Method not a method

Teaching? .... I could probably teach grammar & composition. If I had to, & if I prepared myself, I could probably teach a passable intro course in history, philosophy, theology, literature...

Yes, I could teach grammar & composition, and I could teach literature, but I don't think I could teach poetry writing. Why not? Because the only method I know is inspiration. & inspiration is not a method. & most of the "methods" taught in poetry writing classes just get in the way of inspiration.

As I understand it, poetry is deeply-rooted in something you might call "breaking-into-song." No one breaks into song without being lifted-up, being inspired. There is something holy, sacred, & surrounded-by-fire in this experience, this song-rapture. The words, the poems, the traces of such inspiration give off the heat & light of that experience, & are tinctured with that "divinity", that sacred awe, that... apartness, strangeness...

Don't get me wrong : I don't think inspiration is a replacement or short-cut for craft & hard work. I just tend to think that that kind of labor - the path from "grammar & composition" to inspiration to finished work of art - is best struggled at sort of privately & indirectly. You must wrestle with the angel to win your birthright. Not necessarily in solitude, by any means : but it should be an individual artistic search. Otherwise there are too many middle-people involved, muddling up the distinction between writing true poetry and versifying, between inspiration & method.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but this is how I've always understood poetry. & I can't teach inspiration : I can hardly ever find it myself.

Since the ol' Quatrain Express seems to have finally come into the station, I've been pondering about the general basis of my ways in poetry... so it's been quiet around here.

Thinking about my deep attraction for "Deep Image" kinds of things... Mandelstam & Crane's riddles, hermetic imagery, some of that in Pound's Cantos & elsewhere... it's a kind of imagism-symbolism, visual music... Poe's "vagueness"...

but now I'm thinking about it as a kind of limitation...

wondering if there's a psychological/intellectual aspect to it. Like nostalgia for home or childhood instilling a subconcious hunger for vision - which is perhaps temporarily appeased by the striking, un-paraphrasable image, like a gong sounding...

(speaking of gongs, I think Yeats went through something like this, a re-examination of his style... not that I'm doing anything so systematic or dramatic here)

So the challenge for me might be to find a way of writing which I can take to, which involves something more like direct discourse, statement... Maybe.

... & part of the fun of these long poems (for the writer, anyway) is that you are playing with many layers of meaning... successive strata of materials, paint, encaustic... cross-referencing & reflecting back & forth, like a pedal on a keyboard... & within a kind of fetish-structure, a gizmo-design. This is what I'm doing, anyway, with Fontegaia. The numerical business there is pretty complicated & arcane...

I was never much of a runner (though I was captain of the soccer team, & was on the track squad for a while, & was indeed one of Al Franken's wrestling partners!). But something in me (call it "Pegasus") starts racing toward the finish line of these long poems. It happened with Stubborn Grew, with Grassblade Light, with July... & though I was not thinking or planning or expecting it all, it happened again with #8 of this final section of Fontegaia. & it's a wonderful feeling, when something leaps into place - as if it were there all the time, just waiting for you. Rivers play a big role in these poems - & it feels exactly like - suddenly a new tributary of fast, fresh water slams into my regular, slow, meandering, ruminatin' river... I suppose a mundane psychological explanation is that I'm anticipating the end of all this inching laborious composition... maybe so, I don't know. But I did indeed want Fontegaia to run clear - & fast - at the end. & I had no clue as to how that was going to happen, until one evening a few days ago, sitting in the back yard after work, #8 just started tearing along.

It's better to grow up in a land where poets & writers are pretty much low-class, invisible, neglected, ignored.

Why so, O Henry?

Because that first taste of writing something original, something your own... that indelible experience of inner freedom... maybe it's powerful to the extent that it contrasts with the dullness & repression of the milieu out of which it has emerged.

