[The Personist]

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

I also recommend reading Levinas.

I read a poem in which he was mentioned once. I think you should read Lyn Hejinian's poetry; it's very theoretical and very brilliant. There are actually several of her works up on this website for free download:

http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj.../gesualdo.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj...ARD/guard.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/MASK/mask.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/REDO/redo.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj...T/thought.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj...G/writing.html

The Guard is my favorite. I love her poetry and most Language Poetry, especially that which is an extension of the New York School aesthetically, because they're not afraid to foreground or explore theory in their writing. So I think it's germaine to this thread to post it.

[Love As Arson]

Originally Posted by The Personist

I read a poem in which he was mentioned once. I think you should read Lyn Hejinian's poetry; it's very theoretical and very brilliant. There are actually several of her works up on this website for free download:

http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj.../gesualdo.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj...ARD/guard.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/MASK/mask.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/REDO/redo.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj...T/thought.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj...G/writing.html

The Guard is my favorite. I love her poetry and most Language Poetry, especially that which is an extension of the New York School aesthetically, because they're not afraid to foreground or explore theory in their writing. So I think it's germaine to this thread to post it.

I'll have to check it out. I have been reading more poetry, but it's mostly been nineteenth century French poetry, so this should be a welcome departure.

Also, great stuff:


Heideggerian Marxism

[The Personist]

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

I'll have to check it out. I have been reading more poetry, but it's mostly been nineteenth century French poetry, so this should be a welcome departure.

Also, great stuff:


Heideggerian Marxism

Both the links there aren't working for me. I'll try it again later.

Yeah, Language poetry is a lot different. It's very theoretically-based, and while it lacks the giddiness of my favorite New York poets, it's oftentimes laugh-out-loud funny even while it refigures radically a lot of traditional assumptions about poetry and deals with some difficult philosophical issues. Of course, I also think everyone should read the New York School poets, especially Ashbery and Koch and O'Hara. But Hejinian seems right up the alley of this thread, and she stands out to me as someone who rescues poetry from a lot of the more mundane manifestations it's seen in the past 50 years.

I'm attaching two essays: Hejinian's "Rejection of Closure," which is amazing, and then the polemic she wrote in collaboration with the other Language poets about contemporary poetry. They're quite fabulous.

Also, what 19th century Frenchmen? I love me some Rimbaud.

[Love As Arson]

Originally Posted by The Personist

Both the links there aren't working for me. I'll try it again later.

Yeah, Language poetry is a lot different. It's very theoretically-based, and while it lacks the giddiness of my favorite New York poets, it's oftentimes laugh-out-loud funny even while it refigures radically a lot of traditional assumptions about poetry and deals with some difficult philosophical issues. Of course, I also think everyone should read the New York School poets, especially Ashbery and Koch and O'Hara. But Hejinian seems right up the alley of this thread, and she stands out to me as someone who rescues poetry from a lot of the more mundane manifestations it's seen in the past 50 years.

I'm attaching two essays: Hejinian's "Rejection of Closure," which is amazing, and then the polemic she wrote in collaboration with the other Language poets about contemporary poetry. They're quite fabulous.

Also, what 19th century Frenchmen? I love me some Rimbaud.

I've read some Rimbaud, George Sand and Mallarmé. I was going to read Baudelaire, but he was a reactionary.

[The Personist]

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

I've read some Rimbaud, George Sand and Mallarmé. I was going to read Baudelaire, but he was a reactionary.

Oh but Baudelaire is great! As an art critic he was essential in promoting realism (over neoclassicism) and as a poet, even though he wrote in very strict meter frequently, he was very talented. Also, have you read his prose poems? I like them better than the metrical ones, though I must say his address to the reader at the beginning of Les Fleurs Du Mal has always been one of my favorites of his.

You should move into some 20th century Frenchmen--Eluard and Reverdy are great.

[Love As Arson]

Originally Posted by The Personist

Oh but Baudelaire is great! As an art critic he was essential in promoting realism (over neoclassicism) and as a poet, even though he wrote in very strict meter frequently, he was very talented. Also, have you read his prose poems? I like them better than the metrical ones, though I must say his address to the reader at the beginning of Les Fleurs Du Mal has always been one of my favorites of his.

You should move into some 20th century Frenchmen--Eluard and Reverdy are great.

I've only a passing familiarity with his work. I was just turned off by his affinity for the authoritarian elements of the French Revolution. I'll give "Les Fleurs du mal" a try, though.

[The Personist]

I got bored at work and reread this whole thread.

Originally Posted by vodyanoj

Apologetics, PoMo or relativism? some kind of a case may be made for some pomo philosophers (although the majority of them are charlatans or close to veering into charlatanry). The other two are utterly useless, of course, and no case for their usefulness that is not dependent on a particular political or religious agenda can be made at all.

