Krapp's Last Tape

Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape is a depiction of the individual’s interaction with the world. Beckett constantly keeps the play either in the future (as seen in the first stage direction), or in the past (ie. The tape). The reason for this indeterminate present is to portray reality. One does not, cannot, live in “real” time, because all recognition is exactly that recognition. We must process our intake of data which we observe before we produce meaning. And we produce meaning from everything. Beckett uses the example of the black ball’s meaning to Krapp to demonstrate this. Anything and everything is used my the human mind to produce meaning and in order to do that we must process all incoming observations. Therefore, we live in a constant state of memory or of looking into the future, dreaming of what the observations in our live will mean in after the present. The major place where this is seen is in Beckett’s stage direction to have the light on the recording station and everything else be black. The only see-able, knowable area in the play is used for memory (recordings of the past, or recording memories of the past), everything else (the present) is dark unable to be seen, it is unknowable. Beckett seems to suggest that life works this way, that humans must, by definition of being existential beings, live in the past or the future, but also must be unable to live in the present.

Red Lilies

Barbara Guest is clearly a language poet and her poem “Red Lilies” exhibits this fact. She uses the poem much as Williams would to cause the reader to depend upon the language alone for images of the objects described. She does this by using dependent clauses embedded in other dependent clauses to cause the reader to actually depend upon the clause before it for the clause at hand to make any “sense.” To Guest making sense of a poem seems to be more about actually allowing the poem to present the objects attached to words in the imagination and using them to build a group of objects. The congealing of these objects is not nearly as important and is, in fact, the indeterminate aspect of this poem. Some form may be extracted in her repletion of certain words, but one could not use this repetition to form an ultimate determined meaning of the poem. However, the reader is presented with multiple images and allowed to form their own synthesis of these images. The repetition should be considered significant in any interpretation of the poem for it is a poetic form in itself which should be allowed to give the poem as a whole an object-like aspect.

Overland to the Islands

Denise Levertov seems to have missed the post-modern poetry bus in her poem “Overland to the Islands”. The poem gives a narrative account of the travels of a black dog. She gives vivid descriptions of the dog itself throughout the poem. It is easy to dismiss this poem and perhaps Levertov’s poetry in general when one considers this break from post-modernism. We see Levertov’s organic form in her poetry, which is perhaps what brings this narrative back to post-modernism. Her poetics is seen in the “nonaural rhyme” of the poem, and the account of the natural chaos of a moment.
An obvious rhyming image is that of the dog, which is most notably seen in the repetition of the word dog. She returns to the image of the dog itself as seen from a different perspective. If she is returning from a perspective we must ask ourselves from whence she has returned. It is from the perspective of the dog which she has returned. She shifts, though slightly, not as drastically as other poets have done, from the perspective of “let’s go,” including herself and the reader in the movement of the dog, to an outward observatory perspective. This new perspective is seen when she begins to describe the dog itself instead of the us whose movement has been suggested at the beginning of the poem. From here she shifts back to the person in movement when she writes, “and that too / is as one would desire.” The “one” is not the perspective of the dog, but of the person in movement. From there she switches back to the perspective of an observation of the ground under the dog’s feet and his engagement with the world around him. She ends the poem from the perspective of observation.

Ron Padgett

Ron Padgett exhibits an ability to lead the reader to conclusions about an image just before he pulls the rug out from under him by changing the cliché or the common concept of an image. For example, in his poem “Wonderful Things” Padgett writes, “Yes I think of you” aww how cute, “with very little in mind.” What seemed to be a complement was in fact a remark on how little of my mind you actually require. Again he misleads the reader when he writes, “Straight for the edge / Of a manicured fingernail.” Here Padgett toys with the image in the mind of the reader. The edge of something seems like an appropriate phrase for a precipice not a fingernail. He writes in “Big Bluejay Composition”, “the shadow of a doubt / tiptoes down the hall,” as if the shadow of a doubt (being purely a concept) is an actual shadow, and that shadows even tiptoe. The phrase comes unexpected upon the reader.
Padgett does this in order to switch the preconceived images of the mind with new images. These new images break free from the culturally semi-determined clichés of the reader, evoking new totally indeterminate images.

