Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

Robert Archambeau
What I mean about, say, Jakobson is that he sees the poetic as defined by a specific function in language, rather than
by recognition in/distribution by socially recognized poetic institutions like journals or whatever. But yeah, I bet he
has a lot to say about institutions. I have only read more overtly linguistic stuff by him.
Jeffrey Side
[Addressing Michael Robbins’ comment] Michael, I didn’t say because conceptualism is poetry, we have no means to
criticise it. I said that if we blindly accept what a few academics have called it, i.e. that it is, indeed, poetry, then we
can’t criticise it for being, as I think it is, “not poetry”, Once you accept it as poetry, how then can you criticise it for
being not poetry?
Bob, I agree with what you say about Jacobson’s point. It makes sense. For institutions to arbitrarily name and define
things, even in the humanities, is problematic. Besides, as far as I can see, only a handful of academics have named
conceptualism as poetry. So Michael’s consensus argument, even if it were valid, doesn’t really apply here.
[The discussion ended at this point]
A discussion in the British and Irish Poets Listserve about my essay ‘Limited Poetic Meaning and the
Wordsworthian Legacy’
Jeffrey Side
‘Limited Poetic Meaning and the Wordsworthian Legacy’.
July 2015
This essay endeavours to show how the Modernist innovations in poetry in the early years of the twentieth century
became marginalised as serious poetic techniques in favour of a more realist sort of poetic style that was largely
influenced by the poetic aesthetic of William Wordsworth:
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Side%20essay%208.htm
Gerard Greenway
Jeffrey, I’m more than doubtful that ‘It can be demonstrated that Wordsworth’s poetry relies too consistently upon a
descriptive realist aesthetic derived from empiricist beliefs about subject/object relationships’.
Imagination-lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my song
Like an unfathered vapour, here that power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me! I was lost as in a cloud,
halted without a struggle to break through;
And now, recovering, to my soul I say,
‘I recognise thy glory’.
Prelude VI
Jeffrey Side
Gerard, but if you notice you will see that this extract belies what he is saying in it. The text itself is more or less a
description of his thoughts regarding his advocacy of the imagination as a means to inspire his verse. It is not in itself
a demonstration or application of the imagination in poetic form. It is a sort mimesis of his thought processes, and so
could be said to be empiricist in the same way as mimesis of nature is.
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