I said it ALL better 10 yrs ago, talking to Kent Johnson in a Jacket.

It's not, as the pigeonholers would have it, about craft or technique, or about the groups or trends your poet seems to align with, or what all. Americans have an obsession with technology and branding. Poetry is beyond and against all that.

The "technology" of poetic language is intricate and subtle to a degree that escapes paraphrase and conceptualization. As Mandelstam expressed it in his essay about Dante, the Divina Commedia is poetic speech of such alien refinement as to represent a language from the future. (This is the wild region of the atmosphere where poetry, prophecy and science fiction meet...)

And yet "technology" as a term is also completely inadequate for what we are concerned with here.

Minor pigeonholer (& poetry-lover) Jonathan Mayhew happened to bring up the subject of "duende" recently, which led to comment-box activity around this and related para-musical phenomena (fado, saudade, etc.). This kind of vocabulary begins to approach the obscure poetic regions more closely that anything "technical" - regions where the subjective and the communal, knowledge and feeling, are shown - by the artist's expression - to integrate, to interpenetrate.

A poem is feeling and intuition. These forces guide the poet to speak beyond the normal range of utterance.

But what also makes this region even more rarified is that, in the depths, world poetry is one. That is, the poet, possessed by the duende-fury, enters into a dialogue or dialogues with poetic ancestors and contemporaries. There, the vast and profound range of "technical resources" - the rhetorical sublimity of the great poets of the past - begins to become actual, active, and influential. We are talking about the depths of language - like the subtlety, strangeness & uncanny instinct of the most exotic jungle flowers, insects & birds.

A poet like Frost may camouflage these phenomena with faux-folksiness - but he's aware of them : they're there in his themes and compositional models (Horace & Shakespeare, for example).

The main point I want to make here, though, is that all this development - the state of creative composition in poetry - is a subjective, intuitive, and emotional process in the highest degree. Unpredictable. Demanding an integration of opposites : an intense social engagement in the immediate contemporary world, with a profound awareness of subjective and subconscious impulses. Intuitive. A 6th sense.

(I'm only reiterating some things I tried to say in interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket, 8 yrs ago.)

Jacket accepted my review of John Latta's Breeze - it's posted here. That's good news, though I don't think I did it justice. Latta's poetry in this book is conversational rather than show-offy. Or rather the balance between conversation and literariness is pleasing.

Chris Murray alerts me to interesting Dale Smith essay & discussion in Jacket 30. Will want to read this. I got a lot out of an earlier book by Jeffrey Walker, Bardic ethos and the American epic poem.

reading about Kenneth Cox over at Jacket. I see he translated the Sienese writer Federigo Tozzi (Con gli occhi chiusi = Eyes Shut).

Link to a different Lincoln (emergent toward the end, here).

Have been reading the section on JH Prynne over in Jacket. Such complex careful attention. Despite the sense that late-Empire Larkinaise (Larkin-malaise) is easily transmitted to Brit academic fellers, one can be jealous of the highly-cultivated ears over there. A poetry gains weight & resonance when it finds a shared language for shared experiences. A "landscape", a "season".

Also Keith Ward, Religion and Community.

from the "Ancient Light" chapt. of Stubborn Grew:


The train ride to Oxford was something else.
Profound droning weight of iron travel machine,
farmland English backyard a pale moss green
in the moist December light, your pulse

is calm outside of London, Providence
might be a way of life, a common sphere,
fair, sensible and just - a Hertfordshire
in an ovoid Shakespeare's head, a salience.


(cf. Mandelstam's ruminations on poetry as evolutionary "salience", in Journey to Armenia.)

"ovoid"? It struck me yesterday - the distinct oddity of the term for the center of power: "the Oval Office".

*

An egg sprung out of winter Iron Age.

