MIRROR LAKES

       
          For now we see as through a glass darkly; but then face to face.


 
 
There were two of them, always there
every season, on the Mendelssohn border:
in summer, we fished for primitive life forms;
in winter, with blonde Heidi and Holly, we
skated figure eights from end to end.  A
curved ridge covered with spindly apple trees
shaped their frame, sent gradual shadows
across their length at dawn, dusk; the wind
ruffled their surface, scattering in quick squalls
miniature images of clouds, sky, trees.  Nature
formed those natural mirrors; now (after half
a century) I’m holding their image in my mind.

 
Here in the old backyard, the flowers, ferns
and groundcover are swelling from below;
bees and other buzzing bugs maintain their
hum of collective industry.  Mendelssohn
was much the same:  a hive, nest, bursting
with dreams:  with love and desire,
with respect and emulation, with pride 
and skill and ambition, with joy, hope,
laughter, boredom, gossip, pettiness,
bigotry, fear, sorrow... all somehow
interpenetrating, fused in seamless
neighborhood (of time, place, world).

 
Hidden away, somewhere in our midst,
a spiritual Sabbath, Sunday by the lake:
where the mind dove down to its muddy
origin, the murky bottom of the pallid,
chilly pond.  Here was the free soul’s
habitat:  among tadpoles, bass and
carp, lurking along the very bottom.
Out of deep dreams, unconsciousness
your motivation stems – to grow, to be...
to measure every separate deed and thing
by means of that same scrolled snail shell,
that early foreignness, that ur-estrangement

 
– so you burst from the freezing water.  Now
Mirror Lakes reflect a new reality:  the old
one, seen anew.  It is a wheel of seasoned
light, turning around a rooted tree (apple
or almond, oak, pine) whose branches
are a candelabra, spinning sweet
brevity of mortal play to mold 
for eternity: a wakeful courtyard
where servant-bees already gather
to attend their tasks - unheralded,
unproclaimed (– lovers too, intuitive,
becoming those servants thoughtlessly).

 
I’m holding an image in my mind:  Heidi
and Holly, skating across clear ice like
dancers.  As the sunflower grows
by golden degrees, so the dying world
(so teeming full) casts forth its beams
of radiant being: the profile of the ridge
that shaped those lakes remains (like the smile
of a skater, hovering in the mind long after dark).

well, of course, on the other hand, art has to be for art's sake in order to be for Pete's sake, for heaven's sakes! [sigh. so complicated]

Art is not for art's sake. Art, for Pete's sake, is a response to particulars of experience otherwise deflected, packaged, ignored, misunderstood. Inevitably runs up against inimical authorities, if there are any; inevitably outlives those conflicts; ineluctably represents crises of moral choice and vocation.

I'm getting this from Shattuck's book about Proust (who was, he says, often lumped, wrongly, with the purists).

If you're not an aesthete, does this mean you have to dumb down your rhetoric and vocabulary, write for someone other than yourself, become "accessible"? No; but by the same token, take care that your ornamentation, your felicities of style, are not merely designed to impress a coterie. They're not worth the trouble.

HG Poetics : is this my version of "silence, exile, cunning"?

Maybe I should get a site counter after all...

wondering at how distant what I'm doing is from the mainstream fringe.

But I'd better quit wondering & get back to it.

(This is a pea for under-sanding!)

Tomorrow I go to Minnesota for a few days, until the 20th. Up to the woods north of Duluth. Will report back on any readings given to loons, tree-frog conferences, bears, etc.

Have been reading much about Netherlandish art lately. Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden. Startled by how closely the images from Abu Graibh prison, with their grinning, leering guards and piles of naked prisoners, resemble pictures by Bosch and Bruegel (see The Mockery of Christ, for example).

A decision was made (at high levels, it seems) that the circumstances of the war on terror justify dehumanization of the enemy, the abrogation of human rights. Now it's beginning to have unforeseen consequences.

writing a lot today.

HEIDI, PRACTICING ACROSS THE STREET



 
 
Spring plays slow scales, waltzes toward July.
The leaves obscure the branches, and the shade
obscures the leaves.  Time’s intricate façade
a busy undergrowth that blurs the eye.

 
Footnotes and erasures cannot clear away
her dense disguise, your camouflage.
Only a few piano chords, a forlorn page...
we’re magnifying figures in some Book of J.

ON THE OCTAVE


 
 
This limpid morning belongs to the flowering dogwood
drifting white petals stained with a gash of purple
to the center of the sleepy backyard garden.
Hidden somewhere beyond chattering sparrows and
yodeling robins, a solitary mourning dove fingers
an ocarina, like a version (in minor key) of the Angel
with Flaming Sword, at the Garden gate.
                 So Mendelssohn
would become his composition:  a furtive green island
seen as light through water, as fingers extend
to the muted bell-tone
of a final octave.
    So I would travel back
aboard the swift smooth chariot of a single note
to where the ghost of a charitable father turns
to the image of a faithful son, in pure
attunement:
     by deep foundations of the sea
lifted from the grave, as was decreed
before the waters were divided from themselves:
when the soul of every man (Mary, Eurydice,
Persephone...) emerges from the sepulchre to meet
the gardener again.  And now a heavy lilac scents
the air, like limpid light through water; as if
to say
 you must translate and be translated,
the pillar of smoke and the pillar of flame
become your own:  for the only sign
is the sign of a mourning dove
at the edge of the garden.

