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.

I died 45 years ago

In about an hour's time I turn 65 years old (May 29th).  Hard to believe.  But I'm relatively OK with getting old... I guess.  In part perhaps because I died 45 years ago.  I was mantled with some kind of mysterious psychic death and rebirth, which I've been trying to come to terms with ever since (in my life, my writing).  Uncanny, unheimlich.  Personal un-hinge, you could say.

Ever since (O youth!), at least some fraction of me has been on a spiritual mission - really a stumbling, on-&-off effort to express & explain what happened (as far as I can see).

When you have died 45 years before you turn 65, there are psychological ramifications.  When I was 4 years old I was hospitalized in an iron lung for about a month, with a severe case of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (French polio).  I was immobilized up to my neck.  As a result, I've put a premium on breathing, and also perhaps endured a subliminal sense of paralysis.  & maybe something of this early childhood experience carried over into the later crisis and its aftermath.

I've been a poet for all of those 45 years (and longer).  A longtime member of the Dead Poets Society, I guess.  But my membership has been accompanied by few of the standard benefits.  Somehow I write my poems on a different map from that of the mainstream literary traffic highways.  I have trouble connecting there.   The poems exist & flourish, but on a different planet.

I don't blame the world, or the poetry gatekeepers, etc.  I really believe it all stems from the fact that I died 45 years ago.  I'm engaged in a soul-struggle of some kind.  My poems try to straddle a double dimension, & hence are at cross purposes with the purely literary or the purely political or the purely anything.

Yet I try to maintain the integrity of the poem as sufficient creation, as work of art pure & simple.  I believe in that, because I feel it - every time I experience a work of art myself.

Somehow the soul-struggle, the crisis of faith, has to come to expression - yet without succumbing to the desire for an intellectual resolution (a tendentious, rather than free, expression).

This is starting to sound very pretentious.  I'm like the unprofitable servant in the parable (I forget which one) - stuck between two paths (spiritual & worldly).  Neither here nor there.

That's how it is.  I've written a lot of poetry since 45 years ago - & it seems to be whiling away the years in an ineffectual limbo of disregard.  Not needed by anyone.  I can't explain it.  But that might change.

I'm not really worried.  There are larger issues in life.  And it shall come to pass... that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons & your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions... (Joel 2:28)

old poet geezer

haunted scent

ANCIENT SPRING

My soul, like a woodchuck hidden

in Old Charley’s Oak,

must be lit by a stroke

of lightning even to begin –

like that gold spearman on the dome

in Providence, icon

of limpid Everywomban –

Williams’ independent spirit, come

to revolve like Gabriel Crozier-Torch

around his merry Morning

Rose (see Alighieri’s singing

sky).  An Ocean Island (search

Queequeg’s tattoos).  A green Tahiti

lapped by peaceful Ocean

River – Night Sea span,

gold-threaded geometric Ratio,

squared rail-split Israel rondure

(Galilee of Lincoln-

logos, all for one

& one for all).  O armature

of lovely Law!  Fleet safety net

bracing each breathing sheep

with her own fleece... keep

dangling in catenary grace!  Yet

lift the lilies of your haunted scent

until the spirit in us

brims past avarice,

hot pride – guide to your tent

                *

under Polaris & the prancing

Bears, where free children

ripple the utmost common

well.  Like Addams, balancing

book-learning with hand-work,

art with science, freedom

with obligation... some

justice for the beaten fork –

the disenfranchised, cheated poor,

collateral damage

beneath our idol-image

(smoking low sulfuric Boor

of plump kin-pride & greed).

So Hobo Henry muttered

by the mud-brown flood

of Mississippi river.  Honey-mead,

sweet sea-salt air of tamaracks...

the vaulting spire of Dante-

tracks filter the ray

that flies orthogonal – strikes

Roman iron with Hebrew vine.

Gold thread (Apollinaire’s

trompette marine) bears

light into the grain combine –

sun through the moss-green shade

above the ancient spring

(a Restoration thing).

So in a Maker’s aye all things are made.

4.28.17

Personal Advent

Poets employ a type of fuzzy laser-light, reflecting & deflecting the living & dead poets who seem to be signaling them in turn.  Semaphore, smoke-signals.  I keep going back to the main poets who interest me, while also trying to spread out & venture into new regions.  I circle around Ezra Pound, for one.  There's a strange blinking mixed code emanating from him, so right & so wrong.

For some reason over the past year or so I've been delving a lot into anthropology & ancient belief systems & mythologies & prehistoric rites & the roots of human motivation... at least the theories about those roots...

