Modernism and Phenomenolgy

Phenomenology refers to the way that we view the world through our perceptions of it; it is an empirical connection, a sensory observation and analysis of what physically exists. The philosopher Immanuel Kant creates a distinction between two principle ideas:



The Phenomena : The world of things, the material and the substantial.

The Noumena : The world of thoughts, of concepts and ideas, and how we view the physical world through our own mental construction.



At first I found this distinction quite difficult, "The World" is all encompassing and I found it hard to divide it into two camps of 'thoughts' and 'things'. I could not understand how one could view the world as Isherwood's protagonist in Goodbye to Berlin, as "a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking", surely it is impossible to simply view the world without an emotional, and therefore mental connection. Antoine De Saint Exupery wrote, in The Little Prince, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye", an opinion that I have always championed.



John Gould Fletcher disliked imagist poetry because of its lack of substance and human touch. I agree, and wonder whether this best describes my own dislike for the poetry of this week's session.

Our focus was the works of William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and August Kleinzahler, poets who use simple language and informal structures to document the world they see, and their responses to it, without dressing things up into a beautiful grand narrative.

Though this poetic manifesto is admirable, I see no beauty in the works such as WCW's 'The Red Wheelbarrow', cited as his 'masterpiece'

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

William Carlos Williams was a Doctor by profession, and so his poetic products were often the result of the scribbling of mere minutes. He began publishing poetry in 1909, yet didn't attain renown until after 1946, with his larger publication 'Patterdale', an effort enabled by his retirement. Labelled 'anti poetic', he does the opposite of what poetry normally aims for, with a focus on direct form with no concession to poetic music.
The works of the Imagists favoured clear, simple language, much like Wordsworth's manifesto to use 'the common tongue of the common man'. The majority of the imagist poets simultaneously came under the heading of 'modernist' poets, reevaluating their place in a changing world, unlike their Georgian contemporaries who happily stuck to archaic tradition. D.H Lawrence was an interesting figure, in that he contributed to Lowell's Some Imagist Poems anthology, placing him as both a Georgian and Imagist poet. The influence of imagism will go on to be seen in the works of the Objectivists, who worked in a mainly free verse form, and the Beat Poets, who defined performance poetry.

This brings us back to an earlier post, in which I questioned what makes a piece of work 'poetry'? One could make the statement that "Anyone could do that", the answer would be "But they don't", which leads us to the question, why don't people do it, and what difference does it make to culture that it exists?
I suppose the answer is that in order for cultural progress, one must sometimes be truly revolutionary, casting aside all that is 'old', in favour of what is 'new'. The old is still present, as its absence is what defines it as new. WCW hated the use of traditional structures for the sake of being traditional, and questioned how, for example a Sonnet, could fit into his everyday life. By breaking away from traditional English poetic forms and structures, he is able to write with the idiom of America, a poetic Declaration of Independence. This idea coexists with the previously mentioned manifesto of presenting things in their most pure form, without dressing them up. The result is that the subject shines in its actuality, the subject is what it is, and that is enough. An image of a red wheelbarrow, for example, is for WCW beautiful enough, without the need for literary decoration, and though this specific picture is arguably boring, the fact that the mundane can be inspirational truly is admirable.
Though I have not been favourably swayed by the poems this week, it has given me a fresh perspective on the portrayal of beauty, it has made me realise that objects are objectives, and poems are a subjective expression of perspective. Their form and use of language are tools that can be used to provide insight into this perspective, and the words chosen for this description or portrayal are not merely content, but evidence of construction.