Yeehaw!!!
I have the house to myself on what seems a lovely day... Parental units are off for the night to dine with friends, friends they usually hang around with quite a while.... Yeah! I can proceed to dance naked around the house with a lamp shade on my head. Well, not quite, of course.... To any of you permanently scarred by a mental image of such a thing, I remit no apology: that's what you get for visiting my blog. *smart-ass grin* Am thinking I might settle onto the front porch with a half-dozen books, tease through some more of my dissertative thoughts, drinking profuse amounts of rye as music rings through the house. To know tranquility.... Maybe the musical selection should include John Mellencamp's "Dance Naked," even if it has that horrible cover of Van Morrison's "Wild Night."

There's something invidious about blogging. It occurs to me that blogging is a lot less about communicating with others than with talking to oneself, and I'm not entirely sure whether it's a healthy thing or not. Sure, bloggers have readers, and there are things bloggers (or most of them, anyway) save for themselves.

On a more communicative note, I think I may finally have identified the lynch-pin for my dissertation. Some time ago I realized that the many of the key Modern poets were borrowing (often stealing) from the traditions of nonsense poetry even in ostensibly 'serious' verse. Eliot's poetics in Four Quartets, for example, owes a great deal to Lewis Carroll and company, but one can see Eliot's own nonsense Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats as being more significant in his poetic development than many tend to assume. It's interesting, though, how well the nonsensical provides a touchstone for considering Modern poetics in an entirely new light, or entirely new to me anyway. Critics have often wondered how to deal with fissures and paradoxes in the poems of, say, Eliot and Stevens, and they seek super-logical ways of rationalizing them (and therefore hopefully resolving paradoxes and so forth). I'm on the path, then, to identifying a relatively new way of thinking about poetry and poetics that will hopefully start to free the poems from the laborious forms of discourse and material analysis to which they've recently been subjected. It also bodes for a new way of thinking about literature in itself-- even if, in fact, the new way is really quite old, and more akin to what most poets would actually want of their readers. My task is to find the keys to the gates to this, and to articulate it. I'm sure this will lead to charges from supervisors that my reading is 'ahistorical,' 'apolitical,' and 'theoretically-naive.' So what. Who cares. There are larger issues at stake here, and I'm sufficiently iconoclastic to lead the charge. Once more unto the breach!

It's occurred to me that in the Modern age, when humanistic and Romantic notions were on the wane and the world seemed increasingly fragmentary and impersonal, the means to search out or to discover the transcendental came not in articulating statements of faith or asserting values, but in the subversion of them through the devices of nonsense. If there is no intrinsic sense to things, but there must be sense (or so we tell ourselves), then there has to be a sense beyond sense, a meaning beyond the meaning, a meaning that may not be strictly cognitive or verifiable. This helps especially with dealing with guys like Eliot and Stevens who were intensely intellectual but also made proclamations to devalue the pretensions toward determining or fixing meaning. Hence, Eliot's famous statement about the music of poetry. Hence Stevens' deliberate assertion that Ramon Fernandez wasn't meant to be the French literary critic and philosopher, but just a random Cuban 'made up of the two most Spanish names [he] could find.'

In thinking all this, I'm tending toward a total realignment in ways of thinking about Modern poetry, a realignment that embraces paradox, that deflates connotative meaning, and that brings to the reading process a kind of play and whimsy that both Eliot and Stevens, I think, would want (and other poets, too, indeed). Is it really possible that so many of our critics have, as Elito said, 'had the experience but missed the meaning'? This means -- oh my god-- I will have to create and to determine an elaborate definition of what 'meaning' is. This could be a nightmare. I'm up to the challenge. I have nothing to declare but my arrogance. ;-)

Onward & upward.