It is time we had an interdisciplinary world. It is time we created a society where all levels of thinking and society can work together – so the individual psychologies can live together in a more
integrated society. Interdisciplinary thinking tries to promote environmentalism, capitalism, religion, heroic
individualism, and families simultaneously. Beauty, truth, and ethics are united.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Video Poem
This is an interesting idea -- a video poem. What are the possibilities with this?
12 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Exciting! I am the host and curator of SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse at the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, Canada. It's an annual screening event of poetry video and film from around the world. Two of my videopoems are at my site for viewing if you are interested.
Good gracious Dr. T, that's quite a Faustian task you've set for yourself, interdiscipinarian, the Grand Unifier of all Knowledge! Truly, I'm impressed at the scope of your knowledge. Thank you for taking notice of my video poem. As a result of some feedback, I was inspired this morning to violate the cardinal rule of poetry and...explain my motivations! Gads! So here goes...
This is really a gnostic meditation that expropriates the God-interregnum that Heidegger famously alludes to. It also brushes against Philip K. Dick's Exegesis (http://www.philipkdick.com/new_exegesis.html), the light-sparks gone into the world and, through the affliction of anamnesis, abandoning their restorative mission. I haven't watched the Matrix series of movies, preferring not to. But certainly it is a play on Dick's Black Iron Prison. I suggest the word ''soul' has a compelling Heideggerian autonomy. But as any poetry course will teach you, the word itself has become so amorpohous as to be quite meaningless and thus verboten in poetry. And yet, it has holds a stubborn relevance that, I feel, harks back to some powerful promordial emanation. Everybody uses it, continuously, in all sorts of banal ways. And yet it clings, almost supernaturally, to itself.
As I 'applied' this poem to video, it became less and less a poem. I found the need for it to become more tactile --more lyric than poetry, that is, more immediately apprehensible. After all the reader can't 'pore over' a video as a poem. For one thing, it's moving. So immediacy is an incontrovertible element of the form. I happen to believe that song lyrics and poetry are diametrically opposed, sharing only words in common. The modern song lyric thrives on cliche as it is a common touchstone among mostly-distracted listeners ona rush-hour drive to work, a jingle really. Inventiveness of language is not a goal of the lyric, while it is central to poetry.
I'm haunted by my recent readings of Heidegger, particularly in regard to Holderlin. Enough, he says, with the metaphysics and burgeoning new terminology that seeks only to conceal its faltering grasp with ever-new words! Language needs to be restored to its primordiality. The poet does this, or is supposed to. Cliche is language leaked of meaning through time. Not surprisingly, it heads the list of poetry no-no's. When Heidegger speaks of the poet "determing[ing] a new time", I immediately think of T. S. Eliot's still point in The Four Quartets: "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future, /And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable." Though on the contray, I think Heidegger might say all time IS redeemable, provided the poet succeeds in his mission of 'time determination'. In his essays, Eliot expounds upon this timelessness notion, and I paraphrase here, about how the truly contemporaneous poetry must encompass the past in order to be authentically present --in the present.
Sadly, 'the tradition' has become a pejorative for too many 'thoroughly modern poets' who betray their ingrained consumerist tendencies by disfavoring old things. Or perhaps it's a fundamental laziness, an immature rush to advertise oneself to the world ala America's Best Idol-itis? As Harold Bloom notes, poetry is an essentially Oedipal process, the son resisting the father's trod ground by launching off in a new direction, a counter-positioned 'school'. But how can the father be properly euthanized if the son (or daughter) lacks fundamental knowledge of him? Here then comes my rather schoolmarm-ish disclaimer: eat your broccoli and read great books.
Authentic poetry also launches against the conventional notion of language as an atomistic (solipsistic?) vehicle of communication, a transactional conveyance. It further undermines the 'I-emanation' of confessional or even didactic poetry, the overtly assertive voice in poetry that so pollutes the current corpus. Too many 'me's' is a sure sign the fox has entered the hen house. Day-to-day conversation is conducted, as Heidegger instructs, in a depleted or fallen language. Poets are language's restoration-artists. The last thing poetry needs is to trail the profane into an already besieged, sacred space ('Ode to the Dirty Sock' et al).
