in Deserto Rosso

LITTLE ROOM

Like Giuliana’s little boy, in Deserto Rosso

for 6 weeks I was on a ventilator

(“iron lung” back then).  For

Guillain-Barré.  That was 1956 or so.

Paralysis for Henry Fish Quattoir -

great reckoning in little room.

Like coffin-casket, in full bloom;

like April, breathing frailty to power.

Who shall restore the sickly Lord?

There is no temple on the earth,

no glorious basilica that’s worth

the wonder of a single child (a word

once heard with flooding tears, in Ramah).

You who are sum of all

creation – telos, quintessence, lovely corona…

behold the Argos-eyed canoe of Noah.

How the universe giulianizes in you,

Giuliana (as Cusanus wrote)!

You are both verde crown & mote

of mustard seed… the whole tree, Julio!

Now Henry faints… his epileptic storm

of vertigo (at sight of blood)

flings him to Frisco neighborhood.

Where Juliet ascends… to join a swarm

of victims, falling like rain from Golden Gate

(our Twin Towers).  He stretches

out his arms… the King of Wretches,

Grail King.  Melek, MLK (Good Friday fate).

4.1.20

as a Chinese jar

Bangladeshi New Year festival, Eagan, MN

What does it mean to assert that the poem is an end in itself?  In this season of crowds and anxious change, the assertion is controversial, maybe counter-productive.

To say the poem is an end in itself is a way of saying that beauty is an end in itself.  Beauty is self-sufficient; the poem is self-sufficient.  The poem justifies itself, merely as poem.  Beauty is what it is.

But what is beautiful about a poem?  We have a sense of what is meant by a beautiful face, a beautiful act, a beautiful life... not by any means always the same thing.  What makes a beautiful poem?  What makes a poem beautiful?

There are infinite paths in and out of poetry; infinite occasions for the right, the perfect poem.  I've witnessed them, heard them, countless times, in countless places, over the last 50 years.  So what is their common denominator, with respect to the beautiful?  Beauty itself shows many faces, many dimensions - but the common form, the universal factor is this :

the poem is an end in itself.

The poem is its own fulfillment : a kind of pleroma of time & experience.  A breathing, living, perfect, indestructible entity.

An icon, in other words.  A representation of something metaphysical - the transcendence of time, death & change.  A heart-stopping stroke of lightning.  A stillness still moving, living, breathing (Eliot's "Chinese jar" in Four Quartets).

This is the perfection of the poem.  Every poem bears some trace of it.

But the really confusing, paradoxical thing is : the beautiful is everywhere.  Poetry draws its materials out of the most ordinary, impoverished, grotesque, pathetic, banal, & recalcitrant places & episodes in human experience.  The metaphysical diamond is made out of coal dust.  & moreover : the coal dust itself is beautiful (the haze over the grubby railroad tracks, the derelict abandoned bleak junkyards).

The beautiful poem is simply a gesture toward the beautiful poem of reality ("the Kingdom of Heaven is in your midst, but men do not see it", chants the Nazir-poet Jesus).

A gesture.  A geste.  An act in words.

The poetry I enjoy & admire is steeped in an awareness that these perfections and gestures are already complete & finished for us.  Their presence is tacit and unassuming, but it is there : the work of the poets who came before.

This is one of the dimensions of the early 20th-cent. Russian poetic tendency known as Acmeism : an acknowledgement and receptivity toward the past.  Not a groveling imitation, but a sense of kinship - as opposed to the Futurists, who advocated a rejection of the past as a basis for the future.

There are no revolutions in poetry, because the beautiful is inherently integral.  It is a whole, a wholeness.  This is not to deny the validity of other kinds of revolution (political, social, personal).  It's only to say that poetry (as opposed to prose) is (ultimately, somehow) in touch with something beyond change, something perennial.  Rhythm, harmony, music... the beautiful.

Good to keep in mind during wartime.

