Mandelstam, by way of Michael Eskin

[posted also at Plumbline School]

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In an appendix to his book Poetic Affairs (on Paul Celan, Durs Grunbein, Joseph Brodsky, and the kinship each poet shares with Osip Mandelstam) Michael Eskin deftly draws together some logical threads of Mandelstam's "Acmeist" poetics :

1. aesthetic : "Mandelstam's notion of the 'living word' ties in with the overall Acmeist endeavor to create 'an organicist poetics... of a biological nature' - a poetics predicated on biology and physiology, on 'the infinite complexity of our inscrutable organism,' and on the basic notion that a 'poem is a living organism'" [Poetic Affairs, p.139]. More than that : "The breathing, moving human body is the ultimate ground of poetry. The 'poetic foot,' Mandelstam notes, is nothing but 'breathing in and breathing out.' The poem is literally animated into existence by 'the breathing of all ages' to the extent that it is the articulation of the breathing, moving bodies of countless poets 'of all ages' [ibid.].

The image of poetry projected here is strikingly reminiscent of the ecstatic "speaking-in-tongues" event on the day of Pentecost, as described in the New Testament : poetry here is akin to the descent of the Holy Ghost, by means of which people from "all lands" begin speaking together, each in their own languages, yet mutually understanding each other.* Poetry is a physiological embodiment, shared "inscrutably" across time & space.

2. ethical : The Acmeist movement developed in the early 20th century as a dialectical response to the otherworldliness of Russian Symbolism. Eskin explains : "'Acmeism is not only a literary phenomenon,' Mandelstam notes in 1922... This new ethical force... consists first and foremost, in the reversal of the Symbolist denigration of the real, phenomenal world of the here and now... Mandelstam emphasizes the world's very reality and materiality as the Acmeists paradigm and horizon...
"A love for the here and now, for 'all manifestations of life... in time and not only in eternity' - a love for this world and this reality, for one's 'own organism,' for one's singularity, cannot fail to bear on sociopolitics. What kind of sociopolitical setup will foster and secure the possibility of this kind of Acmeist existence?... Mandelstam lays out his own sociopolitical vision:

'There are epochs that maintain that they are not concerned with singular human beings, that human beings must be put to use, like bricks, like mortar... Assyrian prisoners swarm like chicks under the feet of a gigantic Tsar; warriors personifying the power of the state inimical to the human being shackled pigmies with long spears, and the Egyptians are dealing with the human mass as if it were building material... But there is another form of social architecture who scale and measure is... man... It doesn't use human beings as building material but builds for them... Mere mechanical grandeur and mere numbers are inimical to humankind We are tempted not by a new social pyramid, but... by the free play of weights and measures, by a human society... in which everything is... individual, and each member is unique and echoes the whole.'" [ibid., pp. 139-140]

Eskin notes how this stance had consequences for Mandelstam's personal fate, & which was echoed by Brodsky in his remark that the poet "is a democrat by definition" (& here we further note the shade of Pushkin, standing behind both Mandelstam & Brodsky).

Finally, Eskin reiterates Mandelstam's supremely dialogical concept of poetry. M's famous essay "On the Interlocutor" likens the poem to a message in a bottle, set afloat on the sea toward an unknown friend/reader in the future; when conjoined with the charismatic ("Pentecostal") sense of poetry outlined above, we understand that each reader, each one of us - when we truly encounter a poem - has become the intended recipient of the message. We are conjoined - in a kinship of friendly dialogue & companionship, across the sea of time & space - with the poet in person.

[*Note : these references to the Pentecost are my own interpolations, not not discussed in Eskin's text.]

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& how would I relate all this to our Plumbline?

I feel a sense of weight : of the earthly weight of material things, and the weight of lived experience. & I relate this first of all to all those dimensions of poetry which remain unspoken : the submerged portion of the iceberg, so to speak : all the overtones & undertones & inexplicable feeling-tones & hidden meanings & unknowables which help give a poem its resistance, its resonance, its own specific gravity. & further, I relate this to living specificity and particularity, that vividness and local accuracy which are part of the glory of poetry - a synthetic brilliance of referential & evocative vision : faculties of Mandelstam's "infinite complexity of our inscrutable organism." These are dimensions which weight the "middle path" of our plumbline : tied deep down in the heart of faithful utterance, Wallace Stevens' "spirit of poetry" as the "companion of the conscience." & then I think of all this as impelling the poet to strive for a poetry that can speak... like this :

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. (- Wallace Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry")

New posts today over at the Plumbline.

