Rebekah Presson/Writes of Eliot
Michael Cook
Writes of Eliot:
"But sometime in the past 30 years or so, most students stopped memorizing
and performing poems-and started studying them. By now, the people who read
poems are mostly poets themselves or academics in a literature program. The
majority of the rest of us grew to consider poetry as incomprehensible and
inaccessible.
Ironically, a lot of people lay the accountability for this decline in the
appreciation of poetry directly on the manuscripts of the man widely
regarded as the greatest poet in English of the twentieth century, T. S.
Eliot"
But who reads Eliot, to read his poetry one must study them? I am reminded
of "Uriel" by our own Mr. Ross and can almost hear the 'thudclap of Pavlov
bells' Am I mistaken?
Can Poetry Matter?
Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America.
If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work
to make it essential once more
by Dana Gioia excerpt:
"It fried the academic world of poets, criticized today's critics who do
nothing but praise the work of colleagues, how publishers of anthologies
will
publish a poem in their collection not because it's any good, but cuz it is
the work of some poet who has influence over which anthology will be chosen
for university classes. How the literary journals are struggling---that the
contributors are barely ever subscribers nor read the poems of others in the
same journal. How more poetry is being published in all of these journals
and less of it in newspapers, how books of poems, if reviewed at all, are
reviewed in the newspapers only after they have won some huge award.
It also said how poetry readings are ego oriented and we should go back to
the days when poets read the work of other poets too, not just there own."
One point the author made was how the profs must accumulate many
publications (emphasis = quantity not quality) to keep their jobs. They are
also expected to teach, serve on committees, etc. The emphasis on poets
writing quality work just isn't there.
Maybe poetry never really mattered to none but a handful.
That would explain a great deal; in the final analyses perhaps poetry need
only matter to me?
Michael Cook
Joshua P. Hill
<coo...@ameritech.net> wrote:
>Rebekah Presson
>Writes of Eliot:
>
>"But sometime in the past 30 years or so, most students stopped memorizing
>and performing poems-and started studying them. By now, the people who read
>poems are mostly poets themselves or academics in a literature program. The
>majority of the rest of us grew to consider poetry as incomprehensible and
>inaccessible.
>Ironically, a lot of people lay the accountability for this decline in the
>appreciation of poetry directly on the manuscripts of the man widely
>regarded as the greatest poet in English of the twentieth century, T. S.
>Eliot"
True, I think. But Eliot isn't the only one to blame. Modernism in
general forgot its public.
At one time, verse had the role we now accord to prose, so I don't
think that's the case. But once narrative poems and dramatic verse had
been superceded by stories, novels, and dramatic prose, audiences
became less able to parse non-trivial poetry. At the same time, there
was a great deal of pressure to make the lyric poem more prosaic. The
formal elements were driven deep underground. But the lyric poem
depends on those elements to a degree the longer forms do not.
Josh
Dennis M. Hammes
Poultry useta matter to anyone who could hear it, whether there were
written copies or not. When literacy (and print) were a little more
common, more people read the "Johnny" for the travelogue than for
the successes and damnation of a libertine; more were already
listening to Mozart for that part of the story, anyway.
Since 1920, The Shadow knows that poultry has been replaced by the
radio, since more voices than one could contribute to the effect,
and certain idiots would pay good money for "product exposure,"
something too dated to work into a pome or opera, especially
considering the size of the audience reached by the raw voice.
And Talkies and TV can now paint prettier pitchers, even show
nastier dragons and more powerful Superpowers.
To that same hugely-larger audience.
Poultry is an art whose medium is the voice (even when printed).
Fillum, radio and TV make use of telepathy, for which the sound of
the voice is superfluous, being replaced by the sounds (even
visions) of the objects themselves, poked directly into the brain
without the faulty translation to and from these pesky "word"
thingies.
From the 1920s, poultry abandoned the sound of the voice in an
attempt to reach harder, but especially faster, for story objects.
But fillum, radio, and TV could /already/ reach farther and faster
for the same /and more/ such objects, and the audience that could
once pay for candle and beer can now pay for extensive production
equipment, the personnel to run them, and the real estate to house
them; religion is /still/ the oldest, largest, and least-productive
business on the planet.
