Who's this "Hobo", lurks around here & there in Fontegaia?

Related to the hobos in the middle of Crane's Bridge. Diffidence, negative capability... "they touch a key, perhaps". What is this? Detachment from particulars, attachment to some apperception or instinct for life as Whole. (?)

This is a Russian thing, too. Oblomov's homesickness. Tolstoy's mysticism. Nabokovian nostalgia. Desire for summers long gone, for Life with capital L, for childhood... Yearning with a capital Y.

- can be a dangerous... Lots of writers insist on the need to avoid such. Enterprising Odysseus keeps the Lotus-Eaters at arms' length.

Hobo a liminal figure, I guess. Surrenders "living" for the sake of Life. Secret future of the Earth. Hidden zone where all things fuse in one...

Contemplation. Secret quest for answer to the Big Question. Much talk in poetry blogland lately about the "conceptual"... in my view there is just one royal road of "conception"... it is the capacity to conceive a question about the unity of nature, or reality.... the question of origin. & following that thought-trail, to postulate :

1. consciousness pervading nature & reality
2. some logos or order to universe as a whole
3. human consciousness as a sign or representative of this cosmic consciousness
4. human destiny to achieve (after long struggle) union, order, equilibrium & peace within earth, nature, cosmos
5. this destiny represented long ago as return to Paradise or Garden
6. prophetic writings & acts point the way in this direction (I have my own personal beliefs & allegiances in that regard, which I am loath to describe or impose here)

One of the things poetry tries to do is synthesize and vitalize certain conceptual or experiential universals (cf. Aristotle). It may be simply the recounting of a dream. This is what my "Hobo" represents. Among other things. From Way Stations :

7

 
Not the flower, but the whistling stem,
the stump still sprouting
desire from pain, pain from desire -
a homeless voice, roadside day-
lily in rearview mirrors,
unstemmed longing, infinite,
to the barren node of the
horizon.         
          Not for itself,
but in response, a choral thorn-
crown for harvest of black-
eyed Susans tempered
by drought - the keening
proud repentance
of Appalachian eyes.

 
From the fissure, a breath
of warm air - the frozen flower (touched
by a human hum) blooms.

 
In cliffside cave or hermitage,
a prehistorian, unfrozen now, draws
out Nativity from spring charcoal:
under the modal drone of mountain
banjo, streambed clay (glance
of a goldfinch) rose infant lips
are moving (do, re, mi...)

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : consciousness (label : subject/consciousness).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)


Related topics (there are many others): icon, Peirce, subjectivity, "J"...

Notes Toward & So On (11)

A book of criticism on the mid-20th century American poets by Adam Kirsch - titled The Wounded Surgeon - got a rave review in the NY Times yesterday. (The photo of Kirsch - with the little TS Eliot glasses & tie & hair mussed just so... amazing, like some kind of hologrammic projection or clone of the quintessential 50s English prof. Send it to Jim Behrle for processing.)

(Dude, whazzup with your author photo?)

According to the review, Kirsch's thesis is that under the intimidating shadow of the previous generation, the mid-century poets (Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, et al.) were forced to branch into a less monumental, more personal, inward (if that's the right word) practice - but that, nevertheless, the stringencies of the Moderns maintained influence benign.

I'm going to see if the library has this...

Thinking this morning about Pound, though. As critic & schoolmarm-stickler, he certainly had tremendous influence. Yet did he practice what he preached?

Pound is somebody whose mad flight manifests, in all its maniacal fibrillation, a certain freedom, profundity & ranginess, which is not exactly an applicable paradigm or learnable rubric of modernist/New Critical technique. These attributes are cultivated, perhaps, by an insatiable appetite for knowledge - combined with a faith in poetry as the medium of a unified sensibility : an integral consciousness, integrity. (This in no way justifies the stupid, harsh & mean aspects of Pound, though his obvious nuttiness somewhat mitigates our judgement.)

A unified sensibility delves into the world, reality, & finds ways to characterize it - which is why the works can be studied repeatedly, always offering new perspectives. The faith in poetry's value, as a means of expression, results in a long struggle. I guess this was the motive for the production of long poems, even after the displacement of epic by fiction. (On the other hand, an integral sensibility is also the means by which poets discover their own distinctive style - whatever length or form it takes.)

