ABOVE/BELOW
Untitled, by Jon Sarkin, circa 1998
Ink on found card
Images courtesy Henry Boxer Gallery
Says Friedrich Schlegel: “Many works that are praised for the beauty of their coherence have less unity than a motley heap of ideas simply animated by the ghost of a spirit and aiming at a single purpose. What really holds the latter together is that free and equal fellowship in which . . . the citizens of the perfect state will live at some future date . . . .”
Bunte Haufen (miscellaneous mix of colors, heap) can mean the social “masses” that artists of a democracy are drawn to include, and Einfällen (ideas) connotes a flash of insight, wit (Witz), and the fancy. Schlegel’s “unity” presupposes a poet completely in control of the poem’s construction, a poet, he confesses, who is sorely drawn to the lure of unity as control, which inevitably produces homogeneity or as Coleridge said, “reconciliation of opposite and discordant qualities.” “Coherence” necessarily lets some of that control go, imagines and encourages techniques for granting parts of an artwork their independence, just as democracy strives to give prominence to the diversity of its citizens. Opposites and discord, juxtapositions, contradictions emerge in bright colours with “coherence.” In the art of democracy the poet restores a load of discarded experience and holds it together with whatever threads can be found.
Schlegel’s principle of coherence justifies poetry of aperture, of open form, and suggests its method: anything is permitted in, which is the way the world is, full of unpredictable, contradictory, desirable and undesirable elements, parts of elements, and references to things. The poem’s coherence becomes anything that can hold everything together, something concocted on the spot. An asymmetry in which the poet acts as facilitator, watching for a new planet to swim into its ken (Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”).
This formulation for Romantic poetics of democracy begins with an acknowledgement of the world as full of difference, the heterogeneous, that must be revealed and then apprehended. . . coherently, that is, as a work of art. Do we “dare frame” (“The Tyger”) this jumble that is reality? Poems following Schlegel risk incoherence as well as severe criticism and rejection because they oppose the idea of a poem requiring smoothly shaped, integrated, and thus aesthetically “beautiful” form. “Imperfect fit” is the poet Allen Fisher’s term for art in which the part exceeds in value the whole, but insists that imperfect fit, a term that may reveal the look of Schlegel’s coherence, stimulates the reader towards the collision of a maker of art with the infinite unpredictability of embodiments of reality. In the 20th-century collage art may be the extreme outcome of Schlegel’s coherence.
For Ann Batten Cristall, the divine vision produces a coherence of the world’s heterogeneities, uncomfortable but true:
[God] to this world of elements gave forms.
From them he moulded all, yet gave no peace,
But broke the harmony, and bade them rage;
He meant not happiness should join with ease,
But varied joys and pains should all the world engage.
And later, Pound on Robert Browning’s poetry that privileges coherence over unity, which the author of the Cantos seeks to defines the needs of modern poetry:
“Say I take your whole bag of tricks, / Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s an art-form, / . . . and that the modern world / Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thoughts in . . .”
The fragment alerts the reader to their possibility to alter the given; it breaks “the system.” It asserts that “transitions” curtail access to the infinite by denying the interruptions and breaks that the fragment offers. Sparks of life and mind hover around the edges of the fragment and take thought into unexplored territory. As abstract as fragments appear to be, they convey the materiality of writing and the mind in writing: they interrupt, they break, they explode the text right in front of one.
“Shall I turn toward an awkward pile of prose, stolen sentences, a euphoria I don’t recognize or a path through the woods?” (Laynie Browne). And back to Novalis: “Nothing is more poetic than transitions and heterogeneous mixtures.”
The fragment is a critique of form as a received abstraction; not a diminution of its importance but its relativization to content and spirit. See Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Let me think of form less, and the external. Trust the spirit. . . . Keep up all fire and leave the generous flames to shape themselves.”
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