An Ordinary Evening in Minneapolis

After weeks of late winter & spring away from home & away from my books & the library, spending time with my parents at the nursing home, one day last week I had a sudden desire to travel to Wallace Stevens Land.  I was apprised of a good local bookstore during the AWP invasion, James & Mary Laurie Books, & went back there & got a copy of Stevens' collected writings, and The Dome & the Rock, by James Baird (a study of Stevens' architectonic tectonics).

Wallace Stevens... what can one say.  The man is a great artist and American genius, & as representative of the "modern" as Dante is of the "medieval" or Shakespeare the Renaissance or Milton the Reformation.  Representative, that is, as a kind of quintessence or benchmark or perihelion of achievement.  Refinement, acumen, absolute originality, conscious artistry taken to the limit.  & mostly just an utter wonder to read, sparkling with vitality & intellectual force.

That (inadequately) being said, Stevens is a constant challenge to my own way of thinking.  This is part of the bracing experience of the encounter - the sense that deep down I have these qualifications which at the same time I have difficulty shaping into a proper argument.  There seem to be so many pitfalls involved in challenging a poet's basic "worldview" - it seems unfair & liable to blinders & mis-reading.

Stevens himself, unsurprisingly, encapsulated my problem for me.  As he put it in one of his Adagia : "Life is an affair of people, not of places.  But for me life is an affair of places and that is just the trouble."  Baird's study fully amplifies what an "affair of places" - of topos, of landscape, of habitations - actually meant for Stevens.  He argues that Stevens' entire oeuvre is an "amassing harmony" of coordinated elements, one Grand Poem whose form is a mighty arc, a dome built on rock - the rock of the absolute self, a post-Emersonian Adamic American imagination.  The central (& here, American) self - not king, not emperor, not God, but Man as master of reality - is the sole source of true & vital perception.  It is a sort of post-romantic Renaissance Romanticism - a disenchanted naturalism (reality) brought to life again by the human spirit (imagination).

But there's no need here to clamber down into a sort of academic gully.  The encounter with Stevens occurs, as he constructs it, only on a plane of pure poetry.  It is a master building of the absolute spirit of the unique builder - it does not stand for, symbolize, myths & paradigms, but is rather their source.

What I find challenging about all this is that my own "sense of reality" seems to be constructed intellectually (reasonably or not) on an entirely different foundation.  Stevens seems to be part of the central Emersonian spine of American thought & poetry, the tone of "self-reliance", which challenges all past tradition as out of date - because it is recognized as essentially a (continually-obsolescent) myth-making process.  The Christian tradition is a burden and oppression on the free mind & spirit of the present, the American here & now.  When Frost, for example, blends his narratives into an arc of Christian interpretations, he is folding himself under another master, he is choosing to renounce the absolute Kantian-Romantic freedom of the human mind, that categorical enlightened Subjectivity which makes the exterior world what it will.  This is the "modern" (Cogito ergo sum).

But my own mind & imagination have always seemed to trend in a counter-direction.  Stevens' imaginative "dome" is like the under-layer or the photo-negative of the freedom & exaltation of the believing Spirit.  & "life is an affair of people" is a very apt summation of the ground of this other way of seeing.  The Emersonian drive for the spirit's autonomy seems to stumble on the question of "other people" : the nature of the relation (the ratio, the Logos) we call Love.  If the "affair of persons" is a matter of intersecting arcs (rather than sole solar domes) then suddenly we have the potential to imagine "the person" as extending into infinite mystery, and of reality as a whole grounded in this very personal threshold.

Which is a view of things, by the way, which seems to correspond to some elements of traditional Judeo-Christian faith.  I think Stevens understood all this : & further exploration of his poetry will no doubt reveal (& probably has already) such undercurrents.

I like to think of my own attitude as oriented somewhere between Eliot & Stevens & Crane : accepting Eliot's "historical sense" & reverence for tradition, without falling for his reactionary & doctrinaire pessimism.  Thinking of poetry as involved in the creative re-imagining of old sacred meanings - so as to see them in the present in a changed light, a different relevance.*

But let's conclude this boring lecture & get back to Stevens now.  "The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself."

