Synthesis & first principles in poetry

 My "theory" of poetry, how I think about poetry in general or in the abstract, is idiosyncratic and fundamentally improvised.  I don't have a system or a rationale which I can advocate for or teach, as objective or universally relevant.  Nevertheless I feel the urge to organize my thoughts and defend my own practice.  Blogs are exquisitely appropriate for this kind of off-the-cuff table-talk, aren't they?  Sure, Henry.

And inevitably I'm bound to repeat myself.  I've been blogging along here for years.  Sorry about that.

I think poets are usually drawn to poetry as part of a general attraction to literature, an affinity for reading and words, a responsiveness to art and music.  And I think this "general attraction" is part of an even more basic and universal human adherence to the good and the beautiful aspects of life as a whole.  We are drawn magnetically to works of art even as they present the most tragic, painful and horrible dimensions of experience - because these works of art lend these dimensions some kind of meaning and order.  The love of art is a facet of an even more basic love of life itself - which partakes of a kind of shared sacred awe reaching back to the origins of the human race (and maybe before that).

The making and experience of poetry is part of this magic circle of a very primordial sense of awe.  The poetic Word is free, dynamic, holistic and sacred, because it partakes of this powerful aura of a sort of ontological First Principle of reality - the "ground", the source.

By no means would I wish to suggest or have anything to do with a sort of Heideggerian mystagogy or irrationalism.  But I feel that, precisely because poetry is linked with this very basic and universal, this "anthropological" first principle - an innate sense of awe before the wholeness, oneness and power of life - it therefore aligns with the universality of reason, logic and science.  Reason (as Fichte, Brightman and of course many others have argued) is both analytical and synoptic.  We analyze to apprehend and distinguish; we synthesize to understand.  Poetry is no different.  What poetry adds to this rational and philosophic drive toward comprehensive understanding is a kind of aesthetic reflexivity.  Poetry's vivid, personal, expressive verbal enactments of communication both represent and embody, simultaneously.  This extra layer of reflexivity, reverberation, and self-consciousness accounts for the intense configurations of poetic speech (Mandelstam's crystal of "terrifying density").  

As I understand it, poetry gives voice to a subjective, and inter-subjective, dimension of reality.  It is not opposed to science as such; but it suggests and evokes this awe, this attitude of humility toward the fundamental mystery of life.  As such it is vitalist, holistic, and personal - and it presents an image of reality as a whole which corresponds to these qualities.  The struggle of the Romantic movement, to transcend the discursive rationalism of the Enlightenment, presents one of the historic enactments of this duality (subject and object, detachment and wonder, poetry and prose). 

I recognize the perhaps absurd anachronism of these principles.  But with respect to my own poetic development, one of the issues or themes that I have found so fascinating and generative is the American history of the encounter between a colonial worldview, on the one hand, rooted in both Puritan piety and revolutionary democracy based on Enlightenment ideals, and a Native American worldview, rooted in very archaic notions of just this sense of pious awe before the vital spiritual unity of life.  And I began to delve into the "anthropological underside" of my own faith tradition, and recognize affinities with primordial myths and rituals played out across the globe, from which the Native American beliefs represent one branch, and the various sources of the "Old World", another.  So I sense that underlying the tragic conflict and the criminal inhumanities of that American history, there is this basic spiritual encounter, to be understood on an intellectual, philosophical, plane as well as a purely political or historical level.

Anyway, this notion leads into some of the thematic sources and ideas which undergird my lengthy journeys through the realms of the "American epic" or long-poem mode.

& now it's late, I must hit the sack - good night.

Continuity of American Poetry

In 1961 cultural historian and Americanist (& specialist in New England Puritanism) Roy Harvey Pearce published a book, The Continuity of American Poetry.  Clearly a labor of love, the work is a meticulous and passionate appraisal, unfolding a kind of American pantheon, from the Puritans to the mid-century moderns - with a special focus on the "long poem" - culminating in a juxtaposition of Eliot and Stevens, as representing two fundamental modes or "basic styles" - the "Adamic" and the "mythic" imagination.  Both modes hinge on Pearce's central insight : that the specifically American literary challenge (or quandary) has to do with an American urge to manifest a new, democratic concept of "Man" (in the species sense) - in the midst of a raw, pioneering, Puritanical, pragmatic culture which was (in most ways) strictly "anti-poetic".

The book arrived on the cusp of change - when the clashing perspectives of (for just one of many examples) Eliot, Stevens, WC Williams and Marianne Moore were crystallizing in separate canonical camps (New Critics, Projectivists, Objectivists, etc.), and when a younger generation was about to scramble the checkerboard - Robert Lowell's Life Studies, the Beats, the New York School.  And it left out so much (just about any poet who was not white & male, basically - with very few exceptions).  These are some of the probable reasons that Continuity of American Poetry has fallen into oblivion.

Yet Pearce's Continuity has a powerful logical backbone.  Its central argument makes for an impressive coherence, a cohesive intellectual synthesis.  The argument might be bowdlerized thus : American history is rooted in New England Puritanism.  The Puritans' forthright adventure into the wilderness, armed with their Protestant, separatist focus on Biblical scripture rather than ecclesiastical authority, set the tone for the pious, devotional, anti-poetic emphasis on Man's utter depravity - on the complete vanity of worldly hopes - and on Man's total moral abasement and dependence on divine grace.  These touchstones of belief and worldview ensured that the writing of poetry would be at best a devotional exercise, at worst a worldly & possibly heretical hobbyhorse.  This basic attitude did not foreclose the writing of Puritan poetry : Edward Taylor, Anne Bradstreet and others still found ways to harp in the wilderness.  Yet its main consequence was to set in motion - by opposition - what became the major mode of American poetry : the antinomian, anti-devotional, egocentric, "Adamic" imagination.  What began with the prophetess Anne Hutchinson's exile from Boston, led to Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and all their heirs : the American poet's declaration of independence from any and all European shackles or constraints.

Pearce's depiction of the 20th century involves a dialectical reversal.  Robert Frost is the exemplar of the American antinomian impulse reaching its rueful cul-de-sac; he is the sage of diminished expectations, the voice of disenchanted Adam.  Pound and Eliot initiate a counter-thrust : not the poet as creative Adam, but poet as passive, memorious Tiresias.  Surrendering the futile, failing human ego to the mythic and post-mythic absolutes of traditional faith, Man is reconciled to eternity (see Eliot, from The Waste Land to Four Quartets).