Though people routinely practice mastery over terminology, or at least think they do (an analog would be Heidegger's explorations of technology, another false-mastery illusion), the poet doesn't have mastery over language. Language practices mastery over him, or at a minimum exists beside him. It is autonomous and a priori, the Word gone into the world. The poet's role is thus salvivic. Reportage, prose-poetry, prurient confessionals, masturbatory daydreams and the like are decidedly 'of the world', the province of pulp literature or certainly of pedestrian prose. Sorry Virginia, poetry it ain't!
Indeed, the role of the poet is to create new worlds, to create the world anew, to show more of the world than anyone knew. Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," which only showed that, at the end of the Tractatus, at least, he had no earthy idea what poetry was for or about, for poetry uses language to expand language, to press into the unknown, marking a blaze to blaze a path into the unknown. Since poetry cuts a blaze, it has to do so in the known, at the edge of the known, so we will not get lost (as so much contemporary poetry loses us). Part of this ability to blaze into the unknown has to do with the musicality of poetry. Music is able to create and move emotions without words -- poetry makes use of the unsayable lurking in music and appropriates it. Indeed, if language and music originated in a bifurcation of a mating song, poetry is the primordial reunification of language and music into that song, creating news world, including the future, by mining the past. Thus, poetry is "classicist" at its deepest levels. Perhaps Heidegger tapped into this with his notions of "rootedness," not really knowing what he was getting at.
To discover the new, one had to know the old world. How embarrassed would you be to claim that you had discovered new territory, only to find your cousins living in a town there? Yet poets and other artists do this all the time. There is a story told about John Barthes and Donald Barthelme, where Barthelme visited Barthes' creative writing class. Barthelme told the students they had to read all of the world's philosophy before they could write. They objected that Professor Barthes had already told them they had to know all of world literature. Barthelme agreed, saying they needed to know all of world literature, all of philosophy, all science, psychology, etc. before they were ready to write a single word. They were, of course, exaggerating -- but they were making a valid point. One cannot know what the new is until you know what has already been done.
"for poetry uses language to expand language, to press into the unknown, marking a blaze to blaze a path into the unknown."
I would suggest poetry is reclamatory, not trail-blazing. It is gathering up the past to renew it in the present. Of course as we march into the future, day by day, the sense is that we are blazing forward. Actually the future poses the whole new quandary as did the day before, making the past relevant to a new present --a Sysyphian task.
This is the retrospective yearning that informs Heidegger, the 'going back to' the Greeks, hopping over the Judeo-Christian era.
To quote the poet Frederick Turner, "Sometimes you have to break the shackles of the past to create the future; sometimes you have to break the shackles of the present to do so." The way you do the latter is precisely by going back to the past. There is no getting out of time, so we will be creating the future one way or the other. But poetry should always be discovering new lands. It only does so safely when anchored in the known, in the past. It is trail-blazing when it is reclamatory.
Indeed, the past is what it is. But if we become so enamored of the past that all we really do is reproduce it uncritically and make things that, say, Coleridge could have made, then the past is acting as a shackle.
Undifferentiated, or circular, time is also the most primitive form and idea of time. A good poem does of course contain this form of time, but also cyclical, linear, ascendent, descendent, and fractal time as well.
Are 'primitive' and 'primordial' effectively synonyms in this context?
"The primordial time of the unconscious is the time of the 'always already but not yet.' It is what Heidegger, in his 1927 lectures, calls the time of the 'always earlier.'"
--from "Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis", by Ned Lukacher
It would be close to the same thing. Primordial implies that it occurs right before the primitive. Cro-Magnon Man was a primitive man, but Australopithecus was a primordial man.