I could quote RS Crane all day (Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry). In one passage, he talks about how, with Aristotle anyway, it's useless to consider "pleasure" in the abstract, as an "end" or purpose of poetry. Pleasure is always conjoined with particular forms of activity, and is characterized by them. Then, in a paragraph, he telescopes the historical development of mimetic poetry, from basic human pleasure in imitations & mimicry, to the moral distinction between imitation of things admired ("better people") and things satirized ("worse peope"), to the practice of a Homer, in which a complete, integral form has been found to subsume many forms of imitation:

"...finally to have eventuated, with Homer, in self-contained works of art the final cause of which is beauty rather than either the general pleasurableness or the moral utility of imitations... It is indeed a final end in two important senses - in the sense that it is an end peculiar to the poetic art rather than one imitative poetry shares with other arts or activities, and also in the sense that it subsumes the other ends of pleasing and instructing, and goes beyond them. For it is distinctive of poetry such as Homer's that it utilizes the pleasure we all take in imitation and rhythm, and the vivid interest we have in other human beings and especially in the moral issues in which they can be involved, in order to make objects which we can continue to appreciate, after our first curiosity is satisfied, for the sake of their intrinsic rightness and beauty. This therefore is where poetic theory, in its normative aspect, in general must begin..." (pp. 64-65)

Busy plus tired today, plus I just can't decide where to play shuffleboard - near the Ashbery Scenic View, or over by the James Tate Swingset? So more belated Ron Watch for me...

today he's focusing on the discontinuities of experience (a hyper-realist in disguise?). Very disjunctive-elliptical of everything to be so. But some might say discontinuity is the problem set before us, the puzzle to solve by way of knowledge & vision & most of all, poetry. Read Giuseppe Mazzotta (Dante's Vision & the Circle of Knowledge).

Poetry as the trivium & quadrivium activated, synthesized, turned into an ethical topology. Liberal arts - "liberal" meaning they free the mind... for what? Truth, contemplation of the whole, wholeness, unity...

Looking for the ground & the continuum, the form & the telos. Encyclopedic knowledge shaped into harmonic, playful vision - image of grace (Dante).

The play of all plays, the act of all action. The You, the double You, the W.

ie., "zigshaggin yo own sweetblack rizebury W" [or something like that - quote from memory], sez Bluejay.

I'm certainly no authority, but in my recent skimming of Chicago critics, this notion that "a principle must be a principle of something else" stems from Aristotle's method. The active principle of a thing lies in its motive, its end or purpose for action or change. (With Aristotle one can always look at a thing from different perspectives, based on whether you're doing "science" - nature of a thing in itself - or "art" - its telos in relation to other things. I'm sure I'm garbling this, O philosophers, but anyway...).

The statement quoted below seems to align critical practice with my own sense (drawing on Mandelstam), anyway, of the poem as a combination of impulse and material, motive (gesture, genre) and language. & this is a different focus from that of the New Critics, & the mantras of langpo & related "theoretical" styles (text is prior to speech, text undermines authorial presence, etc).

Let's move on, class.

Odd how musicality in poetry - from symbolism onward into the 20th century - became an avenue for increasing experiments in obscurity and private poetic language. Odd, that is, when you consider that music itself has so many characteristics of a "universal" language (of feeling and symbolic order).

What if poets applied musicality in the direction of intelligibility, communicative power? The power of feeling & shared experience. In the same way that ecologists idealize sharing one world. I recognize very clearly how these notions might seem threatening to the very essence of many poets' practice. The truth must be that every poet must find their own balance between sheer verbal exploration & originality, on the one hand, and clarity & intelligibility on the other. And the alignment of this balance will have a great deal to do with the larger or deeper motive or telos for the writing itself. Poets will often "sacrifice obscurity" - turn to very ordinary speech, even cliches - if the larger aesthetic purpose demands it.

(Sometimes I think all creative effort is merely an attempt to recover the powerful feelings and sensations of childhood.)