The Objectivist poets were influenced by the works of Pound and Williams, specifically the ideas set forth by Pound's creation and championing of the Imagists. Pound's work for the magazine Poetry (edited by Harriet Monroe) allowed a model for subsequent avant garde writers to accept and react against, and writers such as Zukofsky and Oppen took elements of the Imagist contribution to free verse, and rejected the seemingly elitist preoccupation with mythology, classicism and intertextuality.
Zukofsky edited a manifesto for his poetic aesthetic aims throughout the entirety of his career, but it would be fair to say that the Objectivist poets were connected by a shared artistic ambition; Objectivist poetry was to be conceptional, in that it brought in many ideas and motives, and set purpose and meaning ahead of the works themselves. Objectivists were to see the poem as an object, as a construction, and a finished work should be secondary to this origin. Following precedents of the avant garde movement, an Objectivist should refuse the lyrical Poetic 'I', setting the poet's persona aside, and taking a theoretical focus, to deliberately astue a human connection. Reader engagement was to be challenged, as poetry would be unconcerned with narrative, focusing instead on language as a tool for this construction.
So what was the purpose, or reason behind, this ideology of the craft of poetry? The objectivist sought to show an object's true essence; that is, to showcase something as it truly is, rather than how you perceive it. The way I imagined it was that there is a universal, objective world, which everyone views from behind a veil of subjectivity. The Objectivists sought to show the reader something in the way it would be seen if that veil had been lifted, simultaneously showcasing the impossibility that it never can be. For the problem lies in the fact that this subjective veil is a construct of language. Language is the way that we see the world, and makes up our perception of it, because every word holds within it certain connotations.
Your understanding is made up from language, because it brings you into form, and gives you a form to fit things into. When you were a child, it would be fair to say that your memories started when you gained the ability to articulate your vision of things into descriptives. When this has been grasped you can truly connect to the world, as this subjective veil of language allows you to understand things, to fit them into some sort of framework and assert their qualities with signifiers.
Objectivist poets were aware of this inability to show the world without our veil, because language is ultimately a cage. You can try and strip back the language, to reduce it and make it clinical, but no matter how much you do this, you can never escape its signifiers - you will always attach connotations to the simplest of poems, and thus construct a narrative. In effect, you can reduce, but never be truly reductive.
To combat this, poets such as Zukofsky played with a technique called 'homophony', to interrupt our apprehensions, or preconceptions brought about by these connotations, by translating from how words sound and look from one language to another. A way to stop signification is to create new words, and use the textures of sound, layout and poetic construction to make a literary work not dependent on meaning from language.
One may ask why the poem, as a form, is used as a vehicle for this. Zukofsky wrote that poetry is good, because it calls attention to it's form and structure, in its artificiality. There is nothing inherently natural about a sonnet, for example. It is a work, like a sculpture, that has been carefully made, it is an object in that it is the literal craft of language, of language being used as a tool to make something beautiful within the restrictions of a set form (14 lines, with alternating ABAB rhyme scheme, usually ending in a couplet, normally with a romantic subject).
Poems invite discussion, whereas philosophy seeks to answer questions. Poetry is therefore closer to truth than truth itself, as it makes no assertions that it is true, which would only make it false. Grand Narratives such as religion, science and marxism, that seek to do this, are broken down, and subjectivism reigns instead. In this way, poetry is a microcosm of the world, for if you can understand how a poem works, you can understand how the world works. Why? because by calling attention to its own artificiality, it simultaneously does so to the world around it. This subjective veil of language causes the world to be a construction by many artists, we only get a picture of the world when, like building blocks, we arrange all of these perspectives of the world together, enabling us to see it in its entirety. This idea that we live in a world of fragments sets this manifesto in a postmodern framework.
And so, the resultant homphonic poetry, which seeks to challenge our preconceptions, is like nothing we have seen before. This is deliberate. Much like Picasso's artistic career, the technical lessons of poetry had to be learnt before they could be broken, for it is difficult to react with any merit when you are ignorant of what you are reacting against.
Members of our seminar group felt that works created from this movement did not constitute poetry, and as much as I didn't enjoy the poems themselves, I enjoyed the ideas behind them, which according to the Objectivist manifesto is the most important part of the eventual product anyway. I feel that the fragmented subjectivist elements of the manifesto correlate to my own views of poetry as a form of connection, and though the poems produced have no points of human touch, the ideas behind them do. By interrupting traditional concepts of perception, the objectivists challenged the reader to see the world in a new way, to see language in a new way, and to promote it as a tool for connection. The beauty of the world can be viewed through many eyes, and the world belongs, in this sense, to everyone. If these fragmented, personal perspectives replace an overarching, all encompassing but singular narrative, the world can only be seen in a richer, deeper entirety, and this promotes reason and value for the study of the English language, as the creator of the subjective veils which allow these contributory perceptions.
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