Notes Excerpt #2
Fulton (Alice) constantly mentions that “voice” is a construct; I mean, sure it is, but it doesn’t strand us as Fulton says it does: “Rather than mirroring its age, fractal disruption functions as a Zen slap, awakening readers from the spell of the ‘sincere’ voice. It contrasts transparent lines with less ‘genuine’ dictions, and the disparate tones vibrate like complementary colors” (71). Artfully said. But why this skepticism that readers will not buy into any textual utterance—has postmodernism & deconstruction really left us in so untenable a position? I don’t think so. I think this technique can and should “mirror” this age. That’s what is, for us, genuine. To drive home this point, I refer us all to watch fifteen minutes of television, or note well what web pages we came from and will go to after this one.
posted by Wil at
7:35 PM
3 Comments:
It might help to know where Fulton is coming from on that note. Though you're challenging her assumptions about authenticity here (and I agree, and I suspect she would too), she's responding to a pre-postmodern view of "voice"--the notion, she says, that every poet must find his or her "voice." She's arguing for polyphonic poetry and poets, and I'm guessing is probably not too concerned with the heirarchy of those voices so long as they perform "colorful" interesting disruptions.
I AM guessing here, but Alice was my teacher at Cornell for a brief year or so, and I did hear her talk about voice a few times.
Gina
By
gina, at 5:40 AM
That's a helpful qualification, Gina, especially the idea that the "voices" which constitute Fractal Poetics aren't ranked or privileged one over another. I suppose I'm attracted to the notion of polyphonic voices *within* a voice - which would be the Big Idea toward which I'd apply Fulton's theory here - but more generally I wonder if poets, Fractal or otherwise, really must admit the "artificiality" of voice at all. Certainly any written product is marked with artifice; I haven't been convinced that we can't simply accept that condition as given and move our poems past that fact. Phrased as a question: What is the point in calling attention via polyphonic "voices" within a poem to the poem's poemness? Or phrased in an inverse formulation: What might the effect be of using multiple voices *without* explicitly acknowledging the poem as poem?
I like your Blogger callsign, by the way.
By
Wil, at 10:53 AM
I think you and Fulton agree entirely here. The "artifice" of voice, of poem, is the supreme value, I think, in her poetics. She's willing to acknowledge that the narratives of science, technology, architecture, theology, philosophy, etc., are all artifice. She's subverting the term in the sense that artifice makes, post desire and expression. Plurality of voice is poemness.
That said, I admit I'm reluctant to accept the kind of scepticism that the privileging of artifice leads to. Voice belongs to the reader, rather than the poet, which is to say that the reader is left to determine just how polyphonic a poem might be, and if that's important. Maybe this is where you and I agree. The poem of many voices, in my sense of things, is not necessarily more valuable than the monologue.
I'm looking forward to your words on Wordsworth.
Thanks so much,
Gina
By
gina, at 6:46 PM
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