Wallace Stevens, then, for Pearce, represents the culmination of the American No, in thunder to this powerful impulse (via Poe, Eliot & Pound) to reject Whitman's democratic America and its Adamic imagination.  Stevens, in a sense, formalizes the modern, existential vision of human dignity without the Modernist "myths" of God or gods.  He declares and celebrates the sufficiency of the human imagination - in the face of the harshness of material Nature and an intuition of unknowable, alien Mind - and seeks heroic joy & praise in the midst of the storm (there's something very Beethoven about this poetic Mozart).

I've left out Pearce's forecast that future generations would find a way through this either/or.  And I've left out one of the main threads of his thesis, having to do with the development of the American long poem (Whitman-Pound-Crane-WC Williams) as the expression of a completely new form of epic : a tale in which there is no exemplary, legendary, semi-divine epic hero, but in which the poet is the hero, the speaking protagonist, of the new American (& cosmic) imagination - shaping a new vision of human dignity rooted in complete equality : Everyman and Everywoman at the center of reality.

And reading this book puts me face-to-face with my own posture in this field, as a longtime practitioner of the "long poem".  Looking for reinforcements, I've been reading a short book (proceeds of a lecture) by Edgar Sheffield Brightman, from 1925 : Immortality in Post-Kantian Idealism.  Brightman was a philosopher of the "Boston Personalist" school (out of Boston University) - one of Martin Luther King's intellectual influences.

One of the things Brightman asserts is that our beliefs and opinions regarding the immortality of the human person are inseparable from the general cultural ground or worldview out of which they manifest; they are incomprehensible if simply abstracted in isolation.  This is of a piece with his characterization of human reason and logic : he follows the German Idealist philosopher Johann Fichte in proposing a dual architecture of rationality - understanding (analysis) and reason (synthesis).  Both are necessary : we analyze experience in order to synthesize its meaning as a whole, as an organic, living entity.  

This approach - holistic, organic, synoptic - seems to me to be of the essence with regard to poetry.  Poetry is the living speech of living men & women, shaping holistic representations of actual experience.  

Wallace Stevens celebrates this imaginative synthetic human essence with great probity and power.  Yet I have to disagree with him with regard to his most basic postulates.  I stand with the Boston Personalists with respect to theism & a-theism.  

So with poetry, and the vision of poetry,  I feel I am floating somewhere there between Eliot & Stevens, Pound & Crane, & Berryman.  The Personalists argue that the synthetic human imagination, and the organic wholes of full understanding and rationality, encounter a Reality suffused with creative Mind and Purpose; that individual persons do not create the Universe ex nihilo, but reflect and complete that cosmic synthesis in the working-out of their own free destinies - and thus fulfill the graceful purposes of the Creation from in the beginning.  Persons are not dissolved into the One, but manifest it - personally.  And this manifest human dignity - this imago Dei - is the ultimate synthesis of nature and spirit.  So we are not, pace Stevens, existential isolatos, lost in an immeasurable and incalculable natural chaos or storm.  Nor are we superhuman ("major Man") masters of our fate.  Rather we are caught up in Martin Luther King's cosmic "web of mutuality" - a universe of (hopefully) immortal life, moral conscience, and truth, which undergirds and underwrites human dignity and freedom in mortal time and history.

It's getting late, so I will close up here.  (This post is really a throwback to the old bloggy table-talk of HG Poetics days of yore).

least coin of Union provenance

WING-BEAT

The American poem makes do with what’s

right there.  Like a penny in a well

or Peto trompe l’oeuil.

Reminiscences of 1865… hook for hats

on an absinthe wall.  Unlike electricate

sweet Alighieri, burbling Italian

honey-rhyme into his Pythian

pylon – a vertical refulgent ziggurat,

as opposed to our stretched-horizontal

(catenary) system of safety

nets (dangling from Frisco Bay

to DC).  Quipu knots of Neanderthal

design – z-twist, s-twist in a 3-ply

twine, spun with dry grass

or pine bark from Abri du Maras

anchoring light matrices of solidarity.

Ah, nested Rose of Dante’s alta fantasia!

Here lies a homely Providence

cresting seven hills, dense

with ignoble Henry’s disjecta membra.

Plain facts of what happened, what was

made manifest in clay.  Bearing

pinned-up mementos (sprung

Ford’s Theatre tickets… Jimi Hendrix

poster?) – cornered in a coign

of copper maize, a corn

maze.  Dropped in a forlorn

well off North Main St. – least coin

                    *

of Union provenance – silver Penny’s

golden meaning (Love

welded to treasure-trove…

chaste equilibrium of all equalities).

The gift that unfolds at the heart of things –

Francesca’s golden poncho (Peruvian)

spun at Sheep’s Clothing (on Wickenden)

for Dave the California bard (who springs

from Rhody roots himself).  Gift

that is already there in the earth,

shining quietly… an Ocean mirth

salted with grief & everlasting life.

In the heart of remorse & gratitude

rose memories well…

the flaming throne planted in Hell

transmuted to Paris park-bench habitude.

I know whom to thank for this Rose Jubilee.

Stony Magdalen, in Galilee

rolled away, set free

the Rabbi of a rescued Julie-bee.  Recovery!

He was already gone, but she showed us

the way.  & the catenary

curve of Argo’s aerie

twinkles with lights, up there – a million eyes

suddenly flash joy from blue-black sky

pouring Milky Way & Ocean Stream.

La vida es sueño – life is a dream;

the wing-beat of Thunderbird only a sigh.

 4.14.20

sketch by Michael N. Gould

for National Poetry Day

DOVE-CANOE

America is the greatest poem,

Walter Whitman wrote.

After the gun, the vote

& gunboat diplomacy... hums home.

Beneath sea to shining sea

lies middle C : a note

on the grand baby boat

between red & blue (for harmony).

Purple mountains’ majesty,

inverted in a mirror

lake – not so Superior

this time, but simple, free.

So must our dream end in despair?