Today marks the anniversary of the founding of Constantinople in 330 A.D. But more importantly, my daughter Phoebe turns 21 today.

sketching, sketching...

IN THE FIFTIES


 
 
Mendelssohn: a playpen,
a grass-green child-rearing
zoo.  Rows of pastel ranches 
pasted on remnants
of farmland, speckled
with fading apple trees.

 
Everything designed
for us: big yards, swing-
sets, sandboxes, baseball
diamonds... Little
League, Girl Scouts...
the enchanted island

 
ordained by the Bible
(Dr. Spock).  We
watched much TV,
played “army” every 
day, suffered shame
and sibling rivalry;

 
we did the picnics,
the infinite Sunday
afternoons (listening
to the four of them
– Mom, Dad, Grandma,
Grandpa – chortling

 
quietly over the bridge
table)... so much
you know already.
But you might miss
the careful oils
my mother made:

 
glowing grass; kids
akimbo (playing
“statue” under
the sprinkler); dark-
leaved oak trees
swaying overhead.

Reading Roger Shattuck's book about Proust (again). Kerouac's contradictions (alluded to in previous post) echoed in Proust's everlasting dialectic between art/idolatry and experience/suffering. That is, Kerouac's suspicion of "poetry" is similar to Proust's ambivalence about art & its aesthetes. Art is the lure, the drug of the inauthentic; the false fulfillment of envious ambition; etc.

Unless the art is true. He goes into his cork-lined room for 14 years.

BEYOND GHOST WOODS


 
 
I would walk out of Mendelssohn westward
along parallel dirt tracks around the swamp
through Ghost Woods, up the sandy slope
to the ridge that lay between trees and
cemetery.  From there, standing in chest-
high weeds, I could see all Mendelssohn,
and beyond, the tall skyscrapers downtown
where my father worked.  It was summer;
no chores or school; only that high lookout
between graveyard and neighborhood.

 
There’s an old war between generations:
between children, trusting all in play
and grown-ups trusting only in money:
children knowing nothing of hardship
and grown-ups, forgetting what joy is.
A battle tiresome and intense by turns:
adults impatient with insipid offspring,
children scornful of parental blindness...
time itself the substance of their quarrel.

 
Across a blank page I retrace those steps
since somehow walking through woods
to a vantage over tombstones (where both
parties cease their play at last) eases the
bitterness – settles for a while that strife
of labor and delight (thinking of my father
in his far-off gray tower, and of myself
smudging a white page with gray marks).
Time steeps labor in forgetfulness.  The 
only coin in memory is understanding.

JL again, on Harvey Shapiro's review at the time of publication of the (Donald Allen) New American Poets anthology:

He calls particular attention to the poets of the New York School, noting James Schuyler’s insistence on “the connection between the New Poetry and the ideas behind abstract-expressionist art”: the canvas / page as a space “in which to act,” the painting / poem as (he is quoting from Harold Rosenberg’s essay “The American Action Painters”) an “act inseparable from the biography of the artist.”

(- you could consider my poetry a special branch, an offshoot of that direction. see, for example, sections from Dove Street in the archives for 2.20 & 2.21.04)

the guy with the big shades - that's me in Paris, a few (uh, no, more than a few) years ago.

I keep enjoying John Latta's historical reflections on recent American poetry. Great details & documentation.

At the end of today's post he puts this:

"Late nights with Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46. Which bursts into lyricism, bravely defying its own somber bitterness: “I was coming back home to Lowell. It was November, it was cold, it was woodsmoke, it was swift waters in the wink of silver glare with its rose headband out yander where Eve Star (some call it Venus, some call it Lucifer) stoppered up her drooling propensities and tried to contain itself in one delimited throb of boiling light.”

And you know Kerouac just stepped out of himself and time for a moment there. (As he admits, chagrin’d, new paragraph: “Ah poetic.” Why the American propensity to thwart that outburst, to mistrust it?"

Seems that Kerouac's writing here, & his own reaction to it, contain the tendencies of both the "New Americans" and their New Critic critics. Americans tend to be Protestant Rebels, which means they are iconoclastic - image-rejecting - while at the same time rebelling vociferously (emotionally, imagistically, self-centeredly) against their culture's puritanical strictures. A stance with inherent contradictions.

Rev. Jo-Ann Drake made this comment in her sermon this morning:

the actions at the Abu Graibh prison have appalled everyone, with their flouting of basic respect for human diginity; and they are indeed appalling. But last year's photos of Saddam having his tongue & throat inspected - the humiliation of the dictator-prisoner which made the world laugh - from Pres. Bush on down - these images, & the world's response to them, were also appalling, for the same reason.

I've circled around these little problems all my life. But sitting out in the backyard, reading a tanned paperback of an old Eric Ambler novel (ca. 1937: Background to Danger), it occurred to me once again, that I've never changed, I've always been a slightly effete bookworm, a reader, not a doer, while my whole family is predicated on doing, doing, doing, and this is, in fact, the secret of a mens sano corpore whatever.

Hamlet & A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (did I get that right?) & Don Quixote - perhaps the greatest literary works of all. & what are they about? Sickly writer types, who "lose the name of action". Frustrated dreamers.

