[marginal note by Celan to his poem "In Eins":]

M a n d e l s t a m m -
Und so wird man verstehen, daß die Gedichte M's nicht, wie man verschiedentlich von ihnen sagte, "hermetisch" sind, sondern vielmehr offen, weit aufgetan dem Auge, das sie in ihrer ganzen Zeittiefe zu begreifen versucht.
Schluß: DES MENSCHEN ORT - EIN ORT IM ALL (Gellhaus 1997, 340)



[M a n d e l s t a m -
And thus one will understand, that M's poems are not, as it has been occasionally stated, "hermetic", but rather open, disclosed to the eye, which tries to grasp them in their entire depth of time.
Conclusion: THE MAN'S PLACE - THE PLACE IN THE WORLD]

Reading Maurice Blanchot on Mallarme, courtesy of Jonathan.

Distinction he makes between Valery & Mallarme. For the former, poetry is a vehicle of meditation, intellectual mastery; for the latter, purely an aesthetic object formed from words (words from which everything has been refined away, except for this aesthetic essence).

An aesthetic based in turn on the one characteristic of language which fascinates Mallarme : the way in which words replace, disperse - distance themselves, abstract themselves - from the real things they sometimes represent. In so doing, words present themselves in aesthetic form - as poems.

Maybe my shadow-boxing with Language Poetry over the years has been, in part, a battle with my own fascination with, my own bent toward, some such seductive doctrine. Solipsism, solitude, silence, music.

How different the doctine of the Chicago critics (not great poets themselves, admittedly - but going back to Coleridge, for one, anyway...). Here the aesthetic imprint of a poem is not so simply yoked to the words, the language medium, per se.

Just as Mandelstam juxtaposed the Ukrainian philologist Potebnia (with his notion of the "inner psychic image" of the word) to the Russian formalists (with their poetics based on a linguistics which analyzed the word into separate functions) - the Chicago School opposed the strictly linguistic poetics of the New Critics, with a kind of metalinguistic concept of the poem. That is, the poem can't be reduced to its linguistic medium : rather, the medium conveys an imaginative whole, a complex image (a single lyric, or an entire play, or an epic).

Still, Mallarme (and lurking behind him, Poe & Baudelaire) accomplished something permanent (he discovered a sort of antimatter) : everything after has to take it into account. How that gets done, in theory & practice, is the big question. Celan maybe took it to the limit. Every word refers to some train of thought & feeling - conceptual, experiential, personal. Yet the words are so encrypted in their own musical silence as to both invite & defy "meaning", interpretation. The defiance itself is rendered as (tragic) beauty.

So Celan sort of has it both ways. His defiance of meaning is not a literary game or an ideological program. It stems from a felt awareness of death, wrong, grief, hope, love - which are, in a sense, extra-poetic "referents". Or they are elements from the realm of fact & "journalism" which are both acknowledged & somehow won for poetry, absorbed.

I'm sure all this sounds awfully obvious to those who've spent more time with these poets & these issues.

Reading Marguerite Yourcenar's The Abyss. By centering the story on Zeno, an alchemist with a single-minded scientific passion to know & to free himself, who delves into the hermetic secrets of the 4 elements within nature & his own body, Yourcenar gives very rich & vivid shape to a distant time (1500s Europe). The novel somewhat reflects Zeno's own fascination with the human microcosm, becoming a literary microcosm.

Funny how yesterday I was sidelining "hermeticism", since this novel reminded me (this morning) how important the alchemical-hermetic aspect is to the U.S. long poem. Both Paterson ("the giant, Paterson"; "a man = a city") & Maximus are structured largely as literary-alchemical transmutations (the epic questor becomes "Everyman", the image/bearer/creator of a cosmos). I've noticed before an odd thing about alchemical notions (the 4 elements, the transmutation of metals, etc.): once you take note of them in literature, they seem to crop up everywhere. I guess you may say that writing itself can be read alchemically.

Kenneth Warren, in his little mag House Organ, has published a serialized study of Charles Olson & Maximus ("The Emperor's New Code") which is steeped in alchemical-theosophical lore.

(However, let's be clear: alchemy, hermeticism, literary obscurity, trobar clus... these are not all the same thing. In other words I would still disagree with Ron S. when he suggests that a kind of secret writing for adepts represents authorial respect for the intelligence of the reader, or that trobar clus-like poetry is or will be the engine of literary change & advance. Yourcenar (or Nabokov, for another example, or Shakespeare) is a great writer because, among other things, she is master of a clear, precise, and capacious style - capable of absorbing and reflecting realities on many different levels.)

p.s. I don't want to oversimplify in turn ("absorption"). It's true that literary styles often develop in dialectical fashion. Witness the transformation of 20th-cent. Italian poetry, through a rejection (led by Montale & others) of D'Annunzio's heroic-romantic melodrama. At the same time, though, this was undertaken by poets who drew upon other stylistic currents - preceding &/or contemporary with D'Annunzio. The process is never simple. The same goes for the changes in American poetry during the 50s & 60s.

But I doubt that future developments will be led by another hermetic vanguard (as in the heroic romance of Language Poetry). Future developments will be built on those basic literary values previously mentioned : they will be applied in new ways.

