Truth shall make you free

CHICORY MENOROTH

There were Goulds for 150 years

plowing granite outcrops

in New Hampshire.  Topsfield

nurtured them, with jagged shears,

thick brambles, frozen lakes.

They strove in relative

obscurity – no live

broadcasts, no edited remakes.

Live Free or Die.  The grumpy stoic

emits a little light,

no less – the gift outright

be given back (one life, unique).

An intuition of soul liberty,

that’s all – that one might have

life in oneself, to serve

& swerve again (Boethian quiddity);

that conscience might arise like spring

in blustery New England –

a crocus prancing gold

before snow melts; your being

perfect, in a sense (meek master

of your own ramshackle

chicken-yard, O Jacqueline).

You glimpse them off the highway – chicory

menoroth, maybe – glimmering

remote star-woodcuts,

lamps over lonely fields...

just rightness in your bones (beaming).

2.8.16

Reading (slowly) Jay Parini bio of Robert Frost (since I was up Franconia way a few weeks ago). His time at Harvard, classes with Santayana, interest in philosophy of W. James, others.

Got me thinking in desultory way today about how nations & cultures slowly work around (or don't work around) certain intellectual problems or impasses. U.S. philosophy seems mainly about achievement of inner freedom & realism (Emerson's self-reliance), large dose of scepticism about religion (James, Santayana, Royce, many others). Maybe kind of a cousin to British empiricism. (I'm no expert, that's for sure : not well-read at all... just speculatin' here.)

This modern philosophy (secular, pragmatic, humanist, sceptical) runs counter to the older American strain of Protestant religious piety & enthusiasm. & you can see poets like Stevens & Eliot & Frost wavering & pondering at the crossroads of this deep intellectual/spiritual divide - ambivalent, cautious, crafty... (Crane, on the other hand, boldly, brashly, perhaps naively, rashly...) trying to work things out for themselves. Same can be said for their great precursors (Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Melville).

I see in my own poetry an unresolved obsession with this problem of faith & scepticism as well. I'm always trying to "figure it out". The mystery of it all, that is. I've come to some provisional conclusions (oxymoron there, moron).

I think I float somewhere between Eliot & Crane. There's this medieval sense that there is something uncannily canonical & authoritative in the Judaeo-Christian prophetic scripture & religion(s). But there's a stance, with me, against Eliot's reactionary authoritarianism - in fact a strong swing in the direction of Crane's Blakean-antinomian-poetic-Romantic kind of originary vision.

I think for me the resolution comes by way of an idea about the nature of religious language. For me, the Biblical record is - underneath all the hard-to-identify-with cultural archaism (& primitivism : see the amazing "Song of Deborah", for ex.) - strangely factual & historical (& despite the layers & layers & layers of storytelling & thematic editing & manipulation). There has been some kind of prophetic intervention of a powerful divine Word, the nature of which we don't yet rightly understand.

But - & here is my humanistic caveat : this Word, from the beginning, has aimed toward universalism. It is a fundamentally dramatic presentation, of a representative reality. This is epitomized in the title Jesus applied to himself : "the Son of Man". He used it in a double sense, and interchangeably, to refer 1) to himself personally, and 2) to humanity in general. As I understand this, he was intentionally setting himself forward as a kind of "actor of a general sign". This is an awkward way of putting it - I mean as a representative figure. You might think of this action as a kind of equalizer : a democratic limitation on the authority of that same Word. What I mean is, what is being implied by this kind of verbal formulation, is that the scriptural witness, the whole Biblical narration, is to be taken as some of the Epistles take it - as allegory, as typology : "in a spiritual sense". In other words, the historic act of divine intervention, narrated in the Bible, is intended to be understood as an "illustration" of universal human experience.

This is in no sense put forward, here, as asserting a limitation on the moral, experiential, spiritual motivation & meaning - the diverse forms of religious sustenance - which are and can be drawn from this scriptural & sacerdotal source. My thoughts here represent just one among many ways of drawing out the implications of the Biblical event(s). For me, anyway, this vague direction seems to offer a possible means of reconciling faith & humanism, religion & the secular.

& further... it must be kept in mind that the "Son of Man" is characterized by Jesus as someone subsisting always in (close) relationship with the Spirit of God. It's an irreducibly binary or triune mode of existence (leading ultimately to unity & oneness). Here is where humanism & faith part ways. Jesus relates in the Gospels that "all Power & Authority" have been granted to the Son of Man; indeed, the Biblical "illustration" of truth may have even emerged originally from Man; but what is the substance of this illustration, exactly? It is the manifestation, & the record, of the unaccountable activity of divine Spirit - understood as guiding humanity toward its own ultimate goal. Sacred history is a strange sort of two-step... conscious/unconscious... reason/nature... sort of like the action of poetic/prophetic inspiration (O Muse of fire...)

Mark Scroggins writes an interesting response to the review here.

