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2 April 2005: First, *An Important Announcement*: I finally updated my collection of columns for Small Press Review, whose table of contents is here. I was nine columns behind! All that I've written so far, including the one in the issue just out, are now there.
Second, to keep this entry from being too short, a few musings about the value of knownstream art. I have a great problem discussing it because I believe it is what keeps me and my friends in poetry from being properly recognize. Not it, really, but the stasguards able to appreciate only it (if even that) and are dedicated, often unknowingly, to keeping anyone else from developing wider tastes. But many of my all-time favorite poems are knownstream (though some weren't when composed)--"Fern Hill," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to the West Wind," "Tintern Abbey," much of Yeats, Stevens and Frost, to name just a few. Hence, I am understandably conflicted. I think I'm getting it all straight now, though.
My latest revelation came about after I recently spouted at New-Poetry that progress had to occur in the arts just as it does in science, and for the same reasons: more and better tools, plus the example and achievements of prior culturateurs. I went so far as to say that no such thing as an unsurpassable poem. I gave as an example some poet's writing a poem equal to any of the past verbally (and this is done all the time, except for stasguards) and adding visual elements to it, with even a journeyman illumagist's ability.
This last seems logical, but is wrong. The problem is that the additional visual elements must rob from the poem's verbal effects. Put differently, one can make a solitextual poem of maximal verbal intensity. Pluraestheticizing it in any way will only reduce that intensity, however well-integrated with the poem's text it is. On the other hand, I still believe that the greatest work of art will be the one that effectively combines the greatest number of expressive modalities. So, eventually we'll have solitextual haiku, for instance, that are as good as human beings can make them (we already do) and 3-dimensional full-color, animated music-poems that are as good as human beings can make them (some might say Shakespeare did this, but Wagner came closer, because of his use of extensive amounts of music, and once holigraphic movies are what television is today, non-representational illumagery will be able to do for opera what music did for drama--so far as pluraesthetically enhancement is concerned). The haiku will do things no other artworks can--but, or so I hold, the larger, more complex artworks will be superior to them because they'll be able to do more. Or, to be as tactful as possible, some works will have intensity, some magnitude. |
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