golden autumn of the codgers

CHASTE EQUALITY

A synthesis of reality

is the poet’s quarry –

the whole serene array

sweeping like wind over the sea.

Not that irritable reaching

after fact & reason

but a subtler conviction –

life’s laughing dolphin, breaching.

So lips’ continuum of air

sustains your sea-sounding,

reverberates in rounding

surf (os-scintillating there).

The light stems from another realm.

A gravity so dense

you’re pulled beyond sense

to transcend...  Owlish Athena’s helm

shines like an emerald acorn cap

out from that wilderness

of native lovingkindness

(Williams’ mayday just a maple tap).

The Ocean State is what we seek.

The Providence of Roger-

Seeker... golden codger

settled in his freedom, meek

and bold.  Like admirable Edward

Coke, who founded

justice vs. his confounded

king – a chaste equality (rood-hoard).

11.1.18

it depends

Quiet evening here in Minneapolis, along the River Road, by the U of M (no, this is not Garrison Keillor - he's retired).  Sarah is down with the flu (mild for now).  We spent the morning at the clinic.  I'm off the big poem momentarily (Ravenna Diagram).  The house was quiet & the world was calm (right).

Thinking tonight for some reason of Eugenio Montale.  The phrase "superior dilettantism" - from his groundbreaking essay "Style and Tradition" (I like Joseph Cary's translation of that particular passage much better than Jonathan Galassi's).

Montale was a librarian, as well as a journalist, critic & poet, so I feel some slight personal affinity there.  (Not that I was ever much of a librarian, or much of those other things either.)

As person & poet he seems to emanate a good deal of something like Keats's negative capability.  He's sort of oblique.  He doesn't assert; he suggests, he implicates.  It's very sly, but also, strangely meek.  I'm speaking of his poetry.  Out of the literary blind alleys, undertones, non-sequiturs & jokes, you sense this emanation of a cherished & familiar landscape, a way of doing and not doing things.  A landscape of music, feeling.  Lacrimae rerum.

So he's very ancient & very present at the same time (Virgil, Dante, Bible).

He tightropes between the "aulic" & the ordinary, the colloquial.  (Maybe Benedetto Croce has something to do with this...)

& he sings.  Montale aspired to be an opera singer before he turned to poetry.  Let me repeat that : Montale aspired to be an opera singer before he turned to poetry.

Montale the poet is playful & subtle.  One of his striking images is that of the chess-playing woman in Firenze, somehow eking out a spiritual victory over the (Fascist) forces all around her : his muse.  I think he would have made a very good chess player, if he hadn't gone in for opera & poetry.

But I reiterate this idea of the landscape seeping up through the poetry.  The simple vernacular of the land - beautiful & troubled, suffering.  The "earth in labor", so to speak.  The artifice of pastoral yielding gracefully to the fatal wisdom of experience (rustic Adam & Eve, & all that followed).

Not sure where I'm going with this.  I'm surrounded by old books (I am a former librarian).  Montale's "dilettantism" appeals to me.  Not simply because I could be labeled a dilettante myself, but because the concept offers an opening to what Berryman called "the freedom of the poet".

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty..." spake the old vase, & the negatively-capable Keats.  There is something uncanny about the effect of the beautiful - the wholeness, the total impression of the complete work of art, however humble.

The rustic poet speaks quietly out of the landscape, out of experience... & we recognize the truth of those sounds.  We hear (with some trepidation) the implicit judgement of their rightness, their finality.

It's a certain way of responding to reality.  Distinct, that is, at least in some respects, from the scientific, the philosophical, the theological, or the political.  It's more raw, more colloquial - & more refined, more graceful.  Don't ask me why.  (Ends vs. means.  Reality vs. theory.  Innocence & Experience.)

Think of Robert Frost at Kennedy's inauguration.  Think about that for a while.  About what they both were trying to accomplish - & how it actually fell out (in an odd, unfinished, lovable, screwed-up way).

I'm perpetually obsessed with old texts, old words... I'm a librarian, I guess.  I started out as a very with-it (in my view) late-60's hipster poet.  It's how I managed to get into Brown University, back in 1970.  Basically I was following an impulse (by way of Rimbaud & Baudelaire & ee cummings & the New York School & all the 60s novels I was imbibing).  I was making poems.  But then I underwent a religious-psychological crisis, in 1973-74 (when I was about 19).  Not that different, I imagine, from what happened to T.S. Eliot - something deflected his river from its course, and so the waves rippled relentlessly through his life & poetry.

I never liked Eliot, I couldn't stand him.  I actually reacted viscerally to the slimy sibilant sibylline sound of his verses. Some of this certainly must have been mere cultural conformism on my part (nobody liked Eliot back in the 20th century).  We can argue ad infinitum about TSE pro & con.  My point is, that despite my animus, my polar opposition to Eliot, it seems we underwent some kind of fairly similar psychological-cultural-religious crisis of conversion.

Why, oh why do I bring this up, right here in my Nobel lecture about Eugenio Montale?

