Socrates : the thing is, Hen, you can't make an art from an "image" of the artist. You can't get there by well-meaning abstract ideals. It's only an invitation to the next demagogue, the next 2nd-rate "voice".

Henry : so I'm just talking through my hat again?

Socrates : the poet is not the politician. The poet just happens to be there; the poet is the companion. The poem is the bloom of culture.

Henry : the poem is the poem.

Socrates : the poem is the poem.

Henry : I just said that.

Socrates : the word - the word is another thing.

Henry : now you're playing with fire.

I know my crabby essay posted over there last week has some problems. I know. I know.

Poetry is not as messed up as I pictured it. Nor is a dismissive shrug the right attitude to take toward partisan politics. Nor is everyone going to understand society through a lense of vice, virtue and penitence.

I know, I know. But it's been a while since the po-blogworldlings listened to me, anyway. There's something wild & liberating about rejection.

Follow-up to yesterday's post : Silliman's historicism is always framed to promote the idea of an oppositional community - the New Americans, the post-avants, etc. Ironically similar to Ignatow's presentation, in that interview, of himself as coming out of an embattled real American/WC Williams school, which only recently (the '70s) had come into its own, as the authentic American mainstream.

My view of all this remains the same as ever. It's poetry itself, not the poetry community, which is the diverse/unified vibrant entity.

As long as poets and critics continue to deflect criticism along the path of social branding/collectivity exercises, the real issues - of style, form, rhetorical address, aesthetic values, themes, influence - will be obscured.

People would rather politicize the art - turn it into a tribal checkers game of who's where and who's who - than think and evaluate poems and poets independently - empirically - as part of the unified field called "poetry".

Another irony in this situation is this : as long as poets and critics characterize themselves first and foremost as members of some literary subculture or other, they will continue to fall short of the social and political directness and emotional/logical force which poetry always has the potential for showing. And does show, in individual poets and poems - phenomena which always seem to jar somewhat paradoxically with the theories of social branding which are supposed to contain them.

... and there's another, harder, higher way to think about this "sphere of art."

It's when you consider that aforementioned need as a kind of ethical command. A mysterious moral absolute.

This, to me, is what distinguishes "professional writers" from those who think writing means being part of some kind of special, challenged "community". Certainly, writers are part of the commonweal, and speak for it, and to it; but this implies that the speaking is not simply an end in itself. Goodby forever, poetry clubs & committees.

The "commerce" of art & writing is not a quantifiable mass or entity; it's a spiritual or moral quality. It's a demand on the writer - a force of conscience - impelling him or her to address, and condemn, some moral danger, challenge, extremity, debasement : or, on the other hand, it's an undeniable impulse to praise and celebrate some good thing in life & reality.

These moral acts of conscience are what separate and individuate - utterly, indubitably - because they are the substance of the work, its motive - each piece of writing, and each writer's specific "job of work", inspiration, calling. & this element of the whole business is what makes me cast my famously sceptical eye on literary group activities. It's not that I consider myself more correct or moral or effective - I do not, in any way; it's that I'm pointing out an aspect which I recognize & believe exists in the larger phenomenon of writing as a whole.

Another vast curricular discourse from Ron Silliman, the Great Expatiator, makes me want to talk back, which I haven't felt like doing in a long time.

With Ron there is always this immense unexplored poetry turf, just waiting there, underneath the Quietude shrubbery, waiting for the Next Generation of Too Many Poets who Don't Know Enough. It's a curriculum for becoming Informed, in order to Know What Is Going On.

I think I come from a cultural background which is sort of midwestern-stoic, a culture which emphasizes understatement & brevity (believe it or not - & it may be hard to believe, considering the giant Blather-Bank which is HG Poetics). Say what you have to say, no more no less. Keep it brief.

This culture offers, in many ways, an inimical environment for the audacious flora which is Poetry. Yet it has its points. It produces great terse quiet writers like Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson.

I think much beautiful art arises out of nostalgia for an imagined, remembered, childhood-fostered unity of culture. The reactionary tendencies of TS Eliot or Pound draw on it, but other arty characters, like Proust, for example, draw on it too. What is it, exactly? Montale points toward what I'm thinking about with his notions of "dilettantism" and "the second life of art." A certain vivid graceful place where art and life mutually enhance each other, without a lot of explanatory Cliff Notes.