But the fit though very few who read to the very deep end of Forth of July may traverse a thin quipu-bridge to The Countess from Minneapolis, by Barbara Guest (all mixd up with the Queen of Spades in Pushkin's sht stry) (logorithm: guest-geist-ghost-ghoul-gould) published in Providence by Burning Deck Press. to wit (from the Hebrew):

17
There are mzqtz in La Pz
nd at Crgdero we lst a hrs
to a jgr btfly mggt in the ml's
rs fr shr nd the Cntss zps

hr lps th rfinmt ov wht's spcl
tks plc btwn th mt nd th bn,
n'est-ce pas? sd Sgnr Rbnri
th lngthy slw ckng ov th Chldrn's

Op. "Lntls" Th puma wz nthr stry.
Io Zagreus! Th puma, th lnx, Actn, Xn. . .
sldrs, mchn gns, drg dgs snffng lgg. . .
Hrmn hs gn md hz n Wrd 17

fr a bd actn lk Npln r Jls Czr
hz flc wz fxt t th pnpt
b th ghst he trpt upn
th ghst ov th Cntss rzr-

shrp shp lght nd frry eye
th Cntss n hr cnrty hs smth mst
wshng hrslf nkd n th strm-strm
fr tht th fthr v hz cntry (Yoi W)

sht thru wth hr frtvfr
ovrt th clft he gs bncng lk
a yoi-yoi fr lkng
nlwfly n awfly cldly frtvly

twrd the Cntss cvrd wth mzqtz
thr nr Qto whr th mngld gld
ov lmn nd wmbn r = sgns r gthrd
tgthr in th bk ov hr mrkbx (qtzlctlq)

Unable to write for the past couple of weeks, after an enthusiastic spell before that. Maybe, at my advanced age, I'm starting to become slightly conscious of my own creative patterns(?). Early enthusiasm, followed by spate of disillusionment & boredom with my plainness, obviousness, my prosaic style. Some of the more formalist poems in Way Stations came out of similar periods of enthusiasm (technical tours-de-force).

The strong interest in Mandelstam & Montale, especially, for their hermetic qualities: the inward curve of the imagery, the self-sustaining roundedness, the indirection.

The strong interest in long poems for their "learned" qualities: the way an arcane or highly-involved subject-matter folds the poetry into its own sphere of indirections.

So maybe these two interests arose partly out of desire to compensate for my own ordinariness. (I guess I'll just have to quit being ordinary!)

OK, enough confession. "Unable to write," I'm going back to writing...

Odd how musicality in poetry - from symbolism onward into the 20th century - became an avenue for increasing experiments in obscurity and private poetic language. Odd, that is, when you consider that music itself has so many characteristics of a "universal" language (of feeling and symbolic order).

What if poets applied musicality in the direction of intelligibility, communicative power? The power of feeling & shared experience. In the same way that ecologists idealize sharing one world. I recognize very clearly how these notions might seem threatening to the very essence of many poets' practice. The truth must be that every poet must find their own balance between sheer verbal exploration & originality, on the one hand, and clarity & intelligibility on the other. And the alignment of this balance will have a great deal to do with the larger or deeper motive or telos for the writing itself. Poets will often "sacrifice obscurity" - turn to very ordinary speech, even cliches - if the larger aesthetic purpose demands it.

(Sometimes I think all creative effort is merely an attempt to recover the powerful feelings and sensations of childhood.)

I am interested in something I brought up a few days ago, this question of the image as a complex of feeling and intellect. & how the poem or song creates the conditions - sets the stage - for a symbolic or dramatic expression of the image.

I'm thinking of the image-complex itself as a subset or reflection-in-miniature - a dramatic re-presentation - of a larger whole, a life-complex, let's say: the complex or "whole" which is experience per se. Mimetic holism.

And the relation of these aspects to style: the values of clarity, simplicity, order, intelligibility, emotive-expressive power. Because the deep & moving experiences - or recognitions - of life can display not only subtlety and mystery, but also a resolving, overwhelming simplicity of thought & feeling. (Not to mention the simplicity in mundane ordinary everydayness!) I'm saying poetry has a right to be simple and direct as well as original and obscure.

We live in an amazing "Alexandrian" age of multiple discourses, each of which can quite easily form its own worlds of self-referentiality. So perhaps the most important intellectual tool of the practicing poet is his or her private sense of an interlocutor, a listener.

Probably a lot of the bitterness and frustration of poets has to do with their own muddled sense of who they want to address.

Ron Silliman argues that the originality of the more original "post-avant" poets wears the mantle of trobar clus - total "engagement", poesie der poesie, as opposed to more watered-down or populist efforts. He's saying that the really good poets perform the really hot stuff for their peers, for the cognoscenti; no one else will get it.

Nice responses in the comment box from Larry Sawyer & Michael Peverett, who brought up Parzival.

My motto is : Ars Est Celare Artem (Art Is To Hide Art). Poetry can exhibit complexities of communication and motive, but hermeticism is not a requirement for their accomplishment.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a direct and reciprocal relationship between originality (&/or technical innovation) and reaching wide audiences. Sometimes. Not always - think of Gongora or Mallarme. But sometimes. Think Whitman, Shakespeare, Dante...