Toward a Dis-Poetry

In “Four Statements On The Dance: Grace and Clarity” (from Silence), where poetry & dance are called time arts, works dependent on lengths of time and built of phrases much like nature is made of smaller & smaller parts, John Cage states:

With clarity of rhythmic structure, grace forms a duality.
Together they have a relation like that of body and soul.
Clarity is cold, mathematical, inhuman, but basic and
earthy. Grace is warm, incalculable, human, opposed to
clarity, and like the air. Grace is not here used to mean
prettiness; it is used to mean the play with and against
the clarity of the rhythmic structure. The two are always
present together in the best works of the time arts,
endlessly, and life-givingly, opposed to each other.

What I take from Cage’s remarks is that form is not a static formula for expression. Form, the morphology of a poem, its continuity, its expressive content, derives its movement, other than from the obvious devices of meter & sound, from the spontaneity born out of choice, experience & personality. Though this may appear obvious to any wordsmith, how this duality is played out is the matter that makes all the difference. Balance is not the order of the day however; different kinds of order may be established successfully if the poet seeks an appropriate representation of a poem’s constituent parts without sacrificing grace in favour of clarity and the reverse. How Cage composed his lectures speaks to this need to create works that operate on both levels. For example, by embedding a through-text that interrupts the general speech of the lecture we are given the underlying current of an idea or a lecture without weighing down the rest of the content with any unnecessary contextualization or explanation, so, like air, the through-text floats in & out of the general & straightforward elements, reinforcing the subject matter of the lectures.

Form in poetry is often aperceptive, a self-limiting & -perpetuating device; it is desired in work in order to place a kind of roadmap for reading (in the same way we expect to read a poem line by line from left to right, top to bottom). But form alone does not make the poem. Grace, in my view, is a kind of disruptive force like dispersion or decay or luck. It is where awe springs from; a mountain, a canyon, a blood-red moon cannot conjure the sublime without the messy collaboration of grace & soul.

Like Jorie Graham, whose poetry, though lyrical in a conventional sense even when cliché-dependent, achieves a heightened character in its attempt to give clarity to the ineffable and to provide multiple ways to see a scene, I want a poetry leavened by the clutter of human happening & by the Jacobian mental wrestling we experience in our reflective moments. This means a willingness to break out of the stable into the open fields of language. I agree with Cage when he says that a new music will foster new listening; therefore a new poetry will foster new reading. To paraphrase Cage paraphrasing Bergson’s statement about disorder: This dis-poetry is simply a poetry to which many are unaccustomed. Any art form untouched by an experimental spirit, or at least the vitality of change, will corrupt & deplete itself.