it's not the actual statue

COTTONWOOD FLUFF

The poem curls out of the soil

of speech, an idiom

of natural freedom –

not the symbolic Rose (Étoile

du Nord) but the actual rambling

pink thorn-petals

pendulous stained glass

welds to parallactic lightning

(baptism of liquid fire).  These two,

the symbol & the thing

itself, twirl interlacing

through the June weather – like Hobo

& actual Providence, the scrappy

burg Rog Williams named.

Free habitation, framed

by metaphysical hope; happy

locution for Rhodos-location.  Only

an Ocean state of mind,

maybe – where you might find

your inner JFK, sailing toward Galilee;

only a craggy Catholic Oak

whose simple fortitude

cools tempers rude, &

opened ears when Blackstone spoke –

lifting his anima naturaliter christiana

to chant that common law

inheres in English & Ojibwa –

sponge of manna-Minnehaha

                *

drifting like green Columbia

or cottonwood fluff –

adhesive, light enough

for grave thread-whispers (ahh...

I understand).  Radiant Naiad

à New York, lifting her torch

for Liberté... hopscotch

of bare feet round hummingbird

maze-vat... such were smoke signals

for a wide corn-dance –

pregnant sum-trance

of orbic humankind, out of deep wells

(perennial realtà).  It’s not the actual

statue, the actual state

but what they indicate

(A-frame of Lincoln-log) – rational

celebrations of Memorial Days...

Thanksgivings (4th

of July an afterthought

of fireflies)... myriad ways

a Union of republican consent

gathers (in common sense,

civility) at the tense

apex of divine intent –

buffalo tepee of Providence,

Manitou table

of justice; peaceable

kingdom, benevolent, immense.

6.7.17

Notes Toward & So On (9)

If, then, we follow the logic of the Addendum below... poetry includes realia - symbolic facts, factual symbols - with something of a different purpose than does history.

History recounts the truths of what happened on behalf of knowledge & its truth.

Poetry transmits its truths so that it may suffuse them with feeling. Emotional truth.

Oh-oh. This sounds like another pitfall. There were lots of intellectual propounders of the last 2 centuries who were eager to limit poetry to "feeling" (while serious grown-up minds focused on the "thought" of reality - scientific, political, social, etc).

Which brings us full circle, back to the substance of the poetic image - that fusion of intellect and feeling, head & heart - that sense of things, around and about the borders of which Coleridge, Blake, Dickinson, Whitman, Hopkins, Eliot, Stevens & so many others wrote with such authority, with the ring of emotional rightness.

addendum #2: & this still doesn't get it right. Because art also presents symbolic facts as a form of mimesis - perhaps at least as accurate, exact & true, in its way, as any other form of discourse.

Notes Toward & So On (8)

I know I didn't do justice to JH Newman's thinking (in Grammar of Assent). But it seems to be a part of turn-of-20th-cent. general attention to distinction between what Newman calls "the notional" & "the real"; maybe similar to TE Hulme's distinction between abstract "counter-language" and "the image".

Newman focuses on how the mind works with perception and concepts. His "illative sense" is the mental faculty with which we synthesize (1)what we actually experience with (2)our understanding : with what we sense as the inner logic or meaning of that experience. Thus through the illative sense we experience/process what for Newman is "real". This he contrasts with notions, or abstractions which are part of some verbal structure which we have not yet apprehended (or processed with the "illative sense").


Warning! I've probably got this all wrong! It is likely I haven't properly processed these notions through my own illator yet!

Nevertheless I'm interested in how the symbolic language of poetry emerges from these imaginative-illative modelling processes. Because eventually I think Robert Archambeau's & Kristen Prevallet's documentary or contingent poetics might be confronted with some difficult & productive paradoxes involving the differences between poetry & history.

History, like science, can precipitate or solidify into forms of positivism. Somehow, because it's a written document, because it's historical evidence, it's more real. Its objectivity offers the poet an avenue of escape from solitude & solipsism; its communality - after all, that happened to us - seems to strengthen the poet's rhetorical position.

Setting aside the possibility that documents can be misinterpreted (there's a good book out there somewhere, author/title I can't remember, which goes into the young Pound's unintentional misreadings of Italian Ren. documents) - & setting aside the over-familiar issue of cultural-historical relativity - it seems to me that the crux of the problem comes down to this distinction of real & notional (maybe related to TS Eliot's distinction between "information" and "knowledge").

