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From: "Tom Taylor" <TOMT@ch1.ch.pdx.edu>
Organization: PSU Cramer Hall
To: (recipient list suppressed by xian)
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 15:41:18 PST
Subject: Diction
Priority: normal
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A N A B A S I S E L E C T R O N I C
<http://thing.net/~grist/homeanab.htm>
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S P E C I A L P A P E R
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D I C T I O N
Thomas Lowe Taylor
General Editor
<TOMT@ch1.ch.pdx.edu>
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<Diction (part 1) snipped by xian>
Stephen Ellis
-from 2 letters
04.19.95
...diction, L. dictio, pp. of dicere, to say, orig. 'to point out in words'
as a speaking.
not so fiercely opposed to
grammar, i.e., 'the whole apparatus of literary study' but perhaps more the
nimbus w/in these "confines". this 'speaking' seems a primary curriculum, an
active term of study, back from Homer, say, to get the Arges again in full sail -
the 'trial/trail' then the voyage thru the Speakable - the common - unrehearsed
(!) - i.e., if there is NEED to 'rehearse' the common, how common can it BE?
and where dies this put writing, vis-a-vis it being not so much a codification of
that rehearsal? Olson (& Clarke - and Clark Coolidge, so some extent, say the
whole LANGUAGE proposition, in part) still bears significantly on this issue.
The issue being, the temporally formal. Writ has to remain a 'speakable
voyage' if it is to have value - discussable - as in 'therapy' as exchange (from
whence to understand HOW 'law' is this permanentized rather than (to get its
BEAT) valorized....
The nature of this thing has...to do w/ accelerating TEXT past its most
obvious definitions, and into the more primary question of method - how to
sustain the necessary harmonics of relation, to encourage the fluid, the fluent
(as Clarke got from 'analogy', or Olson, his (misunderstood) 'allegory'): to enact
the questions ('speaking', again) so not to make any answer redundant. Any
other seeking after 'plurality' is the burn-mark (brand-name) that remains
enforcedly NATAL. Undiscovered/covered-the Childe enclosed (engulfed) in
aeons of soft-sweet sadness, rather than simply, nakedly, availably THERE. in
conflictis, yet valuably so, as Vincent Ferrini is currently in tremendous
mastery of (alas, ignored)....
**********************
05.16.95
Interesting implex, this diction business, as yr own 'word choice'
extends, of course, as everything does, after the fact of itself, into, well, as it's
guided in some sense, toward, health(?) - that's if learning has some practical
application for other than to its own sake, as, the aesthetics of the body,
corporeal life the embodiment of whatever estate one finds themselves within
the limits (advantage!) of, as it makes itself known, to, and as, the forms of (its)
feeling - 'things' that pass, a kind of counting that makes a visceral 'crowning',
as to each evening its stars possible (meaningful) - each dictum a passing
reference that leaves its interweaving trace as the floor the mind sets its favorite
things out upon, 'as if' t'were indeed the 'dance' that it in actuality ever IS - a
'floor' sewn with 'seeds' - so (just maybe) there is in back of 'diction' just that
stream of vision that produces same, and the question therefore points to one
of actual value, especially in that (again, just maybe) the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group hasn't really been 'feeding' anyone, as per, look,
just what ARE one's "favorite things?" [& how might they be proffered,
primped by whatever 'pomp-and-circumstance' is necessary toward making
them other than codified self-aggrandisement? (the whole 'problem of
reference' is just the university ditty, "ding-dong the hitch is dead" - as if that
could produce any thing that more than analogously [merely] an effort toward
'freedom' studded with the good fortune of 'tenure.']
diction, L dictio, a speaking pp. of L dicere, to point out in words Gr deiknynai, to prove, Ger zeigen, to show, OE teon, to
accuse, taecan, TEACH
teach, ME techen TEACH, TOE, DIGIT, DICTION -- a sign,
indication, symbol, sample, [syn., PLEDGE]
pledge, ME plegge< plevium, security
warranty, infl. by Frank *pligi. liability, akin to OS
plegen, to warrant, "the condition of being held or given as
security for a contract (or promise); also, a toast (of
allegiance)
digit: finger, toe, inch, orig. any of the numbers 0-9,
'cause all was counted 'pon one's own digits.
