Poetry / Which Word First

Thank you for your review; I appreciate hearing your impressions which, by and large, are what I intended.

Perhaps the reason that the lines seem staccatto is because your are reading them more quickly than I would.  A pause for a breath after each line is not too much.

Maybe you would care to read other poems that I have posted some of which are quite different.

Thanks,
ralph

Hello wrdjr,
Thanks for your review.
I’m glad you found feeling in this piece in which I think my projection of it is somewhat subtle and fragile.  You, however, were open to it and I find that encouraging.  
regards,
ralph

Hello wrdjr,
Thanks for your review.
I’m glad you found feeling in this piece in which I think my projection of it is somewhat subtle and fragile.  You, however, were open to it and I find that encouraging.  
regards,
ralph

Hello Johnny,
I’m glad you found this piece interesting.  I hope it’s difficulty made it intriguing enough for you to dig into it – as you apparently did.
Thanks,
ralph

Your analysis of my form is exact.  Thank you for taking the time to count and analyse.
Your additional comments encourage me, although I do not always write in this vein.
I am a student of philosophy as well as poetry and feel the two can reinforce each other to advantage.

Your review is encouraging.

A noun is a name of anything.  There is no hope of their pleasure.
Thank you for the difference in me.

Er, no… a noun is not necessarily a name. And “fugitive” and “ephemeral” are not, properly speaking, nouns.

And, I might add: To deny the “pleasure” of language, even as a given (“objective”) element, is really a quite reductive approach. Etymologies usually reveal that our abstractions are derived from (or floating upon, if you know the source language) quite sensory—and usually kinetic—imagery. Nor do words typically appear thus “de-pleasured” except by extreme artifice.

Moreover, to presume that even a nominative noun has a definite referent at all (which calling it a “name” implies) is absurd. Words get their meaning from us and from context. Hence your meaningless use of “fugitive,” which I call meaningless because (as a substantive noun) it could EITHER mean “things that flee” or “a guy on the lam”—and you, as a writer, fail to step in and EITHER:

• be responsibly subjective, own your words (stand by them, etc.), and say what YOU mean, not what THEY “mean”; OR


• create a context in which both meanings could very well recommend themselves to the reader.

You proceed by the same great falsification every dictionary makes of language: the isolation of words. That’s what throws your nouns into hell, as you put it. If you prefer that hell—the bleakness of the lexicographer’s documentary artifact—then it’s yours by choice, not fate. “Their nature is / to be used up”—hardly. Nature they know nothing of, save to what we consign them.

The first act is choosing the first word.  And then the next word.  Rhetorically, what is fixed?  Is any meaning permanent?  On what basis can we choose?  It is asserted that the fugitive, in whatever sense you  choose, goes toward the ephemeral, the edge, the transient.

Wherein may we agree; in what way does my set overlap your set?

What are nouns if not names; and what, if anything, necessarily?   The quote from Ms. Stein emphasizes, it seems to me, the _any_thing.  Anything might be a noun and if not:
what is “properly speaking” and by whom determined?

Words do die, disappear, change meaning, assume new meanings in new contexts, etc.
In their passage they influence one another and help each other find their own truth/meaning.  One context is the great set of words endlessly interacting.
Events exhale/expire new words/perfume, the fragrance of which surrounds us, and then is wafted away, whereupon we must choose another word – or choose one word to be last.

Dictionaries by their nature are both descriptive and prescriptive, which, and to what extent, to what purpose and by whom, has been argued for centuries.  Who can escape the paradigm or ignore it, or, even more, step outside it?  We are enmeshed but not bound.

One may choose to write about the act of writing, about the act, consequences, alterative means and sources of words, just as one may compose a rant about the injustice of society or the consequences of alcoholism.  One may even claim, as you have done for yourself elsewhere, that the narrator/speaker of the poem is not yourself.  The author may then put words or concepts into the narrator’s mouth that do not represent her complete conception.  That is not the case in this instance for me; but I do not accept the accusation of “proceeding by falsification” rather, if you must have it: by choice.

Books of Objectivist verse are not on the table near my bed, but a collection of the 16th century English Metaphysicals is.  Please don’t box me in too tightly based on the reading of only one piece.

Nouns are “hellish” because they are hell to deal with – in my opinion.

I do not find Webster’s International bleak, I find it fascinating; it and their Thesaurus are on my toolbar; the OED would join the Metaphysicals at my bedside if I could afford the paper edition.  And you are right, dictionaries do include etymologies.

