chris at 3:34 AM |

 

De Campos,"Poetry," & Doing It:
All (not in, so much as) *With*
Words

[A You-May-Want-to-Stop-Reading-Here-Warning: a large portion of text in this post has been removed due to copyright quandary]

De Campos composed a masterful, scathing critique of the rhetorical-yet-more-especially- the-*material*-relations of the social condition that is poetry, "Ode (Explicit)... ," and [text removed due to copyright quandary] Judging from this poem, de Campos had (as it were) a 'bone to pick' with questions of how "poetry" can possibly intervene or perhaps even intercede [ text removed due to copyright quandary]? in the everyday life of everyday folks who are, necessarily, scrambling around trying to make for themselves a better life--they are the ambiguous, ambivalent, but most importantly, the ambitious [ text removed due to copyright quandary] who do not know what to do with "poetry" but think and say they do--initially, and notoriously, they "hate" it. Yet, they are subjects.

[ text removed due to copyright quandary] limit themselves: they take poetry only at what they perceive, receive, or understand as its base levels. They got this tendency from somewhere: from traditions, in terms of the most base of sexual similitudes: the figure of woman as haetara--basically poetry is a whore, though a nice and entertaining one. [text removed due to copyright quandary] could do more, a lot more, yet they have not. This should sound very familiar historically. And: what about today, as in now?

De Campos--love him: his questions went out to "poetry" as he saw it being abusedly exercised, widely, at the time. A time not so long ago?--thus maybe we can be asking similarly today how the same might be functioning? Um, yes: and thank you. He knew that this most distilled, spiritually energizing, maximal power-use of language had more to it than the [text removed due to copyright quandary] or any of its makers in the moment, were aware of or attempting to tap.

The following two poems [were removed due to copyright quandary] continue a skeptical, absolutely (literally!) *inquistive* thread, ominous for its invocation of Orwell's sensibility and novel of (in)famous familiarity in mid- to late twentieth century western literary thinking. Here is social critique distilled to max & offered as poetically a *maximus* kind of equalizing economy. Note how, significantly, the "1984..." poem does not, like Orwell's novel, suggest a captured or snapped up short (thus a somewhat more sheltered sense of moment for the reader) moment in time. Rather, the poem calls out the ongoing, the continuum: what is the inception of an "era"--which is to say, a commonplace sensibility, one that intellectuals now cannot help but seek for sharper awareness, one hopes. But this effect?--really the problem is too familiar, too muddied (thus still applicable--too): how to question what seems so overwhelmingly in power, as in culturally holding hegemonic sway. Think, then, about why someone like Geo Bush Jr could be same, against all apparent intellectual reasonings. Some kind of sway at work, then. What?

Haroldo de Campos :



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I am so glad that [text removed due to copyright quandary] has decided to give these particular threads some attention because it gives us all entry to new ways to think and question what is going on right now in terms of cultural sway, or suasiveness--how ideas persuade and become cultural currency. This is so in terms of trying to highlight a generalized understanding of current ideological functionings and substances, the prospects of what might be in that dialectic and what, recently, has been: think, as does the poem, of uses in the past and now being made of "uranium"-- in 1984 and in "1984" (multilevels: memory of that year as we all lived it individually and collectively, also, in Orwell and in the poem: notice all these layers!) which indicates the making of bombs of the absolutely most destructive impetus, plain and simple.

What other earth-found elements or substances might fit in a similar function now?--well, we could think about what the (here in TX) oil "politicos" continue to soft-sell-feed *into the stream,* what that function-materially and rhetorically, is "up to." But we have known this. For how long?

So, let it be said that here that a "we" via these poems, have raised a few old questions about gender and poetry (again), first, but that is not all: let's just give this multi-mutilating-function a name in relation to poetry today--our beloved *avant*--if only for purposes of self-awareness: how about calling the sources by name? Let's say, a concentrated impetus of conservative Right Wing, an impetus serving capital's highest, material self-interest, at the expense of all else, is still happening as it was when De Campos wrote the poems--right now? That is, I want to give this kind of thing a name and run with it aloud, ya kno? So we know what sad momentum we're dealing with in this our own, and our only (for, who of us can really claim that there is more than this?--one?) midst, our living moment.

Primo paradox for human intellect to continue to consider (a la Nabokov?): a creature the size of a matchstick with a few seeming-papers strategically attached to limbs can navigate the world for seasons turning to ages--without disturbing the world's natural tendencies toward renewal and continuity. That is, the "monarch" butterfly will travel each season and do so continually for ages between S. America and N. But the upright though awkward, sometimes loveable, sometimes cruel, human being, with agile hands in lieu of wings, and way too much paper self invention with infinite words, has managed to travel or to do--What?--comparatively, so far?-in terms of not disturbing vital natural tendencies toward renewal and continuity?
Poetry [ removed due to copyright quandary]?