Wilson seems like an apt critic for the Symbolists & Moderns because he's not really like them. He's a humane journalist-scholar. That is, he reads poetry & fiction as a generalist, through a wide lens of general human problems. He approaches art in terms of character & psychology, but he's not a psychologist; in terms of history and politics, but he's not a historian or an ideologue. He's synthetic, not programmatic or theoretical. As somebody noted somewhere, he's a subtle literary portraitist; we begin to see literary moves & choices as shaded, in part, by the personality of the artist, & in part by the economic & political climate of the times - underneath the more explicit or tendentious philosophical-aesthetic debates.

(- plus he wrote a pretty good essay about Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, so he can do no wrong.)

Reading Edmund Wilson's study of Symbolism and some of its modern avatars (Yeats, Valery, Joyce, Stein, Proust, Eliot) - Axel's Castle. One of those classics we were supposed to read back in college & which I avoided.

Wilson has a sensible capacious humorous humane sceptical critical approach - plants the writing, the writer's choices, in history, character & psychology...

Could possibly shake me up, get me (re)thinking the first principles of all this folderol I've been engaged in for so long...

While I'm thinking of something to say,
here's a toucan from Kuala Lumpur.

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Blithewold Dendron, an American poet with whom you may or probably may not be familiar, occupied the peculiar position known in rugby circles as "fore-back", which is to say, he was both ahead and behind his own times. Ahead, in the sense that his nation and generation had yet to discover his unparalleled works; and in the same sense, behind. Tall, lanky, with a bronze forehead and a somewhat brassy left arm (his writing arm), Dendron was more likely to be taken for a youthful Midwestern gas station attendant than a major American poet (and not only because his main source of income was his full-time employment as a gas station attendant at North Plummet Shell, in North Plummet, North Dakota; the fact is, he simply looked like what a gas station attendant would look like). His voice was dry and clear, if halting - like the sound of a small table saw doing diagonals through cedar knotholes. One shoulder slumped slightly lower than the other, the result of an early collision with an oncoming older sister (Sandra Grumbach, nee Dendron). His reading style was mixed; but that's neither here nor there.

Why do we look, paradoxically, to Dendron, today? Vast and diverse have been the critical speculations on this question. Some scholars have emphasized Dendron's "enigmatic ear" : he could calculate the tempo of a nuthatch in flight at a distance of 400 yards. Others have remarked upon his tendency to present literary themes with uncanny foresight, as in his poem "Treetops", which predicted global warming (in pantoum form) as early as 1962. But Dendron himself explained what he called his "invisible fame" in a very different way. In a short essay titled "Shell Man" (1997), he writes :

"I never wanted to be a poet. All my poems are about something else. They are the traces of a constant effort to escape poetry. All I wanted to do was turn poetry inside out. Not into anti-poetry - I'm not an anti-poet : just something else. What I write about is a huge secret. It is literally, exactly, completely, utterly inexplicable. That's why trying to write it down is self-defeating, and why I'm constantly trying to escape my fate. This is why my fame is invisible, and why the world at large dismisses me, ignores my work. Because, unlike all the famous and successful poets, I'm trying to run away from poetry in the very act of writing it. The sight of a poem, a poem which fulfills all the conventions of a pleasing and successful artifact in contemporary style, is, for me, frightening, abhorrent : it's as if I'm looking at a looming jail cell built specifically for me. Whereas my heart - deep at some occluded level, beyond my reach - is seeking something else, or someone else; not the poem, not poetry, not even the shadow of poetry, but something outside them. I suffer from a kind of literary claustrophobia, a subconscious fear of capture. That's the explanation for my continual disappearance."

Jacqueline Semblanche, the Harvard critic, has written this of Dendron : "he out-formalized the Formalists; he out-experimented the Experimentalists; he out-sang the Lyricists; he out-did the Didactics. His miniature lyrics, his enormous epic sequences, float within a dimension exponentially distinct from all his contemporaries. He surpasses them to a degree such that he cannot be heard at all, like a sound vibration pitched beyond human hearing. And how did he achieve this? By writing about something else; by transcending poetry itself."

Today, in semi-retirement from the gas station, the folksy Dendron can be found on the front porch of his modest 1-person bungalow in North Plummet. Like a war vet, he doesn't like to talk much about his experiences in literature; but he does enjoy telling jocular just-so stories of local doings in Plummet and environs - which, to the acute listener, might be interpreted as parables of poetry. And someday, far in the future and/or past, the world will start to listen.

Randomly across my desk, The Children's Museum, a pamphlet by Ange Mlinko (Prefontaine Press, 2007). Wow. Sparkles. Nervous elegance. She plays tennis with the prose (to steal one of her puns).

I like this poem by Franz Wright, in the New Yorker. American hobo-sound. The boy can play the dobro. (Queer amid the full-page luxury ads.)

Franz Wright cuts an old-fashioned figure, out of Greek tragedy or Old Testament. Shuffles around in mourning rags, hefting the stigmata of his father's blessing/curse. Adds a memorious, para-literary dimension to the febrile atmosphere. A keynote, or a gateway - between the popular and the true, the distinctive and the en-masse. (a bit like "Henry" out of Berryman. huh?)

Back from visiting darling daughter & her fiance, living in Far East. Feeling strangely revived, no jet lag. Ready to explore mysterious Poetry Land.

