william watkin's blog (since 2003)

Introduction Incommensurable: adjective 1 not able to be judged or measured by the same standards. Commensurable: adjective 1 measurable by the same standard. 2 (commensurable to) proportionate to. 3 Mathematics (of numbers) in a ratio equal to a ratio of integers. — ORIGIN Latin commensurabilis, from mensurare ‘to measure’. This has been an age, and ours has been a discipline of incommensurability. Modernism and the Avant-Garde Modernism itself was based on a simple, avant-garde gesture, which was a willing of art to become incommensurable. The rejection of aesthetic values, of the very idea of aesthetic evaluation by professionals or class-privileged individuals, a core value to modernism in all its manifestations, is the taking on of an incommensurability: my poem is not to be measured against or judged by your standards of either prosody, or literature. This was the gamble of the avant-garde incommensurable artists: reject the standards of existing art and in doing so reject the v...

While is is fairly easy to the my students to understand that postmodern poetry is a form of critique of normative poetic strategies of the 20th century, often I find that, in an odd way, they don't necessarily see such strategies as normative. They are not normal for them in that way that for most normal people poetry is totally abnormal. I am them left with the need to teach them what normal is so they can see why Ashbery is not normal. Anyway, here is one way I do it. I usually illustrate first with a poem by Heaney, "Digging" "Death of a Naturalist" something horribly late-Romantic. Then get them to read some O'Hara and Ashbery. It always works. Normative poetry is called variously traditional, realist, late-Romantic, free-verse or voice poetics Elements of The traditional poem: Titular Law: the title announces the meaning Formal regularity and coherence Thematic coherence Significant Lineation (rhyme or strong enjambment) Coherence (narrative, lo...

Redemption, Limits and Swallows Whilst Ash investigates the redemptive power of the elegiac poetic process, Ashbery’s poem is based on the aporias discovered at the outer edges of this process, or what might be called the limits of poetic thinking. Derrida describes the aporia thus: “Paradox, scandal, and aporia are themselves nothing other than sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, as its death and finitude” (Derrida, The Gift of Death 68). What is the limit of poetic thinking? “Fragment” suggests that the edge of the conceptualisation of poetic language is that of the consciousness which, according to Ashbery, controls everything else: “My power over you is absolute. / You exist only in me and on account of me” (Ashbery 79). And yet this consciousness, as the trope of the fragment suggests, can never be encountered in full, and its paratactic accumulations and distributions of the fragments of this self emanate from a vacated subject centre. The combination s...

Ashbery and Ash: The Harp and the Cave Ash’s poetry works on how he can cite the past in poetic language and thus redeem it, without reducing the rubble of its current state of ruination to a kind of gothic theme-park testifying to the permanent presence of absence in our lives. In “Scenes from Schumann” he again comes up against the artefact and the ruin: “The urns showed well against the blue of the river, / and beyond them, the ruins of the old insane asylum, / covered in leaves...” (Ash 156). Here the urn, traditional tropic centre of the transformation of absence into presence thanks to Keats, is not so much juxtaposed ruins as placed on top of or against them, which is a means of imposing an artistic unity onto actual ruination. This is the aporia of the non-redemptive monument. However he then goes on to undermine this: “the words / took off like birds from our lips, to circle an absence // that couldn’t be named without turning the feast to ashes. / Not that the talk died. No, ...

John Ash, Melancholic Historian The semantic paradox at the heart of elegy makes it a prime site for the investigation of a semantics of absence, namely the construction of a monument to absence whose monumental presence, in consoling the mourner, actually ends the process of elegy and destroys the very presence of absence the monument was meant to preserve. Ash seems sensitive to this basic paradox in a work like “The Monuments” where a fictional community commit themselves to an endless process of building monuments even though, “The Monuments meant nothing of course” (Ash 134). The reasoning behind this is melancholy, “Each year the monuments grew larger / The citizens demanded this. As their lives got worse they wanted / longer staircases to descend, towering fountains...” (Ash 133). In the poem the role of art is to “take the place / of events too unbearable to discuss” (Ash 134), a classic formulation of the consoling power of the elegiac monumental utterance: to produce a reifie...

