The Scholar’s Art

Jeg er gået i gang med at læse Robert von Hallbergs bog om Charles Olson, "The Scholar's Art" fra 1978 — og den er endnu mere fremragende, end jeg på forhånd havde forventet. Bogen har i flere år stået øverst på min læs-liste, men først nu har jeg fået den købt. Via abebooks.com. Min amerikanske pap-tante, Laura, lovede at sende mig et signeret eksemplar, og jeg har ventet og ventet – og med længsel. Hun er gode venner med von Hallberg, og de har (endda) på et tidspunkt været naboer. Men altså. Titlen henviser til et citat af Wallace Stevens: "Poetry is the scholar's art." Og bogen (tør jeg skrive, omend jeg indtil videre kun er nået til side 47) anbefales uden forbehold alle med seriøs interesse for digteri.

Her er nogle smagsprøver: 

Om at digte efter historiens afslutning — og/eller før den igen begynder: "The poetic advantages of [...] posthistorical language are clear, especially in American poetry: the poet can go outside his tradition, without apologies, to get what he wants [...] he can speak with the authority of closed books [... ] [that] are now complete and can be summed up from a bird's-eye view. The cost is no less high, however. [...] No man can speak for his times who stands at the end of history; he speaks for himself, asking for amens, hoping for consensus, but still for himself, until history begins again."

Om at vide noget for at kunne skrive om noget: "Without a broad background of knowledge, poetry may narrow its reference: it may concern itself with either a limited range of experience or with itself, or both. Lyric poetry that is more engaged by its own language than by its ostensible subject, in Olson's stringent terms, derives from aestheticism, a blight on modern poetry. [...] His [Olson's] is first of all a referential poetics: hence subject matter is primary for him … "

Om digteri som kommunikation: "A rhetorical poetics was inevitable, for Olson never believed art to be primary; poetry itself is not the first term of his poetics. Poetry is first of all language, a means to an end: communication, the establishment of common knowledge."

Om sandhed og originalitet: "Because there is little agreement about metaphysical order, we have only quantitative terms for describing fullnes: the fullest life is the most diverse; hence novelty becomes an evaluating principle. [...] Even now [...] most people ought to agree that it is more important to speak the truth than it is to say something new; but poetry, most critics have come to believe, had better not be confused with truth. Poets have been known to disagree. For Olson, as for Pound, truth – or what he believed to be true – took precedence over novelty. [...] Pound's injunction was never "Be original!" but rather "Make it new!" He assumes that the poet begins with something to communicate, "it." Olson assumes the same."