"No Digression"
Louis Dudek
From Reality Games (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1998)
The method of writers like Rabelais, Laurence Sterne, Marcel Proust, T.S. Eliot in "The Waste Land," and Ezra Pound in the Pisan Cantos, we might say, is one of digression.
But digression is only possible if one is going somewhere: then there is either progression or occasional digression. If one is going nowhere, what then is it?
I would say it has taken writers a very long time to discover what in fact is the implicit order or beauty in a strong undirected form of writing. For this is neither progression nor digression, it is pure expression.
It is a holy thing, that only happens under a state of sustained emotion or concern, or a profound sense of "inspiration," since the source of that order and beauty is not in itself known; and yet writers have rarely trusted it enough to yield to it completely.
T.S. Eliot later called "The Waste Land" a ragged shapeless poem, or words to that effect, because he did not believe in the order of free associative expression. He seemed to renounce the poem, and he did not write anything more in that form, with the result that his poetry withered away and died on the vine.
Ezra Pound, also, wrote huge chunks of the Cantos in a patterned organized way, so far as he was able to organize it. It was only in the Pisan Cantos, after he was ripped out of his safe and secure life and slammed into a military prison, that he began to write in that spontaneous disjointed way that allows the deeper self to express itself. The Pisan Cantos are by far his best work, and the best part of the entire Cantos.
But Pound was only half-aware of what he was doing; that is, he was not aware of the meaning of the shattered form that his mind had manifested.
When 1 was writing the first pages of Atlantis (then still untitled), while travelling by steamboat to Italy, I wrote the following lines as we were approaching Gibraltar --
"Today we passed over Atlantis,
which is our true home..."
In a flash I had the title of my poem, which occurred to me then and there, and I had struck the metaphoric or mythical element in the word, which has since played so large a part in my thinking.
What is this element? One of the ideas I had haunting me while I was writing Atlantis was that no matter how far I was wandering, in my mind and in my travels, there was an inscrutable order and life, that existed in the poem, which had nothing to do with planning or conscious structure. I was sure that there is a structure or form, in the movement of human life and in large free poems, that transcends such things as “outline" and "development" and prepared design.
This self-generated structure is represented by the idea of Atlantis. It is an ideal order also, which is conceived to be potential, or real, and gives some shape and meaning to our groping, stumbling, disordered lives -- for we are all groping and stumbling toward Atlantis -- and which gives shape to the imagination when it is aroused by emotions, experiences, and hopes or fears in the sphere of the possible.
+++++
Louis Dudek's "No Digression" offers several remarkable insights helpful to understanding some of the choices available to poets given poetry's situation today. Turn aside from its stale vocab of "ideal order," "deeper self," "pure expression," "metaphoric or mythical element in the word." At issue are the relationships that a sequence of poems might establish to its own formal patternings. Dudek limits their pre-determining reach on how a poem-sequence might unfold, in order to allow in an "other side" to inform the motivations of a poem-sequence. Imposing such a limit on pattern could easily be read as desired regression to an earlier moment of contemporary poetry, that of "pure expression," but I don't read "No Digression" this way because Dudek's poetry doesn't demonstrate expressive form very well at all (his poems do often demonstrate reaction, though -- so the insight I'm suggesting he offers poetry today comes despite his poetry's reactive aspects). In "No Digression," I take Dudek as making a distinction between formal patterning conceived of as wallpaper or as "screen." As wallpaper, formal patterning is a decorative design to be glued onto a background in order to create volume effects. But as screen, formal patterning is permeable and membranous, created by refraction and division (they shift and have relative values) between a here and a there, an inside and an outside (and not all are dichotomous like these ones, either), etc. The other side of form (when conceived of as a set of screens) is not known nor pre-determinable by the poet -- the other side is not part of the formal patterning itself and yet is integral to the poem-sequence and to its desired effects (social and formal). Formal patterning as "screen" in this sense opens the poem-sequence to an other side. Formal patterning as wallpaper has no conception whatsoever of there being an other side to its own wall: the poem it makes is a well-engineered design toy, the poet working in a toy factory or Legoland without knowing it.