12 comments:
Exciting! I am the host and curator of SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse at the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, Canada. It's an annual screening event of poetry video and film from around the world. Two of my videopoems are at my site for viewing if you are interested.
http://www.heatherhaley.com
Warm regards,
H
H''
Good gracious Dr. T, that's quite a Faustian task you've set for yourself, interdiscipinarian, the Grand Unifier of all Knowledge! Truly, I'm impressed at the scope of your knowledge. Thank you for taking notice of my video poem. As a result of some feedback, I was inspired this morning to violate the cardinal rule of poetry and...explain my motivations! Gads!
So here goes...
This is really a gnostic meditation that expropriates the God-interregnum that Heidegger famously alludes to. It also brushes against Philip K. Dick's Exegesis (http://www.philipkdick.com/new_exegesis.html), the light-sparks gone into the world and, through the affliction of anamnesis, abandoning their restorative mission. I haven't watched the Matrix series of movies, preferring not to. But certainly it is a play on Dick's Black Iron Prison. I suggest the word ''soul' has a compelling Heideggerian autonomy. But as any poetry course will teach you, the word itself has become so amorpohous as to be quite meaningless and thus verboten in poetry. And yet, it has holds a stubborn relevance that, I feel, harks back to some powerful promordial emanation. Everybody uses it, continuously, in all sorts of banal ways. And yet it clings, almost supernaturally, to itself.
As I 'applied' this poem to video, it became less and less a poem. I found the need for it to become more tactile --more lyric than poetry, that is, more immediately apprehensible. After all the reader can't 'pore over' a video as a poem. For one thing, it's moving. So immediacy is an incontrovertible element of the form. I happen to believe that song lyrics and poetry are diametrically opposed, sharing only words in common. The modern song lyric thrives on cliche as it is a common touchstone among mostly-distracted listeners ona rush-hour drive to work, a jingle really. Inventiveness of language is not a goal of the lyric, while it is central to poetry.
I'm haunted by my recent readings of Heidegger, particularly in regard to Holderlin. Enough, he says, with the metaphysics and burgeoning new terminology that seeks only to conceal its faltering grasp with ever-new words! Language needs to be restored to its primordiality. The poet does this, or is supposed to. Cliche is language leaked of meaning through time. Not surprisingly, it heads the list of poetry no-no's. When Heidegger speaks of the poet "determing[ing] a new time", I immediately think of T. S. Eliot's still point in The Four Quartets: "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future, /And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable." Though on the contray, I think Heidegger might say all time IS redeemable, provided the poet succeeds in his mission of 'time determination'.
In his essays, Eliot expounds upon this timelessness notion, and I paraphrase here, about how the truly contemporaneous poetry must encompass the past in order to be authentically present --in the present.
Sadly, 'the tradition' has become a pejorative for too many 'thoroughly modern poets' who betray their ingrained consumerist tendencies by disfavoring old things. Or perhaps it's a fundamental laziness, an immature rush to advertise oneself to the world ala America's Best Idol-itis? As Harold Bloom notes, poetry is an essentially Oedipal process, the son resisting the father's trod ground by launching off in a new direction, a counter-positioned 'school'. But how can the father be properly euthanized if the son (or daughter) lacks fundamental knowledge of him? Here then comes my rather schoolmarm-ish disclaimer: eat your broccoli and read great books.
Authentic poetry also launches against the conventional notion of language as an atomistic (solipsistic?) vehicle of communication, a transactional conveyance. It further undermines the 'I-emanation' of confessional or even didactic poetry, the overtly assertive voice in poetry that so pollutes the current corpus. Too many 'me's' is a sure sign the fox has entered the hen house. Day-to-day conversation is conducted, as Heidegger instructs, in a depleted or fallen language. Poets are language's restoration-artists. The last thing poetry needs is to trail the profane into an already besieged, sacred space ('Ode to the Dirty Sock' et al).
