"Poetry : What's Next?" (postscript)

A few afterthoughts about the panel discussion on "Poetry : What's Next?", convened last week up in Cambridge, at the Grolier Bookshop.

Listening to Archambeau's & Burt's predictions (both the serious & the not-so), I was bemused to realize that, with respect to a number of their specific forecasts about future styles & concerns, I had already been there.  In fact I'd been doing those specific things in poetry for a couple decades.

Archambeau : 1) densely-patterned rhyming; 2) obscure, allusive, cryptic idioms; 3) extended serial/narrative poems...
Burt : 1) documentary/factual poems focused on local history in out-of-the-way places; 2) baroque, playfully pleasing, extravagantly stylized poems; slangy, idiomatic (quasi-slam) styles; 3) sober, restrained "thing" poems...

All these approaches are descriptive of what I've been doing since the 1990s.  "It's hard to predict the past," noted Archambeau.  Especially if "the past" is not being read, not taken seriously.

All these works of mine are easily available, in book form or for free.   In RI is a local-factual-documentary poem, full of obscure New England historical objects & events.  It was translated into Italian by Anny Ballardini & is available in a bilingual edition.  Forth of July (consisting of Stubborn Grew, The Grassblade Light, and July) is a vast, baroque, playful, epic explosion of rhyme, assonance, off-rhyme, near-rhyme, reverse-rhyme, inside-out rhyme... along with layers of Joycean networks of oblique, allusive references.  Lanthanum is a long serial poem which morphs into a dream-vision.

But the very last thing I want to do is turn this post into another pathetic example of special pleading.  I find the contemporary matrix or juncture of the poetry business, on the one hand, with the history of literature (or literary tradition), on the other, to be more strange and disorienting as the days go by.  All three of the speakers at the Grolier tried to address this jarring dissonance.  But the reality is more strange than any of us can comprehend.

When you set yourself to write long epic poems, or you fall in love with the high wild classics of the past... or when you notice the discontinuity between what is influential, what is paradigmatic, what is necessary, what lasts in literature - over the long span of time & times - and the obliterating/scattering power of time itself - the clash of cultures, the decay of material things, the overwhelming power of time & change ...  well, if you meditate on these things, if you live with them as you write... then the pathos and absurdity, the parochial narcissism, of your average would-be poet (me, for example) becomes glaringly obvious.

This is why, in the previous post on the Grolier talks, I emphasized the impossibility of saying much with certainty on this subject.  What becomes popular, what becomes great, what becomes a classic - & how it becomes such - is a real mystery.  Partly, I guess, because how it actually happens is slightly different every time : there is no fits-all method.  All I think I can say is that what becomes important to a culture at large - and what retains lasting importance - is what is somehow necessary to that people or that culture.  The work provides some kind of guidance, light, pleasure, or nourishment over time. And it does not lose that flavor (at least not completely).  & secondly, I never forget the technology of literature, of the written word.  It has the potential to outlast the Pyramids.  In fact our literature consists of the shards & fragments of ancient cultures' hero myths, sagas, folktales, laws, proverbs... the thrilling mythical tales, the parents' words to the wise & happy endings... - all those alphabetical ruins of broken peoples (Celts, Romans, Hebrews, Greeks, Chinese...) which we inherit (like Borges, the spider in his infinite library).  These epic identity claims, these tribal testimonies, in all their sublimity and beauty, bump up against the a-historical nowness of the homogenizing global hive-mind.

The social media rough beasts of the future have yet to emerge.  We've seen nothing yet.  Meanwhile the hordes of Happy Poets & Artists flood the airwaves with their twittering selfies.  Aren't we lucky to live in America & own smartphones?  Meanwhile the established institutions for the advancement of literature have their megaphones on full blast - pre-recorded, targeted drone-wise directly at your head.  Aren't we smart?  We are the coolness of now. 

I think the ur-poem - the ursus-poem - the Artorius-poem - the epic of tomorrow - will have some lineaments outlined by Walt Whitman & James Joyce.  The "song of myself" - of any self - is an epic poem.  Bloom, the Everyman of Ulysses, is like each one of us.  Every human being lives within a wonder-world, so marvelous it cannot be expressed in words : only in broken Babel-bits.  We're waiting for that Pentecost of the Ur-story... the thing that unites all people without emulsifying away each person's fingerprint... distinctive quidditas.

Shakespeare also seemed to dwell on the uncanny technology of writing in the sense outlined here.  Think of Sonnet 65...

