Reckon my insistence on the otherness of poetic language (see post of yesterday) takes me to the edge (or over) of lunacy, for some readers of this blog.

Certainly poets & poetry are also engaged with, and in complex processes of exchange with, the prose of life & what I was calling "ordinary" language, as well as with everything to which such language is addressed... (see, again, J. Latta's comments today on CD Wright's Poundian poetics of reportage...)

Yet when I tried to think about this briefly (on coffee break this morning) the image of a spiral came to mind... what was this? Double helix of poetry or something? (Now I suppose this really sounds wacko...)

No, I was seeing the spiral, I think, as an image of the root motivation or process of poetry-making... which in my view has its basis in song or harmony... & not in a self-enclosed or autotelic sense (cf. New Critics, Langpo...), but a sort of mystical sense, I guess. That is I think art reaches up to, or drills down to, some locus amoenus, some fundamental rightness, some Paradise, Jubilee - what Stevens meant when he wrote that "poetry is the sanction of life"... & for me anyway this deep harmonics actually shifts the nature of poetic language in the direction of its own telos, pleroma, end, fulfillment.

& I'm attracted to the Romantic notion (see Schlegel, Vico, et many al.) of poetry-making as a recapitulation of original human language-making; that language-creation was/is fundamentally a poetic process; & I am very intrigued by this corollary, that poetry-making actually turns or curls language-creation back on itself - the primal reflexive art-recursion - so as to repeal the structural alienation or distance established by the act of "pointing" or indication or measurement which underlies the making of the first human words. Maybe this is the spiral I was thinking of...

Following Robert Archambeau's "modernity is disinterest" thread. Sceptical about the distinction between Western & Middle Eastern (Islamic) thinking. The idea of some kind of M-E unitary or indivisible mentality sounds suspiciously like earlier Western imaginings of the "noble savage". The Other is always greener on the other side of the fence.

The divisions & splits between (ethical) self and (social) role seem inherent to moral dilemmas of every kind, in every culture. One could just as easily talk about the traditionalist-tribal fathers who kill their own daughters in order to maintain archaic Arab "honor" codes. One can imagine quite a psychic split there between self & social role.

Mazzotta's book on Vico, which I've mentioned previously here, is focused on Vico's challenge to modernity (in the shape of Descartes, Bacon, Machiavelli, Hobbes). The argument of The New Science (to oversimplify) is that poetry, as imaginative (re)making, presents an image of world-renewal, based on wonder & creativity, which is at odds with the disenchanted, utilitarian, and arrogant realpolitik/scientism presented by those avatars of Modern "disinterest" & detachment. At odds with them - but aligned with Dante (Mazzotta's other hero).

I feel a big weight off my shoulders having produced the Lulu books. Sending out some review copies here & there. It's kind of amazing to me how it works. When I can afford it, I will improve the distribution channels even more.

This sort of thing is probably a big temptation to younger writers. It might be better to go through the editorial hoops for a while, the disappointments & the reality jolts. But I've been at it so long, & written so much, that I just want to shape it my own way now & put it out there.

Chapel Hill is a strange duck, a sort of semi-fictional memoir, or semi-memoirish fiction. One of the themes running through it is the idea of history as the work of a child's imagination. The contrast, the clash between historical "facts" and the beautiful & naive dreams which children make of them. A "coming-of-age" story, which circles around between history & family history, & fiction & poetry, in the mixed-up way of adolescent perception. Set in the 60s. About, among other things, two boys & their obsession with toy soldiers, & playing "war", while the older brother of one is off in Vietnam.

I started connecting this the other day with my recent reading in Vico. His way of thinking about the power of the human imagination (as it changes & develops) over cultural behavior. For Vico, according to Mazzotta anyway, "poetry is history" (& vice versa, I guess).

The seemingly innate drive people have, starting in childhood, to make sense of their experience, to recapitulate it, to turn it into story & history, to interpret it - to play with it. & the destiny of the poet & poetry : to judge the doings of individuals & nations through the prism of poetic speech. This seems like a source for both poetry's "seriousness" and its power to lighten & console.

This "historical" aspect of the poet's social role is undermined, sometimes, by so much acidic despair & scepticism, which often seems to turn contemporary poetry into intentionally vapid or superficial cadging & jokery. It's rare in poetry to find a fusion of both clear-sighted irony and hope.

Woke up around 2 a.m. last night, was thinking about some comments in the Vico book (by Mazzotta), having to do with memory. Mazzotta writes something about the nature of memory, as the sign of a break or fracture between present & past. Memory registers the separation or distance between them.

This seems fairly obvious, but it got me thinking about my poetry ("memory, mother of the muses"), and about memory and space.

It might have something to do with having lived my adult life half a continent away from where I grew up. My sense of memory is always connected with distance in space as well as time.

I think about Proust's (heroic & mock-heroic) rendering of memory. Not that I'm a Proust expert, but I have the idea that with Proust, the action of memory is a kind of bridging & retrieval, an absorption in a past state, which sort of blossoms on its own.