At the other end of Stubborn, there's a Joycean-Chaucerian parade-procession of sorts, Anna Akhmatova on her way to get a prize in Oxford:


Nay, the horses are in final fedders and wee flying.
Through the greenmoss ways by the quiet waters,
by the oxenford, near where Actemydovie totters
along with to sieve her mettle, warning and warming

her loving piece all the way to Petroglad, finally;
and well pick Nuckleheadup along the Wye, playing flowt
and flowering flowcraft, like Jimi Hucktrix and what
Bea J Hen can seagal us a supthere, friendly

among the gould keelover flowerpunters,
those steady-eyed treefellers and form farmers
like granite under the holy rollercoasters,
a sprungfeedle farmcanter. A witbull H-er's

resting on the Blackstone shoulders, his liberty
a done thing everydeeday, as we canterbury
along, long plowman's wake - and a very gradumerry
grape it is, ripe to the buddies, from a little tree -

near the edge of the Terrace
the limbs all black and thorny
the buds, just barely
the green moss

soft, tender
spring whispers
kindness now, and grief. Hers,
yours, ours. . . [etc.]


(p.s. the 3rd vol, July, was finished on 3.5.2000, the anniversary of both Akhmatova's & Stalin's death. Akhmatova crops up in odd places throughout Forth of July.)

Jacket Magazine published a few of the more impersonal, "American" sections of July, here. And some sections from Grassblade Light, here.

I think the remarks in previous blog post (on Mandelstam's Redemption/free-play symbiosis) run parallel to some of WH Auden's discoursing. Also, I think the following excerpt from a poem titled "One Evening (Early Spring)" (which appeared in the Jacket interview) illustrates some of Paul Lake's comments on fractal-recursive order in poetry:

         7

  
         Around the synagogue in the evening light
 the houses cluster in their modest drab integrity.
 Walking through their vocations (under blight
 of a voracious contracting whirlpool city)
 the humble continue. . . gathering on holiday
 outside the bronze double doors of their temples.
 The writer (an unnoticed bystander) crumples
 a scrap of crosshatched paper and throws it away.

  
         And the wind lifts a corner of the scribbled page,
 not yet finished with the end of the universe.
 Over the brilliant dome a small cloud of rage
 disguises the sun – cries:  I will immerse
 in tears – I will burn with fire – I will erase. . .
 (– pretending once more deep within heaven
 not only to destroy all creation and then
 again rebuild the whole cracked edifice

  
         but to do all this in the manner of a scribe
 with one hand at his aching brow and one eye
 peering at a mossbound, moldy parchment –)
 and Lord, we have deserved your diatribe.
 The parched earth groans for a comet's finality.
 Your mortified heart stretches through space and
 swelling spreads (ubiquitous) the fiery ointment
 of your love, of your forgiveness, of your peace.


      
                                                3.26.97

Haven't had much time to blog lately.

Readers probably put off by my para-religious discourse sometimes. I can't help it, sorry : it's part of me, ever since religio-psychological crisis here at old Brunonia in 1973, when I thought Shakespeare & Jesus were hovering around my dorm room.

My work in poetry a scrap heap of hesitant forays. Line from which the title came :
"Hesitant, grieving, stubborn grew, the rose."

Have been reading a lot about the ancient Greeks. Am interested in POETICS as an exploration of the borderline between different kinds of knowledge : philosophy, science, history, poetry. & poetry as means of presenting states of feeling & experience that are elusive, not so easily subject to definition & categorical discourse. Talking about this some in the Jacket interview with Kent Johnson.

No, this blog post is not a resume, sorry.
No David H., I'm not a "projectivist". Too much magic thinking & mumbo-jumbo, not enough art.

But I AM recurrently interested, very much so, in the concepts circling around poetry and "polis", or city-making. It's a steady theme in Pound, WCW, Olson, Crane's long poems. It's something I've generally taken an interest in, having an M.A. & experience in neighborhood organizing, living in a little city-state, etc. No this is not a resume, sorry.