From Reality Games (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1998)
The method of writers like Rabelais, Laurence Sterne, Marcel Proust, T.S. Eliot in "The Waste Land," and Ezra Pound in the Pisan Cantos, we might say, is one of digression.
But digression is only possible if one is going somewhere: then there is either progression or occasional digression. If one is going nowhere, what then is it?
I would say it has taken writers a very long time to discover what in fact is the implicit order or beauty in a strong undirected form of writing. For this is neither progression nor digression, it is pure expression.
It is a holy thing, that only happens under a state of sustained emotion or concern, or a profound sense of "inspiration," since the source of that order and beauty is not in itself known; and yet writers have rarely trusted it enough to yield to it completely.
T.S. Eliot later called "The Waste Land" a ragged shapeless poem, or words to that effect, because he did not believe in the order of free associative expression. He seemed to renounce the poem, and he did not write anything more in that form, with the result that his poetry withered away and died on the vine.
Ezra Pound, also, wrote huge chunks of the Cantos in a patterned organized way, so far as he was able to organize it. It was only in the Pisan Cantos, after he was ripped out of his safe and secure life and slammed into a military prison, that he began to write in that spontaneous disjointed way that allows the deeper self to express itself. The Pisan Cantos are by far his best work, and the best part of the entire Cantos.
But Pound was only half-aware of what he was doing; that is, he was not aware of the meaning of the shattered form that his mind had manifested.
When 1 was writing the first pages of Atlantis (then still untitled), while travelling by steamboat to Italy, I wrote the following lines as we were approaching Gibraltar --
"Today we passed over Atlantis,
which is our true home..."
In a flash I had the title of my poem, which occurred to me then and there, and I had struck the metaphoric or mythical element in the word, which has since played so large a part in my thinking.
What is this element? One of the ideas I had haunting me while I was writing Atlantis was that no matter how far I was wandering, in my mind and in my travels, there was an inscrutable order and life, that existed in the poem, which had nothing to do with planning or conscious structure. I was sure that there is a structure or form, in the movement of human life and in large free poems, that transcends such things as “outline" and "development" and prepared design.
This self-generated structure is represented by the idea of Atlantis. It is an ideal order also, which is conceived to be potential, or real, and gives some shape and meaning to our groping, stumbling, disordered lives -- for we are all groping and stumbling toward Atlantis -- and which gives shape to the imagination when it is aroused by emotions, experiences, and hopes or fears in the sphere of the possible.
+++++
Louis Dudek's "No Digression" offers several remarkable insights helpful to understanding some of the choices available to poets given poetry's situation today. Turn aside from its stale vocab of "ideal order," "deeper self," "pure expression," "metaphoric or mythical element in the word." At issue are the relationships that a sequence of poems might establish to its own formal patternings. Dudek limits their pre-determining reach on how a poem-sequence might unfold, in order to allow in an "other side" to inform the motivations of a poem-sequence. Imposing such a limit on pattern could easily be read as desired regression to an earlier moment of contemporary poetry, that of "pure expression," but I don't read "No Digression" this way because Dudek's poetry doesn't demonstrate expressive form very well at all (his poems do often demonstrate reaction, though -- so the insight I'm suggesting he offers poetry today comes despite his poetry's reactive aspects). In "No Digression," I take Dudek as making a distinction between formal patterning conceived of as wallpaper or as "screen." As wallpaper, formal patterning is a decorative design to be glued onto a background in order to create volume effects. But as screen, formal patterning is permeable and membranous, created by refraction and division (they shift and have relative values) between a here and a there, an inside and an outside (and not all are dichotomous like these ones, either), etc. The other side of form (when conceived of as a set of screens) is not known nor pre-determinable by the poet -- the other side is not part of the formal patterning itself and yet is integral to the poem-sequence and to its desired effects (social and formal). Formal patterning as "screen" in this sense opens the poem-sequence to an other side. Formal patterning as wallpaper has no conception whatsoever of there being an other side to its own wall: the poem it makes is a well-engineered design toy, the poet working in a toy factory or Legoland without knowing it.
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