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18 May 2005: I've been wasting time trying to discuss ideas with a bunch of poets again, this time at Spidertangle, the Internet discussion group for makers of visual and related kinds of poetry, in an attempt to clarify recent literary history by separating out prominent groups of visual/etc. poets and naming them. This requires the use of what I call the reducticeptual awareness. That's where one distills concepts from the chaos of existence and tries to systemize an understanding of existence out of them. The obtuseness of most of those replying to me confirmed my long-held impression of poets as not what you'd call big philosophical thinkers. They seemed to hate being forced into their reducticeptual awarenesses.
I couldn't understand why that should be, however, for poetry is made of words, and words are abstract symbols, which is precisely what the reducticeptual awareness is responsible for dealing with. I divide it into the linguiceptual sub-awareness, the matheceptual sub-awareness and the morphoceptual sub-awareness. How could poets, so good with words, be so bad at the reducticeptual thinking required to analyze and reason?
Here's what I came up with after thinking about it for a good four-and-a-half minutes: that poets--most poets--pretty much avoid the linguiceptual awareness, carrying out their work with words mainly in the audio-linguiceptual association center and other related association centers. That is, they work with words as sounds, as doors to images, as narrative counters, and/or (in the case of visual poets) as visual images.
It may be that true language poets are the only poets who work to a significant degree with words as symbols. . . .
This is not to demean poets. We none of us are at home in all the human awarenesses and sub-awarenesses. It also may be true, as I often worry aloud, that I am hindered by my comparatively strong reducticeptual awareness from being the poet I could otherwise be. It is interesting to note that that few of the best critics among poets were prolific as poets. Coleridge and Eliot jump to mind. Pound and Dryden were exceptions. Maybe Jonson, but I'm not sure how much of a critic one could call him. Cummings was a terrible critic. Wordsworth said a few worthwhile things but wasn't a critic. Ditto Keats, although he probably would have become a first-rate critic had he lived.
The best critics among the poet/critics were mostly only practical critics, not systematic critics. But almost no critics of any kind have been systematic critics.
Just thinking aloud, folks. Solipsistically.
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