mike,
for a very different perspective on aging from an american poet from the
heartland (wisconsin I think) you should take a look at jim harrison, ex.
"And you my loves, few as there have been, let's lie
and say it could never have been otherwise.
"So that: we may glide off in peace, not howling
like orphans in this endless century of war."
but . . .
when I was re-reading yeats and writing my comments it occurred to me how
there is a struggle between interpretation of art and poetry (are we simply
trying to reconstruct what the poet meant or are we explicating how the
poem affects us and what is the difference?) and what we do when we analyze
(and yes we analyze) cultural forms from another perspective, say that of
CHAT or ecological semiotics or semiotic ecology or cultural materialism or
structuralist marxism or what E.P. Thompson did in his wonderful study of
Blake. One thing is for sure, not too many people count the words in a poem
and counting is certainly acceptable (if not indispensable) in the kind of
research most of us engage in or have engaged in at one time or another.
How do these different approaches influence each other?
I think Bob Dylan once said about his poetry that he had no idea where it
came from . . . and Gary Snyder wrote that wonderful short poem "How Poetry
Comes to Me."
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light.
Yes Snyder's muse probably is a bear, but still . .
Recently I obtained Karl-Otto Apel's wonderful study of Peirce and it has
clarified for me the attraction I've always felt for the latter -- in
particular Peirce's position that universals are not arbitrary and dependent
on opinions (whether they be individual or collective). But the source,
form, and content (what's the difference?) of poetry seems
so different in form from what Peirce considered the activity that uses
hypothesis (abduction), induction, and deduction to arrive at "one True
conclusion" (Collected works 5.384). Even if our interpretations of what a
poem "means" could be given a final form, wouldn't that kill the poem
itself, sort of like telling someone what happens in a movie or explaining a
joke. Even telling someone what the poem made you feel probably wouldn't
produce the feeling in the other person.
Geez, talk about rambling,
but I also like what the sadly misunderstood american poet and man of
letters, Robert Bly, wrote in "Leaping Poetry"
"My idea, then, is that a great work of art often has at is center a
long floating leap, around which the work of art in ancient time used to
gather itself like steel shavings . . . The real joy of poetry is to
experience this leaping inside a poem. A poet who is "leaping" makes a jump
from an object soaked in unconscous substance to an object or idea soaked in
conscious psychic substance."
He uses Plato's magnetic image to convey the power of poetry . . . and back
in the early periods of the formation of social consciousness and language
(50,000, 75,000 yrs ago?) surely that kind of leaping must have coalesced
those mythic lattice works that as Levi-Strauss claimed form the logical
basis of what was "good to think with.", constantly being broken apart and
put back together again in the play of sound like water ever changing, is
it talking to you or are you just hearing things?
Ah but enough rambling . . . but
On the units of analysis front I feel the need to clarify. My use of the
term was that of Bakhurst's analysis of Vygotsky's usage which he compared
to Marx's as Vygotsky himself did if I'm not mistaken: unit analysis =
analysis of concrete universals. I have the feeling that the way the
discussion has gone, most are using the term more broadly to mean something
like the appropriate empirical-practical reality for a given type of study.
That is not how I meant to use the term "unit of analysis" which could also
be phrased "material ideal".
Paul H. Dillon
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Cole <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2000 8:30 PM
Subject: struggling toward Byzantium
>
> Randy and Paul-- Your messages taken together with a reading of Sailing to
> Byzantium up against "Among School Children" and "Leda and the Swan" and
> out previous discussion has my head spinning. We have an old paperback
copy
> of selected poems, and reading in this section of the book, selections
> from *The Tower* indicates so many cross-cutting and complementary-or-
> competing images.
>
> Randy's reading of Among Schoolchildren really helped me a lot with the
> issue of time, the blending of past/present/future from the perspective
> of a 60 year old public man. I did not know about the nobel prize. I
> only knew a little of Yeat's liasons. I did not know the reference to
> Plato's yolk/egg and how it fit with Leda's progeny. The interpretation
> of the last paragraph seems, indeed, to fall into place, and the idea
> of the different phases of the oak as part of the dance was fascinating
> to me.
>
> Yeats seems transfixed by the possibiliity of monuments of unageing
> intellect. He knows better, but years to be one. In Among Schoolchildren
> he tries to console himself, but here he flees to the realm of the ideal.
>
> I don't know enough to know how platonic he is being, Paul. The ideals he
> picks are not saints on alters as eternal/ideal icons as in the prior
> poem (AS), but they are not NATURAL things he wants to model his bodily
> form on, but cultural ideals, hammered out of manufactured metal.
>
> I get a strong feeling from this small sample, that a broader reading of
> Yeats would provide a lot of interesting ideas about development. I was
> not so sure reading just AS (and not understanding the last stanza!) but
> reading more of the poems and seeing the way that aging is dealt with from
> some many angles makes me think that a week or two spent looking at just
> the developmental aspects of yeat's ideas, the way he thinks about the
> material and the ideal, and about time, would be well spent. (Its probably
> all been done, ever since! In which case, where so I can read it).
>
> Units of analysis are twirling around too. but they will have to twirl
> non-computer mediatedly for now.
>
> I love getting back into poetry this way.
>
> Has anyone got some Wallace Stevens to offer?
> Rilke anyone?
> mike
>
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