Mark Scroggins writes an interesting response to the review here.

My statement that Breeze was modeled "deliberately" on Harmonium appears to have been a case of "creative misreading", as they say. But I'd like to defend myself by saying that there's more to it than simply questions of lineage & influence, as Mark puts it.

"Modern" poets chose distinct approaches to the very central crux of self-consciousness, reflexivity, "art-for-art's-sake". The styles & attitudes of "engaged" or political poets, of epic-historical poets, of confessional poets, of traditionalists, etc. have differed quite a bit.

One of the things that interested me about Latta's book is that he seems to have extended a line from Stevens' general approach - but not in the same direction taken by the New York School, or that of other more florid or "elliptical" poets.

Latta has a gene of the homespun philosopher & nature boy about him (like Stevens' verbal duelist in the anecdote - Frost!). (But I don't think I'll write my next review on How John Latta Sounds Like that Farmer from New Hampshire...)

coffee break thoughts:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric : poetry stems from an elusive necessity, which is inherent to, and resolves itself within, the articulation of the poem itself. But that's not all : the poem's language displays the effects of this necessity with a kind of self-reflexive awareness.

Rhetoric applies language toward particular persuasive purposes. The language itself is of value only insofar as it advances those persuasions. This is a form of necessity external to the work of art.

Many well-meaning poets are writing rhetorical texts, unaware that their golden speech contains no inner necessity.

Here be Ron Silliman's extended encomiae (have I got that right, Gabe?) to Charles Bernstein's new book The Sophist.

Wagrant thoughts: a sophist is a professional rhetor, one who makes the daily bread by means of a persuasive appeal to Wisdom presented appealingly. Criticized, I believe, by Plato, whose notion of the transcendent Truth precluded a simple 2-step verbalization (ie. 1. Truth is; 2. I'm telling it to you). Maybe Aristotle too, who wanted a more disinterested Logic.

Bernstein works out an interesting confluence of Langpo & NY School attitudes; he imitates Ashbery, who perfected the wry self-negating/self-persuasive zennish non sequitur ("Beautifully the words reveal there is nothing to say." - HG imitating JA).

So to title a book The Sophist is classic self-deprecatory/self-affirming - disarming the critic beforehand.

Ashbery (& Bernstein) take the self-reflexive, narcissistic quality of poetry - inescapable, since poetry is the word, unlike any other language use except maybe the joke, which embodies a celebration of itself, among other things - and turn it into a comic system.

The limits of this kind of poetry are the limits of the comic: it appeals to the mind through a stringent disciplining (or mockery) of the feelings. There is something gnostic about comedy: those who are in the know get the better of the dolts who don't get it.

I suppose the opposite of the comic is pathos. Tragedy is based on pathos, the empathy with suffering. A lot of art, not just the tragic, appeals to pathos (think of Portuguese fado, for one thing. or Chet Baker). Emotion, feeling, music, duende. Language poetry built itself on a politically-motivated (moral?) mockery of the bathos of sentimental, self-centered 70s free verse.

Kent's essay, noted below, links prosody to what was perhaps the main divide in 20th-cent. American poetries - bigger than that between "raw vs. cooked" or "New American vs. New Critical" (at least before the advent of deconstruction and langpo, anyway) :  the divide between symbolist/"idealist" and objectivist/"realist"  (Stevens/Crane/Eliot vs. Williams/Pound/Zukofsky, for example).
 
The divide represents a sort of inherent conundrum of thought & perception.  B.J. Leggett's book Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory argues that Stevens actually played both sides, pondering & negotiating his way around issues of imagination & reality.  His skill in doing so registered in the fascination, controversy, sheer volume of criticism of same.
 
I'm always jealous of this kind of well-organized well-informed essay.  But leaning as I do toward the Stevens end of the spectrum, I guess, I have a few quibbles.  There's a value judgement being made:  the line which includes Rakosi is supposed to represent a humbler, more active/passive, more direct apprehension of "things as they is"; Stevens' mode is seen as imposing a priori categories of interpretation on experience.
 
A problem with this analysis arises, though, when you grant the possibility that reality itself and the things of reality display order, logos, Dike, Tao.  Then the self-reflexive and circling "prosodies" - the rhythmic patterns which Kent describes so succinctly - may be understood as poetry's function or capability to evoke or represent such a situation of "realities-within-Logos".  And this may be, ultimately, at least as realist as the more indicative particulars of the WC Williams vein.