Pound was that kind of resilient, stubborn, independent soul, that solitary eccentric (monomaniacal, actually) thinker. There are better, purer, examples of the artist - the ones who succeed in the struggle to unify & transmute sensibility into poetry. It's the flagrant eccentrics, like Pound & Blake, whose extremity illustrates a more general rule.

In fact this may be the main lesson - "soul freedom", utter (vocational) commitment, the link between integrity (of sensibility) & art - which Lowell & Berryman, anyway, took from Pound, rather than anything to do with the monumentality & objectivity of the art work.

Feeling a change in the weather. Must find a way to reduce my own cacaphony, amid the general cacaphony. This is probably a symptom of homesickness for poetry.

(Why am I telling you this. Blogging is weirdly un-private. Or, I am just weirdly blogging.)

I've never learned how to discipline myself, or to negotiate the worlds of writing & publication. & blogging makes an easy substitute for that. Like email for correspondence.

Maybe the poet labors only to reflect back, in a mirror, the pleasure received from reading/hearing other poetry. A closed circle, an artifice, a garden. What you read is a rough translation of what I heard before. (& you try to refine out the noise, in the process of finding the right words.)

But that leaves no room for making something really new, never done before.

Maybe it's both. You make something new in order to close the ring, draw the circle again.

The creative unity which Coleridge looked for in the poetic process. An integration of what you intuit to be the best words, in the best order - with as much of reality as you can manage. This also is to forge the ring, close the circle (on another plane).

But with so much talk & noise & distraction everywhere now - it seems to call for even more discipline & restraint, if you want to sharpen your message & refine your poetry. (of course I include myself among the noisemakers!)

PENTECOST IN AN INITIAL A

                 
                    Stefano da Verona, ca. 1430-35


 
 
These old piles of leathery parchment
fused all the arts – the odd square notes
in plainsong for the choir, the Latin
poetry, and, crowning everything,
such illustrations!
          
                     – this letter A
formed by a pair of rainbow-colored
dragons, whose entwined tongues
sprout leaves.  In the upper swirl,
God the Father sits aloft on wavy
cloud, from which descends
a blue dove, floating over twelve
disciples curled in a circle (within
the hulking serpent’s tail) around 
a taller Virgin Mary.
              
                      So everything
begins again – this time everyone
pregnant with the dove’s bright
fire.  And now the choir begins
to sing:
   
            antequam Abraham fieret 
            ego sum

[the Latin reads: "Before Abraham was, I am"]

This is what I was arguing with the Buffalo crowd about, for a few years there, in the late 90s.

Not "tradition" vs. "experiment", or "rhyme & meter" vs. "new sentence" : but about unity vs. deflection.

But, Tom of St Louis will recork : it's not the poet's emotions, it's the emotion expressed.

In other words, bladderdash, sorry, gotta go.

There is only one number; the rest are just repetition. & that number is. . .

knot to. Quipu.

What bearing does this have on poetics? If you accept the existence of something we can call the universal, as expressed in the many-in-one, then there is no such thing as an autonomous, self-referential artifact; everything persists in relationship, a circumstance which has moral implications. You cannot avoid the communicative function, the cognitive aspect, the social relationship, of the artwork. This may sound like I'm contradicting earlier comments here; but what I railed against before were forms of poetics theory & criticism which stem from a politics already riven with a pre-existing duality (basically, us vs. them), a partisan commitment to, let's call it, class struggle. Instead I asserted a unity of humane values, a "tree of life", from which stem both an ethical way of life in the world and artistic activity. That this "tree of life" is under attack by forms of greed, complacency, epicureanism, misguided ideologies, authoritarianism, and violence does not mean one necessarily must assent to a manichean world view which identifies evil with capital and good with labor; evil with dull mainstream inter-communication vs. good avant-garde artifact-production. This notion I have of art which communicates universal values is actually a challenge to invite poetry to engage with the fully-human existential & political & social problems facing the world.

I suppose the existence of many-in-one is what allows for the possibility of the beautiful.

& if you grant the existence of many-in-one, you necessarily grant the existence of one.

Perhaps the tendency toward the many is creation, while the tendency toward the one is (in Simone Weil's terms) decreation.

But I would say that behind these abstractions there is always. . . someone.