I wrote an essay about the "New Gnostic" poets a while back (published online in the Coldfront zine).  Pound is important in that constellation of developments, along with Yeats.  Both of them deeply caught up in hermetic & occult philosophy.  Am now re-reading a good book on this topic, The Celestial Tradition : a study of Ezra Pound's The Cantos, by Demetres Tryphonopoulos.  The author explores what was called "the rising psychic tide" of all kinds of heterodox & occult beliefs & practices around 1880-1920, from the scholarly to the "thaumaturgic" & the fraudulent/comical hocus-pocus (see "Madame Sosostris" in Eliot's The Waste Land, for a sample).

Pound took no interest in Yeats' style of "practical" spiritualism (magic).  His was a more theoretical focus on the so-called ancient hermetic wisdom.  & his sifting of those traditions and values through the shaping of his poetry was very refined & remarkable, in some ways - and simultaneously extremely harmful & ugly.  His anti-semitism ran deep, his ideology always promoting the "pure, clean, luminous" mythology of the Greeks & the Romans, as opposed to the "dirty, evil" oppressions of the Judeo-Christian (Biblical) cultures.  He was fascinated by Catholicism - but as an expression of more ancient pagan "truths".

Just setting aside for a moment the hatefulness of Pound's anti-semitism - which parallels so closely the despicable Nazi ideology & program of degradation & de-humanization - I am struck by the irony of Pound's very serious, & sometimes beautiful, devotion to the spiritual heights of philosophical-poetic Wisdom.  As Tryphonopoulos so cogently explains, The Cantos are designed not as a narrative journey so much as a mystical initiation.  The process of reading The Cantos is meant to lead the seeker toward an inner spiritual enlightenment, joining the mind through poetry with the heights of wisdom represented by Confucius, the medieval saints & theologians, Ovid, Dante, etc. etc.  It's a very high-minded symposium of mystic illuminati, to which Pound is offering the reader an exalted poetic invitation.

What do I mean by "irony" in this case?  I'm thinking of the juxtaposition between Pound's fervent philosophical/mystical theme and his actual spiritual blindness.  There is the sense, reading his biographies, that perhaps, toward the end of his life, he himself had some awareness of this contrariety, this impasse.  Of course by calling his situation one of "spiritual blindness" I am expressing my own personal worldview...

The legacy of Biblical/Judaic/Christian spirituality includes, at its foundation, the sense that the Creator of the Universe (as we know it) is somehow "personal".   I see here a root contrast with Yeats, Pound, and the legacy of Neo-Platonism & hermetic gnosis.  In their case, spirituality and wisdom are a progress toward a kind of abstract higher wisdom itself.  The seeker is transfigured by spiritual knowledge into a kind of divine being.  Whereas, for Judaism & Christianity, spirituality is ultimately a relationship.  Though we cannot comprehend how the Origin of the Universe could possible be personal - except in some form of the person who reaches down into our own limited vision of the same - yet that is what we sense & believe the case to be.

This is underwritten (for Christianity) by the Trinitarian doctrine of "persons".   The philosophical synthesis (Greek-Judaic) achieved by such thinkers as the Byzantine monk Maximus the Confessor seems foundational - if not yet complete - in this regard.  (Not yet complete, in that while it represented a philosophical synthesis, it did not yet express a full reconciliation with Judaism : a task for the future.)  God is simultaneously present in the original Creator-Spirit, in his "Son-Servant" (Jesus), and in the "Holy Ghost" (present in the world, in infinite manifestations, now and everywhere).  In this way our notion of "person" is not abstracted into some merely transcendent sphere, but is fused with the personhood represented by a particular, historically-contingent, individual - which then serves as a kind of template for humankind in every other situation (rooted in loving relationship).  

For Pound, apparently, the essence of spirituality can be characterized as subjective experience.  For Judaism & Christianity, on the other hand, both the beginning and the end of spirituality rests in relationship.  This is not to say that Ezra Pound did not cherish his own dreams of utopia, human fellowship, and social justice.  But his basic orientation toward knowledge and wisdom - as a kind of abstract goal or measure, something to be achieved and learned - leaves aside any acknowledgement or  recognition of the prior (originating) presence of a sacred Personhood.  The fleeting appearances of Diana or Aphrodite as psychological experiences do not seem, in the end, to provide a firm ground for belief.  But he was searching.

I realize for some this is only another mode of mumbo-jumbo.  But I find reasonable support for this position in, among other places, the 20th-cent. philosophy of the scientist and polymath Michael Polanyi.  Polanyi's major work, Personal Knowledge, is a theory of epistemology.  What is knowledge, actually?  And how do we know anything?

