Reading in & about essays of RP Blackmur, & really liking it. Unlike his more doctrinaire contemporaries, A. Tate, Yvor Winters, & other New Critics, who insisted on establishing strict moral-theological rules of order for the critical enterprise, Blackmur's approach reminds me of Eugenio Montale's "superior dilettantism".
Literature & poetry seem to be, at one basic level, the free play of human imagination. No matter how severe, serious, obsessed & tragic the writer may be, there's a form of "make-believe" going on which is irreducibly playful. & I think this dimension gives the critic a place to stand, an independence. The notion of "tradition" - literary tradition - is a purely critical notion. It has no application outside the sphere of criticism itself. But within criticism, it seems to me that tradition is rooted, not in cultural, religious, or any other kind of mores; rather, real tradition is grounded, paradoxically, in this free play of imagination. It's something grounded in aesthetics, in the sense of beauty.
I'd hate for my statements to be taken as an argument for art-for-art's-sake or pure aestheticism. On the contrary, I think most good art emerges from deep within the larger world of human behavior, history, experience, feeling & thought. It absorbs & reflects upon all those things that impinge upon our sense of beauty. This is the basic challenge to any art which would escape various forms of decadence, futility, desiccation. But the other side of that challenge is the goal of actually making something beautiful or meaningful from all those impingements. & criticism's call to evaluate the results of that challenge, in particular poems & works of art, is ultimately rooted in the tradition of the free play of the imagination. This grounding gives the critic a means to appreciate & evaluate the qualities of poems which may stem from values & beliefs very different from, even at odds with, his or her own.
10.06.2009
10.05.2009
10.03.2009
10.01.2009
Human Manifesto, pt. 5
V. Afterthoughts
I've probably overshot the mark, & want to hedge my remarks a little. My insistence on the epic impulse, on totality, might be taken for sheer grandiosity, magnitude for its own sake. Or for a mandarin complacency, weighed down with pedantry rather than experience : out of touch, out of air. To burden all poets & modalities of poetry with the elaborations of epic would be unrealistic, to say the least; in fact, it would represent an all-too-familiar form of eccentricity. One remembers, inevitably, Stevens' (very 20th-cent.) lines from "Poems of Our Climate" :
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
No : all I want to suggest is that the "integral", integrated vision - the epic impulse, the whole story - lies at the roots of poetry considered as a whole itself, as "one thing". It's there, as a dimension which can't be left out (ie. poetry is not reducible to Sergeant Satire & Private Lyric). A sort of underground spring, a possibility, an impulse, an aspiration - a potential source of nourishment.
The human search for wholeness, love, & freedom is not reducible to either American-style Adamism or European-style existential deracination. The search for truth also involves memory - historical, literary, poetic - & the recognition of continuities, returnings, recapitulations - strange/familiar echoes - deja-vu...
I've probably overshot the mark, & want to hedge my remarks a little. My insistence on the epic impulse, on totality, might be taken for sheer grandiosity, magnitude for its own sake. Or for a mandarin complacency, weighed down with pedantry rather than experience : out of touch, out of air. To burden all poets & modalities of poetry with the elaborations of epic would be unrealistic, to say the least; in fact, it would represent an all-too-familiar form of eccentricity. One remembers, inevitably, Stevens' (very 20th-cent.) lines from "Poems of Our Climate" :
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
No : all I want to suggest is that the "integral", integrated vision - the epic impulse, the whole story - lies at the roots of poetry considered as a whole itself, as "one thing". It's there, as a dimension which can't be left out (ie. poetry is not reducible to Sergeant Satire & Private Lyric). A sort of underground spring, a possibility, an impulse, an aspiration - a potential source of nourishment.
The human search for wholeness, love, & freedom is not reducible to either American-style Adamism or European-style existential deracination. The search for truth also involves memory - historical, literary, poetic - & the recognition of continuities, returnings, recapitulations - strange/familiar echoes - deja-vu...
9.29.2009
9.28.2009
9.24.2009
The William Blackstone who keeps turning up, hovering in & out of my poems, is the same Wm. Blackstone celebrated in Conrad Aiken's great & seemingly-forgotten poem, "The Kid". (I've probably mentioned this before here. & also previously noted the thread linking Aiken - Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano...)
9.23.2009
Human Manifesto, pt. 4
Here's a draft of a new section :
IV. Microcosmic Recapitulation
From various villas of the poetry blogoshphere (not a typo) - from John Latta's periodic jeremiads against deracinated poetic sophistry, to Stephen Burt's New Thing essay, to Kent Johnson's article on an incipient Chicago School - from these directions & others, we are presently witnessing poets taking note of a new bent toward objectivity & real things, of poetic perception as well as expression. So how might a Berkeleyan Idealist-Maximalist-Christian-Platonic Recapitulationist-Poet, a partisan of "integral poetry", with a lot of conceptual baggage (obviously), connect (if at all) with this new trend?
American poetry since the beginning has exhibited strong "Adamic" tendencies - ie. the drive (very Emersonian) toward origination. To call it the "reinvent the wheel" syndrome would be cynical; the idea is that poetic perception returns the poet & reader to a sort of dawn-time, a spiritual & intellectual inner freedom where all things are made new. This is visible across the spectrum, from Whitman to Dickinson, from Frost to Olson - extending, in Olson's case, to a kind of megalomaniac liminal region, psychologically both risky & exciting (Kenneth Warren has been exploring this aspect of Olson in an extended, complex series of essays, in his journal House Organ). Jungian, inward, soulful.
Here, actually, we might find an area of overlap between what I'm calling "integral poetry" and these current trends. That ideal "maximalist-recapitulationist" poet, whom I've been attempting to delineate in previous sections of this essay (let's call him Henry, for short) once upon a time took very much to heart the epic & totalizing ambitions of Pound & Olson. He admired Pound's vivid, witty, shorthand notation of historical events, the way he strove to blend them into vast frescos of civilizational flowering & decay; he took to Olson's injunction (offered to Ed Dorn once upon a time) to steep oneself in the cultural history of one region, one locality - become an expert; he saw this carried out beforehand in an interesting, sometimes-graceful way in WC Williams' Paterson. The challenge posed by these masterful poets was Janus-faced : a call both to emulate & to differentiate - since he found a great deal to disagree with in their underlying worldviews...
We have tried to characterize an integral poetry as rooted in experience, not deracinated : that is, a recapitulation, a synthesis of both lived (historical, biographical) and literary past. Here is the point I'm trying to make : the only way to achieve this level of integration is by drawing on the epic dimension, the epic mode. The poet is "maximalist" because totality, wholeness, universality are active, essential elements in the poetic construction.
The "things", the "minute particulars", which surface in the kind of poetry I'm talking about, are not simply particulars of the world in general : they are distinct things within the microcosmos created by the poem. The integral poet evokes & summons up holistic imaginative worlds, within which particulars are surfacing all the time, on many narrative levels - exhibiting a multitude of facets, harking back to the Biblical/Dantean/Joycean richness of fourfold meaning : literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical...
& I should mention that one examplar of this approach happens to be the maximalist-recapitulationist poet, "Henry" - who has been spinning layered worlds for some time now out of the history & psycho-cyclobiography of the little state of Rhode Island, in various modalities of short & lengthy works...
IV. Microcosmic Recapitulation
From various villas of the poetry blogoshphere (not a typo) - from John Latta's periodic jeremiads against deracinated poetic sophistry, to Stephen Burt's New Thing essay, to Kent Johnson's article on an incipient Chicago School - from these directions & others, we are presently witnessing poets taking note of a new bent toward objectivity & real things, of poetic perception as well as expression. So how might a Berkeleyan Idealist-Maximalist-Christian-Platonic Recapitulationist-Poet, a partisan of "integral poetry", with a lot of conceptual baggage (obviously), connect (if at all) with this new trend?
American poetry since the beginning has exhibited strong "Adamic" tendencies - ie. the drive (very Emersonian) toward origination. To call it the "reinvent the wheel" syndrome would be cynical; the idea is that poetic perception returns the poet & reader to a sort of dawn-time, a spiritual & intellectual inner freedom where all things are made new. This is visible across the spectrum, from Whitman to Dickinson, from Frost to Olson - extending, in Olson's case, to a kind of megalomaniac liminal region, psychologically both risky & exciting (Kenneth Warren has been exploring this aspect of Olson in an extended, complex series of essays, in his journal House Organ). Jungian, inward, soulful.
Here, actually, we might find an area of overlap between what I'm calling "integral poetry" and these current trends. That ideal "maximalist-recapitulationist" poet, whom I've been attempting to delineate in previous sections of this essay (let's call him Henry, for short) once upon a time took very much to heart the epic & totalizing ambitions of Pound & Olson. He admired Pound's vivid, witty, shorthand notation of historical events, the way he strove to blend them into vast frescos of civilizational flowering & decay; he took to Olson's injunction (offered to Ed Dorn once upon a time) to steep oneself in the cultural history of one region, one locality - become an expert; he saw this carried out beforehand in an interesting, sometimes-graceful way in WC Williams' Paterson. The challenge posed by these masterful poets was Janus-faced : a call both to emulate & to differentiate - since he found a great deal to disagree with in their underlying worldviews...
We have tried to characterize an integral poetry as rooted in experience, not deracinated : that is, a recapitulation, a synthesis of both lived (historical, biographical) and literary past. Here is the point I'm trying to make : the only way to achieve this level of integration is by drawing on the epic dimension, the epic mode. The poet is "maximalist" because totality, wholeness, universality are active, essential elements in the poetic construction.
The "things", the "minute particulars", which surface in the kind of poetry I'm talking about, are not simply particulars of the world in general : they are distinct things within the microcosmos created by the poem. The integral poet evokes & summons up holistic imaginative worlds, within which particulars are surfacing all the time, on many narrative levels - exhibiting a multitude of facets, harking back to the Biblical/Dantean/Joycean richness of fourfold meaning : literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical...
& I should mention that one examplar of this approach happens to be the maximalist-recapitulationist poet, "Henry" - who has been spinning layered worlds for some time now out of the history & psycho-cyclobiography of the little state of Rhode Island, in various modalities of short & lengthy works...
I like the short poems that "Peter" (don't know his last name - believe he resides in England) has been posting occasionally to the Plumbline School ("Valentines") - & sometimes also in the comment streams to those posts.
9.21.2009
Human Manifesto, pt. 3
(Note : more cogitating today on poetry, & my poetry... so I may add this to previous post.)
III. Song of Songs
I focused in previous sections on some philosophical or religious background/worldview for my own concepts of what the poet is about. Spirit, mind, idealism, totality... & yet I think I've neglected a vital part of poetry's distinctive range : that is, not so much mind (in the somewhat Platonic sense I've been sketching), as heart, & soul.
Maybe it's the time of year. These beautiful last days of summer & incipient fall somehow help to bring that autumnal phantom, "soul", into view.
If it's permissible to generalize... I don't think our culture is very capable these days of distinguishing between the physical and the psychic, desire and feeling, body and soul. We live in a cultural marketplace of the body - its functions, desires, natural cycles, & illusions - in the midst of which the feelings & intuitions of the soul grow more elusive & estranged.
In the prior sections I talked about how an "integral poetry" would recapitulate experience & suffuse it with meaning, feeling. This is the goal of its voracious inner energy. By this I would not want to exclude experience in any of its ranges or registers; but I also think poetry's deepest impulses have to do with the life, the searchings, the intuitions of the soul. Our tumultuous, painful, exalted, terrible, tragic, comic, sublime, & ridiculous dramas of love, in all its forms, are the substance of that life which poetry aims to recapitulate, represent & celebrate. Thus the "Song of Songs" takes this name because it represents an epitome of song, song reaching toward its fundamental purpose or telos. The rabbinical & monastic hermeneutics which came after - all the interpretations of this sensuous love-song, as a spiritual allegory of the soul's loving search for God - are also paradigmatic, with regard to poetry's expressive purposes.
I'm not trying to canonize the Song of Songs (certainly it doesn't need me for that!) - only aiming to suggest how it represents a central aspect of poetry per se : the search for wholeness, integration - the attunement, the harmony of male & female, parent & child, sibling & sibling, neighbor & stranger - of love with life, soul with body, soul with God.
It can be argued that I'm singling out only one aspect of poetry. True, but there's no help for it : this "manifesto" is an effort to describe my own experience. & what I'm suggesting is that the impulse to write poetry cannot be separated from the impulse to love. Song, as such, is an effusion, an emanation from a state of harmony, or an intuition about possible harmony. It is a back-&-forth, reciprocal drama, which happens as a kind of conversation or encounter, within the creative imagination of the poet.
The affective pathos in individual poems, those qualities which move us, emotionally, are like mini-dramas, off-shoots from the central energy of this creative "love-impulse". The poet, echoing & re-echoing an inward "song of songs", is actually wooing some sweet dimension of life, earth & reality. The song of the poet is analogous in this sense to the "bride" or "bridegroom" (as symbolized in the Book of Revelation).
I think it can be said that the two great (unmatched, unmatching) towers of Western poetry, Shakespeare & Dante, share one central concern : to delineate the nature of love, to measure its whole scale of motives & effects - from blind self-regard to the patient kindness of other-centered agape (rooted fundamentally in the joy & gratitude of life).
These are "soul" matters : not so conducive to scientific analysis or determinate calculation. But that's why poetry happens, anyway : because "there are more things in heaven and earth than are met with in your philosophy, Horatio."
LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.
- E. Dickinson
I want to mention one further consequence of the state of affairs I am trying to evoke here. It seems to me that, if the life of poetry consists in a kind of soul-courtship, or in Mandelstam's terms, a "playful hide-&-seek with the Father", then maybe we have to try to set aside some of the more pedantic, deterministic, superficial, in-house, or otherwise quantified & utilitarian critical approaches to literary reception. Just as the poet's creative labor is subject to the mysterious impulse of the "muse" of soul-searching love - so the reader's reception of the fruits of that labor will echo these deeper dimensions or concerns. & these things are difficult to judge & quantify. The relationship between a poet and his/her culture is analogous to the unpredictable and dramatic dance of courtship. For every culture, this can result in a very long "crane dance" - over centuries, even - at the gate of a very complex labyrinth.
III. Song of Songs
I focused in previous sections on some philosophical or religious background/worldview for my own concepts of what the poet is about. Spirit, mind, idealism, totality... & yet I think I've neglected a vital part of poetry's distinctive range : that is, not so much mind (in the somewhat Platonic sense I've been sketching), as heart, & soul.
Maybe it's the time of year. These beautiful last days of summer & incipient fall somehow help to bring that autumnal phantom, "soul", into view.
If it's permissible to generalize... I don't think our culture is very capable these days of distinguishing between the physical and the psychic, desire and feeling, body and soul. We live in a cultural marketplace of the body - its functions, desires, natural cycles, & illusions - in the midst of which the feelings & intuitions of the soul grow more elusive & estranged.
In the prior sections I talked about how an "integral poetry" would recapitulate experience & suffuse it with meaning, feeling. This is the goal of its voracious inner energy. By this I would not want to exclude experience in any of its ranges or registers; but I also think poetry's deepest impulses have to do with the life, the searchings, the intuitions of the soul. Our tumultuous, painful, exalted, terrible, tragic, comic, sublime, & ridiculous dramas of love, in all its forms, are the substance of that life which poetry aims to recapitulate, represent & celebrate. Thus the "Song of Songs" takes this name because it represents an epitome of song, song reaching toward its fundamental purpose or telos. The rabbinical & monastic hermeneutics which came after - all the interpretations of this sensuous love-song, as a spiritual allegory of the soul's loving search for God - are also paradigmatic, with regard to poetry's expressive purposes.
I'm not trying to canonize the Song of Songs (certainly it doesn't need me for that!) - only aiming to suggest how it represents a central aspect of poetry per se : the search for wholeness, integration - the attunement, the harmony of male & female, parent & child, sibling & sibling, neighbor & stranger - of love with life, soul with body, soul with God.
It can be argued that I'm singling out only one aspect of poetry. True, but there's no help for it : this "manifesto" is an effort to describe my own experience. & what I'm suggesting is that the impulse to write poetry cannot be separated from the impulse to love. Song, as such, is an effusion, an emanation from a state of harmony, or an intuition about possible harmony. It is a back-&-forth, reciprocal drama, which happens as a kind of conversation or encounter, within the creative imagination of the poet.
The affective pathos in individual poems, those qualities which move us, emotionally, are like mini-dramas, off-shoots from the central energy of this creative "love-impulse". The poet, echoing & re-echoing an inward "song of songs", is actually wooing some sweet dimension of life, earth & reality. The song of the poet is analogous in this sense to the "bride" or "bridegroom" (as symbolized in the Book of Revelation).