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o'er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out Against the wreckful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays? O fearful meditation! where, alack, Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?    O, none, unless this miracle have might,    That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

A Talk at the Grolier

The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, located a block or so from Harvard Square since 1927, reminds me of the late lamented  Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan.  It's a splendid little store, full of poetry books you can't find anywhere else.  It's also a sort of miniature poetry museum.  The walls are covered with old b-&-w photos of literary eminences & locals who visited or gave readings there.  A comfortable, welcoming place - yet there's a certain air of literate acuity, articulate awareness.  Intellectual.  Most of all there's a bookish whiff of time & history - of local knowledge, memory, tradition.  Sort of a rare thing - a remnant of old weird America, in the midst of young, amnesiac weird America.

Last Friday evening I took the train up to Cambridge for a panel discussion on a fascinating, though inherently impossible theme : "Poetry : What's Next?"  I feel for the 3 writers corralled to be saddled with this incorrigible subject.  But each of them - Robert Archambeau, Stephen Burt, & Ben Mazer - was up to the task, in his own way.  The passionate iconoclast Thomas Graves was also there, sitting next to me (mild-mannered poète maudit) in the back row, and he has issued his own report on these talks.

Archambeau's talk is replete with self-deprecating charm & Gallic wit.   It's a sort of spoof on the whole idea of a pompous lecture on a profound topic (Archambeau in person radiates jovial good humor).  His pseudo-argument is a scaffold of bold propositions to which "I know you will object" - & then, because he knows we will object, he revises them or shifts to a new dyad of different bold propositions.  It becomes a sort of refrain.  But there seems to be a common thread to the parade of assertions.  He sets poetry within the framework of cultural history, the long view ("the past is hard to predict," he propounds at one point).  And the long view is a gradual but inexorable constriction of the role of poetry in culture at large.  We go from the poet as culture hero and universal sage (Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare)... to the poet as middle-class Sunday fireside companion (Tennyson, Longfellow)... to the poet as maker of difficult autotelic "art objects" (Modernism)... to the poet as merely a member of one among a near-infinite assortment of "special interest groups", subcultures, hobbyists... all of them equal, all of them equally marginal.

This is a familiar story.  Archambeau gives it a twist by describing how past, seemingly passé, modes & techniques - rhyme, allusive symbolism, etc. - have become pervasive phenomena : in rap, hip-hop and spoken word verse, and in the high-symbolist, elliptically-referential methods of commercial advertising jargon.  He does this to underline the obvious difficulty in predicting the "future of poetry" - and also to suggest that the ineluctable constriction of poetry's social sphere may have reached a tipping point... or maybe a moment of dialectical reversal, a Viconian ricorso.  But that's as far as he takes the subject.  Archambeau's underlying message, perhaps, is that there exists no simple avant-garde/Darwinian system of "progress in the arts" - no foundational/revolutionary break with the past (so dear to the hearts of manifesto-writers).  As Eliot put it, "Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are what we know."

Stephen Burt's presentation was more ambitious and serious.  Burt is a rarity in this country : a real poetry critic, and an enthusiast for the new and the little-known.  He honors the poets he discusses, by way of the sheer energy and passion he brings to "unpacking" them - tracing their lineage,  interpreting their "near-nonsense" for ordinary readers.  Burt is also something of a taxonomist.  He classifies scattered species of poets and comes up with resonant family names for the trends they represent (see his essays on "the Ellipticals", or "the New Thing").  This is also a way of foregrounding the oft-unremarked vitality of what's happening now, of the very contemporary American scene.  Burt is quite gifted and discerning in pursuit of these aims.  He can frame in a few paragraphs, for example, the philosophical viewpoints influencing the incursion of "Language Poetry" in the 70s and 80s; their effect (as models for both imitation & resistance) on the innovative poets of the 90s and the past decade; and the socio-cultural forces which impel the emergence of the very latest styles.  True to form, Burt concludes this talk with a taxonomy of four very new and distinct stylistic-technical trends among young American poets, which he reads as growing future influences - because they address, with originality and energy (as Hamlet says they should), "the form & pressure of the time" - giving to "airy nothing" a "local habitation & a name."

