The Ritual of the Eye

miyako, you keep bringing up traditions and cultures that your writings aren't a part of, so I'm not really sure what you're getting at... you seem to be insisting that every poem automatically creates something brand new that must be addressed on its own terms, but that's absurd because everyone is influenced by the past and what they read and learn and like and whatnot. Of course other cultures have their own rules and conventions and standards, but I'd wager that they are not so radically different that they can not be understand or augmented with our own. Afterall, Pound was immensely influenced by Chinese poetry and ideograms, yet he brought much of what he learned to an English context, and we were given a new movement and new ways to think, read and critique.

I didn't link you to the Clive James piece so you would write thinking like him, but rather as just another voice discussing how even writers we think of as "breaking the mold" and "setting a new standard" did so in the context of understanding and mastering the "old" and "conventional" and modifying it for use in their own unique work. Why do you want to ignore all of the wisdom that the past has to teach you? Nobody's asking you to be slavish to it, but merely to understand it, and choose wisely what to to take and what to leave. If you remain ignorant, you have no choice in the matter. As a great quote goes (I forget who said it), what we don't know controls us infinitely more than what we do know.

I don't think you are the right person who can qualify someone's piece of writing. Any form of literature is shaped or formed by its writer's experience, thought process, and worldview. For example, I consider the setting of this poem to be in Asia. There are no sparrows, crickets, frogs, and fireflies where I currently live. I expect that in reading this piece, a reader needs to be sensible to Asian norms and nuances- how silence is an indicator of time, emotion, and isolated life and how seeing is a ritual in a familiar landscape. Ritual, alone, being connected to environment is not a Western conception.

By the way, I'm not Vagantes. I always welcome a healthy exchange of ideas about literature. It's easy to end this exchange by invoking postmodernism and performativity, but I'm done with them now. If you want my theoretical leaning in assessing a poem, I am more of an anthropologist who is interested in ethnography. I consider all kinds of literature as ethnographic pieces or images written or created by their authors. In a way, I give back the lives denied by postmodernists to authors.

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Originally Posted by miyako73

I expect that in reading this piece, a reader needs to be sensible to Asian norms and nuances- how silence is an indicator of time, emotion, and isolated life and how seeing is a ritual in a familiar landscape. Ritual, alone, being connected to environment is not a Western conception.

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Good Lord, where on earth did you get that idea? You seem to be basing your arguments on opinion and fancy, rather than fact. Do you honestly believe that the reader is so ignorant? Do you honestly believe that the conepts you so proudly claim as an Asian perogative are in fact, not universal in the experience of mankind?

For your information England, at least, is littered with ceremonial landscapes dating back thousands of years. So is America, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, etc. etc. The exploration of moments in silence, meditation and temporal reletivity inform western religion, especially in the monastic tradition, science and art, both pictorial, musical and literary. I could name a dozen wirters, from Blake, to Bunion, Gray, Keats, Shelly, Browning, Shakespeare, Armitage, Heaney, Thomas... need I go on? who have explored these ideas.

I think you need to read more.

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Originally Posted by Hawkman

Good Lord, where on earth did you get that idea? You seem to be basing your arguments on opinion and fancy, rather than fact. Do you honestly believe that the reader is so ignorant? Do you honestly believe that the conepts you so proudly claim as an Asian perogative are in fact, not universal in the experience of mankind?

For your information England, at least, is littered with ceremonial landscapes dating back thousands of years. So is America, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, etc. etc. The exploration of moments in silence, meditation and temporal reletivity inform western religion, especially in the monastic tradition, science and art, both pictorial, musical and literary. I could name a dozen wirters, from Blake, to Bunion, Gray, Keats, Shelly, Browning, Shakespeare, Armitage, Heaney, Thomas... need I go on? who have explored these ideas.

I think you need to read more.

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Seriously, do you really think there is something universal? That's scary. Even love is not all about kisses and roses. Fangs and daggers are involved too in some intense cases.

