Beauty will save the world

There's a dialogue between Ange Mlinko & author Iain McGilchrist in the October 2010 issue of Poetry. McGilchrist, a sort of cross-disciplinary brain-scientist/literary scholar, published The Master and his Emissary, a new meditation on right/left brain differences (shorthand : right brain = holism/synthesis/emotion; left brain = definition/analysis/abstraction). Mlinko & McGilchrist explore some of the implications for poetry of McGilchrist's work.

This dialogue appears around the same time as Elif Batuman's lengthy review of Mark McGurl's book The Program Era, on the impact of creative writing programs on British & American fiction-writing (which I haven't read). Both Batuman and McGurl address the academic divide between MFA programs and the other academic disciplines (humanities & sciences) - the split, generally, between "knowledge" and "creativity."

All of which makes me consider the possible connection between the two. Is the MFA/humanities divide a symptom of a deeper distinction between two dimensions or functions of the mind?

I wonder if this old conflict between knowledge & creativity, or what used to be called science & art, has something to do with an absence in our civilization of a philosophical ground in aesthetics - of a viable ontology of Beauty. The ancient Greeks (Plato, Aristotle) had a notion of beauty as musical harmony, rooted in natural proportions, which they were able to synthesize with ethics and metaphysics - natural beauty had its analogue in moral rectitude. The Middle Ages, in turn, synthesized the knowledge of nature with the metaphysics of divine creation, so that all intellectual investigation & knowledge was believed to have its origin in God, and its end in wonder & mystical contemplation. But disenchanted naturalism of the Modern era was rooted in a scepticism about the metaphysical grounds of knowledge. Scientific truth was opposed to the superficial ("accidental") illusions of beauty. Thus the ground for aesthetics no longer existed.

Postmodernism & deconstruction, stemming from Nietzsche & Heidegger, attempted to dismantle the hegemony of scientific positivism by means of a sort of language-oriented but anti-rational vitalism, centered in a notion of poetry & art as displacing scientific reason. Hence postmodern literary Theory pushed a sort of intellectual wedge between American MFA programs, on the one hand, with their "naive" devotion to self-expressive creativity, and traditional academic disciplines, with their "naive" roots in "logocentric" rationalism. Yet postmodern Theory's anti-rational propositions were destined to fall by the weight of their own self-contradictions - and thus the contemporary scene seems to have returned to a strange state of intellectual dispossession, with echoes of 19th-century naturalism & scientific positivism emerging in the contemporary devotion to brain science and reductive biological determinisms.

"Beauty will save the world," famously reported Dostoevsky. Perhaps a new metaphysics, able to discern purpose & meaning in the mysterious phenomena of art and beauty, will tend somehow toward the fulfillment of that prophecy. & I suppose at the center of the chessboard will have to be a new challenge to the deeply-rooted modern-positivist doctrine - that beauty is a surface illusion, floating over a structure of what are simply forces : of non-human, abstract, cosmic physics, and of amoral, remorseless biological nature. Keats's taciturn (but stubborn) urn long ago set all the pieces into play :

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."


- Grace Ravlin (Venice, 1908)

Stephen Hawking, Orpheus, "hellenism"

A different M-Theory altogether...

for Edwin H. on his 91st

Happy Birthday, Edwin Honig

Edwin Honig turns 91

Looking through piles of books for something else, I came up an old copy of Nedge # 4, which includes a poem by Edwin Honig, old friend & teacher (who turns 91 today). I was moved by the way this poem seems to foreshadow Edwin's future (& present) suffering from Alzheimer's. Though Edwin seems to have lost his memory almost entirely, he's retained his old mischievous, playful manner, his sense of humor & surprise...

Here's the poem from Nedge :

Lying on the Half-Truth

No one at the station
meets no one on the train.
Train starts up again,
takes away the station.

Yesterday's
the other-won't-
ever-reappear
place

bursting-brave-
new-opening
into the then-
clear-day

sliding by with
all its own
maybe-now-
when-if-it

chafing thought
squelched by
asking
then-and-there

Did it ever happen?
Was I in it?
How was it to be that
where-and-when now?

*

- I can hear Edwin's bemused, tuneful, comical, wry (what's the word?) human voice in my head, reciting this.... & somewhere I have an old recording of one of his readings... I should try to get it digitized - maybe I will.

Orphic Memos is a cicada in the trees.

Orphic Memos

New blog off-shoot : Orphic Memos

Orphic Pronunciamentos

The old skinny bards in the old skinny days never sang without accompaniment; they all plucked or bowed a little stringed catgut thingamajig, playing off their yowling verses. In doing so, they shored up the effect of art : they framed their speech within its magic circle, they distinguished it, set it apart. Set apart : a holy thing. Filled with dangerous charisma & spiritual mana : the word set to music.

*

We have heard that poetry is the art of the word. But what is art? A kind of order, an ordering. A framework. In time (beginning, middle, end) & space (perspective, view). An ordering, itself ordered toward one end : the beautiful. Ordered by means of, what? Vision (a kind of inward vision, involving all senses). "Beauty is truth, truth beauty..." mumbles Keats's urn. Art is an ordering, an orientation, toward the manifestation of that pre-existent beauty (natural and spiritual).

*

Poetry manifests harmony in the forms of polyvalent rhythm. Not just the rhythms of ordinary speech or patterns of words & lines : these staccato elements are upheld on deeper sound-waves, sea-surges of verbal flow - dialectical turns & counter-turns, suspense & procession, gradual or sudden unfoldings & appearances. & underlying these are yet more vast & mysterious organic changes, imponderable circuits of time itself - life's emotional cycles (say, the films of Satyajit Ray or Jean Renoir...).

*

When they twanged their thingamajigs & yodeled the myth of Orpheus, those skinny old bards entered an echo chamber. Self-reflexive (how postmodern!). The myth of Orpheus the Singer was the story of themselves : taming the wild beasts, enrapturing everyone with sweet melody... descending even unto Hades to fetch back dear Eurydice... child of Apollo, torn apart by unreasoning (Dionysian) Maenads... Yet this myth also reflected back another way, onto Myth itself : for what is myth, if not a kind of ritual orientation? A harmonizing activity, meant to resolve chaos into order, to humanize life, make it intelligible - by means of words, stories? Myth in general has an orphic dimension. So in the story of Orpheus these dual reverberations overlap and intertwine.

*

The God of the Torah and the prophets is also a kind of Orpheus, in medias res (& before all things). Creating an ordered cosmos by his word, his "Let there be..." As is the Christ of the Gospels, who says "Heaven & Earth shall pass away, but my Word shall not pass away".... who after Good Friday descends Orpheus-like into Hell, to liberate imprisoned souls. Renaissance poets (Ariosto, Spenser, Milton), in all their furry & bejeweled verbal elegance, made much of this blended Yahweh-Jesus-Orpheus. & Dante, following the call of Beatrice from Hell to Paradise, played Christo-Orpheus Redivivus to the glittering hilt of heaven.

*

& someday some inspired scholar might penetrate to the unity of Shakespeare's oeuvre... tap the spine of his deepest motive... & Hamlet's play-within-a-play-within-a-history-play within the play of History will reveal a certain Orphic ambience... & we, who are the mortal, sinful audience, outside the magic mirror of the Tempest, might recognize Prospero as a type of Orpheus-in-reverse : not so much descending into Hell, but calling to us, calling us back to, that echoing, heavenly Island of well-tempered sounds...

*

Those scrawny ancient minstrels, whether Jew or Greek or otherwise, provided metaphors, analogies for experience in general - for Everyman & Everywoman. Thus the descensus ad Inferos, the Harrowing of Hell, by Orpheus- and Jesus-Hero, presented an icon, an exemplary tale : reverberated with unspoken (or unspeakable) dimensions of human life. Such as, the well-known Fall of Man. We know, intuitively, that both as individuals and as a species we have fallen away, we have lost something, we have forgotten some early heaven, we have drifted from eternity to mortality. & the Hero who climbs down to Hades & redeems its pitiful denizens is the saving (self-saving) dream of Man, of Species-Man, Everyman : to climb from the nightmare of history & become the rightful Gardener of the planet : to fulfill the deep-sown mission of humankind itself, the ultimate human telos...

*

The scent of Orpheus (pine-boughs?) hovers around Modern poetry too (both an explicit & implicit presence). Eliot set the tone with "The Waste Land", that desiccated nowhereville in extremis, in direful need of a redemptive Word (shantih). Pound & Crane followed & divagated in their different ways. But the Greco-Christian Orpheus was never simply an Apollonian savior, heroic, powerful & glorious; he was tainted with blood & passion & Dionysius. The Christian "descent into hell" was not just a nekuia : it was also a kenosis : a humbling, a shedding of divinity & glory. Jesus-Orpheus as Suffering Servant. & I note an echo of this (kenotic) theme in the 20th-cent. long poem - the poem of shards & local facts & glittering fragments, the "grab-bag", the Whitmanish loping & limping life-poem, the wayward processions & unfinished works-in-progress, the poetry of dissociated bits & pieces, humiliated poets... it's a mode of Everyman-kenosis : the shattering & scattering of the Orphic Word, of the Son of Man, into the grimy, glimmering wasteland of forlorn & chirping backgrounds & back alleys... (think David Jones here).