Dynamic symmetry, golden section... the new spring growth of Nature... applies to this narcissism-mirror-problem too.

Mim-mim-mim-Mom & Sis-mimesis. the ultimate st-st-stutter.

I had to interrupt the previous blogosition to let Pushkin the cat outside (it is nice evening here, & he was whining).

My God, my God, my whole weird life has pivoted on this hair's-breadth. I am not kidding, nay, not one bit.

The poetry of Shakespeare & the Bible drove me out of college into the wilderness. The poetry of the NY School got me into college (Ted Berrigan imitations : he grew up a couple miles from my alma mater).

Zen & the Art of Information Maintenance.

voice/text
art/knowledge

Gospel: Jesus (the Nazir - not the "Nazarene", but the Nazir, the ecstatic singer-prophet) - speaking of the future, says, offhandedly: "Knowledge shall increase." Oh, heart/mind. Logos/pathos/ethos. Mimesis vs. analysis.

One of the best books I've ever received was a gift from a carpenter-photographer high school friend, who dropped out of college in the early 70s & came to NY to get into the art scene: The Nazarene : Studies in New Testament Exegesis, by Eugenio Zolli, Univ. of Rome (publ. Herder, 1950). On the Hebrew/Aramaic context of the poetics of the parables.

In my blunt statement about poetry & academia, I neglected to mention a third (& mediating) factor: the enthusiasm for knowledge, the pleasure involved, shared alike by teacher, student, poet. "Poetry is the scholar's art." (right, Wally. He also said that academic poets were "kept men".)

Yet knowledge & poetry ain't the same, eggzackly (as JL, whose comments instigated this thread, points out). The original NY School can be understood as a sophisticated effort to do an end run around the professionalization of poetry, which was promoted by Eliot, Allen Tate (whose style strikes me immediately as that of a canny academic imitation of Hart Crane) & the New Critics (Janus Face of Modernism, an excellent study of the Crane/Tate dynamic & its aftermath: I forget the author's name, unfortunately...).

Poetry is the sabbath-day of consciousness. Pleasure & rest & fluent bright activity all at once. The only thing didactic about it is what is didactic about every thing : every thing teaches by example.

So what's all this about the relations between the academy & poetry writing?

Seems like the academy is one of the sources of socially-sponsored, officially-accredited writing. It gets this authority, obviously, due to its assignment to teach the young. Teaching requires books & knowledge; a school is, for one thing, a publishing (book-sponsoring) & book-collecting center.

Poets also make books, & teach too, in a way. So you can see how a symbiotic relationship occurs there.

I suppose a major element in the development of a meaningful artistic style involves finding a way to avoid, overturn, deny such authorization. Why? Because formal education is one thing, and the school of hod nicks is another. These two also have a symbiotic relationship. Teachers bring to school what they learn on the outside: if they didn't, school would be even more boring than it is. Poetry has to come from outside, too.

Excised fussy whine from previous post. Probably too late: sorry, dear bloggoner [sigh].

Catalogue of Comedic Novelties : a good title for 20th-cent. poetics. I've met Lev Rubinstein a few times, & heard him perform at the Hoboken conferences (Russ-Amer poetry). He's quite slight, like a baby bird, about 5 ' tall. Elena Shvarts' twin, actually. (They don't eat enough over there, sadly, & they smoke too much.) Remember the two of them walking together up the NJ sidewalk in close conversation, like a couple of pigeons.

As Shvarts & Rubinstein, so Acmeism & Futurism. Not one without the other. (Stravinsky & Shostakovich?)

When I practiced piano on the old upright in the ancient blue-green living room, my back was directly facing the screen door (mentioned in previous poem). Heidi Johnson (blonde daughter of chicken farmer Dale) would usually be practicing too, across the street: sometimes we sent each other musical signals.

IN MENDELSSOHN


 
 
The little forsythia in the shade of the fence
is losing its gold sheen already.  The only
sign of spring in Mendelssohn: when
we tumbled through the screen door
without our coats.  Light green, it glows
now in thought like an icon, beckoning.

 
Like ancient priests with their rituals
or primitive soldiers hypnotized for war
we were sleepwalkers – playing, playing.
The bold spring sun infused each one
with silliness, joy, anarchy – with 
daring leaps, with fledgling flights.

 
I lounge now in the old backyard
like a dried-up husk or hollow pupa,
papery wasp's nest.  The sun still
shines in Mendelssohn – awake, awake...
We were dreaming then.  I’m sleepy
now (my only desire: to dream again).

An "incarnational" poetics, which is what I'm concerned with, would circle around this asymmetrical symbiosis (voice & text) - but with a different emphasis from that of the postmodernists, post-structuralists, etc. A different "reading" of the evidence of experience, a different notion of what the poet is about.

I know this sounds simplistic, polemical, unfair. It is. But these are tendencies, not sharply-drawn distinctions. & I'm just trying to resolve my own problems of composition & style.

Between ordinary speech and literary artifice : always this balancing act.

Didacticism of the Moderns (Pound, Eliot). Contemporary poets inherited from them the notion that experiment & technique are something separable and to be acquired. I think earlier poets considered these things something you learn in your apprenticeship & don't talk about too much.

Why? Because in the older sense of style, the aim was a holistic impression - a seamless unity of voice, manner, technique, subject. The complex becomes simple and the simple is complex; the poem resolves itself into a singleness, a unified impression, a whole.

