Here’s my own diagram of Louis Zukofsky’s lines (that I quoted on The Verb): that poetry is:
an integral
lower limit speech
upper limit music
This is what I see when I read it, anyway.
I also cited Tom WN Parker’s Loving in Truth, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle, CUP, 1998.
The discussion was very detailed in the recording, and was trimmed a little to make the whole show 30 mins long.
For example, I wanted to make the point, against the idea of poetry and maths as truth, of the “approximately equal” - a sign that looks like the equals sign, but with a bump to it.
If you look at Ptolemy, I said, and the idea of the planets revolving around the earth, that theory seemed to explain a lot of the movements of the planets but had some postscripts and exceptions. I believe that the idea of retrograde motion, important to those astrologically inclined (I no longer am), comes from this. Planets were thought to seem to go backwards on the circuits Ptolemy set for them.
Then Copernicus came along and rewrote the equation.
But what of the calculations made meanwhile? Poetry can not only be based on a false theory but actually be complicating and falsifying it. Adding data that “shouldn’t be there” according to the current equations.
I only say this because my Pi piece for the Verb aspires to that sort of pushing forward of knowledge (the idea of a Pi harmony, for example, of Pi mnemonics in different languages all in the same form) by a kind of “getting everything in”, or baggy data gathering.
Above all, I’m stressing the counter-intuitive, as the term is used in science. (Me, I follow intuition in the common sense meaning, doing something for a reason of its energy, its tingle, its hunch). But the counter-intuitive in science refers to how you look at a problem, and make sense of it according to what you know (literally, what theories you know, although you may have internalised them as common sense).
What you often do with an equation is put it by your side (or as your dark glasses) as you enter a world which you’d not get if you tried to make sense of it as per usual. A poem works exactly like that, sometimes. We feel able to go into grief, into awe, into love, guided (but not told what to do) by a poem, or a line from a poem.
I refer to the idea of the counter-intuitive quite a lot in my prose poem, “O to Subject”, published by The Radiator, 2003.
Monday, 4 December 2006