I think it can be said that the two great (unmatched, unmatching) towers of Western poetry, Shakespeare & Dante, share one central concern : to delineate the nature of love, to measure its whole scale of motives & effects - from blind self-regard to the patient kindness of other-centered agape (rooted fundamentally in the joy & gratitude of life).
These are "soul" matters : not so conducive to scientific analysis or determinate calculation. But that's why poetry happens, anyway : because "there are more things in heaven and earth than are met with in your philosophy, Horatio."
LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.
- E. Dickinson
I want to mention one further consequence of the state of affairs I am trying to evoke here. It seems to me that, if the life of poetry consists in a kind of soul-courtship, or in Mandelstam's terms, a "playful hide-&-seek with the Father", then maybe we have to try to set aside some of the more pedantic, deterministic, superficial, in-house, or otherwise quantified & utilitarian critical approaches to literary reception. Just as the poet's creative labor is subject to the mysterious impulse of the "muse" of soul-searching love - so the reader's reception of the fruits of that labor will echo these deeper dimensions or concerns. & these things are difficult to judge & quantify. The relationship between a poet and his/her culture is analogous to the unpredictable and dramatic dance of courtship. For every culture, this can result in a very long "crane dance" - over centuries, even - at the gate of a very complex labyrinth.
9.20.2009
Started new chapter of Lanthanum (ch. 4). & changed the name of the poem to Lanthanum Road.
9.18.2009
Human Manifesto
I. Poetry & Worldview
I sent a letter to Poetry magazine, in response to Robert Archambeau's essay on manifestos.
Poetry & Worldview. There's a tension in the idea of poets' manifesting a worldview - since art & poetry are, basically, a constructive escape from abstraction. And a manifesto is a strategic reduction or formula ("My poetry is....")
On the other hand, certain very creative periods (say, 12th century France, or Renaissance Italy, or Eliz. England) seem to have so much energy that philosophy & poetry, abstractions & particulars, find their way into productive chemical (alchemical?) bondings...
As regards poetry, I'm a maximalist. I'm drawn to the deep thinking of Wallace Stevens & Mandelstam, on the spirit of poetry & the poet's vocation. The "theory of poetry" is about the relationship between poetry and the world, between poetry and worldview. It assumes that underneath all the differences, somehow, poetry is "one thing" : and that mysterious something is distinct from other modes of human thought, action and art.
So what marks it out, distinguishes it? To put it baldly : in poetry, language is most alive. If you think of the power, the effect of words & conversation & storytelling upon the mind & senses of a young child - & the child's desire to respond with a substantial message or articulation of his or her own - you are getting closer to the motives & effects of poetry. The Word in this sense is simultaneously Order (the world making sense), Meaning (communicating that sense), & Pleasure (having fun with that newfound power). Mandelstam's theme of "domestic hellenism" - poetry's capacity to domesticate & civilize the world, to help us be at home in reality - gets at this also.
If I were to write yet another(!) manifesto this afternoon, I would push for something like an integral poetry. This would be a bent toward understanding the poem & the work of art as an utterance which synthesizes, rather than alienates, its own background. By this I mean something like Mandelstam's voting for Potebnia over Saussure & the Russian Formalists, in terms of the linguistics source of poetics - Potebnia's notion of the underlying image-basis of language, the ur-image. Language in this sense is not an autonomous shuttling of symbolic differences, disconnected from their origins in primitive pointing & representation.
The poem is an enacted recapitulation or summation of experience, as well as a free & self-contained art-work. It must balance these two, if it wants to be fully integral - that is spilling over with both meaning and (emotional, perceptual) sense. It must both breathe and be complete (exhibit finish, shape, fulfillment - the forms of beauty).
Poetry is the human race throwing itself bodily into vocal, dancing evocation. It is the embodiment of language by (the human) spirit. This is how - by being "maximal" - poetry becomes what Wallace Stevens calls "the sanction" of life. The epic impulse - the Bible, Virgil, Homer - is the impulse to an integral fulfillment - in language - of a time & a culture as an entity, as a whole. Northrop Frye writes about this.
Emily Dickinson : "my circuit is circumference".
II. Mindful Consequences
"The letter killeth; the spirit giveth life." If poetry is the human spirit entering, reviving & giving life to the twilight realm of dead letters - & this, of course, is a big & debatable if - what are the consequences? What implications can we draw for both worldview & poetics?
In the current intellectual climate I suppose my terms & formulae will not find much traction. No, they will be ignored, if not rejected out of hand. Because by using such terms as "spirit", I'm implying an idealist worldview - something of a throwback, akin to the Romantics, & to much earlier thought. One of my heroes indeed is Bishop George Berkeley, a one-time Rhode Island (Newport) dweller (who turns up in the long poem Stubborn Grew) - an idealist if there ever was one, the idealist's idealist, an object of practical Samuel Johnson's mockery.
How can I characterize or summarize my perspective? Our experience of reality and the universe is grounded in consciousness. The human mind is a manifestation (a Human Manifesto) of some more universal & substantial form of Mind. This substantial consciousness is the underlying ground (the sanction, if you will) for world civilization (in Mandelshtamian terms, the global well-being of "domestic hellenism").
So again, what are some of the consequences for poetry? I can only speak for the small sliver of my own point-of-view & my own enthusiasms; there are as many such perspectives as there are poets. & my perspective, to put it awkwardly, is something like incarnational. I wish I knew the technical theological term for my sense of this : it has to do with the logical "architecture" of the manifestation of human thought & language in time, culture & history. One term close to what I'm thinking of might be recapitulation.
Mandelshtam, quoting some 19th century thinker whose name escapes me (Darwin? Lamarck?), writes somewhere : "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." In other words (I think) the individual of a species recapitulates, in its features & characteristics, all the prior stages of evolutionary growth. It carries the signs of its own species-history like scars (or tattoos).
One philosophical implication or analogy I draw from this is, that the individual can be viewed in a "teleological" way : that is, speaking of human beings, the Person is viewed as bearing the signs of an end, a fulfillment, of all prior time & development. Each person an encyclopedia, a microcosm of the species (Whitman harps on this idea in every line of "Song of Myself").
One literary-theological implication or analogy I draw from this notion (of recapitulation) is as follows : each Person is the telos or end or fulfillment of the language expressed in relation to him or her. The Person supercedes or fulfills or embodies or surpasses all the text, scripture, language within which he or she is enmeshed. In this sense, the Christian concept of the "fulfillment of Scripture" is a kind of symbolic norm, referring to an actuality which applies to all persons. One does not have to be a doctrinal believer in order to at least entertain, philosophically, the idea that Jesus' & the Church's playing with the notion of completing, fulfilling Scripture, in Christ's own body & person, is a symbolic representation or acting-out (in a kind of Northop-Frye sense) of a cultural reality which is universal (keeping in mind that the historical record of such theological "play" has included some violent & absolutely tragic results).
I realize I'm getting into some deep & controversial waters - a seeming roadblock to my readers, to anyone who is trying to follow how this gnarled idea relates to poetry itself. Let's go back to the primary assertions here :
1) Poetry is language brought to life by a kind of joyful, expressive energy - of assimilation, representation, & recapitulation of experience.
2) The human spirit proceeds from consciousness, mind - which is the ground of any reality we know.
3) The person, as a kind of epitome or manifestation of this Mind, can be understood in teleological terms as End and Microcosm.
To these basic ideas, let us add the reminder that human language is partial, imperfect, often mistaken : so that that personal "epitome" - the Person from whom, to whom, and around whom language proceeds & gathers - appears in a kind of shroud or disguise of error. Eliot (for one) repeatedly refers to this dimension, with his references to the poet's "faulty equipment, always breaking down" (Four Quartets - if I'm quoting correctly!).
As the Person is the epitome of the species, and Mankind a kind of microcosm of the universal elements, so Poetry aims to epitomize experience in the mirror of language. This is what Frye describes as literature's "epic" drive toward totality, the aim to include everything (see Whitman, Dante, Homer, the Book of Genesis...). Poetry is the telos or summa of language in general; it is speech brought to measure, harmony (& there is no harmony without wholeness, completion).
So, an "integral poetry" would manifest as such on both a micro and macro level : that is, on the micro level, its language would be integrated, synthesized, with prior experience, rather than closed off from it; while on a macro level, its language would aspire to, or at least reflect the presence of, that epic totality which mirrors the substantial wholeness of the original, universal grounding in consciousness itself.
Some of these ideas are glanced at in this stanza of a poem called "Letter to Emily D." (publ. in Dove Street) :
For Scripture precedes history - your insight
precedes Scripture - April's alpha and omega
purl playfully from your soul-saga.
Who finds you meets a palm-tree full of light.
III. Song of Songs
I focused in previous sections on some philosophical or religious background/worldview for my own concepts of what the poet is about. Spirit, mind, idealism, totality... & yet I think I've neglected a vital part of poetry's distinctive range : that is, not so much mind (in the somewhat Platonic sense I've been sketching), as heart, & soul.
Maybe it's the time of year. These beautiful last days of summer & incipient fall somehow help to bring that autumnal phantom, "soul", into view.
If it's permissible to generalize... I don't think our culture is very capable these days of distinguishing between the physical and the psychic, desire and feeling, body and soul. We live in a cultural marketplace of the body - its functions, desires, natural cycles, & illusions - in the midst of which the feelings & intuitions of the soul grow more elusive & estranged.
In the prior sections I talked about how an "integral poetry" would recapitulate experience & suffuse it with meaning, feeling. This is the goal of its voracious inner energy. By this I would not want to exclude experience in any of its ranges or registers; but I also think poetry's deepest impulses have to do with the life, the searchings, the intuitions of the soul. Our tumultuous, painful, exalted, terrible, tragic, comic, sublime, & ridiculous dramas of love, in all its forms, are the substance of that life which poetry aims to recapitulate, represent & celebrate. Thus the "Song of Songs" takes this name because it represents an epitome of song, song reaching toward its fundamental purpose or telos. The rabbinical & monastic hermeneutics which came after - all the interpretations of this sensuous love-song, as a spiritual allegory of the soul's loving search for God - are also paradigmatic, with regard to poetry's expressive purposes.
I'm not trying to canonize the Song of Songs (certainly it doesn't need me for that!) - only aiming to suggest how it represents a central aspect of poetry per se : the search for wholeness, integration - the attunement, the harmony of male & female, parent & child, sibling & sibling, neighbor & stranger - of love with life, soul with body, soul with God.
It can be argued that I'm singling out only one aspect of poetry. True, but there's no help for it : this "manifesto" is an effort to describe my own experience. & what I'm suggesting is that the impulse to write poetry cannot be separated from the impulse to love. Song, as such, is an effusion, an emanation from a state of harmony, or an intuition about possible harmony. It is a back-&-forth, reciprocal drama, which happens as a kind of conversation or encounter, within the creative imagination of the poet.
The affective pathos in individual poems, those qualities which move us, emotionally, are like mini-dramas, off-shoots from the central energy of this creative "love-impulse". The poet, echoing & re-echoing an inward "song of songs", is actually wooing some sweet dimension of life, earth & reality. The song of the poet is analogous in this sense to the "bride" or "bridegroom" (as symbolized in the Book of Revelation).
I think it can be said that the two great (unmatched, unmatching) towers of Western poetry, Shakespeare & Dante, share one central concern : to delineate the nature of love, to measure its whole scale of motives & effects - from blind self-regard to the patient kindness of other-centered agape (rooted fundamentally in the joy & gratitude of life).
These are "soul" matters : not so conducive to scientific analysis or determinate calculation. But that's why poetry happens, anyway : because "there are more things in heaven and earth than are met with in your philosophy, Horatio."
LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.
- E. Dickinson
I want to mention one further consequence of the state of affairs I am trying to evoke here. It seems to me that, if the life of poetry consists in a kind of soul-courtship, or in Mandelstam's terms, a "playful hide-&-seek with the Father", then maybe we have to try to set aside some of the more pedantic, deterministic, superficial, in-house, or otherwise quantified & utilitarian critical approaches to literary reception. Just as the poet's creative labor is subject to the mysterious impulse of the "muse" of soul-searching love - so the reader's reception of the fruits of that labor will echo these deeper dimensions or concerns. & these things are difficult to judge & quantify. The relationship between a poet and his/her culture is analogous to the unpredictable and dramatic dance of courtship. For every culture, this can result in a very long "crane dance" - over centuries, even - at the gate of a very complex labyrinth.
IV Microcosmic Recapitulation
From various villas of the poetry blogoshphere (not a typo) - from John Latta's periodic jeremiads against deracinated poetic sophistry, to Stephen Burt's New Thing essay, to Kent Johnson's article on an incipient Chicago School - from these directions & others, we are presently witnessing poets taking note of a new bent toward objectivity & real things, of poetic perception as well as expression. So how might a Berkeleyan Idealist-Maximalist-Christian-Platonic Recapitulationist-Poet, a partisan of "integral poetry", with a lot of conceptual baggage (obviously), connect (if at all) with this new trend?
American poetry since the beginning has exhibited strong "Adamic" tendencies - ie. the drive (very Emersonian) toward origination. To call it the "reinvent the wheel" syndrome would be cynical; the idea is that poetic perception returns the poet & reader to a sort of dawn-time, a spiritual & intellectual inner freedom where all things are made new. This is visible across the spectrum, from Whitman to Dickinson, from Frost to Olson - extending, in Olson's case, to a kind of megalomaniac liminal region, psychologically both risky & exciting (Kenneth Warren has been exploring this aspect of Olson in an extended, complex series of essays, in his journal House Organ). Jungian, inward, soulful.
Here, actually, we might find an area of overlap between what I'm calling "integral poetry" and these current trends. That ideal "maximalist-recapitulationist" poet, whom I've been attempting to delineate in previous sections of this essay (let's call him Henry, for short) once upon a time took very much to heart the epic & totalizing ambitions of Pound & Olson. He admired Pound's vivid, witty, shorthand notation of historical events, the way he strove to blend them into vast frescos of civilizational flowering & decay; he took to Olson's injunction (offered to Ed Dorn once upon a time) to steep oneself in the cultural history of one region, one locality - become an expert; he saw this carried out beforehand in an interesting, sometimes-graceful way in WC Williams' Paterson. The challenge posed by these masterful poets was Janus-faced : a call both to emulate & to differentiate - since he found a great deal to disagree with in their underlying worldviews...
We have tried to characterize an integral poetry as rooted in experience, not deracinated : that is, a recapitulation, a synthesis of both lived (historical, biographical) and literary past. Here is the point I'm trying to make : the only way to achieve this level of integration is by drawing on the epic dimension, the epic mode. The poet is "maximalist" because totality, wholeness, universality are active, essential elements in the poetic construction.
The "things", the "minute particulars", which surface in the kind of poetry I'm talking about, are not simply particulars of the world in general : they are distinct things within the microcosmos created by the poem. The integral poet evokes and summons up a holistic imaginative world, within which particulars are surfacing all the time, on many narrative levels - exhibiting a multitude of facets, harking back to the Biblical/Dantean/Joycean richness of fourfold meaning : literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical...
& I should mention that one examplar of this approach happens to be the maximalist-recapitulationist poet, "Henry" - who has been spinning layered worlds for some time now out of the history & psycho-cyclobiography of the little state of Rhode Island, in various modalities of short & lengthy works...
V. Afterthoughts
I've probably overshot the mark, & want to hedge my remarks a little. My insistence on the epic impulse, on totality, might be taken for sheer grandiosity, magnitude for its own sake. Or for a mandarin complacency, weighed down with pedantry rather than experience : out of touch, out of air. To burden all poets & modalities of poetry with the elaborations of epic would be unrealistic, to say the least; in fact, it would represent an all-too-familiar form of eccentricity. One remembers, inevitably, Stevens' (very 20th-cent.) lines from "Poems of Our Climate" :
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
No : all I want to suggest is that the "integral", integrated vision - the epic impulse, the whole story - lies at the roots of poetry considered as a whole itself, as "one thing". It's there, as a dimension which can't be left out (ie. poetry is not reducible to Sergeant Satire & Private Lyric). A sort of underground spring, a possibility, an impulse, an aspiration - a potential source of nourishment.
The human search for wholeness, love, & freedom is not reducible to either American-style Adamism or European-style existential deracination. The search for truth also involves memory - historical, literary, poetic - & the recognition of continuities, returnings, recapitulations - strange/familiar echoes - deja-vu...