Why I'm attracted to poets like Stevens & Crane, who are sceptical about the idea that technique + novelty = originality.

Sent another bird-clock to Elena Shvarts in St. Petersburg. Apparently she had a fire in her building, lost a lot of books & personal things, including the bird-clock & little blue & white wooden bathtub ocean liner, Sophie, which my mother had made 50 years ago.

[p.s. addendum, 5.18.07 : years later, my mother's wooden boat was lost forever in a major fire in Elena Shvarts' apt. Ah, Russia!]

feeling a little better about the poetry today.

perhaps I should build on those very elements that seem out of style at the moment: simplicity, clarity, ordinary speech, the lack of flashy & baroque "technique". ars est celare artem.

Profound discouragement. Must take deep breath & continue making same mistakes.

Responding to John Latta's notes on "ambiguous figures":

yes, the characteristic quality of poetry is its reflexivity (its way of being something rather than simply pointing to something); but the shortcoming of so much postmodern poetry is that it simply turns this into a dichotomy ("poetry must not be mimetic since it is reflexive, self-mirroring"). What happens then is it gets further and further from ordinary experience & feeling, accenting its function as intellectual game.

The real puzzle, it seems to me, is how poetry can be both mimetic & reflexive.

How come I never heard of the poet Susan Stewart? duh... thanks, Ron Silliman. She looks very good, from the few samples I've read on his links.

Interesting article this morning in Times science section, about film diva Hedy Lamarr. Did you know that (along with being "the most beautiful woman in the world") during WW 2, with composer-friend Georges Antheil, Lamarr developed a radio-jamming device based on randomly changing frequencies - they called it "frequency hopping" - which would utilize linked pairs of player piano scrolls - one in the ship, one in the torpedo? & that they patented this & took it to the Navy, which eventually classified it? & that the idea helped lead to aspects of internet & cellphone technology? & that Lamarr was given a Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997?

In a black mood lately. Trying to think positively about this: maybe it's the sign of a new direction. This has happened before.

The poems written in the last month, for the most part, are well-meaning & workmanlike, but also quite stuffy, stodgy, giving the impression of forced effort. With a couple weeks' distance they feel alien & clunky.

Seems like I've lived several lives in poetry already. Sometimes the mountain seems too large & cold to move.

When I'm in this mood it's better for me not to observe the "scene" at all.

It's a good thing I can play some music. Five of us now: piano, guitar, fiddle, accordion, harmonica, jaw harp, saw (yes, saw), kazoo, jug, washboard, bass (have started playing bass, finding it fun). We're sounding very jug-zydeco-afro-pop.

Though this too is just a distraction... "nobody knows the trouble I've been."

PENTECOST IN AN INITIAL A

                 
                    Stefano da Verona, ca. 1430-35


 
 
These old piles of leathery parchment
fused all the arts – the odd square notes
in plainsong for the choir, the Latin
poetry, and, crowning everything,
such illustrations!
          
                     – this letter A
formed by a pair of rainbow-colored
dragons, whose entwined tongues
sprout leaves.  In the upper swirl,
God the Father sits aloft on wavy
cloud, from which descends
a blue dove, floating over twelve
disciples curled in a circle (within
the hulking serpent’s tail) around 
a taller Virgin Mary.
              
                      So everything
begins again – this time everyone
pregnant with the dove’s bright
fire.  And now the choir begins
to sing:
   
            antequam Abraham fieret 
            ego sum

[the Latin reads: "Before Abraham was, I am"]

ANNUNCIATION


 
 
The painter, patient, painstaking, slows time:
quick nervous feathered strokes congeal
the gorgeous pageant of the real
to stillness, light (transparent pantomime).

 
The model, posing in a quaint alcove,
waits too (for pregnant image to emerge):
vague drafty sketches, baseless camouflage
become sharp stream of fire from beak of dove.

When I say that we should consider poetry, not so much as always pioneering out new spaces in Time, but rather as bridging two separate regions of time (time-as-movement and eternity) - I'm saying we should take the notion of the soul into consideration.

Once upon a time, "world" and "eternal soul" were measured against each other: this was the basis of both moral freedom and personal integrity.

But that was back when we had persons.

All the problems of aesthetics have been solved so many times over that nobody knows what art is anymore.

MADELEINE IN APRIL


 
 
The white-flowering pear tree
against a backdrop of gray
clouds, lead-silver rain:
tiny Milky Way

 
or early Pentecost, turning
slowly in the melancholy
mirror (over the small
seed-spirals, buried

 
in puddles, soil).  Then you
turn toward the water too:
toward the cloudy glass
framing the blossoms;

 
toward your Jerusalem
(model or chamber,
ointment jar:
invisible).

This notion of fitness & the imaginative grasp of the "whole image": relates to Wallace Stevens (drawing on IA Richards' version of Coleridge on Imagination) in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, "It Must Be Abstract" (ie. the poem is an imaginative whole, an "abstracted" image of reality). Mandelstam, somewhere: "Acmeism loves 'the idea of Man' more than men themselves." (quoting from memory) Mandelstam is not saying that the acmeist is either inhumane or naively idealistic. He's saying that reality is grounded in a beautiful concept. In another place (in a poem) he put it something like this: "It's not Rome, the city, which endures through the ages: it's Man's place in the universe." (cf. Stevens' "the McCullough", or "Major Man".)

