Preface to Functional Redundancy
When I was in my teen years and writing poetry probably daily, with great
ardor, poetry, especially American poetry, was at a curious and fascinating
point. I think for many years it had been dominated by academia and the darlings
of the academia (e.g. Robert Lowell, et al). Then in the Fifties a great shift
occurred. This was happening in all the arts, the main vortex was visual art
with Abstract Expressionism, and jazz was beginning to break out of all confines
too. The Beat Poets seemed to lead the charge.
Of course, one might argue that this revolution had been going on for ages,
since the Impressionists, since the Dadaists. But this seemed like a pretty new
deal as far as poetry was concerned, as far as what was exciting in poetry in
this country.
I was already reading LeRoi Jones and Ginsberg and those guys, but the book
that turned me into a fierce believer in poetry was Donald Allen's anthology,
The New American Poetry 1945 -1960. It was maybe five years old when I
discovered it, but I was just enthralled, and immersed myself in it. These were
the folks who were throwing open the doors and letting the light in. From
Levertov and Creeley, Gary Snyder, to O'Hara, there were new discoveries on
every page.
Now according to the new manifestos published at the conclusion of the
anthology, there were new rules for poetry. Form follows function, in fact form
follows from the breath, that was the big deal. So a poem could look like
anything, as long as it had breath! As if the patients in the asylum where those
windows had been thrown open could now also cast off their strait jackets,
breathe and rejoice! Of course, as mentioned above, this was in line with the
general tenor of the arts of the times, and of the times themselves, which were "rapidly changin'."
However eventually I realized I'd come late to the party. By the late
Sixties when I was so involved with poetry, there seemed to be little in the way
of walls to be knocked down, and by then the main battle seemed to be all about
song. Academic poetry was a straw man; one could rail against the Man, but
everyone was doing it, it had been done already. In a way I was discouraged
because there was just so much freedom.
I think it was in an article on Bryan Ferry years later that some critic
advanced the idea that when there's too much freedom, it is avant-garde to
become more conservative. I believe he or she was comparing Ferry to the
Mannerists. This may not have been an accurate assessment in terms of art
history -- what that particular term meant (it's rather hazy, apparently) --
but this insight resonated with what I'd discovered in my youth: when form is
oppressive, one seeks the formless, however when the formless triumphs, one
seeks form. And the latter, rather sadly, had been what my era seemed to me to
demand.
In any case, as Charles Olson said (perhaps in The New American Poetry), we
do what we know before we know what we do. The principle of seeking form began
to jell for me in a visceral manner when I lived in The Netherlands for half a
year in my early twenties. I believe I'd already begun experimenting with more
rigid forms such as sonnet and (more enthusiastically) sestina. I don't know if
it was exposure to such a clean and ordered society, built up on such flat
geography, or getting exposed to the work of Dutch artists such as Mondriaan,
but I began to feel much more mathmatical in my approach to poetry. The game for
me became how to preserve passion within a stricter framework. However I wanted
to invent, so I began to try my own forms, rather than the received. So while I
lived in Amsterdam I spent three months or so working on one poem, called The
Propositions. During this period I was also becoming more cognizant of the
Concrete Poetry movement, especially because there was a great little bookstore
named Other Books and So, almost entirely devoted to "visual poetry". The proprietor, a poet named Ulises Carrion, put me in touch with Michael Gibbs, the editor of a journal called kontexts, which ultimately published my poem in its final issue.
There are a several elements I still find interesting about this poem. It
is the most maniacally mathmatical piece I've ever done. I started out with a
kind of mold or schema; for example, in the first section, there is the definite
article "the" followed by a one syllable word. This also represents the
awakening of the word, the beginning, so the first words are basicaly nonsense
(at the finale the poem will descend back into this controlled chaos). Then move
on to two syllable words with the accent on the first syllable, then a section
with the accent on the second. This schema continues until the poem is
presenting five word phrases, still according to rules of accentuation.
Throughout all of this all words or phrases are grouped into threes, although
the criteria is somewhat loose; in other words with "the dist the drak the darf"
it's alliteration; whereas the grouping "the Hostess Pies the Maxwell House the
I.B.M." is obviously about content (i.e. all products). Anyway, you get the general
idea. Other elements which I enjoyed: because of the repetition of the definite
article throughout the poem, it had a unique "look", so that justified it as "langwejart";
and by virtue of such repetition, it took on a chant-like quality, which harkens
to the roots of poetry. In fact without repetition there would be no poetry, this
is what gives it form. And so these are the "functional" elements.
Eventually as an artist I moved away from poetry in the strict sense, but
once in a while I'd come back to my "redundancy" poems and try something new.
Usually this meant, somewhat ironically, breaking it apart in some way, taking
it in a slightly new direction, or anyway so I hoped. But I think this is enough
of a preface. It starts with The Propositions and, well, goes from there.