The first inhabitants

ordered the elements

on thankful tables – mysterious share

from Wakan Tanka (Thunderbird).

The greatest poem hums

beneath war drums,

discordant malice, noisy fraud;

it is the sound of the earth itself

awash with slow rivers,

where Jonah hovers

in her dove-canoe – a constant Alph

down to zydeco Cajun Zee.

America, l’âme

riche, la mer...

coo-cawing in cloud-thunder tree.

10.4.18

Confessional blog post # 341

Greetings, fellow moles.  I've lost the habit of conversational blogging.  The old Brown University Library (the Rock) was my Alexandria, my table-talk slab : now I'm way out here in the high lonesome, like a rolling stump (off Highway 61).

Apparently we inhabit these digital knowledge-canals.  Robots remember things for us, bots remind us, etc.  I've gone out of fashion (about 10 years ago) as bloggentator (aka Mr. Potato-head).

Poetry shivers in the frisson of its immediacy, its grasp of The Cool - the shimmer of This, your slangy Now.  Behind lurks the power of the Word Itself - like an Old Master, like Big Daddy, with the moneybags (Universities Bank Here).  It Can Help You.  But the kids are nervous : that's how it goes (swimmingly).  The Academy of American Poets invites you to become an Associate Member (tote bag to follow); Poetry magazine hits monthly, like velvet lightning.  Jimi Hendrix reads us!

(It is really good, btw - especially the issue I was in, sometime last year.  Tonic verbs, with scattering of playdough... what is poetry, btw?)

I've lost, as I say, the hobbit of consternation.  Out of the gloop.

Still try to read books, now & then.  People may get the idea I've retreated into some kind of bizarre eccentric personal hut.  As John Keats once averred, "I am picked up and sorted to a pip.  My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk."

Yet my day is very scheduled (horae) - what with family industries, managing various major national crises, reading parts of a book or mag, and writing my Answer-To-Dante Poem...

As a matter of fact my personal mental space is so "Middle American" it's become exotic to many.  Recently I was subjected to a biting, sarcastic FB attack, by the accomplished young poet Phillip B. Williams - I guess because he felt I was some kind of Neanderthal.  Probably a generational thing (young guy knifes geezer).  You have to wear a digital sign on your head now to explain what appropriate medicines you are currently on in order to make you immune to the wrong purifications.

Am in the middle of this volume, American Covenant.  By another Philip - Philip Gorski (Princeton UP, 2017).  See, I can still find scholarly tomes!  This is a good one.

Do you know the difference between despotism, liberalism and republicanism?  Are you aware of the "civic religion" of These States?  Are you conscious of its binding presence in American history, and in your daily life?

It's a kind of hagiography, or demonology - from John Winthrop through Hannah Arendt, H.L. Mencken, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Lincoln, the Federalists, Roger Williams, many another.  Along the road you receive a blast of enlightening rational political science, theology, sociology... sorting to a pip the various strains of religious nationalism, radical secularism, libertarianism, neo-liberalism, democratic republicanism, etc etc - aside from the special orthodoxies of the Two Major Parties - which have framed the debate about American life since the Primal Dawn of Roger Williams' Canoe.  Umpt to Trump.

Gorski is searching for the spiritual-intellectual common ground : the forces moving American history.  I'm finding (right now) his commentary on Hannah Arendt quite stimulating : her concept of the "public happiness" - as she describes the revolutionary origins of the United States - having to do with a very concrete experience of democratic participation, a path to finding oneself-as-citizen, something wider and more liberating than oneself-as-private (economic) individual.  She gets at the root of the necessity for self-government, popular sovereignty : that we become content, energized, & deeply happy, as we engage with our neighbors on a basis of equality and justice.  Thus she redefines (or rediscovers) the Founders' meaning of "pursuit of happiness" : it's a public, civic thing.  So she asserts the authority of the forum, the commonweal, as a counterweight to merely private interest, the seductions of predatory Mammon (pure money).  Reading Gorski's interpretation I was reminded of my halcyon days with the VISTA program (established by JFK - the domestic Peace Corps) so long ago : community organizing for civic engagement, empowerment (by the scruffiest neighborhoods).

There are many sorts of poetry.  I'm following up some very ingrown toenails of personal obsessions, with me since the early 1970s (that's almost 50 years ago).  Problems with Shakespeare, Bible, Nabokov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Hart Crane... Pound, Dante, Stevens, Eliot, et al...  - what to do with the Epic Poem?

I am aware that just because they are old obsessions doesn't mean they are interesting.  Coolness is a kind of polish - lemon wax.  You have to be able to speak to the moment... perhaps I've lost my touch, my Lemon Pledge (if I ever had it).

Too late now, I guess.  I'm an inveterate Blog Monster.

Ancient John Berryman

Immured like a feeble Fisher King, home with the flu, old Henry offers a few stray thoughts.  Have been spending some time with Berryman again, aided by a fine study by Brendan Cooper, Dark Airs : John Berryman and the spiritual politics of Cold War America (Peter Lang, 2009).  Cooper goes a long way toward clearing out some of the commonplace critical pigeonholes, the convenient groupings.  He delves into the political commitments and concerns in Lowell, & especially Berryman, as they shaped them into poetry, & provides evidence that the handy label "Confessional" - with all its negative connotations for scholarship of the last 3 decades, at least - diminishes the real social & political complexity of their work.

So I delved into Berryman's poetry again today, reading Homage to Mistress Bradstreet & some of the shorter poems.

It struck me how this poetry from the 1950s still maintained a living bond with old high modes of poetic diction, stretching back to Shakespeare, & Chaucer, & beyond to Dante, & the ancient poets.  It's high-toned, scholarly, informed, intelligent.  This matter of tone or diction provides the poet with a way to explore cultural, historical & religious phenomena on a sort of "intimate" basis.  The everyday demotic speech of the present confronts a chasm of incomprehension : the tools of articulation are no longer there.

But Berryman is not simply a "traditionalist" or "formalist".  Far from it.  He wallows in archaizing vocabulary : he plays with it, alternately leaning on it directly for effect (as when the rhythm of the Shakespearean pentameter comes to his aid in powerful passages), and making a travesty of it - flipping it around with wisecracks, slang & verbal pratfalls.  It's Berryman's way of actually absorbing, confronting & making something new out of his encounter with the great forerunners, going back to the Bible & maybe beyond (Henry/Gilgamesh?).