but the 'accounting' of that also implies
"toe hold" - a 'digging in' (also 'toeing the mark') - even as it is our TOES wch,
like the tails of dinosaurs, are one of the more important elements in keeping
one's balance in the sheer 'accounting' of each step - i.e., that they (toes) are
TELLING. thus, to bring it back to diction, telling of just what, exactly -
TOES leave the likes of letters in the sand w/ each step (given that yr going' to
the beach every weekend!) -- you count on yr fingers, but you remember w/ yr
toes given that they are what most obviously are imbedded in the matter of the
moment -- fingers are sensitive, toes are "of an more steady apprehension", the
'sounding' of wch keeps one in concert with precisely that sense of PLEDGE as
a 'grip upon' "each forth along each their own trail", plurality for sure, not
KULTURAL so much as to each individual in his/ her own ability to receive,
the RATE (truly what diction might point out) of the common occurring
profoundly within the locally possibly and fortunately small 'pledge' that counts
anywhere between 0 and 9 - & each that, our own tithe, moment attached to
moment as life's only true lineage, and thru wch diction's allowed to indentify,
what shall we call it, The Family Name.....
A 'behavior' and 'a method' are productive contradistinctively as to
what their confluence 'dictates', we're in the realm of counting here, say, the
rungs of the ladder that must then be climbed - though not to emphasize duality
- 'up' and 'down', as either way, as you call it 'the rush' is what overtakes the
moment at any rung (& there's your 'constancy'!) - 'that which exists through
yourself' - such that a composition is located essentially 'beyond itself' (like in
the song just came o'er the radio, "Stuck In The Middle With You") at the
outset, and that the apprehension of that 'place' cognitively is 'a result of' the
strengthening action that both makes the soul 'dry' and the 'construction' (of it)
on foundations that are thus sufficient to supporting it - the presence of 'the
mysterious' itself essentially what is 'outside' the parameters of the construction
of 'the temple' (Gr: "back of head") materially, yet is referred to precisely as
such construction's extent. Diction is thus forwarded as the 'sound
construction' (the projective)that alone is able of producing the 'tokens' that
mark the whirlpool whence 'behavior' and 'methodology' commingle - the litral
'ark' of Utnapishtim which not only was not necessarily 'a ship', but also was a
stone - either of which was 'square[d]' - and both of which were meant to
'excite the waters' whilst keeping them 'at bay' such that the literal 'source' of
materials on which to work also defined its limits as Bellerophon's invocation
via Poseidon of a 'flood' against Iobates contradictionedly loosed from within
Iobates' temple (the equivalent 'object' of Bellerophon's quest against Iobates'
'ingratitudes') the Xanthian women, who hoisted their skirts above their waists,
and rushed Bellerophon butt-first, offering themselves to him if he would only
relent. Bellerophon turned tail and fled, as this wasn't the 'flood' he'd had in
mind - an object lesson of the invocatory 'power' position is capable of, i.e., the
'undescribable' IS described 'elsewhere' - (as behavior come incidentally to
'instruct' the former restrictions of the methodology that unwittingly
encouraged it.) So, sure, the 'journey' as you say, is 'it', though only insofar as
you do admit there be actual 'beads' to string on its 'thread' - beads as word-
choice, and word-choice made 'new' only by reference to that which in actuality
has been so felt - the 'innate', including the extent to which the person of it does
deliver his/her excursion' of it (that 'innate') through to the aeration of - the
'playing' - the 'leading ledger' (first blurts) of - the con(ed) from which might
lilies rise. The unexpected whose 'ground' has yet been thoroughly laid - the
group ensemble and solo work, unhedged, that the best of 'head arrangements'
allows - and includes maximal possibility of 'dishin' on so-and-so', making the
whole time' a rune-bridge, dictated across as epaoide, 'to lay a trip on', & as
"precision abiding in passion to 1st powers' / invocation, flooding amor, cor,
flor / by analogy, no mere repeating of the magic / words, but making mum to
an act shimmer" - diction as that sound(ing) knot.
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Ivor Winters (In Defense of Reason)
...The poem, to be perfect, should likewise be a new word in the same
sense, a word of which the line, as we have defined it*, is merely a syllable.
Such a word is, of course, composed of much more than he sum of its words
(as one normally uses the term) and its syntax. It is composed of an almost
fluid complex, if the adjective and the noun are not too nearly contradictory, of
relationships between words (in the normal sense of the term), a relationship
involving rational content, cadences, rhymes, juxtapositions, literary and other
connotations, inversions, and so on, almost indefinitely. These relationships, it
should be obvious, extend the poet's vocabulary incalculably. They partake of
the fluidity and unpredictability of experience and so provide a means of
treating experience with precision and freedom. If the poet does not wish, as,
actually, he seldom does, to reproduce a given experience with approximate
exactitude, he can employ the experience as a basis for a new experience that
will be just as real, in the sense of being particular, and perhaps more valuable.
