In the realm of poetry (& maybe other realms) I find it difficult to balance and reconcile truth & beauty, the didactic & the aesthetic, the legislative/executive & the playful/imaginative, the prophetic & the poetic...

Look at people like Pound, Olson... ambitious-serious "alpha male" epic types. Avatars of the will-to-order, the will to govern, to dominate, to rule. (Yeats's "king of cats".) Though I don't consider myself very alpha, I feel I've muddled along in some similar deep swamps. Hence my affection for figures closer to the "artist" side of this line (Hart Crane, Stevens). Forth of July is really a playful jab toward the crystallization of a "national epic", drawing on contrary models (like Crane, Berryman, Mandelstam, etc.). [ (Will anybody ever notice what I've been doing here?) ]

from one perspective, the sane & ethical approach, as an artist, would be to maintain a strict detachment, to offer an impersonal mirror... from another perspective this seems impossible, an illusion : we are already caught up and involved emotionally & intellectually with the "materials"...

the whole issue of the poet as "unacknowledged legislator" stems from the fact that all our communal social constructs are rooted, at least to some degree, in the imagination itself... or is this an attitude (for an artist anyway) of foolish, over-reaching pride? Is the substance of reality firm & structured & prior to our conceptions about it?

(Another aspect of this is that much social, didactic, political poetry is not really very poetic. It's prose dressed up as poetry. Of course it can be very effective just like that. But it doesn't re-imagine, re-create the cosmos, the way the great epics do. It lacks the orphic fictional-poetic power of Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare... - the regal sceptre of the imagination - Mandelstam's "baton". I suppose the sceptre has been passed to the novelists, the scientists, the philosophers, the "critical theorists"...)

Old puzzles... this crux perhaps marks the difference between the medieval, the Renaissance & the modern mentalities...

Maybe that's one reason I like the philosophical writings of Nicholas of Cusa so much. For Cusanus, our knowledge reaches its limit in puzzles & paradoxes. God is "the conjunction of opposites". He acknowledges the source of all order & creation in God; at the same time he asserts that all our concepts of God are just that, human constructs, "conjectures", that in fact our whole sensible, knowable reality is a conjectural human construct, an artifice of the mind...

I thought this morning that the resolution of this puzzle or paradox lies in an understanding of the nature of divine love. If "God is Love", as the epistle of John has it, and if Love is a kind of binding embrace of the Other which is at the same time a renunciation, a self-giving to the other, a state of service or servanthood - then it's in the light of this kind of Love that we can imagine another Biblical concept, ie. "perfect freedom".

Imagine a divine nature which wants to create a cosmos of "perfect freedom", because this desire is rooted in love, and love's deepest motive is to "set free". Then this divine nature would of necessity have to withdraw, relinquish control and dominion on some level. Of course this does not necessarily entail indifference (the remote, the clockwork God). "Selfless-love-without-indifference", then, is in itself a kind of incomprehensible paradox. Incomprehensibility, even absurdity, of a kind we meet with in ordinary life (cf. the parable of the Good Samaritan).

I guess I'm simply recycling some old, old via negativa notions going back to Pseudo-Dionysius & Byzantine theology & long before (Plato on love, etc.).

But these notions seem to be essential to any integration of order & freedom, of cosmos & chance, of medieval and renaissance, of theology & humanism. A figure of paradox like Cusanus appears at the cusp of this historic shift (between medieval & modern). He has a mind fascinated with invention and creative freedom. His writings are playful intellectual-philosophical games, conceptual inventions.

But it seems to me the crux of it all is this fusion of the will-to-love ("good will") with the idea of "perfect freedom". Maybe this is the nexus where the gift of artistic detachment & inner freedom rhymes with a more "sober" concept of necessity, reality, history, fact, the moral law, governance, political & juris-prudence, etc.

The (ancient) idea mentioned a couple days ago, ie. Love = Cosmic Constant (ground of all trust & good will - unchanging principle of steadfast devotion) - this is certainly reflected in Shakespeare's sonnet. It's also reflected in the numerical center of Forth of July :

28


 
As the whirring shape of a hummingbird
like a miniature bluejay overhead or
bee suspended over the clover
whispered

 
Love is our North Star high up above

 
I heard and
(as the rustling of that honey-mover
swelled across a grass-clay sheep-door)
lay in the sweet soil listening for your word.


     
                                 4.10.99

Often the serious thoughts seem to arrive early in the morning, when I'm still half-asleep. I was in such a state recently, half-thinking about Erica Dorf, a dear lady of 88 (John Tagliabue's sister), who died on New Year's eve, and about what I would say at her memorial service, and these lines from Shakespeare's sonnet 116 came to me : "Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds,/Or bends with the remover to remove."

Here's the whole sonnet :

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

 
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

 
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

 
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

- certainly one of the greatest love poems.

It got me pondering (lying there half-awake) in a vague way about several different things... first, about a distinction between modern & ancient, or romantic & classical, notions of love - which seems related, in turn, to very basic aspects of design - ie., form & movement, crystal & fluid...

The modern romantic (Aristotelian?) conceives of love as involving change, growth, transformation. The ancient classic (Platonist?) sees it, on the contrary, as beyond change : steadfast, firm, constant, right & true, eternal.

It's the ancient notion which seems less familiar to us. (& of course there are moral/social attitudes which follow from how we conceptualize love.)

I started thinking about all this in terms of theology & cosmology. When we read in the Bible that "God is Love" (letter of John), do we envision that as an attribute of the "unchanging Father of Lights" (letter of James)?

