The Cantos
The Bridge
Paterson
The Maximus Poems
"A"

- here's a stack of them. How, how well, do they represent social/city life? How well do they evoke "utopia"? quick notes:

Cantos have a sort of tragic grandeur, as well as a hectic energeia which sometimes captures the quick rough quiddity of experience, the plunging violent unpredictability of urban reality. Also a practiced lyrical-cantando-enchantment, esp. describing nature, feminine allure. Still, as Olson pointed out long ago, the backward-looking antiquarian preciosity, as well as the authoritarian politics, push the Cantos toward a sort of ever-living obsolescence.

The Bridge, in my view anyway, succeeds pretty well in blending lyric proportion, emblematic history, and Gotham immediacy (the Joycean day's dream-journey of the narrator) - so that the reading experience itself reproduces its locale (how shall I put this: when you read The Bridge, you have the pleasant sensation of being-in-NYC-reading-The Bridge. Sort of Borgesian, that way). Its technique, however, is refined and ironic - so that much is left out which its competitors here try to include (there's a study on puns in The Bridge, though, which argues that a lot of that excluded mundaneity comes back in by the back door. Paul Giles, Hart Crane : the contexts of The Bridge). Crane's trans-chronological "Atlantis" is a sort of poetic summation of 1920s "Our America" idealism. Still beautiful & hopeful.

Paterson is best of these in evoking city as a collective-psychic organism, where drab dailiness overlays historical-geological fragments & dreams, an arena of contingencies & possibilities. WCW's sharp eye & humor help, but for me the language is too flat & derivative to be very moving, & his cautious analytical bent doesn't do much for me, though others will savor the stringent-sour critical awareness of this social & egalitarian poet. His empathy often strikes me as tepid & careful, the attitude of the professional medical man (many will disagree). He also tries too hard & too obviously to remodel his models (Eliot, Pound).

Maximus Poems. When Olson tries to improve on his masters - Pound, WCW - he often does so. He's a genius at turning the obscure historical footnote into both vivid fragment and portentous psychic extrusion-symbol. Better than the rest is the feel for working-class poverty, necessity, & odd moments of liberation. Olson really does succeed at turning a literary mask into an emblem of some vast cosmic order. Where he loses me, most of the time, is with his actual language use. The personality that comes across sometimes - overbearing, pompous, pretentious, eccentric, sneering, vulgar - seems like a weird oedipal reaction to Pound & Literature - an effect like a bad habit, rather than a genuine reflection of Olson the better man. But it's off-putting, and for me, gives sign of minor rather than major poetry. Olson was a kind of hero, in a heroic & lonely struggle for origination & powerful mantic speech - but I wonder if he was up to the battle he chose.

"A" - I haven't read this carefully enough to say much. Zukofsky has an incredible ear for rhythm & sound on the syllabic level. Using it, he takes the civic and the utopian experience and - taking direction from Pound & Joyce & going much further - internalizes, subjectifies those experiences. A sort of quasi-Orphic process, I think: reality is completely absorbed into A-Z's limping, limpid, familial-household mumbling. What bothers me about it is precisely what made Z. appeal to the postmoderns : the turn to pure sound, the recherche Mallarmean-Symbolist aestheticism. Its action is almost diametrically reverse to that of The Bridge : whereas the latter incorporates the reader into an imaginary NYC-America, the former absorbs all things - the world, the reader - into Zukofsky-sound.

Days of hectic. Yet must I drone, drone I must.

Reading about Sienese painting, history. Sounds abstruse? Not really. Democracy, civic values, religion, art, Black Death.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescos of Good/Bad Government in Palazzo Pubblico. Probably influence on Bruegel. Exploratory, panoramic improvisation.

Providence I am reading your local papers. Same issues - gov't overburdened with inertia, selfish interests, bureaucracy. Various levels & types of apartheid longstanding ("suburban golf protection racket" as Stubborn puts it). But hopeful civic efforts underway everywhere - creative projects of betterments.

Lorenzetti read Divina Commedia and was one of first - maybe the first pictor of Dante.

*

Walking about today with fleeting quarter-thoughts in between work. Mild, muggy.

Stevens' Adagia - the ones where he holds "poetry" and "poetry of life" in each hand. Maybe no other way to apprehend it??

Poetry is a sense. Not words, really. We have to feel our way into it again, blindly - into the sense of it we had in our youth, man' decades ago.

I mean poetry in its psychological/experiential context. . . what am I saying? When you ponder the vast variety of human capabilities, personality bents, individual experiences - such ground the vast differences in taste, apprehension, appreciation, valuation. & often I think we literary leeches are the most blind - through jaded appetite. We no longer respond as we did, to a new world speaking to us from the page.

But my own argument here excludes the word "we" to some extent (talkin about myself, I guess). Nothing is determined or set in stone in this regard. We may again find ourselves caught up in a new literary charm, a new discovery, a new love.

Poetry is a sense. A sense of reality-as-poetry. A premonition.

I have a literary reputation as odd, eccentric. Also boring, conventional, traditionalist. Actually I am Super-Normal Standard Poet. My literary memory is an echo chamber. I keep alive certain normal ways of speakin'.

Why poetry? I mean, why do we do this?

We take aesthetic pleasure in words, what language does?

That, and something else. With language we acknowledge, define, order, shape what we experience. This is a techne intimately fused with that which it represents. With poetic speech we "surround ourselves with domestic utensils, the warmth of the hearth" (Mandelstam's description of the poetics of Acmeism - "domestic hellenism". He was doing this in deliberate contrast to the more otherworldly & abstract qualities of Russian Symbolism).

The equilibrium of artifice - craft, techne - and nature is at the root of civilization.

So perhaps we can recognize a certain solemn (&/or playful) objectivity, disinterestedness, at work in poetry - a reflection or emanation of the poet's serious effort to follow & express truth - the poet's equivalent of the philosopher's or scientist's activity.

The image of "the city" in art (as I said, I'm reading about medieval Siena), representing an ideal of equilibrium between know-how & nature, individual & community. (And hidden within every image of the city is that of a garden.)

The word bears the techne of a global equilibrium (Mandelstam also foresaw this). When he talked about the poem as "like unto an Egyptian bark of the dead, carrying everything necessary for life" - he was talking about the word-itself as a sort of Noah's ark.

The curious focus in the American long poem on the local, the city. The unavoidable and only shared "here & now" where any real equilibrium (political, cultural, natural) becomes possible.

audblog audio post Island Road # 11 and 12. My wife says it doesn't sound like me. That's all right. Hippodamus designed cities for playful strangers, according to the phusis(nature) of the cosmos; principles of universal proportion & mediation that so fascinated Simone Weil. (See the fine essay by Peter Murphy, "Architectonics", in Agon , Logos, Polis : the Greek achievement and its aftermath, ed. by Murphy & Arnason, Steiner Verlag, 2001.)