When I said "ritual," I mean a cultural experience not a spiritual activity or ceremony. Drinking coconut wine, for example, in some Asian villages is a ritual among friends using just one shot glass. Can you find that in the West that is so concerned with hygiene and diseases? I don't think so.

Silence in the chaotic West, generally, is negative. It's about death and inhuman deprivation or injustice in the works of Western contemporary writers. Silence among Asian writers is time, environment, solitude, longing. How can you appreciate silence in the West when all you hear all day are moving cars, neighbors' loud stereos, and deafening sounds of a rushing ambulance?

Let me give you an example how reading Asian literature needs readers' understanding of cultural nuances and subtleties not elaborated or explicitly written by Asian writers. When Arundhati Roy wrote, "The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation," to most readers in the West it was about a slow night, but to non-Western readers, that line also involved superstitions about omens and uncertainty. Do you see the difference?

This just shows that only an aware, thinking reader can truly get a writer's intent. I don't wonder why Barthes, a Westerner, wanted authors dead. Among Asian writers, that's an alien concept. A feminist writer in my country once said, "My poetry is my life." How can you understand her poetry then if you know nothing about her life? "Life," by the way, does not only mean one's biography.

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Originally Posted by miyako73

I don't think so.

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This is your problem. You don't seem to be capable of conceiving what westerners think, understand or imagine. You have the audacity to tell us what we do, though... Like I said, you need to read more.

With the drinking thing - do you know what a communion cup is? Do you know what a friendship cup is? Basically it's the same as what you just described. If you truly knew anything about anthropology you would know that fundamentally, people are people the world over. There may be physical constraints upon custom and procedure due to available resources, but the motivation behind human nature/belief is essentially the same, whatever you call it, be it superstition, religion, or "cultural imperative."

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Originally Posted by Hawkman

This is your problem. You don't seem to be capable of conceiving what westerners think, understand or imagine. You have the audacity to tell us what we do, though... Like I said, you need to read more.

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I live in the West. Do you in the East? Loosen up your rigid reading of texts. There are other contemporary literary voices, particularly the postcolonial ones, the conventions of the classics you cling on to cannot fully understand or demystify. I need to write more about real lives and real times I come to know and experience than read and bury myself in the past, if I want to be a good writer.

Try reading some contemporary poetry in English then. I think I already mentioned Heaney. You might also consider reading something on contemporary anthropology. For you information my entire family spent some years in the East, as my father worked in Singapore, and Japan, and India, and Korea... Would you like me to list all the other countries, East & West? It might take a while.

What strikes me about your arguments in this discussion, is that where I see similarity, you only see difference. I see no point in continuing until you learn to open your mind to concepts which are outside your prejudice and immediate experience.

Who should I read in Anthropology? Can you recommend one? I can. Read about ethnopoetics. Hymes and Tedlock can help you improve your reading of and listening to written and spoken texts. Don't rely on Linguistic Anthropology (LA) to support your points. Language being dynamic and flexible, as LA's fundamental thesis, is the antithesis of your rigid and alienating reading of texts.

The fact is: there are other literary voices that can only be understood and appreciated not through conventional poetic devices because they are written without using those same devices. How can you apply the elite, cultured metering of aristocratic writers to the brave, unaffected poetics of writers from the working class or of those lumpen writers? It's unthinkable because it's not possible. Leave Marx out of this. It's just an example.

I'm done with this. Let's just agree to disagree. Some love porridge, others want congee. Cream and sugar may sound good with English porridge, but not with savory congee.

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Originally Posted by miyako73

I consider the setting of this poem to be in Asia. There are no sparrows, crickets, frogs, and fireflies where I currently live.

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I live in the south and there are sparrows, crickets, frogs, and fireflies all spring and summer long, but I've never woken up thinking the crickets were dead and the frogs were silent... FWIW, using silence as an indicator of time and space is not unique to Asian art at all.