The Medium of Poetry

April 17, 2009 at 10:42 pm (Language as Medium) (Art, Painting, The Particular)

What is it to explore the medium of an art? Modernist artists tried to figure out what made painting different from other forms of 2-D art . . . namely the crisis was the advent of photography. Photography did the whole representation thing so much better than painting ever could that it called into question what really was the purpose of painting. What is it that painting does that separates it from all other aesthetic endeavors? Painting isn’t primarily about representation . . . it can be representational, but that doesn’t define what it is to be a painting. A painting is pigment applied to a surface—all else that follows is a refinement of that central quality. The act of painting is the act of applying pigment to a surface. So, an investigation of the medium of painting is an investigation of how pigments might be applied to surfaces: an investigation of texture, color, light, surface effects, brush stroke, pigment interactions, temporal effects on surface and pigment, and on and on.

What is it then to investigate the medium of poetry? What is it that poetry does that is different from other forms of expression? What is it that separates poetry from fiction for instance? Fiction, by its very nature, is better at narrative expression than poetry. Fiction works through prolonged syllogistic development of narrative structures. These structures can in themselves be very poetic, but at its root fiction is about prolonged engagement with narrative content. Conversely, poetry can engage in story telling—just look at Pope’s The Rape of the Lock or Homer or Resnikov’s Testimony or or or. Story telling though is not what makes poetry poetry. In fact I would argue that like painting, content does not define the art form. A particular content does not make something a poem; a poem is a poem irregardless of content. What makes a poem a poem is an attention to detail—to, as Creeley used to say, the particular. When a work preferences an attention to the particulars it is preferencing the poetic in its nature. the important thing about a poem is how something is told or said rather than what is being said: A. C. Swinbourne’s decadent word choice and over the top rhyme, Walt Whitman’s expansive line, William Carlos Williams’ line breaks, Edna St. Vincent Milay’s re-purposing the form of the sonnet, Allen Ginsberg’s catalogue, E. E. Cummings’ broken words, Basil Bunting’s, Maggie O’Sullivan’s, or Geraldine Monk’s sound of place, Steve McCaffery’s idiom of place, Ezra Pound’s composition through allusion, Ron Silliman’s composition through aggregation, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s place composition, Dieter Rot or Christian Bök’s iterations, Emily Dickinson’s punctuation, Bob Cobbings’ xeroxed recontextualizations and blow ups, . . . and the list just keeps expanding. The medium of poetry is the use of language, and as poets like Cobbing have taught us, the use of language extends to mark making and reading as seeing (or maybe seeing as/is reading). An investigation of the medium of poetry is an investigation of how language works and can be made to work.