*p.s. reminder to self : it was the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam who enabled this attitude for me.  Mandelstam's own utterly nonpareil poesie der poesie is yet comparable with Stevens.  The neo-classicism and traditional Judeo-Christian grounding of Mandelstam's & Gumilev's Acmeism resonates with Eliot.  & yet Mandelstam's Dante - in his famous essay "Conversation about Dante" - is not Eliot's paragon of the medieval mind, but rather a kind of playful "futurist" - a voice from an earth to come.  Thus Mandelstam allowed me to find a way between the antipodes of American modernist poetry, and has been a taproot for my own branching these past 35 years.

Conceptualism... blah four

Blah, blah, blah...  not sure how much longer I can yoke these contraries (Concept & Blah) without giving us all the blahs.  But I think of things, walking to work, so I'll try to note it down.

Taking a long (wide?) view, Conceptual Poetics, Uncreative Writing, etc. may be irremediably trivial : yet it's curious how the concept, in connection with poetry, necessarily leads to the nearby endeavors of Literary Criticism.  What is poetry? has been the question.  As it happens I've been wading through a magisterial tome which used to be required reading for every English major, M.H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp.  A historical study of critical theories of poetry, focused on the Romantic era, but analyzing it as one phase in a development stretching back to Plato and forward (for him) to the New Criticism of the 20th century (his own era).  And maybe beyond (I'm less than half way through).

For Abrams, the interesting thing is how the history of critical theories about poetry (in the West, anyway) reveals a procession of world-views, of philosophical eras, of chapters in the "Western mind", which determine in every way the specific aesthetic notions - about poetry and art in general - of each era.  Abrams develops a simple diagram, with "the Work" (the poem) at the center, from which arrows extend in 3 directions - "World", "Audience", "Poet" - which correspond, respectively, to 3 succeeding approaches to poetry : Mimetic, Pragmatic, Expressive.  (These in turn correspond to particular leading theorists : Plato/Aristotle for the mimetic; Horace and the neo-classical authors of the 18th century for the pragmatic; and the Romantics for the expressive.)  A fourth theoretical mode, which corresponds to the "Work" alone, Abrams calls "Objective".  I haven't gotten to those chapters yet, but I think he's referring to 20th-century Modernist and New Critical approaches, which highlight the integral, autotelic, self-contained "objectivity" of the work-in-itself.

Still awake, dear blahdom companions?

You get a sense, reading Abrams, of poetry as an ongoing, curious phenomenon, a puzzle, a conundrum, around which thinkers down the centuries have tried to attach their conceptual pincers.  With only partial success ; the thing remains a riddle, and what critics say about it often says more about assumptions and enthusiasms of their own era, than about this elusive what-not itself.  And the pattern of Abrams' argument seems to be leading toward some kind of crux, or cul-de-sac, since if you walk through his historical chart geometrically, you see a kind of swirl or spiral, of theories - absorbing the outer three in succession (imitative, pragmatic, expressive) and then turning inward to the center, to the last element, the Work itself (objective theories).  Where do we go from here?

Should we ask Helen Vendler?   Harold Bloom?  The Academy of American Poets?  A.W.P., maybe?  or the Poetry Foundation?  I asserted previously in this little series that poetry does more than represent reality - it (somehow) establishes same.  But I want to distinguish this phenomenon itself from its professional American expert establishers of literary establishments.  Poetry tends to get buried under the eager thundering of its mobs of advocates, all trained in their various ways to integrate literature into society, to promote the arts, to laud, praise and p.r. its established practitioners under compost piles of laurels and mountains of award grants.  It's a gradual smothering process out of which swarms of compost-insects rise and dance and do battle (winners & losers & bettors & publicists & kibbitzers).  Bye-bye, poetry.  Hello, symposia, festivals & funeral orations.