For Polanyi, as his book title implies, all knowledge - including objective, scientific knowledge - is grounded and bounded by human subjectivity - by "personhood".  We don't develop "new knowledge" in the sciences, or any other field, without the mediation of human persons.  This sounds pretty obvious (in my sketchy summary) : but Polanyi draws out its consequences in quite profound ways.  He is able to bring the materialism and objectivity of 19th & 20th-cent. scientific positivism back into the moral/spiritual matrix of human persons : which was what Yeats & Pound themselves set out to do, a generation earlier.  With "faulty instruments" (cf. Eliot's Four Quartets).  The great ideological struggle of the "two cultures" (science and art, science & humanism, science & religion) finds a philosophical reconciliation in Polanyi's epistemology : one which Yeats & Pound so brilliantly sought, & so dramatically failed to find.

Michael Polanyi

Kings & Councillors

Have been reading this pow'rful anthropology book, Kings and Councillors, by A.M. Hocart.  (Led there by a note in another deep study, Moses & Civilization).  A good book for poets to read, & everybody else. An eye-opening vision of things.  Hocart is one of a kind.  I guess Isaiah Berlin would call him a hedgehog, as opposed to a fox - a thinker who has "one big idea" & pursues it relentlessly.  But Hocart was not just an idea man.  A veteran of 4 years on the Western Front in WW I, he spent much of the 1920s and 30s doing field research in Fiji, Ceylon, India, along with teaching & etc. in those countries.

Hocart is just a very challenging, provocative & entertaining writer.  He makes his one big idea come alive for the reader.  & what is that idea?  Like any good anthropologist, Hocart shows how contemporary human society is rooted in hundreds of thousands of years of ancient and prehistoric human activity.  But he's especially interested, in this book, in the origins of government.  The intro by Rodney Needham is helpful in comparing Hocart's ideas to those of British philosopher David Hume.  Hume challenged the 2 main traditional theories of government : 1) that government is essentially organized exploitation by the rich and powerful of the weak and poor, or 2) that government is a social contract by which the people as a whole provided for their own welfare through representative authorities.  (You could call these the Autocratic & Democratic options.)

For Hume, government originates in the actuality of warfare between different tribes and peoples.  It is the violent rivalry between groups, and this alone, which necessitates government : gov't is essentially defense.

Hocart has yet another view.  Using comparative examples from very different times & places, he argues that the social orders we call government today, originated in ritual.  And what motivated primitive ritual?  Simply this : the collective human desire for what Hocart calls "Life." Modern society has grown so complex and specialized we find it hard to comprehend the simplicity and universality - the "hive-mind" aspect - of this notion.  What Hocart calls Life, his editor Needham writes, might be more accurately defined by the German word, Heil - health, wholeness, overall goodness.  ("Hale & hearty"...)  What Jefferson called "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

For Hocart, archaic human groups equated the spiritual, universal, divine sources of "Life" with their representatives.  Thus the King or the Chief "stands for" the God, the invisible source of all plenty, the "cornucopia" of all human welfare.  Ritual involved the solemn (or not-so-solemn) acknowledgement of these sacred powers & origins : their representation and application in the actual world.  The King, in fact, is not just a stand-in or symbol of the God - he is the God made manifest.  The "actors" in ritual practices shape a kind of cosmic microcosm.  The "impersonators" (king, priest, messenger, etc.) coordinate their ritual acts to shape a holistic ceremony meant to magically evoke and in fact actualize that which the tribe desires : which, Hocart says, is simply (to use the Biblical phrase) "fulness of life".

Hocart elaborates, in fascinating ways, on how contemporary forms of government and social organization exhibit the archaic categories of authority first present (in embryo) in the prehistoric clans and tribes of humanity.  Before articulated, specialized social orders existed, ritual action began to sketch out their later roles.  As Hocart explains, archaic symbolic roles (or "principals" - kings, priests) became modern functions (presidents, advisers, etc.).  In the process (modernization), the sense of human society as a whole, as a "natural order" centered around a common aim ("Life"),  can become obscured.  But Hocart is more scientific than nostalgic.  He sees human culture as a process of continual change and adaptation - every historical situation is a complex, ambiguous mix of that which has always been & that which is fading away & that which is new.  But it's clear he understands anthropology - or the "study of mankind" - as one way to shed light on what often seems irrational or inexplicable or chaotic in human history.

