Poetry and Relevance

I’ve been keeping relative track of the ongoing discussion in regards to poetry and relevance (and now poetic terminology and relevance and battles between camps) taking place around the poetry blogosphere. See(links taken from Seth Abramson’s blog I (and II, and III, and IV): Adam Fieled (I,II, III), Joseph Hutchinson (I, II, III), Francois Luong, Jeff Stumpo, Johannes Goransson (I, II, III), Robert J. Baird, Jack Kimball]. Brought together (I’m assuming) by Ron Silliman’s poetry links.

Much of the discussion concerning the relevance of poetry and the significance of terms has swelled out of control into a (partial?) meaninglessness. There is a circularity about it— ‘it’ discusses a relatively meaningless term, and then gets all haughty about a particular decided perspectival position within the terminological spectrum. I say spectrum (in terms of a band or series between two oppositional points), since the terms have been, and keep being, laid out in a such a scenario… even Seth’s terms, which supposedly ‘transcend’ (whatever transcendence means in this day and age) the previous experimental/traditional dichotomy. Seth’s terms actually function, in his own use, to create a middle ground between the two previous camps. There is something good about that: shit shouldn’t be all black/white; autobot/decepticon. Yet, while he may want his new terms to escape that very spectral definition by being practical descriptive definitions he seemingly fails by falling back into an alignment with the old. Plus, such three-way divisions already exist in critical writing…

To copy a cursory set of definitions (the divisions of ethos) from wikipedia:

• phronesis - practical skills & wisdom
• arete - virtue, goodness
• eunoia - goodwill towards the audience.

To quote Seth’s terms from a comment portion of a post:

• * Pragmatics: Employed here to mean the use of language to communicate the beliefs or intentions of the speaker.
  
• * Syntactics: Employed here to mean using words in a way that divorces them from both their dictionary and connotational meanings.
  
• * Cognitive Semantics: Employed here to mean using words in environment/connotational (rather than direct, straight-definitional) systems which are received and processed by readers based on their own cognitive processes, to which the poet (being human) is partially but not (being just one human) perfectly attuned.

I don’t admit here that they overlay directly at all, but I just wanted to point out that they are equally arbitrary. The linguistic terms are also troublesome since they are a choice few out of a wide spectrum of linguistic divisions… if one just does a ‘quick wikipedia’ search as Seth suggests (for semantics) one immediately finds, four traditions… “the formal semantic, semiotic, pragmatic, to the cognitive semantic traditions.” Plus their are others on top of these… not to mention the philosophical assumptions within all of them (some of which probably won’t overlay with any honestly contemporary poetry).

But Seth does make a good point when he points toward a diverse current poetic community. I put my vote in for multiplicity. Always multiplicity.

Plus, this online debate is starting to look a bit too much like this:

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.