Little if anything has ever been said or written on poetry that would equally hold for all poetries o f all ages and spaces, and at the same tim e the distinction betw een “poetry” and “prose” (in M. Jourd ain’s sense) has often been pointed out (see Group m, Rhetorique..., 1990: 9) to be the one and only line o f division that is truly universal and characterizes all verbal cultures1. It therefore seems that every culture must, in the process o f its reproduction, constantly redefine poetry (along with all other practices it consists of), and that has to be done in such a m anner that all previously existing forms o f these practices, no m atter how obsolete, would still also fit the new definition. For instance, it would not do for a medieval theorist to assert that poetry is all that rhymes (and hexa- metres are accordingly something else). A redefinition o f poetry is also and perhaps especially necessary in the post-m odern period, where the entire cultural field is once again reorganizing itself and various ends — o f history, of ideology, o f literature — proclaimed and discussed. Below I will try to show, among other things, that in spite o f the radical changes that have affected all discursive traditions o f the world, the cultural process itself is nevertheless developing within a surprising continuity, according to an inner logic — in other words, that “m odernism ” is the predictable outcom e o f the pre-m odernist literary discourses and that practices 1 It is evidently advisable not to use the term “literature” for some
verbal cultures that nevertheless maintain the difference between
“poetry” and “prose” by requiring o f certain categories o f texts, like magic spells or annals of history such use of language that is typical of poetry in other cultures.
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we now call post-m odern are already contained and have been developed within the m odernist paradigm.
Perhaps we could, for the present purposes, envisage poetry to be situated at the juncture o f three kinds of constraints, all of which have also given rise to specific discourses on poetry. The first o f these we could call perceptionalist — the view that poetry is the textual expression o f a certain special kind of perception, an inner vision or a state of mind either characteristic o f a certain kind o f people (sham ans, romantic geniuses etc.) or can be achieved as a result o f psychotechnical practices (Buddhist m edita
tion, drinking o f absinth etc.) This view is now rather unfashion
able in the critical circles — after all, it privileges the author beyond the reach o f the critic — but in many traditions it has been the predom inant theory of poetry for long periods. This view suits very well both a hierarchically organized or “traditionalist” society where the options of self-realization open to each individual are determined by his/her status, or, in general, any comm unity in which symbolic values take precedence over m easurable ones. Not surprisingly the view that a specifically poetic perception lies behind any act o f genuine creation is usually being defended outside academ ic discourses, and mostly by poets themselves.
The second view, which we could call gram m aticalist, entails that poeticity is to be found in the linguistic structure of a text, that poetry is a certain linguistic usage that follows divergent norms.
Anything that allegedly exists or happens outside the text, e.g. in its author’s m ind, is accordingly claim ed to be irrelevant to any serious analysis o f poetry — the perceptionalist theory is thus rejected and the historical author is claim ed to be “dead” . The landmarks o f this argum ent are well known: first suggested by W imsatt and Beardsley in their celebrated article, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), it is developed in full by Roland Barthes in his equally fam ous “The Death of the Author” (1968), which, in turn, has been usefully supplem ented by Michel Foucault in “W hat is an Author?” (1969). As a result, current criticism is inclined to view the author as an elem ent o f the text, a name or signature and not the historical person. This view, still rather privileged, is con
cordant with the prevalence of rationalistic discourses in a culture.
We know it at best through modem literary theory, from Russian
form alism through New Criticism to structuralism , with Roman Jakobson as its chief exponent“, and in this form the view corresponds roughly to the developm ent o f “m odem ” or m odernist poetry. But we can discover a sim ilar attitude in the writings of French classicists, for instance, and it seems quite telling that Boileau wrote his L ’A rt poetique at a time (1 673-1674) when the theories o f Rene Descartes had entered wider circulation.