I think poetry is something we don't really understand.  It comes from the deepest layers of the human psyche & spirit - dimensions that reach far backward & forward, from our very animal prehistory to a future we can't yet see.  Matthew Arnold's notion of "touchstones" gets at some clue of which he may have been unaware - something primordial, like a low iron tone or wooden knock or flute whistle through prehistoric bone.

So, if this is correct, the "vernacular" or the colloquial or the amateur or the unprofessional or the dilettantish or the rustic or the pastoral music of poetry might speak in its own way to the human condition... & possibly in such a charming manner as to reshape the public's conception of reality itself.

We need the old words right now, old words of faith & hope & charity, whether we believe them or not - because there are powers at work that deny the meaning of words per se.

My grandfather Edward S. Gould was a veteran of World War I, and led the veterans' Armistice parades through downtown Minneapolis during the 1920s.  He & my grandmother (Florence Ainsworth) lived in an apartment near the University of Minnesota, where I spent the first 18 months of my life.  Grandpa kept an old brass shell from the war in the corner of their apartment (he was an artillery captain), and over the dinner table hung a print of a famous painting, of George Washington & Lafayette, at a celebratory dance in Washington (Grandma was a member of the D.A.R.).

Grandpa & Grandma were part of the American historical panorama, the fabric.  They were ordinary people.  Grandpa would be called a racist today.  Grandma's beloved D.A.R. tried to keep Jewish refugees from Hitler out of America, and tried to stop Marian Anderson from singing at the Lincoln Memorial.  These are sad, absurd truths.

Yet what did that dance in Washington celebrate?  The experiment of American democracy; the experiment of a new people in a new land of equality.  Eventually Lafayette's dance would bump up against the reality of America's license to enslave, exploit and deceive (the America of Herman Melville's Confidence-Man).  And the Civil War would instill a pattern (freedom vs. slavery) which we have not yet resolved unto this day.

America is an experiment, an improvisation.  Yet the experiment is rooted in something quite deep : the legal concept of equity & justice, of the inalienable rights of human persons, going back before the Revolution to the jurist Edward Coke, and to his student, the pioneer-theologian-lawmaker Roger Williams.

There is something very grounded & rooted in this particular  legal concept.  It is a spiritual ground, a spiritual root.  It is the very ancient notion of Creation, of the realm of Spirit - the mantling wings of Manitou (the Thunderbird).  Martin Luther King's righteous web of mutuality... Black Elk's 6-directional diamond.

Janus-Faced Henryism

In my Janus-faced post of yesterday ("poetry is/is not a psychological double-bind"), I did not quite express the whole of the elusive notion which triggered the initial commentary.  Let me see if I can briefly get there now.

The notion itself was about doubleness : a sense that some kind of detachment or critical awareness is integral to creative art forms - including poetry - and the art-experience itself.

Pasternak once characterized Mandelstam's appearance on the Russian literary scene thus : "you entered a conversation which had already begun."  Many the poet & theorist (Plato, Lacan, Levinas come to mind) have emphasized the dialogic nature of poetry (and consciousness generally).  But the notion is perhaps idealized to some extent.  If art is a dialogue, it seems somewhat one-sided.  One partner speaks, the other listens.  One is expressive, the other is mute.  One is conscious, deliberate, rational - the other subconscious, intuitive, ineffable.  One is assertive, the other receptive.  Yin, yang.  The two halves of creation and reception play a subtle chess game : poets acknowledge dreams, intuition, inspiration, negative capability, or the Muse as the true source of their rational articulations, bringing into question : who is really speaking here?  Who listening?

Then the poet and reader (audience) replicate this original duality - another mirror of doubleness.  The poet recites; the reader listens, responds - is bored, is moved; is misled, is enlightened; is offended, is pleased...

And then, finally, the poet is also the reader.  New poetry grows from old poetry, as the complex emotional-intellectual receptors of the poet respond to achieved works of the past (impossible to overstate the chasm which lies between the poet giving birth to a new, as-yet unknown work of art, and the examples of finished poems, which represent the poet's benchmarks, models, and obstacles).

Moreover, the poet is famously characterized (Keats' negative capability) as the embodiment of receptivity : he or she "reads" not only prior literature and rival poets, but the "signs" emanating from nature and experience as a whole.

The sketch or pattern of the field we are presenting here - this notion of "detachment" as integral to creative expression - begins to appear less like a standard opposition between "poet & critic", or "intuition and intellect", and more like a dimension of aesthetic experience as a whole.

Which raises, in my mind, the question of value.  Taste, critical judgement, tradition : perhaps these are both tacit and fundamental to an era's literary culture.  What do I mean by this?  How does this follow from the previous?  I mean that if tacit reception is one half of art & poetry, as a dialogic duality, then there is more to poetic making than a simple 1-2 process of "create-disseminate".  Reception becomes a kind of fertile, intangible ground or atmosphere within which actual poems manifest.

American culture idealizes immediacy, production, re-invention.  "Make it new" becomes the paradigmatic shibboleth for the sales appeal of the stylish rebel, for the idealization of change per se.  It's a linear, one-way process.  Success = succession.  I think what I am proposing, indirectly, is a challenge to this standard arrangement.