Fundamentally, poetry & history do different things with time. History works with chronological succession, showing how the train of human actions fit into the passage of "ordinary" time. & though the historian's narration may provide all kinds of panoramic, kaleidoscopic palimpsests, the end remains the same : an interpretive recounting of "things that happened".

What does poetry do with time & history? In poetry, history is "figured" within a primary aesthetic experience (the experience of the poem). Time itself - the (aesthetic) "now" of the poem - is absorbed, elaborated, intensified, translated into a new symbolic form - a counter-time. This is the remarkable effect of the imagination's - the "illative sense's" - modelling of its own experience.

& there is no general, abstract imagination. There are shared images, shared symbols, shared histories, shared facts - but there are only individual minds and individual art works (or works by the shared activity of individuals).

Aristotle's distinction between poetry & history comes to the same position from a different direction : poetry exceeds history via its capacity to represent "universals", whereas history deals in particular events. On the face of it this sounds like a position opposite to the one I am outlining. But this is not the case. Aristotle's poetry is capable of representing universals because, in poetry, concepts have been absorbed, shaped, synthesized into a logical architectonic - experienced as real (through the pathos/ethos/logos of identification - the "illative sense").

Thus, I think Robert or Kristen's future "contingent poetries" will face the same kind of critical/aesthetic evaluation as always : that is, have the verbal materials been transmuted by the imagination? Do we recognize & respond to the authentic imprint of original experience?

Notes Toward & So On (6)

In this series of somnambulistic early-work channelings, I am not trying to legislate how to make poetry. Rather, I am searching for new frameworks for reading, interpreting, understanding.

In a witty and clever book titled Quantum Poetics, Daniel Albright investigated the science metaphors & worldviews which Pound, Eliot, Yeats & others used to explain what they were doing & how they conceptualized poetry. Particle vs. wave - the oscillation between these two determined the pattern of indeterminacy to follow. I think my musings on the symbol locate me closer to the particle end of that spectrum; Albright notes how Pound & Wyndham Lewis, especially, rejected Einstein (the magician who vaporized matter, space, time) in favor of the earlier philosophy of Leibniz & his concept of the monad : the smallest particle of thought-matter in a vital universe of mutually-mirroring microcosmi. (Oddly enough, Einstein spent his later years taking long walks in Princeton with his friend the math genius Kurt Godel, a confirmed Leibnizian.)

Is poetry a Byzantine mosaic of interpenetrating mutually-reflective correspondences, corresponding in turn to the "signatures" of Nature? Is the text a crystallization of same, a glowing object of infinite labyrinthine riddles (Joyce)?

Or, on the other hand, is language a kind of open, free-play medium for wave-vibrations - reverberations, instantaneous relativity-connections - Whitman's cosmic love-vibe (or Joyce's watery Wake)?

I think I would like to find some synthesis of the two. "Resonant symbol." & I have a hunch this morning that the path in that direction leads through the relationship of word & psyche.

What is an image, after all? A product of a certain faculty of mind - the imagination. Ancient concepts of human consciousness located three distinct areas : Reason (judgement), Imagination (conception), and Memory (knowledge).

John Henry Newman, whose great work Grammar of Assent is something I intend to look at carefully, centered the conceptual activity in something he called the "Illative Sense" - a kind of architectonic capability, fusing all three areas of mind in the work of conceptual modelling.

Language, from the beginning, has been the human conceptual-sense response to unmediated reality (experience). The poem can be seen as an end-product of the shaping activity of the illative sense (imagination, taste/judgement, memory), using that primary human tool of representation. But it more than a record of experience : it is a living image of same. How so?

First of all, words themselves present a fusion of senses (image, sound, & evocation of touch, taste & smell). Secondly, poems exhibit a reflexive or self-reflexive pattern : their sensuous qualities - rhythm, image, sound, word-play - run rings around the reader in a reverberating echo-chamber. Reflexivity is a generator of expansive dynamism, a principle of nature & art exemplified in the famous "golden section" of the Greeks, the fibonacci sequence, etc. (ie. any patterned object which contains a ratio between smaller & larger parts, which equals the ratio between the larger part & the whole).

I wrote earlier in this series about the conceptual complexity of the symbol, which faces in two directions : toward the actual object the words evoke, and toward the universe of correspondences or meanings with which it sets up reverberations. Or, as quoted from Austin Farrer, earlier : "We write in symbol when we wish our words to present, rather than analyse or prove, their subject-matter... Symbol endeavors, as it were, to be that of which it speaks, and imitates reality by the multiplicity of its significance."

