Mockingbird : a poem

"I was washing outside in the yard..." : poem by Osip Mandelstam (1921)

 A poem by Osip Mandelstam, written in 1921.  Russian original, recited (ochin, ochin amateurishly) by me.

Epiphany

Notes on Poetry #1

It may be that every single assertion about poetry in general, poetry in the abstract, can be contradicted by another assertion. Poetry is as multifaceted as the language and speech from which it grows. Moreover, the word "poetry" itself suffers from many types of overuse (my own type very much included).

With these caveats... here goes, anyway.

Poetry is the blossom, the fruit, the harvest of the ear. Much has been made of its roots in imagery, dreams, the visual imagination. But every landscape "seen" in poetry is a vision interpreted by the ear. My first thought is of the immense quiet of the forest. The delicacy of muted signals and rustlings of small birds and animals, within that enveloping near-silence. The title of Eliot's book of essays, The Sacred Wood, comes to mind. Poetry sets itself apart, distinguishes itself, by means of protective rings (like a bird's nest) of quietness, hiddenness, remoteness.

I don't mean to suggest any kind of hermeticism or passive withdrawal from the brash, noisy parade – the tense moral battles – of time, history and humanity. No : rather poetry absorbs, reflects and transfigures all that loud aggressive vitality – by means of its superior powers of the ear. And these powers are rooted and refined in the vast, remote, "woodland" habitat – the quietness of the word.

Back to the future of blogging ?

I'm very belatedly trying to edit and update HG Poetics. Working on my "Blog List" sidebar, I've deleted some old or unavalaible links – and surprised to find that an extreme few of my longtime comrades from the Blogging Era are still there. Will try to explore what they're saying and doing. I've also updated the links to available HG books. Meanwhile I will ponder how to make HG Poetics more alive and interesting to Vexillologists, Poetry-Loving Expert Technicians, Distant Interlocutors, and other Readers of the Future.

Advent Found Poem (found just now)

     UNEXPECTED LIGHT

       courtesy of Dennis Overbye & NY Times (12.8.20)

Slight threads of Agnes Martin

touch their way across a night sea.

The universe is a shade too bright.

…more very faint galaxies or star clusters

     contributing to the background light.

The most likely explanation, he said…

    a less exciting possibility… “we messed up

    and missed a light source or camera

    artifact that we should have figured out.

    This is what I worry about the most.”

But how dark is dark? …the measurement

    had a 5 percent chance of being a fluke.

       “Your distant neighbor eating leftover turkey

    at three in the morning is not going to

    wake you up at night from the glare.”

A leafless oak with its arms thrown out

like a knot of knots in the arctic wind

– thin memory of warmth (hearth,

heartbeat).  Presumably, in an infinite

    static universe, every line of sight

        ends at a star, so shouldn’t the sky appear

    as bright as the sun?  But astronomers

    now know… But how dark is dark?

        2 sigma – far cry from gold standard

    for discovery of 5 sigma… zoomed past

Arrokoth, formerly Ultima Thule

(7.14.2015).  We imagine a manger

in drear December.  One ox-eyed

bare exile, burbling in a steaming barn

beneath caved-in roof… placid beasts, 

primitive smiles.  In the Darkness

    of Empty Space, Unexpected Light.

From the human heart steps the King

    of Fools… now her serene lowliness

nurses the Emperor of Poverty in peace.

         12.10.20

Synthesis & first principles in poetry

 My "theory" of poetry, how I think about poetry in general or in the abstract, is idiosyncratic and fundamentally improvised.  I don't have a system or a rationale which I can advocate for or teach, as objective or universally relevant.  Nevertheless I feel the urge to organize my thoughts and defend my own practice.  Blogs are exquisitely appropriate for this kind of off-the-cuff table-talk, aren't they?  Sure, Henry.

And inevitably I'm bound to repeat myself.  I've been blogging along here for years.  Sorry about that.

I think poets are usually drawn to poetry as part of a general attraction to literature, an affinity for reading and words, a responsiveness to art and music.  And I think this "general attraction" is part of an even more basic and universal human adherence to the good and the beautiful aspects of life as a whole.  We are drawn magnetically to works of art even as they present the most tragic, painful and horrible dimensions of experience - because these works of art lend these dimensions some kind of meaning and order.  The love of art is a facet of an even more basic love of life itself - which partakes of a kind of shared sacred awe reaching back to the origins of the human race (and maybe before that).

The making and experience of poetry is part of this magic circle of a very primordial sense of awe.  The poetic Word is free, dynamic, holistic and sacred, because it partakes of this powerful aura of a sort of ontological First Principle of reality - the "ground", the source.

By no means would I wish to suggest or have anything to do with a sort of Heideggerian mystagogy or irrationalism.  But I feel that, precisely because poetry is linked with this very basic and universal, this "anthropological" first principle - an innate sense of awe before the wholeness, oneness and power of life - it therefore aligns with the universality of reason, logic and science.  Reason (as Fichte, Brightman and of course many others have argued) is both analytical and synoptic.  We analyze to apprehend and distinguish; we synthesize to understand.  Poetry is no different.  What poetry adds to this rational and philosophic drive toward comprehensive understanding is a kind of aesthetic reflexivity.  Poetry's vivid, personal, expressive verbal enactments of communication both represent and embody, simultaneously.  This extra layer of reflexivity, reverberation, and self-consciousness accounts for the intense configurations of poetic speech (Mandelstam's crystal of "terrifying density").  

As I understand it, poetry gives voice to a subjective, and inter-subjective, dimension of reality.  It is not opposed to science as such; but it suggests and evokes this awe, this attitude of humility toward the fundamental mystery of life.  As such it is vitalist, holistic, and personal - and it presents an image of reality as a whole which corresponds to these qualities.  The struggle of the Romantic movement, to transcend the discursive rationalism of the Enlightenment, presents one of the historic enactments of this duality (subject and object, detachment and wonder, poetry and prose). 

I recognize the perhaps absurd anachronism of these principles.  But with respect to my own poetic development, one of the issues or themes that I have found so fascinating and generative is the American history of the encounter between a colonial worldview, on the one hand, rooted in both Puritan piety and revolutionary democracy based on Enlightenment ideals, and a Native American worldview, rooted in very archaic notions of just this sense of pious awe before the vital spiritual unity of life.  And I began to delve into the "anthropological underside" of my own faith tradition, and recognize affinities with primordial myths and rituals played out across the globe, from which the Native American beliefs represent one branch, and the various sources of the "Old World", another.  So I sense that underlying the tragic conflict and the criminal inhumanities of that American history, there is this basic spiritual encounter, to be understood on an intellectual, philosophical, plane as well as a purely political or historical level.

Anyway, this notion leads into some of the thematic sources and ideas which undergird my lengthy journeys through the realms of the "American epic" or long-poem mode.

& now it's late, I must hit the sack - good night.