I've circled around these little problems all my life. But sitting out in the backyard, reading a tanned paperback of an old Eric Ambler novel (ca. 1937: Background to Danger), it occurred to me once again, that I've never changed, I've always been a slightly effete bookworm, a reader, not a doer, while my whole family is predicated on doing, doing, doing, and this is, in fact, the secret of a mens sano corpore whatever.

Hamlet & A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (did I get that right?) & Don Quixote - perhaps the greatest literary works of all. & what are they about? Sickly writer types, who "lose the name of action". Frustrated dreamers.

Dynamic symmetry, golden section... the new spring growth of Nature... applies to this narcissism-mirror-problem too.

Mim-mim-mim-Mom & Sis-mimesis. the ultimate st-st-stutter.

Responding to John Latta's notes on "ambiguous figures":

yes, the characteristic quality of poetry is its reflexivity (its way of being something rather than simply pointing to something); but the shortcoming of so much postmodern poetry is that it simply turns this into a dichotomy ("poetry must not be mimetic since it is reflexive, self-mirroring"). What happens then is it gets further and further from ordinary experience & feeling, accenting its function as intellectual game.

The real puzzle, it seems to me, is how poetry can be both mimetic & reflexive.

The painting by Rogier van der Weyden described in poem yesterday is up at MFA in Boston. Hope to go see it this week. (The poem only begins to get at the complexities of this remarkable painting.) Luke was the patron saint of artists. In this picture, he's doing a silver-point sketch of Mary & infant Jesus. In a sense, the painting revolves around two joined (& perpendicular) wheels: first, the wheel from the "onlookers" in the distance, pointing to the tiny church where one could imagine this entire scene is taking place; second, the wheel from Luke's sketch through the Gospel he is writing to this painting as a whole (& thus back to the sketch, or this painting's - & the gospel's - own origin). It's done with spots of light & the linear relationships established between them (a light through a chink in the wall over Mary's head, paralleling a similar light over the writing desk; lines criscrossing through the center of the painting connecting Luke's stylus, the direction of his sketch-pad, the hand of Jesus, the writing desk, the two lights, etc.) - and - and this is important - it's all unified by the fact that the figure of Luke is van der Weyden's self-portrait.

Borges couldn't have fashioned a more subtle self-reflexive design. Besides, it's beautiful, down to a microscopic level: you have to peer at minute features of the clothing, or the coat-of-arms in the stained glass window, or the tiny figures walking in the distant town - or the man pissing against the wall there; and yet it comes together as an integrated whole. & this is one of the great lessons in "fitness" of the old masters: you can't understand the meaning of the details, unless you somehow begin to grasp the meaning, the motive, of the whole image.

& this, of course, teaches us something about "reading" nature, or experience, or reality, as a whole. (which gets back to something I was trying to get at a few days ago, discussing the status of the image in poetry.)

St. Luke Drawing a Portrait


 
 
It’s a game of perception.  The Virgin, calm,
attentive, aims the nipple of one small breast
toward the lips of the laughing Infant.  St. Luke,
draped in flowing vermilion, pauses, looks up
from his sketchbook, his fine black-golden
stylus held there motionless.  It’s a portrait
of the artist (van der Weyden); in a corner
behind him, an ox curls under a writing stand,
where a draft of the third Gospel lies open.
Between pillars in the center, beyond the
garden, on a bridge, in the middle distance,
a man and a woman (with their backs to us)
gaze at a river that glides to the horizon.
The man aims his index finger toward
a far-off spit of shoreline, where
a tiny church is barely visible.
       
                                 (This work
the mirror-image of an earlier one, by Jan
van Eyck, The Rolin Madonna: the kneeling 
donor, holding his book, looks up (entranced 
by mother and child) from the opposite side 
of the room (and painting); in the center,
in the deep distance, the same river,
almost the same onlookers.)
              
                             It’s a game
of perception, with multiple mirrors:
that onlooker’s index, pointing almost
out of the scene, circles back to this room:
St. Luke, looking on, is van der Weyden,
looking on: as we are looking on, absorbed
(as that infant soon will be) in the milky flow.

Unable to write for the past couple of weeks, after an enthusiastic spell before that. Maybe, at my advanced age, I'm starting to become slightly conscious of my own creative patterns(?). Early enthusiasm, followed by spate of disillusionment & boredom with my plainness, obviousness, my prosaic style. Some of the more formalist poems in Way Stations came out of similar periods of enthusiasm (technical tours-de-force).

The strong interest in Mandelstam & Montale, especially, for their hermetic qualities: the inward curve of the imagery, the self-sustaining roundedness, the indirection.

The strong interest in long poems for their "learned" qualities: the way an arcane or highly-involved subject-matter folds the poetry into its own sphere of indirections.

