Defense of a Diagram (3)

I've started reflecting out loud, in a slapdash way, on Ravenna Diagram, an ongoing work-in-progress, comprising a certain diaristic sequence of poem-segments, some of which have appeared on this blog, and which are collected into an incremental design of chapters and books.

The first two postings under this heading ("Defense of a Diagram") might give the impression that the poet in question (that would be me) is merely filling out a pre-existent didactic pattern, standing on a very narrow, marginal, & maybe obsolete theological/confessional set of beliefs.

I hope the reader would be freed from such assumptions by simply encountering some of the poems themselves.  The life of any poetry is deeply bound up with improvisation, contingency, surprise : as Whitman said of Leaves of Grass, it's a kind of language experiment.  Perhaps paradoxically, poetic language (as Osip Mandelstam argued) is much more primal & "raw" than prose.  It is "the cry of its occasion" (Wallace Stevens).  It is a kind of verbal embodiment or model of actuality (the closest linguistic approximation to "incarnation").  Thus, within the dramatic entity which is the poem, any & all kinds of verbal signs, propositions and abstractions are tested in the (poetic) field.  It doesn't matter, in the end, what the argument is, what the doctrine, what the theology, what the cultural tradition - if it doesn't manifest as actual poetry.

So part of the "drama" of what I'm trying to do here is the suspense of a geste.  The poet takes on a difficult task : & can she do it?  Can she make it work?  Can she cross Mandelstam's "two strands" of the "poetic material" - the subject-matter with the verbal medium itself?

What I'm attempting - & have been working at for a long time (say about 35 years) - is an adventure in vastness, enormity, & grandeur.  The long, long, long poem, the epic.  Melville's American "anti-Bible" (Moby Dick) - Pound's "tale of the tribe" (The Cantos) - these are models.  Ravenna Diagram was preceded by a number of earlier such works from my hand : In RI, Island Road, Stubborn Grew, Lanthanum, et al.

Thus there is a genre, a mode, a literary context, and a history (a tradition, you might say) which helps to place what I'm trying to do.  There are many other poets working this vein, in one way or another.  (Robin Coste Lewis' "Voyage of the Sable Venus" is a recent, celebrated example.)

But what spurs me on?  Is it some kind of character flaw - obsessive-compulsive behavior?  Megalomania?  Competitive, rivalrous overdrive?

Not really, I think.  The motive gets back to the question of the "argument" or the over-arching theme.  A work of literature has a specific gravity - heavy or light, depending on the poet's skill and the gravitas of the theme.  The Idea, the First Idea.  The one who attempts the epic must have something to say, something urgent to get across.

At root, poetry is a spiritual activity.  "A Tear is an Intellectual Thing / And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King" (Blake).  Spirit and conscience guide the creative freedom of the artist.  As such - as a spiritual activity - the poet & the poem make absolute claims about the "nature of things."  Thus I have harped repeatedly, on this blog, in many different ways, that poetry is the most adequate (& thus accurate) verbal representation of Reality as a whole, as a wholeness.

These notions lay a burden of obligation - a "burden which is light."  The inherent suspense, the drama of the poet's geste, is to prove worthy of these claims, in the fulfillment of the work.  What is your definition of poetry? the interrogator asked Mandelstam, hoping to catch him in some kind of Soviet fallacy.  The poet's sense of being right, he replied.  You can actually hear Mandelstam's conscience speaking there - his feeling of obligation to express the inner rightness of his vision.

So no, with Ravenna Diagram I am not filling out a simple pre-ordained ideological pattern.  Rather, I'm exploring a mystery - trying to express what little I can see of the underlying nature of things.  That this involves an historical sense seems basic to my own interest.

If one is proposing a metaphysical or theological way of interpreting experience, then one can sketch out a plain model of vectors or intersecting lines of force : history, time, the divine (the spiritual), the personal (subjectivity), poetry, and the history of poetry (tradition).  & if one is willing to conceive of Jesus (in the manner of David Jones) as the point in timespace where Man (humankind) and the Divine intersect "in the order of signs"... as the living template or paradigm of every human person - then "the historical Jesus" - or the "Jesus of poetry" - is where all these vectors coincide.  Obviously, not every reader of poetry is going to be prepared thus to conceive the nature of things!  But that's part of the joy & thrill & suspense of the enterprise : how the strange encounter is tested & plays out in the poem itself.  One need not accept the doctrine (inchoate, mysterious & confused as it is) in order to enjoy the song.

The Labarum

The triple form of the argument or plot of Forth of July, as I've described it, gets back to question I mentioned a couple days ago : why does Bluejay disappear at the conclusion of the 1st part of Stubborn Grew? After leading Henry on what he thinks is an epic re-enactment of Dante's descensus inferos, into local Rhode Island history?

Bluejay disappears because Henry must undergo further descents & disintegrations before he can speak & recognize the truth; in the process, the truth becomes first "nationalized" (the dream-journey up & down the Mississippi, the encounter with Whitman, Lincoln, New Orleans, etc.), further "poeticized" (the Orphic drama of raising the dead Juliet & the suicide-poets Berryman & Crane), further universalized (the infiltration of Biblical, Russian, prehistoric-shamanistic, Vallejo-Peruvian, etc. elements), and further personalized (as the motivations, desires & actions of Henry are unveiled, the search for a "lost cat Pushkin" leads, at the end, to an identification with the villain in Pushkin's gambler tale Queen of Spades).

All these developments are prefigured in miniature in various sections of Stubborn Grew (the 2nd chapter, "Ancient Light", is a virtual microcosm of the entire poem); in the 2nd half of Stubborn, after Bluejay has disappeared, the poem subsumes both Pound's Cantos & Joyce's Finnegans Wake in paired parodies delimited by the Falstaffian "downfall" - & hinted recovery - of "Henry" at the very end of the book (finished on Good Friday evening). Before he leaves, Bluejay continually hints & predicts to Henry that he is still unaware of the deeper purposes of their trip.

