dialect of high & low

CLAY NAVEL

Literature might be political.

The dialect of high & low,

the pyramidical Pharaoh

& Erich Auerbach in Istanbul...

slaves muttering (familial)

athwart the exaltations

of regal Lion-Suns

& River-Moons (extra-terrestrial)

their jocular contra-dance lingo.

Dantean, obsolete

vernacular (obsidian);

mosaic featherweight, grave Galileo.

Everything formed from nothing... out

of a pinhole in the universe.

Clay navel – Osiris hearse

called up by current, cattail flute.

Whorls of tree-rings mantle each mortal eye.

Isis in Iowa,

Blackstone of raven-sigh –

Cautantowwit, under the Milky Way.

The tacit origin.  Your motherland,

O King.  Incipient

restoration, air apparent...

transparent equilibrium (beatitude).

Near the steel vault of St. Louis.

In the seine of the fishermen,

over the Mississippi.  Sign

from tree-logs, Jessie Ophelia... always.

6.23.19

Hyper-formalism & the Long Henry Poem

I made a simple creative decision about 4 years ago.  I knew I was about to embark on yet another long serial poem (I've written about 9 of them).  I decided that the individual parts (the separate poems) within the whole thing should be, if possible, more free-standing.

In part, I wanted to make my writing more accessible.  I wanted more magazines to accept my poems for publication (always a real struggle for me).  In order for that to happen, these smaller parts would have to be more autonomous, complete in themselves.  They would need separate titles, not just "Lanthanum bk. 12 no. 28" & the like.

The titles were the easy part.  My plan has only been partially successful.  But partial is better than nothing.  I've landed a few pellets of the new poem (Ravenna Diagram) in various magazines : Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, Journal of Poetics Research, West Branch, Notre Dame Review, Truck, Battersea Review...

This is a step forward for me.  I've probably written more poems, and published less, than any poet in America.

Part of the problem is, I'm not consistent.  I make resolutions & then go the other way.  I resolved a year ago not to post so many poems on this blog, & then I did the opposite.

Not only that - I also alienate potential & previous friends and publishers.  Things go awry.  I've come to the conclusion that there are various subtle patterns shaping these frustrating encounters.  Real books only emerge because they were meant to be.  Or because your deepest affinities have finally borne fruit - by grace, by miracle, you meet the small publisher who's been waiting all this time for you.  Kismet.

My waxing voluble here is due to the fact that I'm unwinding.  I'm celebrating the successful finish of book 9, Ravenna Diagram.  & I'm nearing the halfway point of this hyper-formal poem.  It presently stands, or sits, at about 510 pp.

I know where I'm going (as in the old Isle of Mull film).  The poem has a plan for me.  Sort of a sand mandala, shaping itself up with little voodoo flicks of sandy fingertips.  An hourglass in the form of canoe.

It's a Leaves of Grass kind of mumble-saunter.  It's a mummer's walk around a golden labyrinth - a traditional Crane Dance, performed by a blind man (mesmerized).

That's why the blog has proved so seductive & essential.  It's both immediate and chronological; it walks with me on my planetary seasonal rounds.

The poem is a stone fallen from heaven; no one will judge it.  Osip Mandelstam.

I'm trying to exemplify & prove the truth of this statement.  Of course, there is a social cost involved.  If you try to go around the distinguished cultural authorization channels, you will, most assuredly, be branded an outcast, an interloper.

Someone has probably written a treatise on the mutual co-dependence of High Society and Literature (maybe at the New Yorker?  or Paris Review?  Kenyon?  Harvard?).

On the other hand... please understand... I harbor no animus toward Society.  I am, simply, a poet caught in the net of hyper-formalism.

& what, you may ask, is hyper-formalism?

Hyper-formalism is the emergence of a form out of the necessary logic of a theme.  The theme, you could say, is the fate of the poem - & its fate determines its form.

