The Poverty of the Image

The claims of imagism have always seemed to me hyperbolic. There is something more evocative in even the most cliched 19th-century sentence than in a clipped, retentive modernist line--which is sometimes only a self-caricature, more applicable in theory than in practice. But, my suspicion of some of the claims of imagism perhaps comes only when one conceives that the stripped-down poetic image gives more, not less of the reality to which it refers. I've been working through a lot of Bergson lately, and happened upon a good precis of his work, reminding me of the essential poverty of the image:

perception adds nothing new to the image; in fact, it subtracts from it. Representation is a diminution of the image; the transition from image to pure perception is “discernment in the etymological sense of the word,” a “slicing up” or a “selection” (Matter and Memory, p. 38). According to Bergson, selection occurs because of necessities or utility based in our bodies. In other words, conscious representation results from the suppression of what has no interest for bodily functions and the conservation only of what does interest bodily functions. The conscious perception of a living being therefore exhibits a “necessary poverty” (Matter and Memory, p. 38).

Williams' "things," then, as tied to ideas, can only be what Bergson calls "less than things," in that our relation to them subtracts an image of them (thus, they are virtual in the commonly defined way as the simulacrum, but not, for all that, are they purely subjective); subsequently, they return to the reservoir of accumulated images (thus, they become virtual in the more strictly Bergsonian sense of memory inaccessible to action). It is here where the third imagist principle--"as regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome"--comes into play. When the image is reduced to data, it can more freely engage in speed, dynamism, mobility--thus, just as the modern VJ can create more lively compositions with YouTube crap than with lyrical HD footage (no pun on HD intended), the modernist reduced the world to fragmented images, which in themselves had little power, but which, when entering into the durational play of the art form, opened up powers inherent in some truer nature of time. (cf. the Bergsonism of Stein.) Yet, our ability to choose those images effectively, pulling them from the virtual to make them commensurable with present action inserts the qualitative, creative impact of the temporal interval on what would otherwise be a moment of pure, unthinking action. (cf. the Theosophical background of Pollock; and to continue and contradict my VJ comparison, more thoughtfully captured images may, then, instigate a more complex experience.) This notion of data that is useful for our bodies is a very powerful way to conceive how Paterson was composed along side of Williams' duties as a doctor, as well as the themes he explores dealing with the usefulness of certain forms of knowledge in pursuit of a "radiant gist."

Interanimation of Words

"It is not that Williams's language is without history, but that its history is not European; rather, it is local, polyglot, and as likely as not merely personal. It is not that those who learn a language through books rather than through speech rarely come to feel the kinship of words, so much as that the grounds of what I. A. Richards calls the 'interanimation of words' have radically shifted. Much of the language Americans used, certainly, had no visible antecedents as they walked down the street, and the imperative, especially but not only in school, was to adopt an English overlay. Malcolm Cowley complained bitterly that 'our studies were useless or misdirected, especially our studies in English literature: the authors we were forced to read, and Shakespeare most of all, were unpleasant to our palate; they had the taste of chlorinated water.' What landscapes did Charles Olson's father carry in his head as he walked his Post Office rounds in Worcester? What mythologies did he attach to them or find in them? When Williams calls Paterson 'a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands' he is identifying his poem as an attempt to end the split between American writing, speech, and landscape . . ." Disjunctive Poetics, Peter Quartermain 14.
I like the idea of "interanimation of words," as a way to deal with the sound/text split by pointing to the power of sound without essentializing it (the Derridean critique), yet it seems that whatever was gained by this move is lost by essentializing some pristine notion of the American language. How can there be no visible language on the street when this era was one of the proliferation of mass-produced signs in the cities (not to mention the language of the papers, the comic pages, the radios blaring from radio shops). That language read in books seems to be the definition of "visible language" here seems a problem. An earlier reader of my copy put an exclamation point next to the quote about Shakespeare. It is unclear whether this ! meant "what a howler!" or "I agree!" but it seems to me that Shakespeare here is the wrong example to proffer. Iambics aside--indeed a bete noire for Williams--the wildness of Shakespeare's unofficial English is precisely American in its inventiveness, and thus, therein, a lot to learn about the ways in which the sonic-linguistic landscape can energize a poetry. Wouldn't this formulation be better than to try to imagine Charles Olson's father as some sort of noble savage? (and if he was carrying the post, did he not have those visible letters--as well as the bric-a-brac of memory shot through with other legenda--to carry him through?)