Poultry can still get you tits -- provided you've /already/ the
equipment and real estate from some other source, to house them.
And provided they're not already leaking over some priest (actor),
politician (actor), or other form of Boy band (actor), merely
because the /actor/ is the one the baby can /see/.
But that last is not the whole answer, either; I had rubbed in my
face yesterday (by an ad for a CD collection) that "Boy bands"
/used/ to be able to /sing/, and only two generations ago. As I've
had rubbed in my face by my own VHS collection that "Hollywood"
/used/, only a couple generations ago, to be able to make movies, to
write scripts, to act, to tell a story.
These things are poetic functions.
The sensory overload of fX is not. But things that "blow up real
good" can keep a baby glued to the TV where a pome can't. As a wad
of overamplified white noise, a whiteout light show, and some
repetitive screeching of reality-hatred keeps them lined up for Boy
concerts. Fight /that/ with a Poetry Reading? Pf.
Today's productions have a whole lot more polish on (and energy
in) a whole lot fewer parts, and those parts are selected for the
widest, i.e., least competent, i.e., most juvenile (no matter the
calendar age) audience possible because, while the audience no
longer pay for the production, product-exposure numbers /do/.
Which is why I can't figure today's "poet" (-wannabe), who insists
he's gonna recapture the audience by getting rid of the polish as
well.
But the whole problem for poets that "lie too much" for a market
that mostly wants whiteout glitz, is that a /poem/ must appeal to a
mind willing to translate it back into the encoded percept/concept
memories (it's only a map, and must successfully /encode/ that stuff
in the first place) even in order to lift him out of his mundanes
let alone /to/ "anywhere" else (i.e., he has to do it /himself/,
meaning that he has to /know how/ to decode "words"), while fX
overload of any kind /directly/ blows that troublesome "reality"
shit out of the awareness of the infant-wannabe consumer, /and/
maybe even drops him in the middle of Never-Land, /for/ him.
Without an erg of his own effort, and for a fake dollar somebody
printed solely for him to do it with.
We've /achieved/ the world of Wells' "The Time Machine" and
Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons."
Think of it as natural selection in action.
Trouble is, it IS "all about the tits," and the brainless meat
bred for all the tits and ass, while /we/ drag these pomes around
"by one arm like a rag doll." Gibbering about competing with fool
injection. Pisser, innit?
--
------(m+
~/:o)_|
I am in the habit of taking large quantities
of bad coffee in such cases. -- V. van Gogh
http://scrawlmark.net
DRHarkness
Dean.
"Dennis M. Hammes" spake thus:
Wes
(Dennis M. Hammes) electro-penned:
<snip>
>Pisser, innit?
</snip>
Yuh, it shur uhr!
Actually, Dennis, I totally concur.
Well said!
All of us subjected to the modern media technology are it's victims, to
some degree.
Some say "it's /not/ all about the tits", --- that it is /about/ the
money and the power. This may be true, momentarily, but eventually the
money and the power /IS/ all about the tits.
Wes
Aidan Tynan
Some say "it's /not/ all about the tits", --- that it is /about/ the
money and the power. This may be true, momentarily, but eventually the
money and the power /IS/ all about the tits.
what amazingly erudite remarks; it could be said, however, that the
modernist/Romantic dream of autonomy has been subsumed under the monolithic
postmodern *model* of hegemony and anti-Hegelian (unless you want to misread
Hegel's notion of differentiated sociality) totality ...
-Aidan
Joshua P. Hill
wrote:
>what amazingly erudite remarks; it could be said, however, that the
>modernist/Romantic dream of autonomy has been subsumed under the monolithic
>postmodern *model* of hegemony and anti-Hegelian (unless you want to misread
>Hegel's notion of differentiated sociality) totality ...
Yeah, but does it have tits?
Josh
Tom Bishop
Perhaps we should mark the cup-size on the subject line,
and the newsreaders could use /that/ as additional sort option.
--
Tom Bishop
The only place success comes before work
is in the dictionary. -Donald Kendall
Tom Bishop
The cosmic comedy /almost/ makes me believe in gawd,
but try as I might I can't find a nail that will
hang that jello on the wall.
