A poet's special pleading only goes so far. Poems of necessity make their way in the world completely on their own : their making is both counter-intuitive and intuitive, their reception by the public is no different.

Everybody has a unique personality, carries around their own baggage. Maybe I identify my own obsessions too directly with those of the public world... maybe I need some distance & objectivity.

- who knows. It's complex & intuitive (this matter of creativity). The mind (or the whole person, the soul) leaps ahead of itself, to take the place it somehow (instinctively, intuitively) senses is out there, waiting : the opportunity, the open door.

The "Acmeists" aimed for their own sort of public speech or craft, a certain "classical" worldliness. I suppose it's laughable to think of me & my writing in these terms. But in relation to the "American Acmeism" proto-essay posted here a few days ago, I thought of this poem from Dove Street, also posted here quite a while back : "Fragment from Purgatory".

What's interesting is that the poem addresses, sort of allegorically, what I called the authoritarianism of the Eliot/Pound strain (they are the two figures on the erratic ship), as well as the New-World ideal of freedom. Dante shows up here, and also Whitman, in the hobo figure at the end - who quotes a poem by Edwin Honig ("Freedom builds within/or breaks your bones" - from his poem "Cuba in Mind"). So here in this poem are the 2 ends of the spectrum I sketched out in the Acmeism essay (with say Eliot and Crane at either pole).

But I'm realizing lately that a poet has to step out and speak to the crowd. Theorizing and explaining and meditating and experimenting are necessary but not sufficient.

How this happens, though, is very complicated... since we live in a noisy age of self-promotion and gimmickry, of surfaces, not depths, sensations, not memory or knowledge. In the old days a poet like Yeats, for example (or Pound), would get up on their soap-box and declaim in the old bardic way... but nowadays maybe the poet has to be a master of quiet and silence... "slow poetry" of a sort... to speak clearly, yet neither mumble nor shout...

textual note on poem posted yesterday : a "hermaphrodite" is a type of brig (which is a type of 2-masted sailing ship).

A FRAGMENT FROM PURGATORY


 
 
– so we moved along the bank upstream,
   and where the river bent in a broken circle
to the left, beheld a busy municipium:
welter of gleaming glass and flickering steel
   resembling vast shuttlings of water bugs
(chaotic, breaking apart the smooth still
surface into myriad coarse shags
   of garish noise).  Then my eyes shifted
to the river itself, and picked out a brig
there – hermaphrodite, trim, she drifted
   with peculiar motion, perpendicular
to the flow.  At prow and stern were lofted
pennants (princely St. George at the fore,
   and aft, a black-green, jumbled image
fusing, it seemed, some fasces with a star).
Upon the poop, a gaunt man in a rage
   stood, yapping imprecations toward the bow,
whereat a lank chap, dignified with age,
responded languidly (voice diffident and low).
   Apparently, they each commanded wheels,
and piloted the ship as if to go
both ways at once – causing the luckless keels’
   erratic laterality (crosscurrent,
at cross purposes).  I turned to him, whom eagle’s
perspicacity once lifted to the firmament
   on high.  Stern and melancholy then
he gazing, spoke.  “Throughout the Occident
once reigned supreme in poetry, these men –
   their tandem sway the ultimate authority.
In talent matchless, their forceful mien
bore down all before them.  Yet, perdie,
   an overweening awe for ordered rule
(drawn, I blush to say, from De Monarchia!)
caused them to miss that inlet whence the whole
   sweet cataract of liberty descends;
and so you see them, netted in such moil
of turbid aimlessness.”  “And yet,” contends
   me – “if there be contempt for duty,
honor, justice, loyalty –  neither high lands
nor low – no fear of that sublimity
   called holy – what remains, but feud and die?
What path leads out of universal enmity –
that peevish self-engorged impiety
   which desolates the vernal countryside
with fattened castles – that blighted antipathy
to common good, which makes the cities bleed?”
   My dear guide, pensive, murmured then:
“Remember this (your elder teacher’s screed
of long ago):  Freedom builds within,
   or breaks your bones.”  And on that note
I glanced upriver – glimpsed the leonine
white crown, the heavy shoulders, the stout
   birch staff, the hiking boots – the veteran’s
cap, askew – the slouching, musing gait –
pioneering through cane reeds, alone –

* ["Freedom builds within,", etc. : from a poem by Edwin Honig titled "Cuba in Mind"]