The Practice of Outside

Robin Blaser.

Spicer was so marvelous since (because of) the fact that language wasn’t working. It didn’t give him a world. It didn’t give any of the rest of us a world. It just jabbered on & on & on.

-Blaser, on cosmology, in an interview with Paul Nelson

Key Points:

subversion (even abandonment?) of the lyric:

"He had said early on in conversation with a young poet that one had first to learn to use the I and then to lose it." (271) and perhaps also

"You have to-- not really want-- not what you don't want to say. It's a very complicated kind of thing. You can't play tricks on it. That's the second stage." (274)

“...he found the fundamental description of the lyric voice, which had defined the extent of the poem’s concern, and his dissatisfaction with it, and he also found the extreme question, who or what is speaking?” (299) good question. And later:

“…Jack’s concern for a flowing, incomplete sense of form: the basic question—who is speaking?—turns of the gossip, the baseball forecasts and the meannesses—turns into a world.” (322)

dictation: (related) “Now, the third step in dictated poetry is to try to keep all of yourself that is possible out of the poem… The more you know, the more languages you know… the more building blocks the Martians have to play with.” (275)

polarities:

“This is the necessary laying of oneself alongside another content, which brings form and keeps it alive—the double of language, where it holds to both reason and unreason, thought and unthought… to find what is also there at the gates—a discourse, recomposing, which also happens to be a ‘motive of things that we are not’.” (316)

“…neither baseball nor poetry are for amusement. They disclose something—perhaps only a virtuality. The rules are invisible, the players a visibility.” (317)

“Disbelief and invisibility are as real to experience as belief and visibility… If our visibility falls out of language, the language comes back to talk by itself.” (290) This leads to his idea of the “fix”:

the “fix”: “He also meant the language of it—a fix of the language that is not true to its own structure and that tends to stop the real in something one can only refer to.” (283)

and: “Jack in particular is clear on the part language plays in the composition of what we call real. Thus, the poetics becomes directive to perception and stance, a way rather than a fictive transcendence.”

perhaps: “The looking into something as it composes in the poem, especially as it is of our own time, is to see what is on the other side, but not separate from this side or its terror. One can’t see without meaning…” (285)

but certainly:

“The public, the political, the social are all forms of thought and experience… these forms must begin again because we are inside the death of these forms, the “fix” of them.” (289)

And I think it’s possible to say that the “fix” is necessary—perhaps even inevitable; Blaser says, “For us, outside the strangeness of poetry, discourse has been accepted as an act of language between ourselves, an agreement of logical structure that turns out to be our impositions of an order. This amounts to a closure of language, which brings it into our own limit, and ultimately that discourse will die as man does.” (291)

But how to get this “fix”?

opening/closure of language: “Where, so to speak, a public language has closed itself in order to hold a meaning, it becomes less than the composition of meaning…and becomes an imposition rather than a disclosure.” (275)

and Mallarmé’s idea that “Nothingness… was not an end but a point of departure”? (298)

and [a final aspect of Jack’s work]: “that the reader participates in the meaning of the poem—that the poetic reopens words into action… At the center of a poetry of this order, there is a perilous act, which is of the nature of thought itself.” (300)

which brings us, I think, to form:

“The poetic can only be a persuasive dressing-up of a system or a grid of meanings. It is then only a disguised discourse. The poetic, where it breaks out of the ordinary discourse and is either too elemental or to visionary, will have a life of its own and be true to itself.” (302)

Coleridge, on form: “Remember that there is a difference between form as proceeding, and shape as superinduced: —the latter is either the death or the imprisonment of the thing: —the former is its self-witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency.” (303) (think also of Keats’ negative capability)