• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.6
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• pp.1001-1021
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• 2012

This paper is concerned with John Ashbery's poetics of difficulty, questioning in particular the nature of communication in his difficult poems. Ashbery has an idea of poetry as 'information' to be transmitted to the reader. Meaning, however, is to be created by a series of selections among equally probable choices. Ashbery's poetry has been characterized by resistance to the interpretive system of meaning. But the resistance itself, as I will argue, can be an effective medium of communication as the communicated message is not simply transmitted but 'selected' and thus created by the reader. In Ashbery's poetry, disruptive 'noise' elements can be processed as constructive information. What is normally considered a hindrance or noise can be reversed and added to the information. In Ashbery's poems, random ambiguities or noises can be effectively integrated into the final structure of meaning. Such a stochastic sense of information transfer has been embodied in Ashbery's idea of creating a network of verbal elements in his poetry, analogous to the interconnecting web of hypertext, the most dynamic medium 'information technology' has brought to us. John Ashbery, whose poems are simultaneously incomprehensible and intelligent, employs ambiguities or noise in his poetry, with an attempt to reach through linear language to express nonlinear realities. It is therefore my intention to examine Ashbery's poetics of difficulty, from a perspective of communication transmission, using the theories of information technology and the principles of hypertext theory. Ashbery's poetry raises precisely the problem confronted in the era of communication and information technology. The paper will also show how his aesthetics of difficulty reflects the culture of our uncertain times with overflowing information. With his difficult enigmatic poems, Ashbery was able to move ahead of the technological advances of his time to propose a new way of perceiving the world and life.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1119-1133
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• 2010

This paper explores Myung Mi Kim's poetics of the archive in Commons. Commons begins with a gesture that critiques a prior act of archivization: "Here, this speck and this speck that you missed." As the poems accrue in the book, Commons demonstrates the desire to record those experiences that have been neglected by the architects of traditional archives while at the same time interrogating the very logic of the archive. Crucial to that interrogation is the poetic form. Kim's attempt to archive silences and gaps leads to a radical experiment with form and language. It reformulates the archive as an open system amenable to interruption, extension, and revision. I examine in detail the techniques that contribute to her poetics of the archive, a poetics that draws the readers out of the narrow confines of their personal experiences and their political identities. By juxtaposing Kim's poems with her statements of poetics given as interviews, this paper connects the project of Commons to Kim's larger concern with open form and experimental writing. I argue that the "difficulty" of her poetry should be reinterpreted as a demand that her text makes on the readers to broaden their terms of engagement. The linguistic experiment of Commons provides an occasion to rethink the habitual ways in which time is experienced, national histories are written, and literary works are consumed.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.171-185
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• 2018

Students and other new readers of modernist poetry often experience difficulty with the influential early work of Ezra Pound. Although these typically brief poems may appear (deceptively) simple, an understanding of the relationship between Imagism and Vorticism is crucial to reading-or teaching-them effectively, which in turn requires significant familiarity with relevant poetics theories as well as representative poems. This essay clarifies the complex relations Imagism and Vorticism as two distinct styles that are too often conflated to the detriment of an accurate understanding of either one (and, in consequence, of the later modernist poetry that builds on their discoveries). In order to elucidate the modernists' justification of free verse over traditional metrical composition, I begin with an elaboration of T. E. Hulme's 1911 theory of the "cheerful, dry, and sophisticated" modern classicism on which both Imagism and Vorticism were largely predicated, developing Hulme's important distinction between the version of classicism that is "static" (and gives rise to Imagism) and the one that is "dynamic" (and leads to Vorticism and beyond it). In the following two sections, I draw upon and synthesize a broad range of Pound's own poetics statements to reveal the evolution of first sound ("melopoeia") and then the image ("phanopoeia") throughout his early work. Although the body of this article is analytical and historical in nature, it concludes with a practical template prompt for a creative response assignment, appropriate to undergraduate and graduate students, designed to help new readers recognize for themselves how Vorticist art works and why it matters.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.529-552
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• 2011

My essay aims at reading Ginsberg's "Howl" and "Kaddish" with the concept of 'shaman-prophet-poet' to illustrate the dynamic relationship between his poetics and radical politics. Throughout his widely-ranging career, Ginsberg represents himself as a poet-prophet and commands a typical rhetoric of revelation as a way of decentering Cold War orthodoxies. While well aware of the oppressive and pervasive power of the dominant post-war ideologies, he adopts 'madness' to oppose conventional political, social, and religious institutions; by way of entering into the madness of this world and actively engaging himself as a victim, he can finally heal both himself and the world. This dual function of poet characterizes his rhetoric of revelation, but it doesn't appeal to the mainstream of American critical ideology where the post-structural approach to language and subject gives a skeptical look at any account of active human agency and humanistic belief in the possibility of language. In "Howl" and "Kaddish," Ginsburg persuades the reader of the truth of his own vision through the convincing and realistic portraits of his contemporaries as well as his own mother and family. Different from his visionary predecessors such as Emerson and Whitman, Ginsberg knew the difficulty of a negotiation between history and divine vision, and attempted to imbricate his family, friends, and even the larger social and political units within his visionary experience in order to avoid naive idealism, escapism, or solipsism. Furthermore, he deconstructs the Logos of Western prophecy and replaces it with the groundless identity and the nontheistic epistemology of Buddhism, which, in turn, leads to emptying his powerful language of absolutist meaning and prevents his prophecy from becoming re-reified as divine essentialism. Ginsberg's idea of poet and poem revitalizes the skeptical view on language and literary representation of our contemporary critical community which is unwilling to engage the experimental scope of his radical prophecy.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.45
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• pp.219-243
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• 2016

The life of Antonin Artaud exactly reproduces a very cruel drama. He lived in constant anguish and suffered from severe mental pain. This research will trace his thoughts in his writings while he was a prisoner of language. Artaud was a poet filled with anxiety about language, things, being, and thought. Whenever he tried to explain the mystery of being by means of mundane language, he experienced psychological agony. His poetic thoughts began to break down, because of his identity loss. Nevertheless, he was destined to grasp the world through language. Artaud had suffered from mental illness during his youth. His mental illness was associated with his difficulty in creating poetry. In this research, the letter, Correspondance avec Jacques $Rivi{\grave{e}}re$, is analyzed. The poet refers to "the collapse of the spirit's core, and the erosion of the fundamental thought that slips away" to convey his linguistic incompetence. Hereafter, he constantly demonstrated anxious mental symptoms. Even though he became mentally deranged, he maintained his consciousness, as is apparent in his writings. Also, his spiritual belief is reflected in his mental uneasiness. While he was traveling through the Tarahumaras area in Mexico, he was obsessed with its primitive belief in the Peyote rituals, and he immersed himself in performing them. His unchristian belief was the product of his mystical personality. Until his last breath, he did not give up writing. Artaud's mental derangement does not mean lunacy, but if one insists in calling it so, that is a metaphor. His derangement comes from his refusal to accept his limitations and from his aspiring to regard his body in the same light as his intellectual perceptions. His intellect could manifest more easily when his mind was elevated to the extreme. Artaud's lunacy is no different from that of a profound philosopher. The lives of poets who suffer from mental derangement are more poetic than the lives of those who do not. Artaud's atypical emotions provide a way of to measure our own limitations, helplessness, and resignation. His scream is nonsegmental but different from that of a mental patient. That difference is why people are interested in his works and wish to delve into his writings.