The third view holds that everything is “poetry” that is believed to be such in a given culture, and that all other cultural practices can be defined or delim ited in a sim ilar way. W e could call this view sociocentristic, and it is beginning to overtake the gram m a
ticalist view in academ ic discussions. Exposed in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and other sociologists o f culture, the socio
centristic view opposes the gram m aticalist position by denying the existence of any self-sufficient linguistic m les or m echanism s that would separate poetry from prose, but at the same tim e it endorses the gram m aticalist critique of the perceptionalist view and is not very keen on resurrecting the historical author. Although the theory has first been elaborated by Bourdieu on the French literary situation at the turn o f the 20th century — on the home ground of gram m aticalist m odernism , so to say — it gains in credibility in the current post-m odern situation, since it offers an effective explanatory fram ew ork to the m ultiplicity of literary traditions and the radical experim ents with poetic form contained in the post
modern: as long as you can get away with it, it is the real thing.
The sociocentrist view is very difficult to oppose. It seems to be doing to structuralism and its derivatives the same thing that structuralism once did to M arxism: the newcom er feels no need to refute the tenets o f the retreating paradigm, since those will simply becom e irrelevant when the new theory is accepted (Ansart 1990:
18). This breaking point is well seen in M ichel Riffaterre’s critique (1970) of the article by Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss (1962/1977) on B audelaire’s “Les Chats” — while Riffaterre 2 His Linguistics and Poetics (1958), probably the most succinct expres
sion o f his views on the subject, also contains several seminal tenets that most adherents of this theory agree upon
3 For a condensed presentation of his views, see Bourdieu 1993.
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(1970: 191) is still attacking their position from the inside of structuralism , as it were (“ ...there may well be strictly poetic structures that cannot be recognized as such by an analysis not geared to the specificity o f poetic language”), from sociocentrist position the argum ent of Jakobson and Levi-Strauss does not have anything to say about the poem at all.
A gram m aticalist critique (“not everything can be declared poetry, but only texts which have relevant linguistic features”) could easily also be declared conservative, as it is (m ost o f the time, quite rightly) being done in the field o f contem porary art: the sociocentrists and post-m odernists claim that there is no point to this argum ent other than an effort to withhold the right to define the “relevant features” that constitute an acceptable work o f poetry of art.
But other aspects o f the sociocentrist view are m ore proble
matic. It seems that a strict sociocentrist should necessarily hold that the corpus o f poetry is not historically constant: some texts that have been considered poetry in the past may not be seen as such any more, and others that have not been view ed as poetry in their initial context might becom e such when the context changes.
Therefore, there is no guarantee that any o f the texts that we now call poetry will m aintain that status in the future. Therefore, the very notion o f poetry should be purely arbitrary and definable only by its socio-cultural functions. However, the correlation between the formal aspects o f poetry — like the use o f typologically sim ilar rhetoric devices — is clearly visible in the m ajority o f cultures, whereas the socio-cultural functions of poetry vary to a con
siderable degree: some poems written as parts of the Confucian officials’ exam inations in Tang China might resem ble elegies of the Arcadian salons that enacted pastoral fantasies in late 17th- century Italy, but their socio-cultural functions were totally different.
The most problem atic aspect of sociocentrist theories is nevertheless the question o f which instance or institution could declare a certain set o f texts to be poetry (or art, or music) without invoking m arket indicators and officially canonized literature.
Thus sociocentrist theories tend to reduce the mechanisms of the cultural process to the workings of capital and power and, in some
cases, to privilege bestsellers of all genres since these form the stuff of culture that the m ajority of the m em bers o f a certain com munity actually use. The increasing quantity o f research of comics and soap operas (not as sociological m aterial, but works o f art) testifies that such an attitude has gained currency in academic circles as well.
A lthough each o f these views m ight seem self-sufficient in a suitable cultural moment, I think that a com bination o f the three would yield us with a more tenable definition: there would be no poetry w ithout specific linguistic constraints, nor without an underlying shift of perception, nor w ithout socio-cultural factors that allow poetic discourse to circulate and enjoy a certain status in the respective comm unity.
