on your dark retina

SEA-FROTH

The soft touch of watercolor

like a moist afterthought

on your dark retina.

The comeliness of ballet dancer

uprightness of innocent angel

her glance prematurely sad

– unfolding her fan of mustard

gold (butterfly wings on purple balsa)

beneath rough branches of jack pine

& beside the air conditioner,

a sunless window (in its lunar

TV efflorescence).  With her fine

naiad brow, brimming with thought

& the dignity of her wings

like a daughter of Memphis king

or mother… Isis or Hathor (Thoth

merging with dappled river pattern

yet again).  & in upper

right-hand corner a minor

violet cloud, a miniature icon –

Notre Dame (unburnt as yet?) – or

Statue of Liberty?  Unclear,

inchoate… like right now, here

in this charcoal-smoky, somewhere-

possible America – suffering glare

of phosphor-bomb campaigns

& camouflage engines –

blind canvas (some cimetière

                  *

marin) of noon.  & as the sun descends

west of the granite capital

& you sense (as the ineffable

arc of those feathers, wafting, bends

to rose Pacific horizon) the limpid

gloom of freedom’s evening

then she will be gathering

fragment-limbs of her beloved…

Isis, young dark dancer by the Nile.

Shades of live oaks,

holm oaks, holly oaks…

green Acorn Kings of Hollywood… will

stay awhile.  The restoration of the earth

will be a Morris dance –

as (in his happy trance)

the young king will relight the hearth

under the aegis of that Providence

kind Williams’ hand held forth

over the sea-froth

chasm of an Ocean State (whence

every liberty proceeds).  I mean

the heart’s imagination

of dove-divination,

when prancing St. Jeanne rose again

from dusty repetition of revenge

into a coracle of Union –

her canoe of sun-flotation,

Hobo’s freeway cloverleaf (Stonehenge).

2.21.20

Reading Maurice Blanchot on Mallarme, courtesy of Jonathan.

Distinction he makes between Valery & Mallarme. For the former, poetry is a vehicle of meditation, intellectual mastery; for the latter, purely an aesthetic object formed from words (words from which everything has been refined away, except for this aesthetic essence).

An aesthetic based in turn on the one characteristic of language which fascinates Mallarme : the way in which words replace, disperse - distance themselves, abstract themselves - from the real things they sometimes represent. In so doing, words present themselves in aesthetic form - as poems.

Maybe my shadow-boxing with Language Poetry over the years has been, in part, a battle with my own fascination with, my own bent toward, some such seductive doctrine. Solipsism, solitude, silence, music.

How different the doctine of the Chicago critics (not great poets themselves, admittedly - but going back to Coleridge, for one, anyway...). Here the aesthetic imprint of a poem is not so simply yoked to the words, the language medium, per se.

Just as Mandelstam juxtaposed the Ukrainian philologist Potebnia (with his notion of the "inner psychic image" of the word) to the Russian formalists (with their poetics based on a linguistics which analyzed the word into separate functions) - the Chicago School opposed the strictly linguistic poetics of the New Critics, with a kind of metalinguistic concept of the poem. That is, the poem can't be reduced to its linguistic medium : rather, the medium conveys an imaginative whole, a complex image (a single lyric, or an entire play, or an epic).

Still, Mallarme (and lurking behind him, Poe & Baudelaire) accomplished something permanent (he discovered a sort of antimatter) : everything after has to take it into account. How that gets done, in theory & practice, is the big question. Celan maybe took it to the limit. Every word refers to some train of thought & feeling - conceptual, experiential, personal. Yet the words are so encrypted in their own musical silence as to both invite & defy "meaning", interpretation. The defiance itself is rendered as (tragic) beauty.

So Celan sort of has it both ways. His defiance of meaning is not a literary game or an ideological program. It stems from a felt awareness of death, wrong, grief, hope, love - which are, in a sense, extra-poetic "referents". Or they are elements from the realm of fact & "journalism" which are both acknowledged & somehow won for poetry, absorbed.

I'm sure all this sounds awfully obvious to those who've spent more time with these poets & these issues.

Paul Valery : Imagine God, before Creation, turning to examine himself in the mirror (& adjusting his tie). Someone said, "God vacations in France." There you have him.