symbolist

Browsing The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (wonderful
bathroom reading) i came across a passage concerning the French symbolist
poets (late nineteenth century) that i thought was interesting in digital
contexts:

"Mallarme's conception of 'pure poetry' was of a point at which poetry would
attain complete linguistic autonomy, the words themselves taking over the
initiative and creating the meanings, liberating themselves from the
semiotic tyranny of the language and the deliberate intentions of the poet.
With Mallarme, subject matter is a function of an intense preoccupation with
the medium. Speculation in this direction reached its limit in Valery, who
eventually found the processes of poetic composition more interesting than
the poetry itself."

That's from the encyclopedia's entry on 'pure poetry'. Of course, the notion
of 'pure poetry' is at least as problematical, now, as many another
essentialist take on things. Problematical in many ways, not least of which
is the desirability and usefulness of any notion of 'pure poetry'. But I
found the notion of words themselves attaining some active autonomy from the
deliberate intentions of the poet a beautiful thing. And of course relevant
to digital poetics in that digital documents have not only content and style
but also behavior, so that many a digital poem attempts, one way or another,
to confer some type/degree of independence on the words themselves, give
each word (or some unit(s)) behavior/active process.

Also, I was delighted to read of Mallarme's 'intense preoccupation with the
medium'. Such a concern seems still not to be widely understood, even after
McLuhan. Media are active, whether we wish it so or not, in the rhetoric of
attention focus, meaning construction, and the general framing. Artistic
concern with media, even 'intense preoccupation with the medium' is, at its
own peril, oblivious to the other 'material' of art–the two types of
'material' are of concern, obviously, not solely the medium–but one without
the other, ie, concern for 'content' without understanding of media or, on
the other hand, 'intense preoccupation with the medium' without committment
to human affairs–each is usually without the sort of vitality we associate
with art.

Finally, I was interested to read that Valery "eventually found the
processes of poetic composition more interesting than the poetry itself."
The word "eventually" may be telling. Over the course of a lifetime of
reading and 'continuing to think to continue', it seems possible to come to
a point at which one may continue to be an artist yet hardly be interested
in "the poetry itself" or 'the paintings themselves', or whatever, and
concentrate, instead, on either "the processes of poetic composition" or
other similarly somewhat meta-level aspects of "the poetry itself".

And this needn't be erm wankery. The analogue in mathematics, for instance,
is concern not so much with 'the mathematics itself' so much as with
meta-mathematics, or formal systems. And, as you may know, such concerns
with the foundations of mathematics have, arguably, produced the most
profound results of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (non-Euclidean
geometry -> axiomatizing the real number system -> set theory -> the
transfinite -> Godel's incompleteness theorems -> Turing's solving Hilbert's
decision problem). And has resulted in language becoming a subject of study
in mathematics itself, and of course the rise of the language machines.

To which, of course, poetry must respond. It cannot go on for long that the
most intense engagements with language take place in fields such as
mathematics and its formulation of the theory of computation without poetry
comprehending it. 'Comprehending' as in taking it inside.

Symbolists. I see.

ja
http://vispo.com