Synthesis & first principles in poetry

 My "theory" of poetry, how I think about poetry in general or in the abstract, is idiosyncratic and fundamentally improvised.  I don't have a system or a rationale which I can advocate for or teach, as objective or universally relevant.  Nevertheless I feel the urge to organize my thoughts and defend my own practice.  Blogs are exquisitely appropriate for this kind of off-the-cuff table-talk, aren't they?  Sure, Henry.

And inevitably I'm bound to repeat myself.  I've been blogging along here for years.  Sorry about that.

I think poets are usually drawn to poetry as part of a general attraction to literature, an affinity for reading and words, a responsiveness to art and music.  And I think this "general attraction" is part of an even more basic and universal human adherence to the good and the beautiful aspects of life as a whole.  We are drawn magnetically to works of art even as they present the most tragic, painful and horrible dimensions of experience - because these works of art lend these dimensions some kind of meaning and order.  The love of art is a facet of an even more basic love of life itself - which partakes of a kind of shared sacred awe reaching back to the origins of the human race (and maybe before that).

The making and experience of poetry is part of this magic circle of a very primordial sense of awe.  The poetic Word is free, dynamic, holistic and sacred, because it partakes of this powerful aura of a sort of ontological First Principle of reality - the "ground", the source.

By no means would I wish to suggest or have anything to do with a sort of Heideggerian mystagogy or irrationalism.  But I feel that, precisely because poetry is linked with this very basic and universal, this "anthropological" first principle - an innate sense of awe before the wholeness, oneness and power of life - it therefore aligns with the universality of reason, logic and science.  Reason (as Fichte, Brightman and of course many others have argued) is both analytical and synoptic.  We analyze to apprehend and distinguish; we synthesize to understand.  Poetry is no different.  What poetry adds to this rational and philosophic drive toward comprehensive understanding is a kind of aesthetic reflexivity.  Poetry's vivid, personal, expressive verbal enactments of communication both represent and embody, simultaneously.  This extra layer of reflexivity, reverberation, and self-consciousness accounts for the intense configurations of poetic speech (Mandelstam's crystal of "terrifying density").  

As I understand it, poetry gives voice to a subjective, and inter-subjective, dimension of reality.  It is not opposed to science as such; but it suggests and evokes this awe, this attitude of humility toward the fundamental mystery of life.  As such it is vitalist, holistic, and personal - and it presents an image of reality as a whole which corresponds to these qualities.  The struggle of the Romantic movement, to transcend the discursive rationalism of the Enlightenment, presents one of the historic enactments of this duality (subject and object, detachment and wonder, poetry and prose). 

I recognize the perhaps absurd anachronism of these principles.  But with respect to my own poetic development, one of the issues or themes that I have found so fascinating and generative is the American history of the encounter between a colonial worldview, on the one hand, rooted in both Puritan piety and revolutionary democracy based on Enlightenment ideals, and a Native American worldview, rooted in very archaic notions of just this sense of pious awe before the vital spiritual unity of life.  And I began to delve into the "anthropological underside" of my own faith tradition, and recognize affinities with primordial myths and rituals played out across the globe, from which the Native American beliefs represent one branch, and the various sources of the "Old World", another.  So I sense that underlying the tragic conflict and the criminal inhumanities of that American history, there is this basic spiritual encounter, to be understood on an intellectual, philosophical, plane as well as a purely political or historical level.

Anyway, this notion leads into some of the thematic sources and ideas which undergird my lengthy journeys through the realms of the "American epic" or long-poem mode.

& now it's late, I must hit the sack - good night.

Reasoning about the existence of God tonight ?

Back in my Caesar salad days, I used to ham it up on the old blog almost every waking slumber.  My forte (whether by music, poetry or pure verbiage) having always been improv - "uniquely suited" (as they say) to extensive bloggification on all matters pertinent and impertinent - I was having a field day every night.

Oh well, enough about that.  I've been reading - trying to read - an extremely dense and philosophically technical book by Denys Turner, titled Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge UP, 2004).  It's one heck of a meatloaf.

