Tony Hoagland’s essay “Got…Edge?” from nidus, is a smart take on the difference between discursive and non-discursive poetries. It highlights specifically the successes and drawbacks of non-discursive poetry. By Hoagland’s inquiry, here are some of the things a non-discursive aesthetic is capable of (it’s worth noting that I’m using Hoagland’s quotes generically, to suggest characteristics of a type of poetry. In his essay, they reference specific poems):
1.) An “emotive voice caught in the tumult of experience; it is good for questioning and querying; it represents, one could say, the fluttering zigzag actuality of perception and thought.”
2.) “It prefers not to exert narrative or intellectual authority…It refuses the pretense of ‘mastery,’ syntactic or otherwise.”
3.) A deep love for the “poetics of distraction.”
He notes however, a trade-off for poems that harbor these aesthetic choices. Specifically:
1.) “Such a poem doesn’t offer the rigor of an intellect seriously in pursuit of something, turning this way and that as it limits and extends it’s exploration…it is almost impossible for a lyric-collage poem…to muster that quality of sustained, concerted attention. Because it has abandoned the aesthetic devices (complex grammar, for instance) of coordination and qualification, it is a skittery and diffuse poem, despite its fine intensity.”
2.) This type of poem can’t “Think Through” or can’t “think hard or deeply.”
Before any of this sounds out of context, it is worth noting that Hoagland isn’t bemoaning the use of a discursive method in contemporary poetry–he’s arguing that it is worth knowing the consequences of an aesthetic choice, and using specific examples to make general statements.
But there is some opinion behind his taxonomic gesture–and I would suggest he’s interested that so much of modern American poetry subscribes to a collage or associative aesthetic, and so much willingly forgoes the “edge of sustained, concerted thought.” If such poems truly are “skittery,” then they can’t think hard or deeply–and the loss, for Hoagland, is depth. His frustration may not be that poets are writing in an associative style–but it may very well be that so many of them are writing that way, leaving a void of in their exuberant wake.
My sense is this–the zeitgeist of associative poetries (of which a D.A. Powell poem and a Katie Ford poem serve as examples in this essay) is that we recognize time moving in a different way, and so meaning forms differently. No longer is meaning something latent always to be uncovered, something always there–our era (and our ear) is one of accumulation. Meaning is a summary affect. You take the shards that constitute the whole, and their evocative powers, derived from accumulation, juxtaposition, inversion, surprise and negation, are the extent of the poem’s claim to power.
The result is a more flexible poetry able to mean in many ways. It is also a poetry that honors the generative impulse of its creation; by which I mean to suggest that a such an generating impulse does not have static, regular meaning itself. The generating event(s) that pressurize to a poem are not always as we first recognize them–they are capable of change, even in the past tense. Non-discursive poetries mirror that flexibility in a way that discursive poetries cannot. An impressionistic poem about a honeycomb might mean something else entirely if all the bees disappear in three years.
What is lost is not a poetry of high attention; I think what is lost is an understanding of the world that permits high attention. Maybe even that can change.