Abstracts

One thing I've been realizing in my readings lately is that the postmodern aversion to meter and rhyme is not based on any clear reasoning in method but rather on simple prejudice. After all, if one can write a poem using a telephone book, certainly one can do the same with rhyme and meter. It's as if no painting is authentic if done in oils. Or even watercolors. But because so many "wrong-headed" or "outmoded" poems have been written in meter, let's throw the baby out.

The following selections are from different poetic schools and address abstraction in different ways. One sees abstrasction more as method, the other as stance.

From "The Founding of English Metre" by John Thompson:

The line or measure with its combination of feet and its representation of juncture, the end of the line, is a model of the larger units of language. This is what the metrical pattern is. It does for language what the forms of any art do for their materials. It abstracts certain elements from the experience of the senses and forms them into patterns, as painting abstracts elements from what the eye perceives, dancing from what the body perceives as it moves, music from what the ear perceives. The elements are ordered in patterns similar to those the senses experience all the time, but art characteristically makes the patterns simpler and clearer and the artist regards them as having a kind of independent existence they do not have in everyday experience.

From "Personism: A Manifesto: by Frank O'Hara

Abstraction in poetry, which Allen recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude toward degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody yet knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.

Meter is not abstraction in the manner of O'Hara. Personism is not abstraction in the sense of Thompson. Neither selection is necessarily exclusive of the other. At least, that's what I'm thinking today.