flu-sufferer's epic grab-bag (beware!)

i was writing an earlier post (back in the early couplet days) that got lost. in that post, i was thinking about steve’s ideas about form. steve, it seemed like you were discussing form/the couplet as a kind of curb, keeping things reined in. i started wondering if i felt the same way. i had concluded that i think i do proceed with form as curb, but as a teeny little curb – working on a phrase to phrase basis, where the phrase and its sound and sense restrain and determine what come before and after. along these lines, i love catherine’s idea about what the prose poem needs and why. maybe a poem doesn’t have to have lines, but could we say a poem needs building blocks that relate to or rebuff one another to build a larger structure? (to my mind, this could be a structure that’s contradicting itself or pulling itself apart, but the tension of the larger idea is still there in that the ‘building blocks’ – phrases, lines, sentences, individual poems in a serial poem – are placed in proximity.)

so does this have anything to do w/rigor – maybe - well, tracking back i think that this is a basis on which i start wanting to link form to rigor and rigor to attention. the ideal would be the word or phrase you’re on tells you what word is coming next (if you pay enough attention to catch the tiger’s eye or his stripes in the brush...). but then the words and phrases change/constellate relative to what’s around them – phrase 2 shifts depending on whether you read it closer to phrase 1 or to phrase 3. the idea is of moving from inside out – but it seems important to remember that there is an ‘out’, a whole. (sometimes i think i forget that in my love of micro-fiddling.) or, as catherine said so fantastically “The words have to turn in on themselves, around the sound, then bust out!”

i love the following quote from duncan (from the beloved duncan-levertov letters) in that it implies the idea of a unity, a whole, that can include complexity and even (especially?) failure:

“What the creative mind waits patiently for or rages in impatience for is the unifying experience. The artist rightly rejects all solutions and works at the border of necessity: it is the need where the advent may come. This unity – and I would propose that it be thought of as a congregation, wherein a unity of unities appears, each member being center of a wholeness – is a focus or pitch of perception or understanding. The poet comes first to be aware of, to hear, the unity of the poem. It is a complex unity and the experience is that of apprehending what one has faild to do out of what one has done.”

i’m taken with this idea that the work includes the thing your mind jumps to because of its absence – the very thing you have failed to include.

and that unity is a pitch of perception – surrounded by smaller sub-unities, smaller foci of perception (“each member being center of a wholeness”).

....rigor and attention – the idea i’m chasing would be one of intuitive rigor – that is, holding yourself to being every minute right but every minute changing. or not every minute right, but accountable for mapping and tracking the shifts between right and wrong, or the shifts in the world around you and your response to it. keeping tabs on the relationship between you and your environment ... that you have some kind of responsibility, like a stewardship for what you observe, and for marking its response to you.

severity would not have to be stiff when the rigor of attention tells you that you have to jump, hop – change quickly. or, the straight lines are very very tiny and joined to each other to draw curves. rigor could be endlessly qualifying, even endlessly attenuating attention – but the backbone of who or what you are deciding to be snaps it together again. “character is an adventure of the imagination” says duncan in the d-l letters. or, as jared has already said it: “the other rigor i can think of is not a systematic imposed idea of form, but a rigor of perspective that comes out of a person...”

there’s a couple of lines (couplet?!) in one of jared’s poems that i love particularly:

“Our eyelets get notches cut in them
b/c we would not abuse decoration.”

one reason i bring this up is because i’m always managing to misread ‘eyelet’ as eye or eyelid...."our eyes get notches cut in them..." so the line has come to have this sub-meaning to me about how a response to the world, to what we see, cuts notches in our own eyes. if you figure out 'what is outside' it has already recoiled back into your thoughts about it - affected or re-tuned the way you think. and tracking these turns, these calibrations and motions out and back, is something that matters. is a part of not abusing the outside as fodder - not just allowing oneself to burn the outside up in the 'fires and pyres' of one's own emotion/sensibility about it. jared, hope you don’t mind me reading my own concerns into your poem this way; i love the lines for themselves and what they actually say, too!

in an awkward transition to 'rigor-in-architecture', steve, i wish i could remember more of what tony and i were talking about, and i’m kind of worried about misrepresenting his ideas. the best i can come up with: tony seems to dislike – in contemporary practice – the idea of making a grandiose, sculptural building, plunked down in its surroundings without a relationship to them. when i think of the way tony works, i get the idea of rigor as systems responsible to each other – that the parts of the building are interacting with each other, with the surroundings of the building, and possibly with a larger context. interacting not in an arbitrary way, but with each system shaping the other and creating the necessity that it is the way it is. another way to say it would be that tony likes to invent rules for himself to follow, but he doesn’t like the rules to be totally arbitrary (or purely formal) and imposed on the space – he seems to derive his rules from the space or conditions he’s given to build in. kind of a form follows function thing, but with a fairly loose definition of what form is and what function is. i guess i would say that part of his rigor is ethical: he doesn’t want to do work that is self-serving.

trying to come across a happier definition for rigor in the dictionary, i didn’t really get one, but i did come across the nearby:

rigeroso – (for music) rigorously, in firm accent
rig-out - a costume

sorry to stretch out this post endlessly, but i wanted to throw in a couple of quotes about henry james from a book i really love, called henry james and modern moral life. (re-reading it, i realized that basically all my ideas are just ripped off from henry james.) the trajectory of the quotes: first, two quotes about how james makes paying rigorous attention almost impossible – endlessly suspended, conditional, discontinuous, and backward-leaning. then last a third quote that i think shows why he makes paying attention so hard – because it’s so hugely important....

1. "None of these characters know yet what they intend, not because such motives are hidden from them or because they hide them from themselves, but because James has “placed” their motives in some complex, fluid social space among them all, showing us their incapacity to act except in the light of anticipations and expectations massively uncertain.

And this is meant by James, I think, as radically as it sounds: as if a future negotiation among participants could end up determining what could now count as the “real” motive in the past, almost like “backward causation” in physics."

2. “The great density of the opening pages of James’s The Golden Bowl is a density of nearly unmanageable possibilities, not of hidden meanings or self-deceived motives, “actually” there, waiting to be seen or exposed. And the resolution of such possibilities does not require honesty or deeper insight, but does require a kind of dependence on and engagement with others, personally and individually, a commonly made meaning, one might say, all as if all and any meaning could be only determined “retrospectively,” and “cooperatively,” as if life cannot be lived as life, but only as material for remembered life, to allude to Proustean affinities. As with Proust, life seems lead in perpetual future perfect tenses and subjunctive moods in the Jamesean universe. Not, my motive for X-ing now is M, given my current understanding of situation S. But, I will have meant to X, because of what will have been M, should the situation have turned out S."

3. "Understanding in James is still linked to the possibility of getting something right and to assessing the rightness of actions, and the inescapable claim on us of such a possibility is treated quite realistically. What we are trying to get right, what it would be to get it right in our dealings with each other, what especially this all requires now, all form the central core of James’s great animating question."