The same factors apply to the post-m odern cultural situation as well. Or should we rather say situations — it has somehow become custom ary to link certain cultural trends to the socio
political aspects o f the post-m odern (as postdating the “m odem ”), although sim ilar cultural situations have also occurred earlier and elsew here — for exam ple, the verbal culture o f classical Sanskrit in India and the poetry o f the turn o f the 13th century in Japan have more in comm on with post-m odem literature than with most other periods in European literary history, although the socio
cultural functioning o f these texts was m arkedly different. What renders the present situation truly unique, however, is the global nature o f “our” post-m odern, wherein heterogeneous traditions exist side by side.
The post-m odern condition of poetry is characterized by two m ajor factors: firstly, our cultural horizons have widened to cover the entire world and we now have to accom m odate very different traditions in our own understanding o f what poetry is, and secondly, the radical transform ation o f the poetic form that has taken place in many cultures of the w orld during the last 150 years has profoundly affected our understanding o f both the content and the form of poetry in general. It could be asserted that the change has occurred and been initiated first and forem ost in W est European cultures, which is true in a sense, but the change has not been less radical in those countries that have, during that period, come into closer intellectual contact with other cultures of the
The Im possibility o f Form 87
world, including European ones. And not always has that change been initiated by European m odem literature: some cultures have received equally significant influence from traditional European poetic practices. Thus, for instance, the “poetry in the new form ” (shintaishi) that emerged in Japan in the 1880s was catalyzed by translations o f W ordsw orth and Schiller rather than contem porary authors.
To speak o f post-m odem poetry is to speak o f the voices of a decentralized space in which a huge construction consisting of heterogeneous elem ents has first been put together and then taken into pieces again, whereas those pieces are not the same that were used for the initial project. The m echanism that has brought about the radical transform ation o f the poetic form has been effective in the structure o f European cultures at least since the French Revolution: unlike the vast m ajority o f other cultures that produce new phenom ena by transform ing the old, in the cultures of the 19th- and 20th-century Europe (and their derivatives) it has been custom ary, indeed necessary to overthrow the old in order to bring about som ething new. The biological m echanism o f generation gaps and the logic o f political revolutions have been transplanted into the cultural process and, as a result, the poetry o f each generation has had to stand out in contrast to the previous one. In its efforts at being as anti-canonical as possible all the revolutio
nary m ovem ents have thus been as dependent on canonic norms as traditionalists w ould have been: the latter strive to adhere to the norms o f their canon, the form er need them to break them.
The quick developm ent o f the poetic form from the still rather traditional sonnets o f Baudelaire, the m ajor poetic innovation and scandal o f its day, through the linguistic experim ents o f M allarme to the autom atic writing o f the dada was only to be expected under the circum stances. It took only about 60 years to accomplish this:
Les Fleurs du m al was published in 1857, Les champs mag- netiques by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault was written in 1919. It should also be noted that the latter, a far more radical rupture with the poetic conventions of the preceding generation, caused much less controversy than the former.
It seem s that deviant verbal behaviour could not be taken much further than some of the extrem e m anifestations of the dadaist
m ovem ent did so that it w ould still carry m eaning (and rem ain capable o f being declared poetry), which is why m ost subsequent developm ents in European poetry m ight be view ed as retreats, m ovem ents back into the realm o f tangible form.
The m oment o f this retreat is, in a sense, the starting point of European post-m odern literature. It is significant that it coincides with a new wave of non-European influence in many spheres of culture, including poetry, where the im pact o f Japanese poetry on the imagists is perhaps one of the m ost visible influences, but the interest M odigliani or Picasso felt for A frican sculpture belongs to the same trend. The goal of an ultim ately revolutionary poetic practice is silently abandoned, and sim ultaneously the great tradition of the first world starts to break into a m ultitude of little, local, intrinsically equal narratives — a long process that finally produced our post-m odern condition. Thus we might find one of the first post-m odernists in the figure of Ezra Pound, whose immense erudition allow ed him to stroll in many literary traditions of the world with seem ing ease, and who dem onstrated in his translations and paraphrases a near-perfect m astery o f various poetic forms.
