Curious how Anastasios & I sometimes seem to be thinking along parallel tracks. His current post is helpful to me. I obsess about this profound riddle & mystery (the one he describes).

This morning it occurred to me that the only way it makes sense (to me) is as something both 1) real - factual - in some unexplicable way, and 2) symbolic: a theatrical performance.

But Campbell, here, seems to help with the explication part. Myth as reality, in some fashion, anyway (in the Northrop Frye sense, maybe).

Religious or spiritual concepts & vocabulary, aided (in the face of doubt) by the "science" of art & storytelling.

First glance at a book noted by Anastasios over here : Stephen Cushman's Fictions of Form in American Poetry. Cushman hypothesizes (in the epilogue) that maybe poets & poetry aren't taken very seriously in America, not because Americans are (stereotypically) vulgar & materialistic & philistine, but rather because they take words so seriously (a revolution & a constitution being the founding events, rather than an endless stream of time & traditions). Poets are kept at arm's length because at some level Americans sense that the poet's words might shake things up.

Sounds like a stretch to me, but maybe there's something to it...

Anastasios Kozaitis takes an interesting, wide-angle look at the form/anti-form history in American poetry, in an essay over at his blog, thisbetown. I want to check out some of the books he mentions.

Feeling weary & bruised (& stupid!) after the usual sterile blogpoetics wars, I go & visit George.

The normative = the humane imagination. Sympathy & ethical response in conditions of crisis & ennui & powerlessness. The Just One will suffer calumny, spite, slander, malice, hatred, treachery and violence in order to stand beside the weak & utter the truth. What's that line from the Bhagavad Gita at the end of the Waste Land, Anastasios? "Sympathise - [something] - Control" . . . (I guess it's on your blog)!

Anastasios, asking me to respond to a news article about shifting Bush Administration positions on the nature & extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons program.

Before the war, I defended it, here on the blog & on poetry lists; I let my forensic instincts have their way. One motive for doing that was my sense that poets were opposing the war in a knee-jerk manner, a reflexive anti-government attitude which had little to do with the actuality before us. This reactive attitude degrades the role of poetry too. Of course there are lots of roles for poetry. There are always the new new brutalists & the advocates of toy poetry, finding ever-new ways to celebrate poetry-as-subculture & cottage industry.

I'm not against this, don't get me wrong. It's just that walking around Providence last night in the spooky moist spring haze, with all the cherry trees & magnolias & azaleas flowering, thinking about my crumblous, desiccated "career" in poetry, I felt the ever-recurrent determination that a poet must try to speak to public questions, face the pressure of the time & articulate it in the poetry & the essays. The models that came to mind were Auden & Brodsky. I know so well how alien this & these models sound to the nuvo-bohos of the bloggy set.

So, you will say, isn't that what we are doing? No, it is not. I guess I would go back to early days of this blog where I was writing about "metaform". I think poets have to find ways to synthesize & correlate & enunciate a coherent & capacious RESPONSE to the issues facing the world. I like the way Joe Duemer seems to be aware of this, though we disagree on the politics a lot. But a POETRY-response is not yelling on the internet or protesting in the streets or even pamphleteering, even though these things also have their inherent poetry!!!

What comes to mind for me again anyway is also this notion of the "literary absolute". Have been thinking lately that maybe it's analogous to Georg Cantor's & Godel's notion of infinity & the "continuum problem" & the "incompleteness axiom" (if I've got that right). There are these different levels of mathematical reality, and some levels are incommensurate - sort of unapproachable - using the tools inside particular "ordinary" systems of math. So I think of the literary absolute as this poetic capability - a synthetic articulation - which is incommensurate with both the ordinary levels of talent & desire to write, and with the coordinates of the literary industry & all its subcultures. Another aspect of "Pushkinism"?? Is this a flanking chess move?? But do we perhaps NEED some such concept (literary absolute) if we want to maintain a "normative" literary-civilizational culture? Do we want to maintain such a thing? Do Americans even understand or accept the notion of "normative", sustainable culture or civilization? Sustainable would have to include self-critical, dedicated to an ethical absolute (not the same as the literary absolute, but maybe analogous).

An aside : took home from the library Elena Shvarts' 2-vol collected poems, published in Petersburg. Old-fashioned 19th-cent. heft of the volumes. Looking at her lines with their hieratic Cyrillic, their bold but firm syntax, dashes & periods. Oddly, the poem I opened the book to was titled "Poetica : More Geometrico" ("more" - sea? death? method?). Mathematical literary absolute a kind of authoritative articulation of Person-in-Civilization, an image at the root of liberal education. . . AND beneath this the notion of absolute devotion/vocation to THIS line, THIS phrase, THIS text & no other : the finality of writing : inescapable, uncanny aspect of the literary absolute (see Emily Dickinson). Mandelstam [paraphrasing] : "reading the poem we enter into & share the poet's death". Poetry is serious, serious fun. Frost : "a game with mortal stakes".

