Reading Moxley's "Fragments of a Broken Poetics"

As Teddy's been napping this morning I luckily stumbled across this lovely, keen, and provocative piece of aphorisms on poetry by Jennifer Moxley, whose work I admire. Here are some of my favorite passages with my own half-baked marginalia interspersed:

1
"The poet's psychology, visible only to the poet's friends, floats lightly over the surface of the poem. It discolors some words temporarily, but never quite settles into them—provided those words belong together. If so, they will eventually cast off this shadow; if not, it will eventually smother them. Thus, it is the poem, not the poet, that we love. Through it the singular becomes shared, the transitory eternal."

-What a superb response to the problematic relationship between poet and poem.

8
"The idea of audience is a nuisance born of the need for spectacle. Poems haunting the precarious dialectic between existence and extinction do not need it. Their magic is dependent on the private experience of separate individuals."

-Yes!

17
"Sleep, to whom Keats partly owes his "worthy rhymes," has long been kin to poetry. Saint-Pol Roux affixing a sign that reads "poet at work" to his bedchamber is the most playful example of this alliance. Both sleep and poetry open a passage to the unconscious, one by nature, the other by artifice. Both create memories of astonishing wakefulness, one through dream, the other through imagination. It is almost impossible to reproduce or transmit such experiences by other means."

-Yes, more or less, but I dislike the overly tidy distinction between nature and artifice... I don't know that either domain (sleep or poetry) rests purely in the realm of these two extremes. Is there not an art to dreaming? A wild, natural poetry?

"It is almost impossible to reproduce or transmit such experiences by other means."

-To my mind, it is impossible. It is where mimesis fails, which is why I find dream and poetry to be the most compelling states we can inhabit.

25
"Sometimes the poem has more friends than the poet."

-We can only hope so!

29
"There is a time in every poet's life when the mention of other writers, even if dead, is intolerable. It is a necessary rejection of the known text in favor of the not-yet-written. If things go as they should, this allergy will be only temporary. The lively mind will eventually find such closed antipathy boring and opt for openness instead."

-Don't I know it. Luckily all my allergies come and go...

28
"Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators. Rapid and sequential page turning gives us a sense of progress and accomplishment, relieving us from the double threat of frustration and impatience."

"concentrated lingering"--getting harder and harder to do!

29
"Language has no weather, and therefore is not, strictly speaking, an environment."

-Hmmm. I really want to quarrel with this one. Maybe J.M. and I have different ideas of what weather would mean for language. I tend to equate weather with mood (don't ask why, just a bad pathetic fallacy tendency I suppose--though I don't think of it so literally, i.e. gray sky doesn't equal sadness)--I mean that mood is a kind of psychological weather. And think perhaps the most important aspect of a poem is its mood. So for me poetry can work as a kind of psycholinguistic "weather".

34
"I once wrote, 'those who think poetry is working, are laboring under a misconception.' By which I meant that the mental activity of writing a poem sabotages the mechanized reproduction of culturally programmed cognition: work-a-day thought is put to a stop. "

-Hell yes.

37
"The trick with fashion is to sit it out."

-An excellent reminder!

41
"After a point, even the poem can grow bored with its own devices."

-I hate it when that happens. That's when it's time for a coffee break or a bike ride.

45
"A great deal of overlap notwithstanding, the poem's knowledge is never quite identical to the poet's. Poets understand the intention behind their poems, and may even recognize the outcome, but there is always a remainder they cannot foresee and, indeed, may never detect."

-Couldn't agree more. This is why we need poems--we can get at that remainder no other way.