Another thing : on this question of "confessionalism".  It seems to me that Berryman, in the Homage and the Dream Songs, is indeed confessional : but maybe in a different sense from that of the critical cliche.  Berryman is confessional in the old medieval sense, of a sinful man facing Eternity, frightened for the future of his soul.  This comes through not just in the late "(re)conversion" poems : I found it so powerful today in the Homage as well.  Berryman's shady, adulterous epithalamion for Anne Bradstreet provides a plot-frame for a painful, terrifying soul-shriving.  Terrifying in at least two senses : first in that Berryman provides no consolation (except perhaps very obliquely, in the moments of praise for the natural grace & beauty of Anne & her children).  Cooper points out the Homage's ironic judgement on the spiritual enthusiasm of the Puritans : they thought they were founding a "city on a hill"; instead they were setting the stage for mid-20th century American version of decadence & systemic violence (Berryman is writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the advent of the atomic bomb, and the Cold War).

Terrifying, secondly, in that the Homage seems to implicate the poet in an irreversible repetition of the "damnation" which threatens.  In these passages it seems to me that Berryman becomes "confessional" in both a personal & a theological sense.  The formality of the poem strains with Berryman's sense of guilt & soul-fear, his anxiety about his eternal soul in the face of his 1) sins and 2) unwillingness to repent.

There are many aspects to Berryman's persona and writing which seem ancient, archaic.  The beard, the bardic grandeur, the Irish, the Yeats, the Shakespeare... but on another level there is this access in his poetry to an older way of being, of understanding.  He's like an Old Testament prophet, castigating his nation while at the same time pouring ashes on his own head.  The fact that he can also convey at the same time a fragile gaiety & antic wit, speaks to his humanity.

Needless to say, the more I read Berryman, the more I realize this Henry is not that Henry, if you know what I mean.  It's hard to exaggerate the sense of despair and desolation emanating from much of the American literature of the mid-20th century.  Existential angst.  Its keynote seems to be the loss of faith : the death of God.  The inability to reconcile the horror with any kind of theodicy.

Berryman seems to have been torn by agonizing & recurrent crises of faith - the most powerful spiritual experiences coming toward the end of his life.  I've been there, too, in my way... but the pivotal crisis happened when I was young, around age 19.

Along with Brendan Cooper & Berryman himself, I've been reading another book on my sickbed : The Gothic Cathedral, by Otto von Simson.  A beautiful, brilliant work, focusing on the architecture of Chartres Cathedral.

I was intrigued to learn that Suger and the other masters of the early Gothic were part of an intellectual milieu centered on the spiritual vision of St. Bernard, and much influenced by the Neo-Platonic Christianity of the Byzantine mystic known as "Pseudo-Dionysus".  Pseudo-Dionysus got blended with the patron saint of the Il-de-France, St. Denis.  According to Simson, the "Dionysian" theology of progressive emanations of spiritual light was filtered to Paris by way of an old acquaintance of mine, the Byzantine monk, St. Maximus the Confessor.

All this is neither here nor there.  But Simson explains how the anonymous "Master of Chartres" was an artist of genius, transforming the Romanesque into a new aesthetic unity of perfect proportions and overwhelming light.

I can't go into all the insights Simson provides.  He writes about how different the medieval worldview is from our own (his book was published in 1956).  I'm just here to confess how this study helps & reinforces my own viewpoint.  For me, a rational faith in the incarnate Word is possible; in fact, it's the door to all hope for humankind on this planet.  Chartres is simply one of the most powerful architectural expressions of this "rational faith" on earth.

Job's debate with God about suffering, horror and evil goes on.  It has no simple rationalistic verbal or formulaic resolution.  The inward "confession" of the human person cannot be abstracted, turned into a determinism.  & yet as far as the legal argument over the problem of evil, I stand on the following principles :

1)  Human persons have free will; they make choices for good and evil.
2)  God as spirit & creator is not responsible for Man's free-will choices for good or evil.
3) The message of Jesus is that repentance, mercy, forgiveness & transformation are not only possible, they are the power of God at work in Man to save the whole creation, and to save and heal individual persons.

Where Berryman is anguished, I am calm.  It is startling to me that while I was growing up in Minneapolis, John Berryman was living in my parents' and grandparents' old neighborhood, where I live now.  My family & I probably passed him on the street.  I wish I could have held out my little Henry hand to help him.

*

Postscript

I realize my juxtaposition here of "the old high modes" and "everyday demotic speech" lands me plop in the middle of seemingly-outgrown battles over the true progress of American letters.  I come across as would-be mandarin, elitist, aligned with Eurocentric Anglo-centric stuffy traditionalism in poetry.  My comments seem to dismiss what has been a prime element of American literature : the search for an idiom adequate to specifically American speech, and to the vastness of American experience, exemplified by W. C. Williams, Wallace Stevens & so many others.  Instead I appear to have opted for that rather stuffy, contrived mid-century period, when New Critical academics sought to perfect & standardize their pedantic version of T.S. Eliot's "tradition".

But I think Berryman's poetry exemplifies how & why nobody has to align themselves with these critical pigeonholes or literary clans.  His absorption of the disciplines of the "old high style" reveal a debt to Yeats; the desire to emulate and recapitulate the ancient manner stem ultimately from a passion for participation, which moves poets to inhabit & revive the ghosts of ancient texts and long-gone times.

In my view this is of the essence of the poetic vocation; it comes from a power within "song" itself, to enliven and resurrect dead words, dead times, the old poets.  The bard goes into a kind of visionary trance in order to re-encounter these things - the way Homer, or Virgil or Dante all went down into the depths of the afterlife to speak with their ancestors.

So there is always something uncanny, a whiff of archaic mana, when a poet starts to mime the old speech in a new way.  And all I mean to suggest by the above is that Berryman's or any poet's engagement with the "old high forms" - various modes of traditional poetic artifice - opens doors to time and history not otherwise available.  The poetry of American "plain speech"  has indeed made accessible enormous new spaces of artistic perception & grasp of experience; I'm just suggesting that someone like Berryman re-enacts the exploration of past human times.

