[MD] Fwd: ACLA 2016: "Poetry as Practice, Practice as Poetry"

[John Carl]

Arlo,



On 9/4/15, ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [John]
> Second, poetry is different from painting, music and sculpting in that it
> requires a higher-order brain to comprehend.
>
> [Arlo]
> First, are you suggesting that "painting, music and sculpting" does not
> require a higher-order brain to comprehend? Does this suggest that, say, a
> cat can comprehend Beethoven's Ninth?

Jc:  Yes, with the caveat that by "comprehend", I mean experience
directly and empirically.  Words have to be interpreted.  To a cat, a
poem is just grunting noise - maybe a sort of purring?  That's what
I'm trying to get at.


Arlo:

> But you are completely wrong here,


Jc:   Well!  Thank goodness I have you to set me straight then, Arlo.
there's nothing wrong with being wrong, as long as I'm willing to be
set right.  right?


Arlo:
> John, all of these are semiotic systems, whether markings on a page or
> brushstrokes on a canvas or sound waves in the air or vocal utterances on a
> stage.

Jc:  They can be viewed that way, Arlo.  They can also be viewed
simplistically in terms of sounds and sights.  What they "are"
ultimately,  varies widely with a  range of experience.    Only a
person immersed in 4th level patterns, would listen to an orchestra
play Mozart "semiotically".  But material "things" obtain  a different
level of agreement, phenomenologically speaking.   We listen to music
through a contextual filter, but is there any doubt that sound is
being transmitted alike to all creatures with ears?

Arlo:

> Poetry is one form of high-quality endeavor, and like other forms of
> high-quality endeavor it can leverage opportunities for dynamic emergence.
>


Jc:  I agree.  There is something very DQ, about good poetry.  I think
it is a sort of bridge between disparate realms - the intellect and
the emotional and thus has traditionally been held in the highest
esteem.  Although I think Plato excluded them from his Republic
because when you've got the perfect system, agents of change are no
longer necessary.   I think that's probably the prevalent view today,
also.

Arlo:

> Perhaps you can criticize this seminar for focusing specifically on poetics
> (over other forms of artistic semiosis), but
>
> [John]
> Anybody can hear music, or see a painting or feel a sculpture, and have a
> good sense of what they are - empirically speaking.
>
> [Arlo]
> Well "anybody" seems to refer to humans, so I'd imagine what you mean here
> are humans without higher-order brains (possible due to traumatic injury?).

Jc:  imo, Arlo, human awareness of animals and our ability to
conceptualize their experience, is a crucial aspect of our basis of
thought.  Their reactions confirm our categories.  Just as our fellow
humans do the same  I don't assign personhood to people alone.

But there's a lot that needs to be said concerning Personalism.
Another thread, perhaps.

Arlo:

> It's true, iconographic semiosis can appear, on some levels, to be more
> trans-cultural, but this is mostly illusion, a projection of your cultural
> assumptions onto a artifact with no regard for the intentions or meaning
> ascribed to it from within its own culture. But indeed, as we move from
> iconographic semiosis towards more symbolic semiosis (e.g. from a 'picture
> of a building' to the word "BUILDING"), the argument is that the MEANING has
> greater potential for complexity. By your argument, then, poetics is a more
> advanced, and thus better 'meaning bearer', than painting or music. And, as
> such, poetics SHOULD be the something that better represents the intricate
> aesthetic practice of human experience.
>

Jc:  Why better?  What is better about greater complexity?   I'll go
ahead and quote you the James statement I had read in my Personalism
researches, wherein he gives a broad overview of his philosophy:

"It means individualism, personalism: that the prototype of reality is
the here and now; that there is genuine novelty; that order is being
won --incidentally reaped.  That the more universal is the more
abstract;  that the smaller & more intimate is the truer.  The man
more than the home, the home more than the state or the church.
Anti-slavery.  It means tolerance and respect."

I'd say that the intellectual discipline of semiotics is fine, as far
as it goes.  But when it starts thinking of itself as better, it's in
trouble.

> [John]
> But poetry depends upon linguistic and cultural interpretations that can be
> different for different listeners.
>
> [Arlo]
> I dare you to make your way to the heart of Australia, sit with an
> Aboriginal tribe, listen to one of them play the didgeridoo, and tell me you
> this form of semiosis requires no 'linguistic and cultural interpretation'
> for you to understand its meaning.