*

Walking to work today I passed the fine sculpture "Orpheus Ascending," by Gilbert Franklin, at the RI School of Design. Orpheus clutches his lyre, while Eurydice, led by Hermes, heads back to Hades. The lyre was Orpheus' bardic thingamajig : the lyre, the frame of sound, the scaffolding of harmony, which accompanies & merges with the word in poetry. (Muse+Word = Music.) Hermes plays a key role in this story : messenger, communicator, mediator between realms (heaven, earth, underworld). If Orpheus represents beauty, art & Apollonian order, and Eurydice the (lost, repressed, imprisoned?) feminine spirit, Hermes stands for the occult connections & affinity between differences, opposites, antagonists. In Franklin's work, we behold these three at the point of tragic disjunction (yet united by another "lyre" - the shell of form underneath their feet). The title, "Orpheus Ascending," strikes me as somewhat ironic : Orpheus stretching up toward heaven, ready to crow like a rooster (in a major key), is by this very action separated from Eurydice and Hermes, moving away and down (on a minor chord). Or is it the tragic irrevocable chord itself that Orpheus strums, as he makes the fatal (human) mistake - a failure of faith (turning to see if Eurydice's still there).



*

We have pointed toward notions of art as an achievement of harmonious order - of finish, completion, fulfillment; a kind of labor, which rests on the most natural and instinctive human (aesthetic) responses to beauty in general, beauty pre-existent in nature. But our contemporaries may (rightly) be skeptical of such notions : in fact all the flummery about Orpheus, mythology, Jesus-Orpheus, & so on, might be seen as laughably irrelevant to the manifold existential crises of the present day. We inhabit an age of science, disenchantment, a knowing disillusionment : so what's the point of all this archaic play-acting, these mystifications? And our skeptic will likely be well-trained and steeped in such doubts - since a strong, perhaps the strongest, current of thought, since 1914 at least, has been thoroughly Nietzschean, Dionysiac, iconoclastic. A notion of art as order is viewed with great suspicion (& not without basis, considering how such a notion was distorted and manipulated by fascism, Stalinism, etc.). 20th-century art was largely anti-art: self-contradictory, enmeshed in a struggle with its own processes, repudiating any claim to its own autonomy or authority, cannibalizing and parodying its own backgrounds... Paradoxically, however, when we remind ourselves of this central struggle - between icon and iconoclasm, between Apollo and Dionysius, between harmony and force, between order and chaos, between "beauty" and "truth" - we inevitably restore the relevance of the now-maligned, diminished side of this battle (the Apollonian, the Orphic). The "return of the repressed"....

*

We have suggested a sense of the Orpheus myth as self-conscious, self-reflexive. Orpheus is the "type" not only of the myth-maker, but of myth itself, when myth is considered as the basic expression of human (poetic) imagination. In the story of Orpheus the poet steps forward onto the stage, like Shakespeare playing Hamlet's father, or Hitchcock strolling through his films. Orpheus is poetry's "play-within-the-play." Again, the chorus demands : the relevance of all this for today? Well, take a look at the August 2010 issue of Poetry magazine, in the essay there by Tony Hoagland. Hoagland recasts and re-imagines the too-familiar "binary" of the American poetry wars, between "mainstream" and "experimental" (& all the other brand-names for same), as an issue between two essential approaches : poetry as an art of : 1) "perspective" or 2) "resistance." For these terms, read, respectively : Apollonian or Dionysian. What we have here is a very ancient duality dressed up in today's terminology. What we have, at root, is an inner struggle within art : between a sense of beauty as order, finish, fullness, completion - and a contrary sense of beauty as invigorating, enlivening, liberating, aleatory, chaotic. & just as in the realm of politics, the ideological partisans (of both sides) resist any mediation of this polarity, any proposed resolution of this conflicted conundrum. Orpheus, with his temperate, well-tempered lyre, continues to be torn apart by joyfully inebriated Dionysians : harmony opposed by, & opposing, force (say, since May 29th, 1913 - & the first performance, in Paris, of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring).

*

The (late) Plumbline School (before it got derailed by a Dionysian) was seeking that temperate Apollonian chord.

The goods on Quietude

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

- T.S. Eliot, "Choruses from the Rock"

Lanthanum 6.5

5

Oriented to the center, then, and through
the eye of a needle ‒ threaded with junkyard
wool, black-white, grey… a cast-off loaded
with canards, castaways… your slander-

ship… your malady, milady (hubby-
hearse). & if I could mumble your tomb
open, little junkman's wing ‒ if I could hum
your name ‒ Red, Rube or Ruby?

‒ roseate as early raisin, ripe as grape
or turnip from heaven (purple-grey) ‒
I'd be home free. I'd be in Ithaca,
Itasca today ‒ I'd be ship-shape.

Only light, weightless light, Archimedean light
in a trice, through the eye of a bee.
Honey-light, glowing (you'll see, you'll see)
lifting a double-bass through brass fishnet

of wayward tears, years… (yours).
So we spin through the eye of hexagram-
hurricane, my dear ‒ 'twixt cherubim-
leavings, leaf-wings, pendulous

angle-bowers ‒ abeam every wandering
birchbark in creation. Drawing water,
bailing bale… rainwater, eye-water…
air & water & fire for the pottering

King of J (your ornery ancestor).
Who's coming back. Through that ring
of steadfast, bifoliate flame ‒ Love's singeing
Lincoln-leaf (O dove-cast mistress-master)

8.12.10

Lanthanum 6.4

4

To encounter the stranger, to welcome the guest,
to enlarge the circle ‒ a constituent element
of civilization at large ‒ the fundament
of more primordial union. & this was a test

of mettle for many characters, native & settler ‒
all particular tongues & colors, whorled
in clay… into a goldenrod sham Hamlet, moored
in Venice, Tunis. Queequeg's tattoo (vespered,

fluted in Nantucket, scored for ten fingers
with the Sign of Man, whispered
alive again ‒ the skin of his forefathers
saved by the skin of his teeth)… earth-tinctured,

all. Sparse sketches from memory
of prehistory ‒ a time when builders were
delvers, weavers, spider-wise ‒ somewhere
beneath exuberant & bracing armatures ‒ See

through my hand! wind mutters from the mound.
Midway, mid-continent… magma-lamp
in Maggie's palm ‒ the magisterium (tent-camp
& camel-dome) of deserted garden (Eden, found).

Labyrinth of fingertips. A whorl of star-
embossed flesh ‒ pent Quaker grandmother,
earth-patching grandfather ‒ the dance-patter
of partners in a pattern-wheel (a potter's far-

flung chariot of fire). & your ache
behind the eyelids is a rainbow-streak
of so many spirits round about you : Jake,
Jonah & (tender, tending wing)… hums, wake.

8.11.10

Words & Logos

There are the words in poetry, and then there is the Word. There is the written poem, and then there is the poet, the person - behind the poem, with the poem. There are mountains of texts, and then there is the Word-made-Flesh, the enacted word, the word which someone "stands by". There is the "tradition of the new," the Modern - stretching back to the Renaissance, if not before - and then there is a Way - a way which involves a resistance to novelty for its own sake : a resistance motivated by a different sense of history, a different kind of commitment. T.S. Eliot's curious and much-maligned path through poetry represents a mode (imperfect, bigoted, misguided as it was) of this "way." Welsh poet David Jones represents another example of this resistance. John Berryman was turning (returning) this way, at the end of his life.

You can focus on poetry as pure aesthetics, and you can ground your aesthetics in the modern, the contemporary - the continuous revolution of the new-for-its-own-sake. But this narrow focus represents a version of idolatry. There is another, more substantial newness which stems from the action of the Word - of the spiritual word, of the word-beyond-art, the encompassing Word - a word manifest in actual persons, substantial history.

Does this mean that we must devalue the dignity of poetry-in-itself? Must we simply harness aesthetics to more ideology, another overpowering "belief system"? Isn't this to fall into yet another (neo-Puritan, "iconoclastic") trap? Not necessarily. Because the encompassing Word-made-Flesh itself contains a dimension of creative ("incarnational") wholeness and inherent self-fulfillment. The notion (deriving from the Word) of the cosmos as a complete and beautiful creation provides the analogy which justifies the inherent value of art. But when we replace this central, primary analogy - the analogy of the imago Dei - with the concept of the autonomous centrality of Art and the Artist, we nullify the basic relationship between divine and human, spiritual and material, creator and creation. The "Logos" is this ratio - this (human, superhuman, personal) relationship.

This may sound like a strange sort of antique philosophy : but its strangeness is simply a reflection of our cultural amnesia. We have forgotten everything : in its place, we frantically pursue the "new" like hamsters on a flywheel.

"Typology" is not what you thought it was

Reading deep book, very valid & valuable.... (the 3 V rating) :

Events and their Afterlife, by A.C. Charity.