Of course, words are never used up, else how would we speak to each other?  But it is a fact that language, attitudes toward it, words, semantics, grammars, spellings, and pronunciations do change.  Languages interact, evolve and are organic.  These are linguistic realities.  But what does that mean?  Can there be no Philosophy of Language?  Although I would not presume to do more than attempt it.

For centuries the egotistical mistake made by those who have made language their primary concern has been to assume that their way of saying is somehow final and somehow once and for all correct.  Yet archaisms and fossils persist, the patois of today fades, new words are added to the core from other cultures in exchange for what some would claim are the contributor’s defamations.  We still understand and appreciate the beauty of Shakespeare but can we think it possible that three or four hundred years from now readers, speakers and listeners will understand and appreciate hip-hop?  Or perhaps Webster’s will preserve it.  

I plead guilty that in this piece I have struggled to present words in isolation.  I attempted to record the act of writing and thinking simultaneously.  It resulted from the acceptance of the blank screen and the consideration of what to do first?   In that sense, yes, I was being reductive.  Later, I “played with it”.  Who would deny me the pleasure though they do not experience it too?

My “stepping in” is the piece in its entirety, not some word or words or parts of it.  I take responsibility for it.

To quote Ms. Stein again, “After all what is the difference between it and you.  Everybody has said they are happy.“  

However, I feel there is little hope for your pleasure.  Did you enjoy reading this more than you did reading my “poem”?

I did enjoy reading your comment—and I did enjoy (to a lesser extent) reading your poem as well. The difference? In your comment I perceive, whether or not I oughtta, a man using language, rather than “language using itself”—a thing Objectivist poems, and much postmodern discourse, is particularly apt to do.

I dispute little of what you say regarding dictionaries and the change of language over time. Yet I find that giving this change too much credit, and ourselves too little, leads to a dangerously passive attitude. Shakespeare we will continue to read (and perform, critique, translate, etc.) because he achieved something permanently remarkable with language. If a hip-hop artist achieves something comparable, I imagine that work will endure as well, those usages and ideas will endure, even if the “language at large” evolves. We may still read Campion for no other reason. Certain jazz and tango lyrics will endure, saturated as they are with slang, for no other reason.

I don’t see anyone in history who wrote something down in the “egotistical” belief that they were fixing the language itself, forever. They were fixing their language, their piece of it, their work. Many poets have proceeded very consciously aware of the flux of language—e.g., Leopardi the philologist, who “revived” old terms and restored them to poetic sonority by deliberate application. Housman, of a similar acquaintance with classical languages (and his own), did much the same. Pound attempted much the same without confining himself to one or even a few languages. Linguistic evolutions go in both directions temporally, and we can take charge of the process. I believe that as poets we do so whether we want to or not, so we might as well accept responsibility and make it deliberate.

I personally dislike Objectivist poetry for the same reasons I dislike Stein and “language” poetry and much else in the same vein. It exalts language over the person in charge of it. It presupposes that context is automatic—that it comes along with any old word as a default condition. But there IS such a thing as the failure to create context—which is exactly the failure of the word in isolation. Only typists and scribes start with the first word and then proceed to the second. Writers (perhaps I should say “authors”) start with ideas, or notes, or outlines, or the ending, or whatever. Writers create entireties, fictions, contexts.

The great “falsification” of dictionaries is precisely the isolation of the word, and the great failure of many philosophies of language is that they base themselves on such isolation. The invention of the space between words (that is, between letters) is relatively recent in human history, and the invention of dictionaries and glossaries is even more recent, and most likely a related event.

I don’t think we should oppose this trend towards words in isolation as concerns knowledge or even reading materials; I love reading (and annotating) my dictionaries too, even if Webster’s isn’t my preference. (For bilingual dictionaries I prefer Cassell’s over all others I’ve examined.) But at the same time, I think we shouldn’t lose sight of the everyday facts about language—namely, that we don’t use words in isolation, and that we don’t typically use words ambiguously unless for deliberate effect (and, if our effect succeeds, via the creation of a context that allows for semantic multiplicity).

Have you recorded the act of writing and thinking simultaneously? Only in a very narrow sense, I believe. Only if you equate writing with typing, and exclude the preliminary work involved in creating a fiction, a context, an argument.

In any event, I certainly hope the print OED doesn’t appear on your nightstand anytime soon, because even discounting the structural damage such a weight would exact on such a piece of furniture, it would leave scant room for a lamp.

Hello noblesavage,

I’m glad to hear you are partial to this particular style and liked this particular example.

If you look at some of my other postings you will see that, even though I always struggle to be concise, I do often use more words.

Thanks for your attention.

regards,
ralph