Permanently

Kenneth Koch presents a “love” poem (that is a poem about love), titled “Permanently”. Koch presents a personification of language which must be taken into account during the last stanza which reflects on his love. Ultimately the adjective in the poem is lost. The description, the emotion of language is lost. In our language we use adjectives to depict and clarify, as well as we can, the images in our own minds. However, here Koch proclaims them lost. He then continues, “So am I lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat.” One could read this as a moment of romantic bliss, but according to the loss depicted by the adjective unto which Koch has likened this loss it is not romantic bliss he speaks of. Instead Koch is depicting the inability of the individual to move past the physical into an actual communication of selves. He is lost, unable to find the other self of his individual, just as the adjective is lost during communication of language. Therefore, the kiss, the physical barrier, cannot be undone, “until the destruction of language.” This is because if language does not exist then these communication barriers will not exist either. Ironically if language was destroyed then these individuals would not be able to know of “the self” and therefore could not understand the concept of romance. HA!

The Skaters

“These decibles,” the poem itself, “Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound.” Ashbery slams the meaninglessness of language, of sound, right in the reader’s face in the first two lines of the poem. He makes the point that Spicer makes about language as only absolutely determinable by the individual and the inability to communicate any meaning by the use of language. Ashbery accomplishes this in two lines. Wow! He continues, “Into which being enters and is apart.” In other words the being, the perception enters into language but is ultimately separated from the meaning of the sounds issued by other individuals.
Ashbery says of this flagellation of sound that it is, “a new kind / Of demand that stumps the absolute because not new.” The poem is itself new but not new at the same time. Of course the image is new, the perception is new, but it is only possible to present these new perceptions by using old conventions, ie. Language, sound, cultural concepts.

Poem

Frank O’Hara toys with the reader’s concept of time in his poem “Poem”. He begins with the note on the door, but soon changes his perception of time from being, “headed straight out the door,” to, “It was autumn / by the time I got around the corner.” Again he changes the perception of time after giving a detailed depiction of his host’s greeting by noting he was invited, “several months ago.” O’Hara builds up the details of the moment in order to wreak havoc on the reader when he fast-forwards through time seeming only to have moved around a corner.
The reader must ask why O’Hara does this. By changing one’s perception of time the instant is only as good as the objects attached to each instant, because time and space are, in the poem, indeterminate. This allows the reader to fully appreciate each moment of the reading as an independent image.

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

Robert Duncan creates the image of another world in is poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”. The world is, “a scene made-up by the mind.” Here Duncan tells the reader that this world is “made-up” meaning it is an illusion of his own mind. However, he goes on to clarify the vision. Duncan continues, “that is not mine, but is a made place, / that is mine, it is so near to the heart.” Here Duncan clarifies that though this other world is made by the mind it does not belong to it. This separates the mind from what goes on inside it in the imagination. The alternate existence of a place made in his mind by another self, not the interacting with the world, conscious, physical me. Instead it is the I need to find a way to cope with the madness of the world and my own existential realization of myself as separate from the world and in which I am absolutely capable of dying – type of self.
The place is created by light as well as the mind. This shows the reader that the inner self conscious self is the light, or truth. Thus this truth of the metaphysical is seen in the individual as, “the shadows that are forms.” This escape from the physical is essential to the existential existence of humanity and Duncan even says that this illusion of the meadow of thought is, “ given property of the mind.” This striving by our selves for the metaphysical is “given” and may even provide the “certain bounds” which may “hold against chaos.

Phonemics

Spicer shows the inabilities of language to fully communicate in his poem “Phonemics”. The telephone is used as a metaphor for the long distance communication between individuals under any circumstance. The poem defines the separation of individuals and the impossibility for them to ever completely know another. Just as the telephone breaks, “sound into electrical impulses and put it back together,” so also do the functions of the human brain take sound and, “route to phonemes, then to bound and free morphemes, then to syntactic structures.” Spicer is referring here to the process in which sound is understood to have meaning. He points this out so the reader will realize that any language communication is “long distance” in the sense that what is heard is not meaning, but sounds which are given meaning by one’s own mind. This is important to Spicer’s poem because the meaning of the speaker is entirely at the will of the listener. It is not the speaker’s meaning which is understood by the listener, but the listener’s own meaning transferred to the voice of the speaker. Thus, individuals are left alone in the world by their own understanding of language.
Furthermore, Spicer says, “Long Distance calls to your father, your mother, your friend, your lover.” Here the word “calls” is not used, as before, as a noun, but instead the word “calls” is used as a verb. The distance is the agent of the phrase and it is calling. This realization is ominous considering that those closest to the individual are still at a distance which cannot be breached, for only the distance calls to them not the individual himself. This is all due to the way language is a meaning given by one’s self not another.

