Monday, July 27, 2009
If proceeduralism is the scaffolding that a creates the dimensions of a poem, it can be assumed that an engagement with the absurd is more likely, but not entirely necessary. There is always a pressure to write within the constraints that are being employed by the author, and it can become necessary to embrace the absurd in an attempt to maintain cohesion within the scaffolding. Not all lines or stanzas can make perfect sense all the time, or fit perfectly within the poem. Sometimes it can be particualry hard to find a word that ryhmes with another, or to write a line with a perfect syllable count. Even Shakepeare's poems have discrepincies in scansion. Understanding that the absurd must be utilized on occasion for the purposes of proceeduralism can not only add memerable aspects to the poem, as the absurd can be delightfully entertaining to the audience, but can save the writer some frustration in choosing the perfect line. Poetry is wonderful in that it does not have to make sense 100% of the time. If it did, it would be even more difficult to write than it already is. As an effect of proceeduralism, the meaning of poems can be made to be interpreted by the audiences differently, as any one reader of the poem will be affected differently by the authors use of the absurd. The effects of contraints could also be contstrued in the manner that which meaning is hidden in the poem; not all poems are straight forward in their meaning and must be deciphered by the audience. Such is the work of Yeats, as his spurning gyres and allusions to who knows what weave about within his works, it can become confused, jumbled, and frustrating to the reader. Enigmatic passages seem to me to be a function of constrained writing. Even in my own poetry, I must resort to the absurd via metaphor or other devices to make something work. Unfortunately, it can make whatever poem this is applied to hard to figure out, as well as decrease readability in the audience.
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I might be missing your point slightly here, so please correct me if I'm off on a false lead, but are you saying that the difficulty in Yeats' work is somehow connected to a use of constraints? If so, what constraints do you have in mind?
ReplyDeleteThe Yeats poem you're referring to, "The Second Coming," unlike some of his other work, is not even regularly metrical or rhymed (though it does seem to use a vaguely iambic base, and there are some half-rhymes).
As you suggest yourself, what's actually difficult about Yeats is that he is so densely allusive in such an elliptical and multi-registered way. He drops what sound like casual mentions of arcane mythological systems, as though he just expects you to get them immediately. In this way he's like Ezra Pound, or later poets like Charles Olson or Robert Duncan. (Granted, in "The Second Coming" he at least names outright the weirdo source for much of his imagery, the Spiritus Mundi.)
In contrast, procedural writing doesn't necessarily require you to be familiar with anything beyond the procedure itself.
I'm interested in some of the other points you make above, though sometimes your prose is a little hard to follow. In particular, I'd like to hear more about how you think using constraints makes it "necessary to embrace the absurd in an attempt to maintain cohesion." In what way does absurdity reinforce cohesion? It seems at first thought as though absurdity would weaken cohesion, at least as cohesion is generally understood.
Can you give an example of how you've had to "resort to the absurd via metaphor" etc. in your own writing in order "to make something work"? What is it that wouldn't "work" if you didn't turn to absurdity?
I liked what you had to say about how "it can become necessary to embrace the absurd in an attempt to maintain cohesion within the scaffolding." Forgive me if I am wrong, but I think what you meant by that is that it sometimes becomes necessary to make-up words or use odd phrasing in order to remain true to the constraint you employed. "Cohesion" in this sense refers to the fact that the constraint is strictly adhered to and the poet has not "cheated" by breaking his own rules (or, the rules of the constraint). I think this is interesting because I have always thought the constraint produces the absurdity and did not think about the author intentionally "embracing" the absurd in order to maintain the constraint. Good post!
ReplyDeleteI would like to thank kayla for summarizing what I meant in a more understandable manner. I agree that by cohesion i mean that the constraints are strictly adhered to. This can force a writer to inject something into a piece that doesn't seem like it belongs, but still adheres to the formal set of constraints agreed upon in the authors mind. I was writing some thing that could be construed as a love poem, and I stumbled across a situation where in order to maintain syllable count and rhyme scheme i had to settle on a line that did not have the intended meaning that i wanted. I then decided to get a dictionary and theasaurus out to discover if I could build a metaphor or other device to maintain the cohesion. What came out could be considered to be in the realm of the absurd, but it was vague enough where a correlation to the emotion that I was trying to capture could still be extrapolated by a reader if anaylzed. Whatever Yeats constraints may have been, I'm sure utilized some sort of procedure in order to create his poetical works. Wherther they are immediately identifiable to the audience seems irrelevent. Harkening back to what Dr. Mohammad said about whether the scaffolding of the work is intended to be noticed by a reader. In his work, I don't think his constraints were meant to be obvious, but that doesn't mean they weren'y there.
ReplyDeleteBut actually, they're not there. Yeats was not a proceduralist poet. He sometimes used regular rhyme and meter, but see my first post re: the difference between proceduralism per se and the mere use of rhythmic and sonic devices.
ReplyDeleteThe closest Yeats came to a procedure in the strict sense I'm appealing to here was that he believed in a spiritual world and sometimes based his poems on his "communications" with the dead via seances. But this is a matter of general process rather than an actual procedure. Like if I were to put on Lady Gaga to "get in the mood" while composing or something.