Turner is defending against an old traditional challenge to St. Thomas Aquinas.  He's too rational, he's too philosophical : and as such, he veers too far toward the "natural", the secular, the humanist, the agnostickal, the pantheist, etc.  Turner is also challenging those contemporary theologians who have basically surrendered any rational argument for theism, on behalf of an interpretation of "negative theology", apophaticism, & so forth, which disallows rational argument on behalf of mystical (post-rational?) faith.

I'm not doing Turner justice, and am bowdlerizing & totally messing up what this extremely logically assiduous scholar engage is trying to say.  Nevertheless, I'm on his side.

After working through, very carefully, the alternative mentalities of Kant, Bertrand Russell ("the world is just a fact") and a few other prominent agnostics, Turner comes around to defending, very obliquely, very elegantly, the logic of Aquinas, regarding the one most basic & most profound children's question at the heart of philosophy and religion : Why is there anything, rather than nothing?

Sit back and think about it, quietly, for a while.  La vida es sueno.

There is no simple "positively theological" answer to this basic question, as Turner makes clear.  Negative theology, "apophaticism", is inherent in our reasoning itself : because we know we cannot explain how God has produced this intricate dream-cosmos.  The question ends in wonder.

Which leads Turner, and Aquinas (and me) back to the delicate distinctions of the Chalcedonian creed.  We know God only through her manifestation as the conjunction of differences : the human-divine Person... "without separation, without confusion..."

Love manifest as infinite mystery, gift, harmony... and, in the end (at the center of interplanetary melody) - victory, glory, law, fulfillment, redemption.  Star of Redemption... promised land, "kingdom of heaven".

Don't ask me to explain.  Bird has left the cage.

Ancient John Berryman

Immured like a feeble Fisher King, home with the flu, old Henry offers a few stray thoughts.  Have been spending some time with Berryman again, aided by a fine study by Brendan Cooper, Dark Airs : John Berryman and the spiritual politics of Cold War America (Peter Lang, 2009).  Cooper goes a long way toward clearing out some of the commonplace critical pigeonholes, the convenient groupings.  He delves into the political commitments and concerns in Lowell, & especially Berryman, as they shaped them into poetry, & provides evidence that the handy label "Confessional" - with all its negative connotations for scholarship of the last 3 decades, at least - diminishes the real social & political complexity of their work.

So I delved into Berryman's poetry again today, reading Homage to Mistress Bradstreet & some of the shorter poems.

It struck me how this poetry from the 1950s still maintained a living bond with old high modes of poetic diction, stretching back to Shakespeare, & Chaucer, & beyond to Dante, & the ancient poets.  It's high-toned, scholarly, informed, intelligent.  This matter of tone or diction provides the poet with a way to explore cultural, historical & religious phenomena on a sort of "intimate" basis.  The everyday demotic speech of the present confronts a chasm of incomprehension : the tools of articulation are no longer there.

But Berryman is not simply a "traditionalist" or "formalist".  Far from it.  He wallows in archaizing vocabulary : he plays with it, alternately leaning on it directly for effect (as when the rhythm of the Shakespearean pentameter comes to his aid in powerful passages), and making a travesty of it - flipping it around with wisecracks, slang & verbal pratfalls.  It's Berryman's way of actually absorbing, confronting & making something new out of his encounter with the great forerunners, going back to the Bible & maybe beyond (Henry/Gilgamesh?).

Another thing : on this question of "confessionalism".  It seems to me that Berryman, in the Homage and the Dream Songs, is indeed confessional : but maybe in a different sense from that of the critical cliche.  Berryman is confessional in the old medieval sense, of a sinful man facing Eternity, frightened for the future of his soul.  This comes through not just in the late "(re)conversion" poems : I found it so powerful today in the Homage as well.  Berryman's shady, adulterous epithalamion for Anne Bradstreet provides a plot-frame for a painful, terrifying soul-shriving.  Terrifying in at least two senses : first in that Berryman provides no consolation (except perhaps very obliquely, in the moments of praise for the natural grace & beauty of Anne & her children).  Cooper points out the Homage's ironic judgement on the spiritual enthusiasm of the Puritans : they thought they were founding a "city on a hill"; instead they were setting the stage for mid-20th century American version of decadence & systemic violence (Berryman is writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the advent of the atomic bomb, and the Cold War).

