Queequeg was covered with tattoos

The slow fuse of indignation burns in the joints of an old man, keeping him warm.

It's late.  Not sure why I'm here.  We're having a Minnesota mini-blizzard.  I did some late-night shoveling, then took a walk through the new snow, round the old haunts.  East River Road - past Granddad's, Grandma's brick house.  He built it (grain-elevator engineer) 90 years ago.  My mother & uncle & aunts grew up in that house.  We used to visit for dinner almost every Sunday.  (I live in an apartment around the block from there now.)

The snow is falling soundlessly.

Whence cometh the indignation?  Is it envy?  Frustration?

Well... let's see.  I've been bloggin' here recently about what seems like a kind of atomic oscillation, an inherent duality : passion/detachment, poet/listener, reason/intuition, poet/reader, poet/audience...

Which reminds me that a few days ago I was nattering on about another duality : poet/bard.

Which seems to chime (imperfectly) with the fault line that's troubling me now.

I'm indignant with, I'm troubled by, the institutional pattern of poetry in America.

How do we (as a social what-not) decide what writing, what poetry, is central, necessary?

We are such a massive, rich, diverse & powerful country.  The nocturnal titanic beams of energy from the power-plants are blinding.

There is a kind of establishment prestige which seems to settle like a natural force, like snow, like rain, upon those gifted workers in the artistic fields who find a way to establish their credentials.

It doesn't matter with us how abrasive, shocking, & subversive your art-work is : sooner or later you will be crowned with platinum awards & ecstatic acclamations.  You will arrive.  This is democracy.  This is ***AMERICA***.

The glamour spreads from Lincoln Center & Kennedy Center through all the ivy-clad academic domains & the newspapers, unto the magazines, the radio stations, the local reading groups, the bookstores, libraries... You are the successful author; you are the beloved.

Isn't it great?  It is great.  So what's my problem?  (I haven't written anything, maybe?)

My problem is that America is stultified by its own success.  The laurels showered on our favorite writers are like flaming iron tongs, dropped on the martyrs from moronic Nero's box.

Our literary culture rewards its writers with a kind of recognition resembling the daily specials board over the deli counter.  It will be different tomorrow : maybe meatballs.

& the poets try so hard.  Our top critics review every new book (from a careful selection of new & established authors) with an eye to immediate value for money down.  The hyperbole comes naturally; everybody's hungry, after all.  They're all brilliant.  If they weren't, they wouldn't be writing for the major publications, believe me.

But my problem goes deeper.  It goes back to this odd schizophrenic duality.... poet/bard? Emotion/detachment?

I walk down to the Mississippi in the dark night of the snow.  Poetry is not about poems.  Poetry is about the dark night of the snow.  Queequeg was covered with tattoos; each one was painful to apply. Time & history turn the artist into her own fresco.  The crux of things is a matter of life or death - of spiritual values, not literary reifications.

Yet the poet must struggle toward an integral wholeness - a good end, a finished work.

Hence for Mandelstam (for one example) the appeal of the Redemption.  Hence for Dante the adoration of the high-school flame (a resolution of all things).

The Promised Land must be a kind of vanishing point, where life & art coalesce in equilibrium.  Some romantic kind of classicism, maybe.

I'm going down into the depths, beyond these reifications of the national machine.  That's the Mississippi down there.  Very cold tonight.

the palm, the fiery gates

PRAIRIE ROUNDELAY

American robin on my fence

I sense you are a friend

& neighbor – here to lend

your orange breast, for salience –

swell-sign of aerial fellowship

in gravid cave-adventure

(blue waves of chicory

pacing old roads, from Boston slip

to San Francisco).  How your edgy

yodeling interrogates

our grubby, wormy hates –

sclerotic, squamous tragedy

of shriveled hearts, rancid hypocrisy!

You diagram with song

a madrigal so strong,

so many voices in emergency

merge into blueprint buoyancy –

manifest (garnet clay

prairie roundelay)

a ship-shape evening constancy.

Mute gesture from crow’s-nest G-ray!

Memory, beyond time

salts a Boethian rhyme-

beat... in quella Roma onde

Cristo è Romano.  Staunch ruddy

steersman indicates

the palm, the fiery gates,

Pacific O... – Eternity! is all his study.