Walking around Ravenna Diagram

Ravenna Diagram, the project I've been engaged with for the last few years, begins with a poem called "Potter's Whirl".  That poem was set in motion by small ceramic plate my mother made many years ago, featuring a pale pink starfish with a background of stars & rays - sort of a cosmic little dish.

You could say this poem is an introductory pointer toward the shape of Ravenna Diagram as a whole.  The "diagram" in question is actually a kind of Venn diagram, with two interlocking spheres centered, respectively, on the contemporary here & now, and on Dante Alighieri's presence at the end of his life among the Byzantine structures & mosaics of Ravenna (Dante completed his Divina Commedia there, and is buried in Ravenna).

It's meant to be a kind of juxtaposition of Modern & Medieval mind & culture, or a synthesis.  The Venn diagram also points to the underlying worldview of the western Middle Ages : a concept of Incarnation, which is itself a sort of Venn diagram, melding the human and the divine.  In the poem, this worldview or philosophy is represented in part by the figure of Maximus the Confessor, a Byzantine monk whose writings on the Trinity had a deep impact on the thought-world of the 12th-cent. French cathedral-builders, as well as on the Byzantine Orthodox church itself (see Otto von Simson's monograph The Gothic Cathedral for more on this).

I think of my Dante juxtaposition as a sort of 90-degree tweak.  While the Divine Commedia climbs vertically (up & down the ladder from Earth to Heaven), Ravenna Diagram works on the horizontal - set upon the "flat plate" of the American Midwest, & seeking this-world ramifications and consequences of a spiritual worldview (the eschatological meaning of "Providence", for example).

I sense that the poem actually gathers mass & energy in the same way that my mother shaped her plates and bowls from lumps of wet clay turned on a potter's wheel.  The making of ancient, medieval and Renaissance poetry was enmeshed in such "ring structures" - their unity welded by numerologically-concentric rings of design.  This process is something I've been pursuing over several long poems & several decades of work.  The chapters & books of Ravenna Diagram turn on their own centers, which in turn are linked by motifs surfacing in the corresponding or parallel "numbers" (ie. the 14th poem in Book 1 will find echoes in the 14th & nearby poems of Books 2-9+).

One of the strange effects for me of this process is that the individual units or poems will foreshadow each other in advance.  Here's how it happens.  My general method is to read through the aligned or corresponding "numbers" of the previous books before setting out on the next poem.  Thus if I'm writing # 27 in Book 10, I will read through the previous #27s in Books 1-9, seeking a general orientation.  Then I will proceed to write #27.  The odd thing is this : when I then turn to composing #28, and proceed to read all the previous #28s, I discover that what I'm reading has already been foreshadowed by what I've just written (#27).  It's sort of a double motion, planned/unplanned.

If this sounds convoluted, my apologies : the basic idea is that the large poem is structured on a series of rings, growing slowly outward, like a tree.  It's a massive ceramic plate - shaped by clay lips (a sort of "whisper gallery").  Or a maze, a labyrinth - a slow, spiraling pilgrimage one has to walk.

My constant companion in this seemingly endless project is a shadow of doubt & frustration.  There is no acknowledgement in the literary world for what I'm engaged with here.  The silence is absolute.  It's like I'm traveling in a separate or private universe, on an irrational fool's errand.  There is a vast chasm between creation & publication.  I have no prestige, no powerful advocates.  Ravenna Diagram goes out there on HG Poetics, with occasional forays into literary magazines (for which I'm extremely grateful).

I've written before about the motivations for blogging the poem. Basically I find that the blog is an appropriate way to present a long, serial, diaristic, processual work, which sometimes interacts with signal holidays or public events.  But the disadvantages are many.  Moreover, I have a very old & very bad habit of self-publication - which doesn't sit well with many people, especially prestigious academics, book reviewers & editors.  This greatly limits my access to the larger literary scene.

But I want to suggest that there is another, more fundamental dimension to this poetry thing I am acting out at such great length.  & that is that I am attempting to express a radical worldview, a sort of philosophy with my work.  The intellectual pivot of all these poetic ring structures is a challenge to the modern & postmodern era as a whole (an intellectual challenge).

One might see this coming with a poem structured on a parallel to Dante.  Eliot & Pound, in their own ways, did something similar.   But I'm not at all a neoconservative or revolutionary-authoritarian Modern, as they were.  My intellectual allegiance (if I have to choose models) is closer to Hart Crane & James Joyce.  Or to some of the visionary dimensions in Mandelstam & Yeats.

I believe in a new Age of Faith : but one in which faith itself is understood also in a new way.

Poetry, in my view, is a mode of expressing the vitality, goodness & beauty of Reality as a whole : as an End, as a Creation, as a living, breathing multivalent Sign of a supreme loving Consciousness.  This view need contradict neither human free will nor scientific objective reason (theory & evidence).  But it is rooted in this sense of faith : this joyful apprehension of a benevolent purpose in cosmic nature (call it divine "Providence").

I can only call it Faith, because it is incommensurate with simple verbal arguments or logical verifications.  But I do think this is what Jesus meant when he spoke of "going back to the beginning", or about faith as the root of all active accomplishment, or when he characterized God the Creator as Love.   This faith is really not that different from the "primitive" faith of archaic human cultures - that all goodness descends from the One Great Spirit, from the "Manitou" who is the source of all blessings.  We are talking about the root meaning of the general social-behavioral attitude we call "good faith", "good will".

This way of putting things will strike many as not "new" at all.  I agree : I'm not up to the task here in prose.  Hence the need for poetry.  Ravenna Diagram is circling very slowly around a new sense of "Incarnation" - something emerging presently, out of the here & now, out of the clay of Big Muddy, like an infant emerging from the womb, or Jonah from the whale.  An Incarnation which expresses and confirms (forever) an inherent thankfulness-for-being; a celebration of its own existence, a happy end-in-itself.

