2 March 2004. I can't say I enjoy haughtily laying down criteria for excellence in poetry. On the other hand, I believe excellence is possible and of value. Ergo, today's entry will be on my latest arts term, "ubergestalt," which has to do with that. An ubergestalt is the overall organizing element any artwork of the first order must, in my view, have. It can be something simple, like a story or a thesis. Sometimes, it will be more complex, or--to put it better--less overt: a mood or atmosphere, a vision . . . Anything that gives the work coherence. Not necessarily total coherence, just sufficient coherence. Indeed, I don't think any first-rate work's details will all cohere; an artwork ought to falter awry here and there to avoid being too predictable. But it has to have sufficient coherence.

I think in some earlier writings of mine, I called the ubergestalt the "organizing principal," or something very similar. Whatever one calls it, it is not popular among the best poets, almost all of whom practice various kinds of anti-coherence. Visual poets fragment texts, smear it, overpaint it, join it to the most seemingly incompatible graphics imaginable; infraverbal poets misspell words in every possible way, misuse punctuation marks, remove or add spaces with a wanton disregard for grammatical decorum; mathematical poets mismarry mathematical symbols with verbal elements; language poets (or, to be eulexicographic, idiolinguistic poets) misuse grammar in every conceivable way-all of them attempting to break with convention, free up the infocipient's mind to wonder deeper and wider than what the text denotes, or could denote and connote using the less disruptive techniques that conventional poets are content with. The results are almost always interesting, but also often aesthetically unsuccessful-due to the absence of ubergestalts.

Modernist instances would be Pound's Cantos, Stein's Tender Buttons, Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Much contemporary burstnorm poetry ultimately proves unsatisfying aesthetically for the same reason. Of course, fans of this kind of work often claim that no ubergestalt is necessary. For them, the more they can read into an artwork, however unintegrated it is, the better. (Most such fans are what I call "frivolniks," and thus incapable of grasping ubergestalts.) I don't deny that many of the details these people cherish are of value, and sometimes of a high order of beauty. I would argue that if these details had an ubergestalt to interact with, though, the pleasure they caused would be more than doubled, for then an infocipient would experience not only the details' own discrete beauty but the beauty of their relation with the ubergestalt--and to all, or much, of what the ubergestalt had other links to.

Then there are those who carry ubergestalts with them that they can clamp onto nearly any artwork they encounter. The most typical of these is the political rigidnik--communist, feminist, fascist, whatever--who can't take in an artwork without fusing it to his central fixation, which acts as an ubergestalt. The problem for the rigidnik is that his ubergestalt (a rigidniplex, in my theory of psychology) is too limited to accommodate all, or even a good proportion, of any artwork's best details. Moreover, most of the links the artwork's details' make to the rigidnik's ubergestalt will be strained, arbitrary, unable to carry much energy from detail to ubergestalt. The rigidnik's pleasure, in other words, will be limited--less, probably, than that of the milyoops.

Fortunately, the best contemporary poets who claim no need for their work to have ubergestalts center it unconsciously on some viable ubergestalt or other often enough to produce poems of the highest order. Other poets, some of them also among our best, ruin some of their poems by too desperately forcing an ubergestalt on them. Balance, as in all of life, is crucial.