Anastasios must be thinking I'm evading his question. WAS THIS WAR JUSTIFIED? I don't know. . . it seems too early to base such a judgement on the current results of WMD search. I feel like my mother, who told me she wanted to keep her mouth shut (hard for her) at the neighborhood coffee get-togethers, because she felt so oddly unconflicted & optimistic about the war in Iraq, & this was very out of step with Minneapolis opinion (not I suppose with Dallas opinion though).

You could start almost anywhere with Simone Weil, Anastasios. Her extremism is seemingly inseparable from her genius, she's one of the most moving & powerful writers I've ever read. There are some essays which are in the form of devotional meditations - I think some are collected in Waiting for God. Also the very curious tract The Need for Roots deals with this question of an inherent thirst for God, in the context of a kind of neo-medieval social vision. My favorite works are the 2-vol. Notebooks, a posthumous collection, a grand mish-mash of theological/scientific/philosophical/gnostic/aesthetic notes & plans for essays, also Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks, where her extensive knowledge of mathematics is brought to bear on some very beautiful theological speculations.

Simone Weil was deeply troubled & divided about established religion. Though a devout Catholic on an intellectual level, she refused to participate in the institution of the Church; though Jewish, her notebooks are filled with antagonism toward Old Testament Hebrew religion (she equates the Hebrews with the Romans as forms of totalitarian society). Perhaps there was an element of self-hatred at work. I'm not that familiar with the details of her biography, except that she died in a London hospital during WW 2, exiled from France, essentially of starvation, in solidarity with the French people. She loved the Greeks & she loved France. And she had a compassionate awareness of, and participation in, human suffering, which radiates through everything she wrote (and did).

I guess this must be Orthodox Holy Saturday, right, Astanasios ? - Renhy

from toward the end of Stubborn Grew (finished on Good Friday):

In time it was. For his bird-day was springing
toward the last para-trump, and was it time? In
time it was. Trump April last - for the twin
springing was daddy-bird his, for birthdaying!

For twelve is a happy numby, and April
a pleasant isthmus, all gold together nicily
though in Minersoda ice frizzy somedaytimely!
Them twinners were pretty cities, Will -

still are they! Arise then, and gold -
we shall pellmell pilgrummage our wheaty
way homeward now, and celebeatify
the drum for he is raisin hupahole hold

fulla goldbroth and cisterns! He is raisin,
thought the vinelady - gripin abit at the pall - but
wheelbarrow it an iron it an roost it an itwill all
comb outa gain in the washingtons. Jeffersin?

Me? Not know - right left wrought lift rut loft
all the siamese twines will process us cheese us
milk us bore us bier us berry us cream us
dream us as Oswego along the rusty rus trailaloft

the bearing straitened circumnavastints
in the Pete's sacreblueship toward the originatal
redman - a dimeforhis name? - is omegal
too one zero and we shall meet him in the quint-

existenting tonight on the old campground
on our way now to Indian Point. Himalayatied out
yet? Not yet? Then pint your ompeter toward at
land - tissue almondjoy yet? Stormepetrelbound?

(O Petrasbornagains, O svleet Musk-
ovyntights - all Meldamshtombletamed!
Hichikehukfinnaginjompluliltrainsetgoald!
Who Akhmeldovatend, who Tsvetavelvattuned,
whocoowhorldinalbatrysted, frosencaroltruthedusk.)

Anastasios, I agree with you that there are powerful cultural & political forces on the Right in the US that employ, both consciously & unconsciously, forms of mythological thinking that overlap a kind of literal-magical sense of scriptural Christianity, with obedience to the state (in this case right-wing Republicans who manipulate those very mythologies).

On the other hand I don't agree with you that these forces simply "run" America, nor that they are uniform & merely simplistic in their attitudes themselves (I mean the fundamentalists). In a real sense the left-academic worldview is out of touch with religious AND political culture in the US, & suffers from mythologies of its own.

One of them being that Bush et al. (because they are capitalist fundamentalists) MUST have an evil plan for world domination, that we are simply repeating the Vietnam War in Iraq, that all the anti-war propaganda is the moral high ground, etc.etc.

