Got myself a copy of Ralph Maud's "counter-biography", Charles Olson at the Harbor (critical of Tom Clark's previous bio). Looking forward to this. Heard about it in Kenneth Warren's magazine, House Organ.

*

Continuing with G. Hill's essays. Two of them, toward the end, basically take-downs of TS Eliot. Eliot gets no respect from nobody, nowhow, these days. Sometimes the animus on Hill's part seems a little heavy-handed. He puts too much weight, seems to me, on offhand comments Eliot made to a reporter at some verse theater festival in Scotland (part of his evidence for asserting steep decline in quality of Eliot's later poetry).

But right now, Hill's powerful attention & intellect carries a lot of weight with me... just seems pretty obviously to be shaping his British canon - & shoving Eliot down a notch. Maybe he's right. Pointed toward a book by Eliot contemporary Charles Williams (English poetic mind, c. 1932), which sounds pretty good, based on the bits quoted.

House Organ #60, edited by Kenneth Warren, arrived today. I feel lucky to be getting this in my mailbox. The funny thing is how this little folded-over xerox-style magazine, full of quiet poets you've never heard of, mostly, is the best thing going in hopped-up, expensive America. Tom Epstein put me on to it, several years ago.

Yesterday, by surface mail in the actual world, I received a note from Kenneth Warren (editor of House Organ) about In RI (I'd sent him a copy). Kenneth was so enthusiastic that I had to go back & read the poem again myself. Surprised to find how topical/political it is. A blast against fundamentalism.

Reading Marguerite Yourcenar's The Abyss. By centering the story on Zeno, an alchemist with a single-minded scientific passion to know & to free himself, who delves into the hermetic secrets of the 4 elements within nature & his own body, Yourcenar gives very rich & vivid shape to a distant time (1500s Europe). The novel somewhat reflects Zeno's own fascination with the human microcosm, becoming a literary microcosm.

Funny how yesterday I was sidelining "hermeticism", since this novel reminded me (this morning) how important the alchemical-hermetic aspect is to the U.S. long poem. Both Paterson ("the giant, Paterson"; "a man = a city") & Maximus are structured largely as literary-alchemical transmutations (the epic questor becomes "Everyman", the image/bearer/creator of a cosmos). I've noticed before an odd thing about alchemical notions (the 4 elements, the transmutation of metals, etc.): once you take note of them in literature, they seem to crop up everywhere. I guess you may say that writing itself can be read alchemically.

Kenneth Warren, in his little mag House Organ, has published a serialized study of Charles Olson & Maximus ("The Emperor's New Code") which is steeped in alchemical-theosophical lore.

(However, let's be clear: alchemy, hermeticism, literary obscurity, trobar clus... these are not all the same thing. In other words I would still disagree with Ron S. when he suggests that a kind of secret writing for adepts represents authorial respect for the intelligence of the reader, or that trobar clus-like poetry is or will be the engine of literary change & advance. Yourcenar (or Nabokov, for another example, or Shakespeare) is a great writer because, among other things, she is master of a clear, precise, and capacious style - capable of absorbing and reflecting realities on many different levels.)

Let's gab some more about long poems, OK Hen? OK.

Both Warren & Dale Smith, in that issue of House Organ, point toward the messianic/utopian. Smith, in asserting a bond between the poet's line & the actual (natural/cultural) locus poeticus or environment. Warren, more specifically, seems to judge the "messianic" as a sort of aggressive ethos-formation or ideology, formed in conscious or unconscious conflict with deeper psychosocial forces (patriarchy, anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism). (I think Warren displays sort of a Catholic-Jungian syncretism, in which apocalypse, messianism, utopianism are "outer" phenomena, which fall short of a more complete & substantial inner integration or paradisal state. But I'm sort of guessing here, having given his essays only a cursory & intermittent reading.)

The long poem, with its collective & holistic ambitions, applies itself especially to utopian aims.

Seems to me that in order to approach such aims, any such work would have to have:

1. some kind of cosmological worldview, social-scientific philosophy, or religious base.

2. some kind of holistic or encyclopedic representation of social life.

(Northrop Frye & others have written a lot about such generic requirements.)

How do the American examples stack up in this regard? More in a minute.

The latest issue of House Organ arrived yesterday, including another chapter in editor Kenneth Warren's ongoing Olson research, "The Emperor's New Code", and a little defense of the vitality of "the line" (& rebuttal of Ron Silliman) by Dale Smith. Also some nice late-summer poems.

Warren's effort is unusual. He has a mercurial, intuitive capacity for interpretation, which is a perfect lens for Olson's psychological-historical-occult mentality; he brings a vast store of Jungian-astrological-mythological-sociological knowledge to bear, combined with a critical sense (which is not about "promoting" Olson, but opening up both the dark & light aspects of his epic ambition). This issue's chapter is a fascinating look at the Olson/Ferrini constellation, in which the "ferrous"-iron Ferrini stands for "Red Knight"/Mediterranean/Jewish/feminine qualities, which Aryan/masculinist/German-idealist Olson must challenge. (Here's a Warren review of Ferrini, drawn from another House Organ issue, which gives a sense of what he's getting at.)

p.s. Kent Johnson appended a good comment to this post, please click the box below(even if it shows "0 comments!").

Something from Grassblade Light (vol. 2 of Forth of July). I may have posted this before. I like to think of my longish poem as stylistically somewhere between Hartford & Gloucester.

(My life changed after 2000 - watershed. Kenneth Warren's essay one of those goads to put it all back together.)

         4


  
         Orpheus in love goes undeground,
 a demonstration - Blackstone's Law: what's lost is lost.
 Blackstone dives into his pile of leaves, his palimpsest,
 to prove a mother-of-pearly paradox - what's lost is found.

  
         They baptized you outside the colorful cathedral doors,
 a point of light, a peephole in a dreamy spectrum.
 Something other than angel, animal - a hum,
 a hem in someone's seemly seamless smock - hers,

  
         yours, ours.  Henry remembers you, remembers then,
 via the impress of your lack of shade - he floats
 in whiskered haze, within the darkness that you made,
 a Noah, sinking in a sea of bird-calls, in the wine-

  
         dusky seas of Evening Man, winely drunk...
 - at the pinnacle of that majestic oak, bluejay
 or mockingbird salutes a descending starling, sideways
 (choral grackles measuring the distance Henry sank) -

  
         I shall not drink it with you again til Kingdom Come,
 he said to them.  Blackstone footing out the Roman foot
 from here to there:  only a cupful, only a child's foot,
 only the spectrum of a children's toy, he told them,

  
         spinning and coming round again.  A rainbow.
 Noah, Bluejay, Blackstone, Henry -
 drinking together from the horn of plenty
 of memories... old autumnal children now,

  
         old men.  And Orpheus goes down into the chaos
 shod with mercury, to reap the enormous harvest;
 Eurydice, still silent, paces toward the past -
 ghost of his future, empress of all his shadows.


        
                                     10.26.98

Kenneth Warren's House Organ, issue #45, arrived yesterday. Includes another installment of "The Emperor's New Code", his serial meditation on Charles Olson.