Some Myths of the PIC (Poetry-Industrial Complex)

1. The text of the poem = the poem. Therefore I am free to skim, browse, delete, copy, etc.

2. Since Poetry is One Thing, Poets are One Social Group. Networking is important!

3. Since there is No Such Thing as Poetry, but Only Kinds of Poetry, Poets are Many Social Groups. Networking is important!

4. Gossip about the lives & careers of poets is more interesting than poetry.

5. Poetry is an Autonomous Art Phenomenon which can and should Change the World.

6. A poem is simply a jazzy way to write things down fast.

7. Poets are born rebels, with the seared consciousness of life's evil & pain. Not to mention hip. I want to be like them.

8. Poetry is really very simple. Who are these people who keep claiming it's so difficult? Elitist duffers.

9. Poetry is about celebrating & partying together.

10. Language is meant to be abused in poetry. That's what poetry is for, duh.

11. As Plato tells us, the poet is a light & winged soul, fragile, mercurial. They should not be expected to think or behave like ordinary people.

12. If I don't get it right away that's the poem's problem. Bye.

A chip off the new Lanthanum

Here's a plonk of more obscure Lanthanum. Harks back to some ancien matiere de Stubborn Grew.

3

Another solo Sunday, sweltering.
I mold my provisional home here, out of faulty
memories of weddings - each waltzing peripety
& its aftermath. From 157 Doyle (sheltering

tenement apartment) extending consequences
to infinity. Beside the Y there, just below
the Doyle Observatory (tracking a showy
morning star, her amiable glimmer). Providence,

my Providence, he whispers, like St. Louis
outside Tunis. Wrecks & errors
& the homely sorrows... nowhere's
where am is, he sez. His fraying quipu's

knotted to 1256 - but he can't explain
what he would like to sing! The choir's
aloft, but the soloist's a-hoarse - cribbed
with that defunct crabshell up in Maine -

helmet of some lost poilu (ultimate unknown
soldier). We found a single fingerprint, though :
a twirling labyrinth, back to the protozoa;
wound like snailshell, or cat-o-nine-

lives' smile... what does it mean? I think
it means the old man's comin' back. The Sojer-
Boy, back from the sands - the Ghost, the Over-
Ghost... back to embrace his mourning Morning

Star, once more. That Old Man of the Mountain,
that clay-foot weeping statue, that... silhouette
of a leaping Lafayette? In a state of minuet?
Through the needle's eye... whirl, premonition.

7.25.10

"As muted organ pipes / Accompany a woman's voice."

When Ezra Pound was locked up in a prison cage, he was given a Bible & an old poetry anthology by a kindly G.I., his guard. Osip Mandelstam's forced exile & final deportation to Siberia, by Stalin, was a hundred times more severe, and infinitely more unjust. He too was short of books (& most other things) in the provincial town of Voronezh. One of the few books he took into exile, & steadfastly carried around with him, was a copy of the Divine Comedy.

On Feb 12, 1937, he wrote the following untitled poem, translated here by James Greene :

I'm plunged into a lions' den, a fort,
And sinking lower, lower, lower,
Under the yeast shower of these sounds:
Stronger than lions, more potent than the Pentateuch.

How near your summons:
Keener than commandments of childbirth, firstlings -,
Like strings of pearls at the bottom of the sea
Or baskets meekly borne by Tahitian women.

Motherland of chastening songs, come close,
The declivities deepening in your voice! - O primal mother,
The shy-sweet faces of our daughters
Aren't worth your little finger.

My time is still unbounded.
And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe
As muted organ pipes
Accompany a woman's voice.

Nadezhda Mandelstam (in Hope Against Hope, ch. 39) writes that M. had been listening to Marian Anderson, then visiting Moscow, on the radio - singing African-American spirituals, and that this was part of the poem's scenario; but they had recently returned from a visit to another exile, also a professional singer, who was distraught over her husband's sudden arrest and deportation, yet still hoping - desperately - to use her musical talents to earn a living & win her husband's release... & this too was part of the subtext.

Maybe there is yet another dimension in the background. M's devotion to the woman's deep-singing voice echoes Dante's relation to Beatrice. And there is a parallel between M's role as Daniel in the lion's den, sinking lower & lower, led by "chastening" (purgatorial) song, and Dante's redemptive journey through Hell. There is a pivotal, dramatic moment in the Purgatorio, at the conclusion of canto 9. Dante & Virgil have arrived at the very gates of Purgatory. They encounter an angel, who scratches 7 P's (for peccati, sins) across Dante's brow with the tip of his sword; then, using 2 keys given him by St. Peter, the angel opens the great doors so Dante can enter, & leave the Inferno behind. Just then, he hears voices singing on the other side :

Io mi rivolsi attento al primo tuono,
e "Te Deum laudamus" me parea
udire in voce mista al dolce suono.
Tale imagine a punto mi rendea
cio ch'io udiva, qual prender si suole
quando a cantar con organi si stea;
ch'or si or no s'intendon le parole.

[ Hearing that gate resound, I turned, attentive;
I seemed to hear, inside, in words that mingled
with gentle music, "Te Deum laudamus."
And what I heard gave me the very same
impression one is used to getting when
one hears a song accompanied by organ;
and now the words are clear and now are lost.] (trans. Allen Mandelbaum)

Mandelstam's "summons", the commandment of the "chastening song", the Muse & music for whom & by means of which he mingles both the power of Marian Anderson and the suffering of his victimized friend, here aligns Dante's Inferno with the lion's den of Stalin's prison-empire, & points with strange hope toward the way up & out (toward the "rapture of the universe") - as "one hears a song accompanied by organ."

Here, too, was a "true Dantescan voice."

The Well is Always There and Forth of July have been added to my profile page over at Google. You can preview or search quite a bit of each book there.

Zaccheus the peasant

re previous post : it occurs to me that this "conservative" stance, so described, is not so different from the attitude of the medieval (or older) peasant, who hides his grain under the cellar floor whenever the Royal Tax-Collector, or the Army, or the local mercenary band comes around, to grab what they need. Not the most civic-minded attitude, I suppose... but maybe it's very local.

As it happens my great-etc-grandfather Zaccheus Gould, of Topsfield, Massachusetts, penned what must be one of the earliest public petitions to government authority in America. I found it long ago in the old Essex County record books. It dates back to the 1630s. Zaccheus & his fellow farmers petitioned the Massachusetts colonial government to allow the young men of the township to skip militia training practice during the summer months, because said military duty greatly increaseth the hardship on farmers, as it interferes with the haying.

Zaccheus' petition appears in the long village-history poem, In RI (ably translated into Italian by Anny Ballardini).

(- as I say, this attitude may strike you as not very civic-minded - as rather small-minded & tight-fisted, conservative... but I would not be surprised if you also find traces of it in your own family history.)

Back to the Bull Moose

Sent this comment to the blog digital emunction just now :

"People gen­er­ally on the left (as in this post) wonder at the seem­ing dis­junct between Amer­i­can qui­etism & the impov­er­ish­ment of the middle class of recent decades. But there is a basic con­ser­v­a­tivism in Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence which has to do with the desire of indi­vid­u­als & fam­i­lies to manage & dis­trib­ute their own wealth, the pros­per­ity & well-​being they have labored at them­selves. This is at the root of the idea that “the best gov­ern­ment is that which gov­erns least.” Now those on the left may mock this posi­tion, as deluded-​sucker false con­scious­ness; but there it is – the basis of the dis­junct.

Some­body will figure out a con­vinc­ing cen­trist vision – some­thing like Pop­ulism or TR Pro­gres­sivism. Because the solu­tion is not in some economist’s math­e­mat­i­cal pro­jec­tions or sta­tis­tics; the solu­tion is in Amer­i­can soci­ety as a whole, making a com­mit­ment, with con­fi­dence, to a new sense of a shared common good. It’s not down with cap­i­tal­ism; it’s up with fair­ness & good gov­er­nance (TR’s trust-​busting as one exam­ple).

Part of the prob­lem is that Tocqueville’s repub­lic began with town­ship democ­racy. Vil­lage self-​governance is hard to trans­late to the scale of con­tem­po­rary nation-​states. But this is the exper­i­ment we must take ahold of, with… gusto… !"

(p.s. in this regard, see my "Teddy in the Amazon jungle" poems in Rest Note.)

Franciscan on St. Henry's Day

Today, July 15th, used to be a Catholic saint's day - St. Henry's Day (the celebration was moved to July 13th in the 1960s). On this date in 1999 I started the final volume of the long poem Forth of July (titled July). On this date in 1099, Geoffrey Bouillon & the Crusaders entered the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (after conquering the city with a bloody massacre).

I've been reading an interesting book by Mary Alexandra West, titled The cross that Dante bears : pilgrimage, crusade, and the cruciform church in the Divine Comedy (Univ. Press of Florida, 2005). All about how Dante "maps" his poem onto the medieval cartographical orientation of the world with Jerusalem in the center (with the East at the top of the map). She also focuses on the militant, "crusading" dimensions of Dante's poem.