Fate is, naturally, a dramatic force : a force for drama.  & poetry is the mimesis, the dramatization, of fate.  So poetry has discovered its vocation, finally - it's a mumbling medium for the human theatre.

& what if the fate of the poem - its theme - is to be a kind of local, allegorical embodiment of (universal, elemental) truth?  The poem veers toward prophecy... the poet veers toward seer... toward manifest Logos...

A stone fallen from heaven.  You begin perhaps to comprehend & forgive the orientation toward immediacy, toward "unsponsored" speech.

I've devoted most of my life to these verbal snares, these long-walk dream songs.  It's been a joy & a challenge.  I'm stepping blindfolded around a maze on the floor of Chartres cathedral.  Ariadne is the thread.  The Earth lies underneath.

Article in Coldfront Magazine

(This is my second blog post about this.  I deleted the first one, which was certainly impassioned, but a little over the top.)

Coldfront magazine published an article of mine a few days ago, about the New Gnostics group of poets, here.  Ed Foster, an old acquaintance from Hoboken Russian-American poetry conference days (late 90s), edits Talisman magazine and recently ran a special section featuring the writings of the NGs.

I guess there are strengths and weaknesses in shaping an essay which foregrounds a history of rivalry between (mostly male) poetry collectives or schools.  This is what I do, framing the spiel on a contrast between the NG's and the Language Poets.  As it happens, I am currently reading a lot of psychoanalytic writings about the Bible & other literature.  History in general seems to be made up in large part of violent struggles based on (mostly male) Oedipal & pre-Oedipal fantasies - mythical stories -  about objects of desire (Mom, women, slaves...), and domination of rivals for same.  Very primitive, very adolescent, very subconscious...

So I can see why poets - especially female poets - might sigh with boredom & despair... deja vu all over again...

It's got me thinking, vaguely, though, about the region of poetry & the imagination... the middle region, the realm that Wallace Stevens liked to call "sense"... which art & poetry inhabit.  Where the intellect & the reason are fused with feelings, emotions... the "affective" responses to experience.  Poetry limns this region & helps us grasp where we are... the sense of words in poetry is multivalent.

Moreover, this brings in the whole question of the relation between the human imagination - the "vision thing" (as the 1st Pres. Bush so demotically put it) - and our knowledge of reality, our worldview.  There is no denying that poetry down the ages has been a platform for synthesizing and ordering a culture's "sense" of the world it inhabits.  And because this is true, it seems that there will inevitably be clashes of worldviews, battles over the orientations of basic belief.  Believe it or not, the stakes are high in this regard.  They are high, even if we wish they weren't - because part of us wants poetry to be a day of rest, a playful Sabbath-day, from ideology and fact.  We want the poet to express an idiosyncratic liberation from all fixed ideas and cultural shibboleths.  We want the poem to be free (& fun).

As my article sketches out, there are these incidents of forking paths : disagreements over how poets employ language, how they ring variations on past poetry.  I think, speaking as generally & basically as I can, that the story of the "contretemps" between Barrett Watten and Robert Duncan, and between Ed Foster & Charles Bernstein - this "event" - may have been motivated primarily by two different attitudes toward the "language of poetry".

(An aside : it would be interesting to reconsider the role of Louis Zukofsky in this regard.  He was apparently the occasion of the original disagreement between Watten & Duncan : & his work can be seem as greatly overlapping & over-shadowing both "schools".)

Simply put : for the Language Poets, the "word" is a Saussurian system of binary signals.  Words are bundles of potential meaning-signals.  if we "turn off" the meaning-function, we detach ourselves from hegemonic, oppressive ideologies & political structures; we create a new anarchic space of purely textual freedom.

For the New Gnostics, on the other hand, words retain their more traditional aura or ambience.  They can never be merely counters or linguistic codes, because words themselves are dwelling-places of affective memory and cultural-historical meaning.  In other words, there is the assumption of some over-arching, if implicit, meaning-architecture - which is not to be "switched off", but rather "turned on", intensified.