"In tits we trust" ..yeah, now that's what it /should/ say.
Yeah, just substitute tits=gawd, and all of a sudden the world
starts to make some sense.
OK.. geez, is that what everybody's doing, and didn't tell me.
..and you have turned quite a word here!
> --
> ------(m+
> ~/:o)_|
> I am in the habit of taking large quantities
> of bad coffee in such cases. -- V. van Gogh
> http://scrawlmark.net
Your new site is still broken.
--
Tom Bishop -----
The only difference between a problem and a solution
is that people understand the solution. --Charles Kettering
Joshua P. Hill
>"Joshua P. Hill" <josh...@snet.net.REMOVE.THIS> wrote in message news:ie5qfuom3iftnfoid...@4ax.com...
>> On Tue, 4 Jun 2002 20:20:52 +0100, "Aidan Tynan" <aty...@eircom.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >what amazingly erudite remarks; it could be said, however, that the
>> >modernist/Romantic dream of autonomy has been subsumed under the monolithic
>> >postmodern *model* of hegemony and anti-Hegelian (unless you want to misread
>> >Hegel's notion of differentiated sociality) totality ...
>>
>> Yeah, but does it have tits?
>>
>> Josh
>
>Perhaps we should mark the cup-size on the subject line,
>and the newsreaders could use /that/ as additional sort option.
And there should be a flag that indicates whether they're natural or
not.
Josh
Aidan Tynan
>
>The cosmic comedy /almost/ makes me believe in gawd,
>but try as I might I can't find a nail that will
>hang that jello on the wall.
Then read The Golden Bough and The White Goddess, they'll mess with your
head ...
-Aidan
Tom Bishop
Mess with my head? Now you gotta be joking.
The Golden Bough - Frazier
You refer to: http://www.bartleby.com/196/ (copyright must have expired)
----- a summary
A monumental study in comparative folklore, magic and religion, The Golden Bough shows parallels between the rites and beliefs,
superstitions and taboos of early cultures and those of Christianity. It had a great impact on psychology and literature and remains
an early classic anthropological resource.
------
For it's /impact/ (images allusions) perhaps it is interesting,
but as a serious study, no I can't take religion, spirituality, magic, or
the tooth fairy very seriously. Do you?
The White Goddess - Graves
Reference: (since seemingly still copyrighted)
http://www.serve.com/Lucius/Graves.index.html
------ a summary
The White Goddess was one of the first widely available books
which uncompromisingly advocated a Goddess-centered spirituality.
-------
..ohhh, that sounds deeeeeep <not>.
-------- quote about graves
Graves' thing for the White Goddess was not just talk. He had two wives, but idolized
and loved various other women.
--------
Sounds to me like a (relatively) common ailment of an
over obsessing on /tits/. It's current incarnation can be
amply observed on: soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm.femdom
(which also wallows in wicca/pagan and other fluffy concepts)
No sense in obsessing, there are MUCH more fun things to do with them.
Have you tried Julian Jaynes?
> -Aidan
>
>
>
>
Aidan Tynan
>------
>
>For it's /impact/ (images allusions) perhaps it is interesting,
>but as a serious study, no I can't take religion, spirituality, magic, or
>the tooth fairy very seriously. Do you?
You should also read Aleister Crowley, then, start with the Goetia, 777 &
Other Qabalistic Writings, and go from there. How about some alchemy?
Basilus Valentinus should be a good place to start, or how about Geber? Then
you can study the occult for a few years, you know, hermeticism, gnosticism,
Kabbalah, the Nag Hammadi, some rosicrucian and messianic texts, the Knights
of Templar, Agrippa, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Bruno the Nolan, for an
anthropological perspective try Levi-Strauss's classic Myth and Meaning, EE
Evans-Pritchard's Magic, Oracles and Witchcraft among the Azande, then
Jung's Psychology and Alchemy, Freud's Totem and Taboo, Turner's The Ritual
Process, some stuff by St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch,
Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullian, Aquinas, Augustine, The Occult in
Russian and Soviet Culture by Bernice Glatzer, the Upanishads, the Tibetan
book of the dead, the Necronomicon, Charles Fort, Georg Christoph
Lichtenberg, Robert Anton Wilson, then come back to me and tell me if you
still consider it 'fluff'. One wonders what you consider your 'poetry' to be
...
btw, I thought you had me killfiled?