These themes are not lacking in Forth of July. It was done consciously, in an indirect, imagistic fashion. "Henry", in that final book, goes on a pilgrimage of his own - but into the interior of America, & into the "spiritual interior" of the poetic word. He goes on a crusade of his own - but it's a march of puns - centered on July, Julius, Yule, Julie, Juliet, Jubilee, JL, and "jewel-eye"... which delivers a sort of Franciscan overturning of political force & violence ("Julius Caesar") by the spiritual power of the Word, or the Holy Spirit of wisdom ("jewel-eye"). The poem (July) progresses thus from St. Henry's Day, with all its crusader/Jerusalem connotations, to the Ides of March (8 months later - Caesar's downfall) and the Ides of April (Good Friday, Easter, death of Abraham Lincoln).*

I think the U.S. poetry world has been slow to pick up on the "major music" available to them in this & other poems of mine. But I'm pretty confident that day will come. I was looking over Forth of July again last night, under the instigation of some political commentary over at the Digital Emunction blog. My poetry may be complicated & evasive in some ways, but it's not autotelic, not hermetically-sealed-off from the world, & not meant to be. But it's meant to be poetry, not prose or commentary - & I serve a jealous Muse, who previously cohabited with Hart Crane & Osip Mandelstam, among others.

*for more on the Franciscan connection of all this with Joachim of Fiore, see here (especially the post on 4.3.07).

Poetry : it's a numbers game

For a few years now, my poetry has been caught up with numbers & counting. When I start fiddling around with meaningful numbers, stanza designs, line-counts, etc., I know there's a poem on its way. It's usually connected with other things I've been obsessing about.

The work-in-progress Lanthanum... how did it originate? It's been over a year now, I'd have to look through the old scribbles. I remember I simply liked the sound of it - that Greek word for an atomic element (# 57). & what it came from etymologically, as named by its discoverer (Grk for "secret, hidden, unnoticed").

I got into this number thing back in the late 80s, reading books by Alastair Fowler and others on numerology as a design factor in ancient & Renaissance poetry. & in connection with wild speculative books by John Michell et al., on Pythagorean geometry & ancient measuring systems, gematria (the practice of assigning meaningful numerical values to letters & words), etc.

Lanthanum is based on the # 57, as well as the quatrain, & the associated numbers 7, 4, 28. 7 & 28, obviously, have connections with the lunar cycle & the seven-day week. When you think that the 7-day week & other calendrical systems help to "synchronize" human activity with astronomical phenomena (the 365 rotations of the earth in one yearly revolution of the sun), you can start to see how these systems work on a symbolic level. Thus, for example, Genesis describes the creation of the universe in 6 days, with the Creator resting on the 7th; which obviously fits rather neatly into the numerical division of the 365-day year into (52) weeks; so that the tradition of working 6 days & resting on the 7th (sabbath) day means that, in doing so, Man imitates & remembers the Creator, resting "with him" at the end of the work week.

A poem based on these numbers might be saying something similar, in a figurative sense. Lanthanum is (projectively) made up of 3 volumes; each volume has 4 chapters; each chapter has 3 sequences; & each sequence has 8 poems : consisting of 7 poems of 7 stanzas, or 28 (4x7) lines each, and an 8th poem containing 8 stanzas (32 lines). Therefore each sequence contains a set of 7x7 or 49 stanzas (in 7 poems), plus an 8th poem (of 8 stanzas). The total number of stanzas then, in each sequence, is 57 (the number of lanthanum). (There are more complex patterns hidden in the whole design, but they shall remain "hidden"!)

Another figurative dimension implied here in this pattern 49 + 1, 49 + 8, has to do with the "sabbath of sabbaths", or Jubilee year (every 50 yrs in ancient Israel). In Lanthanum I apply lots of indirect & figurative symbolism to synthesize this number (50) with the number of states in the U.S., with the "sabbath number" (7), with their fusion or sum (57), etc. I like to spin out & play with the religious, historical, & poetic implications of these combinations (since I think of poetry itself as a kind of semi-divine sabbatical "play", which intrinsically praises & celebrates life & nature in its aspects of wholeness & creative fulfillment or completion).

The Well Is Always There

I published a massive tome today...

The Well Is Always There : HG Poetics, 2003-2010. 736 large pp. And I had to cut a lot! It's pricey, unfortunately - though the ebook format is cheaper.

Why would anyone want to buy this, when the blog itself is FREE, & full of links? Well, it's a selection. & a kind of summation & record of all my babble.

Maybe your library - if it still exists! - would be so kind as to add it to their collection...

Lanthanum, 7/4

Here's something from the 2nd volume of Lanthanum (drawing toward the center of the poem, now...). I'm only posting this because I can't imagine any magazine wanting to publish this very obscure passage... (p.s. "soul liberty" was a phrase Roger Williams used to characterize his notion of freedom of conscience. & the bit about "Cyrus" draws on Sir Thomas Browne's wonderful & justly famous numerological-botanical essay titled "The Garden of Cyrus". & "perfect rune"? Well, in a sense this refers to the number 28, the number of lines in this poem, which is a "perfect number", & has long been associated with the lunar calendar).

6.2

Quiet, all quiet... the
boom of last night's fireworks giving way
to sunny Sunday, 7/4. Soul liberty,
he said - only a single secret path through the

labyrinth. Its perfect rune, rhyming
with lofty, solitary moon (not white
not black, but dappled by limestone light
that shines before stars start wandering)...

one seven added to those fifty stars
that shimmer in the haze of history -
for sabbath-day, for Jubilee - really
one red & cardinal number (yours)

for wedding memory & justice (everywhere).
Cyrus planted a garden once, to celebrate
Earth's intricate flourishing (a quince quintet);
the center of the world, enclosèd there,

was calm (slight violet eye, beholding
hurricane). It was his grandmother, calling;
it was his grandfather, responsive, echoing;
before Cyrus was born, before Time began -

a wedding-song, a dream, a constancy.
An octave note, for makings of one family
from reconciling tribes, & tyrants finally
dethroned - bell-booming independency

on earth, as it is... in Cyrus's garden;
when the milky light at last reigns equally,
& fifty stars are seven sisters (really
one star, one limestone pentagon...). & then...

7.4.10

The wise architect of the Great Temple designed it as a perfect microcosm of the Universe, an elegant replica in gold & precious stones & lapis lazuli. After much labor, he completed his blueprint, & lay down to rest. But as he slept, God appeared to him in a dream, & said, "You've left something out." The wise architect immediately rose from his bed, and took up his work again. Finally, after staring at the blueprint all morning, he made a slight change in the lower left corner : he added a tiny image of himself, working quietly on his blueprint for the Great Temple.

Grain of Lanthanum (for Father's Day)

ONLY WHEAT

On the last day of spring (already sultry
as July) I would make a little summa-
testament, for summer. As you crumble
a humble clod of earth, in memory

of your local Rome (marking its boundary)
or walk with weatherbeaten gardener around
the blackened iron fence of some New England
family plot - as you linger in the shade there

where uncut grass of tumbling gravestones
marks the locus tribes & nations meet
at end of time - all that sown wheat
of long-gone fathers (embattled Blackstones,

Lincolns, Washingtons) - there
where covenants of every hamlet find
their mirror in a lightning eye-in-hand,
primordial - you'll hear the thunder,

finally - a voice inside the thunder.
& it will be only wheat... rustling out of
the chest of that familiar gardener (whose step
you keep). The voice of your own, your only father,

gentle & kind; the voice you've forgotten
& never forget. Coming back out of the grass
as Lazarus, or Berryman - for those almond eyes
(light brown) that call him from oasis-grotto -

from the wide wave of Union, everlasting.
Like silkworm shrouded in its tomb... like that
butterfly - a monarch-outline, light & sweet
but yellow-black - the plowman's pilot, floating

home.

6.20.10 (Father's Day)

the stone in the well

This morning, lying on favorite couch (that looks out east porch window), getting ready to go to work, looking over notes for ongoing Lanthanum project, my thoughts about the nature and design of this poem seemed to grow more clear. About its theme & purposes. Of course I've had shifting notions about it from the beginning - sometimes clear, sometimes fuzzier - but this morning felt like a little more of a breakthrough. Curious that this would happen so soon after yesterday's post here, about the (rare) qualities of good, strong poetry - how ongoing (plot, theme, ornamental) threads sometimes coalesce, reach their acme or peripeteia.

Almost 40 years ago I wrote this curious poem, with the epigraph about a Byzantine church. & (as noted on this blog before) I think sometimes a poet will (understandably) forecast, unconsciously, future developments - a sort of embryonic "prophecy" of the themes & subject-matter to come. & this poem I think relates not only to a lot of the writing I've done since that time, but to the possible insight I had this morning about Lanthanum.

