the old poetics
by Mathew Timmons
The Canon has shown that works composed according to rules or artistic demands (i.e., those that adhere to the old poetics) find themselves shackled to the old poetics. One used to talk about the end of the line in poetry—instead of it being “ba BOM”, it would just be “BA.” This speculation though, overflows the limits of the old poetics, and, in other words, proclaims that the new poetry will usher in a new way of feeling and living.
“The old poetics are dead, it’s not enough to mean what you mean anymore,” etc. etc. We were lying beneath the arbors of our hunch-backed, logical starting point, and found an outcome we could not exploit, bound up in the presuppositions of the old poetics. It’s not enough to refer generally to a new poetics, one must perfect and enrich an appreciation of the old poetics. What marks this poetics is a poet’s more contemplative mood (Plank 1966, 112).
What emerges from the new poetics is a relinquishment of the old poetics of being, in favor of a frontier poetics of becoming. The old poetics lasted because it could be developed in significant ways to accommodate the valuable insights provided by narrative. We must now get down to the characteristic problems of the old poetics. By making a list detailing various attributes of the old poetics, we can band together and solve problems with our capacity for attention, and we can expand our vision to other arenas where poetics has become the central concern.
Now we have, at last, come to the cause of our dispute and evidently the old poetics is to be blamed for it. The old poetics does not mind representing peasants in a banquet hall (where a banquet hall represents the old poetics). Callimachus, for example, mistook one art for another by concretizing metaphor—a phenomenon that persists in our own time. This shows we are still trapped in the old poetics with its combinations of actions and its characters envisioning that now, we have at last come to the cause of our dispute.
The old poetics is to be blamed. It does not mind the representation of peasants. This symbolism, pointing either to the real or mental worlds, was the basis of the old poetics. In the act of shifting the symbolic locus from real things to a mental banquet hall, the old poetics can be seen and represented. However, Callimachus was concretizing metaphor and marble at the same time. But if we mistake one art for another, we remain trapped in the old poetics with its combinations of actions and its characters envisioning the grove of Demeter. On one level this represents the new poetics and is set in opposition to Erysichthon’s representation of the old poetics as a banquet hall.
I now ask of you—partly thinking of the old poetics, about how you (my dear, dear reader), David Bromige, Maria Damon, and George Bowering composed over numerous months a hilarious list (an openly exploited extra-literary list) of reasons to justify the removal of the old poetics of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Is it worth noting that Grinberg, according to “Buffalo ‘99” by Kent Johnson, claimed that certain energetic adherents to the old poetics (including a list of established poets and critics) through the figure of E.P. (Pound), “developed and set aside the old poetics of song,” while through Mauberly they “showed the aim and imprint” of their own poetics?
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