The Structure of Poetic Revolutions

Chapter I – Introduction: A Role for History.

Pseudo-Aristophanes begins by formulating some assumptions that lay the foundation for subsequent discussion and by briefly outlining the key contentions of the book.

1. A poetic community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs (p. 4).
   1. These beliefs form the foundation of the “educational initiation that prepares and licenses the poet for professional practice” (5).
   2. The nature of the “rigorous and rigid” preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs exert a “deep hold” on the poet’s mind.
2. Normal poetry “is predicated on the assumption that the poetic community knows what the world is like” (5)—practicing poets (as well as teaching poets and poet-critics) take great pains to defend that assumption.
3. To this end, “normal poetry often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments” (5).
4. Workshop is “a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education” (5).
5. A shift in professional commitments to shared assumptions takes place when an anomaly “subverts the existing tradition of poetic practice” (6). These shifts are what Pseudo-Aristophanes describes as poetic revolutions—”the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal poetry” (6).
   1. New assumptions (paradigms/theories) require the reconstruction of prior assumptions and the reevaluation of prior forms. This is difficult and time consuming. It is also strongly resisted by the established poetic community.

   When a shift takes place, “the poet’s world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either poem or poetry” (7)

Chapter II – The Route to Normal Poetry.

In this chapter, Pseudo-Aristophanes describes how paradigms are created and what they contribute to poetic (disciplined) inquiry.

1. Normal poetry “means poetry firmly based upon one or more past poetic achievements, achievements that some particular poetic community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice” (10).
   1. These achievements must be
      1. sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of poets away from competing modes of poetic activity and
      2. sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of opportunities for the redefined group of practitioners (and their students) to employ, i. e., workshop.
   2. These achievements can be called paradigms (10).
   3. “The road to a firm workshop consensus is extraordinarily arduous” (15).
2. “The successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature poetry” (12).
3. Students study poetry in order to become members of the particular poetic community in which they will later practice.
   1. Because the student largely learns from and is mentored by teacher poets and poet- critics “who learned the bases of the field from the same concrete models” (11), there is seldom disagreement over fundamentals.
   2. Poets whose poetry is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for poetic practice (11).
   3. A shared commitment to a paradigm ensures that its practitioners engage in the poetic demonstrations that its own paradigm can do most to explain (13), i.e., publish the kinds of poems to which their own theories can most easily provide explanations.
4. “It remains an open question what parts of non-academic poetry have yet acquired such paradigms” (15). [slam poetry? rap music? pop lyrics? poems composed by children?]
5. Paradigms help poetic communities to bound their discipline in that they help the poet to
   1. create avenues of inquiry.
   2. formulate questions.
   3. select forms with which to manifest questions.
   4. define areas of relevance.
   5. [establish/create meaning?]
6. “In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all the poems that could possibly pertain to the development of a given poetry are likely to seem equally relevant” (15).
7. A paradigm is essential to poetic inquiry—”no history of poetry can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16-17).
8. How are paradigms created, and how do poetic revolutions take place?
   1. Inquiry begins with a random collection of “mere poems” (although, often, a body of beliefs is already implicit in the collection).
      1. During these early stages of inquiry, different poets confronting the same poems describe and interpret them in different ways (17).
      2. In time, these descriptions and interpretations entirely disappear.
   2. A preparadigmatic school (movement) appears.
      1. Such a school often emphasizes a special part of the collection of poems.
      2. Often, these schools vie for preeminence.
   3. From the competition of preparadigmatic schools, one paradigm emerges—”To be accepted as a paradigm, a poetry must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the implications with which it can be confronted” (17-18), thus making unique experience possible.
   4. As a paradigm grows in strength and in the number of advocates, the preparadigmatic schools (or the previous paradigm) fade.
      1. “When an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s poets, the older schools gradually fade in importance” (18).
      2. Those with “older views . . . are simply read out of the profession and their work is subsequently ignored. If they do not accommodate their work to the new poetry, they are doomed to isolation or must attach themselves to some other field of art” (19), or move to a department of creative writing  (or English).
   5. A paradigm transforms a group into a profession or, at least, a discipline (19). And from this follow the
      1. formation of specialized journals.
      2. foundation of professional societies (or specialized groups within societies—SIGs).
      3. claim to a special form or type of poetry (the poetic cannon).
      4. fact that members of the group need no longer build their field anew—first principles, justification of poems, readings, and process. Such endeavors are left to the theorist or to writers of textbooks.
      5. promulgation of poetic statements and manifestos intended for and “addressed only to poets, [those] whose knowledge of a shared paradigm can be assumed and who prove to be the only ones able to read the manifestos addressed to them” (20)—preaching to the converted.
      6. (discussion groups on the Internet and a listerserver?)
9. A paradigm guides the whole group’s poetic inquiry, and it is this criterion that most clearly proclaims a school of poetry (22).