The poem (Lanthanum), as I've mentioned before, is a sort of "dream song" which emerged about an odd dream I had one night about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, MO (a monument I've never seen, & never previously given much thought). The structure began to magnetize & collect certain themes, symbols, ideas... among them being :
- my long-term fascination with Hart Crane's poem The Bridge;
- the affinities I find (imagistic, stylistic, architectural, thematic) between Crane's poetry & the work of Russian "Acmeist" Osip Mandelstam;
- my desire to write a poem which synthesizes the American long poem's more national, "New World" impulses (in Crane, WC Williams & others) with the larger & older context of Western or world culture & traditions (as in, say, Auden, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, David Jones..., as well as Mandelstam & other Russian poets) - here the St. Louis Arch (in Eliot's birthplace) would stand for a kind of fusion of Old & New Worlds;
- a movement forward from the long poems I've already written, such as Forth of July, with its focus on the Mississippi (what the French called the "St. Louis River") - & in this context making connections with my own biography, & the whole "John Berryman", dream-song dimension;
- the desire to center this synthetic context within a certain Rhode Island (Providential) framework, where the worldview of pioneers like Roger Williams & William Blackstone - a magnanimous fusion of sacred & secular, religious & political freedom - finds its echo in the incarnational theology of Orthodox monk Maximus the Confessor (& so winds back into an affinity with the Russian poets)...

but what I sensed in particular this morning was how the poem's trajectory (& perhaps my whole 50-yr trajectory as a poet) finds itself illuminated or clarified by a single analogy : that is, the analogy between the American tradition of egalitarian political democracy (which as Tocqueville describes, grew out of New England town-meeting political independence & co-responsibility) and the theological concept of a world civilization based on a shared equality before God. In aesthetic terms, the latter has an application in the Russian Acmeist notion of "chasteness" : that is, the poet with "chaste" vision recognizes the inherent dignity & beauty of each & every unique created thing - each thing's beautiful "right to be itself". & this Acmeist vision in turn is very close to Whitman's ecstatic "democratic" celebration of the "union" of all things in creation. Thus, with all this in mind, it's possible to see how the trajectory of a nation's democratic principles & values might find their future justification in a broader, global concept of global civic equilibrium & normative world civilization - a peaceful world civil society (a new, more universal version of Dante's vision of a "Rome where Christ is Roman"). & this would be the ambitious project for a poem to remember, illustrate & celebrate.

What pleases me about this "clarification" is how it seems rooted in my longtime poetic debt to Mandelstam & the Acmeists : it shows a continuity of purpose in my writing over many years. The long poem partly rooted in both Longfellow & the Kalevala (& Mandelstam's "Karelian birches" - so close to Petersburg) circles back on its trans-American trans-Siberian, Mandelstamian-Nabokovian origins. Mandelstam's first book Kamen ("Stone"), was an anagram for Akme (in allusion to Acmeism). My first book (1979) was also titled Stone. Through this "Blackstone" vision I am reaching toward the "Akme" of a shared world worldview.

One fine day...

& then one fine day the Main Idea, the "first idea", the primal idea, the True Idea, the Only Idea (for hedgehog or fox) will swim into your ken... - the idea Walt Whitman sketched very brightly in "Song of Myself"... that is, the idea of God as character, as a character like yourself, as consciousness - that day when the surprising Creator-out-of-Nothing is revealed as Person, in the likeness of... with heart & soul & mind & strength...

& on that day everything that follows from this Thought will slowly unroll before your eyes... & you will see that Reality & Cosmos & Experience are framed for you, proportionate to you... & you will recognize (with the "chaste" eye those Russian Acmeist poets Gumilev & Mandelstam insisted upon) that the Earth is our "God-given palace", and the Heaven is our "limber, everlasting habitat", our traveling Gypsy caravan... & we are playing a part in a mighty Play... as the old wild Irish bard Yeats cried out :

Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar paradise.

& you will understand how God has arranged so that all the sacred writings & all history & all nature will be epitomized & tied up in the ineffable & unbreakable flesh-knot of a single human Person.... crowned "king" of creation... which is really the beginning (Alpha & Omega) of the crowning of you yourself - to lay all history & religion & wisdom & time & destiny & nature at your feet - you... Person... & so, like a child at last (without drugs or spells or amulets or idols) you will finally walk into God's true Kingdom, always beholding the face of your Father (& mine)...

Rarity in Poetry

Most things we say in general about poetry turn out to be wrong. Nevertheless, I'd hazard to say that, in general, to make a good poem is a rare & intermittent thing, an occasional occasion. This holds true even (perhaps especially) for scriptomaniac obsessive versifiers like me.

Now why is this so? I began thinking about this today after looking over some recent parts of a work-in-progress, & realizing that they were stronger than some other adjacent parts. I was wondering what made them stronger... & in this particular case it seemed to me that the poem itself had meshed a certain theme & a certain way of expressing it, so that it began to resonate or sing in a way that seemed to overflow or surpass itself...

- here the immediate analogy for me is music : when you hear a passage in which the various threads that have been going on in their strenuous workaday way suddenly blend together into something surpassingly beautiful or moving, surprising... that is, the various directions in which the piece was secretly moving finally reach their crux or climax - the harmony toward which they were tending all along...

& another interesting aspect of this, to me anyway, is that these superlative strong passages often (perhaps always) involve an element of recollection. That is, the piece is beautiful because, somehow, it reminds you of something you already knew or felt or heard before. There's an echo of past music (or past poetry) or something in your own memory & experience which mysteriously returns, in this work that moves you - as if something came back from the past or the dead & was, by this new work, justified (or provided with a new sense). So harmony (in part) is about emotional & intellectual (& aesthetic) resolution.

Well, these high points or strong points or poems don't happen every day. & to experience them seems to reinforce the distance between actual, discrete, achieved works of art, and all the feverish vanity & seeking & triviality & philistine noisemongering of that pervasive self-enclosed salon-world fishbowl, where we chit-chat & squabble about poets & poetry & fame & pecking-orders & po-biz in general....

Henry & ol' Bluejay

A commenter to previous post criticizes me for not being "weird enough". Have a feeling he doesn't really know much about my poetry. Note the lens of Native American & Siberian shamanism, that focuses my longest poem, Forth of July. See the syncretism of Christianity & other aspects of traditional Western culture through that lens (for an example, here's a passage from Grassblade Light, the central book of Forth of July, which was published in Jacket magazine, once upon a time. It's about "Blue-J").

Weird is as weird does. Like many a "shamanic" type (charismatic), I have to live at certain a distance from socializing (po-biz et al.), & strictly limit my daylight behavior to regular routine (i.e. I mean, going to the library every day for 25 yrs...). (I say this only partly tongue-in-cheek.)

But read it in my poetry. Not many do (they're too busy decorating the tombs of their ancestors).

Or hey... consider the "Berryman's Henry redivivus" theme. (All the way to the operatic "Hen-scratchin'-on-the-dump" Finnegans-Wakean finale to Stubborn Grew. & happy Bloomsday to you!) Oh, I'm just gettin' started with weird...

Rethinking (HG) Poetics

Having just heard this very morning about a conference at Columbia (Rethinking Poetics), I might possibly be able to attend some of it (be passing through NYC tomorrow). But just in case I can't, & because it's a quiet day here at ye olde library in ye olde Providence, I thought (& re-thought) I would do a little top-o'-th'-heading about Poetics right here, right now. A diary entry, of where we stand at the moment, lacunae & befoggeries & etc. inclusive.

As that Henry who tried valiantly to join the Rolling Stones, back in yon mythical 1970s.... & the poet Henry whose Major Cat Opusses have been for the most part ignored & dismissed by his fellows & peer cats... squirreled away & corner'd as yet he is in the fastnesses of the Rock (Rockefeller Library)... you might say Henry am the Stone the Builders Reject'd, poetickally speaking....

But all that aside... I can say my ponderous thinking rumbles & leans more & more toward an overwhelming apprehension of Personhood - of full human consciousness & sensibility & heart & soul - as the inalienable ground of Reality. Forgive me friends & fellow travelers if 1) this sounds like me repeating myself, and 2) this sounds like a truism.... all I can say is that it becomes more & more my frame of reference with relation to the purposes of Poetry (& thus my poetics). I think of this Personhood as including God - & by that I mean one of the consequences is that this Personhood within which we live & move & have our being is both individually subjective, unique, distinct, and shared, universal, objective... & I understand this is not something easily packaged & explained by logic, nevertheless I affirm it...

Can such a worldview prevail without constraining & hampering our human progress, our science & knowledge, & the objectivity thereof? I believe it can so prevail : in that the Reason which we share as a human birthright need not confuse Religious or Philosophical explanations for Scientific problems, nor will Science necessarily explain away Religion... (herein I do not wish to expound the arguments in favor of this assertion, & yet I hold it to be true...)

& here the special avenue for Poetry opens up... for Poetry is characteristically & forcefully representative of Reality as lived, as experienced... as human Drama : so that our special avenue takes a winding Turn about itself, it curves. By this I mean that Poetry is especially concordant - as dramatic personal expression - with the dramatic personal nature of history & experience in toto. This sounds, I know, like a tautology : but if you think of language as a kind of expressive limb or tool, adapted to its circumstances the way the shape of a boat is adapted to the watery element, then we can say that poetry is language adapted to the dramatic dimension of reality.

