Epic might be personal

Another interesting and insightful diary-entry from John Latta : this one on an essay on New American Poetry by Canadian writer Brian Fawcett.

Fawcett's critique of Charles Olson's epic "imperialism" & megalomania, while not exactly original, sounds (from Latta's excerpts anyway) well-put, and hard to deny. Yet it seems to me you lose something if you reduce Pound's & Olson's epic ambitions & projects to mere egotism & ideological grandiosity. Epic ambition is in part a search for epic wholeness : that vast multiplicity-in-unity - ancient epic's synthesis of history, poetry, & cosmic vision - bringing all experience (or at least the symbolic image of same) into the microcosm of a shape, a work of art. What from one angle looks like the shadow of megalomania, narcissism & totalitarian thinking - all the basically ugly & atrocious elements of these poets' vainglory - can, from another angle, be recognized as rooted in the basic shaping impulse of art : what I have tried to describe elsewhere as the ("Acmeist") humanizing, or personalizing, of reality. I see this as a primordial artistic task, going back to the archaic shamans : the function of providing a sense of order in the cosmos through dramatization - giving meaning to experience, and order to chaos, through "playing it out."

Olson & Pound both took this high-priestly role in some dark & demagogic directions. Totalism, totalitarianism are inherent dangers of any search for wholeness through art. & we should be careful not to romanticize the irrational, self-aggrandizing impulses of same. Yet this humanizing/dramatizing/synthesizing/visionary/epic dimension is fundamental to poetry. (Classicist Charles P. Segal has explored the ambiguous duality of the poetic "pharmakon" - delusive drug or visionary guide? - in a number of studies.)

& with this in mind, I guess Pound's self-effacing disciple in the "long poem", Zukofsky, can be seen as their alter(ed) ego : so many maximus-pounds of anti-gravity. Foreshadowing, in "A", the objectification of "language" to come...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : long poems (label : subject/long poems).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are many others):

American poetry, Dante, narrative, numerology, Stubborn Grew...

Jordan is happy today. And when he says, "our ugly NY/slam/beat performativity", I'm thinking, the worm has turned.

But the question of "surplus" is not resolved simply by positive attitude (though that is always appealing in itself).

My theory (for today) is that the surplus problem is resolved by a critical approach : ie., a new critical taste for perfection. By which I don't mean a license for more negative reviews, but rather a challenge to be careful & discriminating enough (and independent enough) to find the perfect.

(p.s. isn't that an old Zukofsky criterion? "the objectively perfect")

Mark Scroggins, so much better acquainted with Zukofsky's poetry than I am, responds.

Zukofsky's turn, as Mark describes it, will probably (hopefully) be understood & appreciated more in future.

Odd juxtaposition, for me, between these poet issues, & the essay by Louis Menand on Edmund Wilson in NYorker this week. Menand describes with what brilliance & acumen Wilson understood & loved the Big Moderns like Joyce & Proust - & yet felt they had taken a wrong turn, into aesthetic narcissism, art for art's sake.

Raises a lot of questions which I can't formulate right now.

& why was Crane so completely different? Well, for one thing, he started from Joyce. Anti-Pound, anti-Eliot, almost as much as Stevens was. His Bridge is a pun-soaked "day in the life".

Zuk set himself up as Pound's dialectical flipside (Pound/Zuk, not Olson/Zuk is the real antinomy). But the Mallarmean extremism is not that different from Pound's aesthetic liminality. Wanting to be like Shakespeare : but being a sweet Shakespeare in a kind of muted Joseph Cornell music-box.

Paterson : too much the willed effort? A rush job. Didn't soak the guitar wood long enough. Plays on the surface - drab, prosaic.

Haven't perused Josh's most-recent report on the Z conference yet. But thinking of the focus on Zukofsky long-poem & gender questions.

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The critic, the interpreter, seeks out a logical architecture (this leads from that). Necessary even for full aesthetic appreciation of a work.

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Each poet's personal "tradition" hinges on those affinities with other poets, whose work inspired immediate love & admiration & desire to imitate. But perhaps underlying this process, lies something infused more tightly with both psychology & the character of poetry in general : ie., maybe what we love in the predecessor or the model, is the flicker or intimation of Paradise-Utopia, the lost equilibrium or childhood or Heaven or ecstatic state or spiritual beatitude or Peace at heart or Jubilee. . . & this is the charismatic or the perfect goal or quiddity hidden in poetry or faintly echoed or represented by poetry.

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The epic is a literary game, representing the ultimate "return home". . . thus Joyce's Ulysses points emphatically to Homer; and underneath "Bloomsday" is a kind of apocalypse - a World-Day in which time stops & turns toward Joyce's particular image of happiness, blessedness.

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It needs no repeating, that my "tradition" seems like Mandelstam closely joined by Hart Crane & Joyce. . . thus, for Joycean example, Forth of July hinges on many signal dates, and a particular date (4/7). . . aiming toward Jubilee. . .

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& the logical architecture - if you want to read this 1000-pp poem as a nice short poem? 4 books in 2 Parts:
1. Stubborn Grew
2. The Rose;

or, dying & rebirth;
& built on what? Family dynamics. . . gender relations. . . ie. tragicomic love song (Orpheus).

The figure of Elena Shvarts as incarnation of the Russian Mandelstam-model;
the figure of Juliet as poetry ghost-bride of a lost-&-found (native) America;

- these are like variations on a theme, the theme of the abandoned Orpheus-poet harping on his losses & mistakes & dreaming of a vast reunion.

& this logical architecture in turn, to repeat, intimates or stems from or allegorizes the general action or character of poetry per se, poetry as a phenomenon (the flicker of a Paradisal state).

Zukofsky (via Josh) & "objectification" - aesthetic principle of rest, finish, completion, fulness, equilibrium, self-sufficiency (beauty/pleasure), being related to utopia, Paradise, Shabbat (sabbath).

A very old notion - much speculated upon by Byzantine theologians (Hexaemera - meditations & sermons on the 6 "days" of Creation).

Poetry's special relation to the word as good-in-itself.

Comes out in Forth of July via imagery of the ark, the covenant, Jonah ("dove"-prophet-spirit), Jerusalem, Jubilee, time-travel.

I sought "finish" & objectification in my own way. The patterns of numbers, seasons, festival days - the "occasional poem" elements. (5.28) The formal crystallization of the 3-vols. + Coda. The numerical extensions of the abba quatrain; numerology. The symmetry of the 3 vols (over 900 pp.) centered on a single 7-line poem (#28) at center of Grassblade Light, which itself in turn pivots on a single line. Then the thematic rhymes, the Russian puns, the "delta" element, the Orpheus-Bluejay-Ojibwa layers. . . the central puns (Julius, Juliet, July, Jewel-eye, Jubilee. . .)

Plus a lot of great Minnesota stuff!!!!!!!!!! whoopie!!! loon calls!!!!!!! Put up yer dukes, Zuks!!!

Josh mentions Jonathan Ivry's paper on "Zukofsky's Quincunx". I hope Ivry noted the classic literary source on this subject, Sir Thos. Browne's essay The Garden of Cyrus.

Terrific, fascinating posts on the Zukofsky conference from Josh Corey. Thank you, Josh.

Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza. . . the effort to confront & describe the nature of God per se within the context of the definition of world & nature.

Theologian Keith Ward, as I mentioned a week or so ago, has been a great help to me lately in this area (three books: Religion and Relevation, Religion and Creation, Religion and Community).

Olson, Zukofsky. . . the epic boys are in the weather.

Very curious how Olson is still a living psychopomp in some circles: Kenneth Warren, at least, keeps the "drama" of Maximus Poems compelling, wherein the encounters of Maximus & his agonisti are mythic, iconic Kultur-ectomorphs.

Kent points toward some of the wider rings - Dale Smith, Stephen Ellis, Ed Dorn. . .

Zukofsky too, in his way, as the centennial celebration shows. Ron Silliman's post of yesterday begs the question : is the big-poem-epic deal a men's preserve?

Traditional literature in general was a men's preserve for a long time, obviously. How much is the mode of heroic culture-quest even more so? There are elements of "Iron John" role-modelling involved. Zukofsky clearly modelled his work on Joyce & Pound, as ephebe-challenger.

This is not necessarily bad. I suppose what's sexy today is the inquiry into what slanting illuminations or criticisms these heroic (& anti-heroic satirical) works bring to gender dynamics.

John Latta at the Hotel on Abstract Expressionists, Zukofsky's object-at-rest. I just finished reading N. Cusanus's Compendium, so offer his simple four-foldity :

point / line / plane / solid object
letter / syllable / word / sentence

(& more obscurely : Capability / Equality / Unity / Similarity - which I suppose could be figured as:

Power = point/letter
Equality = line/syllable
Unity = surface/word
Representation = object/sentence

Cusanus writes : any shape - a line, a circle, a sphere - is an image formed of equality.