The emotional affects or effects of this "descent-ascent" vary greatly - basically the whole poem is a set of ring-changes in various emotional & visionary keys - but here's just one sample from toward the end of the poem of the mingled sense of universality & personal displacement or journeying (from July):

         5

  
         You stole through the Hopkins cemetery   side-
 stepping the gravestones   while for 35 years
 you hid a pebble on your tongue   unsavory
 Bosch-man unsavior   unable to decipher

  
         the broad paths of the Republic   nor
 the narrow corridors   footprints of
 one sole's   limping history   interpretations
 of a colorful clan   shaded by particulars of

  
         unacknowledgeable shame   your private
 Halloween mocks you   dog star   a silver
 stake left (pointed, unconnable)   reveals
 a secret ski-pole star   black vapid revels

  
         of unlaminated Pushkin   the wager you bet
 unaware one night   against your neighbor
 and if forgiveness comes (your rubbery rosary
 well-said from sad well's   deep tab's tub)

  
         it must come from her who   rose   a stone
 from the depths   of your fire-tonged
 prison   Henry   for whom you return in
 ash-strewn flame and   a reverse nostos

  
         where the vernal jewel   of a summer submarine
 repels the magnetic pole   downward   toward
 the bull's eye   of your signful urn   (retarded
 twice-embossed   crossed-out   snaildrum)

  
         heart and   hope to die   the children swear
 over the grave   pregnant   beneath layers of
 ice-coated Qs   and endless lines of   wayfaring
 strangers   in a winded   anti-host-figure

  
         to that crossroad   mapped red-eye   trained
 on your heart   dead-central   lemon   a
 cup of green   Teo-Hiawathan T   the scent
 of death   steam-railing toward   a restoration

     
                                       1.22.2000

What is a long poem?

They come in a great variety of forms, obviously, but what interested me in the beginning was how its 20th-cent. American versions carried forward & revised the epic mode.

Northrop Frye wrote a useful summary of its generic attributes. Among them are the epic's encyclopedic & cosmogonic qualities, the aim to present an image of universality.

One of the contrasting or counterbalancing characteristics of 20th-cent. poetry, though, from Symbolism on, was a push toward aesthetic autonomy, self-sufficiency, singularity : the idiosyncratic charm of modernist poetry lies in its assertion of the humble-sturdy beauty of things in themselves, including poems-as-poems. The poem becomes a delightful & useless contraption, rather than a utilitarian medium for something else. This is a particularly American spin on the notion of "invention" - & it goes somewhat against the grain of America's own iron laws of practical & useful enterprise.

& I think this idiosyncratic autonomy is what differentiates my own poem (Forth of July), contra Jonathan, from the prosaic medium of traditionalist narrative long poems.

Forth of July, as a form of late modernist epic, presents an encyclopedic cosmogony of sorts; & I think this was probably the underlying motive propelling its construction. Moreover, it's a cosmogony founded on a strictly poetic equation. A better phrase for this would be "poetic axiom", or poetic given : which, in any realm other than poetry, would probably be considered a tautology. As Milton understood, the frame & plot of epic is built on its "argument"; but in the 20th century, the age of autonomy & self-reflexivity, art focused more than ever before on the notion that its best, perhaps only, "argument", is its ability simply to be : all the assertions and denials which proceed from that are merely corollaries of an irreducible & complex manifestation.

A tautology is a kind of "ring structure", the primordial form of traditional epic poetry; we might liken it also to Mandelstam's (contra Symbolism) "law of identity" : "A = A".

Readers may be surprised at how postmodernist my discourse here is tending. Yet this tautological law of identity is more radical than standard postmodernism allows. Underlying the law of identity is an assertion of unity and universality, ie, "A = A" includes the universe (whereas in postmodern thought, "all" is "nought", and identity is an illusion with totalitarian implications).

The fact that a contemporary long poem has an argument of any kind, no matter how obscured, confused, and tautological, points up a distinction between (at least one aspect of) modern & postmodern; the corollaries of an argument for "identity" (A = A) lead to unities of form & construction which postmodern literature denies. I think this distinction is part at least, of the challenge my poem offers to the contemporary climate.

But can I be more explicit about the argument underlying Forth of July? How is it a strictly "poetic axiom", a tautology?

The argument of Forth of July can be likened, with reservations, to the controversial "anthropic principle" in physics (itself a kind of tautology). The epic journey-story of narrator "Henry" - with the help of spirit-guide "Bluejay" and wisdom-spirit "Blackstone" - does three coordinated things simultaneously. It unveils the layered roots of desire motivating the experiences of personal history ("Henry's confessions"); it unveils the roots of local, national, & strictly literary history as a story of repressed & denied realities (Bluejay's "basement" narration of Rhode Island & United States from the perspective of a homeless black/native American crazed ghost of ambivalent sexual proclivities); and it asserts that global history itself pivots on a mysterious "intervention" in human time & affairs of a Word of Love, analogous to poetry itself.

In this third element lies the ring structure or tautological aspect of the epic argument. For if human time & history pivot or revolve on a Word of Love comprehended by humankind, then poetry is a manifestation or mimetic image of same. The "wildness" of poetry, the poetic license which spins objective realities into dream-speech & fiction, comes round again (the ultimate "ring structure"): turning, as Whitman knew, on the essential, the most fundamental purpose of speech in the first place : to build a home for human beings, through love-speech (mother-love, father-love) - to reconcile the child to the mortal world. Mandelstam called this "domestic hellenism".