Much has changed in the 70 years or so since M.H. Abrams composed his subtle summa of Romantic poetics.   The critical ground has shifted, or given way completely.  Postmodernity rejects the unproblematic essentialism of all critical terms.  History and cultural identity are relativistic, contested fields of competing discourses.  The New Critical icon of the "poem itself" shattered and crumbled quite a while ago.  Ron Silliman, the Language Poet, for example, pronounced that "there is no such thing as poetry - only poetries."  So-called avant-garde programs (Flarf, the Charles Bernstein Unit, Uncreative Writing, etc.) are structurally self-corroding, designed and promoted through tongue-in-cheek technique.  Sincerity is for simpletons.  In a sense, these theory-driven or concept-based movements (arm-in-arm with most of the sub-critical poetries at which they poke fun) dramatize the hollowing-out of traditional literary criticism - dancing on its grave.

So... ?  Abrams' spiraling template ends (I'm guessing) at the summit of the "Work".  The poet's job used to be to imitate Nature in a wise & pleasing way (Mimetic).  Then it evolved into an Horatian mode of rhetorical suasion - leading readers to Goodness by way of Charm (Pragmatic).   Then the Romantics came along - resurrecting a neo-Platonic (Plotinian) spirituality, replacing the attenuated Deism of the rationalist Enlightenment with a new enthusiasm, grounded in the lamp of divine Imagination (Expressive).  Finally, once the ruinations of industrialism and war put paid to Romantic ideals, new forces of reactionary/revolutionary Modernism arose, grounded in the autotelic power of the Work itself (Objective).  Then at last came the great deconstructive fibrillations of the late 20th century.  & here we are.

Versions of all five of these approaches are still with us.  The whole Coliseum of professional American literary praxis continually justifies itself through apologetics based on some or all of these critical angles.  (Mimetic : " Poet X provides an excruciating but finally enthralling account of what it's like to live in Y."   Pragmatic : "Poet J reminds us, with moving memories of home, that we need to return to our roots."  Expressive : "Poet Q is a magician, an alchemiste du Verbe - revealing a wonderworld of fantastic visions."  Objective : "Poet Z is an uncompromising formalist, who cannot be tagged with any of the current labels. Neither traditionalist nor experimental, her austere, formidable style is literally incomparable."  Postmodern : "Poet M. unravels poetry from his shoelaces down, and builds it up again - as video.")

Yet poetry, the thing itself, slithers along like Montale's eel, some subterranean life-force, beneath the flimsy fabrications, the droning roar of the pros of the status quo.  Some of the most gifted 20th-century poets, including Stevens, Crane and Berryman, struggled against the complacent New Critical dicta regarding the autotelic "poem itself".  They were searching for some firmer sanction.  Stevens, often portrayed as the paragon of a neo-Romantic sublime (Bloom) or as a master of the self-pleasing, self-sufficient work of art (Vendler), might instead be understood as someone engaged in a relentless, rather tense intellectual struggle to find a justification for his work, for the making of poems.

Poetry and worldview : I think we can say these depend on each other.  But maybe the poet doesn't so much articulate or express a worldview, as respond, obliquely, to the existent worldview, the reigning zeitgeist.  And maybe within this response are encrypted some intimations of futurity - of a future human ambience, or common sense of things, which hasn't happened yet.  Thus when I proposed that the poetic Word not only represents, but establishes, maybe this could be understood in this kind of future tense.  Here I'm reminded once more of Emily Dickinson....

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--

Between Eliot & Stevens (or Bard & Bible)

My own way out toward the future involves a confidence in the spiritual role of the poet. - Wallace Stevens

When I was around 20 yrs old, in the early '70s, at the height of the brief "Jesus freak" era - a sometime-communal monastic-peripatetic neo-Christian version of the broader countercultural/hippie "youth movement" - I went through a religious/psychological breakdown that radically & permanently shifted the direction of my life. For me this happened in a kind of bell-jar solitude : I wasn't "converted" by anyone (I was already a lapsed Episcopalian). Rather it was a quasi-literary experience - a sharp, spasmodic reaction to reading Shakespeare's sonnets & the Bible, at a time when I was very vulnerable to both depression & manic enthusiasm... & by the same token, open to new ideas.

