minor unit of sincerity

Zukofsky reiterates the point that poetics is a "thing" that can only be defined by many elements instead of one simple idea. Musicality, time, process, intention, blah blah blah alot of stuff right? It's an organic being, comprised of many parts, adaptability building on complexity, feeding off our consciousness. This time around I wasn’t that interested in taking on their ideas as a waterfall of knowledge, near impossible to capture between my hands. Instead I asked myself what does all this have to do with syntax. What I’m thinkin’ is the syntax relates to the many elements of poetry through their relation to each other, not just the syntactical elements of word, meter and language use. The age in which the poem is composed, the elements of meaning expressed through speech, the energy transferred.
At the end of ‘Objective’ Zukofsky says that poetry acts on particulars. It has impacts on history and depends on little for renditions, only it’s existence in a physical form. Poetry is a working cog in a machine running the consciousness we call existence. What is important to note is that it has an actual form, however allusive and indefinable. Poetry is and is not. Zukofsky says it is the image, sound and interplay of concepts. These things can be found on the elephant that everyone is touching and describing, called poetics. Casually almost, he calls for some symmetry in the arts, and we can find it in poems.
Like those leaves we tried telling Paul about, delicate, and fractured between symmetrical veins.

1 comment:

Kasey Mohammad said...

As I think I mentioned briefly in class, "particulars" as invoked by people like Zuk and Creeley et al. is one of those modern poetic keywords whose meaning is tantalizingly elusive. It's endlessly suggestive, for example of the idea of parts or particles (particules?) of a larger whole that is articulated in some inter-relational way by the distribution, as you suggest, of all those parts.