I am quoting this because I want you to come back, and also because I want to know who these charlatans of whom you speak are. Because I very much disagree.

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

Oh, and fuck Kant.

Eternally this.

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

I've only a passing familiarity with his work. I was just turned off by his affinity for the authoritarian elements of the French Revolution. I'll give "Les Fleurs du mal" a try, though.

http://fleursdumal.org/


EDIT: This is one of my favorites, but I'd suggest looking for a different translation: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/116
There are multiple translations of each poem from Fleurs Du Mal online there, which is very awesome and convenient.

I still can't get that book to download, dammit.

[Love As Arson]

For people that were interested in "Heidegerrian Marxism", it is attached below. I've also attached "The Flesh of Words" by Jacques Ranciere:

Quote:

This new collection of challenging literary studies plays with a foundational definition of Western culture: the word become flesh. But the word become flesh is not, or no longer, a theological already-given. It is a millennial goal or telos toward which each text strives.

Both witty and immensely erudite, Jacques Rancière leads the critical reader through a maze of arrivals toward the moment, perhaps always suspended, when the word finds its flesh. That is what he, a valiant and good-humored companion to these texts, goes questing for through seven essays examining a wide variety of familiar and unfamiliar works.

A text is always a commencement, the word setting out on its excursions through the implausible vicissitudes of narrative and the bizarre phantasmagorias of imagery, Don Quixote’s unsent letter reaching us through generous Balzac, lovely Rimbaud, demonic Althusser. The word is on its way to an incarnation that always lies ahead of the writer and the reader both, in this anguished democracy of language where the word is always taking on its flesh.

[The Personist]

A lovely little quote I stumbled upon. This also works nicely in the context of all those old battles over religion:

Originally Posted by Terry Eagleton

I do not mean that [literature] is unstable because value-judgments are 'subjective.' According to this view, the world is divided between solid facts 'out there' like Grand Central station, and arbitrary value-judgments 'in here' such as liking bananas or feeling that the tone of a Yeats poem veers from defensive hectoring to grimly resilient resignation. Facts are public and unimpeachable, values are private and gratuitous. There is an obvious difference between recounting a fact, such as 'This cathedral was built in 1612,' and registering a value-judgment, such as 'This cathedral is a magnificent specimen of baroque architecture.' But suppose I made the first kind of statement while showing an overseas visitor around England, and found that it puzzled her considerably. Why, she might ask, do you keep telling me the dates of the foundation of all these buildings? Why this obsession with origins? In the society I live in, she might go on, we keep no record at all of such events: we classify our buildings instead according to whether they face north-west or south-east. What this might do would be to demonstrate part of the unconscious system of value-judgments which underlies my own descriptive statements. Such value-judgments are not necessarily of the same kind as 'This cathedral is a magnificent specimen of baroque architecture,' but they are value-judgments nonetheless, and no factual pronouncement I make can escape them. Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgments: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps able to guarantee their truth, that you are the kind of person worth making them to, that something useful is accomplished by making them, and so on.

Thoughts?

[circasuicide]

Originally Posted by The Personist

I read a poem in which he was mentioned once. I think you should read Lyn Hejinian's poetry; it's very theoretical and very brilliant. There are actually several of her works up on this website for free download:

http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj.../gesualdo.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj...ARD/guard.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/MASK/mask.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/REDO/redo.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj...T/thought.html
http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/proj...G/writing.html

The Guard is my favorite. I love her poetry and most Language Poetry, especially that which is an extension of the New York School aesthetically, because they're not afraid to foreground or explore theory in their writing. So I think it's germaine to this thread to post it.

wow. i read 'the guard'. excellent.

[Love As Arson]

Originally Posted by The Personist

A lovely little quote I stumbled upon. This also works nicely in the context of all those old battles over religion:



Thoughts?

Those statements are intelligible, at the very least. What some argue, and I might agree, is that a statement may be so incoherent as to have no real meaning. It's similar to Chomsky's demonstration that sentences,while grammatically correct, may be nonsensical.

[The Personist]

Originally Posted by circasuicide

wow. i read 'the guard'. excellent.

Read the rest! Great stuff.

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

Those statements are intelligible, at the very least. What some argue, and I might agree, is that a statement may be so incoherent as to have no real meaning. It's similar to Chomsky's demonstration that sentences,while grammatically correct, may be nonsensical.

I may just be tired, but I feel like I"m missing the Chomsky connection here.

[Love As Arson]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorle...ep_furious ly

I was using that as an example that people that make theological statements are making incoherent statements, because the concepts they're speaking about are unintelligible.

[The Personist]

Originally Posted by Love As Arson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorle...ep_furious ly

I was using that as an example that people that make theological statements are making incoherent statements, because the concepts they're speaking about are unintelligible.

The wiki article mentions how I would respond--polysemy allows for the sentence to be interpreted.

[circasuicide]

for the record, jesus is not my 'homeboy'.