My notion of midwestern understatement seems to chime with this other concept; that is, art makes itself manifest & speaks of and for those who really need it. It's a kind of (pseudo? super?) natural phenomenon, which in some sense renders anxieties about readership or transmission or canonicity or whatever - all these "middleman" issues - truly academic.

I'm sure I can be accused now of anti-intellectualism & know-nothingism. OK. But I believe art gets made by those with the talent to make it, out of their need to make it; and it is discovered & enjoyed by those who really need to discover it; and that this process begins not in grad school or even high school but in childhood - it's transmitted by the people who read & sing songs & tell stories to their children. I also don't think it's managed or controlled by intellectuals & academics, because the process of making and responding to art and poetry operates on its own level between producers and receivers.

I'm probably not expressing at all what I set out to try to express. I'm thinking of the place of poetry in life as something different, humbler, from that imagined by its intellectual supervisors in the academies & the publishing houses & outlaw-wannabee subcultures. Not that it's anti-intellectual, not at all : but it's a place, a sphere of activities, which is simply maintained (unsystematically, freely, adventitiously), in shared fashion, by those who know it & love it.

"The giant race of American poets between the two world wars agreed that the great, the permanent, subject of poetry is the ennobling transformation of common existence by the imagination. Their axiom was old enough, in a sense, for they believed also that wherever art rises beyond the motives of religion, politics and vanity, it accomplishes the great purpose."

- Irvin Ehrenpreis, in a review of Donald Justice & others, published anonymously in TLS # 3760 (March 30, 1974). Quoted in Certain Solitudes : on the poetry of Donald Justice (Univ. of AK Press, 1997).

(This seems to me like one of the best, most accurate formulations of "what it's all about" I've ever come across. Even though it reminds me that my own poetry, most of the time, is a murky obscure mixture of religion, politics & vanity - my own private Amazon jungle.)

p.s. Happy Birthday, Walt.

Have been reading Lords of Limit, G. Hill book of essays.

Much focus on 16th- and 19th-century English poetry & philosophy. Held together throughout by the notion of writing as an engagement which is ineluctably rendered up to moral judgement. Poetry's grounding - its entanglement - in both words and experience - its human particularity - is its weakness & its strength. It is implicated in, as it informs, the moral reality of persons, times & nations.

Hill's manner is extremely ruminative, somewhat oblique. He'll take up a single moral paradox or literary-historical impasse, and slowly ravel into his progress these very acute & nuanced evaluations of the chorus of poets & thinkers who have weighed in on that particular issue over the span of a century or so.

It's as if there's an unspoken assertion serving as the pillar for the whole baroque architecture : the sense of poetry as a culture's necessary redemptive presence (because of that very rooted & particular moral implication in its speech & history). Not exactly in Stevens' sense ("poetry is the sanction of life"). Hill points out that Stevens was following in Arnold's footsteps, seeking to offer poetry as a substitute for religion. For Hill, it seems, the ultimate judgement & sanction lie elsewhere, outside literature - but literature, when it approaches the beautiful & the true, bears witness to that judgement - or bears the marks of it.

Reading Geoffrey Hill's Without Title. Airport reading (my daughter Phoebe returned from 4 months in Bangladesh yesterday).

May try to write a review of this fascinating book. Dedicated in homage to E. Montale, I seem to see influence of Montale's late style (in Satura). He also translates M's famous poem La bufera ("The Storm"). Some great "Pindarics", one of the high points of the volume. A poem about Hart Crane. Several allusions here & there to Mandelstam.

Still trying to fathom something of the political stance (not that that's the most important thing, but Hill sometimes speaks very gnomically & obscurely - hard for me, anyway, to follow). There are references to politics & democracy, but the outlook seems bleak, disillusioned. As though democracy suits his heart but seems unrealistic to his mind (politics is done by "the elect", in an ironic sense).

I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, though - too early to comment.

But the question got me thinking. Perhaps democracy is only realistic as a radical commitment. By that I mean one must be - thoroughly - a committed believer in popular sovereignty and the intelligence of the common person and ordinary opinion - radically so, despite the debilitating processes & events so conducive to despair & cynicism. Because only such a commitment is strong enough to say nay to the centuries - millennia - of elite thinking on politics (from before Plato, to Plato, to Macchiavelli, etc. & beyond). One has to be radical enough - & sceptical enough of intellectual pretension - to regard the elite discourse on politics - no matter how intelligent, informed by hard experience, and persuasive - as wrong-headed and out-of-date.

Novus ordo seclorum.