6.7.16

Map of Rhode Island, 1780

A nighttime sun

If my own experience in poetry is reflected in, or has any bearing on, the common culture of our times, then I would have to insist that the obscure mirror or skeleton key to understanding our times is to be found in that obviously & oddly unfinished fragment of an essay by Osip Mandelstam, "Pushkin & Scriabin".  It was first published outside Russia, long after the poet's death; but scholars believe it was written about a century ago, probably in 1915.

The unfinished character of this text is like an open invitation -  pregnant with future (exploratory) life.  It's been for me what they used to call a touchstone : a word, a gospel, a message - a voice that keeps coming back, recurrent, at unpredictable intervals.

Mandelstam is writing about Pushkin, and about Scriabin - but the words are prophetic in their weird self-portraiture.  He himself is foreshadowed in Pushkin's & Scriabin's exemplary suffering.  "They served as an example of a collective Russian demise, they died a full death... their personality, while dying, extended itself to a symbol of the whole people, and the sun-heart of the dying remained forever at the zenith of suffering and glory." [tr. Sidney Monas]

This is only in the opening paragraph!

M. sketches out a symbiotic contrast between the two culture heroes, with Scriabin as a sign of Russia's cultural regression from the wholeness and integrity of the "Christian chronology".   Pushkin is the perfect icon of an "encrypted" Christian sacrifice for the whole people; Scriabin is the sign of its dissipation or betrayal.  Yet watch how Mandelstam refuses to descend into some kind of elegiac complaint!  He himself is enmeshed in both Pushkin's chaste clarity (the whole essay is rooted in prior Acmeist insights & formulations of his martyr-friend Nikolai Gumilev) and in the "Hellenic" (revolutionary) frenzy of Scriabin - the Dionysian element of the Greek dyad (Dionysus/Apollo).

But the substantial, the quintessential nectar embedded in this garbled fragment is sketched out in Mandelstam's vision of the relation between Christianity - as the fulness of God's free & loving redemption of the whole cosmos - and the soul and personality of the individual artist.  It is this "logic" of soul freedom and integrity - again, foreshadowed in Pushkin and Gumilev in particular, along with Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Nadezhda Mandelstam, so many others - as actually a result of the divine gift of free grace & redemption - which, for Mandelstam, explains the vitality, wholeness, and integrity of Western art in general.

"Christian art is free.  It is, in the full meaning of the phrase, 'art for art's sake'.  No necessity of any kind, even the highest, clouds its bright inner freedom, for its prototype, that which it imitates, is the very redemption of the world by Christ.  And so, not sacrifice, not redemption in art, but the free and joyful imitation of Christ - that is the keystone of Christian esthetics.  Art cannot be sacrifice, for a sacrifice has already been made; cannot be redemption, for the world along with the artist has already been redeemed."

"What then is left?  A joyful commerce with the divine, like a game played by the Father with his children, a hide-&-seek of the spirit!"

Mandelstam does something here akin to one of his 19th-cent. heroes, Chaadev.  He distinguishes clearly between religion and art, in order to illuminate the actual relationship between the two.

"Nourishing art, giving art of its flesh, offering it in the way of a sturdy metaphysical foundation the most real fact of redemption, Christianity demanded nothing in return."

This is a very fascinating formulation.  But for contemporary Western culture, it sounds like some arcane, indecipherable mathematical equation.  This too, however, is foreshadowed here (Russia has a strange way in general of foreshadowing & echoing cultural phenomena in the West).  Mandelstam talks about the contemporary regression from "the Christian calendar", the sense of history under the sign of a metaphysical Redemption.  There is no spiritual light at the end of the tunnel.  We have forgotten, or forsaken, or bowdlerized, the pure affirmation of the message upon which our culture was built.

"O ye of little faith!  Verily, if you say, lift up this mountain & toss it into the sea, & ye have faith, it shall be done for you!"

What is the meaning here?  It is not to declare that any one of us can perform weird magic tricks at any time of our choosing.  It is to say : The Son of Man is coming with Power, on the clouds of heaven.  The Earth has already been redeemed, by the manifestation - the incarnation - the sacrifice - & the heroic victory - of perfect Love.

This is a kind of pure Christian Classicism.  It can be heard in the taut moral scales of Shakespeare.  It can be heard in the ineffable organ-music of Donne.  It can be heard in the melody of Andrew Marvell.  It can even be heard lifting under the anxious heartbeat of John Keats.

It's that to which Wallace Stevens alluded, perhaps unknowingly, as his desire to celebrate the "normal" (a hard thing to do).