Ben Mazer's talk was quite different, as Thomas Graves has already pointed out.  His lecture was a species of what they used to call "poet's prose" - creative, evocative, impressionistic.  As if in light mockery of Archambeau's and Burt's enumerations and categories, Mazer proposes "eight points" which seem to dissolve into cloudy ether at the end.  Yet he issues a categorical challenge - a sort of high-Romantic toss-down of the gauntlet - to any reductive intellectualizing or sociological bracketing of the poet's exalted mission and role.   For Mazer, poetry is both spiritual vocation and craft tradition.   If you don't know and absorb the incarnate, embodied, and unitary tradition of Poetry - a mode of encompassment and renewal which only a bona fide poetic Genius can accomplish - then you have missed the essence, the quiddity, the soul of poetry - and all your pedantic critical intellectualizing about it is pettiness and vanity, is bound for the dustbin.

It is kind of refreshing and incredible to listen to Ben Mazer's resonant poet's voice proclaim such unseasonable articles of faith.  In an age of the populism of creativity - everybody is a star - such quasi-elitist views are going to meet with much scorn.  Yet there is a certain logic to Mazer's position, too.  Poetry is the in-breaking of the ecstatic and supernatural.  It is the voice of the Muse - of an inspiration which cannot be rationalized or paraphrased.  On these grounds the vatic Druid, the sage-mage-shaman, lurks just beneath the surface of the poet's incantatory charism.  There is something definitely archaic and slightly liminal about Ben Mazer's way.  Here it peeks up from beneath the shelves of ye olde Cambridge bookshoppe, like a corpse-flower, or a skunk cabbage, a lily-of-the-valley, or some other shy New England sign of spring.

My own two cents on "What's Next" - which I tried, unsuccessfully & pretty inarticulately, to formulate as a question to the panel that night - is as follows.   I think it's too soon to write off poetry as a marginal hobby or irrelevant throwback.  And I think it's a mistake to solder the Balkanization of contemporary poetic trends onto the Babel-like diversity of contemporary American culture.  This is ultimately based, I think, on a very American, yet also very parochial, attitude toward history.  America's wonderful rainbow-like infinitude of ethnic & cultural & psycho-social identifications is folded within what I believe is a more global and, and yes, universal human history.  The mother of the Muses was Mnemosyne - Memory.  The poet's vocation is to gather up the common threads of our history - what binds us to past generations - and to make sense of them.

We live in a polarized nation : the Right is possessed by a nostalgia for the certitudes of the past, combined with a fundamentalist/Puritan suspicion of the arts; the Left is suffused with an idealism and a passion for social justice as a set of abstract principles - which often unites with a petty scorn and hatred for its political "other" which exactly contradicts the very ideals so cherished.  Such is today's red/blue and very stale purple stalemate.

I think the poet is the dissatisfied one.  She cannot abide the brackets & distinctions of the minor trends in style : she sees them as more of a problem than an opportunity.  The great poetry of the past inherited the narrow trends & techniques : and transmuted them by an uncanny, irreducible process of alchemical synthesis (we call this "making poetry").

What's next?   I look toward a future for poetry without so many qualifying adjectives.  I look to a poetry which is passionately drawn to what we hold in common, as well as to that which is irradicably unique, personal, & unrepeatable.

Human Manifesto

I. Poetry & Worldview

I sent a letter to Poetry magazine, in response to Robert Archambeau's essay on manifestos.

Poetry & Worldview. There's a tension in the idea of poets' manifesting a worldview - since art & poetry are, basically, a constructive escape from abstraction. And a manifesto is a strategic reduction or formula ("My poetry is....")

On the other hand, certain very creative periods (say, 12th century France, or Renaissance Italy, or Eliz. England) seem to have so much energy that philosophy & poetry, abstractions & particulars, find their way into productive chemical (alchemical?) bondings...

As regards poetry, I'm a maximalist. I'm drawn to the deep thinking of Wallace Stevens & Mandelstam, on the spirit of poetry & the poet's vocation. The "theory of poetry" is about the relationship between poetry and the world, between poetry and worldview. It assumes that underneath all the differences, somehow, poetry is "one thing" : and that mysterious something is distinct from other modes of human thought, action and art.

So what marks it out, distinguishes it? To put it baldly : in poetry, language is most alive. If you think of the power, the effect of words & conversation & storytelling upon the mind & senses of a young child - & the child's desire to respond with a substantial message or articulation of his or her own - you are getting closer to the motives & effects of poetry. The Word in this sense is simultaneously Order (the world making sense), Meaning (communicating that sense), & Pleasure (having fun with that newfound power). Mandelstam's theme of "domestic hellenism" - poetry's capacity to domesticate & civilize the world, to help us be at home in reality - gets at this also.

If I were to write yet another(!) manifesto this afternoon, I would push for something like an integral poetry. This would be a bent toward understanding the poem & the work of art as an utterance which synthesizes, rather than alienates, its own background. By this I mean something like Mandelstam's voting for Potebnia over Saussure & the Russian Formalists, in terms of the linguistics source of poetics - Potebnia's notion of the underlying image-basis of language, the ur-image. Language in this sense is not an autonomous shuttling of symbolic differences, disconnected from their origins in primitive pointing & representation.

The poem is an enacted recapitulation or summation of experience, as well as a free & self-contained art-work. It must balance these two, if it wants to be fully integral - that is spilling over with both meaning and (emotional, perceptual) sense. It must both breathe and be complete (exhibit finish, shape, fulfillment - the forms of beauty).

Poetry is the human race throwing itself bodily into vocal, dancing evocation. It is the embodiment of language by (the human) spirit. This is how - by being "maximal" - poetry becomes what Wallace Stevens calls "the sanction" of life. The epic impulse - the Bible, Virgil, Homer - is the impulse to an integral fulfillment - in language - of a time & a culture as an entity, as a whole. Northrop Frye writes about this.

Emily Dickinson : "my circuit is circumference".

II. Mindful Consequences

"The letter killeth; the spirit giveth life." If poetry is the human spirit entering, reviving & giving life to the twilight realm of dead letters - & this, of course, is a big & debatable if - what are the consequences? What implications can we draw for both worldview & poetics?

In the current intellectual climate I suppose my terms & formulae will not find much traction. No, they will be ignored, if not rejected out of hand. Because by using such terms as "spirit", I'm implying an idealist worldview - something of a throwback, akin to the Romantics, & to much earlier thought. One of my heroes indeed is Bishop George Berkeley, a one-time Rhode Island (Newport) dweller (who turns up in the long poem Stubborn Grew) - an idealist if there ever was one, the idealist's idealist, an object of practical Samuel Johnson's mockery.

How can I characterize or summarize my perspective? Our experience of reality and the universe is grounded in consciousness. The human mind is a manifestation (a Human Manifesto) of some more universal & substantial form of Mind. This substantial consciousness is the underlying ground (the sanction, if you will) for world civilization (in Mandelshtamian terms, the global well-being of "domestic hellenism").

So again, what are some of the consequences for poetry? I can only speak for the small sliver of my own point-of-view & my own enthusiasms; there are as many such perspectives as there are poets. & my perspective, to put it awkwardly, is something like incarnational. I wish I knew the technical theological term for my sense of this : it has to do with the logical "architecture" of the manifestation of human thought & language in time, culture & history. One term close to what I'm thinking of might be recapitulation.

Mandelshtam, quoting some 19th century thinker whose name escapes me (Darwin? Lamarck?), writes somewhere : "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." In other words (I think) the individual of a species recapitulates, in its features & characteristics, all the prior stages of evolutionary growth. It carries the signs of its own species-history like scars (or tattoos).

One philosophical implication or analogy I draw from this is, that the individual can be viewed in a "teleological" way : that is, speaking of human beings, the Person is viewed as bearing the signs of an end, a fulfillment, of all prior time & development. Each person an encyclopedia, a microcosm of the species (Whitman harps on this idea in every line of "Song of Myself").

One literary-theological implication or analogy I draw from this notion (of recapitulation) is as follows : each Person is the telos or end or fulfillment of the language expressed in relation to him or her. The Person supercedes or fulfills or embodies or surpasses all the text, scripture, language within which he or she is enmeshed. In this sense, the Christian concept of the "fulfillment of Scripture" is a kind of symbolic norm, referring to an actuality which applies to all persons. One does not have to be a doctrinal believer in order to at least entertain, philosophically, the idea that Jesus' & the Church's playing with the notion of completing, fulfilling Scripture, in Christ's own body & person, is a symbolic representation or acting-out (in a kind of Northop-Frye sense) of a cultural reality which is universal (keeping in mind that the historical record of such theological "play" has included some violent & absolutely tragic results).

I realize I'm getting into some deep & controversial waters - a seeming roadblock to my readers, to anyone who is trying to follow how this gnarled idea relates to poetry itself. Let's go back to the primary assertions here :
1) Poetry is language brought to life by a kind of joyful, expressive energy - of assimilation, representation, & recapitulation of experience.
2) The human spirit proceeds from consciousness, mind - which is the ground of any reality we know.
3) The person, as a kind of epitome or manifestation of this Mind, can be understood in teleological terms as End and Microcosm.

