I consider Fa yeung nin wa (In The Mood for Love) directed by Wong Kar-wai the supreme work of art of the last decade of the 20th century (culminating in 2000), for its sublime and supreme mix of fin-de-siecle tropes, images and style, taken from both Western and Eastern cinema, literature and art.I think it is the finest High Erotic Drama in 20th century film, after Vertigo, which is the second best film ever created, for the intense, beautiful and multiple elements surrounding love-death themes from Wagner, Freud and Chandler, which it unleashes.
2046 would be in any list of created works that might vie against Bob Dylan's album (see previous post), but ultimately is slightly weaker than its prequel, though perhaps more fascinating, even visually intricate. However, Fa yeung nin wa seems to me to have generated its own textures - moods, flavours - so as to almost invite radical comparison with so-called reality: it is, arguably, the embodiment of desire.
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However your analysis of Dylan I am in agreement with, as he is an accessible poet whose mark will well be remembered by all who love beauty in a song and wish to see the gift of mnesomyne and co in operation in the brains of poets, which I have just read mirror the universe in miniture and contain keys of DNA which unlock the galaxy's code.
Apparently it all goes back to the golden fleece myth and 50 oars the ship Argo had, or at least that's an entry node in a theory I didn't have time to study in depth beyond grasping its basic thrust that things are so much meant to be that the logical conclusion all deep thinkers come to is that a spooky poetic only true bards can discern is in play on near infinite levels. What does this suggest I imagine to hear you asking?
Where indeed Todd? Well I would direct you to stay abreast of things in cyberspace and keep checking the inbox, because strange things are afoot in the world of verse at this moment and new voices are being discerned on the web publishing megaphone of blogdoms, where informed opinion is rustled up quicker than pot noodles in temples of takeway zen and presented with sheens of pukkability impossible to dismiss or, in some cases when the word joining dazzles, be affected by on plains of understanding which can be thought related to text without too much effort, and used to access regions of intelligence ascended to through zones leading to rarefied esoterical pastures one can truly believe exist only as the surrounding demense of a monastry with well ordered bee hive cells, or the suburban gateway of a buddhist temple city where kaleidoscopic cultures whirl potential meaning to zen like hidden calms on frequencies few sensible or insensitive deep thinkers are capable of attaining in the midst of this beyond modern 20.05 time, where confusion supreme reigning over the land man planet of gadgets, gizzmos and whatsits we don't understand, is ruling existence, keeping us fixed on the spot and trained on the mark with a machine like aiding hypnotic precise strength of cleverness which only the next generation of artificially assisted human robot strength minds will be able to fully resist.
So step into the circle of my concentration and let me begin with the words of a wise man, long gone and living only in pieces of myth attached to a programme note on this mosquito quick piece of whit-williamesqueness I wish to sheep dip in the disinfectant dye filter of sense here at the silliman heliconitic height temple to all things inner working wherever the act of language unravelling is to be found. I am also thinking that with a true pomo scene of audio, a crucial shift begins toward a future of more listening to poetry, which logic dictates must effect, at the very least, an increase in the populace for the spoken and written word of good writers/performers and MC's wanting to spread textually transmitted information.
The dead man is the acquaintance of poet and man of letters Samuel Johnson and his name is Richard Savage, an 18C vagrant poet, whose poem "the bastard" contains the following
"Nature's unbounded son, he stands alone,
His heart unbiased, and his mind his own."
They seem to be the most encorouging I could find in this chaps one poem ouvre, who I had cause to seek out after forgetting the name of the poet I wanted to quote but whose name I could not remember, but was a 1920's union labor poet of italian roots who had a poem about a man getting lynched and a line in it about those who do the hanging have the most fear as the person about to be lynched is prepared to "die for a light he will never see."
We had Saul Williams in Dublin earlier this week. I forgot all about him coming, after noting it down to remember to catch him when I read he was coming 2 months back. Noel Sweeney told me that he and god (aka Mike from county Meath due to his flowing locks) were there and god started ranting about something to Saul. Mike is the only person I have met who can genuinely freestyle. To witness true extemporisation for the first time is an enlightening experience, as whatever is going on is something never seen before in any other person.
He can only do it when other people toss in words at random and if he had the right set up and devoted himself could be the new Saul himself. I asked Sweeney if he moved away from god when he started ranting and he said he wasn't standing close to him in the first place, as he was on the other side of the room telling him to shut up, unknowing it was Mike until later.
He said Mikle was saying something about the "trinity," which could have been a reference to any number of things, but one which my instinct suggests is the trinity of Ireland's names - Eriu, Fodhla and Banbha - who were 3 daughters of a Tuatha De Dannan godess, Ernmas, and who the Milesian invaders agreed to name Ireland in honour of.
There are also other aspects to the triple godess myth which need not be addressed here, and which Saul would no doubt not have been particularly interested in hearing about as he was starting up to do his spot of magic making.