The world is not "normal" now.  The world is undergoing the symphonic stress of global birth-pangs.  Yet the Redemption stretches out the warm spiritual hand of healing, reconciliation, sanity, wholeness, integrity, hope, joy, freedom & love.  The structural harmony of the world is - the Redemption itself.   This metaphysical-historical fact, according to Mandelstam, is the substance of the "poetic license" of artistic freedom & truth.

America has in some respects lost sight of its own cultural inheritance.  The arts, and society as a whole, are overwhelmed with a righteous, judgmental, Puritanical fervor - splintered into multifarious factions, partisans of subcultural identifications.  The soul seeks some kind of moral justification : but it's an anxious, deracinated search, akin to the Dionysian frenzy of Scriabin & the revolutionaries of 1915.  God is playing hide & seek; but no one knows where to look for release... & yet...

"I shall be released."

The Secret Problem : Ersatz Wild & Crazy

What is the Secret Problem of America, which, like a tumbling domino, creates the Secret Problem of American Poetry?

The Secret Problem of America is that Americans try too hard to be wild & crazy.

(Evidence? I mean, check the 2006 Winter Olympics, OK?)

The British, their forefathers, have known this for centuries, but they're too polite & perfidious to say anything. The Brits understand themselves : they are not wild & crazy, not at all. That's why they developed their charming, Japanese-garden-variety eccentricities. (Prince Charles, intently observing the behaviour of an hedgehog, and so forth.)

Because Americans try so hard to be wild & crazy, the slimy money-grubbing culture-creeps have learned how to turn this foible into a fast buck (hence, U.S. pop culture).

How do I know this? I have 1) so much Irish in me; and 2) some certified Whack in the family.

Hence my admiration for the Irish, and my genuine love for the Russians.

They don't have to try so hard; it comes naturally.

I won't get into this here, but this explains most of the serious weaknesses of contemporary American poetry.

It's time we got back to Longfellow : he, at least, had some knowledge of Finnish metrics & French-Canadian history. He was like the best Americans : a cosmopolitan, polyglot oddball.

Think of a poetry of political diagnosis. Iliad, Odyssey, Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, the Russian novelists... they all explored what could be acknowledged as good & right & normative, in contrast to all that could not be so acknowledged. Joyce wrote somewhere about Ulysses, something like, "I have affirmed what I was able to affirm about the modern world" (probably haven't got that quite right, sorry).

But their world is not our world; we're confronted with our own present-day spectacle of words & actions, plans & conflicts, ideals & realities, to be comprehended by & for ourselves.

To delve like reporters (rather than opinionators) into the history, turmoil, chaos, sickness, confusion, obtuseness, misapprehension, insight, foresight, suffering, sacrifice, greed, treachery, pride, hatred, war, ignorance... the whole 9 yards. That would be a sort of political poetry.

The dissonance between what an American might see as hopeful & right, and what the woman &/or man on the street in Cairo or Beijing or Uganda or Bogota thinks and experiences; the difference between democracy & privilege, on the one hand, and poverty & the ideologies - the para-politics - of rage & revenge, on the other; the difference everywhere, including the US, between ideals of equality and freedom and the reality of hardship and pinched opportunities, between ideas and facts... there's plenty to write about, in the political sphere, if you can find a way into its reality.

My decision to vote for Bush never was & is not easy on my mind, or simple. I remember before 9/11 I was angered & bothered by Bush's Supreme Court victory, & the hubristic foreign policy attitudes which followed. But I would say the vote came after a gestation period which began when I saw the Left's, & most of the world's, reaction to the Bush policy toward Iraq & the sanctions problem. I was struck at that time by the ideological rather than the pragmatic nature of the response. I saw a lot of Vietnam-spectre hand-wringing; I saw a lot of purely partisan Bush-bashing; I saw a lot of sanctimonious pacifism, willing to appease, and indeed collaborate with, the Saddam regime, in order to avoid holding him to account. I saw the UN willing to do almost anything besides actually enforce the sanctions; I saw Europe gladly join hands with the Baathists rather than support the US in bringing down that neo-Stalinist regime.

I already know the rebuttals that readers of this blog are thinking & perhaps preparing to post. There's the argument that the US should have been more patient with inspections. Then there's the argument that even if the war was justified, the aftermath has been botched, with horrific consequences. I understand the merit of these arguments, and of many others; but in the end they are not strong enough to convince me that the Bush long-term strategy of pushing democracy in the Middle East is fundamentally mistaken. Rather, I think the critics and the naysayers have got history wrong; they remind me, to a degree, of the people who opposed Lincoln in the Civil War, as a matter of fact.

