Want to follow up a little on yesterday's notes.

If we assert that poetry (and creative artistic work generally) has its roots in some kind of "elsewhere", a place to some extent detached from our will, intellect, & rational calculation - well, this is a big step & has a lot of consequences.

The desire is always to integrate these three - will, intellect and imagination. But cultural history bears a lot of scars, a lot of evidence for the struggle, one way or another. Apollo vs. Dionysus. Ben Jonson (master craftsman) vs. Shakespeare (native genius).

What does it mean that ancient poetry - in its "serious" (not comic, not satiric) modes, anyway - invariably invoked the Muse? The muse is a kind of personification of the imagination's elusive unaccountability.

Probably no critical essay has been dismissed and derided in the last 50 years as has Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent", which includes statements like : "The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." The basis for such dismissals is usually social in nature : American society in particular is more diverse and divided, less certain of its foundations or overall unity, that it was (or at least seemed to be) when Eliot wrote this 80 years ago.

But if we think of Eliot's order of poetic tradition as primarily imaginative, rather than social, or even aesthetic, then his position becomes more persuasive. Starting with Augustine's classic tripartite map of conscious - will, intellect, and imagination - let's say that in art, the imagination moves into a position of priority. The phenomenon of original invention in art - the appearance of a new concept or new vision of relations, which seems to organize all the rest of the artistic material around it - is the fruit, the product, the telos of imaginative activity. What we find beautiful in the products of art then forms or is a part of this pre-existent "ideal order". It is not an order of history or culture so much as an order of originality, an order of beauty.

Which brings me back to the idea of poetry's "otherness". No one can predict the workings of the imagination, of imaginative invention. It is a spark which ignites the whole mind and being of the artist.

One can respond to this phenomenon in diverse ways. There are those who love and serve the imagination; there are others who calculate and strive to force it into channels for their own selfish purposes. The latter route, of course, is ultimately self-defeating. Cultural history is an immense garbage dump of such vain efforts : cultural history is a joke played on us by the Muse.

Many are the critical writings which try to rationalize talent and aesthetic judgement on the basis of social frameworks and determinations. & far be it from me to suggest that poetry exists in a rarified absolute realm, distinct from ordinary social life. It seems perfectly legitimate to explore the socio-historical and generally human context, which illuminates motives and meanings implicit in the artwork itself. But if, in this endeavor, one neglects the original, instinctive spark of imaginative conception - the seed and basis of the whole process - then one has indubitably missed the boat.

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.)

... & what do I mean, exactly, when I align poetry and horse-race?

- thinking less about contemporary po-biz, more about Pindar and Dante.

Pegasus stamps ground in Greece, sets off 9 Muses' Pierian Spring. What's that about?

The cicada-sound of poetry displays an animal otherness. It is a tradition unto itself. This uncanniness, this "call of the fife", is propelled by a powerful motive distinct from our ordinary utilitarian pragmatic fill-in-the-blanks provisional necessitous usage.

Such functional usage differs diametrically from that of the bower-bird (poet) who must be able to grasp the potential aesthetic value hidden in the cheapest bit of driftwood (drift words). It's an innate capability.

Poetry is the horse. We're just the jockeys.

The muse (fed by Pegasus) possesses the poet : the poet sings.

I'm for literary democracy, I believe poesie springs up everywhere; as Edwin Honig wrote, it's "a buzzing in the air". At the same time, however, I believe in the literary absolute, ie. the Tradition of Pegasus the Centaur.

A nation's or culture's literature is ultimately judged by its faithfulness, not to various socological parameters or editorial juggling, but to the literary absolute.

That's the start & finish line of the only race in town.

from the long poem somewhere...

 9
   
                  we never step outside the portals


  
 Now if a six
 turn out to be nine
 I don't mind...
 Let's play pick-up-sticks,

  
 kids – bones.
 Because it's really
 early-late, see.  And
 I'm no yesman

  
 or gnomon –
 I'm a soul man.
 (Not really certain,
 understand...)

  
 Here's the black
 bare cueball.
 Duck.  Rabbit.
 Here's the trick:

  
 square two thumbers
 like so, behind a curtain
 and then wave your ten
 clay beachcombers...

  
 gradually...  See?
 It's a live butterfly!
 It's a handmade moth!
 Will you marry me?

  
 I'm only ten.
 I'm eleven.
 I'm Hen –
 I'm your cousin!

 
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