The encounter between Watten & Duncan seems emblematic in many ways.  I see it as a sort of a clash of two worlds : Duncan's mythic-archaic-shamanistic-magic-Romantic realm of the traditional Imagination, as opposed to Watten's modern, post-modern, disenchanted, ironic, intellectual Rationality.

My current readings in psychology and psycho-history underline for me how King Oedipus still reigns over the world of human imagination.  We live out myths without knowing it, sleepwalking down familiar paths marked out by the natural rhythm of pre-conscious fears & desires.  Art still has to discover its own lanterns, its own ways through this human labyrinth, toward some kind of liberation.  Both the Langpos & the New Gnosts were, & are yet, engaged in such searching & making.

The epic drive

Knowledge, taken in the abstract - say, by the vulnerable ephebe just starting out in college - displays a frightening visage : abyssal, disorienting, nightmarish. Knowledge, in its authorized, authoritative forms, is demanding (all those martinet-professors, those requirements, those deadlines & examinations), impersonal... fundamentally inscrutable. Say our tenderfoot student is curious about History. The question is, where to begin? If all "facts"are equal... & if the historians, each with their particular perspective and expertise, number in the thousands upon thousands... Indeed, there is a specific demon of angst which persecutes the undergraduate - whose malicious intent is to induce a painful, extremely self-conscious (to the point of paranoia) sense of being lost . What do I know, in the midst of all this formidable universe of chilly and alienated learning? How can I know anything? How can I trust my own feeble capacity to find meaning, to understand?

It is just here (as has often been pointed out) that the arts attempt a rescue mission. Art is synthesis, not analysis; its aim is not to detach elements of experience by means of abstraction in order to re-align them into codes of information, hierarchies of data. Art does not truck with the supposed "objectivity" of formalized knowledge; rather, Art produces holistic representations of experience - images which we need not learn, because we already recognize them. We do not "acquire" these representations - we immediately identify with them. And in these identifications our inward sense of personal understanding is encouraged, fortified, strengthened, and above all, expanded. (Perhaps the paradigmatic expression of this commonality of experience is John Donne's famous passage from Meditation 17 : "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.")

Is this the happy end of story, then? Art comes to the rescue, trouncing adolescent despair? Well, yes, perhaps. But for the artist the picture may be more complex. How, say, in poetry, are these holistic representations - these charmed and charming narratives, capable of evoking sympathetic understanding and identification - to be successfully created? The endless debates within the various guilds of poets over issues of subjectivity/objectivity, personality/impersonality, individuality/commonality, point toward unresolved difficulties, internal contradictions. How does the poet achieve a balance between self-indulgent, anecdotal subjectivity on the one hand, and a bloodless, abstract objectivity on the other? How few are the poems which succeed in integrating these polarities - in presenting "concrete universals": those characteristic particulars which are nevertheless capable of global relevance.

Works of the past called "great" are just these poems which have achieved a kind of wholeness and universality. The Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare... these are some of the familiar benchmarks - narratives which fuse representative, characteristic individuals, with a shared history - Pound's "tale of the tribe" - the many and the one.

We could call this the "epic" drive in poetry : the struggle to present multiplicity in the form of holistic order. Northrop Frye described this totalizing impulse as the defining characteristic of the epic mode. The works which achieve such encyclopedic synthesis become foundational texts, paradigmatic narratives of peoples and cultures. They construct a kind of aegis or rooftop of mutual understanding - or, to use another image, a sort of network of vital pathways, which encourage individuals to emerge from isolation into the ethos of a shared tradition.

The path toward such epic achievements involves the most intense struggle : because no imagery of wholeness will be accepted as authentic unless it has been earned. It would be impossible for an audience to assent to epic pretensions, if the work itself did not display an indwelling awareness, a comprehension, of actual, lived experience in its heights and depths. The achievement of an epic narrative is thus a kind of celebratory moment - when individual artistic making is matched with the real existence of the whole society.

- to be continued, maybe... -