The foregoing sketches out a vision - not unrelated to that of the Russian Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilev.  A "chaste" vision, of the inherent beauty & blessedness of all things; of the harmony of the cosmos as one fundamental, & fundamentally victorious, Dream-reality.

poem in memory of Mark Baumer

DOVE’S FEET

                             i.m. Mark Baumer

The poem’s wobbly orrery

of airy ore is self-

correcting, like an elf

inside a gyroscope.  Unwary

cheerful troubadour, he walked

barefoot across these states

joking at potentates

to heal a hurt planet – balked

by Mammon, Moloch (vanity,

acedia).  The white van,

an indifference machine

in seething Florida... such petty

wreckage snaps a sapling tree.

The jungle broods, silent.

Her gentle ape’s extinct.

Minotaur mutters his poetry.

We have not learned the lesson of

the golden bowl.  We tread

the fractures on a head

of Incan stone (grey mourning dove).

Coatlicue is raging at

her funeral.  Splinters

of daylight almost pierce

the warped crossweave – chariot-

spokes of angry Manitou.

Thunder comes soon.

The light’s deep green.

The land is ripe for tornado

                  *

when Francis ambles right past you.

A river of pink peonies

surges through cities...

salty labyrinth in Dallas blue.

Her pillbox hat, his scattered bran.

Unnatural shocks (that flesh

is air, too).  Gold mesh

of tangled fleece... your Ariadne-

champion.  All-suffering rabbi

who declares : the violent

bear it away   rent

robes of kind Melchizedek   mild

eye of Isis   throned in adamant

warm heart of Magdalen

at almond gate   Open...

Joseph’s weathered rainbow-garment.

The poem’s just an ornery gray stone.

The slash of Cain that clouds

its brow irks human crowds –

has not been stitched til now.  Atone,

Adams.  Icons through unworthy

lips break into clay

rivulets & melt away –

your only balm is Charity,

sole antidote to Jealousy.

Spring comes on mild

dove’s feet... her wild

breeze from the open sea.

1.23.17

the sense of being right

Stray thoughts of a stray dog, this afternoon...   Have been reading the translation of Mandelstam, by Oleg Lekmanov, a sober, concise, and poignant biography.  Came upon this passage, quoting a letter (written to his wife in the spring of 1935) of Sergei Rudakov, a writer who spent some time with the Mandelstams during their exile in Voronezh.  Rudakov :

"I have never seen anything like this in my life... At a distance it is impossible to measure or relate.  I am standing before a working mechanism (perhaps even organism - it would be the same) of poetry.  I see the same thing as in myself, though in the hands of a genius, which will mean much more than it is possible to understand now.  There is no human anymore - there is Michelangelo...  For the sake of 4 lines, literally 400 are pronounced.  He does not see anything.  He does not remember that some of these lines belong to his earlier poems and repeats these lines again.  Then by eschewing the old lines he creates new poems." (Mandelstam, p. 144)

Anna Akhmatova's memoirs are then quoted, reflecting on the same period : "It is amazing that the sense of space, breadth, deep breathing appeared in Mandelstam's poetry in Voronezh, when he was not at all free."

There are several statements here worth pondering.  I just want to focus on what they triggered in my thoughts.  First is Rudakov's impression of the "biological organism" at work.  The sense I have here is of an artist who has ripened and sharpened his talent over a lifetime.  This is not a dilettante, but a kind of word-sculptor ("Michelangelo"), who is refining - in compositional "real time", so to speak - his own conception of Russian poetry as a totality, and his own individual idiom, purpose & sense of occasion - within the theatre of creation which is the making of the particular poem.

Secondly, these pages got me thinking about works of art & poetry as monuments, turning points, as benchmarks of cultural refinement.  As great expressive achievements : quintessential, incomparable.

This sort of window on poetry seems unfashionable these days.  We don't think of poems (or poets) as "rare" : in fact we go out of our way to encourage everyone to be a poet.  We don't understand this picture - a poet composing out loud, not writing anything down - reciting 400 lines in order to melt them down to four.  The whole idea is alien to us.

Poetry today is nothing if not transitive, direct, colloquial, and above all informal.  Every line is a throwaway line.  Every line is a "hook."  Even our current "experimental", formalist poets lay out their organizing principles very explicitly,  as if on a blueprint, or as a Powerpoint presentation.  We are meant to see & appreciate exactly how A leads to B.

Difficulty is conceptualized as "technical difficulty".  Poetry is evaluated by the sharpness or effectiveness of its rhetorical weapons.

This is not to deny that sharp, effective rhetoric has not always been a part of poetry.  But what's missing in art & poetry today (in large part, if not everywhere) is some kind of elusive spiritual dimension.  The strange epileptic seizures or fits of passionate composition which we behold in Mandelstam should be understood as the culmination of decades of committed labor at his craft; yet they must also be seen as Mandelstam's own conscious submission to the wave of inspiration.  He cannot fully control what he is making, because it is happening out of the improvisatory process itself; and yet it is guided by a kind of overall sense of wholeness or cultural mission - a critical sense - which shapes and informs his artistic "oracles".

Mandelstam refines 4 lines out of 400 lines because he senses he is not just writing "for himself" but is composing something which has objective meaning for the Russian people as a whole, and perhaps for humanity as a whole.  Poetry is not solely a private egotistical achievement, but is part of a vow, a "commission", to produce these integral, free-standing objects or monuments of harmonic song.  They belong to everyone, and he is somehow aware of this, and his awareness reinforces his effort to sing it exactly right.

This is perhaps one interpretation of the retort Mandelstam offered, when asked by an apparatchik interviewer for his "definition of poetry."  Mandelstam simply replied : "the poet's sense of being right."

Where do we find this sense of mission in American poetry?  Where do we find a poet relinquishing the calculations of rhetorical guile, and submitting to a more profound source of inspiration?  Where do we find a poet refining & refining lines out of an obscure sense of enunciation, of oracular speech?

I'm not arguing such poetry is not out there in America now.  I just think perhaps it's a little hard to find, under the unceasing bombardment (from what Mandelstam called "the horde of scribblers") of easygoing, unctuous, smarmy, clever, cozening, glib, prosaic, tossed-off, complacent, shallow, and trivial so-called works which offer themselves to the public in the name of poetry.

for the future ages' resounding glory

Arctic cold here.  Just returned from a beautiful concert of medieval choral music by the Rose Ensemble, at the Basilica of St. Mary (over by Loring Park).  Incredible freedom in the rhythm & harmonies - you sense the hardship of life in those days (nasty, brutish & short), stamped with this otherworldly exaltation.