Terrifying, secondly, in that the Homage seems to implicate the poet in an irreversible repetition of the "damnation" which threatens.  In these passages it seems to me that Berryman becomes "confessional" in both a personal & a theological sense.  The formality of the poem strains with Berryman's sense of guilt & soul-fear, his anxiety about his eternal soul in the face of his 1) sins and 2) unwillingness to repent.

There are many aspects to Berryman's persona and writing which seem ancient, archaic.  The beard, the bardic grandeur, the Irish, the Yeats, the Shakespeare... but on another level there is this access in his poetry to an older way of being, of understanding.  He's like an Old Testament prophet, castigating his nation while at the same time pouring ashes on his own head.  The fact that he can also convey at the same time a fragile gaiety & antic wit, speaks to his humanity.

Needless to say, the more I read Berryman, the more I realize this Henry is not that Henry, if you know what I mean.  It's hard to exaggerate the sense of despair and desolation emanating from much of the American literature of the mid-20th century.  Existential angst.  Its keynote seems to be the loss of faith : the death of God.  The inability to reconcile the horror with any kind of theodicy.

Berryman seems to have been torn by agonizing & recurrent crises of faith - the most powerful spiritual experiences coming toward the end of his life.  I've been there, too, in my way... but the pivotal crisis happened when I was young, around age 19.

Along with Brendan Cooper & Berryman himself, I've been reading another book on my sickbed : The Gothic Cathedral, by Otto von Simson.  A beautiful, brilliant work, focusing on the architecture of Chartres Cathedral.

I was intrigued to learn that Suger and the other masters of the early Gothic were part of an intellectual milieu centered on the spiritual vision of St. Bernard, and much influenced by the Neo-Platonic Christianity of the Byzantine mystic known as "Pseudo-Dionysus".  Pseudo-Dionysus got blended with the patron saint of the Il-de-France, St. Denis.  According to Simson, the "Dionysian" theology of progressive emanations of spiritual light was filtered to Paris by way of an old acquaintance of mine, the Byzantine monk, St. Maximus the Confessor.

All this is neither here nor there.  But Simson explains how the anonymous "Master of Chartres" was an artist of genius, transforming the Romanesque into a new aesthetic unity of perfect proportions and overwhelming light.

I can't go into all the insights Simson provides.  He writes about how different the medieval worldview is from our own (his book was published in 1956).  I'm just here to confess how this study helps & reinforces my own viewpoint.  For me, a rational faith in the incarnate Word is possible; in fact, it's the door to all hope for humankind on this planet.  Chartres is simply one of the most powerful architectural expressions of this "rational faith" on earth.

Job's debate with God about suffering, horror and evil goes on.  It has no simple rationalistic verbal or formulaic resolution.  The inward "confession" of the human person cannot be abstracted, turned into a determinism.  & yet as far as the legal argument over the problem of evil, I stand on the following principles :

1)  Human persons have free will; they make choices for good and evil.
2)  God as spirit & creator is not responsible for Man's free-will choices for good or evil.
3) The message of Jesus is that repentance, mercy, forgiveness & transformation are not only possible, they are the power of God at work in Man to save the whole creation, and to save and heal individual persons.

Where Berryman is anguished, I am calm.  It is startling to me that while I was growing up in Minneapolis, John Berryman was living in my parents' and grandparents' old neighborhood, where I live now.  My family & I probably passed him on the street.  I wish I could have held out my little Henry hand to help him.

*

Postscript

I realize my juxtaposition here of "the old high modes" and "everyday demotic speech" lands me plop in the middle of seemingly-outgrown battles over the true progress of American letters.  I come across as would-be mandarin, elitist, aligned with Eurocentric Anglo-centric stuffy traditionalism in poetry.  My comments seem to dismiss what has been a prime element of American literature : the search for an idiom adequate to specifically American speech, and to the vastness of American experience, exemplified by W. C. Williams, Wallace Stevens & so many others.  Instead I appear to have opted for that rather stuffy, contrived mid-century period, when New Critical academics sought to perfect & standardize their pedantic version of T.S. Eliot's "tradition".