Luke... look... lac.

The painting by Rogier van der Weyden described in poem yesterday is up at MFA in Boston. Hope to go see it this week. (The poem only begins to get at the complexities of this remarkable painting.) Luke was the patron saint of artists. In this picture, he's doing a silver-point sketch of Mary & infant Jesus. In a sense, the painting revolves around two joined (& perpendicular) wheels: first, the wheel from the "onlookers" in the distance, pointing to the tiny church where one could imagine this entire scene is taking place; second, the wheel from Luke's sketch through the Gospel he is writing to this painting as a whole (& thus back to the sketch, or this painting's - & the gospel's - own origin). It's done with spots of light & the linear relationships established between them (a light through a chink in the wall over Mary's head, paralleling a similar light over the writing desk; lines criscrossing through the center of the painting connecting Luke's stylus, the direction of his sketch-pad, the hand of Jesus, the writing desk, the two lights, etc.) - and - and this is important - it's all unified by the fact that the figure of Luke is van der Weyden's self-portrait.

Borges couldn't have fashioned a more subtle self-reflexive design. Besides, it's beautiful, down to a microscopic level: you have to peer at minute features of the clothing, or the coat-of-arms in the stained glass window, or the tiny figures walking in the distant town - or the man pissing against the wall there; and yet it comes together as an integrated whole. & this is one of the great lessons in "fitness" of the old masters: you can't understand the meaning of the details, unless you somehow begin to grasp the meaning, the motive, of the whole image.

& this, of course, teaches us something about "reading" nature, or experience, or reality, as a whole. (which gets back to something I was trying to get at a few days ago, discussing the status of the image in poetry.)

Interesting notes (as usual) over at Hotel Point. I had been thinking vaguely somewhere in the same general area this morning.

That is, about how poetry is an art of modulated speech flow. Something like learning to play the flute or another instrument. There's a level of diction, meter, rhyme, etc., just as there's a level of technique with the instrument. Then there's another level combining fitness & invention, which is maybe somewhat similar to composition. (I know what I'm talking about, having studied piano from age 6.)

(Obviously these are not new ideas - just basic ideas.)

Maybe it's the notions of fitness (these days, anyway) that vary more than any of the other factors (from poet to poet).

St. Luke Drawing a Portrait


 
 
It’s a game of perception.  The Virgin, calm,
attentive, aims the nipple of one small breast
toward the lips of the laughing Infant.  St. Luke,
draped in flowing vermilion, pauses, looks up
from his sketchbook, his fine black-golden
stylus held there motionless.  It’s a portrait
of the artist (van der Weyden); in a corner
behind him, an ox curls under a writing stand,
where a draft of the third Gospel lies open.
Between pillars in the center, beyond the
garden, on a bridge, in the middle distance,
a man and a woman (with their backs to us)
gaze at a river that glides to the horizon.
The man aims his index finger toward
a far-off spit of shoreline, where
a tiny church is barely visible.
       
                                 (This work
the mirror-image of an earlier one, by Jan
van Eyck, The Rolin Madonna: the kneeling 
donor, holding his book, looks up (entranced 
by mother and child) from the opposite side 
of the room (and painting); in the center,
in the deep distance, the same river,
almost the same onlookers.)
              
                             It’s a game
of perception, with multiple mirrors:
that onlooker’s index, pointing almost
out of the scene, circles back to this room:
St. Luke, looking on, is van der Weyden,
looking on: as we are looking on, absorbed
(as that infant soon will be) in the milky flow.

Another motive for the inability to write, I've noticed: the feeling of being overwhelmed by a theme or concept.

Unable to write for the past couple of weeks, after an enthusiastic spell before that. Maybe, at my advanced age, I'm starting to become slightly conscious of my own creative patterns(?). Early enthusiasm, followed by spate of disillusionment & boredom with my plainness, obviousness, my prosaic style. Some of the more formalist poems in Way Stations came out of similar periods of enthusiasm (technical tours-de-force).

The strong interest in Mandelstam & Montale, especially, for their hermetic qualities: the inward curve of the imagery, the self-sustaining roundedness, the indirection.

The strong interest in long poems for their "learned" qualities: the way an arcane or highly-involved subject-matter folds the poetry into its own sphere of indirections.

So maybe these two interests arose partly out of desire to compensate for my own ordinariness. (I guess I'll just have to quit being ordinary!)

OK, enough confession. "Unable to write," I'm going back to writing...

Have been reading a lot of Sophocles lately (some of Julia's poems remind me of the translations).

Robert Fagles' versions are great, I think. I've read his translations of Oedipus Rex, Antigone & Oedipus at Colonus. I'm hoping he also translated Philoctetes, which is my favorite of the seven extant.

Electra seems like one of the weirdest plays ever written.

These plays are 2500 years old.

(Sophocles lived to 90 yrs. Philoctetes his 2nd-to-last play (before O. at Colonus). Athens already defeated by Sparta, & Sophocles had already died, when O. at C. was first performed.)

My thoughts on the basic motives & purposes of poetry after the movements of the 20th century can be juxtaposed with these interesting remarks at Boston Comment. As Kent Johnson & Stephen Burt in particular pointed out, the demand to innovate originates, not entirely but to some degree, in a political stance. One could say that literary innovation and difference, as we have come to know them, have two roots: first in what I described before as the attempt to catch up with contemporary historical change, and secondly in the notion that literary "experimentalism" (as opposed to simple experiment) marks the boundary of political opposition to mainstream institutions or allegiances.

