What drives the way of saying

On iTunes or other rental places you can find: Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight. He said, “I don’t trust styles and I especially did not want to be encapsulated in one.” He also said in that documentary, “works that are too preconceived go dead[…] the peculiarities of the moment are more energized”. It’s a tricky spot to figure out what makes a practice work, and what is a knock off of the outward seeming practice but missing the point, or key elements or implementing it poorly and eroding the concept. What comes to mind is the filter down effect of clothes that come from runways to discount stores, modifying at each step to the constraints of price point and usual materials accessed and you end up with a cut of clothing that worked with a stiff fabric but with a rayon-clingy drape and the innovations to make the changes with the color of the year and clientele length and decoupage, end up with a rag. Regardless of what style poetry starts as, it can descend to cardboard verse. As Glaser said, “Crystallization of belief – “oh I’ve got it now – becomes a limitation” in the not good sense of limitation.
As the creation habit continues, the pendulum swings: Neo-classicisist, The Romantics, Symbolists, Imagistes, Dadaists makers of concrete poetry, OULIPO and Language poets.
Each were at the start only a handful of acquaintances over a short period of time that sort of agreed and if you squint held common threats, the way stars hold a constellation and story that help us orient ourselves but the myth isn’t really in the sky or history.
With each phase of poetry, one tries to correct for the weaknesses of the last phase, to be more structured, less structured, driven by sonorous, by paring away extraneous, by suggesting, by mathematics, by directing thru deletion, by accumulation, by curating the unimportant, by lifting up the mythical, by pointing past little things to the cosmic, by seeing the universal in the pore, by stripping false myths away, by insisting the universe is not kind but cruel, or not random but kind, ruled by kings, not by the common man, by including the unbeautiful and non-sequitur and disorder. All the methods try to not stand in the way of a reality that gets obscured by our habituating.
Pratt, in The Imagist Poem relates what TE Hulme said in 1924 in Speculations about language decaying in its power to signify over time. That’s why we choose “fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not because they are new […] because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract” by overuse.
Glaser’s drawing hand can think for him directly much. We record the world around us, but they are means, the world and the recording, not ends. “We don’t have an obligation to represent the tree, but the tree initiates”, Glaser said. The outward and inward are also a mobius strip.
Glaser’s an interesting fellow. Drawing, cooking and chopping, “I don’t see these as different kinds of experiences”. “What I’ve always hated is the parochialization of as an action, unrelated to other activities.” All activities are about interrelatedness, redesigning our world for the better in whatever sphere and capacity to create civilization, which is that which links people so we don’t all kill one another.