*...the poetic line...should be a functioning part of the larger complex,
or poem. This is, imagine, what Mallarme should have had in mind when he
demanded that the poetic line be a new word, not found in any dictionary, and
partaking of the nature of incantation (that is, having the power to materialize,
or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, being, a new experience).
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Style is psychoactive Thomas Lowe Taylor
Suddenly there is no cultural history. Maybe it snuck up on us, but I prefer to
think of it as a coincidence of critical mass and the cumulative effect of the past
20 years of media-glut. There are I suppose some consequences of the post
WW2 turnaround. Not only the death of the image, flattening the canvas to a
two dimensional phenomenology but the cumulative effect of surrealism
moving from a cult of secrecy to basic fare from the ads, this rendering of a
intentionally & privately obscure code becoming common discourse ("It was Surreal,
man.") An ironic success for the for the Surreal, to create a world in its own
image. But the flattening of the epoch into an oppressive immediacy bears
some examination. First of all, the audience has become frighteningly literate,
at a nonverbal level, it is Hip. It responds primitively to a sophisticated set of
signals or messages, but you can't fool it (all of the time...); the main
consequence of this immediacy, what makes us "hostage to the moment", is a
subsequent flattening of all doctrines whereby none is ascendent--it is an
entirely `democratic' situation in which each school of thought has its direction
discretion and no body is right. In fact "being right" seems to have nothing to
do with anything. Nor being wrong, for that matter, every man has the right to
be whatever kind of fool he wants to be.
What this means to poets is the same was what it means to everyone else--if
nobody is right and nobody is wrong, or, rather, if it doesn't make any
difference, how then do you talk about things. It used to be you'd compare an item,
a poem, say, to the existing canon and see if it came up short, succeeded, or,
perhaps, lead the way to something new. Here in the third generation of "do
your own thing" there is no established canon, and the elitists who act as if
there were one are, uh, cute. I don't buy into too much of this. There is a future, of
course, and we all have a place in it. It's fine to talk about the past, but all
those fine writers we get compared with are dead and we're the only game in
town. That seems important to me when talking about a basically closed
shop that seems to exist at present.
Times change and with that change what was once disallowed
becomes the rule, or gets its fifteen minutes, whatever. Measuring a poetics
against itself is a different matter. We are hostage to the moment
because we want it that way, we chose to imbed ourselves in the cultural
immediacy of being present in the present--after all, one of the mystical goals of
self effacement. Poetry is a progressive series of seizures on the part
of the practitioner, and the cumulative effect of those seizures is that one
develops and improves or else one stagnates and withers on the vine like
yesterday's eggplant. This vitality is manifest, measured by the feel of the
work, how it strikes you living in your own present; to that extent, yes,
indeed, syntax is psychoactive, you get a little thrill after you've weeded your
way through a complicated transmission and arrived at the end with a sense of
completion, of 'passing beyond.' It is the poet's task to take
you there, into the beyond, by hooking you onto his little red pony and pushing
through the fog into the next room. That's the job.
There is a statement from Gertrude in What Are Masterpieces.... to the
effect that since each of us lives in our own time, when it comes
around to voicing what and who we are, we do so in the character of the
moment in which we find ourselves, for we can do nothing else. To do
otherwise, that is, to write a complicated poetry from another time, is, well,
nostalgic and vital, but it does nothing to advance the cause. I'm sure this will
piss somebody off, but now that the avant garde is just another school of
thought, embedded in the soul of the academy as tomorrow's salvation, where
then is the so-called leading edge, why is it invisible and where is it going and
how do you know when you've bit into an olive? By its taste? Hence the focus on
Diction, it being an examination of the smaller units of the poem to discover
what kind of glue holds them together and whether the current crisis, which is as
much epistemological as it is anything, is getting anywhere.
Of course, criticism and theory have done little but confuse the issue by
competing with the poem for primacy in the cultural dialog. If in the present
where all arguments are reduced to the same platform where none is right and
none is wrong, all you get is your fifteen minutes on the soapbox and it's time
for the next one. This is what bothers us about the Slam, not that
it's competetive, but that it reduces to mob rule the ivory towered moment of
purity and grace; nonetheless, what rises to the surface is usually what is
permitted to do so by the relative buoyancy of the medium itself. So
what has been there, so-called Language Poetry, got on center
stage because it was safe, it involved a celebration of consciousness without
any of the messy, spiritual stuff which usually accompanies that venue. LangPo
really worked over a lot of territory which actually precedes the poem, issues
of resemblance and repetition, issues of consistency and sense, the vague
feeling that one was being lied to, or at least that the deeply true and private
self of the writer either did not exist (a currently attractive notion = there Is no
self), or that if it did, it was all a game to get five pounds into a four pound bag.
