{"id":3285,"date":"2010-03-07T12:32:41","date_gmt":"2010-03-07T17:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=3285"},"modified":"2010-03-07T12:32:41","modified_gmt":"2010-03-07T17:32:41","slug":"would-you-want-an-idea-for-a-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/would-you-want-an-idea-for-a-friend\/","title":{"rendered":""Would you want an idea for a friend?""},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This morning Charlotte Mandell<\/strong> reminds us of an interview Brad Morrow<\/strong> did with Robert Kelly<\/strong> back in 1987 and that is now available<\/a> in the Conjunctions<\/strong><\/em> website’s archives. It is quite a treat \u2014 & here is one of the bits I liked specially:<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

MORROW: You must be aware of Pound\u2019s dictum that all a writer\u2019s thoughts can be gathered onto half a page, and the rest is simply exposition. Even if you don\u2019t believe that\u2019s an accurate theory, what would you put on your half page?<\/p>\n

KELLY: I don\u2019t think I\u2014or anyone else\u2014have half a page to fill up. Pound\u2019s idea, which he may have gotten from T. E. Hulme, is funny, and therefore useful and memorable. And it\u2019s in some way true. But its truth is a comment not on the nature of men or poetry, but on the nature of ideas: Ideas are trashy things. I wouldn\u2019t want to have an idea. Would you want an idea for a friend? I think poetry is the activity of people with nothing to say. I would hate to read that Kelly has this idea or that. Ideas are for people who can\u2019t do anything. Ideas are the pabulum of pseudo-intellectuals\u2014<\/p>\n

MORROW: Of course these are all ideas that you\u2019re tossing out here.<\/p>\n

KELLY: These are prejudices, these aren\u2019t ideas.<\/p>\n

MORROW: Define an idea.<\/p>\n

KELLY: Idea in its strictest, purest sense preexists any formulation we could make. A man could never say an idea. A thought, it seems to me, is the corpse of dead thinking. Or the corpse of thinking. After you think you have a thought, just as after you live you have a corpse. \u201cThoughts of the great ones\u201d\u2014I think that\u2019s pseudo-intellectual trash. Our society has been accumulating it ever since Emerson\u2019s time as something to shore up against its ruin. Emerson himself was much wiser. Emerson every now and again would fall for his own thoughts instead of for his thinking. In his wonderful essay on the poet, he charts out perhaps for the first time anywhere an American tradition: that the nature of any artistic activity, if it\u2019s valuable, is a journey and is of value only in so far as the journey is complete, that it goes somewhere, comes back and reports what it has found there. Art is the report of a place, not an idea about something. Nor attitude peddling. We live in a time when thoughts and ideas are treated as commodities. When Pound talks about the half sheet of paper, I think what he\u2019s really doing is complaining, like many Western half-educated intellectuals. \u201cMy ideas aren\u2019t treated with respect! Nobody\u2019s buying my artifact!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning Charlotte Mandell reminds us of an interview Brad Morrow did with Robert Kelly back in 1987 and that is now available in the Conjunctions website’s archives. It is quite a treat \u2014...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,56,91],"tags":[208,255,645],"class_list":["post-3285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intellectuals","category-interview","category-poetry","tag-brad-morrow","tag-conjunctions","tag-robert-kelly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}