I sent a letter to Poetry magazine, in response to Robert Archambeau's essay on manifestos.
Poetry & Worldview. There's a tension in the idea of poets' manifesting a worldview - since art & poetry are, basically, a constructive escape from abstraction. And a manifesto is a strategic reduction or formula ("My poetry is....")
On the other hand, certain very creative periods (say, 12th century France, or Renaissance Italy, or Eliz. England) seem to have so much energy that philosophy & poetry, abstractions & particulars, find their way into productive chemical (alchemical?) bondings...
As regards poetry, I'm a maximalist. I'm drawn to the deep thinking of Wallace Stevens & Mandelstam, on the spirit of poetry & the poet's vocation. The "theory of poetry" is about the relationship between poetry and the world, between poetry and worldview. It assumes that underneath all the differences, somehow, poetry is "one thing" : and that mysterious something is distinct from other modes of human thought, action and art.
So what marks it out, distinguishes it? To put it baldly : in poetry, language is most alive. If you think of the power, the effect of words & conversation & storytelling upon the mind & senses of a young child - & the child's desire to respond with a substantial message or articulation of his or her own - you are getting closer to the motives & effects of poetry. The Word in this sense is simultaneously Order (the world making sense), Meaning (communicating that sense), & Pleasure (having fun with that newfound power). Mandelstam's theme of "domestic hellenism" - poetry's capacity to domesticate & civilize the world, to help us be at home in reality - gets at this also.
If I were to write yet another(!) manifesto this afternoon, I would push for something like an integral poetry. This would be a bent toward understanding the poem & the work of art as an utterance which synthesizes, rather than alienates, its own background. By this I mean something like Mandelstam's voting for Potebnia over Saussure & the Russian Formalists, in terms of the linguistics source of poetics - Potebnia's notion of the underlying image-basis of language, the ur-image. Language in this sense is not an autonomous shuttling of symbolic differences, disconnected from their origins in primitive pointing & representation.
The poem is an enacted recapitulation or summation of experience, as well as a free & self-contained art-work. It must balance these two, if it wants to be fully integral - that is spilling over with both meaning and (emotional, perceptual) sense. It must both breathe and be complete (exhibit finish, shape, fulfillment - the forms of beauty).
Poetry is the human race throwing itself bodily into vocal, dancing evocation. It is the embodiment of language by (the human) spirit. This is how - by being "maximal" - poetry becomes what Wallace Stevens calls "the sanction" of life. The epic impulse - the Bible, Virgil, Homer - is the impulse to an integral fulfillment - in language - of a time & a culture as an entity, as a whole. Northrop Frye writes about this.
Emily Dickinson : "my circuit is circumference".
II. Mindful Consequences
"The letter killeth; the spirit giveth life." If poetry is the human spirit entering, reviving & giving life to the twilight realm of dead letters - & this, of course, is a big & debatable if - what are the consequences? What implications can we draw for both worldview & poetics?
In the current intellectual climate I suppose my terms & formulae will not find much traction. No, they will be ignored, if not rejected out of hand. Because by using such terms as "spirit", I'm implying an idealist worldview - something of a throwback, akin to the Romantics, & to much earlier thought. One of my heroes indeed is Bishop George Berkeley, a one-time Rhode Island (Newport) dweller (who turns up in the long poem Stubborn Grew) - an idealist if there ever was one, the idealist's idealist, an object of practical Samuel Johnson's mockery.
How can I characterize or summarize my perspective? Our experience of reality and the universe is grounded in consciousness. The human mind is a manifestation (a Human Manifesto) of some more universal & substantial form of Mind. This substantial consciousness is the underlying ground (the sanction, if you will) for world civilization (in Mandelshtamian terms, the global well-being of "domestic hellenism").
So again, what are some of the consequences for poetry? I can only speak for the small sliver of my own point-of-view & my own enthusiasms; there are as many such perspectives as there are poets. & my perspective, to put it awkwardly, is something like incarnational. I wish I knew the technical theological term for my sense of this : it has to do with the logical "architecture" of the manifestation of human thought & language in time, culture & history. One term close to what I'm thinking of might be recapitulation.
Mandelshtam, quoting some 19th century thinker whose name escapes me (Darwin? Lamarck?), writes somewhere : "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." In other words (I think) the individual of a species recapitulates, in its features & characteristics, all the prior stages of evolutionary growth. It carries the signs of its own species-history like scars (or tattoos).
One philosophical implication or analogy I draw from this is, that the individual can be viewed in a "teleological" way : that is, speaking of human beings, the Person is viewed as bearing the signs of an end, a fulfillment, of all prior time & development. Each person an encyclopedia, a microcosm of the species (Whitman harps on this idea in every line of "Song of Myself").
One literary-theological implication or analogy I draw from this notion (of recapitulation) is as follows : each Person is the telos or end or fulfillment of the language expressed in relation to him or her. The Person supercedes or fulfills or embodies or surpasses all the text, scripture, language within which he or she is enmeshed. In this sense, the Christian concept of the "fulfillment of Scripture" is a kind of symbolic norm, referring to an actuality which applies to all persons. One does not have to be a doctrinal believer in order to at least entertain, philosophically, the idea that Jesus' & the Church's playing with the notion of completing, fulfilling Scripture, in Christ's own body & person, is a symbolic representation or acting-out (in a kind of Northop-Frye sense) of a cultural reality which is universal (keeping in mind that the historical record of such theological "play" has included some violent & absolutely tragic results).
I realize I'm getting into some deep & controversial waters - a seeming roadblock to my readers, to anyone who is trying to follow how this gnarled idea relates to poetry itself. Let's go back to the primary assertions here :
1) Poetry is language brought to life by a kind of joyful, expressive energy - of assimilation, representation, & recapitulation of experience.
2) The human spirit proceeds from consciousness, mind - which is the ground of any reality we know.
3) The person, as a kind of epitome or manifestation of this Mind, can be understood in teleological terms as End and Microcosm.
To these basic ideas, let us add the reminder that human language is partial, imperfect, often mistaken : so that that personal "epitome" - the Person from whom, to whom, and around whom language proceeds & gathers - appears in a kind of shroud or disguise of error. Eliot (for one) repeatedly refers to this dimension, with his references to the poet's "faulty equipment, always breaking down" (Four Quartets - if I'm quoting correctly!).
As the Person is the epitome of the species, and Mankind a kind of microcosm of the universal elements, so Poetry aims to epitomize experience in the mirror of language. This is what Frye describes as literature's "epic" drive toward totality, the aim to include everything (see Whitman, Dante, Homer, the Book of Genesis...). Poetry is the telos or summa of language in general; it is speech brought to measure, harmony (& there is no harmony without wholeness, completion).
So, an "integral poetry" would manifest as such on both a micro and macro level : that is, on the micro level, its language would be integrated, synthesized, with prior experience, rather than closed off from it; while on a macro level, its language would aspire to, or at least reflect the presence of, that epic totality which mirrors the substantial wholeness of the original, universal grounding in consciousness itself.
Some of these ideas are glanced at in this stanza of a poem called "Letter to Emily D." (publ. in Dove Street) :
For Scripture precedes history - your insight
precedes Scripture - April's alpha and omega
purl playfully from your soul-saga.
Who finds you meets a palm-tree full of light.
III. Song of Songs
I focused in previous sections on some philosophical or religious background/worldview for my own concepts of what the poet is about. Spirit, mind, idealism, totality... & yet I think I've neglected a vital part of poetry's distinctive range : that is, not so much mind (in the somewhat Platonic sense I've been sketching), as heart, & soul.
Maybe it's the time of year. These beautiful last days of summer & incipient fall somehow help to bring that autumnal phantom, "soul", into view.
If it's permissible to generalize... I don't think our culture is very capable these days of distinguishing between the physical and the psychic, desire and feeling, body and soul. We live in a cultural marketplace of the body - its functions, desires, natural cycles, & illusions - in the midst of which the feelings & intuitions of the soul grow more elusive & estranged.
In the prior sections I talked about how an "integral poetry" would recapitulate experience & suffuse it with meaning, feeling. This is the goal of its voracious inner energy. By this I would not want to exclude experience in any of its ranges or registers; but I also think poetry's deepest impulses have to do with the life, the searchings, the intuitions of the soul. Our tumultuous, painful, exalted, terrible, tragic, comic, sublime, & ridiculous dramas of love, in all its forms, are the substance of that life which poetry aims to recapitulate, represent & celebrate. Thus the "Song of Songs" takes this name because it represents an epitome of song, song reaching toward its fundamental purpose or telos. The rabbinical & monastic hermeneutics which came after - all the interpretations of this sensuous love-song, as a spiritual allegory of the soul's loving search for God - are also paradigmatic, with regard to poetry's expressive purposes.
I'm not trying to canonize the Song of Songs (certainly it doesn't need me for that!) - only aiming to suggest how it represents a central aspect of poetry per se : the search for wholeness, integration - the attunement, the harmony of male & female, parent & child, sibling & sibling, neighbor & stranger - of love with life, soul with body, soul with God.
It can be argued that I'm singling out only one aspect of poetry. True, but there's no help for it : this "manifesto" is an effort to describe my own experience. & what I'm suggesting is that the impulse to write poetry cannot be separated from the impulse to love. Song, as such, is an effusion, an emanation from a state of harmony, or an intuition about possible harmony. It is a back-&-forth, reciprocal drama, which happens as a kind of conversation or encounter, within the creative imagination of the poet.
The affective pathos in individual poems, those qualities which move us, emotionally, are like mini-dramas, off-shoots from the central energy of this creative "love-impulse". The poet, echoing & re-echoing an inward "song of songs", is actually wooing some sweet dimension of life, earth & reality. The song of the poet is analogous in this sense to the "bride" or "bridegroom" (as symbolized in the Book of Revelation).
I think it can be said that the two great (unmatched, unmatching) towers of Western poetry, Shakespeare & Dante, share one central concern : to delineate the nature of love, to measure its whole scale of motives & effects - from blind self-regard to the patient kindness of other-centered agape (rooted fundamentally in the joy & gratitude of life).
These are "soul" matters : not so conducive to scientific analysis or determinate calculation. But that's why poetry happens, anyway : because "there are more things in heaven and earth than are met with in your philosophy, Horatio."
LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.
- E. Dickinson
I want to mention one further consequence of the state of affairs I am trying to evoke here. It seems to me that, if the life of poetry consists in a kind of soul-courtship, or in Mandelstam's terms, a "playful hide-&-seek with the Father", then maybe we have to try to set aside some of the more pedantic, deterministic, superficial, in-house, or otherwise quantified & utilitarian critical approaches to literary reception. Just as the poet's creative labor is subject to the mysterious impulse of the "muse" of soul-searching love - so the reader's reception of the fruits of that labor will echo these deeper dimensions or concerns. & these things are difficult to judge & quantify. The relationship between a poet and his/her culture is analogous to the unpredictable and dramatic dance of courtship. For every culture, this can result in a very long "crane dance" - over centuries, even - at the gate of a very complex labyrinth.
IV Microcosmic Recapitulation
From various villas of the poetry blogoshphere (not a typo) - from John Latta's periodic jeremiads against deracinated poetic sophistry, to Stephen Burt's New Thing essay, to Kent Johnson's article on an incipient Chicago School - from these directions & others, we are presently witnessing poets taking note of a new bent toward objectivity & real things, of poetic perception as well as expression. So how might a Berkeleyan Idealist-Maximalist-Christian-Platonic Recapitulationist-Poet, a partisan of "integral poetry", with a lot of conceptual baggage (obviously), connect (if at all) with this new trend?
American poetry since the beginning has exhibited strong "Adamic" tendencies - ie. the drive (very Emersonian) toward origination. To call it the "reinvent the wheel" syndrome would be cynical; the idea is that poetic perception returns the poet & reader to a sort of dawn-time, a spiritual & intellectual inner freedom where all things are made new. This is visible across the spectrum, from Whitman to Dickinson, from Frost to Olson - extending, in Olson's case, to a kind of megalomaniac liminal region, psychologically both risky & exciting (Kenneth Warren has been exploring this aspect of Olson in an extended, complex series of essays, in his journal House Organ). Jungian, inward, soulful.
Here, actually, we might find an area of overlap between what I'm calling "integral poetry" and these current trends. That ideal "maximalist-recapitulationist" poet, whom I've been attempting to delineate in previous sections of this essay (let's call him Henry, for short) once upon a time took very much to heart the epic & totalizing ambitions of Pound & Olson. He admired Pound's vivid, witty, shorthand notation of historical events, the way he strove to blend them into vast frescos of civilizational flowering & decay; he took to Olson's injunction (offered to Ed Dorn once upon a time) to steep oneself in the cultural history of one region, one locality - become an expert; he saw this carried out beforehand in an interesting, sometimes-graceful way in WC Williams' Paterson. The challenge posed by these masterful poets was Janus-faced : a call both to emulate & to differentiate - since he found a great deal to disagree with in their underlying worldviews...
We have tried to characterize an integral poetry as rooted in experience, not deracinated : that is, a recapitulation, a synthesis of both lived (historical, biographical) and literary past. Here is the point I'm trying to make : the only way to achieve this level of integration is by drawing on the epic dimension, the epic mode. The poet is "maximalist" because totality, wholeness, universality are active, essential elements in the poetic construction.
The "things", the "minute particulars", which surface in the kind of poetry I'm talking about, are not simply particulars of the world in general : they are distinct things within the microcosmos created by the poem. The integral poet evokes and summons up a holistic imaginative world, within which particulars are surfacing all the time, on many narrative levels - exhibiting a multitude of facets, harking back to the Biblical/Dantean/Joycean richness of fourfold meaning : literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical...
& I should mention that one examplar of this approach happens to be the maximalist-recapitulationist poet, "Henry" - who has been spinning layered worlds for some time now out of the history & psycho-cyclobiography of the little state of Rhode Island, in various modalities of short & lengthy works...
V. Afterthoughts
I've probably overshot the mark, & want to hedge my remarks a little. My insistence on the epic impulse, on totality, might be taken for sheer grandiosity, magnitude for its own sake. Or for a mandarin complacency, weighed down with pedantry rather than experience : out of touch, out of air. To burden all poets & modalities of poetry with the elaborations of epic would be unrealistic, to say the least; in fact, it would represent an all-too-familiar form of eccentricity. One remembers, inevitably, Stevens' (very 20th-cent.) lines from "Poems of Our Climate" :
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
No : all I want to suggest is that the "integral", integrated vision - the epic impulse, the whole story - lies at the roots of poetry considered as a whole itself, as "one thing". It's there, as a dimension which can't be left out (ie. poetry is not reducible to Sergeant Satire & Private Lyric). A sort of underground spring, a possibility, an impulse, an aspiration - a potential source of nourishment.
The human search for wholeness, love, & freedom is not reducible to either American-style Adamism or European-style existential deracination. The search for truth also involves memory - historical, literary, poetic - & the recognition of continuities, returnings, recapitulations - strange/familiar echoes - deja-vu...
9.02.2009
Day by day, John Latta issues his uncomfortable complaint... & it seems right to me, most of the time. What sets him apart : a view of the poet as marking a distance between poetry & all the other busy discourse-games & artifice. Drawing a line on behalf of an imagined unity or congruence between the speaker/singer and the natural world. Nature as a source of equilibrium or restoration, after the corruptions of civilization - actually as a mirror of a free identity or way of living. This is in line with Pound, and through him, Whitman, Dante, the Troubadours... maybe way back to the old bards & shamans.
& the poem as complex material matrix of sound & sense, an object, a work of art - not a flippant game with discourse-symbols, or an abstract program or technical tweak, not a clever groupuscule - because the poet is engaged with a personal & psychic renewal-through-poetry, which necessarily involves subjective experience & objective vision - a personal try at the traditions of verse-music, & a working-out of actual experiential difficulties, which can't be reduced to group sing-alongs & Facebook "shout-outs".
Latta's shambling laughter & sharp left jabs are a way of coaxing us back toward a more natural & significant sense of the "honor", the dignity, of poetry - when it stands on its own feet, & separates itself from the generally lightweight distractions of the phony world of ingratiating po-biz chitter-chat...
a poem as having specific weight & gravity, & form & color - bearing witness to some silent lifting, or lifting silence... a struggle, a labor of composition (as in painting, music, sculpture...) - composing the lips for speech-song...
& the poem as complex material matrix of sound & sense, an object, a work of art - not a flippant game with discourse-symbols, or an abstract program or technical tweak, not a clever groupuscule - because the poet is engaged with a personal & psychic renewal-through-poetry, which necessarily involves subjective experience & objective vision - a personal try at the traditions of verse-music, & a working-out of actual experiential difficulties, which can't be reduced to group sing-alongs & Facebook "shout-outs".