I'm not trying to explain away or psychologize, reductively, what happened to me : far from it. In that weird crucible I started morphing into the religious believer I am today. As such, I can in some ways identify with the stance of T.S. Eliot. When I reflect on the 35 years or so of brooding, meditating & writing (about God, religion, tunafish & the cosmos) which followed that crisis, I think I can say that my way of responding to those events & ideas has basically been the that of a poet, a poetic response. I have tried to think my way into a perspective in which poetry is an expressive medium & imaginative force which is especially empowered to articulate and give access to a spiritual vision or version of reality; & often on this blog & elsewhere I have argued for such a position. I've often & in various ways asserted that the harmony & internal coherence & self-sufficiency - the integrity - of poetry, offers a kind of analogy for a view of reality as meaningful "creation" or dramatic, Providential event. I've advanced (often vaguely & confusedly, I admit) the idea that a restoration or renaissance of a kind of humanism is possible : a synthesis which balances faith and reason (the reunion of "Athens and Jerusalem"). I've argued that poetry represents the vital consciousness - personal, passionate - which can get buried & displaced beneath the abstract determinisms of other modes of discourse.

Nevertheless... I need to add a caveat to all of this. Despite my personal "credentials" of religious belief & experience, & my resultant affinity with Eliot's (often-maligned) stance - this general position does not quite give the whole picture. I want to be able to say that my view of poetry draws as much from, say, Wallace Stevens or Hart Crane, as it does from Eliot. Not out of some national chauvinism or American nativism (as in W.C. Williams) : but rather with respect to Stevens' & Crane's sense of poetry, which is ultimately closer to the Romantic poets than to the high Moderns (or perhaps closer to Yeats than to Eliot).

I'm not sure how best to explain why I need to add this reservation. But I believe in the integrity and dignity - even the primacy - of poetry as such. I think this dignity & integrity is grounded in the wholeness of the human imagination itself, and the artistic/aesthetic constructs (Stevens' "fictions", Crane's "vision") which the imagination produces. An analogy here, from the religious life, might be between, on the one hand, a person's inward, nourishing and active faith - expressed in concrete acts of devotion & discipleship - and on the other, the merely verbal formulae of dogmatic belief. Poetry inhabits, of course, a verbal realm : but its whole labor is, in a sense, (as Frost famously put it) to make its "saying" equivalent to "deeds" : to fill mere words with the passionate concreteness & authenticity of lived experience. In this way, "blind" poets, attentive to the obscure workings of the imagination (their "muse"), produce those beautiful & accurate representations which do justice to reality : which is a kind of blessing - culture bringing nature to fulfillment. & this imaginative-creative process occurs within its own sphere : rather than being subservient to received dogma, it lends meaning to religious assertions. It acclimates & complements revelation. Some remarks by Matthew Arnold (so liable to Eliot's derision) seem apropos :

"[Religious language] is approximative merely, while men imagine it to be adequate; it is *thrown out* at certain realities which they very imperfectly comprehend. It is materialised poetry, which they give as science; and there can be no worse science than materialized poetry. But poetry is essentially concrete; and the moment one perceives that the religious language of the human race is in truth poetry, which it mistakes for science, one cannot make it an objection to this language that it is concrete... Everything turns on it being at realities that this... language is aimed." [from the Preface to God and the Bible]

Now I would hesitate to assent to this paragraph myself, in toto : I think Arnold magnifies "science" in typical 19th-cent. fashion, while at the same time weighing religious discourse too lightly on the scale. Religious thought itself - say, in Aquinas or Augustine or Maximus the Confessor - gets beyond the dry scaffolding of dogma, and approaches the particular (& I would say humanist) "accuracy" of philosophy. Nevertheless I think Arnold's basic point is central and worth defending : religious language is both approximate.and poetic. (& one can see what a close affinity this shows with the stance of Northrop Frye.)

Here I would like to gesture toward the intellectual stance & figure cast by that Renaissance humanist/Catholic priest, Nicolas of Cusa. In Cusanus' philosophical essays and dialogues, one finds a playful excitement at work, stimulated by the sharp recognition and celebration of the power of the human imagination - scientific, philosophical, aesthetic & religious all melded together in one activity of Mind. Cusanus was writing at the crest of Renaissance humanism, when translations of ancient Greek philosophy (Plato, Aristotle & others) exerted a powerful influence : his own philosophical writings seek to find that logic which can balance the human and the divine - the ineluctable certainties of divine order, with the equally stubborn fact that we live in a "conjectural" world : ie. a world bounded by the limitations of our own imaginative reach & constructs. Even our notions of God are human "conjectures", which bump up against the ineffable mystery - as well as, for Cusanus, the historical facticity - of God's presence & manifestation (in the Incarnation).