Measure and Beyond

I've been dipping into Michael Golston's Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science. I've had a long standing interest in ideas of "musical soul" as they intersect with questions of technology and race. Golston is one of the few writers I've found who discuss early ethnomusicologists like Milton Metfessel and Carl Seashore, who created elaborate recording machines to analyze the emotional qualities of African American song. (Metfessel even made a graphic analysis of the "negro laugh.") After reading the first very interesting couple of chapters in Golston's book, I skipped ahead to his thin, albeit important final chapter on Williams' "measure." For Golston, Williams' concept of "measure" is his definitive, yet little explored challenge to the rhythmic ideologies of other modernists such as Pound and Yeats (and detailing these "rhythmic ideologies" forms the rest of the book's meat.)
Williams' move "beyond lyric" requires a dispassionate stance towards these rhythmic myths promulgated by other modernists, tied biomechanically to blood and pulse and fantasmatically to the inaudible consanguinities of race and nation. Williams' more constructivist notion of "measure" always struck me as non-musical, and Golston solidifies my hunch that its association with musical notions is misleading. The word conjures up both science and haberdashery, a numerical span or swatch held out at arm's length. If anything, Williams' "measure" is something you do with materials after the fact. The concept of rhythm, of the other hand, has an originary feel, making claims to a core authentic outpouring, which is why it encourages both the irrational plenitudes of "soulful" performance and the cultic violence of the fascist homebody.
In tandem with this book, I was reading Susan Stewart's essay "Letter on Sound." If the above sounds Derridean in its suspicion of the vitalist category of rhythm, it still maintains a clear dichotomy which Stewart's (more Derridean) approach seems to challenge. While Williams' "measure" is not really synonymous with meter, Stewart's distinction between rhythm and meter seems to evoke a creative tension between the planned, measured structure of a poem, and the various existential or performative iterations of it. "The sound of the poem emerges from this dynamic tension between the unfolding temporality of the utterance and the recursive temporality of the fixed aspects of the form. . . . Song, by virtue of its measure, is fixed and repeatable, although it is, like all utterances, subject to transformation. It is the tension between the unfolding semantic pressure of speech and the asemantic pulse of measure that defines the possibilities of lyric art." (34-7)

Paterson Datum no. 32

"As mental acts torqued by the 'perception' of rhythm become automatic, the 'economy of attention' is freed and the mind expands. Miner conflates the vocabularies of psychology and economics here: if production and production-level workers can be automatized through the agency of rhythm, then time, capital, and mental resources may be freed up for expansion--both in economic and in psychological registers. What is generated in both cases is 'interest.' The economic principle at work here--that is, capital converted into automatic production frees up other capital for investment--also mobilizes the intelligence: automatized by rhythmic perceptions, the mind is free to increase its 'economy of attention.' According to Miner, economy is the end of biology, and the ability to perceive rhythmically constitutes the foundation of all human speculation." (Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science, Golston p. 21)

Mindfulness of Detail

More trundling thru Naropa archives. I'm reminded how great a teacher Ginsberg was, how highly conscious he was of the language he was using even as he was talking about it, his tools no dull calipers, but perhaps language on language, lipping further. extracting excaliber? even with the mechanics of meter, a blast from the grammar school past, which takes up the bulk of this file, he brings the foot back to the dance. Anapest, trochee, and dactyl. Mouthing and the breath stop where idiot winds go. By the time he gets through all these meters that Williams doesn't do, you get a better sense of what he actually does.

There is No Verse That is Free

Listening to Williams talk about beat and metrical rhythm, he draws some very fine distinctions, hard to live up to. On the one hand, he has disdain for what gets called “free verse,” even though he praises Whitman for breaking from the iambics of the English. On the other hand, he finds the rhythms of the Beats, and their jazz inspirations, dulling to the poetic imagination (even though his excitement about Bunk Johnson seems to contradict his contempt for jazz as expressed). His notion of the variable foot—always to me a little vague—is starting to seem not as much an exact pattern, but rather a middle ground between a totally free demotic voice, and the regular, obsessive patterning of the jazz and meditational droning in Beat poetics.
I seem to be thinking about the same issues when trying to organize my documentary material for this project in a “musical” way; and in fact, whenever I make any piece which uses samples of vocal material, I’m always wary that an interesting repetition can easily devolve into a kind of anxious circling. Somehow, the danger is greater when dealing with words than with traditional instrumental rhythm. Experiments of this type that are successful—notably the text-based phase-music of Steve Reich, the scratch-cinema of Martin Arnold,




(better together!: although bottom video is being difficult, but you can still click here and it exists) or documentary-musical hybrids like Pamela Z’s Geekspeak and Adam Goddard’s The Change in Farming—are able to make the repetition meaningful (sometimes, in fact, thematizing obsession rather than just fetishizing the technological ability to repeat a recorded sample.) So perhaps it is a bit perverse that preliminary mixes for my intro (for the hopefully forthcoming large-scale audio piece) remix Williams in a clunky, obviously mechanical, techno beat. I wondered whether I should put it out yet, but since the process is the thing, I will post it here now. And I might as well include this fragment as well, which I find interesting, but perhaps unusable.