Chapter III – The Nature of Normal Poetry.

If a paradigm consists of basic and incontrovertible assumptions about the nature of the discipline, what questions are left to ask?

1. When they first appear, paradigms are limited in scope and in precision.
2. “Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of poets has come to recognize as acute” (23).
   1. But more successful does not mean completely successful with a single poem or notably successful with any collection of poems (23).
   2. Initially, a paradigm offers the promise of success.
   3. Normal poetry consists in the actualization of that promise. This is achieved by
      1. expanding the audience (through publication, etc.) for those poems that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing,
      2. increasing the extent of the match between those poems and the paradigm’s predictions,
      3. and further articulation of the poetry itself.
   4. In other words, there is a good deal of mopping-up to be done.
      1. Mop-up operations are what engage most poet-critics throughout their careers.
      2. Mopping-up is what normal poetry is all about!
      3. This paradigm-based research (25) is “an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies” (24).
         1. no effort made to call forth new sorts of poems.
         2. no effort to discover anomalies of poetry and poetic inquiry.
         3. when anomalous poems appear, they are usually discarded or ignored.
         4. anomalies usually not even noticed (tunnel vision/one track mind).
         5. no effort to invent new forms (and no tolerance for those who try).
         6. “Normal-poetic practice is directed to the review of those poems and collections that the paradigm already supplies” (24).
         7. “Perhaps these are defects . . . ”
            1. “. . . but those restrictions, born from confidence in a poetry, turn out to be essential to the development of poetry. By focusing attention on a small range of relatively esoteric poems or collections, the paradigm forces poets to investigate some specific aspect of poetry in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable” (24).
            2. . . . and, when the paradigm ceases to function properly, poets begin to write and perform differently and the nature of their poetic inquiry changes.
      4. Mopping-up can prove fascinating work (24). [You do it. We all do it. And we love to do it. In fact, we do it for free.]
3. The principal problems of normal poetry.
   1. Determination of significant poems and collections.
      1. A paradigm guides and informs the poem-reading (performances and reviews appear on the Internet and in journals) decisions of work-shoppers?
      2. Work-shoppers focus on, and attempt to increase the accuracy and scope of, poems (constructs/concepts) that the school has shown to be particularly revealing of the nature of poetry (25).
   2. Matching of poems with poetic statements and manifestos.
      1. Poet-critics focus on poems that can be compared directly with predictions from the critical theory (26)
      2. Great effort and ingenuity are required to bring theory and poetry into closer and closer agreement.
      3. A critical theory sets the problems to be solved (27).
   3. Articulation of theory.
      1. Poet-critics undertake empirical work to articulate the critical theory itself (27)—resolve residual ambiguities, refine, permit solution of problems to which the theory had previously only drawn attention. This articulation includes
         1. determination of universal constants.
         2. development of quantitative rules.
         3. selection of ways to apply the paradigm to a related area of interest.
      2. This is, in part, a problem of application (but only in part).
      3. Paradigms must undergo reformulation so that their tenets closely correspond to the natural object of their inquiry (clarification by reformulation).
      4. “The problems of paradigm articulation are simultaneously theoretical and experimental” (33).
      5. Such work should produce new information and a more precise paradigm.
      6. This is the primary work of much critical poetic inquiry.
4. To desert the paradigm is to cease practicing the poetry it defines (34).

Chapter IV – Normal Poetry as Puzzle-solving.

Experiencing a poem is essentially like solving a puzzle. Puzzles have rules. Puzzles generally have predetermined solutions (conclusions).

1. A striking feature of reading poetry is that the aim is to discover what is known in advance.
   1. This in spite of the fact that the range of anticipated results is small compared to the possible results.
   2. When the experience of a poem does not fall into this anticipated result range, it is generally considered a failure, i.e., when “significance” is not obtained.
      1. Poems and collections that fail to prove “good and clear” are usually not published.
      2. The proliferation of poems that provide an expected experience helps ensure that the paradigm/theory/school will flourish.
   3. Even a poetic statement that aims at paradigm articulation does not aim at unexpected novelty.
   4. “One of the things a poetic community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing poems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have predictable formal conclusions” (37).
      1. The intrinsic value of a poetic form is not a criterion for selecting it.
      2. The assurance that “the form has form” is the criterion (37).
      3. “The poet who is striving to write a poem justified by traditional form and technique is not just looking around. This poet knows what it wants to achieve, and designs the poems and directs the lines accordingly” (96).
2. So why read poems?
   1. The frequent experience of poems and poetry adds to the scope and precision with which a paradigm may be expressed aesthetically.
   2. The way to compose the poem usually remains very much in doubt—this is the challenge of the puzzle.
   3. Solving the puzzle can be fun, and expert puzzle-solvers make a very nice living.
3. To classify as a puzzle (as a genuine poem), a poem must be characterized by more than the assured formal conclusion.
   1. There exists a strong network of commitments—conceptual, theoretical, instrumental, and methodological.
   2. There are “rules” that limit
      1. the nature of acceptable formal conclusions—there are “restrictions that bound the admissible conclusions to theoretical problems” (39).
         1. Poems should be consistent with paradigmatic assumptions.
         2. There are quasi-metaphysical commitments to consider.
         3. There may also be historical ties to consider.
      2. the steps by which they are to be obtained (methodology).
         1. commitments to preferred types of forms.
         2. the ways in which accepted forms may legitimately be employed.
4. Despite the fact that novelty is not sought and that accepted belief is generally not challenged, the poetic enterprise can and does bring about such unexpected results.