But we loiter here yet in a realm of generalities. How does all this apply (if it does) to HG's poetry, & the "poetics" of its making?

Personal.... dramatic. But I have a sense - reinforced of late by re-readings in the work & biography of John Berryman - that art & poetry are not really very dramatic as long as they remain detached from, or in denial of, their entanglements with the larger flow of world-time : of History (with regard to humanity generally) & of Memory (with regard to one's own life with & among others), & of the place where History & Memory conjoin... & of the ways we interpret - & by interpreting, shape - these things together. I, Henry, can't say what my own poetry will mean to others - only that it is those others, not Henry, who will respond to it & shape its meaning - for them, & for the future. This is not to deny my own paramount responsibility for shaping art according to my own best lights (such I would never want to deny, anyway!). It's only to say that it is in recognizing the shared nature of our time & history, that we discover the actual meaning(s) or themes of that work we are trying to accomplish. We leave a track, we make a mark... which perhaps participates in the free growth of understanding... of humankind's self-understanding... isn't this what cultural & artistic labor is about?

On the other hand, such labors will never be of much use to anyone if they don't exude a scent of original free play : if they are not of value in & of themselves, as themselves. Because this inherent value rhymes with & affirms the inherent value of all things & experience, of the universe itself. This is the artist's bond, the octave harmony, with reality as original Creation, the Dream out of Nothing...

Perhaps the crux of all this, the most interesting thing to me, is that matrix where the inexorable movement of time & History are fused with creation and free play. I see this symbolized in the ancient practices of Sabbath & Jubilee & Thanksgiving. I see this as the deepest root of the cosmopolitan global civilization - that peace on earth, that normative & ethical world civic society - the great goal toward which all the manifold labors of humanity on earth - all the terrific struggles & sacrifices - are pointing. The poet is the Maker : mixing & combining materials : & what are these materials? The matters of memory and conscience. The fond memories & memories of pain & loss, the crux of guilt & remorse, & the slow, slow soul-growth, out of self-bound greedy delusions & distractions, toward ripeness, maturity, true freedom... all these personal & dramatic testimonies (the substance of poems) which give shape to our apprehension & moral valuation of what is happening right Now - our contemporary world, the world for which we bear responsibility. In this articulation the poet holds forth self-judgement & the judgement of times & nations - held to the benchmark of that coming Jubilee.

More & more I recognize this world civilization as an expression of the human universals - borne out by & stretching beyond the concrete experience of every different nation & tribe on earth. This is why I assent, for example to Tocqueville's notion of the coming of Democracy upon the world as a sign of divine Providence : it entails the self-recognition of Everyman, of the Biblical "Son of Man" - that World-Person, that humanity, of which each of us (male & female, Jew & Greek, black & white etc. etc.) has a share in the full dignity thereof. We are living it already. There is no dividing wall, except that of the personal soul & conscience, for which in its choices & actions we bear sole responsibility; & all those choices & actions are carried out in the light of common sense, of shared universal reason & truth, & in the bond of responsibility we have, in our weakness, with the weaknesses of one another. "The high shall be brought low, & the low shall be lifted up, & all shall be made a level plain." That's the prophecy.

Now poetry can be seen in this light as the dramatic expression of the essential drama of the earth, as history unfolds - a drama which no other form of discourse can adequately model or perform. & maybe this is part of the dignity of poetry, & why cultures look to it to say what verges on the inexpressible : so that we may know it, & have it, & recognize it, & admit to it, & live it, & share it, & celebrate it. "The Word is bread & suffering", wrote Mandelstam. Or Stevens : “The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.”

Deleted previous post (on Frank Kermode's book on Gospel of Mark). It had its points.... but these issues are far too deep & complex... emotional... to deal with in the rather glib & programmatic way I did there.

I think this photo was taken around 1975, in NYC, in Chris Kraemer's & Susan Soto's loft on Houston St. (the WTC outside their window)... where I stayed for several weeks (months?) before going over to London (to try to join the Rolling Stones.... !). Chris was taking photographs all over the place with his big old-fashioned b&w glass negatives... buildings, bridges, lots of portraits.... & doing carpentry & cabinet-making (with which I tried to assist a little & earn my keep)... Susan then an up-&-coming fashion designer, the loft always a beehive. (Chris & I went to high school together back in MN.)

Democracy in America

This New Yorker article by James Wood got me reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America, one of da many books I was sposed to read, way back... been on my shelf for about 30 yrs...

& it's inspiring many deep thoughts which I canna articulate at this time.... you gotta believe me... I'd like to be blogging more actively again, but many things both inward & outward push against it these days...

Pondering Tocqueville's "providential" sense of the advent of the mighty power of democracy, & in its American incarnation (& I use that word advisedly in this context). T's view stems in part from his understanding of Christianity : ie. in God's eyes all human beings a'being equal, with inalienable dignity & rights as genuine (though sinful) children of, made in the image of, same. & this spiritual (theological) equality T. sees as borne out in history by the destruction (by the power of Equality) of artificial distinctions of class & inherited social privilege, and the assumption (everyone's inherent right), by a great variety of means, of the skills, knowledge, & determination necessary for liberty. The establishment of township democracy in New England villages, based not so much on material self-interest as on a radically egalitarian set of beliefs about spiritual & civil authority (cf. Pilgrims, Puritans, Roger Williams, etc.) - all this T. understands as offering evidence of the divine shaping of human history (divine providence).

One has to try to get "inside" this theological perspective, where we are witnesses (in time) to God's "overthrowing Kings & Powers" (Rog. Wms.) on behalf of "the Son of Man". Of course such n'all had more obvious bite back when democracy was still rivaled by monarchy & other forms of autocracy, back then.... (or is it really only back then)? (I think of Melville's famous apostrophe in Moby Dick - "O Democracy!" - when he describes God grabbing old backwoods Andrew Jackson out of nowhere and throwing him on a horse to lead the new nation...)

More to come, maybe.... am just getting into first chapters. Relishing T's introduction, with its geographical sweep (North America made of 2 massive planes, one shifting toward the Arctic, the other in the vast bowl of the middle, between the 2 mountain ranges.... with the tipping point at the source of the Mississippi (originally called the "St. Louis" by French explorers), up there in Itasca, MN... I stepped over that particular brook, when I was 10 or so...)

*

p.s. (later) I know all kinds of intellectual dangers lurk in this direction (I mean reading theological signs in history). Such as national chauvinism, American exceptionalism... not to mention the legion of devils in the details (of practical politics).

Details like : Wall Street thieves bloated on the dough of the people; politicians conniving to throw more of it to rich & powerful & greedy special interests (be they industrialists, Masters of War, lobbyists, union bureaucrats, &, lest we forget, themselves); professional demagogues, media moguls & cynical factionalists, making a quick buck serving a coating of propaganda over real injustices & suffering; fat complacent satisfied American vulgarians, supremely content just as long as they get quite a bit more than their fair share; all the vain drones of political self-righteousness, suffocating the American earth beneath the bad breath of their yammering shibboleths & self-flattering cliches... we could all go on.... O Democracy! O Populism!

For the time being I'll just claim my valid & registered poetic license. The poetry of a culture is analogous to the memory & sensibility of an individual person. In an Augustinian sense (I guess), Time itself is a function of human memory & its intellectual/interpretive sensibility. We live in a fleeting Now; the past no longer exists, except on board the good ship Memory (Mandelstam's "funeral barge") & its truthful recall; & the future we make depends on the substantiality (or not) of that truthfulness.

At least this is one way to look at it. Then again, I'm not completely ruling out angels & time travel, either (cf. certified poetic license again). The muse of memorious poetry plays with her inheritance like a child with a toy boat (cf. Heraclitus).

Po-rendipity

It happens. I'm working on a poem. Like a lot of them lately, this one involves illness & recovery, death & rebirth. There's a bit about someone in a hospital - I mention "Room 132". (I'm thinking of Beethoven's late quartet, opus #132, the hymn of thanksgiving for his recovery from illness - among other things.) I finish the poem, & I'm so happy with it I send it off to a magazine. I pick up Berryman's Dream Songs, which I've been reading lately - flip by chance to Part III, which comes immediately after the "opus posthumous" section, & in which "Henry" comes back from the dead. There's a title on the 1st poem : "Room 231".

HG on GG

Reading Gabriel Gudding - first appeared in Critical Flame - has been published jointly by Jacket magazine.

Henry & Berryman, Berryman & Henry H.

Silence reigns at HG Poetics. Wuz happening?

Still working on long poem, Lanthanum. Rather than posting to the web, I'm sending it out in pieces to magazines.

Finally actually finished excellent Paul Mariani bio of John Berryman (Dream Song). (Must have started reading this about 20 yrs ago.) & have been delving into Berryman's work more closely.