This notion of "conjecture" - close to Giambattista Vico's later views on human history as a playing-out of consciousness, a cultural construct - allies itself with a sense of the ongoing project & projections of the human imagination, as expressed in the fictional shapings, the representations, of poetry. & here we are drawing very close to Stevens' central obsessions concerning imagination & reality - the logical grounds for his "supreme fiction".

So I want to think of my own work in poetry as standing somehow within a field shared by both Eliot and Stevens, where poetry is a distinct, secular, universal & human phenomenon, with its own independent basis and raison d'etre & sphere of activity : & yet where poetry is also capable of expressing the substance & pith & concrete values - as well as the uncertainties & mystery - underlying & surrounding the verbal summae of historical belief & dogmatic testimony.

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")

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

Late Stevens

Reading BJ Leggett's excellent (& nice & short) Late Stevens. I really liked one of his earlier books, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory. He has a way of correcting (gently) the Stevens big shots, Bloom & Vendler et al.

Stevens, in a statement on "Auroras of Autumn" : "There are many poems relating to the interactions between reality and imagination, which are to be regarded as marginal to the central theme... [which is] the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfillment." (quoted by Leggett on p.1). & from the epigraph to 1st chapter : "The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." (from Stevens' Adagia)

Leggett's argument (which I'm just getting going with) is that many of Stevens' later poems (in The Rock, etc.) are intertextually aligned with "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and other, earlier poems on this "central" theme. & (to paraphrase) Leggett summarizes Stevens' focus on this theme, as a meditation on the idea that the fiction of reality is the generating dream of an inhuman mind - sagacious, inventive, changing, unaccountable, inexplicable... yet - as an imagination - showing a likeness to our own imagination. Leggett attends closely to some lines in the opening poem in The Rock, "An Old Man Asleep" :

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.
A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth - your thoughts, your feelings,
Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot.

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,
The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

He shows how these lines imply that the river & the chestnut trees are the thoughts of one of the "two worlds" (the earth) - that is, that the things of the earth, the "outside", are fictions of a greater, "inhuman" dreamer; & the "two worlds" are mingled together here, ambiguously joined.

So it seems the "supreme fiction" is a new expression of a very old idea... of the fictiveness (the "made" quality) of reality.

Have been reading Divine Comedy in English, Mark Musa translation. The first time I've gone steadily through it - have tried dutifully in the past to read it in Italian (without much success), have read Singleton & Mandelbaum translations, but usually end up slowing down so much I lose the thread. It's going better this time, even though when I picked up this book (Portable Dante) I thought it was the Laurence Binyon version, which I really wanted to read...

Going through it steadily, you see how each part (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) really builds in momentum and intensity... you also recognize the slow stretches, the not-so-successful passages... it seems (for me anyway) to humanize the great Maestro - you sense him working out the compositional problems... (though I know I'm missing most of the Italian subtleties).

A little bulb went on as I was somewhere in Paradiso last night... felt I was more aware for a moment of the inventive, image-making, image-shaping activity going on... and it reminded me of two things : first, my initial sudden attraction for a book of Mandelstam poems in translation which I came upon in a bookstore back in '78 or so - and what it was that attracted me : the startling-mysterious images; second, a childhood memory of how strong the attraction was I felt for toys, artworks, small objects, toy soldiers... the visceral delight I took in seeing such things...

So these thoughts were going through my mind, and it made me think of another two things - a couple principles of Acmeism (in the Gumilev & Mandelstam version, respectively) : the emphasis on imaginative clarity, clarity of vision; and secondly the emphasis on the continuity of poetic tradition. And the thought occurred to me that perhaps one could say that both of these principles have some unconscious roots in that childhood fascination with both making (invention) and perceiving adorable objects, toys... thus our good poems are inevitably a response to the self-contained radiance, the toy-like mana, of previous poems, of models... and that poetry participates (with the other arts) in this process of active imaginative invention and shaping of images and meanings, forming models of beauty meant to have some kind of equivalence or relationship with the order & beauty we encounter in nature and experience...

