Bay Area Prose
The real interesting sentence theory comes when Silliman starts ‘arguing’. The binary discourse, differentiating what poetry could be to linguistics and its relationship to fiction made sense. Poetry is wordplay and balances on the razor’s edge of image and symbology. So take that idea and combine it with what Silliman shared about the perception of literature as written. What can be said of poetry that is read aloud, or read along with? Silliman is being responsible to the many different cultures outside the west that employ story telling and verbal history. Sure, he might not directly be referring to such cultures, but he is opening up a door to what could be considered second rate art within a western context. Pointing out that prose was considered a second rate art further implies that all aesthetics can be included in literary and artistic dialogue with time.
Barthes’ lexias, in relation to Sarrasine, is the stuff of Silliman’s dreams. Real creative-like stuff. Breaking down sentences of what is a goliath of literature work and turning into a cipher.
When Silliman starts breaking down sentences into logistical formulas, it gets a little too fixation-y. I’ve taken Prakash’s Logic and Philosophy class, and to be honest it is really just overexertion to turn what is abstract into formula. Like various formulas to logic (‘modus ponens’ is the only name I can remember) there will be various forms to the sentence and with potential each object has in relation to the ideas. OH syntax, how you’ve snuck up on me!
scattering sentence-rubble haphazardly
Essentially, let language do what it wants through poking at it.
Some personal rhetoric: I love Lyn Hejinian. What she does with language, especially in terms of image in sentence and syntax in paragraph, really just tickles me pink. I hadn’t read her before this term, and anyone who was watching me when her poem was read in class would’ve seen a gaping mouth. She has something special with the way she points out what she’s doing, a taboo area of poetry. “These are the defamiliarization techniques with which we are so familiar.” Oh, and we both have quoted Paul Klee. But I digress…
Hejinian’s theory in relation to syntax has been the clearest to me. One must consider syntax in every breath of the word. Where one resides, how one reads, what the mind expects and one’s sentiment in regard to linguistics are sequences matching up to what syntax is able to achieve. The instant defines syntax.
Yet nothing is accomplished by generalizations and material deduction.
Hejinian’s says “Form does not necessarily achieve closure, nor does raw materiality provide openness.” Huoohkay, so, the “finished” or “completed” poem has never really ended, and the blank page instead of connoting openness is actually quite deliberate and conclusive. No polar bear nose in winter can truly be free. I get what she’s saying on a very superficial level; Poems can always be rewritten and read in new ways, and words must have some wordplay in order that definition will continue to be allusive.
Again, another corresponding idea: “Because we have language we find ourselves in a special place and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world.” Linguistics defines understanding. The “vastness of understanding” that we are presented with despite being sentient, intellectually-communicating beings, is bottomless. Yet art has, and continues to define everything around us. Poetry is imperative to the human experience because it describes the “vastness” and the everyday in its own language. Abstraction defined by abstractions, common defined by commonality.
I got very involved, to the point of joining the National Speleological Society
Coolidge’s voice is accessible. Instead of waffling around the idea of syntax he outright says that he considers it as arrangement over “composition” or “structure”. Everything that is implied in other essays, Coolidge just comes out and points to. Saying that art is very particular, yet when discussing it we want to use concrete and precise terms, but difficulty persists because we can only work word for word.
The time and effort he takes in describing his geological endeavors is of course not without significance. Is it possibly a metaphor for his process when creating? It certainly gives meaning to some of his work because of the additional disclosure of his background and informal education. Especially principal is his description of the dollar box he used for mineral categorization and new sparked interest in learning rock names. The rocks are the elements of linguistics and the dollar box the structure of poetics, or visa versa.
Resistance is also important to consider, and Coolidge brings it up in reference to the ‘few-word’ poems he wrote. Words that don’t go together are important, not grammatically, but in terms of their weight. Certain phrases and parings can make the words electric or dark or whatever is more viscerally potent. Pound certainly employed this strategy in his short prose poems. Yet Fagin, so trancelike, interjects and points out that the singular words in entirety are less powerful due to their “lack of relationship with anything else.” The shortness must not be replaced by the writer’s ability to describe completely the object or place. It certainly is not wordplay with limitations on the length or breath; it looks more like experiments with what defamiliarization happens with such little context. I didn’t even pick up on the presentation of the noun, then having the noun turn into a verb within two words; trilobite trilobites. Double super sweet.
Whap-bop-aloo-bop-ah-Watten BAM BOOM! or The illusory babels of language
Watten has really tied all the ideas together in his discussion of composition and syntax through the approach of art in a post-modern surrealist world, via sculpture. The theory of pure mental projection, most particular to modern artist, really just takes the form of syntax theory in poetics, when the intentions of poetics are to defamiliarize and instigate analysis of language. The sculptors Watten discusses use these same concepts in their work. By breaking down enjoyable aesthetics, memory light, pre-concept of structure and place, the artist enhances progress of the medium. Watten likens Coolidge, Silliman and Benson to the sculptors he discusses. These modern artists, writers or sculptors, choose to use syntax of form and image as the vessel of change in language regarding their art. Is that a chiasm? Watten mentions static artistic–language, and that seemed to be Smithson’s main aim at change within fine art. Again, like Coolidge said, it is about arrangement. I am surprised, though I’m not sure when this essay was written, that the work of Damian Hurst was not mentioned. A personal favorite,
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