I used to blog on HG Poetics A LOT. Now that Ravenna Diagram is a done thing - finished, packed, booked - I'm someways at loose ends. Feeling the predictable anxiety for the poem's future, its reception (or non-). And trying to live with this awkward new rhythm of NOT writing the absorbant river-poem every day, NOT swimming along in its echoes, memory maps, feedback chicken coops... where to now, Mr. Hen, Mr. Chicken Bones?
Feeling my marginal non-presence, as ever. I don't write much criticism, I don't write many book reviews, I'm not in the professional set-ups. In some ways the MFA structure encourages the membership of poets among the intelligentsia, the knowledge workers - professors, scholars, journalists, scientists, etc. There are certainly some benefits in that regard for literature. But with the professionalization comes a modicum of climate control, opinion moderation, careerism, bureaucracy... Deracination.
Yet poetry is one possible antidote to spiritual deracination.
Am re-reading Philip Gorski's fine book American Covenant. Subtitled a history of civil religion from the Puritans to the present.
Gorski sees democratic republicanism (as in republic with a small, non-party-affiliated "r") as representing the growing, changing, developing civil religion of the United States. Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln are its chief prophets. The civil religion understands history in general, and American history in particular, not as circular (as with social conservatism), nor as linear (as with social progressivism), but as a spiral - by which people draw inspiration from the principles and ideals of the past, so as to move forward toward a more just and perfect future Union.
Such democratic republicanism requires from each a personal tempering and restraint of private passions (whether for fame, or pleasure, or success, or wealth, or domination), on behalf of the res publica, the common good. But this worldview is optimistic about such a process, since the view is grounded in a concept of human nature as fundamentally and naturally social. We do not achieve our best selves or ultimate good in solitude; Man, as Dante put it (following Aristotle), is the animale compagnevole - the "friendly animal".
Gorski sketches out the main philosophical antagonists to our "civil religion" of civic republicanism : 1) religious nationalism - ie. the idolatry of the Nation, the nostalgic (Confederate) blood and soil, cloaked in apocalyptic or narrowly literalist Biblical fundamentalism; and 2) radical secularism, the absolute separation of all religious belief and feeling from the civic sphere, on behalf of various strands of Lockean neo-liberalism, atomized libertarianism, or progressive scientism. He outlines in detail the complex shifts in the growth of these beliefs, and their political effects, through American history.
What does this have to do with poetry? In my view, poetry reflects certain implicit habits of mind and philosophical stances, which are motivated in part by the poet's ongoing commitment to and absorption with the creative process. This view is certainly partial, debatable and not acceptable to all (or perhaps even many) poets; but my firm sense is, that poetry is allied to the mentality of holism, synthesis, continuity, unity. The creative process is an intellectual or logical search for integration, the correlation of disparate or contradictory parts into wholes. The vision of poetry is an effort to abstract a seamless representation from life itself - without tearing or disrupting the seamless experience of reality itself. Normative human life is an incomprehensible ongoing seamless whole; art is a partial moral and intellectual comprehension of that life, through a clear mirror. "My circuit is circumference," writes Emily Dickinson.
I've tried in my own long poems (most recently Ravenna Diagram) to represent life as a living wholeness, a wholeness of living Mind or Spirit.
La vida es sueno : life is a dream. Such an idealist-romantic stance is at odds with the materialist or analytical approach of philosophical skepticism. To put it in a nutty nutshell : my sense is that the primitive spiritualism of archaic humanity is allied with the theological commitments of major religions : we inhabit a cosmos of living Mind, of spiritual Personhood. A position which underlies - rationalizes - all the traditional faith commitments regarding life-after-death or resurrection. La vida es sueno : this is my own "dream song".
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players...
Back to blogging... ? I guess I will leave it at that for now. Good night !
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