If one accepts the notion of the poetic word as harmonizing a duplex form of time & reality, then the first motive for innovation noted above has to be revised. I'm not sure how such a poetics applies to any specific political stance.

Inching Along

I'd like to continue the speculations on future poetics begun a few days ago. I don't have time today for more than a couple brief notes.

I think I've made some progress, but there's a need for more interrogation.

First, I've suggested how a sense of living tradition could be built on a notion of active reading/affinity - grounded in love, which undergirds a different attitude toward the origins, identity and presence of the poetic voice (different from major strains of postmodern theory and writing).

Such an approach opens up the possibility that literary style and technique might be generated not solely by the chronological succession of the New, or a deterministic notion of innovation, but by anachronistic connections of affinity (what Mandelstam describes as the "opening of the Bergsonian fan" across widely separated eras).

Secondly, and related to this, I've characterized the "poetic word itself" in (Mandelstamian) Acmeist fashion, as the crossing of two strands: time & eternity, nature and grace, such that poetry is the emanation of harmony, or the evidence of the harmonization, of these two spheres.

Yet this theoretical framework is incomplete, and as such it short-changes poetry. How so?

By forcing poetry to bear the burden of what is basically a metaphysical doctrine, one inhibits poetry's freedom, to some extent. Poetry needs to be free in its autonomy, in its capability to be whatever it wants to be. And yet I don't want to surrender the theoretical grounding which this description of the duplex nature of the poetic word provides. How am I going to resolve this?

Let's say that this notion of the Word as grounded in anachronistic affinity is the vertical axis of a broader definition. When we described Modernism as a literary effort to "catch up" with the zeitgeist, we were overly abstract, since we neglected to focus on the "how" (how this was accomplished).

How this was done involved what we might call an effort of circumference. Let's make this the horizontal axis of our poetics. What do we mean by circumference? The modernist innovations in style & technique - grounded to a great extent in poets like Browning and Whitman - vastly expanded the range of both subject-matter and level of diction. Whitman, in a sense, can be understood as Dickinson's coeval : what Dickinson achieved in the realm of compression and metaphysical verticality, Whitman accomplished in the realm of horizontal breadth and openness, of descriptive capaciousness, of literary magnanimity.

What were the modernist and postmodernist long poems, but experiments in capaciousness, in extending the range of what poetry could include? No wonder that, over the last 50 years, the squabbles between traditionalists and experimentalists have been so divisive and continuous: contemporary inclusiveness clashes sharply with longstanding concepts of traditional poetic technique.

Every poet has to find their own center of gravity or path through these differing perspectives. Inclusiveness, taken as a kind of stylistic absolute, leads eventually to a condition of no-style (anything can be called a poem). Tradition, taken as an absolute, leaves no room for either originality or genuine change.

So perhaps we approach a theory of the poem as something autonomous, self-creating, self-defining; open to both empirical and metaphysical meaning & interpretation, but only in the sense of something possible, potential, discoverable (rather than being defined by a higher or exterior meaning). The poem is evidence of creative labor - labor which in itself is a kind of freedom from prior definitions & orientations.

With such an undefined definition, have we come full circle? Are we back where we started, with nothing to show for it? I hope not... For me, anyway, that vertical axis opens at least a possible path beyond both modern & postmodern, while the horizontal axis allows poetry to build on the capacious circumference of its accomplishments.

Happy birthday, Shakespeare & Nabokov (& St. George, traditional patron saint of England & Russia).

(... & inevitably, when I look back at my own development in poetry over 30 years, I witness the acting-out of these principles: from early attraction to & imitation of the NY School poets, to absorption (to the point of psychological breakdown) with Shakespeare's sonnets, to complete immersion in the language of the Bible, to a return to poetry-making through the unpredictable influence of Mandelstam (leading, after a long time, to the "literary encounter" with Elena Shvarts), to the long-drawn-out exploration of modernist poetry & the long poem, to the recurrent return to Mandelstam as to a first principle of inspiration. Glazov-Corrigan [p. 146]:

"We can now begin to see why Mandelshtam speaks about Dante's writing as a 'bird's mating call', a fife. 'The fife is nearly always sent forth to scout ahead.' Dante's poetry does not transmit a message: it awakens, stretches out, and develops a response. It is a generative principle of literature.... the poem awakens into writing a generation of writers to come. It precontains, as it were, its subsequent history: 'The miracle-ship left the shipyard with barnacles adhering to its hull.'")

Will follow up on modernism/postmod comments of last Tuesday as soon as I have time. I realize that a postmodernist might accuse me of gross oversimplification. If you look at modernism merely as an aesthetic adjunct to the zeitgeist, and postmodernism as merely an adjunct to modernism, then you are slighting or avoiding the central philosophical interests of postmodernity, such as the status of Being and the subject, the priority of text over speech, the inherent tautology or irreferentiality of text, etc. And these theoretical developments, of course, have had a remarkable influence on late-20th-century American poetry.