So maybe these two interests arose partly out of desire to compensate for my own ordinariness. (I guess I'll just have to quit being ordinary!)

OK, enough confession. "Unable to write," I'm going back to writing...

more Dove Street:

3     
                     Omnia enim universalia, generalia atque specialia in  
                     te Iuliano iulianizant  [All universals, generalities, and 
                     specifics julianize in you, Giuliano]      
                                              – Nicolaus Cusanus


 
A faint gray pencil-sketch   my mother made   decades ago
floats in a blue corner:  two redhead brothers   like twins
almost an octave   Guillem & Giacomo   sit   parallel
each sketching (right-handed)   intent   upon   blank white

 
& Gong Xian   abandoned the field   and the fugue of war
(a change of ancient dynasties   Ming for Shang)
trailing retreat   transmuting each desire
(only flickers   of black horsehair)

 
the Yellow Mountain was   left to your imagination
in grey-black flecks   and war and peace   the blank
spaces   the crooked lightning paths   left up to you
(your willing hand   your loving heart   your sight)

 
Leonardo drew (lefty, mancino) the faintest of red lines
beneath the leaning eyes of Mary   bending down
(seraphic)   toward the babe:   his notes
a kind of mirror-writing (all’ebraico)   with “tired hand”

 
And in the wintry womb   the gray-black limbs
iterate (tired, crooked) against the snow   a backward trail
or trial   a coiled, cold metal spring or   trapper’s guile
(elusive prey   grey shadow   fleeting   glimmering)

 
low cooing   from a frozen eave or   looking-glass
intones an octave   twinned in unison   (some mournful-
silver marriage rite):  a thread of golden lightning
through an ocarina   to a painted ear (and scandalized)

 
announces stormy weather   thunderstorms and   thaw
across the mountains   where waterfalls   rush
past banks of cedars, reeds   (your brush with
fate   by horsehair   led you   here)

       
                                   2.20.04

Dove Street, cont.:

From your node of dove-grey granite   nestled in the Hudson bluffs
above the hustling metropolis   my saint Guillem
where the convalescent painter   painting so patiently
slows time to sweetness   and lights into the depths   I thought

 
I saw   it might be   something like this:
three young ballerinas   in feathery pink and gold   peering
curious and tremulous   around the curtain   on tiptoe
with unconscious grace  (Degas, the Guggenheim)

 
and the young crowd’s eager faces    peering   curious
and tremulous   on tiptoe   with unconscious grace
into the frame:  there   in the feminine mirror   an iteration
of a golden measure   or   benevolent universe

 
the play’s the thing   for melancholy Dane or Orpheus
hooked by the furrowed shadow   of an empty heart;
time slows   and lost is action   to the name, unspeakable
and grey  (like the shimmer of Law   in the dolphin-depths)

 
all’s figures   cries the street-wise idiot
when the heartbroken hero   descends into the grave:
for the one who went before   already lifts him free
in the slivered glint   of every new year’s day

 
and O what mighty wooden O is this   resting on a Sabbath-ship
a ring-dance   ringed around a painted pose   a pause
or cloistered clustering   around a single coiled spring
a noon   where an ink-brush runs   a stream   upstream

 
to a sunny mountain:  what gives   which gives   who gives
and gives   and flows   perpetuum mobile   continuum’s
heart’s blood O   hearty sacrificium   full, complete and
with unconscious grace   (inflected law   of every lovely feat)


       
                                        2.19.04

Finishing up John Irwin's splendid Mystery to a Solution. It occurred to me over the weekend that there's perhaps a certain blind spot in this study of blind spots.

Irwin investigates Borges' labyrinthine project of doubling/alternating Poe's trio of detective stories. Both writers reveal an intense fascination with the "reflexive" capacity of reflection - its tendency toward infinite regression/progression (the way a "complete" map located in a certain landscape would have to include an image of itself in that landscape). Irwin thematizes this aspect of reflection as inherent in the nature of self-consciousness : how we cannot "think" of ourselves without in some way splitting/doubling ourselves; how this binariness is incorporated in our physical structure (the 2 mirrored "halves" of the body); how the reflexiveness of art is epitomized by the mystery story, and can be traced back to, among other sources, Greek tragedy : ie., the double story of Oedipus - as the hero who proceeds from divining the Sphinx's riddle (the solution to which is "human being"), to becoming, due to the inherent blind spot of reflexivity, both the detective and the criminal he seeks.