Though people routinely practice mastery over terminology, or at least think they do (an analog would be Heidegger's explorations of technology, another false-mastery illusion), the poet doesn't have mastery over language. Language practices mastery over him, or at a minimum exists beside him. It is autonomous and a priori, the Word gone into the world. The poet's role is thus salvivic. Reportage, prose-poetry, prurient confessionals, masturbatory daydreams and the like are decidedly 'of the world', the province of pulp literature or certainly of pedestrian prose. Sorry Virginia, poetry it ain't!
take care
norm ball
Indeed, the role of the poet is to create new worlds, to create the world anew, to show more of the world than anyone knew. Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," which only showed that, at the end of the Tractatus, at least, he had no earthy idea what poetry was for or about, for poetry uses language to expand language, to press into the unknown, marking a blaze to blaze a path into the unknown. Since poetry cuts a blaze, it has to do so in the known, at the edge of the known, so we will not get lost (as so much contemporary poetry loses us). Part of this ability to blaze into the unknown has to do with the musicality of poetry. Music is able to create and move emotions without words -- poetry makes use of the unsayable lurking in music and appropriates it. Indeed, if language and music originated in a bifurcation of a mating song, poetry is the primordial reunification of language and music into that song, creating news world, including the future, by mining the past. Thus, poetry is "classicist" at its deepest levels. Perhaps Heidegger tapped into this with his notions of "rootedness," not really knowing what he was getting at.
To discover the new, one had to know the old world. How embarrassed would you be to claim that you had discovered new territory, only to find your cousins living in a town there? Yet poets and other artists do this all the time. There is a story told about John Barthes and Donald Barthelme, where Barthelme visited Barthes' creative writing class. Barthelme told the students they had to read all of the world's philosophy before they could write. They objected that Professor Barthes had already told them they had to know all of world literature. Barthelme agreed, saying they needed to know all of world literature, all of philosophy, all science, psychology, etc. before they were ready to write a single word. They were, of course, exaggerating -- but they were making a valid point. One cannot know what the new is until you know what has already been done.
"for poetry uses language to expand language, to press into the unknown, marking a blaze to blaze a path into the unknown."
I would suggest poetry is reclamatory, not trail-blazing. It is gathering up the past to renew it in the present. Of course as we march into the future, day by day, the sense is that we are blazing forward. Actually the future poses the whole new quandary as did the day before, making the past relevant to a new present --a Sysyphian task.
This is the retrospective yearning that informs Heidegger, the 'going back to' the Greeks, hopping over the Judeo-Christian era.
To quote the poet Frederick Turner, "Sometimes you have to break the shackles of the past to create the future; sometimes you have to break the shackles of the present to do so." The way you do the latter is precisely by going back to the past. There is no getting out of time, so we will be creating the future one way or the other. But poetry should always be discovering new lands. It only does so safely when anchored in the known, in the past. It is trail-blazing when it is reclamatory.
"It is trail-blazing when it is reclamatory."
Now that's a paradox I can live with Dr. T!
Though I'm less enamoured of the past as a shackle. It is what it was.
norm
Indeed, the past is what it is. But if we become so enamored of the past that all we really do is reproduce it uncritically and make things that, say, Coleridge could have made, then the past is acting as a shackle.
Interesting you would cite Coleridge as he describes the oroborus structure of a poem, the archetype of undifferentiated or circular time.
Undifferentiated, or circular, time is also the most primitive form and idea of time. A good poem does of course contain this form of time, but also cyclical, linear, ascendent, descendent, and fractal time as well.
Are 'primitive' and 'primordial' effectively synonyms in this context?
"The primordial time of the unconscious is the time of the 'always already but not yet.' It is what Heidegger, in his 1927 lectures, calls the time of the 'always earlier.'"
--from "Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis", by Ned Lukacher
It would be close to the same thing. Primordial implies that it occurs right before the primitive. Cro-Magnon Man was a primitive man, but Australopithecus was a primordial man.
FYI Dr. T, I have a companion-essay in Dogmatika this month accompanying the Season of Affliction video-poem.
http://dogmatika.com/dm/writing_more.php?id=3289_0_7_0_M
take care
norm ball
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