Makes you think anything is possible.  Also reading a translation of brief, lucid biography of Osip Mandelstam (Mandelstam, by Oleg Lekmanov).  My hero & imaginary friend.  Makes you think anything is possible.

What if it were possible to transmute contemporary American poetry (poetry in American English) into some completely revised, unrecognizable system of relations & values?

The relations between poet / poetry / language / nation-state (or people) are a knotty spider's web.  Think of Shakespeare, setting his seal on English poetry, while advancing the historical legend of Tudor supremacy (there were other poets in English).  Or Dante, basically establishing the Italian language, and the Italian nation, by way of mutually-reinforcing rhyme-schemes.  Or Whitman, the loafing disreputable hobo-bard, inventing a template for the American dream?

Poetry per se - individual poems - subsists as a subtext of these larger narratives.  The unresolved suspense of Hamlet (the play) is a dramatic effect - the plunging of quasi-historical characters into a tragic allegory of their own (semi-suicidal) demise.  Actual England, actual Elizabethan London provides the tacit atmosphere, maintaining these translucent symphonies of lyric speech.

Anything is possible.  What if we initiated something like an American "charismatic (bardic) poetry"?  What if HG Poetics replaced AWP, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Foundation, and the Library of Congress?  What if the charisma of the flinty bard - the stubborn, indomitable shaman/patriarch/prophet/holy fool - what if the drama of poet vs. official anthill - became the most interesting thing happening?

For some reason, I've always found Osip Mandelstam more interesting than any poets or poetry surfacing in the United States.  He emanates this uncanny/contradictory rightness - this resolution in the face of autocratic, totalitarian social control - so as to present the inimitable profile of the free, loving, creative human being.  The person.  I, Walt Whitman, speaking to you, whoever you are - my equal, my soul mate, my camerado.

We need more national drama in poetry today.  Down with the protocols, away with the moneychangers !

Take me into the night, where the Yenisey
flows, where pines reach the starlight,
because there's no wolf's blood in me,
and only an equal shall take my life.

(trans. by A.S. Kline)

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.

Janus-Faced Henryism

In my Janus-faced post of yesterday ("poetry is/is not a psychological double-bind"), I did not quite express the whole of the elusive notion which triggered the initial commentary.  Let me see if I can briefly get there now.

The notion itself was about doubleness : a sense that some kind of detachment or critical awareness is integral to creative art forms - including poetry - and the art-experience itself.

Pasternak once characterized Mandelstam's appearance on the Russian literary scene thus : "you entered a conversation which had already begun."  Many the poet & theorist (Plato, Lacan, Levinas come to mind) have emphasized the dialogic nature of poetry (and consciousness generally).  But the notion is perhaps idealized to some extent.  If art is a dialogue, it seems somewhat one-sided.  One partner speaks, the other listens.  One is expressive, the other is mute.  One is conscious, deliberate, rational - the other subconscious, intuitive, ineffable.  One is assertive, the other receptive.  Yin, yang.  The two halves of creation and reception play a subtle chess game : poets acknowledge dreams, intuition, inspiration, negative capability, or the Muse as the true source of their rational articulations, bringing into question : who is really speaking here?  Who listening?

Then the poet and reader (audience) replicate this original duality - another mirror of doubleness.  The poet recites; the reader listens, responds - is bored, is moved; is misled, is enlightened; is offended, is pleased...

And then, finally, the poet is also the reader.  New poetry grows from old poetry, as the complex emotional-intellectual receptors of the poet respond to achieved works of the past (impossible to overstate the chasm which lies between the poet giving birth to a new, as-yet unknown work of art, and the examples of finished poems, which represent the poet's benchmarks, models, and obstacles).

Moreover, the poet is famously characterized (Keats' negative capability) as the embodiment of receptivity : he or she "reads" not only prior literature and rival poets, but the "signs" emanating from nature and experience as a whole.

The sketch or pattern of the field we are presenting here - this notion of "detachment" as integral to creative expression - begins to appear less like a standard opposition between "poet & critic", or "intuition and intellect", and more like a dimension of aesthetic experience as a whole.

Which raises, in my mind, the question of value.  Taste, critical judgement, tradition : perhaps these are both tacit and fundamental to an era's literary culture.  What do I mean by this?  How does this follow from the previous?  I mean that if tacit reception is one half of art & poetry, as a dialogic duality, then there is more to poetic making than a simple 1-2 process of "create-disseminate".  Reception becomes a kind of fertile, intangible ground or atmosphere within which actual poems manifest.

American culture idealizes immediacy, production, re-invention.  "Make it new" becomes the paradigmatic shibboleth for the sales appeal of the stylish rebel, for the idealization of change per se.  It's a linear, one-way process.  Success = succession.  I think what I am proposing, indirectly, is a challenge to this standard arrangement.

The poem on the page is a kind of message in a bottle.  Sheer potentiality - nothing until it is found and opened and received and evaluated.  And the message itself may be in code; it may be meaningless until you find it out, you give it meaning.  It may also be allegorical - in disguise.  The obvious, the overt message may be meaningless in itself.  The poem lives in another dimension - a quintessence, a 5th element, active only in tacit reception.  The poem is, at heart, a riddle.

I guess I would like to imagine a somewhat different American poetic culture than the one we have at present.  There seems to be a kind of short-circuit driving the current machinery, which goes something like creation-dissemination-publicity-fame-awards-prestige.  What's left out here is the tacit "(reception)" bracketing both sides of the term "creation".  Maybe a healthier, simpler template for poetic culture would go something like this : (reception)-creation-(reception)-publication-(reception).  This model is not driven by ambition, professional interests, & prestige, by ulterior goals and motives.  If I were able to, I would display the latter, (reception) model as a circle.

bookstalls in Paris

Henry Bard is coming to your town

There's something in the air... aside from the global authoritarian regressive New Brutalism in the political wind.  The last few weeks have seen an odd configuration of events linking folk/pop music and poetry.  The Nobel Prize for "the bard" Bob Dylan, the death of Leonard Cohen, and now the publication of early poems of Johnny Cash... the scholar Christopher Ricks' and others' identification of Dylan with archaic oral-poetic-bardic performance in ancient Greece and elsewhere...