Latta's shambling laughter & sharp left jabs are a way of coaxing us back toward a more natural & significant sense of the "honor", the dignity, of poetry - when it stands on its own feet, & separates itself from the generally lightweight distractions of the phony world of ingratiating po-biz chitter-chat...
a poem as having specific weight & gravity, & form & color - bearing witness to some silent lifting, or lifting silence... a struggle, a labor of composition (as in painting, music, sculpture...) - composing the lips for speech-song...
8.14.2009
Hybrid Nation
Am reading fine book by J. Stephen Russell, Chaucer & the Trivium (along with trying to read original Canterbury Tales).
Russell analyzes the differences between modern & medieval thinking. He talks about the influence, on the medievals' sense of language, of a dual, hierarchical culture (Latin & vernacular). & of the importance of systematic, Aristotelian logic : the 10 defining "categories" of a thing, & their adaptation to medieval school-learning (by Boethius, Porphyry, others). Here's a quote :
"What emerges from this dense enumeration is a pair of distinctions. First, of course, are species, genera, and individuals, material that was amplified in [Porphyry's] Isagogue. Second is the distinction between 'of' and 'in', that between necessary (essential) attributes and accidental ones.
"This second distinction is, with only a bit of overdramatization, the cornerstone of medieval philosophy, the taxonomy that held (and, some would say, still holds) the world together." (Russell, p. 35)
The difference between of (what can be said of a thing) and in (what is integral to the identity or substance of - definitive of - a thing). Substances and accidents - how important this concept was to the Middle Ages is indicated by these lines of Dante's final vision, at the end of the Divina Commedia (Paradiso 33) :
I saw that in its depth far down is lying
Bound up with love together in one volume,
What through the universe in leaves is scattered;
Substance, and accident, and their operations,
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple light.
Today hybrid cars are all the rage (focusing our attention on the species "automobile", to the neglect of the genus [mass] "transportation"), as well as hybrid poetry (see the Norton anthology American Hybrid - a politic fusion of "old & new") & hybrid art forms (or product diversification) of all kinds...
I wonder if there's a way to recuperate this distinction (between "of" & "in") for poetry criticism. Today the "impure" holds the positive valence, whereas the "pure" is under suspicion (logocentrism, racial "purity", essentialism, etc.). But the political manipulation of racial hatreds, for example, could be analyzed as a version of logical category-confusion (ie. the "purity of the (German, white, black, take your pick) race" posits a substantial aspect (race) for what is in truth an accident (race is an accidental aspect of the genus human being). & the proposition of "hybrid" poetries - ie. Ron Silliman : "there is no such thing as poetry, there are only kinds of poetry" (I'm quoting from memory) - referring to such things as, I guess, slam, post-avant, "SOQ", elliptical, neo-objectivism, Slow Poetry, Investigative Poetics, conceptual, flarf, etc. etc. - might also be a kind of category-confusion. Cui bono? Who benefits? Is it possible that these hybrid forms offer a sort of brand diversification, a way simultaneously to make inroads in, & to maintain (or re-vivify), the academic industry of teaching poetry-writing? & in the pursuit of "accidental" qualities, are we obscuring (or denying) poetry's more basic, integral substance?
Russell analyzes the differences between modern & medieval thinking. He talks about the influence, on the medievals' sense of language, of a dual, hierarchical culture (Latin & vernacular). & of the importance of systematic, Aristotelian logic : the 10 defining "categories" of a thing, & their adaptation to medieval school-learning (by Boethius, Porphyry, others). Here's a quote :
"What emerges from this dense enumeration is a pair of distinctions. First, of course, are species, genera, and individuals, material that was amplified in [Porphyry's] Isagogue. Second is the distinction between 'of' and 'in', that between necessary (essential) attributes and accidental ones.
"This second distinction is, with only a bit of overdramatization, the cornerstone of medieval philosophy, the taxonomy that held (and, some would say, still holds) the world together." (Russell, p. 35)
The difference between of (what can be said of a thing) and in (what is integral to the identity or substance of - definitive of - a thing). Substances and accidents - how important this concept was to the Middle Ages is indicated by these lines of Dante's final vision, at the end of the Divina Commedia (Paradiso 33) :
I saw that in its depth far down is lying
Bound up with love together in one volume,
What through the universe in leaves is scattered;
Substance, and accident, and their operations,
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple light.
Today hybrid cars are all the rage (focusing our attention on the species "automobile", to the neglect of the genus [mass] "transportation"), as well as hybrid poetry (see the Norton anthology American Hybrid - a politic fusion of "old & new") & hybrid art forms (or product diversification) of all kinds...
I wonder if there's a way to recuperate this distinction (between "of" & "in") for poetry criticism. Today the "impure" holds the positive valence, whereas the "pure" is under suspicion (logocentrism, racial "purity", essentialism, etc.). But the political manipulation of racial hatreds, for example, could be analyzed as a version of logical category-confusion (ie. the "purity of the (German, white, black, take your pick) race" posits a substantial aspect (race) for what is in truth an accident (race is an accidental aspect of the genus human being). & the proposition of "hybrid" poetries - ie. Ron Silliman : "there is no such thing as poetry, there are only kinds of poetry" (I'm quoting from memory) - referring to such things as, I guess, slam, post-avant, "SOQ", elliptical, neo-objectivism, Slow Poetry, Investigative Poetics, conceptual, flarf, etc. etc. - might also be a kind of category-confusion. Cui bono? Who benefits? Is it possible that these hybrid forms offer a sort of brand diversification, a way simultaneously to make inroads in, & to maintain (or re-vivify), the academic industry of teaching poetry-writing? & in the pursuit of "accidental" qualities, are we obscuring (or denying) poetry's more basic, integral substance?
8.13.2009
8.11.2009
8.10.2009
8.09.2009
8.07.2009
8.06.2009
The Word is Psyche
Working on Lanthanum this morning, looking back through older sections, I was struck by the sense of another level, a poem-beyond-the-poem. Something just intimated or suggested, unexpressed. As if the keynote of the various sections had something to do with this effort to evoke or enunciate a presence or a state of things or persons beyond the actual details, the "narrative". & the whole vague unfinishable quest feeling hanging over it.
Speaking for myself anyway, poets are not very reliable guides to their own poetry. Maybe we're too close to be able to recognize our own distinctive shape or characteristic music... I don't know.
This is another way of saying that often our determined formulations of what we think we're doing are actually expressions of resistance or opposition to our real tendencies as writers - tracks of an inner conflict, maybe.
Thus my harping for years & decades on Acmeism, realism, plain speech, etc. - may have something to do with the fact that in reality I'm sort of an Edgar Cayce of poetry (I exaggerate) - not the "dreamer-prophet", but just the blind dreamer (my resistance to early affinity for Ashbery, a telling sign).
It's this idea of music or evocation - Mallarme, suggestion - Symbolism, heaven forfend! The idea that poets don't really know what they're about, that there is a finer level of meaning, a kind of resonance tone we can barely recognize, inner sight, inner vision...
we each have our own distinctive private relationship & inner bond with speech & language, & with the persons hovering in the background of those rivery sounds we love & echo-resonate...
Mandelstam : "the Word is Psyche"...
More could be said on this, but I have to go....
Speaking for myself anyway, poets are not very reliable guides to their own poetry. Maybe we're too close to be able to recognize our own distinctive shape or characteristic music... I don't know.
This is another way of saying that often our determined formulations of what we think we're doing are actually expressions of resistance or opposition to our real tendencies as writers - tracks of an inner conflict, maybe.
Thus my harping for years & decades on Acmeism, realism, plain speech, etc. - may have something to do with the fact that in reality I'm sort of an Edgar Cayce of poetry (I exaggerate) - not the "dreamer-prophet", but just the blind dreamer (my resistance to early affinity for Ashbery, a telling sign).
It's this idea of music or evocation - Mallarme, suggestion - Symbolism, heaven forfend! The idea that poets don't really know what they're about, that there is a finer level of meaning, a kind of resonance tone we can barely recognize, inner sight, inner vision...
we each have our own distinctive private relationship & inner bond with speech & language, & with the persons hovering in the background of those rivery sounds we love & echo-resonate...
Mandelstam : "the Word is Psyche"...
More could be said on this, but I have to go....
8.05.2009
8.04.2009
Providence/Dhaka jam
Scenes from the backyard... with my son-in-law Khaled, & Phoebe. Playing Khaled's Bengali-pop song.
7.31.2009
On the other hand
The state of my soul, and my rational concepts about religion, are sometimes (maybe always) two very different things (or in two different places). On the other hand, it seems to me that what I believe, and how I act (or don't act) on such belief, largely determine my future.
I am not a Christian fundamentalist; that is, I don't believe in the "literal truth" of Scripture - transparent, beyond interpretation, devoid of symbol or irony. On the other hand, I put great store by the literal meaning of the stories & sayings found there; and I think that within the much-scorned & so-called "right-wing Christian" (sub)culture, there are rich dimensions of experience & understanding which are often outside the range of mainstream mass consciousness. These dimensions have opened up simply because these "fundamentalists" have a serious fascination with the Bible. They read it carefully; they apply its old wisdom sayings & exempla & exhortations in surprising contemporary (everyday) situations (for better & worse). (I'm not just theorizing here... I've met & talked with many such people.)
I am not a Christian fundamentalist; that is, I don't believe in the "literal truth" of Scripture - transparent, beyond interpretation, devoid of symbol or irony. On the other hand, I put great store by the literal meaning of the stories & sayings found there; and I think that within the much-scorned & so-called "right-wing Christian" (sub)culture, there are rich dimensions of experience & understanding which are often outside the range of mainstream mass consciousness. These dimensions have opened up simply because these "fundamentalists" have a serious fascination with the Bible. They read it carefully; they apply its old wisdom sayings & exempla & exhortations in surprising contemporary (everyday) situations (for better & worse). (I'm not just theorizing here... I've met & talked with many such people.)
7.27.2009
7.20.2009
Lunar Lanthanum
New Lanthanum.
re some obscurities in this poem -
1. Yesterday was 40th anniversary of moon landing.
2. I went to school with now-Sen. Al Franken. We were on the wrestling team (sparring partners in the daily practices), & in the literary club together. Franken & classmate Tom Davis were already a budding comedy duo then. One of their first shows together was a dramatization of a short story of mine, which was staged in the school chapel. The story was titled "The Movie-Maker"; the Shirley-Jacksonish plot involved an intrusive TV film-maker & his entourage, invading a small town in order to document "real American life" (barging in on town meetings, picnics, ball games, funerals, etc.). They are finally undone by 3 ancient codgers, usually found seated together on a park bench, "as still & silent as stones, and old as the trees around them." The story was published in the school literary magazine, Talisman, around 1968.
(I'm not sure what the phrase "Al Frankenstein", in the poem, means, exactly; but it's certainly not meant as a personal put-down of Al, whom I like & admire a great deal. I'm thinking about how public figures & political personae are to some extent fictional creations of the public "mind"....)
re some obscurities in this poem -
1. Yesterday was 40th anniversary of moon landing.
2. I went to school with now-Sen. Al Franken. We were on the wrestling team (sparring partners in the daily practices), & in the literary club together. Franken & classmate Tom Davis were already a budding comedy duo then. One of their first shows together was a dramatization of a short story of mine, which was staged in the school chapel. The story was titled "The Movie-Maker"; the Shirley-Jacksonish plot involved an intrusive TV film-maker & his entourage, invading a small town in order to document "real American life" (barging in on town meetings, picnics, ball games, funerals, etc.). They are finally undone by 3 ancient codgers, usually found seated together on a park bench, "as still & silent as stones, and old as the trees around them." The story was published in the school literary magazine, Talisman, around 1968.
(I'm not sure what the phrase "Al Frankenstein", in the poem, means, exactly; but it's certainly not meant as a personal put-down of Al, whom I like & admire a great deal. I'm thinking about how public figures & political personae are to some extent fictional creations of the public "mind"....)
7.11.2009
7.08.2009
7.07.2009
7.05.2009
7.02.2009
7.01.2009
Thundery ruminations in July
Rainy, dark, thunderous. Quiet in the library. Ruminating my usual crop of enigmas.
Relentlessly, in my thinking, I try to reconcile theological concepts with what seems reasonable or true to me.
One of my stumbling-blocks is the patriarchal/sometimes-misogynistic language and ideology in traditional Christianity. (Presently re-reading Susan Haskins' fascinating book, Mary Magdalen, which confronts some of these issues.)
The language about God and the Trinity is, indeed, enigmatic. The misogyny in much of the Bible & in ecclesiastical history (in contrast to what seems to be Jesus' own attitude toward women as depicted in the Gospels) runs deep.
I put this in sort of abstract/discursive terms here, which don't represent very well the inward (or psychological?) realities - where thinking & poetry intersect...
My view of the cosmos leans toward "idealism"... reality is psychic, "personal" - constructed deep in the mind - and the human mind sinks down at some deep layer toward a cosmic Mind or God (the "I Am")... (see the wonderful Erwin Schrodinger on this... or that sometime Rhode Islander, Bishop Berkeley... or Einstein... Coleridge... Nicolas Cusanus...)
The prophetic "plan of Providence", or the revelation of the divine Word in Israel & Christ, is a deeply dramatic event, a "disclosure" (see Hans Urs von Balthasar on this).
Part of this disclosure involves an element of spiritual power or authority - the authority of the truth itself, the authority of authority, the power of power, the truth of truth. I understand the "plan of Providence" in part as a disclosure of the spiritual rulership or authority of the divine Mind (or Person(s)) at the roots of the sentient soul. One of the consequences of this disclosure involves the instauration of human freedom (since - in the disclosure of spiritual authority rooted in the human soul - all tyrannical, "earthly" powers of human beings, over other human beings & creatures, are overthrown). The "kingship" of God & Christ - as worked out in history - shows itself to be a kind of anti-kingship (going back to the Mosaic opposition to Pharaoh, and up to Roger Williams' "soul liberty", or Martin Luther King's mission...).
(This is the kind of anti-history, by the way, that I have tried to juxtapose, in my poetry, to other, competing or parallel, "epic" visions - in Pound, Crane, Olson, David Jones...)
I think future theology (already underway) in both Judaism & Christianity (though I can't really speak for Judaism) will see a re-fashioning of gender perspectives and symbolism. Maybe the muse of poetry will have something to do with this. Yahweh & the anointed (king) Jesus will be seen as (male) "actors" in a political-historical drama, which also includes a somewhat subterranean feminine presence, influence and (stage) direction. (This is part of my interest in the (perhaps suppressed) role of Mary Magdalen.) Let's call it (after Harold Bloom's notion of a female author of the Bible) the deep Book of J (still in ms. form)...
The cosmos will not fit neatly into ancient human concepts... but I'm a conservative, I don't like to throw out old ideas just because they're old - I like to try to find the newness hidden in them, the enigmas.
I can imagine a Jesus-like figure emerging on countless various planets across the universe, with different forms of conscious life. Because what it represents is something (remotely) analogous to what happens when Alfred Hitchcock walks through his movie, or Durer paints himself in the corner of a crucifixion scene. That is, the incarnate, embodied figure is the living signature of the Maker : the sign, the seal of cosmic Presence and purpose. This is a very deep thing, at the root of Christianity (& perhaps Judaism too). Creation is indeed a work of art - a drama - one in which our Maker steps on stage, and in doing so, makes us one with the Maker...
Relentlessly, in my thinking, I try to reconcile theological concepts with what seems reasonable or true to me.
One of my stumbling-blocks is the patriarchal/sometimes-misogynistic language and ideology in traditional Christianity. (Presently re-reading Susan Haskins' fascinating book, Mary Magdalen, which confronts some of these issues.)
The language about God and the Trinity is, indeed, enigmatic. The misogyny in much of the Bible & in ecclesiastical history (in contrast to what seems to be Jesus' own attitude toward women as depicted in the Gospels) runs deep.
I put this in sort of abstract/discursive terms here, which don't represent very well the inward (or psychological?) realities - where thinking & poetry intersect...
My view of the cosmos leans toward "idealism"... reality is psychic, "personal" - constructed deep in the mind - and the human mind sinks down at some deep layer toward a cosmic Mind or God (the "I Am")... (see the wonderful Erwin Schrodinger on this... or that sometime Rhode Islander, Bishop Berkeley... or Einstein... Coleridge... Nicolas Cusanus...)