History, fortunately or unfortunately, is not a clear glass displaying the clean triumph of good over evil; nor is the US exempt from deep wrongs of its own. But I happen to believe this particular cause is just.

So the election is over, but the culture war, clearly, is not. Shrill keenings & cries of woe from poetry bloggers on every side. Joseph Duemer one of the more articulate ones among those I've seen.

Politics in America is, or has been, mostly a two-party struggle for power. The struggle involves framing issues & concerns, sharpening differences. It's a mistake, though, simply to take the partisan frames at face value, and impose them on the portion of the electorate that voted differently from you. Guess what, people in the red states are complex animals too; some of them may be even less like "true believers", chanting partisan mantras & slogans, than you are. Imagine: some of them may be reasonable, intelligent people.

Why should I accept that? you ask. They swallowed the vicious right-wing propaganda, the kultur-kampf which has been strengthening on the right for decades. They don't share my values, you say.

Actually I think it's more complicated. The story of the 2-party system is not a matter of decades, but of more than a century. The Republican Party has been an organized force to reckon with since the Civil War. Yes, it failed the country at the time of the Depression; yes, it followed Nixon into 8 more years of war in Vietnam & Cold War support for repressive regimes around the world; yes, it made a devil's pact with the southern bigots & Dixiecrats in an attempt to turn back racial justice; yes, it followed Reagan's hard right ideology into a new conservative era. This is a reactionary record, and that's the reason I've voted Democrat since I came of age.

But guess what: the Republican Party has also stood for some positive things, during various periods of American history. Two in particular: freedom (against slavery; against tyranny) and reform (particularly under the 1st Roosevelt). And many of the voters in the red states have affiliations with that party going back generations. Democrats love to mock the "values" orientation of their opponents, seeing them as manipulated pawns, trapped by their own reactionary, "atavistic" religious beliefs. But when a majority of them said "values" was the deciding issue, it may be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this was simply homophobia. I think a lot of church-going red-state voters were deeply offended by the morals of the Democrats' vaunted standard-bearer, Bill Clinton; I was offended myself to see the Oval Office turned into a porn site. & there was Bill, out campaigning for Kerry - a slick, ambitious, & opportunistic issue-spinner. When Republicans told pollsters that "values" were the pivotal issue, some of them were saying that while they were troubled by the economy and Iraq, in the end they decided that Kerry wouldn't make things much better on those fronts anyway, and that at least Bush set an example of personal integrity & decency, which they didn't think Kerry & his rich celebrity friends could ever do.

I believe the Republican right's socio-religious platform is deeply Macchiavellian and uncharitable - victimizing - at its core. And this must be opposed. But Joe Duemer's analysis - that Democrats are enlightened free-thinking non-religious persons, while Republicans are backward, superstitious bigots, and we share no values, and we must sharpen the differences between the parties almost on a theological level... I think this is a strategy for further widening of the culture divide, more polarization, more stereotyping, and ultimately more ignorance and misunderstanding.

The Democrats who will remake their party are those who actually understand and in some cases share the traditional religious background and value-system of the other side; it is they who will be able to interpret history and politics and economics for the electorate, in a way that doesn't demean or deny their religious beliefs, but which challenges that reactionary, deeply uncharitable, partisan spin, which feeds parasitically on those values from the far right. I am not saying that Democrats must follow Republicans into some kind of hypocritical religious pandering. (I live in Rhode Island, for Roger Williams' sake!) I'm saying that it is probably those on the left who have at least a "liberal", non-judgmental awareness of the role of religious belief in human society, who know something about the foundations of Western faith-systems - it is these people who will be able to challenge the religious bigots on their own ground, and suggest a different set of foundational values for a just and free civic order.

At this point I should say, to be brave & foolish, that after standing in the polling booth for at least 10 minutes, I voted for Bush. My reason for doing so, despite my complete rejection of many of the Republican positions on social issues, the economy, and the environment, was because I think we are actually doing the right thing in Iraq. But that's a debate we've had before in this corner of the blogosphere, and I am not going to get into it now. I suppose I've lost about 35% of my blog audience by saying this (2 people, I reckon).