A rare image of the elusive poet John Ash Not much if anything has been written about the work of UK poet John Ash. This is a shame. Along with Lee Harwood, he represents the successful export and development of New York School poetics intoa European environment. Which is not to say that he is also his own man. In fact the much mentioned similarities between Ash and Ashbery, the basis in some sense for this paper, are overstated. That said, here I am stating them. This was originally presented at the Symbiosis conference in UCL towards the end of last century. Sorry, couldn't resist the grandeur of that phrase. Like so many of my earlier works it was accepted for publication by Symbiosis only to be cut when the editors got chicken over using theory to analyse poetry. Ashbery's Fragment The beginning of dizain 3 of John Ashbery’s “Fragment” expresses the paradox of poetic edges: “This page is the end of nothing / To the top of that other” (Ashbery 78). The poem was written in a...

Malevich, Black Square "O black black black black black" Patterning Machines: Towards an Avant-Garde Prosody In traditional prosody, of which Koch is aware, there are three basic methods of sensible patterning: rhythm, rhyme, and spacing. Each of these is absolutely determined by repetition of the same and repetition as difference, the first two parts of machine grammar. Rhythm repeats the same stresses in a regular pattern called metre, rhyme repeats the same sound at the stage of the final syllable of a line, and lineation (imposed space at the end and so between lines) makes sure this happens after the same number of syllables, as well as organising complex variations of this. Yet, metre is a function of the mind which recognises regularity of stress through the regularity of non-stress in a binary fashion. [i] While all speech has stress, metre organises stress into an abstract pattern of similarity and difference. Rhyme meanwhile produces two exact sensible repetitions...

"O black black black black black" Cohesion Machines While it is easy to see the significance of poetry machines at the level of linguistics or at the level of literary theory, to relate the two things together so as to fully understand the impact of Koch’s work one needs an interim discipline such as stylistics. Stylistics has a number of terms for the modes of repetition in literary texts but they fail in some respects as they are, on the whole, concerned only with cohesion while Koch’s use of repetition is always deviant. Still, they are essential tools for understanding repetition in Koch’s work and I have already mentioned anaphora, which is an example of the RD part of my grammar. In addition, we must consider Geoffrey Leech’s foundational terms free verbal repetition and verbal parallelism, along with more general stylistic terms such as parallelism, cohesion and deviance. Leech chooses a quotation from the bible to present his idea of free verbal repetition, a passage ...

Grammar Machines It must be made clear at this point that the idea of a deep structure which may be said to be the grammar machine of Koch’s poetry is, like the idea of the machine itself, really just a figurative concept. The trope of the machine is something I am using, following on from a number of other poststructural thinkers, in particular Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, to better describe the mechanistic nature of much of Koch’s work. Similarly, the use of the idea of a poetic deep structure is really only to allow us to better document the peculiarly mechanistic manner in which Koch composes his highly repetitious poems. To do this I will consider three very different poems from Koch’s early career, When the Sun Tries to Go On¸ “Sleeping with women,” and “Collected Poems,” all generated in the same machine-like way in relation to the ideas of deep structure in generative grammar, cohesion in stylistics, and patterning in traditional prosody. The aim is first to break poetry...

Poetry Ideas—Poetry Language—Poetry Machines The theory of “poetry machines” comes from Koch’s own theory of “poetry ideas” which he developed to teach children to write poetry. Koch explains: I taught reading poetry and writing poetry as one subject. I brought them together by means of “poetry ideas,” which were suggestions I would give to children for writing poems of their own in some way like the poems they were studying...for the Wish Poem, starting every line with “I wish.” [i] Already one can see in this passage the mechanistic poetic technique that dominates Koch’s own work, and although poetry ideas are not fully worked out, I think, in Koch’s mind, with little more in his prose work to really develop the concept, however one definite feature of the concept is repetition as a mode of cohesion: As for trying difficult forms, this was all pulverized into one form or variations of one form: repetition. I would say, “Start every line with ‘I wish,’” “Put your favorite color in ...