It's a hopeless task trying to formulate the perfect political position, because perfection is actually getting away from it all, perfection is going into the mountains & fleeing the beehive & the anthill, perfection is becoming a hobo, perfection is returning to childhood, when you understood instinctively the surrounding nest & neighborhood, & the outside world (mediated by tales of adventure & images of rough reality) was only a dream you imagined, before you grew up & walked eyes closed toward your image of adventure.

My sense of poetry, I think, comes from this experience of a happy & boring & too-secure suburban childhood, which, while you still inhabited it, instilled in you (through fleeting images & fiction & stories) a thirst & a desire to go out into the rougher, wilder, more real world : and then your discovery a little later that fictions & representations were artificial creations too, that the "real world" was rougher & more chaotic & painful than those images of adventure had been. Then poetry made its appearance. & this is why Hart Crane's formulation of the Bridge symbol seems so apt to me - poetry encapsulates a surrender to wildness & the unknown WITHIN words. But not a total surrender - it's both a surrender & a report from that region, thus a bridging action. Poetry is impulsive speech, like a glossolalia, like a response to unbearable pressure - pressure too strong for the constructs of ideology or the plotted atmosphere & stage-craft of fiction.

So poetry is a kind of charismatic or epileptic or orgasmic response to the failure of artificial fictions of the world. This is an aspect of poetry that strikes me in poets like Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Mandelstam. Of course poetry has its Apollonian side too, the aspect of wit, harmony & intellectual elegance. But the Dionysian element is just as powerful, & it plays against prose of all kinds.

Among other effects, this is what underlies the appeal of really good descriptive poetry. You are getting a symbiosis of effects : Dionysian escape combined with the pure joy of questing into a larger landscape of the real world. Crane was right : the hobo has the key.

(p.s. I reckon the Taoist & Zen poets of East Asia knew something about this.)

Anastasios listens to me make myself even more of a pariah.

A response from Anastasios (of Ineluctable fame) to my comments about Iraq made here earlier today:

Henry--

I completely hear what you are asking in terms of all these questions. The only reason I cannot entertain the thoughts you are allowing yourself to entertain is because I have absolutely no trust in the US government's improving the suffering's plight . The suffering Kurds and Iraqis, in my opinion, mean absolutely nothing to Team Bush. If international pressure increases and if the inspectors were given some teeth along with some intelligence, there might be an opportunity to rid the Iraqis of Saddam while also improving everyone's lot on the Arabian peninsula. However, I don't think a million bombs and an additional loss of lives will improve the situation over there. It could well turn into WWIII. Hell of a lot of good we've done Afghanistan. Karzai is propped up by US henchmen, the Taliban are re-entrenching, and people are just waiting to assassinate him.

Ultimately, I cannot, do not and will not trust Bush and his lot of criminals (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Negroponte, Condoleeza, Pointdexter, et al).

I pray things don't get worse.

Monday, always a good time to backtrack. I can't "prove" a poetics. Moreover, there will always be an oscillation between the "out there" & the "made thing", even if you can idealize Reality with a capital R as inherently singable. Somehow the poetics has to include the completely useless.

In a way that's what I started with on this blog, when I wrote about the babble of the SOUND of poetry, as reflexive, turned back on itself - the source, perhaps, of Plato's suspicion. I think, though, that my general tendency in these polemics is to protest against the self-reflexive as a system: what I've seen in postmodern poetry as a denial of the relationship between the poem & an "out there", or, a similar position, the attitude that reality is always more chaotic & meaningless than the artificial structures, the imaginary worlds, of art.

I guess I feel in sympathy with the general attitude of the Objectivists & neo-objectivists (Anastasios pointed out to me in a backchannel their affinities with the Russian Acmeists): the view that poetry is in relationship with an actual "out there" which can't be dismissed as either meaningless, chaotic, or simply presented as the stasis of cliche. It's a relationship in which both art & reality signal & gesture toward one another, and poetry exhibits an innate harmoniousness that it discovers in both. Such "realism" is, for me, one of the avenues connecting present-day poetry to all the poetries of the past; acknowledging the simple, direct & mimetic in speech and representation, without insisting on some prescriptive, necessary or a priori version of them. & if we go from there to these interesting ideas from Anastasios about nature in poetry, the "aural analogue" (or the beautiful sound & its analogy in "inscape"), maybe we can see how, in a preliminary sketchy way, such a perspective begins to show the outlines of a consistent poetics (& by that I mean not a technique but an understanding of what poetry is & can be). Moshe Safdie again, on architecture & the natural/cultural landscape (see recent NYorker article).

OK enough of these wearisome abstractions. . . it is Monday after all. . .

(& cf. Anastasios' comments on natural form & sound values of words in GM Hopkins & unity of being & English tradition over at Ineluctable.)