Bluejay & Henry's nekuia, or descent into hell, in Stubborn Grew :

the presence of the rejected, the abject, the detritus, which, curiously, is essential element of a true picture of "America" : that which was evaded, elided, or avoided by aesthetics of "EP + EP" (Poe & Pound).

Bluejay a sort of amalgam of abject or "persecutable" qualities.

I'm sorry, but the culture of poets seems a total bore to me. It's as if we were supposed to be a devoted fan club for some obscure chess association, and required to be up to speed on the personal lives, gossip, awards ceremonies, funeral orations, etc., and that this somehow was the substance of the way of life. . .

& ironically the professed avant or post-avant wing of that society was supposedly dedicated to a depersonalized, politically-critical, collective notion of the role of the art form, against all that decadent & mealy-mouthed artsy narcissistic solipsism of the academicized mainstream. Their "collectivity" is nothing but a farm school or adjunct sub-college or self-help support group for league careers in that same greeny grove.

Something essential is missing when you domesticize & acclimate poetry to its own (sub)-culture. What's missing is its own otherness, its capacity for criticizing, transcending, metamorphosing the social and aesthetic conditions which produced it. This is its originality, and its social function. But now a fake otherness - paralleling "rebel" social behavior in pop culture - an ersatz otherness pawns itself off as the very medium of literary exchange. Poetry subcultures are built upon modes of talking or writing in special ways, distinct side-of-the-mouth idioms, like in-house passwords.

The real challenge is to find a middle ground, a mode of address to human political, social, aesthetic and philosophical issues outside the poetry sphere. W.H. Auden was very interested in a kind of "objective" mode of address, beginning with his leftist sympathies during the 30s, and complicated later by his religious convictions (which permit a kind of general address to the human condition) and by his deep interest in the social & satirical poetry of the Restoration era.

Something is missing, folks. The real radical poet is not the denizen of an idiom-club or the successful careerist. It's the one whose "middle voice" touches a chord in the public at large : an effect of, rather than a betrayal of, originality. This is the continual challenge to the authentic literary professional, not the card-carrying clubhouse member, frittering away time with gladhanding pals & weeping crocodile tears on every occasion. Because poetry does not belong to individuals : it happens to them & changes them.

I admire the "Petersburg" notion of these things (Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva [honorary member], Gumilev, Mandelstam, Brodsky). Pushkin started it. The human being possesses social dignity as inalienable right. The poet, as poet, possesses a particular social prestige or status as a consequence of fame for producing authentic works of art. One should defend the former with one's life, and treat the latter with professional detachment.

My sermon for today. (I know you can all think of contemporary poets, young & old, who do not fit my stereotype or deserve my diatribe.)

John Latta's earthbound empiricism a healthy thing. But America has always been closer to Pascal than to Montaigne.

Remember flying home from college in early 70s after nervous breakdown, singing the mealtime hymn "Praise God from whom all blessings flow. . .", with my poor long-suffering father in the seat beside me. A woman came up after we landed & said "Thank you so much - I was nervous about flying too."

& flying back to Providence a few days later with a pistol & ammunition hidden in my suitcase (it went into the Providence River).

Desperate for God the Father. Jesus Freaks.

But back to the main question. & it may well be argued that, in the context of poetry, this is not the "main question" in any sense. You will have to prove it, Pushkin (Pushkin the black cat is sprawled on the bed in the other room. He's had a long day.) What does the US experiment in democracy have to do, directly, with the progress of poetry in english?

But it has been argued that the US experiment in democracy is not so much nationalistic in essence as civilizational. It was a project in government based on Thucydides & Locke & the Enlightenment, to a large extent. I'm talking not about the economic underpinnings, but the superstructure, if you will; about the philosophies of governance which inspired the planners.

The founders plunked for a republic, something between direct democracy and elite governance. In other words, a utopia. Atlantis.

Impossible. Analogous to the way that family happiness is impossible : yet it happens. Silly Brit monarchy; silly Yank democracy.
Silly Feds in rancher-land; silly park rangers.

Silly Man! [huh?]

Reading Closing of the American Mind. A great jeremiad. If he's right (& he is right about a lot of things), poets are "performing" in the midst of an era of extreme cultural & educational decadence & misdirection. The so-called mainstream/oppositional distinction is meaningless in this environment, a tendentious distraction : we no longer remember or comprehend the role of reading in the enlightenment of "souls" (as Bloom puts it) or the sustenance of American culture.