...clearly, there are political poets whose dazzling personal intensity & fireworks of experience are far more exciting than the goodly little gray poet-figure I present... For these poets, life & politics & art are all one, fused in a demanding existential personal performance.

I go along with that. Everything, in my book, is infused with personality & personhood.

Yet I also like to think of Poetry itself - the communal endeavor, the "tradition" if you will - Poetry with a capital P - as the performance : & that we individual poets are the channels & the interpreters.

This has been a particular dialectic in American poetry, I think - between the scrawny, brave and inimitable voice of individual experience - and the Grand Communal Voice of Poetry. Quite a juggling act.

(...clearly the whole question goes much deeper than that, however.

A poet becomes identified with ordinary people by way of his or her own passionate identification with same.

But such a passion implies an isolation, a separation, of some kind.

In overcoming that primal distance - in the victory of the quest, the winning of the game - the poet embodies something supremely ornamental in their own person & art.)

(Geez, this sounds suspiciously way too much like D'Annunzio..., or, Lorca, I'd rather think of. Crane. or Dickinson, the Silencer.)

Ange Mlinko writes:

"As to the question, "How to find the way to write both an artful and utilitarian poetry?" I can't say I would ever use "poetry" and "utilitarian" in the same sentence, but if Sarah means "relevant to the daily lives of nonintellectuals," I think there are lots of examples, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Daisy Fried, but it entails an abandonment of abstraction and ornament."

I admire the impulse, disagree with the analysis.

Akhmatova was a best-seller in her time (the 1910s, -20s). She managed to write a poetry which fused the simple and the ornamental, the harsh & the sweet.

One can deflect this with more analysis, of one flavor or another. But her impact, her commitment to a social, populist poetry (similar to Whitman) is just one example which denies the Puritan form of this dichotomy, which American poets seem to fall into again & again.

& I don't want to surrender Wally from Hartford, either.

Stray thoughts on Ezra Pound, in relation to the controversy at Tony Tost's blog:

EP assumed the mantle of the traditional poet, in all its intensity & vatic pomp. Anyone who has heard recordings of his chanting the Cantos will recognize some of the effects. The intensity, the dramatic presence, he instilled into his experimental epic, comes through, even as it works in counterpoint across the free-slapdash, quotational-notational, archival-dustbinnishness & slanginess.

As such & so he was assuming a mask, the mask of the ancient epic vates; a very unusual & curious endeavor. I think he did this under the influence, & in the partial shadow, of Yeats, and somewhat in conscious contrast to Eliot, whose Anglified urbanity presented another version of "tradition".

What I find interesting is just the wildness of the project itself, the way this something of a swamp Yankee upstart sloughed off his own Americanness to become a sort of eccentric-yet-representative "figure" for the West at a certain and particular historical crossroads; and the way the contradictions involved in assuming such a pose are reflected in the grain of the poem's (the Cantos') style and "plot", the excruciating way it tries to meld archaic Europe with US political developments, in an overall world-epic of consciousness.

Pound thus presents himself as an inescapable, pivotal literary-historical phenomenon. But what remains valuable is not so much the substance of his own world-view, or his pronouncements, but the example of engagement he offers. Not the engagement with politics (which revealed both his shrunken capacity for empathetic humanity, and his misguided authoritarianism) but the stance he took, his attitude toward poetry as a living tradition, as something of continuing relevance and importance to the world at large. He wasn't satisfied with his own dialect, his own experience, his own land, his own local business: for him poetry engaged the whole world and the whole past and future; Dante & Homer & Spenser et al. were still living literary forces, spirits he encountered. Olson was right to argue that Pound was so tied to tradition and the past that it distorted his understanding of contemporary reality; but the weakness of Olson's technique, in comparison to Pound's, shows how much was lost by shrugging off Pound's vatic mantle.

An "incarnational" poetics, which is what I'm concerned with, would circle around this asymmetrical symbiosis (voice & text) - but with a different emphasis from that of the postmodernists, post-structuralists, etc. A different "reading" of the evidence of experience, a different notion of what the poet is about.

Wasted some time in comment-box squabbles over at limetree. I guess I must come across as a querulous curmudgeon, trying to shut down healthy discussion.

Surprised myself sometimes, at the extremity of my animus against poetry/politics debates.

People think I'm being a-political or conservative, when I try to separate poetry from these theoretical or praxis-oriented discussions about literature & politics. But I don't believe that's really the case. I simply believe that poetry speaks most effectively to social & political concerns when it remains in its independent poetry sphere. Poetry-making has complex difficulties of its own, and the misguided attempts to water them down, through group efforts & theorizing, really get one no closer to either effective politics or authentic poetry.