& when writing is celebrated & glorified & adulated & popularized & becomes hip & funded & organized & careerified... maybe hordes of so-called writers emerge who don't really recognize that moment of freedom - or value it much... writing becomes a sort of social game, reflecting complacency rather than that original, primordial thirst...

(thoughts of an old-timer from the mysterious 1950s)

It's not, as the pigeonholers would have it, about craft or technique, or about the groups or trends your poet seems to align with, or what all. Americans have an obsession with technology and branding. Poetry is beyond and against all that.

The "technology" of poetic language is intricate and subtle to a degree that escapes paraphrase and conceptualization. As Mandelstam expressed it in his essay about Dante, the Divina Commedia is poetic speech of such alien refinement as to represent a language from the future. (This is the wild region of the atmosphere where poetry, prophecy and science fiction meet...)

And yet "technology" as a term is also completely inadequate for what we are concerned with here.

Minor pigeonholer (& poetry-lover) Jonathan Mayhew happened to bring up the subject of "duende" recently, which led to comment-box activity around this and related para-musical phenomena (fado, saudade, etc.). This kind of vocabulary begins to approach the obscure poetic regions more closely that anything "technical" - regions where the subjective and the communal, knowledge and feeling, are shown - by the artist's expression - to integrate, to interpenetrate.

A poem is feeling and intuition. These forces guide the poet to speak beyond the normal range of utterance.

But what also makes this region even more rarified is that, in the depths, world poetry is one. That is, the poet, possessed by the duende-fury, enters into a dialogue or dialogues with poetic ancestors and contemporaries. There, the vast and profound range of "technical resources" - the rhetorical sublimity of the great poets of the past - begins to become actual, active, and influential. We are talking about the depths of language - like the subtlety, strangeness & uncanny instinct of the most exotic jungle flowers, insects & birds.

A poet like Frost may camouflage these phenomena with faux-folksiness - but he's aware of them : they're there in his themes and compositional models (Horace & Shakespeare, for example).

The main point I want to make here, though, is that all this development - the state of creative composition in poetry - is a subjective, intuitive, and emotional process in the highest degree. Unpredictable. Demanding an integration of opposites : an intense social engagement in the immediate contemporary world, with a profound awareness of subjective and subconscious impulses. Intuitive. A 6th sense.

(I'm only reiterating some things I tried to say in interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket, 8 yrs ago.)

Finished Suite Francaise. Moving, beautiful, heart-rending. Tremendous. Goes into "metafiction", as at the end you read her journal entries, in which she plans new sections of the novel (fascinating entry into compositional process), & comments with searing clarity, insight, irony, on the situation in France and her own impending doom (she was murdered, as was her husband, in Auschwitz). Astonishing story of this book's survival.

(Interesting to read this after having read H.L. Hymes' Underground City.)

I mosey over here to read about more recent art...

Aiyeee, what am I doing... fewer & fewer people drop by this blog. What am I doing with this old Renaissance lumber?

What a pyramid of blather I've piled up at HG Poetics. But the fluency slowly inexorably 'sgone away, it seems. You need to sense an audience to be able to speak with confidence. I've alienated or been dismissed in so many directions, can't even count 'em anymore. Just an old wannabe-has-been, I guess.

I'm like a trickling fountain struggling to break through my own frozen grime & encrustations.

Worn out at the end of the day I slouch with my little Neo & a few scribbles. I don't know what I'm going to write, I just go into the woods with a list of vague ambiguous directions. Along comes another number, & I like it, & it feels good to be working on something.

Poetry for me (as I've writ before) is a kind of large-scale construction project. Poems are complex buildings or pyramids, strange engineering feats.

So be it.

Crane & Olson. But a different C & O.

(As I've noted before here someplace...) I was reading a monograph on Aristotle when I started Stubborn Grew.
Helped me add sort of an introductory echo effect (talking, in the poem, about what the poem was going to do).

Yeats wrote out prose "plots" or paraphrases as part of the composition process.

busy busy busy here... & I will be away until Sunday.