To these basic ideas, let us add the reminder that human language is partial, imperfect, often mistaken : so that that personal "epitome" - the Person from whom, to whom, and around whom language proceeds & gathers - appears in a kind of shroud or disguise of error. Eliot (for one) repeatedly refers to this dimension, with his references to the poet's "faulty equipment, always breaking down" (Four Quartets - if I'm quoting correctly!).

As the Person is the epitome of the species, and Mankind a kind of microcosm of the universal elements, so Poetry aims to epitomize experience in the mirror of language. This is what Frye describes as literature's "epic" drive toward totality, the aim to include everything (see Whitman, Dante, Homer, the Book of Genesis...). Poetry is the telos or summa of language in general; it is speech brought to measure, harmony (& there is no harmony without wholeness, completion).

So, an "integral poetry" would manifest as such on both a micro and macro level : that is, on the micro level, its language would be integrated, synthesized, with prior experience, rather than closed off from it; while on a macro level, its language would aspire to, or at least reflect the presence of, that epic totality which mirrors the substantial wholeness of the original, universal grounding in consciousness itself.

Some of these ideas are glanced at in this stanza of a poem called "Letter to Emily D." (publ. in Dove Street) :

For Scripture precedes history - your insight
precedes Scripture - April's alpha and omega
purl playfully from your soul-saga.
Who finds you meets a palm-tree full of light.

III. Song of Songs

I focused in previous sections on some philosophical or religious background/worldview for my own concepts of what the poet is about. Spirit, mind, idealism, totality... & yet I think I've neglected a vital part of poetry's distinctive range : that is, not so much mind (in the somewhat Platonic sense I've been sketching), as heart, & soul.

Maybe it's the time of year. These beautiful last days of summer & incipient fall somehow help to bring that autumnal phantom, "soul", into view.

If it's permissible to generalize... I don't think our culture is very capable these days of distinguishing between the physical and the psychic, desire and feeling, body and soul. We live in a cultural marketplace of the body - its functions, desires, natural cycles, & illusions - in the midst of which the feelings & intuitions of the soul grow more elusive & estranged.

In the prior sections I talked about how an "integral poetry" would recapitulate experience & suffuse it with meaning, feeling. This is the goal of its voracious inner energy. By this I would not want to exclude experience in any of its ranges or registers; but I also think poetry's deepest impulses have to do with the life, the searchings, the intuitions of the soul. Our tumultuous, painful, exalted, terrible, tragic, comic, sublime, & ridiculous dramas of love, in all its forms, are the substance of that life which poetry aims to recapitulate, represent & celebrate. Thus the "Song of Songs" takes this name because it represents an epitome of song, song reaching toward its fundamental purpose or telos. The rabbinical & monastic hermeneutics which came after - all the interpretations of this sensuous love-song, as a spiritual allegory of the soul's loving search for God - are also paradigmatic, with regard to poetry's expressive purposes.

I'm not trying to canonize the Song of Songs (certainly it doesn't need me for that!) - only aiming to suggest how it represents a central aspect of poetry per se : the search for wholeness, integration - the attunement, the harmony of male & female, parent & child, sibling & sibling, neighbor & stranger - of love with life, soul with body, soul with God.

It can be argued that I'm singling out only one aspect of poetry. True, but there's no help for it : this "manifesto" is an effort to describe my own experience. & what I'm suggesting is that the impulse to write poetry cannot be separated from the impulse to love. Song, as such, is an effusion, an emanation from a state of harmony, or an intuition about possible harmony. It is a back-&-forth, reciprocal drama, which happens as a kind of conversation or encounter, within the creative imagination of the poet.

The affective pathos in individual poems, those qualities which move us, emotionally, are like mini-dramas, off-shoots from the central energy of this creative "love-impulse". The poet, echoing & re-echoing an inward "song of songs", is actually wooing some sweet dimension of life, earth & reality. The song of the poet is analogous in this sense to the "bride" or "bridegroom" (as symbolized in the Book of Revelation).

I think it can be said that the two great (unmatched, unmatching) towers of Western poetry, Shakespeare & Dante, share one central concern : to delineate the nature of love, to measure its whole scale of motives & effects - from blind self-regard to the patient kindness of other-centered agape (rooted fundamentally in the joy & gratitude of life).

These are "soul" matters : not so conducive to scientific analysis or determinate calculation. But that's why poetry happens, anyway : because "there are more things in heaven and earth than are met with in your philosophy, Horatio."

LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.
- E. Dickinson

I want to mention one further consequence of the state of affairs I am trying to evoke here. It seems to me that, if the life of poetry consists in a kind of soul-courtship, or in Mandelstam's terms, a "playful hide-&-seek with the Father", then maybe we have to try to set aside some of the more pedantic, deterministic, superficial, in-house, or otherwise quantified & utilitarian critical approaches to literary reception. Just as the poet's creative labor is subject to the mysterious impulse of the "muse" of soul-searching love - so the reader's reception of the fruits of that labor will echo these deeper dimensions or concerns. & these things are difficult to judge & quantify. The relationship between a poet and his/her culture is analogous to the unpredictable and dramatic dance of courtship. For every culture, this can result in a very long "crane dance" - over centuries, even - at the gate of a very complex labyrinth.

IV Microcosmic Recapitulation

From various villas of the poetry blogoshphere (not a typo) - from John Latta's periodic jeremiads against deracinated poetic sophistry, to Stephen Burt's New Thing essay, to Kent Johnson's article on an incipient Chicago School - from these directions & others, we are presently witnessing poets taking note of a new bent toward objectivity & real things, of poetic perception as well as expression. So how might a Berkeleyan Idealist-Maximalist-Christian-Platonic Recapitulationist-Poet, a partisan of "integral poetry", with a lot of conceptual baggage (obviously), connect (if at all) with this new trend?

American poetry since the beginning has exhibited strong "Adamic" tendencies - ie. the drive (very Emersonian) toward origination. To call it the "reinvent the wheel" syndrome would be cynical; the idea is that poetic perception returns the poet & reader to a sort of dawn-time, a spiritual & intellectual inner freedom where all things are made new. This is visible across the spectrum, from Whitman to Dickinson, from Frost to Olson - extending, in Olson's case, to a kind of megalomaniac liminal region, psychologically both risky & exciting (Kenneth Warren has been exploring this aspect of Olson in an extended, complex series of essays, in his journal House Organ). Jungian, inward, soulful.

Here, actually, we might find an area of overlap between what I'm calling "integral poetry" and these current trends. That ideal "maximalist-recapitulationist" poet, whom I've been attempting to delineate in previous sections of this essay (let's call him Henry, for short) once upon a time took very much to heart the epic & totalizing ambitions of Pound & Olson. He admired Pound's vivid, witty, shorthand notation of historical events, the way he strove to blend them into vast frescos of civilizational flowering & decay; he took to Olson's injunction (offered to Ed Dorn once upon a time) to steep oneself in the cultural history of one region, one locality - become an expert; he saw this carried out beforehand in an interesting, sometimes-graceful way in WC Williams' Paterson. The challenge posed by these masterful poets was Janus-faced : a call both to emulate & to differentiate - since he found a great deal to disagree with in their underlying worldviews...

We have tried to characterize an integral poetry as rooted in experience, not deracinated : that is, a recapitulation, a synthesis of both lived (historical, biographical) and literary past. Here is the point I'm trying to make : the only way to achieve this level of integration is by drawing on the epic dimension, the epic mode. The poet is "maximalist" because totality, wholeness, universality are active, essential elements in the poetic construction.

The "things", the "minute particulars", which surface in the kind of poetry I'm talking about, are not simply particulars of the world in general : they are distinct things within the microcosmos created by the poem. The integral poet evokes and summons up a holistic imaginative world, within which particulars are surfacing all the time, on many narrative levels - exhibiting a multitude of facets, harking back to the Biblical/Dantean/Joycean richness of fourfold meaning : literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical...

& I should mention that one examplar of this approach happens to be the maximalist-recapitulationist poet, "Henry" - who has been spinning layered worlds for some time now out of the history & psycho-cyclobiography of the little state of Rhode Island, in various modalities of short & lengthy works...

V. Afterthoughts

I've probably overshot the mark, & want to hedge my remarks a little. My insistence on the epic impulse, on totality, might be taken for sheer grandiosity, magnitude for its own sake. Or for a mandarin complacency, weighed down with pedantry rather than experience : out of touch, out of air. To burden all poets & modalities of poetry with the elaborations of epic would be unrealistic, to say the least; in fact, it would represent an all-too-familiar form of eccentricity. One remembers, inevitably, Stevens' (very 20th-cent.) lines from "Poems of Our Climate" :

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

No : all I want to suggest is that the "integral", integrated vision - the epic impulse, the whole story - lies at the roots of poetry considered as a whole itself, as "one thing". It's there, as a dimension which can't be left out (ie. poetry is not reducible to Sergeant Satire & Private Lyric). A sort of underground spring, a possibility, an impulse, an aspiration - a potential source of nourishment.

