Thinking Poetry

Peter Nicholls, Peter Boxall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134918218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection brings together some of the most prominent critics of contemporary poetry and some of the most significant poets working in the English language today, to offer a critical assessment of the nature and function of poetic thought. Working at once with questions of form, literary theory and philosophy, this volume gives an extraordinarily diverse, original and mobile account of the kind of 'thinking' that poetry can do. The conviction that moves through the collection as a whole is that poetry is not an addition to thought, nor a vehicle to express a given idea, nor an ornamental language in which thinking might find itself couched. Rather, all the essays suggest that poetry itself thinks, in ways that other forms of expression cannot, thus making new intellectual, political and cultural formulations possible.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Poetic Thought

J. H. Prynne

This keynote speech given at the Second Pearl River International Poetry Conference, Guangzhou, P.R. China, on June 14, 2008, was pitched specifically to a Chinese audience. It examines some principal features of thought and thought-practice in poetry, as distinct from thinking or thoughtfulness or reference to extrinsic systems of thought or ideas, and also from self-expression by the poet. The discussion is highly condensed and thus does not present or examine text-examples; but each stage of the argument is fully documented in footnotes referring to Western and Chinese contexts.

My topic is poetic thought, in its more or less modern aspect or at least from a modern point of view. It is not easy to approach this large and abstract idea and to offer some comments in a short space of time. Furthermore, what might be meant by this phrase, ‘poetic thought’, must seem elusive in the context of different cultural and historical settings: old and new, east and west.

Both words will give us difficulty. By ‘thought’ I do not mean the previously accomplished results or productions of a thinking process, still less a codified system or assemblage of ideas as might characterise a school or an era, such as in ‘late-Scholastic thought’ or ‘Mohist thought’.¹ I mean something more like the active process of thinking, mental energy shaped to some purpose or tendency: I think of it as poetic work. But I do not mean this as the personal history of someone thinking, the efforts of conscious mind-focus as pursued by an individual subject, or even by an individual poet.² It is possible to speak of ‘the poetic thought of Wang Wei’ or ‘the poetic thought of John Keats’, but such is not my interest here.

Nor in any way should I wish to restrict this sense of ‘thought’ to exclusively or even principally intellectual procedures or their outcomes. The thought of a thinker who is more or less professional in that role may indeed possess this character of speculative coherence within a territory of mental exertion according to rules and disciplines which are specific to the profession. It’s true that an experimental scientist may not initially generate thought in my large sense, whereas a scholar in (say) the field of the history of religion deals all the time with thought practice and its systematic developments. But here also these uses and concepts of thought are not my present theme. Thus we proceed by negative definition.

To turn now to the qualifying word ‘poetic’, again I need to set aside any notion that thoughts or ideas or mental conceptions can be described as ‘poetic’ in an impressionistic sense, just because they seem rich in fancy, in colourful images, and suggestive turns of expression and because they deviate (perhaps playfully) from a more strict or impersonal system of rational argument.³ I do not mean this at all. Nor do I want to mean here, by ‘poetic’, something that bears the character of what poets do or what an individual poet does. It is possible to say that John Keats led an intensely poetic life, but whatever that may mean it is not part of my meaning on this occasion.

There is a slight discomfort in the next stage of my negative definition, because I want to say that ‘poetic’ in this usage does not mean, merely, ‘expressed or set out in the forms characteristic of poetry’ or ‘contained within a discourse belonging in a category of poetical composition’. The discomfort arises here because the meaning that I want to uncover for the phrase ‘poetic thought’ does lie somewhat close to my last description.

So what then is this topic to signify? Not all activities of poetry and its composition can be found to work with and through poetic thought. Nor is an end-productive subject-thinker, an identified poet-in-charge, required. The activity of thought resides at the level of language practice and indeed is in the language and is the language; in this sense, language is how thinking gets done and how thinking coheres into thought, shedding its links with an originating sponsor or a process of individual consciousness.⁴

Separating from its origins in a life history (personal beliefs, memory, emotion, and physiology of personhood) is an essential step in the generation of poetic thought; but once again by negative description, it is necessary to understand how this step does not mean that prior activity in consciousness transfers into something less active, more like a result of activity. The case is quite the reverse: the focus of poetic composition, as a text takes shape in the struggle of the poet to separate from it, projects into the textual arena an intense energy of conception and differentiation, pressed up against the limits which are discovered and invented by composition itself.⁵

To amplify these contrasts, we may recognise that some part of the constraints which give form to energy of conception are intrinsic to the specific character of poetic discourse, to the practice of poetry, which is always in some sense its own topic-focus; if only because it will be under intense pressure of innovation and experiment, not just wilfully crushing the natural grain and rhythm of language but discovering new reflex slants and ducts and cross-links that open inherent potentials previously unworked. Does this perhaps suggest that thoughtfulness can be an accompanying posture and glint to strong new working with poetic language? Well maybe so; but thoughtfulness is just a colour of discourse, one of its moods or habits, not to be held equivalent to poetic thought in the sense being searched for here; indeed, thoughtfulness may be a kind of conscience-money paid for the tacit avoidance of ardent, directed thought.