Glazov-Corrigan addresses these issues in the final chapter of her Mandelstam study. She shows how the poet - despite his fascination with pre-text and intertextuality - differs from such theorists as Barthes, Bloom, Culler, Kristeva, in that Mandelstam - rather than seeing writing as the site of otherness, disconnection, or embattlement with the spectral echoes of past texts - understands poetic tradition as a living, affirmative phenomenon, based on kinship, affinity, admiration - on love. Glazov-Corrigan underscores this with some marvelous quotations:

"If Dante had been sent forth alone, without his dolce padre, without Virgil, scandal would have inevitably erupted at the very start." (Joseph Brodsky)

"From then on, yes, from then on, since the time in Naumov's picture, when, before my very eyes, they killed Pushkin... I have divided the world into the poet - and all of them; amd I have chosen - the poet - have chosen the poet to be among those I defend: to defend the poet - from all of them, however they all are garbed, however they are named." (Marina Tsvetaeva)

One of the best:
"Tradition has appeared to all of us; to all it has promised a face; to all, each in a different way, it has kept its promise. We have all become people in the measure in which we have loved people and had the opportunity to love." (Boris Pasternak) [my italics]

Pasternak, again:
"A step forward in science is taken according to the law of repulsion, from refutation of prevalent errors and false theories... A step forward in art is taken according to the law of attraction, from the desire to imitate, follow and worship well-loved percursors."

Brodsky, again:
"The real poet never avoids influences and indebtednesses, but often nourishes and emphasizes them by all available means. There is nothing more physically (and even physiologically) pleasing that repeating in one's head or aloud (in full voice) someone else's lines. The fear of influence, the fear of dependence - this fear - and sickness - is characteristic of a wilderness inhabitant [dikar] and not of culture, which is all - receptivity, all - echo. Let someone pass this on to Harold Bloom."

The postmodernist may ask what this has to do with theory; and in reply I would point to the first Pasternak quotation above. The law of attraction or literary kinship - and the law of "identity" (or "ontological status of the Subject") - are both grounded in love. As love is an "established" spiritual reality, so much so is poetic tradition a living phenomenon.

Wasted some time in comment-box squabbles over at limetree. I guess I must come across as a querulous curmudgeon, trying to shut down healthy discussion.

Surprised myself sometimes, at the extremity of my animus against poetry/politics debates.

People think I'm being a-political or conservative, when I try to separate poetry from these theoretical or praxis-oriented discussions about literature & politics. But I don't believe that's really the case. I simply believe that poetry speaks most effectively to social & political concerns when it remains in its independent poetry sphere. Poetry-making has complex difficulties of its own, and the misguided attempts to water them down, through group efforts & theorizing, really get one no closer to either effective politics or authentic poetry.

Feeling weary & bruised (& stupid!) after the usual sterile blogpoetics wars, I go & visit George.

John Latta has his own take, today, on Samizdat #10 over at Hotel Pt.

glNotes Toward...


I want to elaborate on yesterday's post. I'd like to try to do this in a way that doesn't wear both of us (you & me, dear reader) out. So I'll try to limit myself to short propositions or statements.

1. A new poetics would have to start with a concept or understanding of what modernism & postmodernism are (or were). Let's think of them in terms of their relation to Time itself. Yesterday we sketched a very simple diagram: modernism was an aesthetic effort to "catch up" with contemporary reality understood as accelerated time: accelerated industry, science, social activity, and especially, communication. One facet of this accelerated communication involved the displacement of poetry by prose (journalism, fiction, scientific discourse). Suddenly romantic-victorian poetic discourse seemed irrelevant to the new realities. Poetic modernism was in part an effort to reassert that relevance by catching-up with contemporary time. Literary postmodernism, on the other hand, exhibited symptoms of uncertainty: once art had caught up with contemporaneity, it was faced with more essential doubts & questions about its nature and purpose.
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2. Modernism exhibited three basic strategies in its response to modernity. I will use a Russian schema to diagram them:
a) Symbolism. This strand posited a clear split between worldly time/material life, and eternal time/spiritual life. Poetry's strategy was to withdraw from worldly time into a realm of poesie pure - anti-prose, anti-journalism: attaching itself to music (somewhat like a leech) in such a way as to fuse beauty with non-referentiality ("supernal beauty").
b) Futurism. This strand opposed symbolism in dialectic fashion. Modernity and modern time were understood as irresistible force and materialist vitality. "The word itself" would act as a speed-machine or flight-mechanism, imitating technology in order to reproduce, in art, the existent vitality considered as ruling force or the primary order of reality.
c) Acmeism. This strand sought a middle path between the first two. Acmeism recognized essential distinctions between Word and Matter, Word & Time; but rather than surrendering (or transcending) matter & time (as in symbolism), the acmeist believed that poetry could accept, incorporate, celebrate, and finally transfigure time & matter by means of the word. The Word is the binding, illuminating force between two distinct realms - time & eternity. The existence of eternity sets limits on futurist contemporaneity; the mediating role of the word liberates poetry from symbolist otherworldliness. Acmeism is grounded in a Bergsonian concept of reality as itself grounded in a time-transcending spiritual vitalism (consciousness).