The human search for wholeness, love, & freedom is not reducible to either American-style Adamism or European-style existential deracination. The search for truth also involves memory - historical, literary, poetic - & the recognition of continuities, returnings, recapitulations - strange/familiar echoes - deja-vu...

Thoughts on Rimbaud from Robert Archambeau. Tres interessante. (He should write more often in this concise notational vein.)

Back from my new nephew Inigo's baptism, in beautiful Puerto Rico, in a little Catholic church with a metal roof, and an altar which illustrates the sacred scenes almost entirely by way of pelicans (which sail over the beach there). "The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down."



Seem (who knows) to be done with my 10 yrs of quatrain mining. Feeling of lightness. Hope to find something new & interesting to do now.

Enjoyed today's post by Robert Archambeau, on the Cambridge School poets, reading vs. consuming, etc., the battle of the Brits (similar to many of our clashes by night over here).

Robert Archambeau writes a thoughtful extended response to the blither-blather on "post-avant" over at the Harriet site (Reginald Shepherd's posts).

I tend to see the negative side of what Robert's calling "negative legislation" (the contemporary poet's refusal to judge and emphasis on the ambivalence & waywardness of language). To me it often feels like a cop-out, to the extent of denying human agency in the creation and use of language. That's one reason I'm being provocative myself (see the comment on Shepherd's anthology Lyric Postmodernisms).

But I'm not merely being negative about the negative. I'd like to replace the ubiquitous 20th-cent. fixation on "language" (as system : as the currency, the substance, the organizing matrix, of poetry) with an emphasis on silence, gesture, mime. Hart Crane's statement should be its motto: the poem is

"a single, new word, never before spoken, and impossible to actually enunciate".

A poem is, in this sense, the sum of the poet's strategic gestures toward something never-before-said or -sayable. It is absolutely uncategorizable according to any prior linguistic grid, and the poet bears complete responsibility for - is the human agent of - the final & efficient cause of - all its meanings and reverberations.

Robert Archambeau writes a brief note on In RI : a kindly reminder that my books & poetry actually exist outside my own head. Not sure he's actually read much of it, since that "gently melancholy" tone he describes changes as the poem goes along. There is a plot, centered on Roger Williams's successful evasion of theo-cats in Massachusetts Bay, & getting of independent charter for colony of religious toleration & sep. of church/state (you know, lil' Rhody). Concomitantly the poem's tone becomes less "melancholy" & more varied. (p.s. Rosmarie Waldrop's take-off on R. Williams' Key into the Language of America was published in '94, so apparently we were consulting this text at about the same time. I was not aware of her book until later.)

Olson is part of the background - but perhaps more so is Williams' Paterson. I remember I was also reading at the time (the poem was written in 1994-95) Jeffrey Walker's critical study, Bardic ethos and the American epic poem, which takes a rather dim view of Olson.

The blog & the DIY books have allowed me to sift & shape My Very Own "oeuvre" - so somebody could come along & discover this little Rhody Cosmos if they wanted to. As it is though I exist in a virtual webspace or self-enclosed Netherland, a non-entity in Poetry World. Very strange. My past WERKE weighs heavily. I need to write a novel or something, get out from under this oppressive sense of frustration. Am actually very pleased with Fontegaia (poem) of last few months - writing can be its own reward, but I'd like it to be more. Gets lonesome in My Own Private Siena.

In order to improve on the Silliman Bi-Focal Theory of Contemporary Poetry, Robert Archambeau looks to an essay by David Kellogg.

Based on Robert's summary, however, I can't see how this is any improvement. The structure of the grid is the same, although Kellogg has added a dimension.

Poetry is assumed to be this product which flows out of culture in measurable quantities. You can establish fixed criteria for assigning individual pieces of the product to a grid : ie., "tradition" and "innovation" are already known & defined, "self" and "community" are items you can abstract without too much difficulty from any particular portion of the GNPP (Gross National Poetry Product). Voila : your poet is assigned a critical niche in the Standard Schema.