If you try to reconcile this older concept of Love with notions of creation & making, what do you arrive at? A notion of the Universe as finished, complete (even if that completion involves freedom, chance, perpetual changes). A crystallization, an end-in-itself.

& I guess these vague notions also have consequences for the artist. If you think of inspiration/creation/artwork less in terms of a sort of expansive Romantic afflatus, and more in terms of a sudden coalescence of disparate materials - a fusion of chaos into cosmos - the formation of an integral whole... - well, maybe this tends toward a sort of "classicism".

Again we come to this (traditional, Byzantine) analogy between nature-as-creation, and artist-as-maker.

But all this was triggered as I lay there thinking about Erica, who throughout her life, in her small apt. in New York City, was an ever-fixed mark - a small harbor of light & joy, for strangers confronting that vast, proud & sometimes intimidating metropolis.

What if reality, cosmos, life-in-general - what if this whole is a crystallization out of an infinitely-deep well of creative Love? & that Dante's notion of the proper direction of the human will-to-love - repentance, in other words - involves not so much a change or transformation, as a re-alignment of one's own small reservoir of love, with that vast infinite source?

& speaking of valentines & all that, it might be very good for me to write, for myself at least, some kind of account or analysis of the themes, aspects in my poetry, relating to love, gender, sexuality, & such like complexities.

So much of my poetry is "love poetry", more or less - I mean it is prompted (& structured) by some real or imagined feminine person or presence or quality. "Gendered." (the Beatrice Effect)

& I'm sure it would be possible to analyze all this as very, very, confused. Even the analysis would get confused.

If one tends to believe, as I do, that the (poetic) imagination is involved in creative cosmogony or theogony - I mean a sort of (relatively) ex nihilo world-shaping, starting everything over - one gets involved in challenging or revising traditional (often patriarchal or authoritarian) symbols or mythologies of such cosmogenesis.

& if this ambivalent impulse - I mean simultaneously to maintain & to challenge certain conceptualizations of reality & belief - gets fused with a romantic or emotional alignment of poetry & love - then feminism & cosmology & poetry (the "muse") become sort of indistinguishable...

& if, moreover, these impulses are aligned also with certain subconscious or psychological motivations (ie. childhood, Mom, the equilibrium & bouyancy of the body/ship in the womb) - a sort of Bachelardian emphasis - these trajectories are amplified even more.

The trouble with all this, I think - & with the neo-mythologizing of personal psychology (Jung, & Freud too) - is that it leaves both poetry and philosophy at a certain state of formation which, while very important - & maybe essential (especially for poets like me) - still leaves huge dimensions of discourse out of the picture.

What I'm referring to, I guess, is what you could call the "gender neutral" or universal aspects of social experience, morality, & justice. This gets complicated, because it seems to require holding two sometimes contrary aspects in balance at the same time. First of all, society as we know it, to varying degrees around the world, is certainly warped by gender inequalities and the oppression of women. But there are other, equally pervasive facets of global violence, injustice & disorder. & it seems that the path to sane and happy social life on earth involves pragmatic, common sense action - political, scientific, social - where gender equality is both insisted upon and taken for granted (so that the focus can be on the specific practical problem at hand). (This is not to suggest that gender equality and gender identity - or indistinguishability - are the same thing... although that, too, is part of the equation... All poets, I suppose, are androgynous in some way or another.)

I'm guess my cogitations are quite primitive & simplistic. But I'm thinking specifically about the sphere in which social issues become material for poetry. & what I'm thinking is that the cosmogonic-mythologic "feminism" represented in a lot of poetry - and a lot of my own poetry - can sometimes (not always) hobble its capacity to address public, civic issues & social phenomena in a certain ordinary, objective way. It's like being trapped in some Jungian, personal psychodrama; like some character in the Divina Commedia, unable to climb above a certain level & see things more clearly, & address them more impersonally.

What I'm trying to say, I think, is that there are vast regions of human activity and social action - and many dimensions of ethics and justice - wherein men & women can, and do, work (& play) together, without gender coming into it at all (except perhaps in fun). & poetry likewise should be capable of addressing these conditions & occasions in a witty, direct, impersonal & gender-neutral (or simply "gender-comic"!) manner.

All that being said, I'm sure I will continue to follow the very obscure, oblique & mysterious (& mysteriously feminine) impulses from which my poetry emerges. What would life be without sex? Vive la differance, & all that...

& I do think that the utopian or apocalyptic drive underlying religion & human history is powerfully, substantially "feminine" in ways we tend to elide or misunderstand. This is partly what aligned my own direction toward Crane & Joyce as opposed (at least on the surface) to Eliot's & Pound's seemingly more patriarchal attitudes. The happy dreams of Noah's Ark, or the spacy moon-ship of Jubilee, really are impelled, in some obscure subconscious way, by the affective womb-life & infancy of mother-&-child. Humanity - in taming & "civilizing" (& also endangering & ruining) the earth - is motivated by these profound & early impulses - the buoyancy effect, an infant equilibrium.

So maybe Fontegaia is a love poem of sorts... Trying to show love cohering in synthesis, a "synthetic" vision. How reality itself is rooted in love. (Mostly a ponderous jumble, maybe!)

Everything seeks its own level, its echo. What is strong, deep, authentic emotion, if not love? Composition wells up from those obscure intuitive regions. The "impulse" (Mandelstam's term) is love.

"What thou lovest well, remains"

The other thing about poets, though, is that they understand (through vocational experience) that you can't just rationalize & "explain" everything (nature, human nature). The subconscious & intuition remain unaccountable : analogous, I suppose, to "leaps" of faith & acts of selfless participation (ie., love). One of the Bible's shorter sentences : "God is Love." (Epistle of John)