He seems so different from me (his personality) in almost every way. Where he is tortured, I am calm. Terrible childhood, happy childhood. When he is fiery & mercurial, I'm subdued & detached. (He is "bored Henry" - I'm just... boring.) Different brands of negative capability, maybe. Where he struggles & works hard, I am complacent, lazy (everything comes easily, & always has). Well.... & he's famous, & I'm.... - might be a relation there.*

I note a few odd parallels & connections, however. Minneapolis. He lived at 33 Arthur Ave. in his last years, just a few blocks from where my parents have lived, early & late (I grew up on Arthur Street, myself). He jumped off the Washington Bridge on my grandfather's birthday, a few blocks from his house. Toward the end of his career (& life), he experienced charismatic religious experiences. This happened to me at the outset of my poetry "career." He taught at Brown briefly, a couple years before I arrived. & Edwin Honig assigned me the task of organizing the memorial reading there in his honor (1972).

& then there's the Huffy Henry factor...

*though some people might disagree with this self-assessment. My wife, for instance, would probably call me a nervous melancholic obsessive scribbler.

Note to Flarf, Conceptualism & All (from Kenneth Burke)

"Do not get me wrong. I am pleading for no 'retreat' to anything. No literary Buchmanism, no off-by-itself, no back-to. Let our enlistments remain as they are. I am asking simply that the temper of our enlistment undergo a change of emphasis. That the norm of our tone cease to be the insulting tone that 'talks down' to people. Nor would it be a presumptuous tone, that laid claim to uplift them. But rather a tone that would plead with us all, with the writer-to and well as the written-to. In it there must also be disdain, for those who have been giving the final insult to democracy, as they contrive to suggest that one almost has a moral obligation to write trivially and superficially, as though one could only show a proper love for mankind by plying the citizenry with flimsy items, 'to be used once and thrown away.'"
- Kenneth Burke, "Semantic and Poetic Meaning", from The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)

These poems from Way Stations are noise-resistant. Try 'em & see!

All ten of my Lulu books can be previewed extensively now on Google. Looks nice.

I have to feel relatively calm, confident & relaxed to write poetry. I have to be composed in order to compose. So my ability to write depends on a certain feeling of equilibrium. On the other hand, I never feel quite happy or calm or equable unless I'm working on a poem.

This is a serious catch-22. Classic neurosis/obsession, I guess. Married to it. Some people write because they have to. I understand Whitman's "life poem" project.

Have started integrating my books into the Google "Partner" program. Makes them easier to find, search, & preview. Five books are ready, 5 more on the way. The links are here.

Henry's ancient history (ca. 1980...)

Restoration Day (the harmony is there)

It's Friday, it's Shakespeare's birthday... Henry will talk some more about poetry...

Henry has been let us say struggling with poetry & with being a poet nigh on 40 years now. I started being a poet in earnest just 40 years ago, in 1970 - when I came to Rhode Island & the East from Minnesota, for school (though I started writing it before, in the 60s... composing my first poem in 1959 - my father scribbled it down on a key card as he went out the door to work).

& a struggle it has been... for recognition, for validation, for publication, for fending off failure & shame & fear & oblivion... but mostly a struggle to write well, to keep at it, to find a way to keep making poetry... when the pressures & temptations & distractions of life are sometimes all against it...

& why? It's a calling. I find a certain superficiality, a thinness, a lightweight quality to much of the current talk about poetry in US circles... a forced & slightly fevered tone that comes mostly from the anxiety of trying to make poetry a career... that's one of the factors, anyway. Another might be the typically-American obsession with technique, technology, gimmickry : the poem is treated as a cool gizmo rather than an utterance emerging from the real stress of human experience, of life & death, of time & history. The "realism" of poetry is not some kind of photographic or documentary replication (another technique) : it's the product of the poet's confrontation with the trials & sufferings & perplexities & joys & marvels of actual life, in the struggle to answer the call of the poetic vocation itself - to fulfill the claim of that calling. The Greeks named memory the "mother of the Muses" - & what is memory, if not the reflection of the conscience - on life lived, choices made, crimes & sins committed, love & charity given & received, punishment, ignorance, foolishness, mistakes, wisdom, & grace? The inward field of the human drama - in this "vale of soul-making," as Keats put it. This is partly what I think Wallace Stevens meant when he wrote about the "conscience" of the "faithful poet" - the poet faithful to conscience & memory & the truths they bear. Every true poem is an accounting, part of someone's last will and testament. This is one of those affective dimensions which a literary world trimmed to the latest gizmo-circus spectacle simply cannot see.

& there are other dimensions missed, too - aspects of poetry seen from a more impersonal or philosophical (aesthetic) perspective. I understand poetry most basically as song. By "song" here I'm referring to harmony, in its essential (not simply musical) sense. A poem, as a work of verbal art, is an entity in harmony with itself. In other words, it is a thing of beauty : it displays an integrity & wholeness & proportion & brilliant originality (Aquinas' & Joyce's requirements, basically). As a thing of harmony, it resonates : in the poem, language reverberates, stands free, returns upon itself in generative reflection & depths of meaning. This is the magnetism of the work of art in general : we are drawn to its resonance, as something with inner integrity & life, as something with inherent value.

But is poetry, then, an end in itself? Is it art for its own sake? Not in my view. The poet's vocation - the vocation to "sing"- stems from an inward (often-unconscious) faith in the ultimate harmony of life itself. How is this possible? Is poetry, then, essentially a throwback to pre-Enlightenment civilization? Is not the Modern era defined by the term disenchantment? Is there not a fundamental chasm between modern and medieval consciousness?

If there is such a chasm, then poetry spans it. Because neither atheism nor religious faith can be proven, we are faced with a pragmatic choice : we must think, that is, inductively - gather up our inferences, order our incomplete knowledge, and live by means of a "working theory," an hypothesis. This gets to the crux of my understanding of poetry's highest purpose and the poet's ultimate vocation. Poetry's song is - at its most basic and its most exalted - primarily a song of thanksgiving. A celebration of the ultimate (unknowable, but sensed) harmony of reality. And (for me) this harmony is ultimately Personal : human & divine. Reality is Creation : God is Personal : and the God who created all from nothing will also save that creation, and us along with it - in fact, has already done so. This is the ur-drama, the play-within-the-plays, of the history of the earth (theologian Hans Küng has described all this better than I can, in his great book Eternal Life?). To the sceptic this will sound like typical neo-medieval mystification; but, as anyone who has followed the theism/atheism debates over the last decade will know, there are many intelligent people today, with impeccable intellectual credentials in various professional fields, who are also theists. To repeat, neither side can prove its case : but what I am arguing is that the harmony of poetry bears witness to a greater harmony at the silent, hidden heart of reality itself. It is the imagination of an inexpressible dimension (a dimension, as Küng suggests, that humanity must go through death to find - the way of the Cross, and of Everyman).

The objections to all this are already clear. Henry, you do a disservice to the autonomy and variety of art and poetry (not to mention of life) by yoking it to a theological rationalization. You narrow poetry down, you squeeze the life out of it : poetry is more than pious vision. This is another unending, irresolvable debate. I respond : yes, poetry is various, secular, impertinent, impious, impish, unpredictable, free. But I also say this : harmony is the heart and soul of poetry; and harmony is something inherent within life itself, within reality as a whole. My own explanation for the presence of this harmony is theological : there may be other, and differing, explanations for it : but I, as poet, assert that the harmony is there - and that is why I sing.

This, in my view, is the essential difference between poetry and prose : you can have prose without art, but not poetry. For a long time, the modern, post-Enlightenment temper has reflected disenchantment; and as a result, we have had a flood of dense, reductive prose "explanations" for life's phenomena. But what if the ultimate truth is harmonious, is harmony? This is what the Romantic poets asserted (Coleridge, Blake) - this was at the heart of their protest. I am not a Romantic, but something a little older (let's say, a Christian humanist) : put me with Donne, and Milton, and Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. This is the true Restoration (check out the photo of young Henry, in NYC, ca. 1975, at his Royal typewriter). I was born on Restoration Day, by the way - May 29th; also Rhode Island Statehood Day, and the date on which my gr-gr-...grandfather Zaccheus Gould established the town of Topsfield, Massachusetts (1637 or so). Poetry has been a long struggle, for me - but I will top the field. I live by the River Okeanos; Rhode Island is the Ocean State. My poetry is not so well known, yet - but it's out there; its endless surf of abba-soundwaves will penetrate the atmosphere, someday.

* p.s. I suppose I said almost all of this more effectively in this earlier post (The scrambled oeuvre of Henry Gould).

Hans Küng

Reading lately : Eternal Life?, by theologian Hans Küng. A great book. Enlightening for anybody (includes me) puzzling over Big Questions (Christianity, resurrection, life after death, the veracity of Biblical testimony...)

A Dissociated Writing Program (or, the Quiddity of Things)

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April 2010 ushers in the conjunction of National Poetry Month with the vast and bulbous Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Conference (in Denver this year), and so, under the lights of such stars, we non-attenders and outsiders are tempted to assess the national state of the art. But the first question is, is there such a “national state”? Should we call it “America” or “the United States,” or neither? I’m going to use “America” and “American” here for the sake of convenience. But simply deploying a name is not enough : you have to prove the name corresponds to something in nature. Presently we Americans are enduring a time of extraordinary divisions, partisan disputations, multiple balkanizations, political and economic stress, upheavals and dislocations, war and terrorism, (man-made) ecological threats, poverty, uncertainty, change and anxiety; is it possible even to speak of a single American nation and culture anymore?

