Poetry: Cosmology or Zoology?

"For several decades now, world literature, music, painting and sculpture have exhibited a stubborn tendency to grow not higher but to the side, not toward the highest achievements of craftsmanship and of the human spirit but toward their disintegration into a frantic and insidious 'novelty.'" -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

This quote comes from a wonderful essay by Solzhenitsyn which you can find here. Though I do not agree point for point with the great Russian (may he rest in peace), his essay is at least a brother to this post.

I would like to talk about poetry, but not in dry words which suck the marrow from its very bones. I want to talk mythically -- poetically -- about something very dear to my heart. Forgive me if this gets a little strange -- I will try to bring it all around in the end.

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". This, the spoken logos which formed the universe (the singing, as Lewis so beautifully imagines in The Magician's Nephew). The word made word: something from nothing, yet in another sense something from everything. Creation ex nihilo in one sense, but in another not, for the creation sprang from the very wisdom of the LORD.

The modern world has, of course, sloughed the LORD off to the side but in a very real sense has kept the idea of ex nihilo creation intact. Like most ideas traditionally kept in the realm of religion, ex nihilo creation has been shuttled to the realm of the aesthetic. Man, in his infinite arrogance, has put himself in the place of God. There is certainly a very mystical side to all this (e.g. man's desire for transcendence "satisfied" through aesthetic means) but I want to focus tonight on the practical.

Let us narrow our focus from the cosmos to a single act of artistic creation. Narrower, narrower: we observe the poet about to write a poem. Now, what happens during those moments of thought and scribbling and editing? I submit that the prevailing conception of this act bears some resemblance to the ex nihilo. This assessment must of course be tempered. No one thinks that the poet shoots up into the Platonic stratosphere, grabs the forms he requires, and makes a flawless reentry right onto the page. Words exist already, and certainly even influences such as personal history are acknowledged as informing the artist, but in the end ex nihilo prevails. The very word 'creates' implies this making something from nothing. We do not speak of those who fashion poems (poetry and music make good examples here, better than the visual arts; one can readily imagine describing a sculptor as a 'fashioner' of artistic goods). Rather the poet would seem to make little universes each time he takes up his pen.

In the course of writing my senior thesis, I read quite a lot about the genesis and shape of the genius paradigm (the dominant artistic from the Enlightenment to today). Tied inextricably from the paradigm is the notion of the genius as just such a demi-god, forging world upon world in the bellows of his imagination. For our purposes it hardly matters whether this gift is egalitarian (it would seem to start out far from there, but of course the slide into post-modernism and "warm fuzzy" aesthetics has levelled the field a bit); the remarkable break with previous thought comes in thinking that it can be done at all.

This has been destructive to aesthetics in uncountable ways, but tonight my focus is on this "relentless cult of novelty" which Solzhenitsyn feels his way toward. If artistic creation may be equated with the ex nihilo, then what counts in aesthetics is the pressing on, the continued search to find new worlds to speak into existence. It is not sufficient that art be beautiful or good; it must first and foremost be new. We see this all over, in the very words critics use: bold (new), tired (in the pattern of something gone before).

But we have strayed. Let us once more trade the telescope for the microscope. One area which hits close to home for me is the poetic aesthetic. I must tread the proverbial eggshell here and make sure I am not misunderstood. Over time, poetry has shifted off the tracks, so to speak. Poetic forms long honored have been chucked out the window in favor of an "anything goes" aesthetic. The traditional concerns of poetry have been abandoned to make room for the obsession with personal expression. Let me make very clear that I am not making a wholesale attack on newer categories such as postmodern poetry or free verse. There is much that is good in these things, but I am saying that the general mindset of this aesthetic is fundamentally unsound. The quest for originality has led to a confusion over what poetry is really meant to be. Ideas such as rhythm and cadence (or rhyme and reason for that matter) give way to writing down whatever comes to mind, a sort of a vomit all over the page.

This is where all presumed ex nihilo creation leads. In my thesis (shameless self promotion: ask me if you want to read it!), I describe the genius paradigm as fundamentally self-destructive. There I am mostly concerned with the way that it has undermined itself by exhausting the wells of originality (leading to the ennui driven doodlings of postmodernism). Here I want to put it another way: how the drive for ex nihilo in fact leads to an increase in chaos. The poet sets out to create a world for himself, but instead ends up with a swirling eddy, a sounding fury.

Take, for example, the poetic "style" of flarf. What value -- save comedic, perhaps -- does the random jumbling of search terms hold? True, flarfsters are doing it (mostly) ironically, but this only goes to show how far poetry has fallen (a point I raise in my thesis is that postmodernism represents the downward slope of the genius paradigm, the slow viscious rebellion against a thought system which nevertheless presents indisputable guiding principles). The pursuit of novelty has led to this: mindless, artless scribbles on a page.

Let us turn the page, quite literally, from the first chapter of Genesis to the second. Here we see man in his natural habitat, so to speak. Man in the garden, charged with a special task in the creation process. Not the ex nihilo of the creation; the much humbler task of naming the animals. Man was not tasked by God to perform divine functions; he has not the power to make things that never were be. Rather he was allowed to participate in the divine song by giving order to those things which were already created. The ordering which began when God separated the light from the darkness continued as Adam lumped rhinoceri with rhinoceri, but well away from the lions.

You do not have to believe a word of the Bible to see the very profound insight given in this assigment. It has direct bearing on this artistic conundrum of the cult of novelty. We must in fact shift our paradigm away from a belief in the ex nihilo power of the artist and toward a belief that the proper function of art is to bring order and reason and harmony, both to our own thoughts and to the world around us. The genius paradigm has already proven itself to be rotten at core; we must set our feet on firmer ground.

The poet does not create from nothing. Instead he bestows order on the world around him, the thoughts which flit through his mind, the dog which waddles down the street. He grabs from this place, steals that word, mixes them together like a potioneer. In that sense he does forge; he smelts his various parts into a glittering ore. Freed from the ridiculous desire to create something original, he can concentrate on making something good and beautiful.

What would such a thing look like, practically speaking? It would mean a reverence in art for clear form, balance, order. In poetry, it would mean an embracing of form and especially rhythm. It would not be the endless rote sculpture of the Egyptians, cranking out sonnet after sonnet as easily as making sausage. Certainly the breaking of form can be as artistically significant and beautiful as the strict adherence to it. I fully recognize the good in straying from forms set down, but when those forms are abandoned completely, only chaos remains.

I close with this: what a wonderfully freeing thing constraint is! We are so afraid that boundaries commit us to staid art that we miss the plain truth, that there is immeasurable freedom in pursuing things within their limits. The beauty of Chris Paul breaking ankles on a drive to the hoop is in no way diminished by the fact that he can never score a touchdown; rather, such blurring of lines would be a diminishment. So too with art: when man steps over the line of restraint, grabs greedily at the ex nihilo, he winds up with nothing indeed. But if he will stoop, be content with the naming given to him, who knows what wondrous hippopotami will emerge?