Anastasios, asking me to respond to a news article about shifting Bush Administration positions on the nature & extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons program.

Before the war, I defended it, here on the blog & on poetry lists; I let my forensic instincts have their way. One motive for doing that was my sense that poets were opposing the war in a knee-jerk manner, a reflexive anti-government attitude which had little to do with the actuality before us. This reactive attitude degrades the role of poetry too. Of course there are lots of roles for poetry. There are always the new new brutalists & the advocates of toy poetry, finding ever-new ways to celebrate poetry-as-subculture & cottage industry.

I'm not against this, don't get me wrong. It's just that walking around Providence last night in the spooky moist spring haze, with all the cherry trees & magnolias & azaleas flowering, thinking about my crumblous, desiccated "career" in poetry, I felt the ever-recurrent determination that a poet must try to speak to public questions, face the pressure of the time & articulate it in the poetry & the essays. The models that came to mind were Auden & Brodsky. I know so well how alien this & these models sound to the nuvo-bohos of the bloggy set.

So, you will say, isn't that what we are doing? No, it is not. I guess I would go back to early days of this blog where I was writing about "metaform". I think poets have to find ways to synthesize & correlate & enunciate a coherent & capacious RESPONSE to the issues facing the world. I like the way Joe Duemer seems to be aware of this, though we disagree on the politics a lot. But a POETRY-response is not yelling on the internet or protesting in the streets or even pamphleteering, even though these things also have their inherent poetry!!!

What comes to mind for me again anyway is also this notion of the "literary absolute". Have been thinking lately that maybe it's analogous to Georg Cantor's & Godel's notion of infinity & the "continuum problem" & the "incompleteness axiom" (if I've got that right). There are these different levels of mathematical reality, and some levels are incommensurate - sort of unapproachable - using the tools inside particular "ordinary" systems of math. So I think of the literary absolute as this poetic capability - a synthetic articulation - which is incommensurate with both the ordinary levels of talent & desire to write, and with the coordinates of the literary industry & all its subcultures. Another aspect of "Pushkinism"?? Is this a flanking chess move?? But do we perhaps NEED some such concept (literary absolute) if we want to maintain a "normative" literary-civilizational culture? Do we want to maintain such a thing? Do Americans even understand or accept the notion of "normative", sustainable culture or civilization? Sustainable would have to include self-critical, dedicated to an ethical absolute (not the same as the literary absolute, but maybe analogous).

An aside : took home from the library Elena Shvarts' 2-vol collected poems, published in Petersburg. Old-fashioned 19th-cent. heft of the volumes. Looking at her lines with their hieratic Cyrillic, their bold but firm syntax, dashes & periods. Oddly, the poem I opened the book to was titled "Poetica : More Geometrico" ("more" - sea? death? method?). Mathematical literary absolute a kind of authoritative articulation of Person-in-Civilization, an image at the root of liberal education. . . AND beneath this the notion of absolute devotion/vocation to THIS line, THIS phrase, THIS text & no other : the finality of writing : inescapable, uncanny aspect of the literary absolute (see Emily Dickinson). Mandelstam [paraphrasing] : "reading the poem we enter into & share the poet's death". Poetry is serious, serious fun. Frost : "a game with mortal stakes".

Anastasios must be thinking I'm evading his question. WAS THIS WAR JUSTIFIED? I don't know. . . it seems too early to base such a judgement on the current results of WMD search. I feel like my mother, who told me she wanted to keep her mouth shut (hard for her) at the neighborhood coffee get-togethers, because she felt so oddly unconflicted & optimistic about the war in Iraq, & this was very out of step with Minneapolis opinion (not I suppose with Dallas opinion though).