Introduction
Origins, especially literary origins, are often ideological shelters. Nonetheless, the 1971 publication Robert Grenier’s and Barret Watten’s magazine is often isolated as a fountainhead for the widely variegated movement known as Language Writing or Language Poetry. All poetry is composed of three phases in varying proportions: melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia, as described by Ezra Pound.
Pound’s Views on Aesthetic Poetry
Pound distances himself from modernism, referring to it as “the present chaos” in which “the modern poet is expected to holloa his verses down a speaking tube to the editors of cheap magazines.” Poetry in the modern age has become something rhetorical and commercial. He also acknowledges the importance of a poetic tradition, arguing that “it is not for us moderns to go saying it over, or to go obscuring the memory of the dead by saying the same thing with less skill and less conviction.”
Auden’s Views on Aesthetic Poetry
In order to reintegrate the self, the erotic love of the aesthetic must be transformed into the agape, or brotherly love, of the religious, which is unselfish love which seeks to serve its neighbor without attachment or desire, and in which God, or the transcendent, is the “third party” in the relation.
The Politics of Play in Grenier and Howe
Grenier’s first book of poems, Dusk Road Games, published in 1967, is written in the tradition of the earlier poetics of William Carlos Williams. The deconstructive strategy of Howe’s “The Falls Fight” is more than mere quotation or an instance of historical collage. The self, in the course of Howe’s poems, is a fractured construct, an intersection, a point of reference, a repetition, a doubling, a graft, and an effect of discourse.
Nature and Ecology in Snyder and Ammons
Deep ecology rejects the “human-in-environment image in favor of the relational, total-field image. Organisms are as knots in the bio-spherical net or field of intrinsic relations” (Naess). Gary Snyder has steadfastly worked toward the fusion of Eastern religious thought, primal cultures, and the rise of the science of ecology.
Conclusion
There is no objective reality behind subjective appearance is philosophical idealism, and Auden was quite specific that his philosophy was not to be equated with idealism. The poet-narrator of Garbage, therefore, is both comically and tragically self-conscious, self-referential, self-aggrandizing, and self-effacing.
Works Cited
- “Language, Poetry, Realism.” In The American Tree. Ed. Ron Silliman. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2002.
- “A Retrospect.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New Directions Press, 1935.
- Pound, Ezra. “How To Read.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New Directions Press, 1935.
- Greene, Roland, et al, eds. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th Ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
- “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1975.
- Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn. New York: The Guilford Press, 1997.
- Naess, Arne. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle. Trans. David Rothenberg. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1989.