The prophetic "plan of Providence", or the revelation of the divine Word in Israel & Christ, is a deeply dramatic event, a "disclosure" (see Hans Urs von Balthasar on this).
Part of this disclosure involves an element of spiritual power or authority - the authority of the truth itself, the authority of authority, the power of power, the truth of truth. I understand the "plan of Providence" in part as a disclosure of the spiritual rulership or authority of the divine Mind (or Person(s)) at the roots of the sentient soul. One of the consequences of this disclosure involves the instauration of human freedom (since - in the disclosure of spiritual authority rooted in the human soul - all tyrannical, "earthly" powers of human beings, over other human beings & creatures, are overthrown). The "kingship" of God & Christ - as worked out in history - shows itself to be a kind of anti-kingship (going back to the Mosaic opposition to Pharaoh, and up to Roger Williams' "soul liberty", or Martin Luther King's mission...).
(This is the kind of anti-history, by the way, that I have tried to juxtapose, in my poetry, to other, competing or parallel, "epic" visions - in Pound, Crane, Olson, David Jones...)
I think future theology (already underway) in both Judaism & Christianity (though I can't really speak for Judaism) will see a re-fashioning of gender perspectives and symbolism. Maybe the muse of poetry will have something to do with this. Yahweh & the anointed (king) Jesus will be seen as (male) "actors" in a political-historical drama, which also includes a somewhat subterranean feminine presence, influence and (stage) direction. (This is part of my interest in the (perhaps suppressed) role of Mary Magdalen.) Let's call it (after Harold Bloom's notion of a female author of the Bible) the deep Book of J (still in ms. form)...
The cosmos will not fit neatly into ancient human concepts... but I'm a conservative, I don't like to throw out old ideas just because they're old - I like to try to find the newness hidden in them, the enigmas.
I can imagine a Jesus-like figure emerging on countless various planets across the universe, with different forms of conscious life. Because what it represents is something (remotely) analogous to what happens when Alfred Hitchcock walks through his movie, or Durer paints himself in the corner of a crucifixion scene. That is, the incarnate, embodied figure is the living signature of the Maker : the sign, the seal of cosmic Presence and purpose. This is a very deep thing, at the root of Christianity (& perhaps Judaism too). Creation is indeed a work of art - a drama - one in which our Maker steps on stage, and in doing so, makes us one with the Maker...
6.26.2009
Kermit Roosevelt, Noam Chomsky & the East Side Monthly
Poets & spies... the links go back a long way (to Christopher Marlowe, if not before). The recent turmoil in Iran, and the sense that the Iranian Revolution may be coming full circle, got me digging around in my old cardboard files - since the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 set the stage for my own slight, indirect (& comical) brush with cloak-&-dagger.
In 1979 I was hanging around Providence after graduation from Brown, running a food coop & trying to write. One day I was behind the counter at Kneecap (the storefront coop) when I was approached by one of our volunteer members, a grad student and film maker. He told me he had been working as a graduate assistant for one of the elder professors at Brown (possibly in the Poli Sci or History depts, I can't remember which) - a professor who had retired previously from a long career with the CIA.
The student told me that the professor had received the proofs of an unpublished book from one of his former colleagues, a career CIA man named Kermit Roosevelt (the grandson of Theodore). The book was titled Countercoup. The book was ready for publication and distribution when the hostage crisis suddenly erupted, in November 1979. At that point, publication was halted : the copies were warehoused. Roosevelt's story of his role in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government, and the installation of the Shah, while not completely new and unknown, was explosive.
Anyway, this student told me he had surreptitiously made a copy of the proof version of Roosevelt's book, and he would relay it to me. We both felt at the time that the truth should come out, though in retrospect our motives seem naive and self-interested (grandstanding, in a situation where hostage lives were endangered). I felt like I was playing an exciting bit part in a spy drama.
After receiving the xerox copy of the proofs, I read through the book and wrote a long "expose" in the local neighborhood paper (probably one of the most unusual articles which the very parochial East Side Monthly has published in its 40-yr history). I also contacted Noam Chomsky, and eventually sent him a copy of the ms. I have Chomsky's correspondence with me from that time : in retrospect he seems prudent (warning against doing something rash in that overheated situation).
That, I think, is the extent of my spy experience, at least up to now... (I suppose it was also the last time the elderly Brown prof - ex-Company man - was himself the object of an espionage attack...)
p.s. on 2nd thought, maybe I'm being too hard on myself & the young grad student. At the time, we thought the Kermit Roosevelt book might simply be deep-sixed, shredded. That's why he passed it to me in the 1st place. & that's why I wrote the whistleblowing article for the East Side Monthly. "Shout it from the rooftops". God is Great. Death to the Dictator.
(p.p.s. I'm reading old Graham Greene novels these days. A high school favorite. My father's favorite movie : Our Man in Havana (reading that now). He's great... so much better than John le Carre...)
In 1979 I was hanging around Providence after graduation from Brown, running a food coop & trying to write. One day I was behind the counter at Kneecap (the storefront coop) when I was approached by one of our volunteer members, a grad student and film maker. He told me he had been working as a graduate assistant for one of the elder professors at Brown (possibly in the Poli Sci or History depts, I can't remember which) - a professor who had retired previously from a long career with the CIA.
The student told me that the professor had received the proofs of an unpublished book from one of his former colleagues, a career CIA man named Kermit Roosevelt (the grandson of Theodore). The book was titled Countercoup. The book was ready for publication and distribution when the hostage crisis suddenly erupted, in November 1979. At that point, publication was halted : the copies were warehoused. Roosevelt's story of his role in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government, and the installation of the Shah, while not completely new and unknown, was explosive.
Anyway, this student told me he had surreptitiously made a copy of the proof version of Roosevelt's book, and he would relay it to me. We both felt at the time that the truth should come out, though in retrospect our motives seem naive and self-interested (grandstanding, in a situation where hostage lives were endangered). I felt like I was playing an exciting bit part in a spy drama.
After receiving the xerox copy of the proofs, I read through the book and wrote a long "expose" in the local neighborhood paper (probably one of the most unusual articles which the very parochial East Side Monthly has published in its 40-yr history). I also contacted Noam Chomsky, and eventually sent him a copy of the ms. I have Chomsky's correspondence with me from that time : in retrospect he seems prudent (warning against doing something rash in that overheated situation).
That, I think, is the extent of my spy experience, at least up to now... (I suppose it was also the last time the elderly Brown prof - ex-Company man - was himself the object of an espionage attack...)
p.s. on 2nd thought, maybe I'm being too hard on myself & the young grad student. At the time, we thought the Kermit Roosevelt book might simply be deep-sixed, shredded. That's why he passed it to me in the 1st place. & that's why I wrote the whistleblowing article for the East Side Monthly. "Shout it from the rooftops". God is Great. Death to the Dictator.
(p.p.s. I'm reading old Graham Greene novels these days. A high school favorite. My father's favorite movie : Our Man in Havana (reading that now). He's great... so much better than John le Carre...)
6.25.2009
Erwin Schrodinger, science & poetry...
Finished the Schrodinger book (Nature and the Greeks ; and, Science and humanism). This physicist makes an unlikely ally for the artist, in that he maintains a strict sense of the limits of science. He emphasizes (in reflections on early Greek science & its legacy) how the scientific model of objectivity is just that - a model : insofar as consciousness - the consciousness of the observer - is detached from the agreed-upon common worldview which develops along with the development of science. Schrodinger's philosophic attitude maintains an awareness of both dimensions, without confusing them. He reiterates that science has not answered (and cannot) the most basic question : "Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?" (and all the subjective, personal, spiritual experience that consciousness and identity entail). In this he seems to stand in opposition to much current scientific thinking (brain science, biological determinism). His thinking is dense, sophisticated, & deeply informed in philosophy, history of science, & scientific practice per se (he was, remember, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century). & a pleasure to read - though so subtle & complex (as when he gets into old issues of free will & determinism) I sometimes have trouble following... Want to find his book Mind & Matter now.
Since I was a teenager I've had this bent toward cosmology, metaphysics... & have tended to think of poetry as a different way of being & thinking - in rivalry, that is, with scientific positivism & determinism... but not necessarily irreconcilable (same with religion & science)...
Since I was a teenager I've had this bent toward cosmology, metaphysics... & have tended to think of poetry as a different way of being & thinking - in rivalry, that is, with scientific positivism & determinism... but not necessarily irreconcilable (same with religion & science)...
6.19.2009
On Form & Infinity in Poetry
Have been reading some beautiful things by 20th-cent. physicist Erwin Schrodinger (Nature and the Greeks). What a witty, wonderful writer he is! Philosopher-scientist. Interesting how the crisis of the 2 world wars & the Nuclear Age sent so many different kinds of thinkers & personalities back to origins of civilization (Schrodinger, TS Eliot, Chas. Olson, to name just a few...).
Anyway, reading his description of the encounter of earliest Greek science (Pythagoras, Thales, others) with the riddles of mathematics... it occurred to me that this all might have some pertinence in relation to poetry wars...
The thrust of the "new" (contemporary) formalists - & beyond formalism, the thrust of Poetry-as-Craft in general - is grounded in a concept of elegance : elegance, rooted in "number" in the poetic-mathematical sense. The poem is a sleek sort of toy - a verbal isometry between the concept & its expression (wit) - in which the evidence of mastery takes the form of elegant numbers...
Well, the problem I'm having with all this at the moment is that the idea of number... allied with the notion of craft & finish... & connected thus with the idea of elegance, mastery &, basically, success... (or authority)... well, all this runs head on into an aspect of Nature (that Nature with which Art is supposed to be elegantly married) which we might call either the Continuum... or Infinity... or Irrational Numbers...
an aspect of number which was a conundrum & embarrassment for the Greeks, & a mystifying puzzle for Cantor & other great mathematicians...
In my book, poetry is connected very substantially with the diagonal to the square of value "1" (ie. sq root of 2) - an irrational number... - & infinity - which scares & has frightened so many sophisticated poets, craftspeople, thinkers, calculators & operators - since it seems to open up again what they thought they had so elegantly counted out, measured, numbered, & closed off -
& why so? because infinity & the irrational are connected with the much-maligned "I" - that mysterious Subject - Shakespeare behind the arras - God - Keats' (negatively-capable) negrido - the Soul... & the great inimitable poets of all times are searching (elegantly, sublimely) beyond elegance... toward the (irrational square) root, the supra-elegance of... the ultimate Workshop (of the supernatural Author's... spiral jetty, or... Book of J...)... ie. the steep, the vertiginous, the vanishing point, that dimensionless point in Dante (& Joyce) wherefrom all the elegant magnitudes of creation proceed...
&, paradoxically, the oh-so-fumbly-stumbling quality of their (metaphysical, experiential) searching is precisely that dimension which allows the personal, the characteristic, the improvisational, to shine forth (very American) in their poetry... & make it inimitable & great... what they used to call Sublimity...
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it...
Anyway, reading his description of the encounter of earliest Greek science (Pythagoras, Thales, others) with the riddles of mathematics... it occurred to me that this all might have some pertinence in relation to poetry wars...
The thrust of the "new" (contemporary) formalists - & beyond formalism, the thrust of Poetry-as-Craft in general - is grounded in a concept of elegance : elegance, rooted in "number" in the poetic-mathematical sense. The poem is a sleek sort of toy - a verbal isometry between the concept & its expression (wit) - in which the evidence of mastery takes the form of elegant numbers...
Well, the problem I'm having with all this at the moment is that the idea of number... allied with the notion of craft & finish... & connected thus with the idea of elegance, mastery &, basically, success... (or authority)... well, all this runs head on into an aspect of Nature (that Nature with which Art is supposed to be elegantly married) which we might call either the Continuum... or Infinity... or Irrational Numbers...
an aspect of number which was a conundrum & embarrassment for the Greeks, & a mystifying puzzle for Cantor & other great mathematicians...
In my book, poetry is connected very substantially with the diagonal to the square of value "1" (ie. sq root of 2) - an irrational number... - & infinity - which scares & has frightened so many sophisticated poets, craftspeople, thinkers, calculators & operators - since it seems to open up again what they thought they had so elegantly counted out, measured, numbered, & closed off -
& why so? because infinity & the irrational are connected with the much-maligned "I" - that mysterious Subject - Shakespeare behind the arras - God - Keats' (negatively-capable) negrido - the Soul... & the great inimitable poets of all times are searching (elegantly, sublimely) beyond elegance... toward the (irrational square) root, the supra-elegance of... the ultimate Workshop (of the supernatural Author's... spiral jetty, or... Book of J...)... ie. the steep, the vertiginous, the vanishing point, that dimensionless point in Dante (& Joyce) wherefrom all the elegant magnitudes of creation proceed...
&, paradoxically, the oh-so-fumbly-stumbling quality of their (metaphysical, experiential) searching is precisely that dimension which allows the personal, the characteristic, the improvisational, to shine forth (very American) in their poetry... & make it inimitable & great... what they used to call Sublimity...
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it...
6.16.2009
6.15.2009
Way Stations, Island Road, Dove Street, Stubborn Grew, Grassblade Light, July - all available now (from Lulu.com) via Amazon. Still waiting on Rest Note.
6.08.2009
6.07.2009
6.05.2009
Local Things - In Loco Kenosis
Speaking of long poems... thinking about Chicagoan Robert Archambeau's recent digest on manifestos, and how, for Robert, style, and the politics of style, seems to be the prime function of poetry, & the pivot of its analysis...
& thinking about Stephen Burt's recent "New Thing" quasi-manifesto, detailing the swing back to restraint, impersonality, objectivism, the thingness of (poem) things... & yet the framework seems to be, again, a focus on the pendulum of style...
which got me thinking of another Chicagoan, Peter O'Leary, who manages to inject a Catholic-spiritual dimension into the consideration of "objectivity" (see his articles etc. on poet Frank Samperi)...
But couldn't it be said that the style of objectivity in American poetry has a lineage in Puritan poetics (Edw. Taylor) & Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau)... & that Emerson, Whitman et al. carried this into a kind of (Romantic) quasi-divinization of the human mind & imagination... setting it free from the Bonds of antiquity & Europe, into the primal wilderness of new "local" discovery (Wallace Stevens, WCW, Olson, Dorn, so many others)...
The thing I keep coming back to is the historical aspect of Christianity... the absolute local "thingness" of the Incarnation... & how the Eastern Orthodox concept of "divinization" somehow echoes, yet corrects & resolves the Faustian egoism of Western Renaissance-Romantic consciousness (precisely because that divinization is dependent on the unique history - the abject-glorious historical actuality - of Incarnation)... as one scholar recently paraphrased the famous formula of Irenaeus - Cur Deus homo? (why did God become man?) "God became man so that man might become God" : "A human being becomes god only insofar as God becomes this particular human being [ie., Jesus. & my italics]." (Arkadi Choufrine, Gnosis, Theophany, Theosis)...
This comes up in my brief essay on the long poem... & reminds me of the tremendous historical-Roman thinginess of long-poem poet David Jones... a local kenosis...
& these theological things might provide a conceptual frame for aesthetics... which transcends the boxed-in artiness of American style-for-its-own sake...
& my own endless unfinished Opusses, lost in Rhode Island... the infinite quatrainian guitar-solos - tending toward the vanishing point of Apocalypse, Eschaton... Golden Age... this is my framework... (& I guess you might even say that this ecstatic see-saw logic of Incarnation - "God became man so that man might become God" - this historical/pivotal, scriptural/anti-scriptural, word/flesh balancing act - is at the root of a style of the "plumbline"...)
(Perhaps the best summa of all the issues raised in this post can be found in Joseph Brodsky's great poem of thingness & crucifixion - "Nature Morte".)
& thinking about Stephen Burt's recent "New Thing" quasi-manifesto, detailing the swing back to restraint, impersonality, objectivism, the thingness of (poem) things... & yet the framework seems to be, again, a focus on the pendulum of style...
which got me thinking of another Chicagoan, Peter O'Leary, who manages to inject a Catholic-spiritual dimension into the consideration of "objectivity" (see his articles etc. on poet Frank Samperi)...
But couldn't it be said that the style of objectivity in American poetry has a lineage in Puritan poetics (Edw. Taylor) & Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau)... & that Emerson, Whitman et al. carried this into a kind of (Romantic) quasi-divinization of the human mind & imagination... setting it free from the Bonds of antiquity & Europe, into the primal wilderness of new "local" discovery (Wallace Stevens, WCW, Olson, Dorn, so many others)...