So to get back to my wacky crusade, an "American Acmeism" would recognize that poetry does not always re-invent the wheel by simply transcribing anecdotes of individual experience; rather it's always engaged with these charismatic models (other poems), with the sound of poetry as some kind of organic, synthetic entity in its own right, with its own living aura and tradition... that poems emerge in a context of other words, other sounds, other poets... As that paramount toy-maker Wallace Stevens put it,

"Perhaps
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master."

Been kind of a drought here at the ol' blog. I seem to be undergoing mild sea-change, in approach to writing, poetry, etc. Thinking a little differently, imagining differently. It began after finishing Fontegaia series, a couple months ago. Then the Colrain Conference. & working on shorter poems.

Perhaps those long-poem projects, & all their dense subject-matter & background reading etc., resolved the question of style for me. & also set in place a certain attitude or stance toward the current literary environment. Gave me a sort of context (if only subjective).

Now I'm afloat in a new framework... new/old issues surfacing, questions coming into play. Memories, too. I'm sort of inching along with it. Not as ready as before to issue pronunciamentos.

Reading Leopardi again, an interest from college days. In Italian, he's on a par with Keats (in the poetry) & Coleridge (in the criticism). Found a copy of an old aquamarine blue paperback translation by Iris Origo & John Heath-Stubbs, of prose & poetry, which I used to own 30 yrs ago. Also reading an interesting monograph by G. Singh (Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry). Curious whether there's any Leopardi background in Wallace Stevens.

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...)

Reading Malcolm Woodland, Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode. Reminded once again how closely Stevens listened to other poets (from Isaiah to Whitman to...), re-fashioning their terms & phrasing to meet the pressure of his own time & his own concerns & idiom (see especially comments on relation between Stevens' "Martial Cadenza" and Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"). Every case is different, every situation is particular.

This, it seems to me, is the real thing, the real work & tradition of poetry, in every era...

Rather tumultuous (weddings, passings) holiday season over now. Reading some books on Wallace Stevens' poetry (The Wallace Stevens Case, by Thos. Grey - on Stevens & the law; and another study of Stevens and "apocalypse" - can't think of author at the moment). Curious about apocalypses, after finishing section of Fontegaia (& the horsemen) not too long ago. Apocalypse means "unveiling". Trying to get myself together toward writing again, not always easy. Also distracted by potboilers (funny old spy novel by Len Deighton my brother-in-law recommended. Remember The Ipcress File, with Michael Caine? It's not that one. Enjoy Deighton's sense of humor.) Boredom & annoyance with just about every snippet of poetry or poetry-reviewing or po-biz reporting I come across : not a good sign. Deep boredom; maybe accidia itself. Or just irritability. This is one reason I need to find a way to write again, that works, somehow. Trying to get my mind around it, in lackadaisical fashion. Good thing nobody's paying me to do this.

Quiet in the library today.

Snowstorm yesterday, now sunlight on the trees, old colonial rooftops. Snow-radiance, winter brightness.

Sort of a northern light, Bruegel-light, Thomas More-light... imaginary sense of medieval gemutlichkeit comes to me now & then, like something out of collective memory (fantasy, I should say). It's in a lot of my poetry.

"Lit with the cold and clear Minnesota light" ("Grain Elevator")

Thinking of Stevens' "idea of the sun". & the tale of the Biblical "burning bush" that drew Moses out into eventual Exodus, and a scriptural Code, a social Covenant, & the history of the West.

The spark is like a mathematical equation :
Universal God + Mankind-Imago = Human Dignity/Equality = Justice

ie. if each & all bear this divine image (like M's "gold coin of humanism") then the irrevocable consequence is : dignity & respect & equality for each & all. (cf. the "greatest commandment", from which depends "all the Law & the Prophets" : Love God; Love your neighbor as yourself)

A further thought : these verbal articulations of social design (justice) are themselves epiphenomena of the unspoken Actual - the common intuited relations of love & respect that relatively free & sane persons offer naturally (at their best, anyway) to one another.

In other words, part of the overall gift of life is a certain unspoken normative justice, an equilibrium of happiness & peace.