But what if the patterns of formative imitation which poets utilize are exactly the same - whether you're in either of the so-called camps? Innovators are imitating their 20th-century models; traditionalists are doing likewise. Both are claiming the mantle of tradition (the traditions of new & old, respectively). Add a further twist : what if the innovators claim to be new by going back to older models (epics, Native American songs, collective poetics, performance art, etc.) in order to be "new"? What if the models of the so-called traditionalists (rhymed iambic couplets, say) are of more recent provenance than those of the innovators (say, free-verse anaphoric lines)?

The fact of the matter is that originality is not informed by the artist's attitude toward stylistic change. In other words, there is no "new" model for imitation : every model - by virtue of being a model - is already traditional. Who is more traditional today than the poets who imitate the 20th-century avant garde?

[p.s. this statement needs refinement. Let me say this : actually, the original, inventive poet will pay very close attention to stylistic developments and what they might mean. But what makes for originality is not their capacity for consistency - ie. the consistent allegiance to whatever is considered the trend of the moment. Original poetry is invariably anomalous : it is original precisely because the poet does not "follow" any particular trend. Thus critical schemas which emphasize such trends, based on abstract invariables such as Kellogg proposes, inevitably distort the un-paraphrasable, empirically-complex literary reality.]

The issue of "self" & "community" is perhaps even more vexed, but I'm not going to get into that here.

I object to the abstract, generic quality of the grid approach to criticism. It's lazy thinking : pigeonholing, card filing. The uniqueness of interesting poetry swallows up every proposed schema : the talent of the great & gifted poet takes a certain essential aspect of poetry - its capacity for obliterating and transcending our habitual mental & philosophical categories - and multiplies it exponentially. Individual poets are always contradicting so-called trends & traditions : & then the new supposed traditions are established in their wake, by their imitators; & then, running a distant third, the critics come along with their cute little diagrams.

Even those poets who seem so middlebrow, mediocre, unable to escape the cliches and paradigms of their period styles - say, Longfellow, considered from the usual 20th-century perspective - if looked at closely and carefully, suddenly begin to reveal their inimitable qualities, their uniqueness. & then it's time for "reconsideration" : critics, prepare your outlines!!!!

lotsa pinblog pinging about Auden today, here &.

I like much about Auden's poetry & criticism. Brilliant in the extreme, engaged. I'm bored sometimes by the Average Man approach. Auden had science/engineering background, & it shows, in that reflexive lot measurement. The rhetoric of the 18th-cent. Restoration : always calculating toward the statistical mean. It gets depressing, like row houses, PBS series, (some of) Larkin... Probably has (ironically) a class basis : in order to address the Common Man, the genteel Oxbridgian scholar feels compelled to apply the dumbed-down statistical patter of the poll-taker, the survey man...

sociological, analytical... doesn't grip down to the coils of individual experience, but puts same in context of the Average. definitely disenchanting, in ways good & bad.

some might want to let the sociologists & novelists carry that load.

Found myself going back again to Robert Archambeau's essays on "Contingent Poetics".

Though I think he's talking about a certain stream of poetry, & maybe not even the "main" stream - still, I think there are really valuable & substantial ideas to work with there.

Maybe I should say that over the past couple days I was struck by the notion that the approach he's taking might be very useful for me. For dealing with my own present creative impasse & difficulties. Time will tell.

It occurred to me that three or so different factors might be affecting me:

1) the impact that Pound/Williams/Olson had on my development back in the early 80s. I went to work on the long (history-based) poem with their examples at hand, sensing that here was a way to deal with some themes that obsessed me. And also sensing that I wanted to do it differently.

2) the other factor is a hunch that what impelled Stubborn Grew has to do with something Pound was interested in before he started working on the Cantos : & that is the notion of the poet's voice as being a mask or persona.

I'm starting to think that what might be the catalyst for synthesizing "lyric" & "document", or song & fact, is the persona - the ritual assumption of the mask.

I was doing this in Stubborn Grew. I was channeling Mandelstam, in his late, Voronezh, Chaplinesque mode. I'm starting to think there is more to discover & try here.

3) the third factor is a sense that "contingent poetics", as R. Archambeau is outlining it, might indeed be integrated with my ideas about history.

The Jewish, Christian & Islamic concepts of history - in different ways - are precisely the variant records of interventions or juxtapositions (or misreadings or jumblings) of spiritual reality with historical chronology - documentary fact. The whole premise of Christianity, for its part, is based on the testimony of witnesses to things that actually happened. (I don't want to get into all the ambiguities & ironies of religious historicism here, but there are many interesting implications for a "contingent" poetics.)