To work with thought requires the poet to grasp at the strong and persistent ways in which understanding is put under test by imagination as a screen of poetic conscience, to coax and hurl at finesse and judgement, and to set beliefs and principles on line, self-determining but nothing for its own sake merely; all under test of how things are. Nothing taken for granted, nothing merely forced, pressure of the composing will as varied by delicacy, because these energies are dialectical and not extruded from personality or point of view. Dialectics in this sense is the working encounter with contradiction in the very substance of object-reality and the obduracy of thought; irony not as an optional tone of voice but as marker for intrinsic anomaly.⁶

So, the poet working with poetic thought requires to activate every part of the process, into strong question where the answer is obscure, or into what looks like strong answer where the question evades precise location.⁷ Language will have to keep up with this as best it can, must not be damaged unreasonably but equally must not be sheltered like a sick child: it can fight its own battles. There is also not too much cause to worry about the reader, since if these efforts produce composition of durable value the reader will catch up in due time. The notion of a reader unwilling to be conscripted by mere appearance brings also an astringent, sceptical aspect into view, and the width of reader-kinds and their motivations also splays out the notion of single-origin, single-issue poetic thought. ‘From China to Peru’ was not just for Samuel Johnson a grandiose fancy; and nowadays, consider the international trade in copper pushing in reverse along that very same axis.⁸

If then the poet in this kind is under pressure of conscience to be fully active within the disputed territory of poetic thought, at maximum energy and indeed vigilance, riding through the supple evasions and sudden blockages of language just prior to its emergent formation, how can the result be other than some testimonial to the power of the creating poet, an inscribed scriptural witness?⁹ I believe the answer to be that strong poetic thought does indeed demand the unreserved commitment of the poet, deep-down within the choices and judgements of dialectical composition; but before the work is completed, the poet must self-remove from this location, sever the links not by a ruse but in order to test finally the integrity of the result. Indeed, until this removal is effected, the work cannot be truly complete, so that the new-discovered and extended limits of poetic thought form the language-boundaries of the new work. Some of the limit-rules here are already inherent in language as a system of social practice and grammatical construction; some of the limit-features have to do with a text’s not breaking the bounds of poetry altogether. But, these powerfully signifying limits are valorised by the internal energy of language under intense pressure of new work, new use, new hybrids of practice and reference and discovery.

Here some of the negative definitions already advanced need to be brought back into view. The fingertip energies of a language are not at all merely or mainly intellectual. Intense abstract visualisation,¹⁰ for example, or sonorous echo-function from auditory cross-talk and the history of embedded sound values in the philological development of a language system,¹¹ all may carry and perform the pressures of new poetic thought. In addition, the formal constraints of structure are not restricted to tight local intensities of challenge to language use: large and extended structures generate tensions of thought-argument, both performative of conceptual and opportune design and also as oppositional bracing, by demand upon logics of completion and straying against an end. Both Milton and Wordsworth are classical masters in apparent straying within the framework of extended form, and of eventual shifted return to the meaning of completion; the same is also true more recently of John Wilkinson, who indeed is here today [and who contributes to this issue of Textual Practice].

One further negative definition is necessary. Poetic thought is empowered within and through energies of language under pressure, but is not definitively produced by this intrinsic agency, as if a language-machine could be set up in generational mode and then switched on, with a few corrective interventions from a poet-supervisor. It’s all too clear that, in whatever stage of social evolution, a discourse practice defaults in a wink to facile acceptance of the commonplace, to bending compliantly under commercial or political distortions, to accommodate by self-corruption. All this is part of language reality within a cultural epoch and certainly may not be merely resisted, because vitality in language change and weakness in servile instrumentalism cannot easily be separated without parade of puritanical disdain.