The Plumbline School is perking up a little...

Things are livening up a little over at the Plumbline School...

I like the short poems that "Peter" (don't know his last name - believe he resides in England) has been posting occasionally to the Plumbline School ("Valentines") - & sometimes also in the comment streams to those posts.

posted something new over at the Plumbline.

Local Things - In Loco Kenosis

Speaking of long poems... thinking about Chicagoan Robert Archambeau's recent digest on manifestos, and how, for Robert, style, and the politics of style, seems to be the prime function of poetry, & the pivot of its analysis...

& thinking about Stephen Burt's recent "New Thing" quasi-manifesto, detailing the swing back to restraint, impersonality, objectivism, the thingness of (poem) things... & yet the framework seems to be, again, a focus on the pendulum of style...

which got me thinking of another Chicagoan, Peter O'Leary, who manages to inject a Catholic-spiritual dimension into the consideration of "objectivity" (see his articles etc. on poet Frank Samperi)...

But couldn't it be said that the style of objectivity in American poetry has a lineage in Puritan poetics (Edw. Taylor) & Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau)... & that Emerson, Whitman et al. carried this into a kind of (Romantic) quasi-divinization of the human mind & imagination... setting it free from the Bonds of antiquity & Europe, into the primal wilderness of new "local" discovery (Wallace Stevens, WCW, Olson, Dorn, so many others)...

The thing I keep coming back to is the historical aspect of Christianity... the absolute local "thingness" of the Incarnation... & how the Eastern Orthodox concept of "divinization" somehow echoes, yet corrects & resolves the Faustian egoism of Western Renaissance-Romantic consciousness (precisely because that divinization is dependent on the unique history - the abject-glorious historical actuality - of Incarnation)... as one scholar recently paraphrased the famous formula of Irenaeus - Cur Deus homo? (why did God become man?) "God became man so that man might become God" : "A human being becomes god only insofar as God becomes this particular human being [ie., Jesus. & my italics]." (Arkadi Choufrine, Gnosis, Theophany, Theosis)...

This comes up in my brief essay on the long poem... & reminds me of the tremendous historical-Roman thinginess of long-poem poet David Jones... a local kenosis...

& these theological things might provide a conceptual frame for aesthetics... which transcends the boxed-in artiness of American style-for-its-own sake...

& my own endless unfinished Opusses, lost in Rhode Island... the infinite quatrainian guitar-solos - tending toward the vanishing point of Apocalypse, Eschaton... Golden Age... this is my framework... (& I guess you might even say that this ecstatic see-saw logic of Incarnation - "God became man so that man might become God" - this historical/pivotal, scriptural/anti-scriptural, word/flesh balancing act - is at the root of a style of the "plumbline"...)

(Perhaps the best summa of all the issues raised in this post can be found in Joseph Brodsky's great poem of thingness & crucifixion - "Nature Morte".)

Posted something new(?) over at the Plumbline.

New post over at the Plumbline (on the "broken middle", & Gillian Rose).

New-old comments on the "scene" over at the Plumb...

New post over at Plumbline.

More new things over at the Plumbline School today.

Added something new again at the Plumbline.

I posted something new over at the Plumbline School today.

J.H. Stotts walks the Plumbline.

The Plumbline School is a-growin'.

I changed the wording in the header from a "fellowship" to a "convocation". I like the word fellowship, but I can see how it might have (unintended) sexist connotations. In other words, I hope some poets of the fair sex will be joining us soon.

New Lanthanum today.

Also some new memoranda over at The Plumbline School.

I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Want to join the Plumbline School, for real? Want to be a BeeP? Sign up here.

Further investigation proves I was mistaken about Charles Olson's notion of the "middle voice". This has less to do with a level of diction or manner, than with a mode of grammar, drawn from Greek originally, in which the verb is between active and passive, & the subject of the sentence is also its object. There are several fascinating google links on this topic. And there may be a tangential relation between Olson's notion & what I've been trying to get at with this notion of "middling" (both ideas are looking for a center of balance).

But the first axiom of The Plumbline School might be -

Poetry = a Happy Medium.

Let's see then... what's a good po-biz moniker-brand for what I've been blagging about today? The school of understated, middling, normative, transparent, direct, inclusive, comprehensive, objective...

- how about the Plumbline School... !!!???

Bards o'th' Plumbline. The BPs. The BeePs.

Who wants to be a BeeP with me?

Here's an early (primordial) BeeP work.