Let's talk about poetry, shall we?

And that just made me realize why telling in fiction is so weak. It's all monologue—the narrator yakking away endlessly. Someone telling you what happened, in a movie he saw for instance, isnt nearly as good as seeing the movie yourself (being shown). Or being told about some event that was powerful and deeply moving for all who experienced it. Hearing a good speaker tell the story is pretty moving (they probably know how to get some Showing in there), but not nearly as powerful as if you experienced it yourself. And Showing brings you a lot closer to having an experience. As close as you can get from reading words on paper (or a screen). It's because it stirs the unconscious—our unknown, intuitive depths. Things in there are far more alive than the things in our fact-obsessed, data-driven conscious mind.

Reach out from your unconscious and stir the unconscious of your readers. That's where the magic dwells.

 

Interesting, and closely related. If you look into Magick as it was actually practiced, much of it was concerned strongly with the visual imagination. In movies it's usually spells and incantations, or dolls with pins stuck in them, and these things all contributed, but mainly as aids to creating and maintaining strong visual imagery. It's also a tradition in a lot of Eastern meditation practices. Monks would practice seeing complex symbols of hundred-petaled lotuses or Chinese-style letters, and keep working at it until they had perfect control over their visual imagination. Its grows stronger with exercise.

In fact today this is the core idea in many of the more effective self-help techniques. Visualize it, and it will manifest. That's the Law of Attraction. It works in the inner world of thought and feeling and idea, but many people believe it works even in the external material world. It can certainly help people realize their goals or overcome problems.

Jung gained access to his unconscious through an exercise he called Active Imagination, which was essentially lucid dreaming, or very close to it anyway. I believe he frequently did fall asleep and had lucid dreams while attempting it. His techniques are identical to certain techniques used to incubate lucid dreams.

William Blake and many other mystics and great artists were gifted with powerful visual imaginations. He would see visions that he said were as real as his surroundings—angels and strange creatures sitting on branches talking to him, as real as any of the people nearby. He knew the difference, but he imputed the visions with as much reality as anything else. He also understood they communicated through metaphor, symbolism and riddles, as dreams and mythology do, and as the unconscious does.

I love it when I suddenly realize that the same idea runs through several traditions and disciplines. The idea here is that activating the visual imagination (showing) is far superior to relating things strictly through words (telling, aka the verbal imagination).

 

Oh I've got that too https://archive.org/details/artofpoetrywriti0000pack

It's too basic, bearing in mind you're regularly in discussions with published poets.
I found this one which I think goes into better detail on the topics of this thread: Poetry the Basics - Jeffrey Wainwright - https://archive.org/details/poetrybasics0000wain/page/184/mode/2up
E.g. it's got enjambment and tone.
But still both are missing: verbal economy, redundancy, milieu, intertextuality, run-on lines, half-lines, or accumulation (where you start with shorter feet or fewer syllables and build up)
I don't think it's that I've been hoarding weird jargon from some obscure corner or cult. It's just that these are beginners' guides.

For Lit.Crit., a good starting point might be The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (M.H. Abrams, 1953)
https://archive.org/details/mirrorlampromant0000abra/page/1/mode/2up
This has nothing about craft. And it's 400 pages long and focused on the Romantic era (1750s-1850s), so I'd suggest to use it like a master-index to try and find your school-of-thought.
Which it will then give a few pages explanation of, and a bibliography.

So for my insistence on character-writing, I can go to page 256 where this book traces it back to the Reverend John Keble (1830s) who sees characters as an "overflowing" of the writer's own character. (He's a vicar, so his overflowing is a gloss for the theological concept of kenosis.)
Using the bibliography, I can find John Keble's methods:-
http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract89/section6.html
And trace it back to the unhallowed aeons of Augustine of Hippo (380s AD), and therefore the author of the Epistle to the Ephesians (~70 AD)

What's a bit difficult with the Mirror and the Lamp is finding how the theories evolve from the Romantic era to the present-day.
How do two saints and a vicar end up in the DNA of non-theistic postmodernist approaches used by cyberpunks and beat poets?
That starts to need more books (including this one) - which will be inconclusive because the dust hasn't settled.

Maybe Keble > Gerard Manley Hopkins > WH Auden > Merrill and Hecht ?
Or Keble > Matthew Arnold > Ray Bradbury ?
Or Keble > Matthew Arnold > The Powys Brothers > Terry Pratchett ?


Keble > Matthew Arnold > The Powys Brothers > Henry Miller + Jack Kerouac

 

Interesting...

So—potes* are mentally or emotionally (or more properly I suppose Ideationally)(or maybe Imagistically?) clogged-up, and they overflow, relieving themselves onto their readers. The guy might have been a plumber, or perhaps somewhat clogged himself. Freud would diagnose an anal fixation I think.

*An honest typo, but it's too good to change.

 

Lol! The more advanced book is called The Basics.