I am interested in something I brought up a few days ago, this question of the image as a complex of feeling and intellect. & how the poem or song creates the conditions - sets the stage - for a symbolic or dramatic expression of the image.

I'm thinking of the image-complex itself as a subset or reflection-in-miniature - a dramatic re-presentation - of a larger whole, a life-complex, let's say: the complex or "whole" which is experience per se. Mimetic holism.

And the relation of these aspects to style: the values of clarity, simplicity, order, intelligibility, emotive-expressive power. Because the deep & moving experiences - or recognitions - of life can display not only subtlety and mystery, but also a resolving, overwhelming simplicity of thought & feeling. (Not to mention the simplicity in mundane ordinary everydayness!) I'm saying poetry has a right to be simple and direct as well as original and obscure.

We live in an amazing "Alexandrian" age of multiple discourses, each of which can quite easily form its own worlds of self-referentiality. So perhaps the most important intellectual tool of the practicing poet is his or her private sense of an interlocutor, a listener.

Probably a lot of the bitterness and frustration of poets has to do with their own muddled sense of who they want to address.

Reading about social structure of city of Aleppo in 18th century.

Society is... omigod. Society is collective survival by... omigod. In society, in general, what is the status of the literary person? What is the status of the religious mystic or the prophet? What is status, and honor, and prestige, and wealth, and power? Omigod.

Life's continuity... wisdom... smarts... family... luck... talent, skill... charity & love... independence, integrity... omigod. It's all over my head. But you know, this is one of the things that interests me : the direct "confrontation" of poet (or writer, generally) & society-at-large.

The egalitarian otherness of "creation" & "creator" - and the social drive for power, status, dominion, survival (the devil & all his works? not exactly. there's such a thing as good will & loving empathy. Humanity is the animale compagnevole).

Literary subcultures are miniature societies. They don't really address the issue. Only literature itself, in its raw state... maybe the substance of literature is that confrontation.

I'm sorry, but the culture of poets seems a total bore to me. It's as if we were supposed to be a devoted fan club for some obscure chess association, and required to be up to speed on the personal lives, gossip, awards ceremonies, funeral orations, etc., and that this somehow was the substance of the way of life. . .

& ironically the professed avant or post-avant wing of that society was supposedly dedicated to a depersonalized, politically-critical, collective notion of the role of the art form, against all that decadent & mealy-mouthed artsy narcissistic solipsism of the academicized mainstream. Their "collectivity" is nothing but a farm school or adjunct sub-college or self-help support group for league careers in that same greeny grove.

Something essential is missing when you domesticize & acclimate poetry to its own (sub)-culture. What's missing is its own otherness, its capacity for criticizing, transcending, metamorphosing the social and aesthetic conditions which produced it. This is its originality, and its social function. But now a fake otherness - paralleling "rebel" social behavior in pop culture - an ersatz otherness pawns itself off as the very medium of literary exchange. Poetry subcultures are built upon modes of talking or writing in special ways, distinct side-of-the-mouth idioms, like in-house passwords.

The real challenge is to find a middle ground, a mode of address to human political, social, aesthetic and philosophical issues outside the poetry sphere. W.H. Auden was very interested in a kind of "objective" mode of address, beginning with his leftist sympathies during the 30s, and complicated later by his religious convictions (which permit a kind of general address to the human condition) and by his deep interest in the social & satirical poetry of the Restoration era.

Something is missing, folks. The real radical poet is not the denizen of an idiom-club or the successful careerist. It's the one whose "middle voice" touches a chord in the public at large : an effect of, rather than a betrayal of, originality. This is the continual challenge to the authentic literary professional, not the card-carrying clubhouse member, frittering away time with gladhanding pals & weeping crocodile tears on every occasion. Because poetry does not belong to individuals : it happens to them & changes them.

I admire the "Petersburg" notion of these things (Pushkin, Blok, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva [honorary member], Gumilev, Mandelstam, Brodsky). Pushkin started it. The human being possesses social dignity as inalienable right. The poet, as poet, possesses a particular social prestige or status as a consequence of fame for producing authentic works of art. One should defend the former with one's life, and treat the latter with professional detachment.

My sermon for today. (I know you can all think of contemporary poets, young & old, who do not fit my stereotype or deserve my diatribe.)