The poem on the page is a kind of message in a bottle.  Sheer potentiality - nothing until it is found and opened and received and evaluated.  And the message itself may be in code; it may be meaningless until you find it out, you give it meaning.  It may also be allegorical - in disguise.  The obvious, the overt message may be meaningless in itself.  The poem lives in another dimension - a quintessence, a 5th element, active only in tacit reception.  The poem is, at heart, a riddle.

I guess I would like to imagine a somewhat different American poetic culture than the one we have at present.  There seems to be a kind of short-circuit driving the current machinery, which goes something like creation-dissemination-publicity-fame-awards-prestige.  What's left out here is the tacit "(reception)" bracketing both sides of the term "creation".  Maybe a healthier, simpler template for poetic culture would go something like this : (reception)-creation-(reception)-publication-(reception).  This model is not driven by ambition, professional interests, & prestige, by ulterior goals and motives.  If I were able to, I would display the latter, (reception) model as a circle.

bookstalls in Paris

Hpypa Wne EraY !

My resolution : to try some new things in writing. That's why I went & bought an old manual typewriter.

*

A poem or an artwork "disintegrates" (Whitman's term for a precipitate) from the stream of time, interest, discourse, chores, etc. It falls, it drops from the sky... because it's complete, it's finished. It has wholeness, roundedness.

"Negative capability" has something to do with the poet's self-transference or absorption into the poem's complete little universe. Unwilled, unforced - a sort of love-manifest. Wholeness and inimitability - the poem radiates the intensity of this total self-transference. (Nobody mistakes Shakespeare for Jonson, or Herbert for Donne, for (obvious) example, or Marianne Moore for anybody else, & so on.)

Look for the density, the specific gravity, of the poet's entire emotional-intellectual participation in the birth of the poem.

This transfer - this back-&-forth - an image of the wholehearted self-giving (non-self-seeking) exchange which is love or charity. Reality as gift.

Yes, today I feel ready to curl up in dream-song land, negative capability land, give up the "irritable reaching after fact and reason"...

If I come across these days as some kind of Preacher McDunderhead, it has partly to do with the fact that lately I have been on a very local campaign to help the struggling little church across the street from me, and my mind is preoccupied with these questions - how to talk about faith to people on a mental fence...

& of course partly to do with the fact that I am a Preacher McDunderhead...

Every poem is a leap of faith.

Poets & literary arty people don't want to hear about rational arguments for God & all that. "they'll figure it out at the Sorbonne someday". All that "irritable searching after fact & reason", or however it goes (Keats). Art feeds the appetite for love & beauty, the palpable textures of experience n' all that. I suppose where artists reside on Yeats's gyres of personal character puts them forever at odds with formal discursive argumentation & reasoning. Since soon after the Romantics, even the vague notion of the "universal Spirit" gradually dimmed beyond the ken of the intellect of the day. Now everyone feels (rightly) oppressed & bothered by aggressive fundamentalist hobgoblins.

Which, from my perspective, makes a rational evaluation of the possible existence & nature of God, paradoxically, important again for general culture (it's always been important for individuals).

Following the discussion of poetry-&-paraphrase from Jonathan, Kasey et al.

I guess I would question whether this is an either-or thing. Why can't a poem have meanings, which can be extrapolated from the poem, & yet retain its integrity & quiddity or whatever as an artistic end-in-itself? The sum is greater or different than its parts - the meanings are abstracted from the poem after all. But these meanings are also evidence of the poem's generative capacities.

Imagine the geometry of a poem as being like a "vesica" - the lens-like shape formed by the intersection of two circles. The shape has integrity despite the fact that it draws from two different figures, two different directions.

I sometimes think that the power of poems has something to do with the compression of meaning into parable. "Telling it slant" (E. Dickinson). You read a 3-line haiku and you experience the pleasure of a whole array of possible meanings, at once. Riddles work in a similar way.

"Paraphraseable meaning" is such a boring way of putting it. The negative connotations stem from the concept's origin in the New Criticism, which was built on a rejection of overt, politicized, didactic poetries of the 1930s (in this it was in line with much 50's art in the US). "The poem must not mean / but be" & all that crap (Archibald MacLeish).

Poets work in such a variety of ways that there is, obviously, no correct method. Negative capability & the passive reception of imaginative expressions & forms is a huge part of the process. However, to deny the importance of "meaning" - & its symbiotic dualities & energies at work in the poem - seems like the kind of rubric which makes a lot of postmodern poetry pretty vacuous & turgid.

. . . but then, isn't poetry where, through speech, we try to fuse "knowing" & "being"?

Which is a futile vain Quixotic effort. & we end up representing human nature through failure.

Comic gargantuan example : Charles Olson. His "Maximus" gains from its ungainliness. The reader's imagination is swayed by the image of the fat man in squalid little apartment in Maximus-town, trying to "say" the Great Unsayable. The mundane seeps in around the edges & gives the would-be Ezra color & humanity.

Another example : Montale. He was very aware of being the voice of the "man in the middle", between transcendent glory and human pettiness. His poems build on the contradiction.

You end up with a doubleness : a sort of incarnate word (poetic language - full, packed, weighted, embodied - Keats), & the shadowy feeble negatively-capable poet who utters it.