*

One thing that struck me forcefully, in reading this book, is the picture presented of a certain likeness between the shapes of prehistoric ritual, on the one hand, and the central rites of Christianity, on the other.  This is not a new idea, obviously.  Lots of writers, from a variety of motives & perspectives, have tried to connect Christianity with ancient pre-Biblical religions & myths (Jesus & Osiris, & all that) - often in order to undermine the integrity or distinctness of Biblical religion.  This is not Hocart's aim, nor mine.  What does strike me as very curious, however, is how the basic orientations of prehistoric ritual seem to echo the rites of Christianity.  The poet David Jones, in The Anathemata, & other works, makes much of these echoes and comparisons : yet Hocart seems to find a parallel on an even more basic level.  The king stands in for the sacred spirit : the King is that Spirit, manifest in the ritual.   The "principal" (the royal or sacred officer of the rite) is the embodiment of the god.  The rite of acknowledgement of the king's generous gifts (of Life itself) culminates in a feast.  The food offered by the king is the spirit, is the god : the king offers himself as food.  For Hocart, ritual is a kind of poetic, metaphorical activity.  The physical differences between distinct things (kings, priests, sacred yams, etc.) are dissolved, or fused, by the ceremony itself.  God = king = sacred yam...  the thing is the embodiment of the invisible spirit which is the center of the whole ritual.

Reading Hocart sent me on a path of preliminary speculation : is it possible that Jesus's call for a return to "things as they were in the beginning" involved a re-creation of very prehistoric and universally-human rites?   Was it a kind of archaism rooted in part in ancient Galilean culture itself?

Hocart emphasizes the communal and "traditional" character of prehistoric human ritual.  It's almost like a tribal "mind-set", or a hive of dancing bees, acting out a collective act of homeopathic magic.  The whole community gathers to ceremonialize the "order of life" itself, as a whole.  What is done by the king now is done because the spirits of the past kings did the same.  I also detect a slight strain of idealization of this in Hocart : a slightly Nietzschean or Spenglerian tendency (the "health" of a society is desiccated by merely "moral" or "intellectual" abstract revisions of the primordial unity - as in Buddhism or the monotheistic religions).  But as I say, this bent in Hocart is so slight as to be almost undetectable.  (Idealizations of "tradition" are less palatable when you consider the downside of mob mentalities and superstitious prejudice, all the forms of "tyranny of the majority".)

It would be very interesting to consider the "promissory" or future-oriented quality of Judaism and Christianity in the light of Hocart.  Here is a faith of the word, of the book : the word of the promise of a future "land of promise", rather than an a-chronous or synchronous celebration of the king's & the land's divine bounty now.  Biblical religion seems rooted so deeply in a withdrawal from Egyptian & Mesopotamian rites of a glorious "now" ; it is a fundamental re-making of that "now" on behalf of a more profound and universal "goodness of life" and world to come.

*

But I think of poetry itself as somewhat primitive in Hocart's sense.  Poets write poetry from every conceivable motive & mind-set, of course.  Much of it is "culturally determined", of course, by the historical situation & the fads of the day.  For my part, though, I seem to have been impelled by this "cosmic ritual microcosm" array of phenomena.  Maybe I'm what they call a "monist" at heart.  I believe in a "spiritual source" of cosmic Life.  I believe the future order of life on earth will be defined by the "good will" which proceeds from a shared sense of this "common good" : some kind of acknowledgement and thanksgiving for the gift of Life itself.  This is at the root of poetic "making", as far as I'm concerned.  It's in all the elaborate structures of my poems, boring & monotonous & obscure as they might be (for some, anyway, sometimes...)

(p.s. my middle name happens to be : "Hale")

Reminds me of this old "poem about poetry", writ at least 30 years ago :

PROVERBIAL

I give you the parables as I received them -
my mother's voice, the nursery rhymes,
the memorized rhetoric and the anthem
leading us like sheep to death sometimes.

The mystery ringing in our ears,
the noise of the cultivated howl
of ubiquitous unknown lusts and fears,
the music of monkey, wolf and owl.

In silence before music and the word,
a voice already prepared to save
delivers you into a pastoral world,
out of the dank and bestial cave.

A cadence I cannot repeat just right -
the pristine choir of many morning birds,
or the patience of children in the dancing light
performing the ritual of careful words.

About yesterday's post : I don't want to give the impression of simply tying poetry to religion. I've always viewed the market/racket in artistic "spirituality" with distaste & suspicion. The various cults of transcendental thinking, the hi-jinks, occult mumbo-jumbo of poetic mages & popularizers - the whiff of pseudo-religion puts me off Robert Bly, Robert Duncan, some of Olson, many more. But maybe to others I come across the same way...

That's not my intention. Poetry's purview is everything under the sun, every subject, ever level of tone & style - omnivorous - lightweight & heavy, secular & "catholic".

However - by the same permission - there's room in poetry for special projects like my own (the saga of Henry). Dante thought so, anyway.