poetry seminar

Judith Balso & Phillip Beck: Lecture 1

A friendship between poetry & philosophy.

Why did Plato exclude poets from thought? B/c he thought poets were linked to false appearances.

Heidegger thought poetry was essential to thinking. Balso thinks the risk is that poetry is subordinate to philosophy.

Balso thinks poetry is decisive for philosophy:

1. What poets can teach philosophy about language.
2. We can learn from poets about the separation between politics and history and what it can be through poets.
3. Philosophy has to learn from/with poets the question of ontology; the being of thought.
4. Poets can teach philosophy the question of the multiplicity of thoughts.

(Philosophy is another kind of thought from poetry, hence, a multiplicity of thoughts.)

Balso considers Stephane Mallarme, Wallace Stevens, Fernando Pessoa, Mandelstam, Pasolini, Philippe Beck, Gennadi Aiji, Bei Dao, Yang Lian.

Pessoa & Stevens dealt directly with ontological questions. Also, poets Giacomo Leopardi and Reynaldo Jimenez.

Multiplicities of Thought:

-Poets exist in their poems. Poetry develops itself through its readers. Poetry is a vast reserve of decisive thoughts.

Often what you don't understand in a poem is the core of the poem.

Pleasure is where thought exists in the poem. Meaning is only a part of the poem. A poem always speaks non-directly. In poetry, language is the material-->two planes of existence in poetry-->singularity of language inside poetry.

1. "Poetry must be a capacity of coldness. It must retire from all these fables and impulses. It must be capable of creating distance to pathos and it must be capable to speak non-directly. To speak directly is too simple." Be Dao

2. "The indirect is representation at its highest."-Philippe Beck

So then what does poetry build in speaking indirectly and with coldness? ∑hat new forces is it creating when speaking non-directly.

3. "The prime function of poetry is being purely and simply available." -Paul Celan

Philosophy follows poetry. Poetry is available to exist first for philosophy. Thought as exists through poetry itself; to catch what is coming and to dispose it inside itself.

"Poetic reason is not the reason that decorates truth, no, truth is rhythm. poetry is the attempt to tell the rhythm of truth." Beck

4. "Many languages fly through this world but when language produces can neither increase nor diminish the silent sorrow of mankind." -Bei Dao

"Poetry makes occur another kind of clarity via operations that give density to the real." -Bei Dao

Poetry must already exist as poems. According to Wallace Stevens' "pressure of contemporaneity". The poet must be exposed to this pressure. This is why poetry brings question of thought to itself.

What is thought in poetry? It lies in the acknowledgment that poetry thinks and the investigation of how it thinks.

Ars Poetica. Self-conscious and self-productive of thought; a capacity to constitute the world, being its own measure of thought.

Poetry is the subject of the poem when the poem has reached is maximum.

1. Question of the "impersonality" in poetry today.
2. Question of "availability" related to openness in poem.
3. Condition of distance related to history and politics.
4. Condition of re-consistency. "Poetry is a consistency of the world which rouses consistency in poem.

Abstract Poets: Is it true then that poetry is 50 years after painting? Balso certainly makes this allusion without intending to.

1. Poet is constant subject of poet. (Frank O'Hara's "Personism", Olson's "Projective Verse".)

[I really believe Mallarme was the first true "electronic poet" within context of historicity.]

[The body as a publishing house where poetry and technology can also be housed within the physical body and not the other way around. The poet should not be subject to the medium but should invoke a poeticization of the media apparatus.]

[Mallarme says "The verse has been touched". His essay "The Crisis of Poetry" which 100 years later led to the practice of "digital poetry".]

The poet's identity is put at a distance.

Rimbaud's "I is another."

Pessoa's heteronyms: campos, caeiro, reis. [The unconcealdness of each identity seems similar to the identity-cloaking of blogging.] Pessoa's "Ode to Maritime".

The poems are the biography of the poet.

A poet is someone who thinks with his whole body, is a manual thinker.

Music is only a metaphor for this separation of poetry from music.
Poetry creates for itself separations in order to create distinctions and to preserve the signifying space around it. Poetry is an infant begging for attention.

-poetry creates its own reading method--> Mallarme.

There are no prose pieces from Mallarme in full volume in north america.

"Immaculate Tongue"--> exposes the idea as a temptation and impossible point where poetry can not reach--> totally private-->[take a look at the tongue of Saint Anthony.] The double state of speech: immediate, crude (propaganda) & essential (poetic).

[To disinfect language from the contamination of ________.]

Poetry separated a tongue within language.

"The poetic act consists in seeing suddenly that the idea separates into several states of equal value..." Mallarme.

Installation: videotape my tongue reciting my poems, just the mouth, tongue, and teeth.

Thought is gibberish. Gibberish is vulgate.

-flickering-->thought-->concentration-->vulgar.

-the poem is peculiar and general.

Hegel's Aesthetics.

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"Conversations On Dante" by Mandelstam

1. The quality of poetry can be defined by rapidity..one has to race across the weeds of a river cluttered with boats moving in disorder.

Mallarme emphasized syntax.
Molina is trying to figure out a "painterly syntax"= and uttering and solidification of words in reaction to the digital surface. Language as sculpture with no materials.

Catallus' "The Origin of The World".

The poetic tongue is always finding how she can replace the antagonistic statements with true thoughts. Poetry is fighting a historical war all the time.

[One will know when one is looking at a poet, as I once told Carlos Lara on the cellphone from the swiss alps to san diego.]

Poetry Piece:
1. Catch the words that are in constant movement through popular media.
2. Hold as many as you can in yr memory.
3. Watch them float across the room just before falling asleep.