The thing I keep coming back to is the historical aspect of Christianity... the absolute local "thingness" of the Incarnation... & how the Eastern Orthodox concept of "divinization" somehow echoes, yet corrects & resolves the Faustian egoism of Western Renaissance-Romantic consciousness (precisely because that divinization is dependent on the unique history - the abject-glorious historical actuality - of Incarnation)... as one scholar recently paraphrased the famous formula of Irenaeus - Cur Deus homo? (why did God become man?) "God became man so that man might become God" : "A human being becomes god only insofar as God becomes this particular human being [ie., Jesus. & my italics]." (Arkadi Choufrine, Gnosis, Theophany, Theosis)...
This comes up in my brief essay on the long poem... & reminds me of the tremendous historical-Roman thinginess of long-poem poet David Jones... a local kenosis...
& these theological things might provide a conceptual frame for aesthetics... which transcends the boxed-in artiness of American style-for-its-own sake...
& my own endless unfinished Opusses, lost in Rhode Island... the infinite quatrainian guitar-solos - tending toward the vanishing point of Apocalypse, Eschaton... Golden Age... this is my framework... (& I guess you might even say that this ecstatic see-saw logic of Incarnation - "God became man so that man might become God" - this historical/pivotal, scriptural/anti-scriptural, word/flesh balancing act - is at the root of a style of the "plumbline"...)
(Perhaps the best summa of all the issues raised in this post can be found in Joseph Brodsky's great poem of thingness & crucifixion - "Nature Morte".)
5.25.2009
newest Lanthanum. Happy Memorial Day.
Lincoln with his generals, at the battle of Antietam. Big guy at the end is my gr-gr-grand-uncle, Genl. Delos Sackett.
Lincoln with his generals, at the battle of Antietam. Big guy at the end is my gr-gr-grand-uncle, Genl. Delos Sackett.
5.24.2009
5.22.2009
5.21.2009
Adios for now
I think I'm going to "go quiet" here at HG Poetics for a while. Will probably be back eventually. Feel the need to change the way I do things. Thanks for visiting, friends.
5.14.2009
5.11.2009
5.08.2009
Late Stevens
Reading BJ Leggett's excellent (& nice & short) Late Stevens. I really liked one of his earlier books, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory. He has a way of correcting (gently) the Stevens big shots, Bloom & Vendler et al.
Stevens, in a statement on "Auroras of Autumn" : "There are many poems relating to the interactions between reality and imagination, which are to be regarded as marginal to the central theme... [which is] the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfillment." (quoted by Leggett on p.1). & from the epigraph to 1st chapter : "The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." (from Stevens' Adagia)
Leggett's argument (which I'm just getting going with) is that many of Stevens' later poems (in The Rock, etc.) are intertextually aligned with "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and other, earlier poems on this "central" theme. & (to paraphrase) Leggett summarizes Stevens' focus on this theme, as a meditation on the idea that the fiction of reality is the generating dream of an inhuman mind - sagacious, inventive, changing, unaccountable, inexplicable... yet - as an imagination - showing a likeness to our own imagination. Leggett attends closely to some lines in the opening poem in The Rock, "An Old Man Asleep" :
The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.
A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.
The self and the earth - your thoughts, your feelings,
Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot.
The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,
The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.
He shows how these lines imply that the river & the chestnut trees are the thoughts of one of the "two worlds" (the earth) - that is, that the things of the earth, the "outside", are fictions of a greater, "inhuman" dreamer; & the "two worlds" are mingled together here, ambiguously joined.
So it seems the "supreme fiction" is a new expression of a very old idea... of the fictiveness (the "made" quality) of reality.
Stevens, in a statement on "Auroras of Autumn" : "There are many poems relating to the interactions between reality and imagination, which are to be regarded as marginal to the central theme... [which is] the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfillment." (quoted by Leggett on p.1). & from the epigraph to 1st chapter : "The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." (from Stevens' Adagia)
Leggett's argument (which I'm just getting going with) is that many of Stevens' later poems (in The Rock, etc.) are intertextually aligned with "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" and other, earlier poems on this "central" theme. & (to paraphrase) Leggett summarizes Stevens' focus on this theme, as a meditation on the idea that the fiction of reality is the generating dream of an inhuman mind - sagacious, inventive, changing, unaccountable, inexplicable... yet - as an imagination - showing a likeness to our own imagination. Leggett attends closely to some lines in the opening poem in The Rock, "An Old Man Asleep" :
The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.
A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.
The self and the earth - your thoughts, your feelings,
Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot.
The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,
The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.
He shows how these lines imply that the river & the chestnut trees are the thoughts of one of the "two worlds" (the earth) - that is, that the things of the earth, the "outside", are fictions of a greater, "inhuman" dreamer; & the "two worlds" are mingled together here, ambiguously joined.
So it seems the "supreme fiction" is a new expression of a very old idea... of the fictiveness (the "made" quality) of reality.
5.07.2009
Gateway of dream
I had an odd experience two mornings ago. I woke up thinking about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, MO.
Why? I have absolutely no idea. I have never given that particular monument, designed by Eero Saarinen, a moment's thought. I have never visited St. Louis (though the 19th-cent. city of Twain & Melville does show up in a chapter toward the end of the long poem, Forth of July).
In any case, the dream may have set me off in a whole new direction. I am thinking a lot about the relation between poetry & architecture right now. Hoping it will offer me a new way to approach "objectivity". Saarinen's catenary arc (a recurrent image in Forth of July) might offer a model for other things - an example (adjustable, adaptable) of how to "place", integrate or infiltrate poetry in a public world.
Architecture wakes me up. There are a lot of architectonic elements in my poetry over the last 20 yrs. I'm a builder - it runs in the family.
Why? I have absolutely no idea. I have never given that particular monument, designed by Eero Saarinen, a moment's thought. I have never visited St. Louis (though the 19th-cent. city of Twain & Melville does show up in a chapter toward the end of the long poem, Forth of July).
In any case, the dream may have set me off in a whole new direction. I am thinking a lot about the relation between poetry & architecture right now. Hoping it will offer me a new way to approach "objectivity". Saarinen's catenary arc (a recurrent image in Forth of July) might offer a model for other things - an example (adjustable, adaptable) of how to "place", integrate or infiltrate poetry in a public world.
Architecture wakes me up. There are a lot of architectonic elements in my poetry over the last 20 yrs. I'm a builder - it runs in the family.
5.06.2009
5.04.2009
5.01.2009
more beginner's speculation on Gillian Rose
Over-simplified version of one major theme in Gillian Rose (at least as far as I can make out) : humanity formulates ideals for itself, and then fails to live up to them. This is the record of history. The "diremption" (violent severance) of ethics from political institutions. The way idealistic intentions lead to their contraries (unintended consequences). Exotic but familiar American examples (my own) : the counter-cultural love-commune becomes the totalitarian death-cult. 19th-cent. Russian egalitarianism becomes 20th-century Stalinism.
The frustrated rage this failure produces, leads in turn to new crystallizations of (pseudo-moral) absolutist or evasive theories & ideologies. (See, in various ways : Derrida, Foucault, Levinas...). Rose demands a closer, harder look at the actualities of the chasm between the stated ideals of modern civil society and the technocratic-statist political mechanisms by which it is upheld and administered. But not on behalf of some new totalizing revolution : rather to make us more aware of this Janus-faced crisis of our civil institutions (our law), so that perhaps we can ameliorate the inescapable conflicts that result (a recognition of the reality of the "broken middle" is the first step toward forms of mediation).
The human tragicomedy of errors should lead to a sense of moral implication, mutuality, recognition, forgiveness, mercy. & comedy. Rose situates herself at the boundary between post-Enlightenment modernity and a more ancient religious conception of human nature - its correlation with & dependence on "Spirit" (Hegelian-Kierkegaardian/Judeo-Christian, I think...).
I may be way off the mark here. Rose is a very difficult writer. Forgive (&/or correct) my mistakes & bowdlerization, you who know better.
The frustrated rage this failure produces, leads in turn to new crystallizations of (pseudo-moral) absolutist or evasive theories & ideologies. (See, in various ways : Derrida, Foucault, Levinas...). Rose demands a closer, harder look at the actualities of the chasm between the stated ideals of modern civil society and the technocratic-statist political mechanisms by which it is upheld and administered. But not on behalf of some new totalizing revolution : rather to make us more aware of this Janus-faced crisis of our civil institutions (our law), so that perhaps we can ameliorate the inescapable conflicts that result (a recognition of the reality of the "broken middle" is the first step toward forms of mediation).
The human tragicomedy of errors should lead to a sense of moral implication, mutuality, recognition, forgiveness, mercy. & comedy. Rose situates herself at the boundary between post-Enlightenment modernity and a more ancient religious conception of human nature - its correlation with & dependence on "Spirit" (Hegelian-Kierkegaardian/Judeo-Christian, I think...).
I may be way off the mark here. Rose is a very difficult writer. Forgive (&/or correct) my mistakes & bowdlerization, you who know better.
G. Rose, G. Hill
Reading more Gillian Rose. What a brilliant thinker. Talk about massive erudition. But it's the path she's treading that interests me most. Between ancient & modern, Athens & Jerusalem (& Rome), faith & reason, law &... Great perceptive insight into the problems with various modern & postmodern philo-socio-anthropological critiques. Has got me very curious to pursue further her indications toward the nature & meaning of "law". Currently reading Judaism & Modernity, a book of essays.
Geoffrey Hill's persistent theme of poetry as irrevocably implicated in the "judicial" context of historical crises, violence, & the "human predicament" (my cliche) seems parallel... I can see why I got clued into Gillian Rose by way of a single reference in one of his closing essays (in the Collected volume).
Geoffrey Hill's persistent theme of poetry as irrevocably implicated in the "judicial" context of historical crises, violence, & the "human predicament" (my cliche) seems parallel... I can see why I got clued into Gillian Rose by way of a single reference in one of his closing essays (in the Collected volume).
4.30.2009
Thinking on God
Low energy, in midst of gorgeous spring weather. Burnt out at work. Spend most of my time lately musing disconnectedly about religious-metaphysical conundrums. Interested in new discovery (Gillian Rose). Discouraged about my place in poetry land. Behind on projects unto which I should attend. What else is new? The phenomenology of the Marginal (Failing) Poet in America.
I'm one of the "believers". I can't help it. Things happened to me. I can't otherwise explain them. But - "Help my unbelief!" I spend a lot of time, very unsystematically, attempting to explain to myself - give myself some rational basis - for exactly what & how I believe.
But to put it into worthwhile & convincing language - writing - is another thing. Don't cast your costume jewelry before swine, Hank.
To the untutored modern/contemporary eye, religion is simply mythology, delusion. A projection from the brain. So how do I account for a faith which grants a very special status to one person, one particular Jewish son of carpenter?
Even if I accept that we cannot read the Bible literally - that much of it is "historical" storytelling & editing by priests, in exile in Babylon, in order to design an apologetic text for their own religious tradition - even so, I can still believe that those priest-writers were inspired by the spirit of God. This is, I think, the traditional idea : that the entire Bible was "composed" (via its writers) by the Spirit of God. I can accept this, I think, without being a fundamentalist - I'm not a literalist, I'm not going to argue for the "infallibility" of Scripture. (I'm an Episcopalian, for heaven's sakes.)
& maybe my great absorption as a bookish child in stories & novels and history, helps me to do this. Stories affect us in obscure ways. Their motive/meaning is not all on the surface, not amenable to reductive paraphrase. Stories & poetry are embodied language. So for me the life & work of Jesus can be both obscured by time & mythology, and historically actual & real (though we may not understand its full meaning & import : for now we "see as through a glass darkly").
My faith is rooted and expressed in a kind of enthusiasm (from the Greek, I think, for "inspiration"). An enthusiasm itself echoing, and triggered by, the vision of a created/creative cosmos - of life permeated & given meaning by the divine Being, the divine "I am". Personhood.
I believe the ancient writers of Scripture were also filled with a like enthusiasm (of vision). They were "filled with the Spirit" : they "spoke for" God (in prophecy). Biblical scripture is the formal sign-making, the forging of an image, a "lawful" text, which represents the "in-breathing" of that Spirit. When I say my enthusiasm/vision is "incarnational", this has something to do with how I conceive the situation. I love the word, I love the writing, and I love the life & truth it aims to represent - it's all incarnational.
In this way I can see the particular work - the vocation - of Jesus in a certain light, as the "Son of Man". As the symbolic End-Person : as the "fulfillment of the scriptures", the "fulfillment of the Prophets". The Son of God, the "first-born of the dead", the 2nd Person of the Trinity, the symbolic Imago or pattern of all humanity. The one in whom the mysterious knot of life-&-text, Word-&-Person, Spirit of God & nature of Man - are brought to a kind of closure-in-union. Earth & heaven, mortality & eternal life are joined together. When the Spirit is knotted, in-fused with the Person, this event becomes a kind of "template" to represent the divine spirit (or potential) in every human person. Star of Redemption : which means redeemed - purchased - from slavery. Soul-freedom, liberation.
The modern sceptic will ask : if the task of Jesus was to "humanize" God - then wasn't that job over a long time ago? Don't we live in a completely humanized, disenchanted, post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment, post-Christian world?
Here again, I can't dispute this on very easily-rationalized grounds. Things happened to me. My enthusiasm I identify as a form of love. Of loving identification. A kind of affinity, a "kinship". Of identification with the lineaments of God as I see them radiate through the "law & the prophets" & the Gospels. The resurrection : I get it. Call it deluded superstition : but again I say, I'm not a literalist. What I get - fundamentally - is the news of a loving creation-Being/Power as source of reality, and of a human culture & human beings responding to that as inspired witnesses : formulating the true words of love & righteous life on earth. Time itself as somehow redeemed by this priesthood of witness. The basic law of love, the Way.
This is not to deny that spiritual wisdom & righteous life take many paths & show many manifestations in many creeds & cultures all over this planet. What it means for me, though, is to affirm a kind of actualization, in history, of the law of a "kingdom of love". That this arose in the Middle East & out of Egypt, both cultural matrices of "divine kingship", makes sense. But this is the counter-action of the Spirit of God, the "king of kings", the Eternal "I am" - the instauration of the ultimate divine law (love, agape, mercy-&-justice). & in the process liberating human beings from inward enslavement to any power & authority not from God : to make the "children of men" into "children of God". & thus to claim their full human dignity as images of God on earth.
As I say, my witness is obscure, I guess. Or perhaps it will be seen as formulaic superstition & mumbo-jumbo. I would not be here writing this if many years ago I had not undergone some charismatic experiences which forced me - as a rational, reflective person - to try to make sense of what had happened to me. Believe me, I have tried to "psychologize" what occurred - to explain my experiences as projections of subconscious personality traits, etc. I am sure there is an entire dimension - or many dimensions - of my life & personality which could be illuminated by such critical reflection. But for me, anyway, those dimensions are not the whole story, or the main story. I've been "touched" by something beyond myself. God's grace, unto this sinful man.
I'm one of the "believers". I can't help it. Things happened to me. I can't otherwise explain them. But - "Help my unbelief!" I spend a lot of time, very unsystematically, attempting to explain to myself - give myself some rational basis - for exactly what & how I believe.
But to put it into worthwhile & convincing language - writing - is another thing. Don't cast your costume jewelry before swine, Hank.
To the untutored modern/contemporary eye, religion is simply mythology, delusion. A projection from the brain. So how do I account for a faith which grants a very special status to one person, one particular Jewish son of carpenter?
Even if I accept that we cannot read the Bible literally - that much of it is "historical" storytelling & editing by priests, in exile in Babylon, in order to design an apologetic text for their own religious tradition - even so, I can still believe that those priest-writers were inspired by the spirit of God. This is, I think, the traditional idea : that the entire Bible was "composed" (via its writers) by the Spirit of God. I can accept this, I think, without being a fundamentalist - I'm not a literalist, I'm not going to argue for the "infallibility" of Scripture. (I'm an Episcopalian, for heaven's sakes.)
& maybe my great absorption as a bookish child in stories & novels and history, helps me to do this. Stories affect us in obscure ways. Their motive/meaning is not all on the surface, not amenable to reductive paraphrase. Stories & poetry are embodied language. So for me the life & work of Jesus can be both obscured by time & mythology, and historically actual & real (though we may not understand its full meaning & import : for now we "see as through a glass darkly").
My faith is rooted and expressed in a kind of enthusiasm (from the Greek, I think, for "inspiration"). An enthusiasm itself echoing, and triggered by, the vision of a created/creative cosmos - of life permeated & given meaning by the divine Being, the divine "I am". Personhood.
I believe the ancient writers of Scripture were also filled with a like enthusiasm (of vision). They were "filled with the Spirit" : they "spoke for" God (in prophecy). Biblical scripture is the formal sign-making, the forging of an image, a "lawful" text, which represents the "in-breathing" of that Spirit. When I say my enthusiasm/vision is "incarnational", this has something to do with how I conceive the situation. I love the word, I love the writing, and I love the life & truth it aims to represent - it's all incarnational.
In this way I can see the particular work - the vocation - of Jesus in a certain light, as the "Son of Man". As the symbolic End-Person : as the "fulfillment of the scriptures", the "fulfillment of the Prophets". The Son of God, the "first-born of the dead", the 2nd Person of the Trinity, the symbolic Imago or pattern of all humanity. The one in whom the mysterious knot of life-&-text, Word-&-Person, Spirit of God & nature of Man - are brought to a kind of closure-in-union. Earth & heaven, mortality & eternal life are joined together. When the Spirit is knotted, in-fused with the Person, this event becomes a kind of "template" to represent the divine spirit (or potential) in every human person. Star of Redemption : which means redeemed - purchased - from slavery. Soul-freedom, liberation.
The modern sceptic will ask : if the task of Jesus was to "humanize" God - then wasn't that job over a long time ago? Don't we live in a completely humanized, disenchanted, post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment, post-Christian world?
Here again, I can't dispute this on very easily-rationalized grounds. Things happened to me. My enthusiasm I identify as a form of love. Of loving identification. A kind of affinity, a "kinship". Of identification with the lineaments of God as I see them radiate through the "law & the prophets" & the Gospels. The resurrection : I get it. Call it deluded superstition : but again I say, I'm not a literalist. What I get - fundamentally - is the news of a loving creation-Being/Power as source of reality, and of a human culture & human beings responding to that as inspired witnesses : formulating the true words of love & righteous life on earth. Time itself as somehow redeemed by this priesthood of witness. The basic law of love, the Way.
This is not to deny that spiritual wisdom & righteous life take many paths & show many manifestations in many creeds & cultures all over this planet. What it means for me, though, is to affirm a kind of actualization, in history, of the law of a "kingdom of love". That this arose in the Middle East & out of Egypt, both cultural matrices of "divine kingship", makes sense. But this is the counter-action of the Spirit of God, the "king of kings", the Eternal "I am" - the instauration of the ultimate divine law (love, agape, mercy-&-justice). & in the process liberating human beings from inward enslavement to any power & authority not from God : to make the "children of men" into "children of God". & thus to claim their full human dignity as images of God on earth.
As I say, my witness is obscure, I guess. Or perhaps it will be seen as formulaic superstition & mumbo-jumbo. I would not be here writing this if many years ago I had not undergone some charismatic experiences which forced me - as a rational, reflective person - to try to make sense of what had happened to me. Believe me, I have tried to "psychologize" what occurred - to explain my experiences as projections of subconscious personality traits, etc. I am sure there is an entire dimension - or many dimensions - of my life & personality which could be illuminated by such critical reflection. But for me, anyway, those dimensions are not the whole story, or the main story. I've been "touched" by something beyond myself. God's grace, unto this sinful man.
4.29.2009
Reading a lot of British philosopher Gillian Rose lately (Dialectic of Nihilism). (Led there by citations in Geoffrey Hill essays.) Reminds me how little philosophy I've studied. Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida... it's all over my head. She makes connections between writing, history, philosophy, religion and law, which I've never thought about before...
4.24.2009
Great article in this week's New Yorker on the exiled Russian bells at Harvard.
Toward the end of Forth of July, a section called "The Green Constellation" was conceived with Russian bells in mind (it's also divided into 4 parts, which correspond - using syllable-keynotes - to the 4 tones of the familiar "doorbell ring"). Here's a passage that refers explicitly to the bells.
Toward the end of Forth of July, a section called "The Green Constellation" was conceived with Russian bells in mind (it's also divided into 4 parts, which correspond - using syllable-keynotes - to the 4 tones of the familiar "doorbell ring"). Here's a passage that refers explicitly to the bells.
4.23.2009
Made some improvements (I hope) to Lanthanum Road 3.
Condense. Show, not tell. Still very good advice...
Condense. Show, not tell. Still very good advice...
Thoughts on Rimbaud from Robert Archambeau. Tres interessante. (He should write more often in this concise notational vein.)
4.22.2009
Progress in Schooling
Ron Silliman, in his post of today, elaborates further on his taxonomy of the American poetry scene. He sets out all the schools & types & movements & mini-movements of the School of Innovation (my term), & reiterates his notion that the School of Quietude is that vast unexplored region of traditionalist poetry "which tries so very hard to be the unmarked case", the school which will not name itself.
Among other rhetorical questions, he asks, about that space of Quietude : "Not only could such a poet-critic map this space, they could answer some important questions, such as why become the poetry without a name? Why is it so important not to acknowledge the existence of other kinds of poetry?"
It's interesting in this context that he also explains the term "post-avant" - which is his umbrella term for all the innovative branches - as having evolved out of the prior term "avant-garde", which is now obsolete, since said a-g has existed for so long now and become so important that one would have to use the term "avant-garde tradition", to describe it - which is an oxymoron. So "post-avant" is more accurate.
So if the "avant-garde" brand has faded into the past, and "Quietude" is the school that will not name itself, then the "post-avant" poetries dominate a middle space, between two kinds of invisibility...
But to get back to his two questions, above - it seems to me they are related. His "Quietude" covers a vast & varied field of poets and poetry, but perhaps their common characteristic, which defines them as an entity of some sort, is a rejection of the ideology and modus operandi of the School of Innovation. We could describe this praxis in a nutshell as an application, in the field of artistic activity, of the ideology of social-industrial-technological-political Progress - progressive change as an unmixed good. Progressive change requires unremitting, urgent innovations and applications, along with the new names for these entities and activities. Thus in the realm of poetry, a new rhetorical technique will be heralded as a qualitative advance, and a motive for the birth of a whole new poetic "school". Progressive innovation also demands its complement - ie., "the old" : the remainder, the trace, the detritus, the disjecta membra, the waste, the excess... all that stuff which had to be thrown out in order to bring in the new.
Ron's "school without a name" - if it existed - would refuse to name itself, simply because it would not partake in the mythology of mass-industrial innovation in art. If something is not "new", it doesn't need a brand name : it is simply poetry. This relates to Ron's 2nd question, because by the same token, the supposed "quietude" poets would simply not recognize all the various fleets & sub-fleets of the school of Innovation as anything important enough to warrant mention. They might certainly focus on specific poets who have been labeled one way or another : but the branding process itself would be seen as both unimportant and extraneous to the work of finding value in the poetry itself.
Among other rhetorical questions, he asks, about that space of Quietude : "Not only could such a poet-critic map this space, they could answer some important questions, such as why become the poetry without a name? Why is it so important not to acknowledge the existence of other kinds of poetry?"
It's interesting in this context that he also explains the term "post-avant" - which is his umbrella term for all the innovative branches - as having evolved out of the prior term "avant-garde", which is now obsolete, since said a-g has existed for so long now and become so important that one would have to use the term "avant-garde tradition", to describe it - which is an oxymoron. So "post-avant" is more accurate.
So if the "avant-garde" brand has faded into the past, and "Quietude" is the school that will not name itself, then the "post-avant" poetries dominate a middle space, between two kinds of invisibility...
But to get back to his two questions, above - it seems to me they are related. His "Quietude" covers a vast & varied field of poets and poetry, but perhaps their common characteristic, which defines them as an entity of some sort, is a rejection of the ideology and modus operandi of the School of Innovation. We could describe this praxis in a nutshell as an application, in the field of artistic activity, of the ideology of social-industrial-technological-political Progress - progressive change as an unmixed good. Progressive change requires unremitting, urgent innovations and applications, along with the new names for these entities and activities. Thus in the realm of poetry, a new rhetorical technique will be heralded as a qualitative advance, and a motive for the birth of a whole new poetic "school". Progressive innovation also demands its complement - ie., "the old" : the remainder, the trace, the detritus, the disjecta membra, the waste, the excess... all that stuff which had to be thrown out in order to bring in the new.
Ron's "school without a name" - if it existed - would refuse to name itself, simply because it would not partake in the mythology of mass-industrial innovation in art. If something is not "new", it doesn't need a brand name : it is simply poetry. This relates to Ron's 2nd question, because by the same token, the supposed "quietude" poets would simply not recognize all the various fleets & sub-fleets of the school of Innovation as anything important enough to warrant mention. They might certainly focus on specific poets who have been labeled one way or another : but the branding process itself would be seen as both unimportant and extraneous to the work of finding value in the poetry itself.
4.18.2009
Ars est celare artem
Mark Wallace & Michael Theune are starting to plan an event or conference devoted to the issues of hybrid, avant-garde, poetry style wars, etc. Might be interesting - like the battle of Saratoga.
Two related thoughts on this occur to me :
1) maybe all the brouhaha during the last century over experiment & innovation in poetry should be understood as an epiphenomenon : I mean as an off-shoot of the general zeitgeist of modernization, industrialization. In other words, not so much driven by something within the sphere of poets & poetry-making per se - but a force acting on art from outside. I realize this idea is neither new nor subtle. But it has implications when we think about "what is poetry" in itself (if you agree there is such a thing). I believe there is such a thing. I believe poetry is older & more consistent than changes within poetry. This is not to deny the value & necessity of stylistic & technical change. It is rather to frame their place within something more basic & central.
2) maybe all the fetishizing & obsession with technique (and technical gizmo-tweaking - as in conceptual, flarf, investigative, Language, post-avant, neo-formal, etc etc) - maybe all this para-poetic bubbly activity should be characterized as a logical sub-category of IMITATION. & nothing more than imitation.
Imitation is essentially preliminary to the actual art-process. By foregrounding the incessant & supposedly highly-serious important hugger-mugger over Techtweakish Innovation, poets (& poet-kibitzers) are putting the cart before the horse, turning the inside out. The Innovator will say : why not? The poet, however, might ask a simpler question : why? The cynic in me will suggest that all the group-formation blitzkrieg around technical gizmatics is simply a method to give mediocre & half-formed poets a leg up in that world where lies their main interest : the world of the world, the world of glamour, the world of buzz.
The true ethic is this : poets should front only their finished work. Ars est celare artem.
Two related thoughts on this occur to me :
1) maybe all the brouhaha during the last century over experiment & innovation in poetry should be understood as an epiphenomenon : I mean as an off-shoot of the general zeitgeist of modernization, industrialization. In other words, not so much driven by something within the sphere of poets & poetry-making per se - but a force acting on art from outside. I realize this idea is neither new nor subtle. But it has implications when we think about "what is poetry" in itself (if you agree there is such a thing). I believe there is such a thing. I believe poetry is older & more consistent than changes within poetry. This is not to deny the value & necessity of stylistic & technical change. It is rather to frame their place within something more basic & central.
2) maybe all the fetishizing & obsession with technique (and technical gizmo-tweaking - as in conceptual, flarf, investigative, Language, post-avant, neo-formal, etc etc) - maybe all this para-poetic bubbly activity should be characterized as a logical sub-category of IMITATION. & nothing more than imitation.
Imitation is essentially preliminary to the actual art-process. By foregrounding the incessant & supposedly highly-serious important hugger-mugger over Techtweakish Innovation, poets (& poet-kibitzers) are putting the cart before the horse, turning the inside out. The Innovator will say : why not? The poet, however, might ask a simpler question : why? The cynic in me will suggest that all the group-formation blitzkrieg around technical gizmatics is simply a method to give mediocre & half-formed poets a leg up in that world where lies their main interest : the world of the world, the world of glamour, the world of buzz.
The true ethic is this : poets should front only their finished work. Ars est celare artem.
4.16.2009
Having fine ol' time reading & trying to follow & make sense of Geoffrey Hill's magisterial criticism (Collected Essays); his arguments go along like by-ways in a morris dance, or some kind of a-symmetrical old cathedral building... can't even try to summarize or paraphrase at this point. Last essay in the book speaks of the "eros" of poetry - but more as a kind of pain of desire, which fulfills itself in "alienated majesty" (tag from Emerson) - alienated from its own historical ground... yet speaking to it. He's against the clever & influential rounding-up of poetry in service of Important Social Crusades (mentioning in this regard, Eliot's culture-criticism, Raymond Williams)... but he also leans against poetry as complacent frippery (late Auden)... calls upon Charles Williams, Gillian Rose, Austin Farrer, other British thinkers & poets, toward an understanding of poetry on its own proper ground, so to speak (actually I'm not speaking so precisely here at all). Duns Scotus, especially GM Hopkins : Aristotle's idea that our generalizations can never be equated with "individual" particulars (Hopkins & "inscape", Scotus' haeccitas) : & this has something to do with poetry's own individuation & integrity... but there is always this moral & historical contextualization (that is, Original Sin : the inevitable evil, the central standing-in-need of grace & redemption) which shades all writings & poetry - the ground-bass of suffering, guilt, mortality which shatters art's (de-humanized) "autonomy"... close here to Celan.
But I started puzzling over what he meant exactly by "eros" (& its mockeries - mentions something about magazine verse & "awkward mating dances")... thought about the fact that most of my own poetry over the last few centuries seems to revolve around or be addressed to someone... (Mandelstam : "the soul is feminine, & loves trifles") -
& Hill mentioned Joyce, which triggered thoughts about the impact of reading Ulysses (& some of the criticism around it) - this sense of creative joy in the image of a particular place, soaked in the moist & alba-atmosphere of some kind of feminine awareness, another mind, another sensibility... somewhat in Pound too, & the "troubadour spirit" leading Dante (in his view, anyway)... Mandelstam : poetry is the "call of the fife"... (Montale, also, a big presence in Hill's poetry...)
not sure exactly what I'm getting at, except maybe the idea of art-making & poetry-making as a form of erotic activity transposed to spirit & sensibility... so busy with its own processes & originality (haeccitas - Hopkins' idea) that it can never be enlisted or reduced to anything... only allowed to flourish, to be what it is....
But I started puzzling over what he meant exactly by "eros" (& its mockeries - mentions something about magazine verse & "awkward mating dances")... thought about the fact that most of my own poetry over the last few centuries seems to revolve around or be addressed to someone... (Mandelstam : "the soul is feminine, & loves trifles") -
& Hill mentioned Joyce, which triggered thoughts about the impact of reading Ulysses (& some of the criticism around it) - this sense of creative joy in the image of a particular place, soaked in the moist & alba-atmosphere of some kind of feminine awareness, another mind, another sensibility... somewhat in Pound too, & the "troubadour spirit" leading Dante (in his view, anyway)... Mandelstam : poetry is the "call of the fife"... (Montale, also, a big presence in Hill's poetry...)
not sure exactly what I'm getting at, except maybe the idea of art-making & poetry-making as a form of erotic activity transposed to spirit & sensibility... so busy with its own processes & originality (haeccitas - Hopkins' idea) that it can never be enlisted or reduced to anything... only allowed to flourish, to be what it is....
4.15.2009
Got myself a copy of Ralph Maud's "counter-biography", Charles Olson at the Harbor (critical of Tom Clark's previous bio). Looking forward to this. Heard about it in Kenneth Warren's magazine, House Organ.
*
Continuing with G. Hill's essays. Two of them, toward the end, basically take-downs of TS Eliot. Eliot gets no respect from nobody, nowhow, these days. Sometimes the animus on Hill's part seems a little heavy-handed. He puts too much weight, seems to me, on offhand comments Eliot made to a reporter at some verse theater festival in Scotland (part of his evidence for asserting steep decline in quality of Eliot's later poetry).
But right now, Hill's powerful attention & intellect carries a lot of weight with me... just seems pretty obviously to be shaping his British canon - & shoving Eliot down a notch. Maybe he's right. Pointed toward a book by Eliot contemporary Charles Williams (English poetic mind, c. 1932), which sounds pretty good, based on the bits quoted.
*
Continuing with G. Hill's essays. Two of them, toward the end, basically take-downs of TS Eliot. Eliot gets no respect from nobody, nowhow, these days. Sometimes the animus on Hill's part seems a little heavy-handed. He puts too much weight, seems to me, on offhand comments Eliot made to a reporter at some verse theater festival in Scotland (part of his evidence for asserting steep decline in quality of Eliot's later poetry).
But right now, Hill's powerful attention & intellect carries a lot of weight with me... just seems pretty obviously to be shaping his British canon - & shoving Eliot down a notch. Maybe he's right. Pointed toward a book by Eliot contemporary Charles Williams (English poetic mind, c. 1932), which sounds pretty good, based on the bits quoted.
4.14.2009
Reading fine work by Geoffrey Hill (in Collected Essays) on Emerson, Whitman, GM Hopkins.