My own sense of memory's action feels more like a distancing : as if one were closing one's eyes & going up in a balloon, or gaining some kind of bird's eye view of oneself, from far away, in a landscape or vast context (of time/space).

This is all rather vague, & maybe I should try to work up an essay or something. But as these notions were occurring to me last night, I also thought of Jonathan's comment of 11/26 :

"So much of reading poetry--and writing it--is ruminative and fragmented. An anxious, frustrating searching through books and magazines. The attention flags. There is not that unitary 6-hour experience of reading a novel, or the novelist's feeling of writing through a certain portion of the narrative."

I'm not sure what he means by "ruminative" here. But I understand the sense of a kind of jumpy or fragmented response to short poems & etc.

& I'm hoping that my own poetry somewhat works against or counters that kind of experience. I mean that these books & sequences of mine aim for a more sustained impression - of vastness - space & memory.

The first (& one of the only) reviews my poetry has received, was in a Brown U. student newspaper, written by an undergrad about my 1st book, Stone. I don't have it in front of me (this was almost 30 yrs ago), but she started it out with something like : "Henry Gould takes his time. He waits until the poem is ready." What she meant, I think, was that I composed slowly & quietly; the poems are sort of calm, without flash, bells & whistles.

I still like those little comments very much, & I think they relate to what I've tried to do.

[p.s. Vico himself might demur from such an individualistic notion of memory. For him memory & history & anthropology are all combined somehow.]

Still reading G. Mazzotta on Giambattista Vico.

Someone could write something interesting on Chas. Olson & Vico, if they haven't already. Olson would have found him agreeable.

Vico disputed both Plato & Aristotle on the nature of poetry. For V., poetry is essentially history. Memory's recollections, imaginations & inventions are inseparable from the drives & passions of peoples, and writing (poetry) records (or adumbrates) the distance or dissociation which is memory itself.

Vico against poetry as "craft", or as something having to do with philosophy or the critical intelligence. He sounds berry much like a Longinian-sublime Romantic.

cf. Mazzotta p. 150 or so.

Vico's Autobiography opens with a description of how he fell head-first onto a stone floor as a child and was unconscious for some time; how the doctor predicted he would either die or grow up "stolido" (slow, retarded). Instead he became a scholar & intellectual. Mazzotta reads this as a comment on the temptations of determinism in science.

Vico (via Mazzotta) juxtaposes science's lust for power over nature (Bacon's New Atlantis), and its mechanical determinism of causation, with the collective "wisdom" of humanities, jurisprudence, political science. Because political science is not "exact", it has to make room for human freedom & unpredictability, the dynamics of debate & consensus.

His lectures on the role of universities in fostering multi-vocal, encyclopedic conception of knowledge : sometimes countering, analyzing, criticizing (Socratic tradition) established political authority.

The self-conscious historical sense. Poetry, unlike science, does not exert control over nature, but rather, through its linguistic shapes & etymologies, unfolds history (the productions of memory).

But I'm conscious of the disconnections, the inability to engage in dialogue. Rationalist, polemical academics who don't understand or appreciate their own cultures; on the other hand, obscurantist philistines, promoting a new dark age of magic formulae & superstition.

Am reading G. Mazzotta's study of Giambattista Vico, The New Map of the World. Mazzotta emphasizes Vico's alignment with "epic wholeness" & history, vs. "irony", scepticism, & Cartesian (a-historical) subjectivity. Vico was in conflict with the Macchiavellian-Cartesian (political) science of his day.

What does this have to do with you & me.

The baroque interlinked storytelling of the long-poem streak in 20th-cent. literature. Pound, Olson, David Jones, et al. Olson's Herodotus (histor). Geography & change, development. The "middle voice", as Olson has it.

Vico puts imaginative poiesis at the center of human history.

Joyce's fascination with all this.

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
                    - Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Re-reading B.J. Leggett's useful book, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory. Interesting chapter on what Stevens may have been getting at with the title "It Must Be Abstract". How he drew upon I.A. Richards' book Coleridge on Imagination to come to a notion of how the mind - whether in perception ("the poet of reality") or imagination ("the poet of fictions") - always abstracts : that all words are imaginative abstractions, creations of thought. In this way he plays/works with the imagination/reality pairing, without getting stuck (like some of his critics) on one prong or the other.

Mandelstam somewhere: "Love the idea of the thing more than the thing itself."

Byzantine icons, Nicholas Cusanus. "God" being a human concept, a name, for something we cannot really grasp; humankind as imago dei one of its imaginative corollaries, a concept which can come to have meaning both in contemplation & action. Coleridge on the imagination as the expression of the divine "I Am". An imaginative idea of the economy of the earth. "O what a piece of Work is Man!"

Leggett shows curiously how Stevens was also heavily influenced by a biographical study of Giambattista Vico, about the same time Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake.