I guess there is something similar between my "tuning fork" & Kasey's idea of "gateway poets".

Mark Scroggins more on polonggevity.

Obviously I'm more caught up in the megalomania of it than some.

That modulated-defensive note from LZ which Mark quotes : understandable, but not an explanation for the phenomenon. There are a lot of interesting technical problems with the 20th-cent. long poem. If the ambition & the desire outruns the supporting framework (plot, thematic development, argument, stylistic variation, etc.) the poem becomes a kind of sponge.

Trouble is, sponges are endearing. Walt Whitman wrote a sponge. There is a tremendous pressure to integrate & unify the process into a life-work.

Some lazy heat-wave thoughts: vertical/horizontal = height/breadth = refinement/capaciousness = Zuk/Olson = Dante/Shakespeare...

Pound's mania linked to Dante's altitude, the view of experience as an embattled uphill climb, the exile's sense that the world-economy is skewed & inimical.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, speaks from a dramaturgically-realized inner equilibrium (rooted in poetic number). Order is the norm : tragedy & comedy are interrogations of social anomaly - disturbances of an ultimate calm. The fact that he was part of an authorized royal-aristocratic theatrical pageant meant that his ironies are always couched in, moderated by, a conservative assent to traditional order.

Pound's attitude stemmed from a decisive technical problem or contradiction. His classicism/archaism, Nietzschean/pagan power-worship was applied as a literary weapon to chastise & excoriate failed (European) civilization. But the role of the Nietzschean avenger-prophet was deracinating : it uprooted Pound from his own American background. He was unable to draw on or benefit from the liberal-democratic alternative to the wasteland of decadent & war-ravaged Europe. So he ended up as zoo exhibit in Pisan cage & Washington nuthouse : fighting a war with the new democratic power which had already rendered his authoritarian allegiances irrelevant.

But then, where does that leave the "long poem"?

Olson, Zuk & WCW came up with their alternatives. Crane had already done something completely different.

We have to look long & carefully at the underlying conceptual choices, literary allegiances & attitudes of these different American writers (& others!), to even begin to consider how the "long poem" or the culture-epic could be re-designed.

Mandelstam toward the end of his life began to formulate notions of poetic practice as "journey" and "kinship" (see Mandelshtam's Poetics by Elena Corrigan). The Dante that emerges from his "Conversation About Dante" is a very different practitioner and a different personality from the Dante of Pound & Eliot. Dante emerges, not surprisingly, as a kind of Ital-Ren. Mandelstam : a wandering, uncertain bird-man, a Chaplinesque-ecstatic Acmeist-Futurist.

The shadow of the poet (Pound's shadow, Olson's Maximus, Wordsworth's ego) is identified with the filtering mask. The mask shades and patterns the experiential universe. Whose world do we inhabit now? The world of the mask of Mandelstam's Dante?

The shape of future poems might depend on some such thing.

When I read this by Reginald Shepherd (in an email to Josh Corey) -

"we are all in the wake of the Modernists, of Modernism, especially when seen as an international phenomenon. All the poetic avant-gardening in the past thirty years or longer has basically been a process of people rediscovering the Moderns, turning over the soil, if you will, and rediscovering things that had been buried or at least lost sight of." -

or this -

"Since I began reading poetry in the 1970s, I have always been opposed to what I saw as contemporary mainstream American poetry, because it was boring and because in its neglect of poetry's verbal resources it was out of the mainstream of English
language poetry from the Elizabethans through the Metaphysicals to Keats and the Modernists. These are the writers who made me want to read and to write poetry in the first place, whose work is still the standard by which I measure my own work and that of others. But historical memory is also something that tends to fall by the wayside."

- I feel a sense of kinship & an affirmation of what I've been doing with poetry all these years.

& when I read John Latta's remarks on modes of speech in American poetry, I get a sense of an active motivation - the will of the poets - underlying changes in style over recent decades. A motivation having to do with authenticity, relevance (against academicism, or imitation for its own sake).

& with these two blog-perspectives on the table, I can look back at my own short & long poems... with some irony, I guess. There's a Scylla & Charibdis... the danger, on the one hand, that one's devotion to the Modernists, & all that came before, will lead to stilted over-refinement (so apparent in a lot of the neo-traditionalist-formalist work of the 90s). The danger, on the other hand, that colloquial bluntness leads (usually) to mediocre writing. Poetry is not the same as stand-up comedy or tragic drunken caterwauling & free-verse self-pity.

Shepherd's comments make me feel part of a tradition. The partisanship of the schools & the cliques has always made me feel left out. One irony is, that there is more complex formal experiment & more multilingual slang in Stubborn Grew, & Forth of July as a whole, than in about all of the "post-avant" production put together. I am not exaggerating!!!! Contrast the Shepherd perspective with that of the polemical cliques. The cliques turn poetry into a game of Capture the Flag or "who do we mock today". They are the a-historical ones.

I understand I think why chelovek Rm Service was bored by Merwin/Brown Mandlestam Selected Poems. There are many 70s Merwin mishaps there; it's never entirely pleased me either. There are better translations. But it was a good project at the time. Some of them are beautiful. Clarence Brown wrote a very good monograph-biography of M.

It would be a pity not to see (through 20-20 hindsight) through the weaknesses & bowdlerizing. The miracle of these little poems' even reaching the light of day is one of THE great tales of 20th century civilization (cf. Hope Against Hope, etc.).

353

 
What has held out against oxidation
and adulteration, burns like feminine silver,
and quiet labor silvers the iron plow
and the poet's voice.

"feminine silver" = MERCURY

357

 
Once a line of verse, in disgrace, father unknown,
fell from the sky like a stone, waking the earth somewhere.
No supplication can alter the poet's invention.
It can only be what it is.  No one will judge it.

"father unknown"

[trans. by Brown/Merwin. written in 1937, the year OM died in exile. The poems want to be read in context, as much context as possible. The context is suffering, hunger, exile & persecution. & a scribbling, muttering compositor.]

He's always looking off into the distance, at the forest, the steppe, the taiga.

351

 
Oh the horizon steals my breath and takes it nowhere -
I'm choked with space!
I get my breath back, there's the horizon again.
I want something to cover my eyes.

 
I'd have liked the sand better - a life in layers
along the sawing shores of the river.
I'd have clung to the sleeves of the shy current,
to eddies, hollows, shallows.

 
We'd have worked well together, for a moment,
a century.  I've wanted rapids like those.
I'd have laid my ear under the bark of drifting logs
to hear the rings marching outward.

                    
                    - Voronezh ("raven-knife"), 16 Jan. 1937

Here he seems to be talking to me. The river design mediates the vast empty plains of exile, and elegant St. Petersburg, his architectural tinker-toy native home. Yes, the last stanza I interpret as being about my poem July.

Curious resemblance between my expressed motives for doing long poems (see previous post) and Josh's comments on Claudia Rankine. But the methods are so different. There are a lot of poets who use collage and documentary material - it sounds like Rankine does so pretty effectively (I've only read an excerpt at one of the links Josh provides). I did some collage in the In RI poem. Less so in Stubborn Grew & sequels (there, anyway, it's hidden, melded with the quatrains).

The problem for me with Pound's "rag-bag" methods, and their recent extensions into "multimedia", is that the form of the poetry tends to get sort of distended and slack. That's how it comes across for me, anyway. It slides into prose & other forms of communication. For some, this is exciting.

I like the otherness of poetic speech, the strangeness which comes with versification, rhyme, lineation. I guess it is most effective when it oscillates back and forth over the border with prose & everyday vernacular.

The otherness creates a sort of magic circle around the language, accentuates the formal impression and makes for intensity.

I feel this "poetry magic" is inseparable from the vocational path of poets, which I sort of sketched in previous post yesterday. Every new generation, every new poem, erases the past, blocks it out of our attention to some extent. At the same time, every new generation has the capability - various capabilities - to respond to and re-create what was done before.

Why is this important? Well, on one level, it's simply natural. There's a natural fascination in the reading of ancient texts, or the hearing of ancient poems, which still work. The process creates living bonds with what is normative and profound in experience - precisely through the "poetic" process of discovering analogies or resemblances between distant and different things. The plays of Shakespeare or Sophocles come in strange and archaic costume, yet we find ourselves caught up in the crises they present.

I guess this is a sort of prosaic version of one aspect of Mandelshtam's Acmeism. Poetry the vital remnant, a link across time and eras.

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

*

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

*

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.

*

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.

*

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. . .

*

& 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).

Inching Along

I'd like to continue the speculations on future poetics begun a few days ago. I don't have time today for more than a couple brief notes.

I think I've made some progress, but there's a need for more interrogation.

First, I've suggested how a sense of living tradition could be built on a notion of active reading/affinity - grounded in love, which undergirds a different attitude toward the origins, identity and presence of the poetic voice (different from major strains of postmodern theory and writing).

Such an approach opens up the possibility that literary style and technique might be generated not solely by the chronological succession of the New, or a deterministic notion of innovation, but by anachronistic connections of affinity (what Mandelstam describes as the "opening of the Bergsonian fan" across widely separated eras).

Secondly, and related to this, I've characterized the "poetic word itself" in (Mandelstamian) Acmeist fashion, as the crossing of two strands: time & eternity, nature and grace, such that poetry is the emanation of harmony, or the evidence of the harmonization, of these two spheres.

Yet this theoretical framework is incomplete, and as such it short-changes poetry. How so?

By forcing poetry to bear the burden of what is basically a metaphysical doctrine, one inhibits poetry's freedom, to some extent. Poetry needs to be free in its autonomy, in its capability to be whatever it wants to be. And yet I don't want to surrender the theoretical grounding which this description of the duplex nature of the poetic word provides. How am I going to resolve this?

Let's say that this notion of the Word as grounded in anachronistic affinity is the vertical axis of a broader definition. When we described Modernism as a literary effort to "catch up" with the zeitgeist, we were overly abstract, since we neglected to focus on the "how" (how this was accomplished).

How this was done involved what we might call an effort of circumference. Let's make this the horizontal axis of our poetics. What do we mean by circumference? The modernist innovations in style & technique - grounded to a great extent in poets like Browning and Whitman - vastly expanded the range of both subject-matter and level of diction. Whitman, in a sense, can be understood as Dickinson's coeval : what Dickinson achieved in the realm of compression and metaphysical verticality, Whitman accomplished in the realm of horizontal breadth and openness, of descriptive capaciousness, of literary magnanimity.

What were the modernist and postmodernist long poems, but experiments in capaciousness, in extending the range of what poetry could include? No wonder that, over the last 50 years, the squabbles between traditionalists and experimentalists have been so divisive and continuous: contemporary inclusiveness clashes sharply with longstanding concepts of traditional poetic technique.

Every poet has to find their own center of gravity or path through these differing perspectives. Inclusiveness, taken as a kind of stylistic absolute, leads eventually to a condition of no-style (anything can be called a poem). Tradition, taken as an absolute, leaves no room for either originality or genuine change.

So perhaps we approach a theory of the poem as something autonomous, self-creating, self-defining; open to both empirical and metaphysical meaning & interpretation, but only in the sense of something possible, potential, discoverable (rather than being defined by a higher or exterior meaning). The poem is evidence of creative labor - labor which in itself is a kind of freedom from prior definitions & orientations.

With such an undefined definition, have we come full circle? Are we back where we started, with nothing to show for it? I hope not... For me, anyway, that vertical axis opens at least a possible path beyond both modern & postmodern, while the horizontal axis allows poetry to build on the capacious circumference of its accomplishments.

Will follow up on modernism/postmod comments of last Tuesday as soon as I have time. I realize that a postmodernist might accuse me of gross oversimplification. If you look at modernism merely as an aesthetic adjunct to the zeitgeist, and postmodernism as merely an adjunct to modernism, then you are slighting or avoiding the central philosophical interests of postmodernity, such as the status of Being and the subject, the priority of text over speech, the inherent tautology or irreferentiality of text, etc. And these theoretical developments, of course, have had a remarkable influence on late-20th-century American poetry.

Glazov-Corrigan addresses these issues in the final chapter of her Mandelstam study. She shows how the poet - despite his fascination with pre-text and intertextuality - differs from such theorists as Barthes, Bloom, Culler, Kristeva, in that Mandelstam - rather than seeing writing as the site of otherness, disconnection, or embattlement with the spectral echoes of past texts - understands poetic tradition as a living, affirmative phenomenon, based on kinship, affinity, admiration - on love. Glazov-Corrigan underscores this with some marvelous quotations:

"If Dante had been sent forth alone, without his dolce padre, without Virgil, scandal would have inevitably erupted at the very start." (Joseph Brodsky)

"From then on, yes, from then on, since the time in Naumov's picture, when, before my very eyes, they killed Pushkin... I have divided the world into the poet - and all of them; amd I have chosen - the poet - have chosen the poet to be among those I defend: to defend the poet - from all of them, however they all are garbed, however they are named." (Marina Tsvetaeva)

One of the best:
"Tradition has appeared to all of us; to all it has promised a face; to all, each in a different way, it has kept its promise. We have all become people in the measure in which we have loved people and had the opportunity to love." (Boris Pasternak) [my italics]

Pasternak, again:
"A step forward in science is taken according to the law of repulsion, from refutation of prevalent errors and false theories... A step forward in art is taken according to the law of attraction, from the desire to imitate, follow and worship well-loved percursors."

Brodsky, again:
"The real poet never avoids influences and indebtednesses, but often nourishes and emphasizes them by all available means. There is nothing more physically (and even physiologically) pleasing that repeating in one's head or aloud (in full voice) someone else's lines. The fear of influence, the fear of dependence - this fear - and sickness - is characteristic of a wilderness inhabitant [dikar] and not of culture, which is all - receptivity, all - echo. Let someone pass this on to Harold Bloom."

The postmodernist may ask what this has to do with theory; and in reply I would point to the first Pasternak quotation above. The law of attraction or literary kinship - and the law of "identity" (or "ontological status of the Subject") - are both grounded in love. As love is an "established" spiritual reality, so much so is poetic tradition a living phenomenon.

I guess my glibness is back.

How do I understand the perspective that informs my "affinities"?

I'm a sort of melancholic optimist, that's how I see it. A metaphysical optimist, due to engagement with religious ideas & experiences. A political optimist, due perhaps in part to happy childhood in the exact middle of 50s Middle America (plus naivete or complacency? you be the judge). Melancholic also by nature & experience.

Perhaps a religious perspective not that far from Eliot fills me (in contrast to him, it seems) with metaphysical optimism. Which partly explains my fascination with Hart Crane's response to Eliot (as opposed to WC Williams'). (Williams strikes me as a kind of populist-empiricist. Crane more like a visionary-idealist. Crane's idealism has religious connotations which I don't find in Williams.)

I found similar "major chords", a similar optimism, in Mandelstam. Not a superficial but a profound saying YES, different atmosphere from Eliot.

Pound also has some grand & wonderful major chords. Along with an almost total mis-reading of religious & humane values in history. Or, should I say: Pound seems to display quite thoroughly & openly how passionate humane impulses are twisted & destroyed by a combination of aristocratic snobbery & wolfish aggressive (un)realpolitik.