But I think Berryman's poetry exemplifies how & why nobody has to align themselves with these critical pigeonholes or literary clans.  His absorption of the disciplines of the "old high style" reveal a debt to Yeats; the desire to emulate and recapitulate the ancient manner stem ultimately from a passion for participation, which moves poets to inhabit & revive the ghosts of ancient texts and long-gone times.

In my view this is of the essence of the poetic vocation; it comes from a power within "song" itself, to enliven and resurrect dead words, dead times, the old poets.  The bard goes into a kind of visionary trance in order to re-encounter these things - the way Homer, or Virgil or Dante all went down into the depths of the afterlife to speak with their ancestors.

So there is always something uncanny, a whiff of archaic mana, when a poet starts to mime the old speech in a new way.  And all I mean to suggest by the above is that Berryman's or any poet's engagement with the "old high forms" - various modes of traditional poetic artifice - opens doors to time and history not otherwise available.  The poetry of American "plain speech"  has indeed made accessible enormous new spaces of artistic perception & grasp of experience; I'm just suggesting that someone like Berryman re-enacts the exploration of past human times.

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).

Richard Swinburne's book (The Existence of God) is like a well-built, deep-drafted seagoing vessel. His command of the logic of evidence, probability - "confirmation theory" - allows him to re-open old arguments toward God's existence - from cosmology, from design, from "Providence", etc. - in new and remarkable directions. His discussion of the kind of universe a good God would create (the chapter on Providence) - one which allows for conscious beings with a capacity for freedom of choice of good and evil, intellectual and moral growth - I found quite moving. Nor does he sidestep the "problem of evil" or the presence of suffering and death.

The rational investigation of the possible existence and nature of God seems to me to be one of the most important cultural developments of any society, because it allows for the possibility of reasoning about and "reasoning-with" a reasonable God. It is an exercise in free thought. It counters the text-idolatry and intellectual tyranny of the fundamentalist and "traditionalist" attitudes, present in all three of the monotheistic faiths.

But vagrancy with the intent of rendering... wholeness, the whole thing.

Poetry presents icons or images - ecological proportionate pictures, as opposed to explanations. The picture acts like a parable or metaphor - reaching reason & understanding at a slant.

But you already know...

The Ron Chronicles ongo. Robert Duncan wasn't up to the historical sea-change of postmodern Theory, which some newcomer poets (ie. I guess the Langpos) were. Up to.

I don't know much about Duncan, but I tend to agree with his juxtaposition of poetry vs. rationalism (reason is something else again). (Kent & I talked about this in the Jacket interview.)

This doesn't mean I go for the mystical-magical. I simply agree that reason requires imagination. Reason acknowledges mystery & the unknown; rationalism, on the other hand, mystifies the power of discursive Explanation. Poetry doesn't have to explain, at least not in obvious ways.

Henry's Postmodern Theory Course (In Five Easy Lessons)

1. Language is all we know.
2. Language refers only to itself; there's nuttin' outside Language.
3. Because Postmodern Theory acknowledges this, it can modify discourse & philosophy into a sort of Poetry.
4. Language Poetry, because it acknowledges Theory, is a sort of poetry of Theory, which is itself a sort of Poetry. Whoo-eee.
5. There is a special word for #1-4 above. The word is "baloney". "Baloney" (the word, "baloney") is a sort of theoretical word in this context, and as such, this "baloney" is, so to speak, a sort of poetry.

Reading The Tale of the 1002nd Night, by Joseph Roth.

And some interesting studies on Nicolaus Cusanus.

Working on Dove Street, the poem. Idea of the epic which ends in state of contemplation. Conjunction of date of Wm. Blackstone's burial & Guillem de Gellone's saint's day (5/28). Gellone & Cloisters Museum in the Bronx. Cloister & metropolis. Thought & action. Soldier & monk. Narratives of epic quest (ie. Odysseus, Orpheus) as subplots of, or figures for, a more fundamental redemptive plot (Everyman "hooked" out of mortality into "kingdom of God"). The dove that floats upon two wings (reason & love). (Emblem for poetry, too).