Struck again last night by the realization of just how odd, distinct & elliptical has been my experience of making poems. Distinct from other kinds of thinking & doing, I mean.

It was the NY School poets back in the 60s who created, for me, an encouraging atmosphere for such activities (amid other kinds of encouragement, from teachers, etc.).

& some of the long poem projects have started out more or less consciously from such a slant. The mind going into new sensation, or memory of old sensations. Deliberate immersion, away from reasoning & pondering & discourse, into "imagination" or a kind of sensorium of feeling. Is this "negative capability"?

Stubborn started out this way. Deliberate babble & fragments. July - the analogy of "goin' into country", Huck Finn-like, sinking into the middle river. Poem as vagrancy.

Am reading Hermann Broch's novel Death of Virgil. Very absorbing, beautiful writing. Translator seems to be echoing Whitman (a lot of anaphora - repetition of words at beginning of sentence or phrase (along with vast cosmic-natural imagery). Wonder if it's that way in the original).

Started writing a novel myself on Saturday. When I was done (with a couple pages written) I learned that the Pope had died. It's been a strange Easter/Passover time this spring, the past week or so.

I went to church yesterday. It was my turn to read the Prayers. So I included John Paul II in them (I'm Episcopalian).

Odd time in the church year, when you're confronted intellectually with the mystery of the Resurrection. It affects the sermons. It's something that the intellect & common sense cannot accept, that is, on a rational plane.

A season when the gulf between faith & scepticism yawns widest.

Are we confronted here with a primitive remnant, something from a previous phase of the human mind? Or is there an aspect of willed or motivated contradiction at play? That is, with the mystery of the Resurrection, a line of estrangement is drawn between God and the world, between spirit & flesh. A veil, wrapped around a single person, a single individual (Christ). Which in turn "personalizes" the relationship between Spirit & humanity.

From another angle, the Resurrection "naturalizes" - even "historicizes" - a spiritual reality which is familiar & accessible through many religious traditions (orthodox & fringe) : the reality of "cosmic consciousness". The idea that the end of the physical body is not an absolute end : that, in some unknowable dimension, there is no death : that the soul is immortal. "What will be is only a promise." I think of certain Yeats poems.

(Riddle of the icon - the representative figure ("the Son of Man"). A unique person is commissioned to undertake a collective, historical role. Archetype. It's like an Escher drawing - a "figure/ground" problem in continual oscillation or reversal.)

Which reminds me of this spring poem, one of Mandelstam's last:

To Natasha Shtempel

 
I
 
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead 
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom 
of her inspiring disability pulls her along, 
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the charity of a concept:
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault, 
and that this is an eternal beginning.

 
II
 
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and to be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.

(Sorry, I don't know who translated this. This poem does strange things to me, like certain passages in Beethoven. It brings tears to my eyes.)

Feeling a change in the weather. Must find a way to reduce my own cacaphony, amid the general cacaphony. This is probably a symptom of homesickness for poetry.

(Why am I telling you this. Blogging is weirdly un-private. Or, I am just weirdly blogging.)

I've never learned how to discipline myself, or to negotiate the worlds of writing & publication. & blogging makes an easy substitute for that. Like email for correspondence.

Maybe the poet labors only to reflect back, in a mirror, the pleasure received from reading/hearing other poetry. A closed circle, an artifice, a garden. What you read is a rough translation of what I heard before. (& you try to refine out the noise, in the process of finding the right words.)

But that leaves no room for making something really new, never done before.

Maybe it's both. You make something new in order to close the ring, draw the circle again.

The creative unity which Coleridge looked for in the poetic process. An integration of what you intuit to be the best words, in the best order - with as much of reality as you can manage. This also is to forge the ring, close the circle (on another plane).

But with so much talk & noise & distraction everywhere now - it seems to call for even more discipline & restraint, if you want to sharpen your message & refine your poetry. (of course I include myself among the noisemakers!)