Issues with a theory of poetry founded in "tautology", or analogy with metaphysical Love-Word:

1. Mental prison-house of identifying the divine or holy with our images of it, one of which is "God-as-Word". Bible itself gets around this in at least 2 ways : first, intense emphasis on God's ineffability, unaccountability in human terms, prohibition against images. 2nd (Christian approach), a kind of constructive formation (Trinity) in which different aspects are shared among Persons in a mysterious fashion (in a Mystery), ie. God-as-Manifest-Word is specifically Christ's incarnational role, not the Father's exactly or the Spirit's, exactly.

2. Word itself is an elusive entity : it can be understood as always dialectical, ie. a form of gesture toward or response to an other. Thus perhaps the most interesting poetry is also a form of reportage on some otherness, howsoever sophisticated or para-literary. Another way of considering this particular problem is in terms of the undeniable importance of Keats' negative capability : the poet as passive vessel for forces, responding to other forces.

Poetry cannot be some expression of boring self-revolving monism or unmotivated, self-satisfied unity. One cannot define love in these terms either. So perhaps there is hope for my poetics no matter how important a role is played by this medievalesque analogical "identity/tautology" which I described a few days ago. Because the other side of the "Orpheus" analogy reveals its hungry driven-ness, its unappeased desire, which propels the whole plot, which creates its duration.

Part of the political aspect of such "disequilibrium" or dynamism, which comes out more fully in the 3rd volume, July, has to do with the dialectic between empire & equality, between "Julius" (Caesar) and Bluejay/Jubilee. Of course this has historically been an inescapable theme for serious poetry & its "unacknowledged legislators" : to speak divine Equality to Power. (Mandelstam took very seriously his role as people's poet-vs-Czar, echoing Ovid vs. Augustus.) (Part of my attraction to Crane, as opposed to Pound, & my interest in "bringing him forward", was the absence (in Crane) of the nostalgic, reactionary, elitist, aristocratic, authoritarian delusions. . . - though of course it must be said that Pound was utterly divided against himself, & some of his best poetry narrates the destructive consequences of pride & power.)

Kasey writes, interestingly :

What connotations, resonances, moods do the patterns evoke? We are veering, or threatening to veer, back to the realm of the referential and the conative (and maybe the emotive itself), but the added element here is something like a belief in, or a wish for, a kind of magic: for the transformation of mere phonemes and syllables into transcendental conveying devices, Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance. It is this romantic valuation that is anathema to the theory behind much Language Poetry, and that is still a beguiling beacon for James, with his New Brutalist’s heart pumping pure Keatsian nectar instead of blood.

So maybe when it is objected that Language Poetry is unemotional, what is really meant is that it forecloses the possibility of using emotions as a portal to a privileged perspective outside materiality. A poetics that wants to take issue with such a foreclosure, moreover, has its work cut out it for it (if it proposes to take issue in a public forum among which there are Language Poets and other materialists, at any rate). Or, coming at the same problem from another angle, how does the New Brutalism propose to answer the inevitable charges of escapism, mystification, naive romanticism, etc.? Or will it ignore these charges and their attending sociopolitical imperatives entirely, content to pursue a pastoral ideal of sweet mad hedonist piping in the polluted garden of contemporary life? The world watches and waits.

One question for Kasey : why must the emotive function, ravelled into the poetic as he describes, be necessarily otherworldly-Romantic? It seems to me that the poetic expression of emotion is often very this-worldly, situational : one of poetry's fantastic capabilities is to evoke a tense dramatic human situation through understatement, thus playing upon deeply mixed emotions (both the emotions deriving from the immediacy of a critical situation, as well as those deriving from an ironic or retrospective distance from those events).

It seems to me that foregrounding this opposition between idealist & materialist ideology is exactly the "argument" of Language poetry - an argument which elides these other potential capabilities & engagements.

Hey Tim, you've got a future in TV. Turn it into a reality show, if possible.

I don't think much about an ideal reader. But I guess I would like to imagine someone who loves to read, all kinds of writing - history, science, literature, poetry. Who takes an interest in poetry without necessarily writing it. Who knows the great old things, but is also willing to explore the unknown. Who is active in the world in their own right, both practically & intellectually, and reads poetry & literature within a generous experiential context. Who enjoys language for its own sake, & yet at the same time wants to learn something specific & benefit from it. [OK, no, this is not a personal ad. Or a job notice.]

Again I ask, do you have something to say to the world, about anything, to anyone outside the clubhouse?

Meanwhile everybody's down on me. I love Janis Joplin.