Poetry is not rational discourse. But it's not necessarily irrational. Wallace Stevens was so interested in this issue. It's not rational because underlying its organicness (sound & sense synthesis, animality) is a kind of a priori AFFIRMATION, prior to dialectics or discussion. It's an enunciation all by itself that creates a roundedness, a sense of pleroma, fulness. That a priori emphatic phatic speech - is that what worried the philosopher (Plato)?

Funny doubleness of poetry : dangerously solipsistic on the one hand; amazingly responsive to direct immediate particular reality, nature, thingness, emotion, experience, on the other. Consequence of the impulse to make sounds, prior to their "correctness", appropriateness (Dante ends Divina Commedia with imitation of baby talk).

Yet the art is about fitness & finish. Which also represent or reflect ethical qualities. Place in good poetry where technique, theme, inspiration coalesce. Cannot be willed or faked. Also often domesticated into permanent Boredom-world (I too dislike it).

Orphism represented "soul search" in Greek world of power-polis. World poetry, poetry in English, American poetry, New American subcultures - what a universe of Babble ! But poetry is an unaccountable synthesis, an appearance of talent, a rarity. & we sicken ourselves on rich food.

Here's an old poem (I know, I posted this back in Jan.):


at noon

Orpheus sings alone,
his lyre left in the wind
moaning in elliptical harmony.

Persephone sleeps, her head
hidden in her arms, and shadows
of clouds passing over her hair.

And John, in his prison, hears
dance music in the rooms above,
and the sound of an axe on stone.

Socrates: Hen, you AWFUL good at glurping out them shimmery concept-bubbles which unfortunately tend to pop before they drop. This gander about "para-form" fits the genre to a T. Sound sushpicioushly like a dead end again.

Henry: Well, I know, Socky. The special temptation to verbalize from the preconscious cortex afflicts us daily.

Socrates: the question I have for you is, ain't "conceptual" form been done about 30 yrs ago, with a lot of boring art anyway?

Henry: Likely so. But maybe the deal with poetry is somewhat different, since the verbal & the conceptual are such close cousins. & often poetic expression tries to put into words the pre- or nonverbal aesthetic/conceptual apprehensions which are also represented in music & painting.

Socrates: And?

Henry: Well, in the essay on Form which I put into this blog a couple weeks ago (Jan 6), and in the interview in Jacket with Kent Johnson, I was trying to get at this idea a little more. The Form essay draws on Rifatterre's study of poetics, which emphasizes the close relation between aesthetic form in poetry (poetics), and semeiosis. The poem is a signal of wavering or variant meaning(s) - not hermetic, but not disclosed in a fixed form either. I would like to build on that notion of the poem as an allusive object of multivalent meaning (simultaneously self- and other-referential, self-sufficient & symbiotic), by adding to it the meta-role of the poet in culture & history. The role I have in mind is a figure (one among others) for the role of the artist in general.

Socrates: & ?

Henry: Think of Yeats, for example. Engelberg's great monograph on him, "Vast Design", brings out the depth and variousness of Yeats' interactions with other arts, particularly painting & drama, and theorizes a "European" concept of all-round culture (he compares Yeats with Goethe in this respect). (Hey, OK, think of Ashbery too if you want.) A unity of being toward which Yeats yearned.

Socrates: Et?

Henry: Et in consequendum heh-heh. The formalities of what US poets have come to think of as formalism languish like chunks of grid-architecture tossed by the side of the highway if they are not integrated into some more natural/traditional sense of aesthetic form - beauty, if you will. In this respect maybe I'm close to the perspective of the US/Israeli architect Moshe Safdie (featured in a recent NYorker article). Beauty that is "functional" in a cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual way all at once. & in a social sense this is perhaps the "unity of effect" for which the utterances of the poet correlate local formalisms informalisms & semiotic signals. The telos of technique. Para-form.

There is more table talk about Mandelstam, long poems, and the HG scheme of things in an interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket issue #10. My only regret about that interview is that I was a little contemptuous (& uninformed) about the New Formalists (not that I will ever be a New Formalist).