COSMIC LOCAL POETRY
Brown Univ. Bookstore,
Providence, RI. July 18, 2012
Stuart and I are here today as part of the Bookstore’s Local
Authors series. And we are local authors – very local. But we’re involved with something global,
even universal. Poetry is a world endeavor,
and we are caught up in that, each in our own way. For my part, I consider myself a sort of Russian from Minneapolis. I’ve been inspired by a group of poets based
in St. Petersburg around 1910, who called themselves Acmeists : Gumilev, Akhmatova,
Mandelstam. Mandelstam defined Acmeism
as “nostalgia for world culture”. This
is a concise summary of their sense of poetry as an enterprise in building
civilization, and as poetry as a global, trans-historical continuum, a
tradition stretching back into prehistory.
Orpheus, legendary ur-poet
of Greece, was priest of Apollo, god of music and medicine : a pairing which
suggests that art and song are about healing.
For the Greeks, this meant a restoration of health and balance through reason,
justice, clarity, wisdom. Orpheus,
Apollo’s representative, fell victim to the frenzy of the cult of Dionysius : the
music of the word was sacrificed to the fury of desire amputated from understanding. Poetry appears at the edge of this polarity,
between mind and sense, intellect and feeling, consciousness and dream. The Acmeists looked to their national poet,
Pushkin, as embodying such an equipoise – at the cusp between alternating waves
of neo-classicism and romanticism.
Mandelstam wrote : “Classicism is revolution.” This had a special implication in the context
of revolutionary 1920s Russia. The
Acmeists were seeking a paradigm, within art, for the sanity and equilibrium –
the “nostalgia for world culture” – which they recognized in the poetry of the
ancient world. The Roman poet Virgil was
searching for such balance in his own day.
His Georgics, ostensibly an
agricultural manual in verse, was really a meditation on a world which had
fallen from a Golden Age of rural peace, into an Iron Age of violence and war. The “audacity of the poet”, as Virgil put it,
was to re-imagine that Golden Age, by way of an all-embracing pity : compassion for a world oppressed
by the rule of brutality, force and chaos.
This is the fundamental Apollonian vocation : through imagination and
song, to bring mankind, us, back to our senses – our intuition of profound justice
and harmony. This is the inner meaning
of Mandelstam’s “nostalgia for world culture” : he thought of Classicism in
this sense as the future.
To my mind, these ideas bring us back to the local, as well :
for here we are, in Providence : we are Providence poets. Providence, to Roger Williams, the city’s
founder, is a theological term, closely bound up with the RI state motto : Hope.
Providence signifies a cosmic plan : the Master Architect’s (or
Musician’s) intention to restore all things to their original well-being. Note how the meaning of this word resonates
with Virgil’s, and the Acmeists’, sense of the poet’s vocation.
Today we are awash in aggressive discourses, a feverish
babble of new technological means and motives.
Many today would advance the image of the poet as master communicator : rock
star, rapper, stand-up comedian, celebrity, social spokesperson, political
activist, promoter of recondite ideologies.
But I think the most basic stance of the poet is as listener. Dante wrote, “Love
speaks, and I follow after, noting down her words like a scribe.” The poet listens to a mute song : the whisper
of conscience, the music of understanding.
And this means that we are all poets here – Stuart and I and each of
you, who are also listening.