Disruptions of syntax, or the development of the Disjunkt into an ascendant
style is cause for alarm if one is stuck there. The progress of styles is
seen to be a progress in the direction of self improvement if not self effacement.
The disjunkt is just that, an admixture of styles which declares all states equal
in the range of their attributes and in the succession of their operations into a new
whole. Nonetheless it arises from a hopeless state of confusion. It's like trying
to make a decision when you're having a nervous breakdown, all possibilities
seem to have equal value and one vacilates from one choice to its opposite in a
continual disarray of decision or growth. I mean, it's kind of amazing how an invented
style, as Lang Po was invented, can be proposed and run through an entire
gamut of acquisitions and disarmaments to become ensconced in the academy
in less than 20 years, it is suspect to say the least; it smacks of manipulation.
However, it just, uh, happened...it was all that could get through, this dry, non-
musical, definitely non-sappy stuff. It makes you feel like your skin is covered
with words, you almost want to wash them off.
And carrying on without music or what's called prosody, technical practices exiled
without ceremony, the celebratory and hypnotic trance-dance only language
can create effaced to a set of simpler operations which held the creation of
trance states to be somewhat illegitimate; nonetheless, the sustaining of the
disjunkt into a major style is a little like making schizophrenia legal, haven't we?
We are, after all, selling little trips in our poems, and if it feels good, one lets it
in, and that's where syntax is psychoactive, you can tell how it fits and feels and
you let it in, and that teaches you to lower your guard and let new information
in, this is the messaging of the poem, how it Feels in a phenomenological state:
I mean, now that the criteria for judgement are all reduced to equals, all that's
left is for me to note how the poem makes me feel, and if I assume the writer is
being sincere, not always a good guess, as I hope we can note later, I alter my
inner mood and go with the writer as long as I can trust the intent of the
message, then I sign off. And the relevant features here also need to be
described in terms of presssure, release, time and space perceptions, what sort
of state the writer is communicating in his non-verbal arrangements. It is no
longer a matter of opening the door to let the cat out, we have to decipher a
strange set of signals and scan them for sincerity. I think the language with
which we talk about poems is up for review--how the poem works as an
organic, phenomenological enterprise, part of my experiencing, enables us to
discuss poems as events, events which open and close according to what is in
them, what specific phlogiston enables the phrases and units themselves to
imply a cosmos, for that's what is happening, each unit becomes the bearer of
the dna of its message, and if the speaker is not at rest, then, too, the
message is not at rest.
This is the morality of what we are doing, what cannot be expunged from the
enterprise at all. If a style is also a behavior, and it is, that one cannot hide
what he is in what he is doing, we are that transparent. Then, too, we must
consider what we are about as people, we are obviously trying to grow and
become more complete individuals, more in synch with the world in which we
write, and that is also expressed; we look at the poem as a sample of what a
person actually is in relation to all of these assumptions we make about life,
that, for instance, we are writing to get somewhere, to explore this unknown
we have blundered into, that we are mapping out an area that is strange to us
and we are returning these reports to share with the others, to lead into areas
where no man has gone before, as it were, V GER to our self. This we share in
our fragments. Remember Archilocus' [In fucking...one discovers...that] the
total frag.
And so in the body language of the poem, an entire aesthetic and its cosmos are
described, defined, given holographic presence for a fraction of a second, and
when my attention is down for that fraction of a second, I'm receptive to a
degree of reprogramming, to a resettling of my own vocabulary to receive
something somewhat new or different from what i'm used to. The didactic.
And so styles must evolve or the message becomes stagnated and the style
empty and safe, a haven for the insecure and stodgy, and while the most wildly
associative stuff may come out, it may be seen as being guided by a kind of
safety, a reveling in what is disjunkt for its own sake, for the comfort of being
somewhere at all. After a while, you just do. Those incipient questions no
longer nag you, it just doesn't matter; and when you do what you do, that's
enough, returned to the realm of play, returned to the realm of just happening,
poems occurring as naturally as leaves sprouting from a tree, spontaneous
extensions of who we are.
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