From the essay on Hopkins (p. 518) :
"Among the numerous consequences of the era of so-called 'protest art' is the irrational embarrassment of the current reaction against the theme of protest, or of political writings in general. Whatever the excesses and affectations of the 1960s and 70s may have done to harm the cause of poetry, there is nonetheless a real connection between it and politics : as real now, if we could disclose its true stratum or vein, as in the Tudor court poetry of Skelton, Surrey & Wyatt or in the political sonnets of Milton or in the relation between Wordsworth's 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads and his tract On the Convention of Cintra, or between Whitman's editorials for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and other papers, and Leaves of Grass...
"Civil polity - let us make the claim - is poetry's natural habitat..."
Civil polity is poetry's natural habitat. Curious rhyme there with the likes of Dale Smith or Kent Johnson (& obviously many others). But G. Hill strongly opposes "the divine common" (Whitman) with "the mean, flat average" (Whitman, too). The commerce of literature & po-biz, the power of the Big Cliche, is opposed to true "glory" (in Hill's parlance, both divine & human).
(Did you know he has a poem for/about Jimi Hendrix?)
From the essay on Hopkins (p. 518) :
"Among the numerous consequences of the era of so-called 'protest art' is the irrational embarrassment of the current reaction against the theme of protest, or of political writings in general. Whatever the excesses and affectations of the 1960s and 70s may have done to harm the cause of poetry, there is nonetheless a real connection between it and politics : as real now, if we could disclose its true stratum or vein, as in the Tudor court poetry of Skelton, Surrey & Wyatt or in the political sonnets of Milton or in the relation between Wordsworth's 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads and his tract On the Convention of Cintra, or between Whitman's editorials for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and other papers, and Leaves of Grass...
"Civil polity - let us make the claim - is poetry's natural habitat..."
Civil polity is poetry's natural habitat. Curious rhyme there with the likes of Dale Smith or Kent Johnson (& obviously many others). But G. Hill strongly opposes "the divine common" (Whitman) with "the mean, flat average" (Whitman, too). The commerce of literature & po-biz, the power of the Big Cliche, is opposed to true "glory" (in Hill's parlance, both divine & human).
(Did you know he has a poem for/about Jimi Hendrix?)
4.13.2009
4.11.2009
4.10.2009
Took Good Friday off. Did my taxes (2 states, 4 hrs - the old way, with pencil). Then sat in little backyard (sun already gone) & read Geoffrey Hill, Collected Essays.
Hill is really the Mountain of poetry in English; the normative, the bringing-it-all-back-home. Hard to follow sometimes, because for him there is a stretch of about 4-500 yrs (1550-2009) of English poetry & prose, which is all one mountain range (are there mountains in England? There are Welsh Hills) to contemplate, take in, evaluate. Serious dark bitter honey. Stringent, accurate, humorous, conscientious... Kind of a deep player, ranging over vast areas of the already-studied, finding new unlooked-for furrows & grooves... in the Book of Everlasting.
I'd like to meet him someday. & write something corrective to the picayune snipes & miss-the-target-by-a-long-shots magazine blab (or maybe I just haven't noticed the more attentive readers).
Hill is really the Mountain of poetry in English; the normative, the bringing-it-all-back-home. Hard to follow sometimes, because for him there is a stretch of about 4-500 yrs (1550-2009) of English poetry & prose, which is all one mountain range (are there mountains in England? There are Welsh Hills) to contemplate, take in, evaluate. Serious dark bitter honey. Stringent, accurate, humorous, conscientious... Kind of a deep player, ranging over vast areas of the already-studied, finding new unlooked-for furrows & grooves... in the Book of Everlasting.
I'd like to meet him someday. & write something corrective to the picayune snipes & miss-the-target-by-a-long-shots magazine blab (or maybe I just haven't noticed the more attentive readers).
4.09.2009
The scrambled oeuvre of Henry Gould
Play, play,
it's time to play!
Play all day,
that's what I say!
Your work is done,
come out in the sun -
play, play, play!
If you count this poem I composed at age 4 (in 1956), preserved by my father in pencil on a key tab, I have been writing poetry for over 50 years. Actually, there was a hiatus of about 10 years there, when I played at various other things. I started up again in jr. high school, with the encouragement of good teachers, good books, and fellow student literati. I kept writing through high school, influenced by ee cummings, Rimbaud, the NY School poets... & when I got to college (here at ol' Brown) I really took off : within a year I had won 3 literary awards. I was on my way.
Then I had my strange encounter with Shakespeare & the Bible... dropped out of school, dropped (partially) out of poetry... traveled around, was at various times a missionary of one, music bum, organic gardener, food coop manager, community organizer. Discovered the life & poetry of Osip Mandelstam. Began to read modern long poems (Pound, Williams, Olson...). Got married, became a father. My last job outside the library (I was scraping the bottom) was as a "professional resume writer". I made what seemed to be a conscious, principled decision to step back from community activism so as to concentrate on my writing. I became a door guard in the Rockefeller Library, at my alma mater. That was in 1984. Have been doing that (concentrating on my writing), mostly, ever since.
Aside from a prize from the Pawtucket (RI) Arts Council (annual poetry contest), those college awards I garnered back in 1971 are just about the last "official" recognition, as poet, I've received from the outside world. I've had much friendly acknowledgement & support from some other poets (Edwin Honig, John Tagliabue, Stuart Blazer, Karen Donovan, Lissa Wolsak, Tom Epstein, Elena Shvarts, & many internet pals, in particular). I'm proud of the fact that I've had 3 poems published on the op-ed page of the local newspaper, the Providence Journal (including my elegy for Joseph Brodsky). I've edited a little mag (Nedge) and an anthology for Edwin Honig (Glass of Green Tea - with Honig), & Honig's collected poems (Time & Again). I helped organize the Poetry Mission, which sponsored a number of readings & events back in the 90s. I've spent (& perhaps largely wasted... though not all a waste, by any means) a lot of time & hot air on internet poetry chat lists & blogs.
& that's my back story. (I'm probably forgetting several important things.) What about the poetry?
As far as style, the major influences are : NY School; John Berryman; the magnetic, harmonic, elusive imagery of Osip Mandelstam; Hart Crane, as filtered through Mandelstam (I saw a kinship there); the long poems of Pound, Olson & Williams, with Crane as my pivot & counterpoint; & other Russian poets.
I've written many long poems, oscillating between the stylistic poles of Paterson & The Bridge. I've written some very short, gnomic poems (mostly back in the '80s) which I still like. & I've written a lot in between, sometimes in particular short forms (sestinas, odes, one glose, pantoums, one nocturne...).
As far as subject-matter, themes, I would say there are 3 basic chords : love/nostalgia; history; metaphysics/religion.
The threads of Byzantium & early Rhode Island history run through it, and are sometimes intertwined. Why? I see Byzantium as filtered through Mandelstam & Russian poetry. I think of it as the place where the Jewish understanding of God & the Greek understanding of Man & the Roman sense of government grew together. Theologians like Maximus the Confessor articulated an intellectual balance between the human & the divine - between the incomparable & mysterious historical earthquake which was Jesus, and the philosophical comprehension of experience.
I see the work of Roger Williams as both a parallel & a counterweight to Byzantium. By recognizing that divine "Providence" works mysteriously through all mankind, Williams was able to assert the separation of the "two tables" of the Mosaic law, the civil & the sacred, and sanction the freedom of the individual conscience to seek its own way to the Way. Behind Williams' equilibrium, and the new kind of State he founded upon it, lies the whole law-ful civilization of the West : going back to the Middle Ages, to Rome & Byzantium, & finally to Athens & Jerusalem.
My sense of poetry is that it is a kind of song-language, slightly alien & differing from normal everyday discourse, or prose; and this difference, for me, registers the gap between the worldly & the visionary, the secular & the spiritual, the world of habit & convention, and the world of consciousness & creation. The motor driving the whole thing goes back to the charismatic faith-experiences I underwent in the early 70s (sketched out elsewhere). After these experiences I can only understand life, the universe, and consciousness as fundamentally alive, vital, conscious, personal, spiritual. The cornerstone of the entire edifice (if such it is) rests in one notion : the constant awareness that the human person is an image, seeking to be a likeness, of the divine Person(s). Call it Jung's or Chas. Olson's "Self", if you will - though for me that doesn't quite capture it, precisely because my sense of God is orthodox & Trinitarian : ie. we don't comprehend the full nature of God without including the whole record of divine intervention, sacrifice & fulfillment in the people of God, & in person & acts of Jesus.
For the person interested primarily in poetry, I realize this is a lot of heavy-duty religion piled on top. Can someone even be a free artist, a free thinker, & carry around all this (perhaps mythological) baggage? I guess that's not up to me to decide. Poetry itself - mine included - cannot be "doctrinal" : it springs, like music, from sources more primitive, primordial, universal, maybe inarticulate. The impulse toward song & beauty runs back deep into the unconscious - to the other side of the mirror, the far side of the moon.
A lot of my poetry is available, but it gets little attention. I think people generally don't know what to make of an artist who falls outside the official zones of recognition & promotion. It's not as though I've kept my distance, or kept aloof - I've had my share of rejection slips etc. & I will keep trying to break in in various ways, because I'm the eldest son of a successful man, I come from a hard-working middle-class background, & I want to be able to feel that my 30-odd years devoted to poetry haven't been completely in vain. But that's not up to me, either. There's a kind of special fate attached to a culture's poetry : & only if the Muse actually spent the night, will there be any lasting trace.
it's time to play!
Play all day,
that's what I say!
Your work is done,
come out in the sun -
play, play, play!
If you count this poem I composed at age 4 (in 1956), preserved by my father in pencil on a key tab, I have been writing poetry for over 50 years. Actually, there was a hiatus of about 10 years there, when I played at various other things. I started up again in jr. high school, with the encouragement of good teachers, good books, and fellow student literati. I kept writing through high school, influenced by ee cummings, Rimbaud, the NY School poets... & when I got to college (here at ol' Brown) I really took off : within a year I had won 3 literary awards. I was on my way.
Then I had my strange encounter with Shakespeare & the Bible... dropped out of school, dropped (partially) out of poetry... traveled around, was at various times a missionary of one, music bum, organic gardener, food coop manager, community organizer. Discovered the life & poetry of Osip Mandelstam. Began to read modern long poems (Pound, Williams, Olson...). Got married, became a father. My last job outside the library (I was scraping the bottom) was as a "professional resume writer". I made what seemed to be a conscious, principled decision to step back from community activism so as to concentrate on my writing. I became a door guard in the Rockefeller Library, at my alma mater. That was in 1984. Have been doing that (concentrating on my writing), mostly, ever since.
Aside from a prize from the Pawtucket (RI) Arts Council (annual poetry contest), those college awards I garnered back in 1971 are just about the last "official" recognition, as poet, I've received from the outside world. I've had much friendly acknowledgement & support from some other poets (Edwin Honig, John Tagliabue, Stuart Blazer, Karen Donovan, Lissa Wolsak, Tom Epstein, Elena Shvarts, & many internet pals, in particular). I'm proud of the fact that I've had 3 poems published on the op-ed page of the local newspaper, the Providence Journal (including my elegy for Joseph Brodsky). I've edited a little mag (Nedge) and an anthology for Edwin Honig (Glass of Green Tea - with Honig), & Honig's collected poems (Time & Again). I helped organize the Poetry Mission, which sponsored a number of readings & events back in the 90s. I've spent (& perhaps largely wasted... though not all a waste, by any means) a lot of time & hot air on internet poetry chat lists & blogs.
& that's my back story. (I'm probably forgetting several important things.) What about the poetry?
As far as style, the major influences are : NY School; John Berryman; the magnetic, harmonic, elusive imagery of Osip Mandelstam; Hart Crane, as filtered through Mandelstam (I saw a kinship there); the long poems of Pound, Olson & Williams, with Crane as my pivot & counterpoint; & other Russian poets.
I've written many long poems, oscillating between the stylistic poles of Paterson & The Bridge. I've written some very short, gnomic poems (mostly back in the '80s) which I still like. & I've written a lot in between, sometimes in particular short forms (sestinas, odes, one glose, pantoums, one nocturne...).
As far as subject-matter, themes, I would say there are 3 basic chords : love/nostalgia; history; metaphysics/religion.
The threads of Byzantium & early Rhode Island history run through it, and are sometimes intertwined. Why? I see Byzantium as filtered through Mandelstam & Russian poetry. I think of it as the place where the Jewish understanding of God & the Greek understanding of Man & the Roman sense of government grew together. Theologians like Maximus the Confessor articulated an intellectual balance between the human & the divine - between the incomparable & mysterious historical earthquake which was Jesus, and the philosophical comprehension of experience.
I see the work of Roger Williams as both a parallel & a counterweight to Byzantium. By recognizing that divine "Providence" works mysteriously through all mankind, Williams was able to assert the separation of the "two tables" of the Mosaic law, the civil & the sacred, and sanction the freedom of the individual conscience to seek its own way to the Way. Behind Williams' equilibrium, and the new kind of State he founded upon it, lies the whole law-ful civilization of the West : going back to the Middle Ages, to Rome & Byzantium, & finally to Athens & Jerusalem.
My sense of poetry is that it is a kind of song-language, slightly alien & differing from normal everyday discourse, or prose; and this difference, for me, registers the gap between the worldly & the visionary, the secular & the spiritual, the world of habit & convention, and the world of consciousness & creation. The motor driving the whole thing goes back to the charismatic faith-experiences I underwent in the early 70s (sketched out elsewhere). After these experiences I can only understand life, the universe, and consciousness as fundamentally alive, vital, conscious, personal, spiritual. The cornerstone of the entire edifice (if such it is) rests in one notion : the constant awareness that the human person is an image, seeking to be a likeness, of the divine Person(s). Call it Jung's or Chas. Olson's "Self", if you will - though for me that doesn't quite capture it, precisely because my sense of God is orthodox & Trinitarian : ie. we don't comprehend the full nature of God without including the whole record of divine intervention, sacrifice & fulfillment in the people of God, & in person & acts of Jesus.
For the person interested primarily in poetry, I realize this is a lot of heavy-duty religion piled on top. Can someone even be a free artist, a free thinker, & carry around all this (perhaps mythological) baggage? I guess that's not up to me to decide. Poetry itself - mine included - cannot be "doctrinal" : it springs, like music, from sources more primitive, primordial, universal, maybe inarticulate. The impulse toward song & beauty runs back deep into the unconscious - to the other side of the mirror, the far side of the moon.
A lot of my poetry is available, but it gets little attention. I think people generally don't know what to make of an artist who falls outside the official zones of recognition & promotion. It's not as though I've kept my distance, or kept aloof - I've had my share of rejection slips etc. & I will keep trying to break in in various ways, because I'm the eldest son of a successful man, I come from a hard-working middle-class background, & I want to be able to feel that my 30-odd years devoted to poetry haven't been completely in vain. But that's not up to me, either. There's a kind of special fate attached to a culture's poetry : & only if the Muse actually spent the night, will there be any lasting trace.
Buried under work; unable to blog much; unable to think straight; very frustrating!
Constant battle with discouragement.
What am I trying to do there, with Lanthanum and Lanthanum Road?
With LR I'm trying to branch out, write in looser, more discursive way. More clearly or obviously connected with the world outside Henry-world. But hoping it will converge with Lanthanum itself (which is more my old style of singalong quatrain-hopping). The honey & the honeycomb, hopefully.
It's just getting going, don't know if it will make it or last. Stumbling along lately - much trouble focusing, finding some clarity & confidence, making sense.
Constant battle with discouragement.
What am I trying to do there, with Lanthanum and Lanthanum Road?
With LR I'm trying to branch out, write in looser, more discursive way. More clearly or obviously connected with the world outside Henry-world. But hoping it will converge with Lanthanum itself (which is more my old style of singalong quatrain-hopping). The honey & the honeycomb, hopefully.
It's just getting going, don't know if it will make it or last. Stumbling along lately - much trouble focusing, finding some clarity & confidence, making sense.
4.07.2009
4.05.2009
Lanthanum, already. Took me by surprise (I don't know why. Have been doing this for 20 yrs). The sap is running. (Pine-sap, in this case.)
New feature on these blogs : if you click on the poem-titles of either Lanthanum or Lanthanum Road, they link to each other. This is what I had in mind (the poems are complementary).
New feature on these blogs : if you click on the poem-titles of either Lanthanum or Lanthanum Road, they link to each other. This is what I had in mind (the poems are complementary).
4.04.2009
4.02.2009
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