I’m not going to try to answer that question directly. My interest here is in the character of poetry, especially American poetry, now – another vast and diffuse and elusive phenomenon; it seems the only proper way to begin talking about that subject is to try to describe the limits of one’s own perspective and method of approach. My method and perspective in this essay are going to be deliberately eccentric. I’m going to look at our subject through the lens of a single critical concept, which was articulated just 100 years ago by a Russian poet in St. Petersburg, a founding member of the fleeting Russian literary movement called “Acmeism” – Nikolai Gumilev. The concept or hermeneutic tool was something he called “chasteness.” Gumilev identified chasteness with a general sense of the integrity of individual, actual things in the world. The concept has religious, Biblical roots (the earth and universe are a creation, which God “saw was good” : the divine is present through God’s “incarnation”), but it is primarily (in Gumilev’s hands) a philosophical idea, with cultural and artistic consequences. Chasteness is akin to Joyce’s aesthetic of the “epiphany” : the artist’s sense to recognize, and to express, the brilliant, distinct particularity of individual things – their quiddity.

The philosophical roots of Gumilev’s notion are clearly planted in Aristotle. Aristotle’s intellectual modesty – that is, the essential humility of the scientific investigator, empirical, inductive – allowed for the substantiality of distinct things, for the “concrete universals” of poetic representation. In Aristotle’s Poetics, the integral wholeness of dramatic plot (beginning, middle, end) undergirds the unique architectonic of each work of poetic art, which in turn mirrors the chaste and distinct integrity of the matter which it represents.

It is indeed the architectonic dimension of Gumilev’s Aristotelian approach which seems particularly interesting and potentially fruitful. Like an Escher drawing, or a series of mutually-supporting vaults, this notion of chaste integrity bridges the distance between the distinct integrity of the poem, and the normative qualities of human experience, the ethos, which it expresses, guards and celebrates. It is an exercise in equilibrium. And there was (and is) a democratic or egalitarian aspect to this projected ethos, since, as Gumilev put it, chasteness represents the inherent dignity of each person and thing, as it is : that is, its right to be itself. (As Mandelstam wittily put it, Acmeism celebrated the “beautiful Law of Identity : A = A.”)

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So then – how do we apply this imported Russian aesthetic concept to contemporary American conditions? As noted above, we inhabit a time of particular storm and stress, of ideological polemic and conflict, of multiple challenges to any claim to authority or consensus. But the Gumilevian/Aristotelian idea of chasteness/integrity, when used as a lens, brings surprising things to light. First of all, it can possibly justify our concern for a specifically American poetry, in that, by the law of “epiphany” and chaste integrity, every culture has a unique history – a particular set of circumstances, characteristics, traditions, choices, events, which go into defining its quiddity. To base one’s approach on such a quasi-scientific, disinterested method is to push back against both ends of the current spectrum of polemics : that is, one the one hand, against neo-classical formalists and traditionalists, who center the norms of poetry in English, and the richness of culture per se, in the great works of past times and places; and on the other hand, against the anti-historical and anti-traditional relativism of the postmodern “permanent revolutionaries.” Our poetry, in such “chaste” light, will be seen as inevitably the expression of a distinct culture and nation (which will also, of course, inevitably include its own set of borrowings, hybridities, endurances, etc.).

Such might be viewed as a statement of the obvious; but then, lost in our byzantine labyrinth of literary jargon, polemics, and the Emperor’s ever-new clothes, sometimes the obvious becomes the necessary. Moreover, Gumilev’s concept rhymes to a striking degree with something very characteristic of American poetry : the sharp-eyed, down-to-earth affection for, and attention to, things-in-themselves. Robert Frost rendered this strain (out of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson) memorably and perhaps best : “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” In his introductory essay to the very popular (and still in print!) mid-20th century anthology, the Mentor Book of Major American Poets(1), Edwin Honig focused on the fond attention to particulars – the confluence of humble, everyday reality and poetic metaphor, in imagery – as the defining characteristic of American poetry (beginning with the Puritan poet Edward Taylor, and growing stronger from there). Imagistic realism, by itself, is an insufficient measure of American poetry (or any poetry) as a whole (in the same way that the Imagist movement of the early 20th-century had inherent limitations); however, when subsumed within the more general concept of integrity (as presented by Gumilev, Aristotle, Joyce), the architectonics of a national literature begin to become visible again (in outline or sketch) through the polemical mist.

In a recent study of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams(2), Harold Kaplan projects a similar sense of American poetry as integral and distinct, by contrasting Eliot’s and Pound’s attachment to traditional European cultural authority, with Stevens’ and Williams’ bent toward democratic humanism. Without referencing the Acmeists, Kaplan describes how Stevens’ notion of human “nobility” was part of an effort to define the social purposes of poetry in relation to more general ethical norms – that is, grounded in a similar “chaste integrity” of persons and things. (Interestingly, in an appendix, Kaplan underlines an affinity between the argument of his book, and a study by Michael Eskin, on the ethos and poetics of Emanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, and… Osip Mandelstam(3)). The integrity of both things and poems, according to Kaplan (and Levinas), is underwritten by the fundamental integrity of persons : and this ontology has consequences for theories of literature – for the status of reading, writing, language and meaning. Kaplan outlines a philosophical realism, grounded not in systemic abstraction, but in a sense of reality that begins, ends, and centers in consciousness – the reflective, affective, ethical, and expressive consciousness of the human person. Again, this affirmation of the distinct personhood of authors and readers is in harmony with what we have called the American (and Acmeist, and Joycean) affirmation of the chaste integrity of things-in-themselves – things, including art works.

Things, including poems. Rather than carry these proposals further into the realm of polemic, here I only want to suggest that such polemic might prove necessary, eventually. By this I mean that the more deliberately one defines the characteristics of an American literature, the more inevitably will disagreements follow – since we inhabit a contentious democratic culture, subject to change, growth and decline. Furthermore, as a critical perspective is articulated, its application to actual works (by both critics and poets) becomes more self-conscious and differentiated. The more it becomes possible to see the outlines of a particular poetic phenomenon, the more one begins to distinguish between the inherently aesthetic and the ideologically (or otherwise) tendentious. What I believe Gumilev’s Russian Acmeism(4) and Kaplan’s American humanism offer us are the beginnings of a “way of seeing” our own poetry – as independent art, grounded in imaginative freedom, in the substantial dignity of persons, and in the quiddity of things.

1) Mentor Book of Major American Poets, ed. by Oscar Williams and Edwin Honig (NY : Signet, 1962)
2) Kaplan, Harold. Poetry, politics, and culture : argument in the work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams (Brunswick, NJ : Transaction, 2007).
3) Eskin, Michael. Ethics and dialogue : in the works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan (NY : Oxford Univ. Press, 2001)
4) For an invaluable study of Acmeism and the poetics of Gumilev and Mandelstam, see : Justin Doherty, The Acmeist movement in Russian poetry : culture and the word (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995)

Harold Kaplan's humanism

Posted this comment to another blog today, Josh Corey's, covering the AWP conference.

"Funny, Kaplan is probably the very last scholar-critic anyone at the current AWP would ever be reading....

but I see a thin phosphorescent clamshell path leading through his work back out to poetry....

Kaplan sets the humanism of Stevens & WCW against the authoritarianism of Eliot & Pound, without denying that all 4 poets were searching for the real social value or sanction of poetry; he also sets their humanism against the dissociations, determinisms and reductions of contemporary literary & philosophical trends.... he suggests that his position on the nature of poetry & literature is akin to that of Emanuel Levinas, who has written strongly against the depersonalization & defacements of post-structuralism... it's a kind of realism in which authors are responsible for their works and establish a "triangulation" between author, reader, & the work... civilization itself is grounded on the substantiality of persons, and in literature the person, the human face, shines out... but the main thrust of Kaplan's book is a reading of the opposing attitudes of Stevens/WCW vs. Pound/Eliot, on the ethical status of human imagination & its expression in poetry.... He shows how these issues are still with us, & suggests how poetry might climb out of its current infatuations with everything that reduces, rather than builds up, the human & the personal..."

Here's the Google link to Kaplan's book...

John Tagliabue

A poem by my children's grandfather, the late John Tagliabue, was featured on the Writer's Almanac program yesterday. The title ("'Thou hast me on the wrack' in various styles") is taken from a line in Act III of Othello. Othello is describing to Iago the pains of the jealousy he has inflicted : "thou hast set me on the rack"...

C. Ricks' True Friendship

Reading True Friendship, by Christopher Ricks. Explores subtexts of Eliot's poetry in the work of Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, & Robert Lowell; also deals with the three poets' varying, sometimes conflicted, critical/poetic responses to same. Though I think sometimes Ricks' hunt for allusions & verbal echoes takes him a little too far, on the whole I'm really enjoying this book. Very much a sense of a high art tradition that lives on, in the subtle inter-poem conversations Ricks uncovers and interprets.