<b>Blog164</b>

Daily Notes on Poetry

14 July 2004. A few days ago, I got a copy of Handbook of Literary Terms, by X. J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia and Mark Bauerlein, in the mail. It was a freebie because I'd given the publisher permission to quote a poem by Karl Kempton I'd published. Someone involved with the handbook had found it quoted in my essay on minimalist poetry, MNMLST POETRY, which is at Light&Dust. It's used as an example of minimalist poetry in the handbook's entry for "Minimalism":

Contemporary art and literature that adopts the principles of spareness, simplicity, abstract form, and minimal content. The term first applied to sculptors and painters in the 1960s (Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and others) who fabricated artworks out of basic materials such as concrete blocks and fluorescent lighting, or canvases of color fields: rather than representations, thus reducing the distinction between material and meaning. The term drifted into poetry and fiction soon after, with poems pared back to near-pure description and fiction written in a deliberately flat, unemotional tone and an appropriately unadorned style. Take, for example, the following poem by Karl Kempton (1991):

ANTIQUE QUESTION

anti question

a we

awe

Because of its looser form and narrative requirements, minimalist fiction cannot attain the blankness of minimalist poetry and art. It often becomes "minimal" by relying more on dramatic action, scene, and dialogue than on narration or authorial summary.

I suppose the entry is okay for a book geared, as this one's introduction states, for "undergraduates getting their first taste of serious literary study." I'm pleased that Karl's poem got a little exposure. But I wonder if he truly pared his poem down to "near-pure description." What bothers me about that is that Karl's poem demonstrates the awe of what I'd called Final Empathy--or separate individuals coming together as a unified group, it doesn't describe it.

Indeed, the entire entry underscores the obtuseness of knownstreamers (and the ones behind this book are not stasguards, but reactionaries; they aren't trying to keep the present literary status quo in stasis, but return us to a previous status quo). Note that the entry only points out certain practices of those it considers minimalist artists. Nowhere is the value of what such people are doing mentioned. I'm not prepared to give my own definition of the term here, but only to say that, for me, the main feature of minimalist art is the use of any means to maximize focus on a single particular of aesthetic meaning. Its aim is lyric intensity. Karl focuses in his poem on its spelling, from which he creates a three-act play . . . so, in a sense, is not particularly minimalist, after all. Consider the pwoermds collected in Geof Huth's anthology, Ampersand Squared, such as the one I obsessively return to as often as I can, it would seem, Aram Saroyan's "lighght." Or Saroyan's "blod," which is a narrative of at least two acts, though only one is shown.

In my practical criticism, I define "minimalist poetry" as objectively as I can by its length. I think I consider it to mean those single-page poems of twenty syllables or less. I define at least one smaller kind of poem. I wrote a short essay of a taxonomy of poems based on their length but can't find it, at the moment.

I'll return to Handbook of Literary Terms in my next entry. It's not egregiously stupid, but it is annoyingly unthorough.

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