Jim Leftwich: I am looking for examples of a certain kind of thinking about poetry which, if pursued to its logical extremes, would eventually include considerations of asemic and/or desemantized writing.
Charles Olson
Andre Breton
William Wordsworth
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Denise Levertov
Emily Dickinson (Thomas Wentworth Higginson)
Gertrude Stein
Arthur Rimbaud
Hannah Weiner
Jan Arp
Adrienne Rich
John Cage
Marshall McLuhan (& Andy Warhol)
Claes Oldenburg
Sun Ra
Isidore Isou
Antonin Artaud
Hugo Ball
Diane di Prima
May Swenson
Jack Kerouac
Allen Ginsberg
Mina Loy
Lorine Niedecker
Nicanor Parra
John Wieners
Thomas Meyer
Dmitry Prigov
Hannah Höch
Varvara Stepanova
d.a.levy, D.R. Wagner and Kent Taylor
d.a.levy
Robert Creeley
Charles Olson, "Projective Verse" (1950)
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is the third term, will take away?
This is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is specially confronted by.
Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifesto (1924)
Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all:
Surrealism, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express ― verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner ― the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
I cannot, however, be insensible to the present outcry against the triviality and meanness, both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is more dishonourable to the Writer’s own character than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time, that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences. From such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy purpose. Not that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formerly conceived; but habits of meditation have, I trust, so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose. If this opinion be erroneous, I can have little right to the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.
[...]
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (1842):
The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye.
Denise Levertov, Some Notes on Organic Form (1965)
Form is never more than a revelation of content.
“The law—one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception” (Edward Dahlberg, as quoted by Charles Olson in “Projective Verse,” Selected Writings). I’ve always taken this to mean, “no loading of the rifts with ore,” because there are to be no rifts. Yet alongside this truth is another truth (that I’ve learned from Duncan more than from anyone else)—that there must be a place in the poem for rifts too—(never to be stuffed with imported ore). Great gaps between perception and perception which must be leapt across if they are to be crossed at all.
The X-factor, the magic, is when we come to those rifts and make those leaps. A religious devotion to the truth, to the splendor of the authentic, involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself; but when that devotion brings us to undreamed abysses and we find ourselves sailing slowly over them and landing on the other side—that’s ecstasy.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
April 16, 1862: I took [Emily Dickinson's letter of the previous day] from the post office in Worcester, Mass., where I was then living. It was postmarked "Amherst," and it was in a handwriting so peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town.
Dickinson envelope circa 1877
Gertrude Stein, In a conversation with John Hyde Preston which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1935
You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. Yes, before in a thought, but not in careful thinking. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition. You won't know how it was, even what it is, but it will be creation if it came out of the pen and out of you and not out of an architectural drawing of the thing you are doing.
Arthur Rimbaud, Letter To Georges Izambard (13 May 1871)
I'll be a worker: that is the idea that holds me back when mad rage drives me toward the battle of Paris where so many workers are still dying while I write to you. As for my working now, never, never; I'm on strike.
Now I am going in for debauch.Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a visionary: you won't possibly understand, and I don't know how to explain it to you. To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that's the point. The sufferings will be tremendous, but one must be strong, be born a poet: it is in no way my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought.
I is someone else. So much the worse for the wood that discovers it's a violin, and to hell with the heedless who cavil about something they know nothing about!
Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, Charleville (15 May 1871)
I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed– and the supreme Scholar!–Because he reaches the unknown!
Hannah Weiner, "If Workshop", Poetry Project Newsletter, February-March 1990
If you are a poet would you have the three obligations: work on yourself to become more conscious, work in the world to change it free and equal, include ecological survival, and work in poetic forms that themselves alter consciousness.
[...]
techniques of disjunctive, non-sequential, non-referential, writing can directly alter consciousness, whether by destroying long habits of rationality, by surprise tactics to which the brain responds differently, or by forcing a change to alpha level by engaging both hemispheres of the brain, choose your science.
Jean Arp, Dadaland (1948)
In 1915 Sophie Taeuber and I painted, embroidered, and did collages; all these works were drawn from the simplest forms and were probably the first examples of "concrete art." These works are Realities, pure and independent, with no meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free rein to the Elementary and the Spontaneous. Since the arrangement of planes and their proportions and colors seemed to hinge solely on chance, I declared that these works were arranged "according to the law of chance," as in the order of nature, chance being for me simply a part of an inexplicable reason, of an inaccessible order.