Then the Biblical revelation (or divine intervention) is not so much a motor of history, on the order of cause-&-effect - but rather a manifestation (a "glory") of the truth as it already is, & always was.

Everything pivots on a sense of the unique Person as enfolded in, or unfolding, an image of the universal & divine Personhood. Everything pivots on consciousness & the Person. "I am that I am."

These things have been known for thousands of years.

I think of Wallace Stevens as pondering along some such path as this...

The mind is creative, the imagination is primordial, originary - since experience is unavoidably subjective : the world we know is the world as we see and experience it.

Thus the vivid, bracing, inventive, concrete perception of poetry offers reality made new - re-shaped anew (or, reality in a new light). Thus the "supreme fiction" displaces the worn-out myths which have congealed into doctrinal belief.

Poetry in this sense is representative of art & artist generally. Which are, in turn, representative of free creative conscious perception generally.

This is very basically the "standard model" of the Artist, since Emerson, the Romantics, etc. And I accept it, I agree with it, for what it's worth : a working credo for the nourishing of creative talents & aims. But it ain't the whole story.

Interesting juxtaposed reading these days : Pope Benedict on St. Bonaventure (Theology of History of St. Bonaventure) on the one hand; a critical study of Finnegans Wake on the other (Joyce, Dante and the poetics of literary relations, by Lucia Boldrini).

I have the feeling Bonaventure would have found FW out of court (even though Joyce is so deeply fascinated with both Christianity and the notion of creative world-making).

Joyce is awfully deep & subtle, but he seems to shape the book in a sort of circular, "Buddhist" (or Hindu) framework : life circles around & around like a river forever & ever. For Bonaventure, the assertion of "the eternity of the world" was one of the primal marks of Aristotle's pagan error. For Bonaventure, the world is a creation, and history has a singular plot (even if B's version of that history has a certain circular quality about it : history is the story of the world being sent forth from God, pivoting on Christ, and returning to God).

I've got my own inklings about this, which I won't go into now...

But getting back to the "Stevens" bit above... I feel more & more on kind of a Nicholas of Cusa/Byzantine tack, with the central notion of the human/divine imago... that is, there are human creators (with maximum freedom) & yet there is also Creation - these 2 perplexibly & unaccountably meshed (like 2 circles) together... & there is the Event at the center...

Christianity : revelation (the event) trumps reason.

Poetry : the actual (drama) trumps abstraction (discourse).

There's a kind of parallel or analogy there... (worked out in History...)

readin': Stephen Prickett, Words and The Word (again. book about languages of poetry & religion)

Brian Fawcett, Expedition Fawcett (an old Arrow Books paperback from 1963. found it in the stacks. following trail of terrific article in this week's New Yorker, by [?] Grann, about search for Colonel Percy H. Fawcett, the eccentric explorer who disappeared in Amazon in 1925) (now that me & the Mississippi have done our evil [evil epic] thing down there in N'Orleans, I'm moving on to the Amazon)

continuing with Sukenick book on Wally Stee.

*

[deleted. you don't need to know about all my little problems]

... also found in stacks : Ecology of Power, by Michael Heckenberger, the anthropologist whom Grann met (after many traveling travails) in the jungle near where Fawcett disappeared. I note on p. 180 : "His last letter, dated May 29[oh-oh], 1925, was from "Dead Horse camp", where his horse had died and he turned back in 1920... It was here, on the border of the Xinguano lands, that the Western dream of lost civilizations in the southern Amazon died as well."

There's that date again. Forth of July flowed around it.

Thanks so much, Mark - but if I'm back at all it's a very shaky back.

In my view the Sukenick book only seems lackluster because it is so workmanlike. He has no oversize thesis-axe to grind. He does paraphrases - which (understandably) many poets would consider the "murder-to-dissect" method.

I happen to need these paraphrases, because I am so dim, often miss the obvious. & by providing a rational structure to Stevens' meta-flora, Sukenick illuminates a terrain of composition which can be useful to other poets (me). I happen to need new themes, new somethings. My old approach seems to be finished.

I really like Graham Foust's brief essay-excerpt on a Wallace Stevens poem in Fascicle. This way of reading seems to me to be what it's all about. Rewarding exploration.

