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Monday, February 07, 2005
Don’t Know Much About Poetry Part 4: The Rape Of The Categories
Back in the mid-Eighties, when Prince -- your Curmudgeon will have no truck with any of his various changes of moniker -- released his single "When Doves Cry," a dear friend commented to your Curmudgeon that "in twenty years, we'll be back in the jungle beating on logs."
Your Curmudgeon and his friend were both in their early thirties at the time. The friend didn't live to see the rise of "rap music," which is halfway between a relief and a pity that he didn't get the satisfaction of knowing his prediction had come true.
All the arts have been under assault for some years. Virtually everyone is aware of the havoc that's been unleashed in the poetry field. Music, as noted above, has taken heavy fire. Much that passes as fiction is completely unreadable, or concerns itself with subjects decent persons would not want explored even in fictional form. And let's not discuss non-representational painting and sculpture, please; your Curmudgeon isn't over his bout with the Martian Death Flu yet.
Though it might seem harsh, the inescapable judgment to be rendered upon the perpetrators of these assaults is that they set out to destroy the categories to which they demanded ingress. A category is a set controlled by a definition; it possesses a genus -- the enveloping category, of which this one is a subset -- and a differentia -- the defining characteristic possessed by the members of the category, which sets them apart from other members of the genus. To force elements into a category, though they come from outside its genus or fail to possess its differentia, is to destroy the definition and render the category meaningless.
Poetry is significant in this regard: it was the first of the artistic forms to come under heavy fire. The reason? In all but a few languages, the defining characteristic of poetry -- a regular pattern of rhyme and meter -- is very difficult to achieve. English, a polyglot tongue whose derivations and borrowings span the globe, is probably the most resistant of all languages to poetic constructions.
Many persons wanted to be considered poets, but lacked either the linguistic skills or the discipline. (The lack of something to say will be held over for a subsequent screed.) They demanded parity of esteem for their formless, rhymeless emissions, and found a surprising ally in the critical community, which also yearned for a stature equal to the artists they deigned to analyze and comment on. Each used the other as a weapon against the standards of the field they strove to enter.
In short order, poetry of the rhymed and metered sort, which had previously been the definition of the category, was reclassified as "lyric poetry," to make room under the poetry heading for free verse, blank verse, and eccentrically formatted prose. Today, no "critic" can be made to commit to a definition of poetry; it's whatever he likes or wants it to be.
The category had been stripped of its differentia. It had ceased to exist except as an arbitrary assertion by certain persons with pretensions to authority.
The same set of weapons was wielded against the other arts. The entering wedge was always a demand that parity of prestige with Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rodin, Beethoven, Donne, Kipling or Dumas go to would-be artists who either didn't have the chops for their chosen art or disdained to apply them. People who ought to have known better -- who mostly did know better -- were cowed into accepting works that expressly and sometimes deliberately violated the strictures of their supposed art as "valid." When enough such violations had accrued, it became impossible to restore the original meanings of the violated terms; objectivity had yielded to arbitrary, baseless authority.
A modern-day literalist such as your Curmudgeon, who dares to speak the unspeakable as he has here, is more often than not sniffed aside as a reactionary, or castigated for "wordy philistinism." But this is to be expected. Once the artistic categories had been destroyed, their destroyers disdained to redefine them. They preferred to play in the rubble, where objective analysis and criticism were impossible. That leaves them with no tools for rebuttal but a self-awarded mantle of authority and a well-turned sneer.
But it's not tennis if you take the net down. It's not baseball if three strikes won't count you out. And an art that has no requirements to differentiate it from babbling in tongues, a scatological fit, splashing pigments randomly on a canvas, or welding oddments of junk together is no art worthy of the name.
Let the screams of anguish begin. But first, the most heart-rending of verses, from one of America's true masters.
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;-
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and I was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee -
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night,
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of a cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: -
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea -
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
-- Edgar Allan Poe --
Comments
I am sorry Fran,
I still don’t get it.
