it for different reasons. HEre's what I think (cartoon): it seems that there are two main thrusts to using fragmenting/modernist techniques in writing: 1. as an act of protest (scott, Language poets), writing against conventional syntax with the desire to change the world, and 2. (i think brenda hillman might fit in here) as the most accurate way to describe the world as it already is. I keep coming back to quantum physics. It seems that there must have been a huge consciousness-shift once it was proven in a laboratory that matter is not an absolute, that immateriality is the basis for all physical objects. Once this happens, doesn't it make sense that there would have been a similiar movement in the arts? How do we account for an apparently illogical (in terms of scientific logic) world? We make seemingly illogical art--but in fact, it is an attempt to mirror what we now know is physically true.
I just skipped right on past love poetry--I think I have landed in the place where I'm thinking about the lyric, content-free.
It seems the only way to justify the "I" is if it's destabilized--but will it be read that way? That's the problem.
It doesn't make sense to me to leave the "I" out--it's a thing in the world, the self, a self. We should try to include all things in our work.
Let me add another one, also from Menocal, that's referenced in yr introduction to American Women Poets in the 21st Century.
"When the world all around is calling for clear distinctions, loyalties to Self and hatred of others, and, most of all, belief in the public and legal discourses of single languages and single states--smooth narratives--what greater threat exists than the voice which rejects such easy orthodoxies with their readily understood rhetoric and urges, instead, the most difficult readings, those that embrace the painfully impossible in the human heart?"
I don't have my head wrapped around this introduction yet, but here I go fumbling toward some ideas. I'm trying to understand the question of why, say, Jorie Graham and Lyn Hejinian might produce work that appears to share much in the way of aesthetics, but who are doing it for different reasons. HEre's what I think (cartoon): it seems that there are two main thrusts to using fragmenting/modernist techniques in writing: 1. as an act of protest (scott, Language poets), writing against conventional syntax with the desire to change the world, and 2. (i think brenda hillman might fit in here) as the most accurate way to describe the world as it already is. I keep coming back to quantum physics. It seems that there must have been a huge consciousness-shift once it was proven in a laboratory that matter is not an absolute, that immateriality is the basis for all physical objects. Once this happens, doesn't it make sense that there would have been a similiar movement in the arts? How do we account for an apparently illogical (in terms of scientific logic) world? We make seemingly illogical art--but in fact, it is an attempt to mirror what we now know is physically true.
I just skipped right on past love poetry--I think I have landed in the place where I'm thinking about the lyric, content-free.
It seems the only way to justify the "I" is if it's destabilized--but will it be read that way? That's the problem.
It doesn't make sense to me to leave the "I" out--it's a thing in the world, the self, a self. We should try to include all things in our work.
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