My statement that Breeze was modeled "deliberately" on Harmonium appears to have been a case of "creative misreading", as they say. But I'd like to defend myself by saying that there's more to it than simply questions of lineage & influence, as Mark puts it.

"Modern" poets chose distinct approaches to the very central crux of self-consciousness, reflexivity, "art-for-art's-sake". The styles & attitudes of "engaged" or political poets, of epic-historical poets, of confessional poets, of traditionalists, etc. have differed quite a bit.

One of the things that interested me about Latta's book is that he seems to have extended a line from Stevens' general approach - but not in the same direction taken by the New York School, or that of other more florid or "elliptical" poets.

Latta has a gene of the homespun philosopher & nature boy about him (like Stevens' verbal duelist in the anecdote - Frost!). (But I don't think I'll write my next review on How John Latta Sounds Like that Farmer from New Hampshire...)

"supremely ornamental" is kind of an oxymoron.

one implication of Frost's poem being, that our teasing artifices are merely the frills & ornaments echoing a more general (& divine) manifestation (or hide n'seek).

& so, furthermore, "telling it slant" is more natural (true-to-life) than some well-meaning deliberate patronizing obvious "realism" (meant for the "nonintellectuals" amongst us).

& yet... & yet... our motive for these evasions moves inexorably toward its denouement, the unfolding of that implicated truth.

it's a both/and sort of tensile harmony.

somewhat relevant poem, by Robert Frost:

Revelation

 
We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

 
'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

 
But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

Jonathan offered a fine reading of Frost sonnet yesterday (5/18) ("Never Again Would the Birds' Song Be the Same").

Just got an email from Elena Shvarts : singing bird-clock arrived safely in St. Petersburg.

Very well-thought-out contribution to the formalism debate from Tim Yu. I agree with much of what he says; but a problem, it seems to me, with much of the debate is that individual practice will always outrun general critical frameworks.

An assumption behind Tim's assessment is that formal verse (sonnet for example) is always an expression of high culture, high seriousness - thus the main effect of Lowell's work is seen as the ironic juxtaposition of low contemporary squalor & the exalted old forms which can no longer contain or express it. But individual poets use form in poetry - from its most basic elements to its most highly-articulated specific types - in ways that are extremely unpredictable. As Jonathan pointed out, Frost, for example, can interpolate colloquial speech into strict forms without any appearance of straining after meter. Modernists might claim that his project - to democratize & "Americanize" forms - to make them popular and relevant in a way parallel to the project of Keats & Wordsworth a century before - failed. Yet Pound's "historical consciousness" (in Tim's sense), and the free verse that followed, has proved to be quite dated as well. What I'm trying to get at is that there simply is no particular "right" way to use or not use traditional forms. And it is impossible simply to consign them to the pile of obsolete machinery, because the present and future use to which they may be put is unpredictable.

A thin layer of white on the garage roof next door this morning. Frost rhymes with rime.

Frost, antique farmer
becomes antic Lowell
unwell amid antiques

Another point from yesterday : Dantean song vs. Melvillean naturalism, objectivity. Poetry/prose; faith/scepticism. That's too simple really, but it's related to the old debate about how to get prose values into poetry, or, in another key, the conflict between literary hermeticism & literary morality, or art-for-art vs. art for truth. Crux of Dantean poetics was to resolve this conflict on the side of art-for-truth, to send the troubadours to Purgatory. Crane votes for a Platonic synthesis : reality is musical. But in doing so he resolves the issue of the purpose/role of poetry only by veering very close to solipsism. The debate crops up again in the role-playing of Eliot & Pound (one's Dante to the other's "miglior fabbro"). (Dante is more serene than Crane because his faith is more firm - he reads the text of God in the book of His works. Crane turns the finding of the harmony itself into the cause for song : thus the Other is re-absorbed into the Same (isn't this the goal of all storytelling?), and the Bridge revolves on its metaphysical ground.)

But Dante's faith that he is commissioned to speak eternal truths in poetry - the confidence thus granted - leads paradoxically to a poetics grounded in empirical precision. The poet who can speak of death & eternity will not have difficulty spelling out the geometry of ethics and politics in petty Florence, or the whole earth's puny threshing-floor.

Jump now to somebody like Frost. This is a very subtle writer. Frost's persona of the old-time NE farmer is a kind of allegorical effect of literature/poetics itself. The mask allows him to meld high art with speech aimed not at fellow litterateurs in their solipsistic cells, but at the ordinary reader, Everyman, Everywoman.

These two I guess are models still - models for a future poetry in english. Not so much models of technique but models (perhaps unfashionable at the moment) of literary ethics. I'm not referring to their personal lives, but to their faith in a concept of poetry which configures it within, rather than separate from or as a shelter from or as a consolation for, life as a whole. "When the work is play for mortal stakes" - that could be Frost's keynote. Crane's not really much different - in his poetry, reality itself plays and flowers, that's his argument.

Robert Frost (today his birthday) prophesies rap music in 1959, over at Laurable.