. . . but getting back to what I was saying, think of Grenier's "I hate speech" and the langpo that followed - think of the general turn toward "textuality" in poetics that began in the 70s and continued - think of these trends in the context I laid out, of an emphasis in 20th-cent. modernism on artifact over communication (the creation of the aesthetically-perfect, self-contained, hermetically-sealed cul-de-sac as a defense against the loss of traditional cultural authority & its forms of shared discourse). These trends were another iteration of the divided zeitgeist (love/knowledge, faith/science) which is perhaps now over. Perhaps the answer to Ron Silliman's well-known & repeated "what's next?" queries will have something to do with poets' reclaiming the communicative function : restoring the balance by means of theme & subject-matter & more direct speech.

The post-structuralist argument which plays into much contemporary poetry, ie. that there is no ground for rational discourse, so no possibility of a return to logos or shared terms, is, of course, also a rational argument, albeit one which contradicts itself in the assertion. . .

Anastasios,

I spent the afternoon on Orthodox Easter raking up 16 bags of leaves from the church yard. Then I finished making some stew & took it over to the monthly discussion pot luck (I live across the street from Church of the Redeemer, a pretty little Episcopal church on Hope St.). Our topic was Reason & Faith - how we reconcile/differentiate/hold them in suspension in our own lives.

Redeemer reminds me of the church I was brought up in in Minneapolis. Old stucco & woodwork, faintly Tudor I guess.

I said that while the relations between Reason & Faith are a hot topic these days, what with all the "clash of cultures", Western democracy & Islam - and it's fascinating in its own right - it seems to me that the role of Christ in the world - his action - occurs on a more basic level, so basic it's below intellectual radar. Christ is "the lamb of God who takes away sin" : essentially a priestly role, a very specific action, which is the forgiveness of sin & thereby the healing & redemption of souls. Just as the soul is found at some core level where intellect, emotion & spirit are fused together in the Self, the Person - so this is where Christ's action takes place. It's deep below or within history, time, argument, debate, etc. It appears, when it appears to consciousness, as an awareness of sin - Joyce's "agenbite of inwit" - the awareness of being in a state of sin in need of redemption. This is why Christ in the Gospels says, "I came not for the righteous, but for sinners". We're talking about a spiritual reality somewhat on a different plane from the intellectual debates about whether God exists etc., the relations between secular & sacred, philosophy & theology, etc. Dante's Divina Commedia illustrates this distinction marvelously. The poet-pilgrim takes an encyclopedic journey through all history & all social roles - but the spiritual states of sin which condemn individuals to hell or assign them to purgatory or deliver them to heaven have nothing to do with their social status or their worldly prestige.

I've been interested in Roger Williams' perspective, as described in some of the biographies. In his letters & writings he argued consistently, as is well known, for the separation of church & state. Less well known perhaps is his background worldview which gave rise to these positions. Williams considered global civil society as ordained, established by God, the Holy Spirit (or "Spirit of Truth"). He liked to remind English folk that the Narragansetts & the Turks & the Chinese & lots of other cultures often showed themselves more civilized, more kindly, more wise than those denizens of "Christian" nations. The knowledge of right and wrong, of justice, of natural law, has been implanted in all people & every culture. Christianity, rightly understood, does not act on this plane : rather, it's an activity of salvation on the plane of the eternal soul, a different dimension from civil society, though its effects (of sin & grace) can be visible there, on a social level. Williams: "Eternity, O Eternity ! That is our Business."

Westerners, as inheritors of this tradition of the separation of church & state, can show bias & complacency toward Islam, for example (ie. as an example of a religion which blurs the separation of religion & politics). But in doing so, secular society divorces itself from an essential aspect of human identity : the soul's thirst for God, which is reflected in all genuine philosophy & religion. Simone Weil, for one, wrote feelingly about this essential thirst.