Jc:  Its meaning?  Do you think the meaning of any artwork can be
confined to just a single meaning?  And why can't I just listen and
absorb without picking apart meanings?  The noise hits my eardrums,
its undeniable.  The meaning of any art is the art itself.  If you
want to read more into it, that's fine, but understand there is no way
to be comprehensive or exclusive in your analysis.

Arlo:

>But, certainly, all semiosis rests on a
> foundation of interpretation, there is never some 'pure' transmission of
> meaning that occurs without enconding-interpretation. It's just that the
> more shared the socio-cultural context, the more common are the
> interpretations.
>
> [Arlo previously]
> Or... we could call Hollywood's output "cinema" and have a separate dialogue
> about the way the art of cinema (like any "art", including "poetry") can
> introduce dynamic elements into static dialogues.
>
> [John]
> that sounds like a better way of putting it and a better discussion to have.
>  I definitely agree that cinema with its use of music, image and words can
> have a more powerful affect than even the best poetry.
>
> [Arlo]
> Maybe, at times, but cinema has a measure of temporal engagement that may be
> less emphatic in other forms of semiosis. While one can (and I have) stood
> in front a painting for hours, the 'effect' of cinema can build off hour
> long engagements that an image may, in isolation, appear to lack. Of course,
> literature parallels cinema in this regard, a good book can engage a reader
> for days, if not hours, or even longer. One poem in isolation may not lend
> itself to this as readily.
>
> But, I think you've must have had a very impoverished exposure to poetry
> over the years, John,

Jc:  Really Arlo?  I dunno.  Compared to whom?  My ma used to read us
poetry at night, as kids.  I've kept a fondness for it, spent money on
books of poetry, which right there puts me in the 99th percentile, as
far as average carpenters are concerned.  My favorite poets are (in
order) Wordworth, Gary Snyder, Rothke and then Kerouac.  Kerouac is
the most interesting, intellectually speaking because he really did
make that effort to dig down to the primal and immediate.  But Snyder
makes me the happiest when I read him.  I also have a very lovely book
of verse from a guy my dad built a house for, back in the 70's, here
in Nevada County, Ca.  James Kavanaugh, Laughing Down Lonely Canyons.

 But the most meaningful poetry I've experienced, has been that I've
created myself.  I can think of two transformative poems - one down
the side of Mt. Tamalpais that I breathed into the air and never wrote
down and the other was set to a song that convinced my lovely Lu to
marry me.  I'd say THAT was  a pretty transformative piece of
poetry... yep.  My intro to the intellectual significance of poetry
was when I coincidentally took classes in Deep Ecology and the
Romantic movement at Sierra College.  I found enough harmony between
the disparate disciplines to bequeath "thoughts too deep for tears".
 But maybe you're right.  Maybe I just haven't experience poetry yet
til I've thought about it semiotically.  I'll have to consider that.


Arlo:

> as I can think of several poems that, in a few short
> lines, altered the way I see the world, changed the way I look at things,
> and in the end made me a better person.
>

Jc:  Absolutely.  Me too.  no disagreement there.



> [John]
> All poetry is practice.  Not all practice is poetic.
>
> [Arlo]
> I don't think this call for abstracts would disagree. Indeed, I think the
> point was to reframe the dialogue (in parallel to the reframing in ZMM) to
> get people to 'see' that practice is not divorced from poetics, to reflect
> Pirsig's term, that practice is aesthetic.
>

Jc:  saving it from the "merely practical" view of the utilitarians.
I certainly agree with that goal.  Utilitarianism is that  dystopian
life of machine-controlled life Orwell describes in 1984 and Pirsig
describes as a Quality-less world.

Of course the sticking point is that not all practice is poetic,
because that would obviate the term.  There is a quest for
transcendence, underlying the notion, that MUST be aknowledged or the
whole enterprise is a lot of blather.



> [John]
> I'm more concerned that you're wasting YOUR time, Arlo.
>
> [Arlo]
> Yes, many days I read the MD and think the same thing. Which is one reason I
> spend my time now mostly in other discourse communities. But, from time to
> time, I guess I fall prey to that old naivety.


Well... there's this to say about that:  there's not really much going
on now.  Idle chit-chat takes on a whole new aspect.  Almost, you
could say, it's a poetic aspect :)

Or you could think of it as a simple program, like TCP/IP which has an
ACK for every QUERY.  Just to make sure the net is alive.

John