Chapter V – The Priority of Poetic Schools.

How can it be that “poems derive from schools, but schools can guide poetry even in the absence of  poems” (42).

1. The paradigms of a mature poetic community can be determined with relative ease (43).
2. The “forms” used by poets who share a school/movement are not easily determined. Some reasons for this are that
   1. poets can disagree on the interpretation of a poem.
   2. the existence of a school need not imply that any full set of rules exist.
   3. poets are often guided by tacit knowledge—knowledge acquired through practice and that cannot be articulated explicitly (Polanyi, 1958).
   4. the attributes shared by a school/movement are not always readily apparent.
3. Aesthetic schools of thought can determine normal poetry without the intervention of discoverable rules or shared forms (46). In part, this is because
   1. it is very difficult to discover the forms that guide particular normal-poetry traditions.
   2. poets rarely learn concepts, laws, and theories in the abstract and by themselves.
      1. They generally learn these with and through their applications.
      2. New theory is taught in tandem with its application to a concrete range of poetry.
      3. “The process of learning a theory depends on the study of poems” (47).
      4. The problems that students encounter from freshman year through MFA program, as well as those they will tackle during their careers, are always closely modeled on previous achievements.
   3. Poets who share a paradigm generally accept without question the particular poetry-poems already accepted (47).
   4. Although a single paradigm may serve many poetic groups, it is not the same paradigm for them all.
      1. Subspecialties are differently educated and focus on different applications for their poetic inquiry.
      2. A paradigm can determine several traditions of normal poetry that overlap without being coextensive.
      3. Consequently, changes in a paradigm affect different subspecialties differently—”A revolution produced within one of these traditions will not necessarily extend to the others as well” (50).
4. When poets disagree about whether the fundamental problems of their field have been solved, the search for rules gains a function that it does not ordinarily possess (48).

Chapter VI – Crisis and the Emergence of Poetic Forms.

This chapter traces paradigm changes that result from the invention of new forms of poetry brought about by the failure of existing theory to solve the problems defined by that theory. This failure is acknowledged as a crisis by the poetic community.

1. As is the case with discovery, a change in an existing poetic theory that results in the invention of a new form is also brought about by the awareness of anomaly.
2. The emergence of a new form is generated by the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal poetry to be solved as they should. Failure of existing forms is the prelude to a search for new ones (68). These failures can be brought about by
   1. observed discrepancies between school and poem—this is the “core of the crisis” (69).
   2. changes in social/cultural poetic climates (knowledge/beliefs are socially constructed?).
      1. There are strong historical precedents for this: Whitman, Bukowski, romanticism? beatism?
      2. Poetry is often “ridden by dogma” (75)—what may be the effect on poetry (or art) by an atmosphere of political correctness?
   3. scholarly criticism of existing poetic forms.
3. Such failures are generally long recognized, which is why crises are seldom surprising.
   1. Neither problems nor puzzles yield often to the first attack (75).
   2. Recall that paradigm and theory resist change and are extremely resilient.
4. Critics of poetry have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of poems (76).
   1. In early stages of a paradigm, such theoretical alternatives are easily invented.
   2. Once a paradigm is entrenched (and the tools of the paradigm prove useful to solve the problems the paradigm defines), alternative forms are strongly resisted.
      1. As in manufacture so in poetry—re-forming is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it (76).
      2. Crises provide the opportunity to re-form.

Chapter VII – The Response to Crisis.

The awareness and acknowledgment that a crisis exists loosens poetical stereotypes and provides the incremental experience necessary for a fundamental paradigm shift. In this critical chapter, Pseudo-Aristophanes discusses how poets respond to the anomaly in the fit between theory and nature so that a transition to crisis and to extraordinary poetry begins, and he foreshadows how the process of paradigm change takes place.