Back to my cave now.

Poetry. OK, we were explaining it, right.

Seems to me I've been explicating it hereabouts at great leennngggth for many a year now! Heavens, yes.

Two things come to mind when I think the p word (no, besides that thing!...):

1. Poetry is... uh... simply put, an exploitation of the innate music of language. Thus, the grand & middling poets of all times & eras with whom we is acquainted, are thems that are fluent in a particklar manner of transmuting the regular matters of language inta something beautiful.

2. & it follows, then (if they are beautiful), that poems are, as I've enunciated at other times & places, in some sense, complete, finished, satisfying, whole, integral... and, strictly in this here aesthetic sense at least, or from this here aesthetic angle, ends in themselves. In other words: the innate music of language - the music in particular, that is - finds its telos, or end, in poems.

But here we's approaching a mystery: what (in the world) is Beautiful?

Keats already answered that one, Hank!! TRUTH is Beauty! BEAUTY is TRUTH! an' he got that off some old greek clay mug!

It follows, that, in this tired old ugly world, this stupid unjust crazy old world, this sleeping half-dead ignorant old world, this weak blind mortal fleshly old world, this hungry starving & confused old world, the appearance of beautiful truthful beauty-truth will be a vital stupendous transfiguring event. An event the borders & substance of which we do not comprehend. An event for which Poetry simply is a symbolic representation or trial balloon improvisation.

In the book Stanza My Stone, a study of Wally Stevens, a conception of Wally's conception of poetry tended somewhat, very roughly, in this direction. The poetry of poetry & the poetry of life were 2 different but somehow analogous things.

Anna Akhmatova was more intelligent & informed than either of these Americans.

The only & great battle in American art has always been between originality & tradition.

Maybe because America (USA) was the most successful & 1st really self-liberated colony.

This is probably why poetry in America has had so many problems. It wants to best the masters of the past, and at the same time it also wants to sing from the beginning of Time, from the veritable New World.

Thus we have TSE and WCW.

Stevens was probably the most intelligent & subtle of the 20th-cent Am. poets, because he took Keats as his model. Keats was the one who found a balance - an equilibrium - between tradition & origination; Keats was the one who bested Milton, not through Vision (Blake) & not through Wisdom (Wordsworth) but through sheer Lyric (music). & Keats wasn't even American!

Eliot was even more intelligent & subtle; but then Eliot was a professional literary man. Stevens was just an amateur.

Days of hectic. Yet must I drone, drone I must.

Reading about Sienese painting, history. Sounds abstruse? Not really. Democracy, civic values, religion, art, Black Death.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescos of Good/Bad Government in Palazzo Pubblico. Probably influence on Bruegel. Exploratory, panoramic improvisation.

Providence I am reading your local papers. Same issues - gov't overburdened with inertia, selfish interests, bureaucracy. Various levels & types of apartheid longstanding ("suburban golf protection racket" as Stubborn puts it). But hopeful civic efforts underway everywhere - creative projects of betterments.

Lorenzetti read Divina Commedia and was one of first - maybe the first pictor of Dante.

*

Walking about today with fleeting quarter-thoughts in between work. Mild, muggy.

Stevens' Adagia - the ones where he holds "poetry" and "poetry of life" in each hand. Maybe no other way to apprehend it??

Poetry is a sense. Not words, really. We have to feel our way into it again, blindly - into the sense of it we had in our youth, man' decades ago.

I mean poetry in its psychological/experiential context. . . what am I saying? When you ponder the vast variety of human capabilities, personality bents, individual experiences - such ground the vast differences in taste, apprehension, appreciation, valuation. & often I think we literary leeches are the most blind - through jaded appetite. We no longer respond as we did, to a new world speaking to us from the page.

But my own argument here excludes the word "we" to some extent (talkin about myself, I guess). Nothing is determined or set in stone in this regard. We may again find ourselves caught up in a new literary charm, a new discovery, a new love.

Poetry is a sense. A sense of reality-as-poetry. A premonition.

I have a literary reputation as odd, eccentric. Also boring, conventional, traditionalist. Actually I am Super-Normal Standard Poet. My literary memory is an echo chamber. I keep alive certain normal ways of speakin'.