Please consider podcasting. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid;=738&e;=1&u;=/ap/20050206/ap_on_hi_te/podcasting
In that way I, and anyone else who might similarly be so benighted, can hear you reciting Annabel Lee so that the last stanza’s change in meter makes some sense. I imagine it’s purpose is to pose for dramatic effect, but I’ve no ear here.
Thus, I’ve tried to make it come out sounding properly, but remain at a loss.Posted by pascal fervor on 02/07/2005 at 10:39 AMAttacks on the arts. Tie-in our own counter-culturalist allies to the Maoists and their cultural revolution.
Yet 1960’s effort wasn’t new. See this sort of criticism in the late 19th Century with the anarchist crowd. Those who wished to be in the avante garde of the progressive new world became popular by attacking all, even, especially, the virtuous.
They anticipated reaction to their destruction, and labelled all defenders reactionary.
These are themes you’ve done a marvelous job of presenting to us, your readers. But the general public still only vaguely gets it. They know what they would like has been under attack, but haven’t been persuaded to look a bit deeper at why what they’ve been offered continues to get shallower and unsustaining.
I am sorry I have limited success at being one of your popularizers. I pray you may yet reach more who will do considerably better.
P.S.
A brief observation:
The last time I encountered Annabel Lee, it was a prop in Play Misty For Me. This was seen as a reactionary move by Clint Eastwood to pass along a moral warning to the babyboom generation of the risks of dalliance, a key element in the attack on our institutions.No surprise about the reaction. I recall his effort was attacked by Rolling Stone. The awarded it “worst movie of 1971.”
Yet it was an early version of the critically more popular Fatal Attraction. Of course that movie starred key liberal actors, and the damage had been done by then (1987).
Posted by pascal fervor on 02/07/2005 at 03:24 PMCommunist Goals
Chuck Morse
Friday, May 9, 2003
On Jan. 10, 1963, Congressman Albert S. Herlong Jr. of Florida read a list of 45 Communist goals into the Congressional Record. The list was derived from researcher Cleon Skousen’s book “The Naked Communist.” These principles are well worth revisiting today in order to gain insights into the thinking and strategies of much of our so-called liberal elite.
.....
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for Socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations that are under Communist attack.The success of these goals, from a communist perspective, is obvious. Is there any doubt this is so?
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV & motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all form of artistic expression.An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings,” substituting shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “ Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
24.Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural and healthy.”....
Chuck Morse is a radio talk show host at WROL in Boston
(http://www.chuckmorse.com). E-mail Chuck at .Fran I have the rest of this if you should be interested, or Chuck Morse would probably be happy to supply it. It is a bit scary when you look at the extent to which most of these objectives have penetrated American culture. In fact, most of what we call “political correctness” seems to follow this line with amazing fidelity.
Posted by on 02/07/2005 at 03:40 PMI actually rather liked “When Doves Cry,” though its lack of bass line was somewhat offputting, subjecting what is actually a fairly tender lyric to excessive jaggedness. (At the time, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince was The Artist Currently Known As Prince.)
Hip-hop, with its emphasis on overlapping rhythms, descends from purely African roots, which of course explains why its most avid consumers are wan white high-school boys.
Posted by CGHill on 02/07/2005 at 04:02 PMPostmodern art
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/arts/design/06fine.html?oref=login
Posted by Mark LaRochelle on 02/07/2005 at 04:51 PMI had a similar conversation today about ‘artists’ passing off tripe as enlightenment. I could perhaps be persuaded to accept some non representational art as worthy of inspection if the artist had shown himself to be successful in working within his the category. That artist has credibility, having defined himself. Only then can an artist go off after some unconventional element. It is the slacker who simply proclaims his own glory with no credibility that seems to be the norm these days. Coming out of a fine arts background, it took me 10 years of toiling with the issue to come to understand what you have stated in a few paragraphs. Excellent work!
Posted by Head on 02/08/2005 at 02:34 AMTwo words sum it up: “Cultural Marxism”.
Posted by ELC on 02/08/2005 at 04:36 PMMy favorite poem.
Posted by Sherry on 02/08/2005 at 06:25 PM
