Dylan A. T. Miner, professor of Transcultural Studies at Michigan State University, articulates that modernity/coloniality “forces the complex realities of human existence into easily codifiable systems of opposites” (174). The conditions that posit the conditions of success or failure are premised on this binary.
I need to spend more time clarifying my thoughts on this question of the failure in a poem; still, I can't think of any art object that succeeds. . . . .in many ways, the beauty, yes I said it, the beauty is in the "failing" of the art object: the horizon where it realizes its finitude; and the beautiful is the oscillation between obscurity and light. The late Reginald Shepherd wrote the following on difficult and obscure poetry on his wonderful blog:
I take Moore’s admonition to refer to the clarity of the materials, of the saying and showing itself, not of what it means or how it’s to be interpreted. This is the clarity of an experience: the poem is an experience the reader has, and though one doesn’t always know what the experience “means,” one knows what happened, what one experienced. But if what happened isn’t clear, then there’s no possibility of making meaning out of it. As Joan Houlihan cogently points out, incoherence is neither mysterious nor difficult; it's just another source of boredom. The poet should provide the reader with the elements out of which the meaning or meanings can be assembled or produced, and the pieces of the mosaic should be clear and distinct (like Descartes’ ideas), even if their relations to one another are not immediately apparent. (Shepherd)
Shepherd posits the conditions not for a successful or failed poem, rather, he situates the poem in a broader experiential context: does it feed life or is it a symptom (boredom) of the desensitizing modernity's shock and awe inflicts on its occupants?
Miner, Dylan A.T.. “When They Awaken: Indigeneity, Miscegenation, and Anticolonial Visuality.” Rhetorics of the Americas. Ed. Damian Baca, Victor Villanueva. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
1 comment:
Right, and this is precisely what I was gesturing toward in my post: the potential of failure for creativity, thus forcing one to redefine it as success (albeit of a different kind than originally intended).
By failure, I meant the failure of any kind of positivism. For example, the failure of translation to reach any kind of Platonic übersprache allows for success in translation. In this sense, the poem can only fail insofar as it's supposed to represent one fixed meaning. As soon as the poem is seen as figurative in any sense (which I believe the deconstructionists have demonstrated is true of all language), it must have some sort of success.
That said, there is always the subjective aesthetic judgment, according to which a poem can either succeed or fail.
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