So I focused, during most of the 1990s, on trying to write epic or long poems. I filled lots of notebooks & wrote lots of rejected drafts. Only small bits saw the light of publication: a section from the poem "In RI" appeared in apex of the M; I published a section of "Spring Quartet" in Nedge (titled "In the Darkroom"). I privately printed a lot of chapbooks, which are now in the Harris Collection at the Brown University Library (and not many other places besides my cardboard boxes at home).

What was I thinking, what were my choices then? It's all a little fuzzy in memory now, but I want to try to recall. It seems like the fundamental issue for me was finding an authentic or authoritative style for the inchoate "matter" I wanted to write about, which circled around only a few basic subjects. So I looked to the models, the previous patterns. And the issue of style seemed to hinge on the spine of subjectivity/objectivity. Poetry seems inherently personal, "characteristic": but then how does one avoid the pitfalls of an irrelevant solipsism or narcissism, on the one hand, and a simplistic, evasive, journalistic reportage/narration, on the other?

Pound seemed remarkably capable of turning "facts" into incantation; yet the Cantos seem glaringly, eccentrically arbitrary in both form & topics - despite the arguments for "ring structure" in individual cantos or the Whitmanic quality of diaristic drama (the poem of a life).

Williams (in Paterson) is very fun to read; but for me the weak point of his mosaic method (quoting snips of newspaper articles, etc.) is that in the verse sections, his diction is just not that interesting; the derivative allusions to Pound & Eliot are too obvious. Perhaps deep down he didn't trust his vision enough? He comes across as a poet with passionate, smart, and sometimes right OPINIONS - but maybe they're not passionate enough - they often seem like table-thumping rather than integrated vision.

Crane seems the most successful, because his aesthetic sense is most acute - he doesn't overreach, his epic The Bridge has a formal sweep & flow & finish, despite the weak (bombastic) sections. So it became an element of what I was trying to do to "bring forward" Crane in my own work, because I think his epic, among the others, has been unfairly slighted by the critics.

Zukofsky has an incredibly acute ear, his versification is splendid in places, but he seemed to foreshadow US postmodern poetics' over-emphasis on sound values. I haven't given him a careful reading yet, though; I found something off-putting in the cryptic quality, the dissolving of statement into Mallarmean-pure versification. I admit I'm probably missing something there.

Olson has many appealing traits; many parts of Maximus Poems are engrossing reading. But again I found some off-putting qualities which prevented me from giving him very careful study. I don't like his pretentiousness, his violence, his egocentrism, or his substitution of notation for musical form.

So during the 90s I was seesawing back and forth between a prosaic, Olsonian, grab-bag approach ("In RI") and a rhymed, versified Hart Cranian one ("Spring Quartet") - and turning back from both in frustration to shorter poems & sequences. "Spring Quartet" was first; and despite my initial absorption, when it was done I felt I had not really found a way to unite subjective/objective, personal/historical. The biographical elements did not jive with the historico-literary frameworks. I bounced from there to the more prosaic, quotational "In RI" - but its lack of versification & formal interest bored me; again there was a blank spot between personal narration and social vision which I seemed unable to resolve convincingly.

Toward the end of the 90s I had two breakthroughs. One was when, in turning in frustration away from epic writing, I started a neo-sonnet sequence called Island Road. Suddenly I was writing in a new way, more slangy and informal, but it seemed to work, and it still mostly does. The second happened a year or so later (late 1990s). I began reading Mandelstam's late lyrics ("Voronezh Notebook"); simultaneously I felt suddenly that I could re-frame the Orpheus story as a means of giving voice to that blank area between personal & historical: ie. "Orpheus" would de-personalize the narrator without complete erasure (as tends to happen in the "grab-bag" quotational method). Mandelstam, once again, was the source of a stylistic confidence: the rueful, informal, heartfelt sound of the Voronezh poems served as a kind of Russian equivalent to the sound I had heard in Berryman's Dream Songs & Ted Berrigan's Sonnets (& which helped trigger the "Island Road" sequence).

But I discovered - both in working on "Island Road", and the long poem which became Stubborn Grew and its sequels - that the focus on Orpheus was not just a technical matter. I was responding to a muse-relation, or love. At this point I would only say that - when Montale describes the relation between his poetry and his inspiration as Petrarchan, or "Dantesque, Dantesque!" - I now know to some extent what he's talking about.