-Aidan
Tom Bishop
>
>
> >------
> >
> >For it's /impact/ (images allusions) perhaps it is interesting,
> >but as a serious study, no I can't take religion, spirituality, magic, or
> >the tooth fairy very seriously. Do you?
>
> You should also read Aleister Crowley,
Some.
> then, start with the Goetia, 777 &
> Other Qabalistic Writings, and go from there. How about some alchemy?
> Basilus Valentinus should be a good place to start, or how about Geber? Then
> you can study the occult for a few years, you know, hermeticism, gnosticism,
> Kabbalah, the Nag Hammadi, some rosicrucian
The psychic institute I attended in the 70's was run by one of these.
For a dirty old fart (now dead) the guy really could score some tit.
> and messianic texts, the Knights
> of Templar, Agrippa, Theophrastus Paracelsus, Bruno the Nolan, for an
> anthropological perspective try Levi-Strauss's classic Myth and Meaning, EE
> Evans-Pritchard's Magic, Oracles and Witchcraft among the Azande, then
> Jung's Psychology
Some.
> and Alchemy, Freud's Totem and Taboo, Turner's The Ritual
> Process, some stuff by St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch,
> Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullian, Aquinas, Augustine, The Occult in
> Russian and Soviet Culture by Bernice Glatzer, the
> Upanishads, the Tibetan
> book of the dead,
Yes actually, these quite a few decades ago.
> the Necronomicon, Charles Fort, Georg Christoph
> Lichtenberg, Robert Anton Wilson, then come back to me and tell me if you
> still consider it 'fluff'.
Religio-spiritual-magic I consider with the same weight one would
give the tooth fairy, except that the authors actually believe their own
spew in most cases. People masturbate in many ways, I prefer straightforward
wanking (if tits aren't around). The mental gymnastics of listening to some
/other/ fool's fantasy just doesn't appeal (anymore). Unless it is a poem,
and even there I am very picky.
> One wonders what you consider your 'poetry' to be
It is saying basically what I want it to say. If you can help me to
say it better, please feel free. If you expect me to make some huge
leap into your concept of creativity, feel free to try, so far your
attempts aren't very effective.
>
> btw, I thought you had me killfiled?
Undid it today, so far not regretting. How about you?
> -Aidan
Thanks for the reading list, but in general prefer to go at tits directly,
so to speak.
I could throw a list of books and philosophies at you also, but they
are all fantasies. Albeit they help order people's lives, and form frameworks
for thought, but a multitude of frameworks exist. Your list is not exhaustive.
For example you never mentioned the Urantia book, which I have read,
not that I consider that /anything/.
--
Tom Bishop
To judge from the notions expounded by theologians,
one must conclude that God created most men
simply with a view to crowding hell. -Marquis de Sade
Michael Cook
"Pisser, innit?" I did ask didn't I. I think you answered my question but
where is the big smiling face and the tits, I sure could make use of those.
Tits make the best pillows and the smiling face, the best reflection.
Oh well
Read Burns (in the original) "The poet is born not made" but then he had
Jean Armour so what more can I say. What are tits worth, one poem, two?
And what of the reflection staring back from a bloodshot eye, it's a cold
icy stare not one that shone without a care or one that oft if not.beckon as
a dare. "Come now" she says "and lay you down to sleep" belies a harsher
truth this liar needs to keep.
Thanks Dennis, now I'm depressed.
"Dennis M. Hammes" <scraw...@arvig.net> wrote in message
news:3CFCE115...@arvig.net...
Dennis M. Hammes
Those already /are/ flags (long may they wave!).
It should be remembered that, to Spinoza, nothing was
"monolithic"; the universe, he put, we examine through the lens of
philosophy. He called it this because he was a lens-grinder; we
would have a considerably different view had he been, e.g., a
pudding manufacturer, but you may still understand that no poet has
ever been bothered by having to examine the universe through the
/cup/ of philosophy, whether Guinness, tapioca, or C.
Dennis M. Hammes
>
> "Dennis M. Hammes" <scraw...@arvig.net> wrote in message news:3CFCE115...@arvig.net...
> > Trouble is, it IS "all about the tits," and the brainless meat
> > bred for all the tits and ass, while /we/ drag these pomes around
> > "by one arm like a rag doll." Gibbering about competing with fool
> > injection. Pisser, innit?
>
> The cosmic comedy /almost/ makes me believe in gawd,
> but try as I might I can't find a nail that will
> hang that jello on the wall.
>
> "In tits we trust" ..yeah, now that's what it /should/ say.
>
> Yeah, just substitute tits=gawd, and all of a sudden the world
> starts to make some sense.
Where did you /think/ all the Big Kiddies get this idea of the Great
Face Over The Playpen?
For that matter, what did you think "the Eye of God" was? Or just
why is it depicted atop a pyramid?
Come on...
>
> OK.. geez, is that what everybody's doing, and didn't tell me.
>
> ..and you have turned quite a word here!
>
> Your new site is still broken.
Yeh; I haven't "been there" since the first night. 120 new posts in
12 hours on rap, 131 on aapc, lawn, bursitis, used socks, where's
the mystery?
But I had to change the sig URL because last weekend my
ex-stepson's soon-to-be-ex-wife deleted his site (incl my old page),
his account, his registry, his key, his freedom, and his used socks.
>
> --
> Tom Bishop -----
> The only difference between a problem and a solution
> is that people understand the solution. --Charles Kettering
Dennis M. Hammes
What? A modern who's even /heard of/ Fraser?
Now follow that up with Campbell...
George Tolis
> Rebekah Presson
> Writes of Eliot:
>
> "But sometime in the past 30 years or so, most students stopped memorizing
> and performing poems-and started studying them. By now, the people who read
> poems are mostly poets themselves or academics in a literature program. The
> majority of the rest of us grew to consider poetry as incomprehensible and
> inaccessible.
> Ironically, a lot of people lay the accountability for this decline in the
> appreciation of poetry directly on the manuscripts of the man widely
> regarded as the greatest poet in English of the twentieth century, T. S.
> Eliot"
Bollocks. The decline in appreciation of poetry came about as a result
of postmodernism, not modernism. And also as a result of insular
attempts to cling onto tradition, nationality and 'culture', probably
a sociological effect during the Age of Ideology as some journalist
muppet has dubbed the 20thC.
To begin with: modernism was/is a reaction to the mainstream that was
deemed incapable of representing society sufficiently - without
stagnation - or deemed a whole load of things that can be summarised
as 'crap'. So the reactionaries pop up and suddenly become really
trendy. They set themselves up as an elite in a time when no one
seemed to be 'making statements', acting cool, etc. and a lot of
people really, really liked them. There were LOADS of *readings* -
you must have heard recordings of Ezra Pound's infamous "Yeats"
reading style, or even Yeats himself, etc. They weren't just ivory
tower poets, it was /alive/ esp. with radio.
So, the war comes along and, according to Marjorie Perloff, interrupts
what they are doing. The flag is dropped and she argues it isn't
picked up again until the L=A=N=Guage poets in the '60s. Well that's
not entirely true because there were modernists working all the way
through the '30s, '40s, '50s, Hill, Seferis, Elytis, HD, Pound, Wolf,
etc. it mutated and disappeared partly because it was no longer
coherent enough to become visible enough to people.
Meanwhile, the /idea/ of modernism that was 'trendy' is picked up by
the mainstream and people begin to make attempts to popularise it. So
over here we have Auden, Grahame Green, country house crap in the
theatre and that develops through to the '50s with only a brief
interlude for the war when some fucking excellent stuff 'happens' but
only as events and that is still in major conflict with the mainstream
that is burying it.
Postmodernism (gradually) came into existence pretty much after WWI
because I see it as nothing more than a popularisation of modernism -
numerous critics have seen postmodernism as further fragmentation of
the fragmentation that was modernism, a bit like those chaos theory
fractals, or whatever they are. Frederick Jameson is good on this,
can't remember the title of the work, but it's got postmodernism in
it.
This transition is where poetry began to die off for the masses - the
publishing houses imposed their ideal of the modernist poem onto the
public through their postmodernists, but then dumbed it down to the
point where people no longer felt it was trendy to be a reader of
poetry. The only times people have turned to poetry since
postmodernism became the dominant voice is after times of great crisis
- WW2, Vietnam, Sept. 11th. OK, I tend to get a bit polemical at
times, but prove me wrong and I'll give some ground.
> But who reads Eliot, to read his poetry one must study them?
Bollocks again. Eliot is outselling about 95% of contemporary poets in
Britain. Of the remaining 5%, 2% is Seamus Heaney. And no, I don't
believe it's all school texts. I'm sure most people in the country
would recognise him before they recognised the poet laureate.
And for god's sake, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, they were ALL looking for the
ignorant reader. The /ideal/ reader who had read nothing else. Each
and every one of the great modernist poems are supposed to be
contained /in itself/ and the emphasis on intertextuality is a result
of the publishing houses shaping the way poetry is marketed to us,
which is a result of turning the non-mainstream /trendy/ modernists
into mainstream, waste-of-space postmodernists.
> I am reminded
> of "Uriel" by our own Mr. Ross and can almost hear the 'thudclap of Pavlov
> bells' Am I mistaken?
>
> Can Poetry Matter?
> Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America.
> If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work
> to make it essential once more
I totally agree. It is something that needs to be checked. But the
fault is not with the non-mainstream poetry. Or even with mainstream
poetry, you might argue. There is quality throughout. The trouble is
that there is no reaction to it all that is being presented to the
public. The public has been told repeatedly that /they must come to
poetry/ and not vice versa.
The time is ripe for a revolution: "Cytherea / has a mind / towards
War" (Simon Turner).
> by Dana Gioia excerpt:
>
> "It fried the academic world of poets, criticized today's critics who do
> nothing but praise the work of colleagues, how publishers of anthologies
> will
> publish a poem in their collection not because it's any good, but cuz it is
> the work of some poet who has influence over which anthology will be chosen
> for university classes. How the literary journals are struggling---that the
> contributors are barely ever subscribers nor read the poems of others in the
> same journal. How more poetry is being published in all of these journals
> and less of it in newspapers, how books of poems, if reviewed at all, are
> reviewed in the newspapers only after they have won some huge award.
> It also said how poetry readings are ego oriented and we should go back to
> the days when poets read the work of other poets too, not just there own."
Yes. I totally agree. The market is ready to collapse on itself. The
industry has ground down its cogs to nothing and I would be over the
moon if I could hasten it's demise. Aidan, spot on with "The White
Goddess" - bring back the druidic culture, troubadours, a
poet-in-every-pub sing-strumming words into pint glasses. Bring back
the patonage system and kill off all the cardboard cut outs of Pound's
"The Cantos". A prophetic, though near-unreadable, epic.
> One point the author made was how the profs must accumulate many
> publications (emphasis = quantity not quality) to keep their jobs. They are
> also expected to teach, serve on committees, etc. The emphasis on poets
> writing quality work just isn't there.
>
> Maybe poetry never really mattered to none but a handful.
> That would explain a great deal; in the final analyses perhaps poetry need
> only matter to me?
Even the crap poetry means something, even if it doesn't reach beyond
the composer's cock/tit-laden brain. Yes, I suppose it should only
matter to you if you never decide to look past the end of your nose.
Shouldn't poetry be made /socially-relevant/ by it's
publishers/marketers though?
GT
Aidan Tynan
>
>What? A modern who's even /heard of/ Fraser?
Frazer? Dammit, we moderns can even spell the man's name *and* tell you a
thing or two about Abraxas!
The Recognitions *is* my favourite book, after all.
-Aidan
"There are many Manii in Aricia ..."
Aidan Tynan
>
>So, the war comes along and, according to Marjorie Perloff, i
I'm reading 21st Century Modernism at the moment, good stuff.
Frederick Jameson is good on this,
>can't remember the title of the work, but it's got postmodernism in
>it.
'Postmodernism', and 'Cultural Turn' are his two main works. Both
recommended.
-Aidan