It seems at first glance that when the chain of radical innova
tion is broken and the need o f destroying the im m ediate past subsides then poetic form is reinstated in its form er capacity, but that need not be so at all: having been so close to the edge, poetic form has lost its functional purity. The use o f any poetic form, even the most simple vers libre, can now only be a conscious choice, and each poetic form also invokes a certain set of back
ground conventions with which the author has to reckon, for instance, by deliberately ignoring them. W hen Petrarch, Shakes
peare or Alfred de M usset wrote a sonnet, there was nothing rem arkable to the fact itself, but now it can only be done in dialogue with the tradition. The rhythm of a popular tune has the same result. Form is always already intertextual, and therefore signifies, i.e. it is by itself more than ju st form, and accordingly it is not form any more.
Obviously poets are more often than not conscious of this fact, which may be well put to use. For instance, the Icelandic poet Thorarinn Eldjarn has written large com positions using the
The Im possibility o f Form 89
traditional verse forms of Nordic sagas, but in the work, figures from the world o f W alt D isney’s films have taken the place of ancient heroes, ju st as they have done in real life (D isneyrim ur, 1980). The result is neither a sample of popular culture nor, of course, a traditional work, but an entirely new quality. The Lithua
nian poet Juozas Erlickas has created a textual world consisting of inverted cliches from both Soviet and post-Soviet times, which is deeply tragic and utterly hilarious at the same time (Raštai ir kt., 1987, Knyga, 1996). But perhaps one of the most sweeping suc
cesses of post-m odern poetic form is the book Sarada kinenbi (Salad Anniversary, Kawade shobõ, Tokyo 1987) by the Japanese poetess Taw ara M achi.
Born in 1962, Taw ara graduated from the W aseda University in 1985, where she had studied under the poet Sasaki Yukitsuna, who encouraged her to write as well. Sasaki represents the school of modern tanka and is rather well-known in tanka circles. Tanka is formally identical to waka, the most im portant form o f classical Japanese poetry the tradition o f which goes back well into the 8th century, and which continued to be written after the M eiji reforms in the 19th century as well. Tanka was reform ed alongside with haiku by M asaoka Shiki at the turn of the century, but after a brief flourish in the 1900s tanka had constantly lost popularity, and since W orld W ar П it had becom e an alm ost totally hobby-circle affair. There were always exceptions, o f course, poets who published a book or even several, and were read also by a larger poetry-reading audience, but since most tanka authors continued to follow the norms o f the “new ” tanka aesthetic from the beginning of the century, the general public had no interest for their work at all. Thus the sales over 1,000 copies would have been quite a rem arkable success for a tanka collection.
Upon graduation, Taw ara started to work as a teacher o f Japa
nese literature and continued to write, until she gained a reputation in the tanka circles as well. But the publication of Salad A nniver
sary in 1987 broke all barriers. It not only brought her the acclaim of critics and a m ajor literary prize, but also sold over 2,500,000 copies and is still in print and widely read. It has also given rise to im itations as well as parodies — volumes have appeared wherein each single poem of the original collection has been parodied
12
(O tokotachi-no... 1987), but also comics and even a CD with music of Chopin and Debussy to be listened to while reading the book (W inters Carpenter 1990). T aw ara’s subsequent work, not inferior in quality, has also been received quite well, though no other of her books has paralleled the success o f the Salad Anniversary.
The secret o f the book is evidently in its use o f form. The ambiences and feelings of T aw ara’s poetry have all been expressed
The secret o f the book is evidently in its use o f form. The ambiences and feelings of T aw ara’s poetry have all been expressed