Jean Arp, Dadaland (1948)
I would meet with Tzara and Serner at the Odéon and in Zurich's Café de la Terrasse to work on a cycle of poems: The Hyperbola of the Crocodile-Hairdresser and the Cane. This kind of verse was subsequently dubbed "Automatic Poetry" by the surrealists. Automatic poetry emerges directly from the poet's guts or any other organ that has stored up reserves. Neither the Postilion of Longjumeau, nor the Alex- andrine, nor grammar, nor aesthetics, nor Buddha, nor the Sixth Commandment could interfere. The poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels at will. His poems are like nature: they stink, laugh, and rhyme like nature. Trivia, or at least what people call trivia, are as precious to him as sublime rhetoric, for in nature a broken twig is as beautiful and as important as a star, and it is men who arrogate for themselves the right to judge what is beautiful or ugly.
Adrienne Rich, Poetry and Experience (1964)
Today I have to say that what I know I know through making poems. Like the novelist who finds that his characters begin to have a life of their own and to demand certain experiences, I find that I can no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express those materials according to a prior plan: the poem itself engenders new sensations, new awareness in me as it progresses. Without for one moment turning my back on conscious choice and selection, I have been increasingly willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than one voice of a single idea. Perhaps a simple way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it. In my earlier poems I told you, as precisely and eloquently as I knew how, about something; in the more recent poems something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it.
John Cage, in conversation with Wes Nisker (originally published in the Winter 1986 issue of Inquiring Mind)
I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.
Statement by Marshall McLuhan famously appropriated by Andy Warhol:
Art is anything you can get away with.
----McLuhan, The Medium Is The Massage (1967)
Claes Oldenburg, I am for an art, from Store Days, Documents from the Store (1961)
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
Sun Ra, Words and The Impossible
The elasticity of words
The phonetic-dimension of words
The multi-self of words
Is energy for thought -- If it is a reality.
The idea that words
Can form themselves into the impossible
Then the way to the impossible
Is through the words.
Isidore Isou, MANIFESTO OF LETTERIST POETRY (1947)
ISIDORE ISOU Shows another way out between WORDS and RENUNCIATION:
LETTERS. He will create emotions against language, for the
pleasure of the tongue.
It consists of teaching that letters have a destination
other than words.
ISOU Will unmake words into their letters.
Each poet will integrate everything into Everything
Everything must be revealed by letters.
POETRY CAN NO LONGER BE REMADE.
ISIDORE ISOU IS STARTING
A NEW VEIN OF LYRICISM.
Anyone who can not leave words behind can stay back with them!
Antonin Artaud, from Ten Years That Language is Gone, Cahier 285 (April 1947)
Translated by Clayton Eshleman (published in 2004)
I am it seems a writer.
But am I writing?
I make sentences.
Without subject, verb attribute or complement.
I have learned words,
They taught me things.
In my turn I teach them a manner of new behaviour.
May the pommel of your tuve patten
entrumene you a red ani bivilt,
at the lumestin of the utrin cadastre.
This means that maybe the woman’s uterus turns red, when Van Gogh the
mad protester of man dabbles with finding their march for the
heavenly bodies of a too superb destiny.
And it means that its is time for writer to close shop, and to leave the written
letter for the letter”
Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto (1916)
I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows... Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins.
Diane di Prima, from November 6, 2013, a conversation with Hilton Obenzinger at Stanford University for a series called “How I Write, published by The Los Angeles Review of Books in January, 2021
And then I took a class with James Waring in composition. He was a choreographer, but I wanted to take his composition class. I was taking dance, and I was doing some performing with him. “Tonight we’re going to talk about form. Everything has a form.” He said nothing else. After about 10 minutes, we all started to go out the door. We were looking at everything. Oh, that has a form. That has a form. What he was telling us was all forms are okay. Leave your mind alone. Don’t mess with everything all the time. And I started to write and tried to follow my mind wherever it went, what [poet] Philip [Whalen] calls the graph of the moving mind. Write exactly what’s happening as closely as you can.
And one of the things that came out of that was Calculus of Variations. One of the things I learned from Jimmy’s class was taking a structure and then hanging absolute freedom on the structure.
May Swenson
Poetry is based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness.
Jack Kerouac, from BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 118th Chorus (1959)
Music is noise, Poetry dirt.
Allen Ginsberg, from MIND WRITING SLOGANS (1994)
Surprise Mind — A. G.
Ordinary Mind includes eternal perceptions. — A. G.
Notice what you notice. — A. G.
Catch yourself thinking. — A. G.
Mina Loy, from Aphorisms on Futurism (1914)
IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed.
AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.
THE mind is a magician bound by assimilations; let him loose and the smallest idea conceived in freedom will suffice to negate the wisdom of all forefathers.
CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that molds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.
CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.
LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re-create.
Lorine Niedecker, The Poetry of Louis Zukofsky (1956)
Technically, a recurring thing, for all but the apathetic student, is never the same -- though the idea of recurrence is useful to establish relationships, to reveal kinship.
_________________________________________
Poet’s work
Grandfather
advised me:
learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoff
from this
condensery
Nicanor Parra, from LETTERS FROM A POET WHO SLEEPS IN A CHAIR (1985)
V
Young poets
Say whatever you want
Pick your own style
Too much blood has gone under the bridge
To still believe -I believe-
That there's only one way to cross the road:
You can do anything in poetry.
John Wieners, from The Journal of John Wieners is to be Called 707 Scott Street for Billie Holiday 1959
I must forget how to write. I must unlearn what has been taught me.
_________________________________________
I must learn how not to write. I must watch with my 5 senses
_________________________________________
All I am interested in is charting the progress of my own soul. And my poetics consist of marking down how each action unrolls. Without my will. It moves. So that each man has his own poetic.
_________________________________________
Thomas Meyer, from ISIS' MEMORY (Caterpillar 5/6, 1970)
The most astonishing fact on which poetry thrives is that every sentence (or projected unit of utterance) CAN stop, not complete itself & begin again as a new sentence related or unrelated to its own initial impulse or sound. No where else in the cosmos is this aspect of will & magic so clearly & precisely manifest.
Dmitry Prigov, from an interview with Philip Metres (1996)
You know, the thing is that no great myth exists now in which a hero could appear. I have written other discourses-the liberal-democratic, the national-patriotic, the contemporary homosexual, the mass metaphysical—these are big discourses—but it’s not necessary to write about heroes. One could just describe a kind of writing. Then there’s the very complex problem of self-presentation-as poet not existing in quantity of poems but as “manipulator.” I have a big project which is about images—I have to write 2,000 poems per year, 24,000 poems overall. It’s also a project that is a type of poetic conduct, more than anything. So I don’t have any problem finding material—some people just don’t understand the structure of this work.
(In 2005, Prigov estimated that he had written 35,000 poems. He died of a heart attack in 2007.)
Hannah Höch
There are millions and millions of other justifiable points of view besides yours and mine. I would like to blur the firm borders that we human beings, cocksure as we are, are inclined to erect around everything that is accessible to us.
I would like to show the world today as an ant sees it and tomorrow as the moon sees it.
Varvara Stepanova (1919)
I connect the new movement of non-objective poetry as sound and letter with painterly perception, and this imbues the sound of poetry with a new and vital visual impression. By blowing up the deadly monotony of fused printed letters by means of painterly graphics, I am approaching a new type of creativity. On the other hand, by using painterly graphics to reproduce the non-objective poetry of the two books Zigra ar and Riny chomle, I am introducing the graphics of sound as a new quality into painting, thereby augmenting its quantitative possibilities.
d.a.levy, D.R. Wagner and Kent Taylor, from Para-Concrete Manifesto
Our concrete poems are Shit
each poem a tiny spat of diarrrrhea
growing into infinite globules of cement excrement
our concrete poems
are beyond concrete poems
Where DaDaism failed, preaching Anti-Art
but creating art & the NaDaists failed by creating an art of nothing-
ness when they proclaimed NOTHING - the cleveland cement fuckers will
succeed in giving the Public SHIT. . .
each poem - a new death of WORDS AS ART.
d.a.levy, from Suburban Monastery Death Poem (1968)
its so easy to convince poets
what poetry is
and what it isnt
& everyone knows
sleeping with the muse
is only for young poets
after you've been kept impotent
by style & form & words like "art"
after being published by the RIGHT publishers
and having all the right answers
after youve earned the right to call yrself
a poet yr dead
& lying on yr back
drinking ceremonial wine, while
the muse, who is always a young girl
with old eyes into the universe
suddenly remembers necrophilia
is an experience shes had before
& shes not interrested
in straddling corpses anymore
Robert Creeley, from Pieces (1969)
p.36
The pen,
the lines it
leaves, forms
divine -- nor
laugh nor giggle.
This prescription
is true.
Truth is a scrawl,
all told
in all.
p.62
Each moment constitutes reality,
or rather may constitute
reality, or may have done
so, or perhaps will.
p.65
So that's what you do:
ask the same question
and keep answering.