Again, despite the "reverberations", I am presenting an image of poetry which seems to lean toward the Leibnizian/particle/mosaic end of the spectrum. The completed poem offers a conceptual-sense fusion or unity in dynamism; thus the critic is free to analyze it & explore its constituent parts and implications; the poem is a kind of object, rather than a wave-transmission.

But this is not the end of the story, today or any day. Because I want to go back to that with which I began this post : the notion that the image-symbol is an effect of a faculty of mind (the imagination). Newman's "illative sense" is profoundly, substantially personal, because the mental act of imaginative or conceptual synthesis of experience is just that : a kind of assent to real, as opposed to abstract or notional or merely verbal, experience. & such experience, in Newman's view, can only be personal. What are the consequences of this for our idea of poetry?

Poetry, then, becomes both a record and a communication of real experience (in Newman's sense, real experience can be imaginary : it's an imaginative rendering or conceptualization). The poem is no impersonal object : it bears the fingerprint of an individual (I'm reminded of the Borges poem about how all the texts in his librarian cosmos were really a map of his own face; or the Walt Whitman version of the "disintegrated" cosmic self). Turn over the intricate Byzantine-patterned coin-symbol-object, & you discover the profile of its maker : & the poem is a reverberant wave-pattern, a message, of the poet, from the poet, to you. The Word is a Person. (the langpo is a NY schoolie)

Notes Toward & So On (5)

The image, the image... I bump up against the limits of my own vocabulary. One falls back into imagining some kind of neorealism, some one-to-one correspondence between the poet's picture & the "real thing". But this is definitely not what I'm talking about. It's not simply a perceptual flash, as in Imagism, or a familiar recounting, as in a realist novel or an anecdotal lyric or a memoir. "Symbol", as I mentioned, is perhaps a more appropriate word for what I'm talking about - a poetic whole which resonates with meaning in different directions, because it speaks from and to the experiential knowledge & feeling of its readers or listeners.

Take a look at Allen Bramhall's post of today. On first glance one is struck by the rather jarring dissonance between this kind of writing, and the "project" for poetry I have been describing. It's difficult here to pick out any kind of familiar "objective correlative", or synthesis of logic & impression. Yet obviously Allen is drawing on & pointing toward certain streams of writing, Whitman to the present. & he's engaged in a kind of poetry-making - a particular manner - which is not so concerned with representation as with pure creation : a kind of happy expressionism, which follows words in their sentences where they lead - resulting in continual surprise. However, if you look more carefully at this kind of writing, you recognize that under and around the sort of free jazz improvisation float the shadows & edges of both arguments (statements about how things are) and feelings (the emotions which words & their connotations evoke). The improvisation and the "mix", the "surround", go together, mutually encourage each other. And the whole leads in the direction of a sort of phantom impression or pseudo-argument (A = A) - self-defining, self-defending - an enjoyable end-in-itself.

Think, in this regard, with what Crane did with the Brooklyn Bridge. Despite the fact that he wrote parts of The Bridge from an apartment looking out on the actual bridge itself - an apartment once occupied by Roebling, the bridge's architect - Crane's goal was not to reiterate what was already known, or memorialize an already-existing history. Crane's purpose was symbolic. In the Brooklyn Bridge he had found a correlative for the real subject of his poem, which is too complex to be paraphrased. The bridge is a symbol for a metaphysical unity (a kind of time-transcending Bergsonian vital Beauty) for which poetry - Crane's "single, never-before-spoken Word" - is itself a more encompassing symbol or counterpart : creation's end-in-itself.

The poem of the "resonant symbol" which I am promoting, has less to do with 2-dimensional image-making, than with multidimensional "speaking pictures" : the fusion or synthesis of impressions into a unified complexity. At the root of speaking lies the cognitive (logical) image or impression - a paradoxical synthesis, which is the poem's underlying bone structure, its "argument". (Again, note how the scale of values differs, here, from that postmodern "indeterminacy" we have come to know so well.)

Notes Toward & So On (3)

& so on we go... as remarked in previous, on first glance talking about "image" & "symbol" seems rather anachronistic. The forthright Josh Corey, responding to these notes, suggested there might be something less than socially-engaged in such focus. He admits to an early interest in the image, which has shifted over to "melopeia" & "logopeia".

On could argue, however, that after the disjunctions of postmodernism, a project to reinvigorate the poetic symbol might be a worthwhile effort. Pound's distinction of phano-, melo-, and logopoeia, furthermore, can be seen as a typical 20th-century reductive dissection. The resonant image/symbol presupposes a synthesis of sound, vision and meaning. Taking a cue from Coleridge, Eliot, & many others, we can say that poetry's basic, characteristic mode is one which fuses the sensuous image with intelligible meaning by means of compelling sound.