These phenomena - coinciding with the sudden intensification of the political/cultural crisis of the West - got me thinking about the concept of the bard, of bardic poetry, and in a personal sense, about my own situation as poet.

There's a book I keep returning to, by Jeffrey Walker - Bardic Ethos and the American Long Poem (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989).  Walker's thesis, in a nutshell, argues that Whitman established the parameters for an ambitious, bardic-nationalist role for the American poet; that Ezra Pound, WC Williams, Hart Crane, and Charles Olson were foremost (among others) 20th-century inventors of a new bardic poetry in the Whitman mode; and that certain shared assumptions of these poets also forecast the limits and partial failure of that particular enterprise.  Walker's is a very detached, critical, cold-eyed analysis of these poets : he shows complete respect for their ambition and inventive power, while at the same time illustrating the central flaws - going back to Whitman himself - which hobbled their efforts.  These flaws cluster around a kind of spiritual elitism - an assertion of cultural values at odds with mainstream American life, despite their proclaimed allegiance to populist-egalitarian ideals.  Whitman's call for a new American literary (bardic) elite was translated by Pound into political authoritarianism, echoed in WC Williams' and Olson's denigrations of electoral democracy, and Crane's tragic vision of the flower of American culture (emblematized in Emily Dickinson, Isadora Duncan) drowned under a surge of crass philistinism.  In his final chapter, Walker decisively contrasts the alienation of Charles Olson, as would-be cultural exemplar, with the rhetorical and spiritual capacity of Martin Luther King, to express basic American and universal values.

Walker's analysis is very acute & necessary.  Yet the limits of his thesis tend to obscure the actual, contradictory, and in many ways egalitarian and democratic messages and impulses surging through these poets.  Whitman, after all, produced a body of nationalist poetry whose moral center is Abraham Lincoln, and whose strident attacks on the corruptions of the Gilded Age constitute a defense of the American (democratic) Republic.  The legacy of Pound, on the other hand, is much more ambiguous.

But it would take more than a blog post to deal justly with Walker's argument and his valuable readings of these long poems.  And my original impulse in posting today is slightly different.

The constellation of "folk-bardic" events this fall suddenly got me thinking in a new way about my own efforts and failures over the past 30 years.  What, exactly, do we mean by the "bard"?  Is there such a thing?  Is there a difference, now, today, between a bard and a poet?

There's certainly a New-Age stream out there trying to revive "bardism" based on ancient Celtic sources and traditions in conjunction with druids, mysticism, etc.  I suppose this to some extent echoes the Romantic era's enthusiasm for a semi-mystical notion of the the ancient bard (Ossian, Taliesin, etc.).  Also there is a genuine literary interest in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland (and perhaps elsewhere) in the lost cultures and skills of ancient bardic (oral) poetry.  Yeats was a great figure in the renovation of the image of the poet-as-bard, as both visionary and crafty minstrel.

And the stream Walker identifies - the American long poem, from Whitman to Olson, et al. - has certainly evolved as a distinct, iconoclastic dimension of the larger American poetry scene.

It was while surveying (in my preliminary sketchy way) these things that it struck me how much my own path with poetry has veered into the long-poem/bardic stream.  It began in the early 1980s, with a curiosity about Ezra Pound - an interest in the capaciousness of the Cantos - the possibility of broadening my own style, being able to "include history" too (Pound's definition of epic : "a poem including history").

But what I'm puzzling over is how my absorption in this effort over 30 years - and the writing of at least 9 book-length long poems - has kept me marginalized, fairly unknown, unable to make a dent.

The main responsibility for this dilemma, no doubt, can be laid at my own feet : the limitations of my own themes & vision & style, the "professional" mistakes, the unimaginative & distracted (& often comical!)  efforts to break out of obscurity, etc.

But the thought occurs to me that perhaps something else is going on also.  Perhaps we can hypothesize a real distinction between bard and poet.  And maybe the American literary scene - both the culture of prestigious magazines and the fashionable canons of academia - has crystallized, has institutionalized, around poetry/poet, as opposed to bard/epic/life-poem.

Maybe - in different ways - both magazine culture and the collegiate order of the "program era" are inimical to certain aspects of "bardism", such as :

a) the bardic investment in large, ongoing, serial, epic, ambitious "life poems" - difficult to excerpt for magazine consumption.

b) the bardic willingness to fuse the poetic, the literary, the rhetorical and the performative.  The aim of the bardic poem is not simply to be a beautiful, self-sufficient, autonomous aesthetic object (such as all MFA programs and strictly "poetic" careers are designed to produce).  A bardic poem, as Walker points out, has suasory (persuasive) designs on its audience : it aims to "spiritually revolutionize" both individual reader and culture at large.  This is not a goal easily taught or pursued in the college classroom.

c) and (related to (b) : the populist, "folk" dimension of bardism - its desire to speak "of, by, and for" the people.  Its openness to unfashionable notions of "national unity", "national purpose", "national history", "national ethos", "national culture" - and a willingness to offer dramatic-performative representations of same (the long poem in its epic-heroic mode).  Clearly, any poet who aspires to such a bardic enterprise would have to address the American audience as a contrarian, a dialectician, a prophet - standing up to debunk the jingoism, racism, and chauvinism of crude "America First" ideology.

I've really just begun to think through these notions.  Beyond Walker's bardic Pleiade, many other poets are worth studying for a bardic counter-view : H.D., Vachel Lindsay, Jay Wright, Lorine Neidecker, Louis Zukofsky, Carl Sandburg, John Berryman, Lissa Wolsak, and the ghost of WB Yeats...

But this is a whole new way - for me, at least - of thinking about American poetry : that there might be an objective cultural distinction to be made between "poet" and "bard"... and that the contributions of all these figures does not define the effort of the long poem, but only serves as instigation toward what might be achieved in future.  It's a path to be cleared...

Meanwhile my own neglected massive poetical-aesthetical-historical-spiritual works are out there, visible in the swamps of blogland, in the dark corners of Amazon books.  & I realize I need to change and revitalize my own practice, to get out there and read & perform & strum the old harp.

Mr. Bard steps out