No, but thank you, seriously. I did some research and the one I ended up buying was said to be excellent. I found that to be true, but of course there are many others, and it's good to hear from somebody who knows what they are. Yeah, bring on the more advanced or more complete books. I'll see if I can find them (last time I checked on the one I had bought, it was no longer listed on Amazon).

 

Amazon's got The Basics. I've got a paperback in my cart. I like physical books for reference work, so I can mark up, dog-ear, and put those little colored sticky bookmarks in. A Kindle or other digital version just doesn't work the same way.

I'll also get The Mirror And The Lamp, but I plan to be critical of that one. I'm afraid if I start reading critcal theory I might transition into evi7x0ic, and become incomprehensible to 80% of readers . But I'll get it because it's only $17.

I really hate those books on Archive.org that are only available to borrow and "Renewable every hour." I tried that once. It means you have to get a (free) membership to something, and then every hour your book disappears and is replaced by an icon saying "Renew" or something, like we're in Logan's Run. Have you ever seen anybody actually renew? It's a scam I tell you, and Soylent Green is people. You then put in an application for renewal, and if they haven't reached their mortatorium (only a certain number of digital copies are allowed to leave the coop at any time), then it will reappear. Way too annoying! Worse than constant commercial breaks. And they're not even selling you anything, and you don't even get the base pleasure of hearing clever and addictive commercial jingles (with annoyingly pedestrian rhyme schemes). Where's the benefit I ask?

 

To be more serious, a problem I have with Critical Theory is that much of it is just destructive reductionism. Tear everything down until there's nothing left and then walk away dusting your hands off. I want no part of that sort of critical theory. I'll be carefully reading through the Look Inside and determining if there's anything of seeming value there or if it feels like reductio ad destructalism.

EDIT—I must say, so far the table of contents sounds promising. Must read on though, and be on the alert for any hint of the Dark Vortex lurking to devour the unwary.

 

He might if he had been born and could find some examples of relieving oneself being used as a euphemism for peeing or pooing prior to ~1840.
The 1930s OED on archive.org doesn't have it, but it's definitely here in this useful-looking description from 1921 of how best to fart during prayers in the Middle East.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.147249/page/n871/mode/2up
https://www.google.com/search?q="relieved himself"&tbm=bks&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1800,cd_max:1821&lr=lang_en

Destructive reductionism would reach a similar conclusion to literary nihilism then - negating its own premise by brilliant authors writing long books of intricate prose about it.

Jung and Freud are only mentioned a few times in The Mirror and the Lamp - they would have been a generation later than the period it covers but it might give a good jumping-off point for further research.

 

Points in the books favor—published in 1953, the word diverse is used with its original meaning, and nothing I've encountered so far indicates any kind of ideological agenda. I do know however that 'Critical Theory" sort of snuck up into its contemporary nasty form from much more humble beginnings.

I think I'll get it regardless and take my chances. Everything I've seen so far seems on point and well balanced. Of course it's only the introduction. If it starts making me feel too smart or too clever I'll stop reading.

 

Sorry, in a couple of places I've said "Critical Theory" for "Literary Theory and Criticism" - probably due to its being in the news so much. I'll go back up and amend.

Criticism isn't as vast as Literature, but it has to spread out just as far.
Most political movements and even cults have to come up with their own theory of literary criticism sooner or later so they can start controlling what and how people read.

But certainly in the Romantic era, CRT's and gender theory's earliest ancestors hadn't emerged yet. Marx didn't write the Communist Manifesto until 1848, right at the end of the period.
And his political theories didn't really start being applied to literature until the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

There was certainly feminist literary criticism e.g. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1796)
I don't know anything about either that, or the early history of racial literary criticism - but apparently Mark Twain's racial treatment of the Uncle Tom character was criticized in the Liberator in 1852.
And H.L. Mencken criticized Joel Chandler Harris in 1917 for stealing his material from black Georgians (link) Possibly neither of those were coming from angles we'd now consider particularly just or aware.

I'd be surprised if there's much continuity of theories from there down to the radical present day stuff.

 

Somehow the site failed to show me this response (or I managed to miss it). Thanks for amending that, you had me a little worried for a while.

 

I composed this for another thread, but it doesn't quite fit the rules there, so I'll put it here instead:

A foot with three syllables, stress on the third, I asked what it's called if you look back
I joked it's tricorder, but now I reorder my thoughts (as I page through my book, Jack!)
Seems it's called Anapest,* deem it one of the best metric plans one can be representin'
And now I need more just to finish this whore so I'm rhymin' and rappin' and ventin'

And I now realize, since I've opened my eyes, that it takes more than one foot to move on
You can't be too strict, you can counter-addict—what I thought was a 'rule' I improve on
Mix 'em up just a bit, cough hack swallow and spit, don't be rigid with laying your feet down
Anapest and Iambic, you can swap out and cross-pick, use a mix-em-up rhythm and beat, clown

* Not to be confused with Budapest