“All art is both abstract and illusionistic. All human invention is an abstraction from reality. We observe, we learn, and we extract; and we use what we learn as the basis for making things. That is to say: we abstract and create illusions. Even linear perspective, which is designed to rationalize the world, is an abstraction from reality.”—Samia Halaby
The field of writing has yet fully embraced abstraction as a legitimate form of innovative praxis. While there have been innovations certainly with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets in the latter half of the 2oth century, we have reached an impasse, I believe, and the exploration of more exciting modes of writerly expression have either been abandoned or never attempted in the first place. Perhaps, in addition to the Language poets we must include James Joyce in the "abstract" pantheon, whose monumental experimental work, Finnegans Wake, is the last great effort to use language in a thoroughly different manner. I know there will be arguments to the contrary--that there are numerous writers over the past fifty years or so who have actually surpassed the abstract innovations of Joyce, but I don't see it.
I'm not going into why this has occurred. I'll leave that up to the reader. I will say we absolutely need a way forward, as I have previously argued. The way forward, I believe, at least in the field of writing, is abstraction--extreme abstraction. The new innovations are not to be found in prose, but in poetry, oddly enough, where abstraction finds a natural home. Essentially Joyce discovered that uncomfortable truth with the Wake. The Wake is really just a very, very long poem, with no obvious plot structure or narrative arc. So many readers and critics approach the book as a work of prose. It is not. Joyce was just a frustrated poet. He certainly worked within the confines of novelistic conventions, but it's obvious he felt more comfortable expressing himself poetically, and abstractly, hence the plotless and meandering qualities of the Wake.
My argument then is that poetry is a far more malleable and exciting form of expression than prose. As we have seen recently with the Conceptual Poets, poetry can be whatever you want it to be. It is harder to make the case with prose, because prose is constrained by more rigid conventions and rules, and has a more intimate relationship with market forces. Many people write novels to make money. No one I know writes poetry to make money! Therefore, there is an inherent freedom to poetry. It a form of expression mostly untethered to the exigencies of capitalist accumulation.