Poetics 2

"A tradition becomes inept when it blocks the nesessary conclusion; it says we have felt nothing, it implies others have felt more."
Creeley means simply that if the tradition of poetry leaves the reader feeling nothing, it has missed its mark and purpose.
"A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act."
Here is the flaw of many readers. To think the poet is simply giving a picture in the mind and nothing more. Of course a poem will give the reader a picture in the mind, but that is not the point.
"The process of definition is the intent of the poem."
A poem must define itself and be the object of the readers reation. The reader and the poem are defined when the energy of a poem is communicated. And the poem must be treated as an object that has been defined in and of itself, not a concept existing outside the poem.

The Language

"Locate I"

Do it. Go on, locate I! The only location I can be is right here. The Self as a metaphysical entity cannot be located apart from the physical location of I. Creeley starts in right off the bat with a challenge. Objects may be located, the physical I may be located. The title, The Language, is straight to the point. Language is, just as the Self, unable to exist without the physical. He is not merely referring to a body to make an arbitrary symbol or sound, but also to objects which must exist in order for the mind to have something for which to make an arbitrary symbol.

"little. Words / say everything." Words, and by implication language, are the only reason we can have a cognitive idea to define objects. In other words, if we did not have language we would not be able to give objects any value in our mind. Cognition would be only instinct and no reason.

"I / love you / again, / then what" The "I" is separated from "love" because, since I is only capable of being located in the physical sense, it must be separated from love. Love cannot be located, is a concept, a metaphysical idea. Being so there is only one object to represent love, a little word. l-o-v-e So words are objects, are concrete, are full. Maybe that one little word is enough on which to locate the abstract idea of love.

Unfortunately, what words are full of is holes. The hole is known as the poverty of the input. One must have objects to label with words. But reciprocally objects must have words before the mind may define even to oneself any object. This is the inescapable power and inability of language.

Poetics 1

Olson's poetics convey a new order of importance to me. The syllable is key to the ear and therefore the mind. We hear in syllables. It is by syllables the mind will move. That movement of the mind must be constant in order to pass the energy of the poem to the reader.
The lines are breaths. Are not to be focused on, these are made as the poem is written. By paying attention to one's breath as he writes.
The field is the poem on paper. This represents the relationships between objects. But one must in composing leave each object, as represented in the whole of the joining of the syllable and line, solid and unchanged.
Though projective verse is "free form" poetry, it cannot be concieved as being formless. Rather, the form is natural, it is made of language, of words, of syllables, of sound. Language has form, it has instictive universal form.

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"In Cold Hell in Thicket"

Olson begins the poem with a question about the (him) self. How can the self stay abstract, strong, strung, and cold, when confronted with this hell and thicket?First, one must ask what the self is confronted by in this hell.
Obviously the self has been knocked down in line twelve, and something has obstructed the self from where it must go. However, there is the possibility of escape. At the moment the self, the speaker deams, may be able to raise himself up out of this hell, this thicket. The problem is the self is "imageless" and "reluctant". He cannot escape or even transform the hell he is in if he does not know who he is. Which is the very question he will eventually ask. He becomes abstract to even himself. The self is its own thicket of questions, of fear at the inability to know itself. It grows as he grows, changes as he changes. The self is the prison and the prisoner, its own afflicter.
He has, "isolated, observed, picked over, measured, raised / as though a word, an acuracy were a pincer!" He knows the self more completely and acurately than ever. The thicket, the self, however, has grown now knows what he knows which only keeps him from raising out of the thicket.

II

The poem halts after the truth has been uttered. "But hell now / is not exterior, is not to be gotten out of, is the coat of your own self." He cannot move. The battlefield is in him. As each old self dies it changes into a new self, and a higher thicket. He is "shaped" and "carved" unable to know himself completely in order to be free of the self, because he is constantly changing. He is constantly, "moving off / into the soil, on his own bones." He must move "without wavering". This is demanded by nature of the self, to move, to change, to waver unwaveringly.

Olson begins with an ignorance is bliss tone of voice, yet follows himself into the realization of an inescapable hell. His awareness of the self has trapped him in indeterminancy. The poem reflects this indeterminancy because the poem is, "precise as hell is, precise / as any words."