The Word is Psyche

Working on Lanthanum this morning, looking back through older sections, I was struck by the sense of another level, a poem-beyond-the-poem. Something just intimated or suggested, unexpressed. As if the keynote of the various sections had something to do with this effort to evoke or enunciate a presence or a state of things or persons beyond the actual details, the "narrative". & the whole vague unfinishable quest feeling hanging over it.

Speaking for myself anyway, poets are not very reliable guides to their own poetry. Maybe we're too close to be able to recognize our own distinctive shape or characteristic music... I don't know.

This is another way of saying that often our determined formulations of what we think we're doing are actually expressions of resistance or opposition to our real tendencies as writers - tracks of an inner conflict, maybe.

Thus my harping for years & decades on Acmeism, realism, plain speech, etc. - may have something to do with the fact that in reality I'm sort of an Edgar Cayce of poetry (I exaggerate) - not the "dreamer-prophet", but just the blind dreamer (my resistance to early affinity for Ashbery, a telling sign).

It's this idea of music or evocation - Mallarme, suggestion - Symbolism, heaven forfend! The idea that poets don't really know what they're about, that there is a finer level of meaning, a kind of resonance tone we can barely recognize, inner sight, inner vision...

we each have our own distinctive private relationship & inner bond with speech & language, & with the persons hovering in the background of those rivery sounds we love & echo-resonate...

Mandelstam : "the Word is Psyche"...

More could be said on this, but I have to go....