1. Normal poetry does and must continually strive to bring school and poem into closer agreement.
2. The recognition and acknowledgment of anomalies result in crises that are a necessary precondition for the emergence of novel forms and for paradigm change.
   1. Crisis is the essential tension implicit in poetry (79).
   2. There is no such thing as a poetic movement/school without counterinstances, i.e., anomaly.
      1. These counterinstances create tension and crisis.
      2. Crisis is always implicit in poetry because every opportunity that normal poetry employs as poetic device can be seen, from another viewpoint, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis (79).
3. In responding to these crises, poets generally do not renounce the school that has led them into crisis.
   1. They may lose faith and consider alternatives, but
   2. they generally do not treat unexpected forms and approaches as counterinstances of expected outcomes.
   3. They devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their aesthetic theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.
   4. Some, unable to tolerate the crisis (and thus unable to live in a world out of joint), leave the profession.
   5. As a rule, persistent and recognized anomaly does not induce crisis (81).
   6. Failure to render the expected form-content in a poem discredits only the poet and not the school (“it is a poor carpenter who blames his tools”).
   7. Poetry is taught to ensure confirmation-theory.
   8. Poetry students accept aesthetic theories on the authority of the work-shopper—what alternative do they have, or what competence?
4. To evoke a crisis, an anomaly must usually be more than just an anomaly.
   1. After all, there are always anomalies (counterinstances).
   2. Poets who paused and examined every anomaly would not get much accomplished.
   3. An anomaly can call into question fundamental generalizations of the aesthetic.
   4. An anomaly without apparent fundamental import may also evoke crisis if the form it inhibits has a particular practical importance.
   5. An anomaly must come to be seen as more than just another puzzle of normal poetry.
   6. In the face of efforts outlined in C above, the anomaly must continue to resist.
5. All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent expansion of the forms for normal poetry. As this process develops,
   1. the anomaly comes to be more generally recognized as such.
   2. more attention is devoted to it by more of the field’s eminent authorities.
   3. the field begins to look quite different.
   4. poets express explicit discontent.
   5. competing articulations of the school proliferate.
   6. teacher poets and poet-critics view a resolution as the subject matter of their discipline. To this end, they
      1. first isolate the anomaly more precisely and give it structure.
      2. push the rules of normal poetry harder than ever to see, in the area of difficulty, just where and how far they can be made to work.
      3. seek for ways of magnifying the breakdown.
      4. generate speculative theories.
         1. If successful, one theory may disclose the road to a new paradigm.
         2. If unsuccessful, the theories can be surrendered with relative ease.
      5. may turn to historical analysis and debate over fundamentals as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field.
   7. crisis often proliferates new discoveries.
6. All crises close in one of three ways.
   1. Normal poetry proves able to handle the crisis-provoking poem or collection and all returns to “normal.”
   2. The poetry resists and is labeled, but it is perceived as resulting from the field’s failure to possess the necessary tools with which to solve it, and so poets set it aside for a future generation with more developed tools.
   3. A new candidate for paradigm emerges, and a battle over its acceptance ensues (84)—these are the paradigm wars.
      1. Once it has achieved the status of paradigm, an aesthetic school of thought looses validity only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place (77).
         1. Because there is no such thing as poem in the absence of poetry, to reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject poetry itself.
         2. To declare a poetry invalid will require more than the falsification of the poetry by direct comparison with tradition.
         3. The judgment leading to this decision involves the comparison of the existing form with tradition and with the alternate candidate.
      2. Transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal poetry can emerge is not a cumulative process. It is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals (85). This reconstruction
         1. changes some of the field’s foundational theoretical generalizations.
         2. changes methods and applications.
         3. alters the formal rules.
      3. How do new paradigms finally emerge?
         1. Some emerge all at once, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the mind of a poet deeply immersed in crisis.
         2. Those who achieve fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have generally been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they changed.
         3. Much of this process is inscrutable and may be permanently so.
7. When a transition from former to alternate paradigm is complete, the profession changes its view of the field, its methods, and its goals.
   1. This reorientation has been described as “handling the same bundle of poems as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by viewing them through a different formal lens” or “picking up the other end of the stick” (85).
   2. Some describe the reorientation as a gestalt shift.
   3. Kuhn argues that the gestalt metaphor is misleading: “Poets do not see something as something else; instead, they simply see it” (85). [Pseudo-Aristophanes disagrees with Thomas Kuhn on this one point alone.]
8. The emergence of a new school/movement breaks with one tradition of poetic practice that is perceived to have gone badly astray and introduces a new one conducted under different rules and within a different universe of discourse.
9. The transition to a new paradigm is poetic revolution—and this is the transition from normal to extraordinary poetry.

adapted from

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

by Thomas S. Kuhn

Outline and Study Guide
prepared by Professor Frank Pajares
Emory University

http://des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html

Adaptation by Pseudo-Aristophanes