I don't quite understand the assertion that such a focus would be somehow a-social or disengaged. I also admire Kristen Prevallet's explorations of "documentary poetics"; poetry can absorb and turn to good effect all kinds of reportage and political-historical material. I have no particular how-to lessons - at least not right now - on the various technical aspects of shaping a poetic image. All I will say at this point is that I'm interested in the notion of aesthetic-logical unity or wholeness of presentation. (There was a book review in Sunday's NYTBR of a book titled - I think - A Different Physics, on trends toward investigating synthetic or holistic phenomena, rather than always taking apart the engine - murdering to dissect.)

I think Josh's reservations - perhaps related to John Latta's comment yesterday about the "earnest burden'd academosphere" - has to do with a fear of critical distancing from the new, post NY School, post-Langpo group-scene poetry environment. Archimedes said that with a lever on the moon, he could move the earth. Poets are justly nervous about critical levers & leverage in general (it's so often misguided, stifling, & wrong-headed).

But perhaps we need some critical distance from the society poetry of today - & I mean society poetry on every brow-level, and in every scene setting. Writing itself is a lever, a tool for distancing, for questioning social assumptions. Perhaps a focus on the effective, resonant, parabolic symbol would enable some poets to identify their proper sphere, synthesizing both social engagement and aesthetic commitment (autonomy). If we begin to approach poems with disinterested critical method - as a resonant artifacts which speak to us as meaningful wholes - we might discover how poems can engage the larger problems of the world, and pass beyond those familiar barriers, which so often render it marginal, minor & ineffectual.

Recently, the so-called "post-avant" generations have been grouped either as leaning toward the NY School, or the Language Poets : toward talky, self-deprecating, slangy "presence", charm, joie-de-vivre, authenticity, on the one hand, or toward politically-saturated, engaged, ironic, intellectual, aesthetically-revolutionary, experimental, on the other.

I would suggest that the very phenomena of social grouping by way of such vague generic qualities represents a critical blind spot : a fogginess about the symbolic, representative, intelligible-emotive powers and processes of poetic language itself, and about the means and ends of poems as distinct aesthetic wholes.

...I understand such books probably sound turribly stuffy & old-hat. Nothing new there for poets in those quotes. All ABC stuff (Coleridge's notion of participation, etc.).

What I'm appreciating, though, is the subtlety of analysis, & the way he identifies sources & trends in thought about these problems. You start to see the genealogy of certain familiar ways of defining things. Thus for example, Ron Silliman's focus on Jakobson's 6-sided figure for language (see today's post) : using Prickett's angle of focus, one might start by recognizing a certain techno-positivist character to Ron's application. As if language is this 6-sided "object" which one can manipulate & turn about in various ways : & as if this manipulability is language's main point of interest to us, as poets & readers. Where is this approach to language coming from? Curious that such a functionalist notion of language is used to defend a poet (Coolidge) who is defiantly "non-functional" in Ron's sense of the word (ie. "vulgar representation").

I think Charles Peirce, for one, would look askance at the 6-sided operational model. Why? Because in semiotics, signs overlap & form hierarchies. Which also parallels the notion of an earlier philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt : that the basic meaning-unit of language is not the word, but the sentence. If the basic meaning-unit is the sentence - and if signs form hierarchies, overlaps & algorithms of meaning and effect and affect - what happens to the simple die-cast theory of signifier/signified, etc.? The signifier disappears into the signified, and what is signified becomes, in turn, a signifier, on another, sequential plane of meaning. The notion of "symbol" and symbolic meaning, in this sense, does not fit neatly into a 6-sided dissection ("we murder to dissect", as another poet wrote).

[p.s. on this idea of the symbolic sequences of signifier/ied/iers : as an example of just one among many types of this overlap phenomenon : see Mandelstam's essay "Conversation About Dante", where he describes Dante's chains of metaphors - "imagine an airplane in flight, launching another airplane off its wing, and then the 2nd launches a third..." (rough quote from memory). This whole question - of how multiple layers or branchings of meaning form & dissolve hierarchies of emphasis - an issue for logic & rhetoric - seems worth thinking about. When Mandelstam wrote that future critics would investigate the impulse behind the text, he was adumbrating the difficulty involved in tracking meaning, the author's elusive motivations. The complexity involved seems to explode any simple, atomistic notion of language as a cube with (6) definable applications.]