I came up with a thesis about ideas and questioning after reading a wealth of thought from a number of deep thinkers, and it was founded on the idea that at some point open inquiry ends and a choice of faith is made, which forms the basis of a poets poetics as they progress through their worlds of verse.
And swinging this concept to talk about english poets of the recent past and their anglophile school of quietude equivalents stateside I spot all having similar trajectories, part of which is education and what part it plays in the creation of poetic myth.
If you are ivyleague or oxbridge associated then these are potential brownie points and intro opportunities most other poets don't have. But many poets who didn't have fags to bully at school do buy into the whole reasoning of the best or most "true" poets coming from a right stock; believing that true poets are those whose accents are of certain socio-economic registers which are associated with a David Niven as Winston Churchill desirabilty in the minds of those feet whose birth perch was a few rungs lower on the socio-economic ladder of life.
Pension plan poets like old fart Auden, the humourless laugh merchant of pinprick pomposity who others so wish to emulate in hope of acquiring irony in order to laugh at their own jokes. Poets like Larkin, who smoothed off the sound of Coventry in his voice and rose into the middle-class, but whose tin bath in the outhouse lineage, meant he could never be a poet who could draw on the experience of bullying fags at school, and so carry true the flame english court poets started on the back of Spenser and rose through Ben Jonson to culminate with the propaganda genius of Milton. This imititive process of graft, transplant and propogation of greco-roman learning laid the foundations of the future direction all western poetry was to undergoe for the next 400 years, rooted in the minds of men who were well over 1000 years away from a living culture they were rediscovering. They looked to greece and rome and decided to try and connect their nations poetical heritage to them, and now the myth is so secure no one bothers looking outside this myth for any more accurate ones a bit closer to home, even though there is a lot more accessible poetic theory right on the doorstep, which doesn't require yeat's like density to tap into. No need for a pHd in impenitrible thought in order to grasp it.
Unfortunately once the greco-rominisation reinvention was started, it caught on, descending into the dreary period of sophistication when clockwork regularity of the augustian age made pope and the rest hep swingers of an enlightenment era, bitching and dissing each other in the battleground of print, which has continued up until the present time. However the Quietitudal schoolies wiv an inflection of socio economic accent others percieve as aristocratic and who like to think they rule the roost at poetry flame HQ, are on the wane, as the publishing change upon us is in the process of asisting in the demolition and exposing of this greco roman myth heritage baloney. New interaction and reply methods are opening up and the respond time to criticism is shortening considerably as poets hone their critical skills in the numnerous webtraining centres, thus circumnavigating the usual print path publishing was for so much of the past, indeed for the whole 500 year entirity of the "contemporary" english/american tradition.
The old duffers clutching the past of yesterdays security in the classics will be unable to compete in the instant age upon us and will sink into doterage raging or muttering incomprehensible dialectics of a fiction based never was reality which served as personal myth and so is difficult to relinquish without major head space renegotiation, which may well be impossible to many, if not most of the old timers wanting to stay abreast of change.
Luckily ron got in at the right moment and is faring better than most, indeed is reclining into his later years with a fairly scored card of respectability through numbers of interested readers who attend his academy, or school of loosely bound readers and affiliates in the arena of chinwag, and in this vein of casual talk I would like to continue, hoping that some of ron's laid backness will rub off in the sheen of form in which the tales spinning are spun.
In an earlier post I informed you I was beginning Robert Graves's "white godess" book, in which he comes up with a superb argument of such immense mythological densisty as to be a work whose claims are subsumed to irrelevance by the sheer breadth Graves's mind displays.
It is his own private faith more than any definitive poetic tome which answers once and for all what is what in poetry and why it is so, which brings to mind my own navel gazing days of true wonder happening when I was in my teens, after discovering the mental complexity levels I could access when running with the concept of zero. I don't know if this was the deepest experience of thought I ever had, but it was up there in the top few profound episodes of near enlightenment, somewhere not much higher above the new method of critical analysis I am introducing into my deposit, which is to listen to poems and snatch words at random in order to create new works.
When I write in this way, up till now entirely at readings, the poem is not just the words of others, as I always insert my own in between the snatched ones, so the poem is 90% mine, but built using 10% of aural words, grabbed by instinct; so instead of reading a load of words randomly until one hooked, doing it by audio.
This is also a great way to keep occupied at readings, because, as we all know, some readings can be rubbish. So instead of feeling cheated as I sit there reaching deeper into the well of farce acting meant to disguise boredom, I can stay bright, alert and content in the knowledge that I do not have to fake being occupied with the reader/performer onstage.
stay well off g a mirror to echo between 99 ghost city why line perfect parrallel baloney sandwiches.
I am listening to the Sundown Lounge from LA and have savoured the wonder or words, sent out on a wind of .....fair skin touching....without word wet lips.... begging for poetry ..on the beach in Venice to a backdrop of children. A poem written for Vincents baby shower. ...Another fellas on Black get O'tooles Coz lets face it, that's wha' all the newbies on the block is wannin'to be remebered for innit?