3. Elena Glazov-Corrigan (in her book Mandelshtam's Poetics : a challenge to postmodernism - Univ. of Toronto Press) conducted an extensive interpretation of Osip Mandelshtam's theoretical prose. There, over time, Mandelshtam worked out the acmeist credo in terms of more specific poetic practice. I can't reproduce her complete exposition here, but I will note a few of his basic propositions as they relate to poetry and time:
a) Poetic production evolves out of a process of reading, and reading involves forms of subjective time-reversal: the distinct "verbal time" of the poet's model (what is being read) begins to absorb the reader, to take priority over the reader's own time.
b) The poetic word or logos is always dialogic, in that it spans disjunctive times or aspects of time: the model's and the reader's; eternity (or recurrence) and clock time. Mandelshtam's primary example is Dante, whose poetic process M. describes as a continual shuttling - an experimentation - between scripture and physics, between the assertions of faith and the experience of earthly time: essentially, the poetic logos bridges the disjunctive realms of nature and grace. What philosophy & theology propose in speculation, poetry asserts in verbal action: the harmony of poetry exhibits the actuality (the aesthetic "proof") of this bridging process, this dialogue, between two phases of reality.

4. Mandelshtam's poetics is simply the most theoretically elaborate and exemplary version of the modernist stream I am calling acmeism. This approach to poetry is found more generally wherever poets assert the reality of two things: a) an eternal time ("duration", "eternal life") distinct from successive clock time; and b) the capability of the poetic word to represent such duration. The approach can be found strongly in Emily Dickinson, for one example: she is continually meditating on and mimetically "harmonizing" disjunctions/conjunctions between natural, seasonal, human clock-time, on the one hand, and eternal duration on the other; she repeatedly addresses mysterious absent interlocutors in the most forceful, anachronistic way, asserting the capability of the poetic word - as a kind of Bergsonian vital consciousness - to transcend clock time.

5. Once a poetics asserts this more complex or duplex notion of Time, it must of necessity move beyond a simple reproduction of either modernist "catch-up" or postmodernist contemporaneity (stasis). The motive or function or role of poetry moves beyond merely a mimetic representation of contemporary active reality; reality is understood as more than either "contemporary" or "active" (in the futurist sense). Reality itself appears approachable or representable only through a kind of double vision, or dialogic bridging process, which is the harmonic action of the poetic word itself. Thus, "innovation" or "modernization" (in style, in technique, in subject-matter) are revealed as insufficient as a basis for aesthetics, since the duplex reality of time is not exactly subject to the progress or succession of eras or periods. Poetic style, aesthetic technique, will result from the same interrogation, the same experimental bridging process, as was applied by Dante in his time. This humbling of "modernization" will eventuate in a period of literary "catch-up" organized around a completely new frame or time-scale.

Issue #10 of Robert Archambeau's magazine Samizdat arrived today, always welcome. In it he has one of his "thematic reviews" titled "The New Modernists", covering books & anthologies such as Manifesto : a Century of -isms (ed. Mary Ann Caws), 21st-Century Modernism, by Marjorie Perloff, & poetry by Kruchenykh, Moxley, Salerno, Strickland & others.

Archambeau's general point, in simplified summary, is that literary Modernism never died (contra Postmodernism) and that an array of good poets carry on its methods of innovation & renovation. In his discussion of Moxley, he notes how her allusive style, her attachment to Hart Crane, her melding of Romanticism & the avant-garde, and other characteristics underline a poetics in which all time (in art, at least) is simultaneous - which Archambeau calls a "profoundly modernist idea".

This last is true: but I don't think he takes it far enough. There are a number of ironies inherent to the whole modernism/postmodernism question. Literary modernism could be described as poetry's attempt to catch up - technically, thematically - with the social/scientific realities of the 20th century, with the speed of the zeitgeist. It was, as they say, a "modernizing" effort. It was an heroic & dazzling endeavor. But now it is also "historical". In a sense, poetry has caught up - and the "modernizing" effort, as it fades into historical memory, now becomes oddly dated itself. This is one of the insights of postmodernism, the motto of which might be, "OK, now what?" Because postmodernism provides no answer to its own question, it abides in this limbo or symbiotic dependency on its predecessor. Thus to suggest a proper title for advanced poets of today to be "the new Modernists" - as Archambeau wants to do - adds another layer to this Zeno's paradox of labels, since clearly a new modernist has still not quite "caught up" with the zeitgeist, is still engaged or identified to some extent with the heroic laboriousness of an era which is now past.

It may be a modernist critical cliche that "all time is simultaneous", but, as time goes by, such articles of faith sound more and more like just that, articles of faith. And we know that in poetry, or art in general, faith is not enough : we need the "proof" provided by aesthetic rightness, the "certainty" of the achieved art work. The question for contemporary poets may not be the postmodernist one ("What next?"), but rather - "if time is simultaneous - How so?" Is there some aspect of spirit or self which measures/transcends time? Is there some aesthetic equilibrium (beauty?) which really (or only metaphorically?) supercedes or triumphs over clock time? How, exactly, is this revealed in poetry?

My own sense is that what will be really "new" in the near future is not a new modernism, in which innovative technique is foregrounded as a gesture toward the modernizing value of invention. The "new" poetry will explore and reveal the meanings & values - on many different levels, both thematic & technical - of "literary time", as something characteristic & distinct from clock time. When this contemporary work comes into its own it will be a new era, distinct from both modern & postmodern. I don't have a name for it.

Our mini-mini-essay is dedicated to Gravity Probe B, launched today (cf. para-sestina posted here last week, "A Waiting Game").