Thus, poetic thought is brought into being by recognition and contest with the whole cultural system of a language, by argument that will not let go but which may not self-admire or promote the idea of the poet as arbiter of rightness. Whatever the users of language claim as their rights to effects of meaning, language is produced by meaning habits but resists definitive assignments of motive and desire. This is a root counterforce of energy in language itself as a scheme of activity in social practice: it is the placement-station of the poet whose argument here will generate poetic thought.¹²

How does poetic thought achieve recognisable form and how is it shaped? The language of poetry is its modality and material base, but whatever its relation with common human speech, the word-arguments in use are characteristically disputed territory, where prosody and verse-form press against unresolved structure and repeatedly transgress expectation.¹³ This is a kind of dialectical unsettling because line-endings and verse divisions work into and against semantic overload, in contest with the precursors to unresolved meaning. The extreme density of the unresolved, which maintains the high energy levels of language in poetic movement, its surreptitious buzz, may resemble unclarity which it partly is; but strong poetic thought frequently originates here, in the tension about and across line-endings, even in functional self-damage or sacrifice as the predicament of an emerging poem determined not to weaken or give way. Thought in this matrix is not unitary (unlike ideas), but is self-disputing and intrinsically dialectical.

What thereby vibrates on the page and in the mind of the reader, in knowledge and memory and moral understanding, thus does not belong to the poet, not any more; it does not belong in the domain of the language system, not any more; it does not reside in the fabric of dispute about values or competing models of state control, or visions of a future life. Even the conceptions of a public domain¹⁴ or an interpretative community¹⁵ cannot claim to be its necessary housing, any more than a conjured posterity and its compact storage in face of the unknown.¹⁶ These are the outer shells, of a dialectic energy working through the methods of poetic composition which cannot be defined or contained by its shells but must break them to become altogether new: new poetic thought.

Notes

This address was delivered as a keynote speech at the Second Pearl River International Poetry Conference, Guangzhou, P.R. China, on June 14, 2008, to an audience of Chinese scholars and students; the following notes and references were added, January–April 2009.

1 Late-Scholastic thought: see F.C. Copleston, A History of Medieval Philosophy (revised and much enlarged from his Medieval Philosophy [1952]; London, 1972), ch. 14–16 (pp. 213–276); Mohist thought: see A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao; Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, IL, 1989), ch. I:2 (pp. 33–53); ‘Later Mohist thought’, pp. 107–111, ch. II:2 (pp. 137–170); Chris Fraser, ‘The Mohist School’ in Bo Mou (ed.), History of Chinese Philosophy (Routledge History of World Philosophies, 3; Abingdon, Oxon, 2009), ch. 4 (pp. 137–163).

2 Thinking-process in this sense is the focus of Robert von Hallberg, Lyric Powers (Chicago, IL, 2008), ch. 4: ‘Thought’ (pp. 105–142); what is meant by shifting the idea of thought into the idea of thinking is fully contrary to the argument presented here, and von Hallberg’s quoted text-examples mostly demonstrate the major difference. A similar deflective transposition is undertaken by Charles Bernstein in ‘Thought’s Measure’ (1980), which despite proposing thought as its subject is almost exclusively concerned with thinking as a Cartesian surrogate consequence of autonomous writing practice (essay reprinted/collected in Content’s Dream [Los Angeles, 1986], pp. 61–86); a comparable manoeuvre misdirects Helen Vendler, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Cambridge, MA, 2004). Compare per contra Martin Heidegger, in What is called Thinking?: ‘We remain outside that mere reflection which makes thinking its object’; and thus there is no call to ‘think about what thinking is’ (his italics); J. Glenn Gray and Fred Wieck, trans. of Was Heisst Denken? [1951–1952; Tübingen, 1954], What is Called Thinking? (New York, 1968), Part I Lecture II, p. 21; further, pp. 28, 127–128, 153.

3 Images: it is often believed that the very origins of Western literary composition placed images and the pictorial imagination at the height of poetic achievement; but this belief is based in misunderstanding. In his Poetics [his treatise on the arts of poetry and drama], ‘there is no evidence that Aristotle regarded poems as images or the poet as an image-maker. … In the Poetics, where imitation is a representation of universals, it is doubly clear that there be no question of direct “images”’ (Gerald F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument [Cambridge, MA, 1957], pp. 27, 28). What counts is metaphor and its relatives, the act of transferring resemblance within a working train of thought; in analogy or allegory it is the same, thinking and imagining with the instruments of representation. See, further...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Thinking Poetry
• 1. Poetic Thought
• 2. The melodics of long poems
• 3. Open Oppen: linguistic fragmentation and the poetic proposition
• 4. Pound’s new criticism
• 5. La filosofica famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the ‘Form’ of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos
• 6. Cold noses at the Pearly Gates
• 7. Language in migration: multilingualism and exophonic writing in the new poetics
• 8. Glossing gloss and its undertow
• 9. Wrong poetry
• Index