Irwin shows how masterfully Poe incorporates reflexivity - the double-fold of "stories about themselves" - in "Purloined Letter" & "Murders in the Rue Morgue" - by (among a multitude of other means) reference to mathematics & the game of "even & odd". Just as the detective plays a guessing game with the criminal, the author plays a guessing game with the reader (a race between the reader & the detective to solve the mystery). Irwin traces how Poe elaborates "odd and even", "simple and odd", into an oscillation between the numbers 3 and 4, geometrized in a square "letter" folded once in half on the diagonal (thus a 4-cornered square becomes a 3-pointed triangle) : a diagonal which is an irrational number, a number which thematizes the incommensurability - the vertigo of infinity - in reflexivity itself. (David Foster Wallace has just published an enormous tome on Cantor's systematization of the infinite math involved here).

The sense one gathers from Irwin's presentation is of an art of infinite regression, ambiguity & recurrence, based on an irresolvable oscillation between self and other, even & odd, 1 and 2, 3 and 4 : an infinite which adds endless complexity and echo to every representation.

What occurred to me over the weekend, however, is that there is something missing from the math here. Something so simple, so obvious, so "hidden in plain sight" (like the purloined letter) - yet something which can't be left out of the cosmic literary design : ie. zero, nothingness.

The difference between zero and one, between nothingness and something, trumps the difference between 1 & 2. The difference between nothing and something is greater than the difference between a thing and its image.

Strangely, it's on this most basic difference that identity - self-identity - finds its ground. & one might say that the deepest verbal "reflection" - the Bible, the Book of Genesis - is grounded on this difference : both in terms of the question of creation from nothing, and in terms of the prohibitions against graven images.

One might also extrapolate a theory of Incarnation on this same basis. The doubleness of human being in a sense contains both "fallenness/salvation" since being made "an image of God" is inherently contradictory. How can you have an image of the imageless? You can, if human being is inherently both fallen (a "mere image") and redeemed (an integral, unknowable, unimaginable self-like-god, a "one"-where-there-was-nothing).

Thus the self can be understood as integral rather than "simply" split & doubled : but only on the ground of unknowable creation-from-nothing, and only in relation to an "imageless", unknowable numero uno.

[p.s. addendum : I guess I'm being somewhat contradictory myself in closing sentences here, re the doubleness/integral(?) character of the self. What I'm trying to say is that the mind/body problem, or the doubleness of fallenness/salvation, or the mirror-like bilateral symmetry of the body - all this "doubleness" is resolved or trumped by the notion of creation-from-nothing. In other words, again, the difference between zero and one is greater than the difference between 1 and 2 or self and other. I see I have doubled a previous statement here (I see I have doubled a previous statement here).]

Dynamic symmetry, images of infinity based on self-reflexive designs : the whole which includes a part which contains the whole which includes a part which contains. . .

one recognizes this is the "paint myself into a corner" problem writ large (& small).

Over the years of my steady-erratic badmouth attack on the binary design of oppositionalism (starting with the Buffalo Poetics List around 1997) I have experienced in my flesh the scapegoat patter-pattern of ritualized literary malice. I have painted myself into the shady corner of infinite giggle-bytes.

Thinking this morning about three things that influence poetry-making, yesterday and today:

1. The inherent exploratory quality of every creative effort, whether in art or anything else. The blank page & its first words face the pre-existent world in all its tenured prestige. Thus there will always be an inventive aspect to original creation.

2. The present-day separation between fiction, poetry, and music, which creates challenges and opportunities.

3. The combination of the first two factors, in the context of a limited audience for poetry (compared with that for both fiction and music), generates an intensified self-conscious, or reflexive, quality in poetry. Creativity is at least as much autonomous and self-absorbed, as it is social and "opportunistic"; the isolation of poetry complicates the rhetoric of its address to an audience - leading poets, in poetry, to question the "fiction of fiction" and the authenticity of every literary mode and manner.

The plot pivots on its ending. The shell turns inside out around its pearl.

Odysseus goes Homer, in his bed built around a live treetrunk, with Penelope. Dante the pilgrim reaches his goal becoming Dante the author starting to write (backwards) "Nel mezzo del cammin. . ." The child Marcel voyages through thousands of pages in order to become Proust the author setting out on the voyage.

World & author becoming whole, becoming one. Shakespeare's Globe, rounded with a sleep.

Happy endings, after turmoil, test & struggle.

What is your plot, what is your theme?

Orpheus curls around his wounded memory like a shell around a pearl. He looks back : & poetry is Eurydice-Hermes.

The contemplative curls around an unlived life, around remorseful memory, like God brooding over creation. & then the curl becomes a spiral (a pale green fiddlehead).