The cicadas of Kuala Lumpur - less buzz, more flute-like. Omnipresent in the forest parks (like this one).

Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm......

I'm in Blade Runner, er, I mean a cyber-cafe in Kuala Lumpur. My daughter's teaching English here, I thought I'd better meet her boyfriend. Finished Portrait of a Lady on the 26-hr plane flight. Surprisingly, no jet lag (must have been those Jamesian subordinate clauses). Now reading Anthony Burgess Malaysian trilogy, bk 1 (The Long Day Wanes). Joseph Conrad in suitcase. Someday I'll read something contemporary - perhaps something by one of you younger chaps/lasses!

I like the heat, actually. I am beginning to understand fascination of Mysterious East. Will explain US poetry scene upon my return.

Cheers!

Busy lately with neighborhood tree planting. That's me kneeling down by the English oak. On Thursday I go to southeast Asia for 12 days, where my daughter is teaching English - probably won't be blogging much for a while.

I know I harp too much on this Michigan chap, but I do feel you can often get several kinds of nourishment from John Latta's comments : 1) an authentic report or history of a few decades of American poetry (starting in 60s); 2) a perceptive understanding of what poetic language actually does, ie., a real aesthetics; 3) a critical intelligence and a sharp critique of some of the hyper-rationalized or ideological or academic trends in the current scene. I don't always agree with him, but I always learn things with pleasure.

See for ex. comments on the image/metaphor today. Rather than indulging in the fashionable mockery-japery so prevalent on blogs, he finds a way to evoke & illustrate what "deep image" poets were aiming for; and in the process, provides a real sense of how poetic speech examines/humanizes/domesticates, weighs experience in the balance, all at once. I believe this was what Osip Mandelstam was getting at with his (Acmeist) concept of "domestic hellenism" - quoting very roughly from memory : "hellenism is the surrounding of the body and earthly life with the teleological warmth of beloved domestic objects" - the civilizing labor itself. Something akin to Bachelard's notions about how the poetic image, the human psyche, and the surrounding world all unite in that image...

AND, in this regard, see John Latta's fascinating post of today.

THE POET AND THE NAME

As everyone knows, we take language for granted. There's a reason for this. A lad carting a wheelbarrow doesn't want to stop & contemplate the invention, design, and special virtues of the wheelbarrow's wheel. In a world of struggle and necessity, we have to get on with things as efficiently as we can.

But life is more than work. As Welsh poet David Jones liked to point out, our aptitude for making non-utilitarian aesthetic objects (art) is what distinguishes the uniquely human from the generally animal. Poetry, too, is situated within that magic (playground) circle. And play itself grants access to otherwise disregarded elements of reality.

Goofing around with words, the poet stumbles upon a hidden treasure : language's native spring - the substance of naming itself. Who among the professional linguists and philologists has comprehended the intellectual wonder of Adamic naming?* When human mind, heart, lungs, throat and mouth first formed the intelligible signs for things? And gathering these signs and keeping them in mind, ordering them by imaginative precedent and law, began to articulate the grand, vast logical-rhetorical sea-going vessel of human speech?

What the poet does, in playing with words, is strike those original sparks of imaginative apprehension - the first (& prehistoric) Promethean fire. Thus the poet reiterates verbal representation with the pungent flavor, the sharp scent of that first encounter. This primal imaginative-intellective labor is what accounts for poetry's famous vividness; what Mallarme (and Eliot) meant when they spoke of their vocation as Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu (to render a purer sense to the words of the tribe).

Mankind the Word-Maker, the Playing Animal... one could go so far as to say that the poet, through free verbal play, recapitulates the human image - polishes it, in order to shine - a kind of microcosm of the human essence.

The poet must walk a tightrope between prosaic, utilitarian usage (which manacles naming under the sign of Necessity), and the arrogant artistic egoism and vanity which treats words as building material, as means not ends (splitting off words from their original naming function, and in doing so, deforming them).

*Giambattista Vico, for one.

Re-reading Welsh modernist poet David Jones's long poem, The Anathemata. Really something. He can pile on the wildest most obscure baroque language and references, because the narrative-thematic structure is deep, simple and strong. "Make your eye single, and your whole body will be full of light."

My poetry these days is banked by such steep cliffs, it's hard to climb down to the current. May keep the water clean, though.

Seems to be some focus on the Chicago blogs lately (Ange Mlinko's recent post at Harriet, Bob Archambeau at Samizdat) on issues of sensibility vs. knowledge. Relates very much to CT Christ's book Victorian & Modern Poetics (discussed in essay here). Of course, poetry should be where these two things happily merge. These lines from Anathemata brought me up short yesterday :

(For men can but proceed from what they know, nor is it for
the mind of this flesh to practice poiesis, ex nihilo.)

(note on previous : see poem by Mandelshtam (in Tristia) which begins something like this : "Upon a horse-sleigh laden with straw...")

Hurtling along goes Fontegaia-sled.

26  (A Fable)

 
Roughly 4000 horsepower-years ago
Abraham fashioned a delicate sled (more
delicate than words) for his dear young
Czar.  As the Lord commanded, thus

 
he performed.  They slipped through snow
so smooth and slow - past Isaac's
Cathedral, the Bronze Horseman (relax,
son!)... the little fellow knew, and didn't know.

 
It was like those games of knucklebones
the orphans play along the riverbank -
suspense lay in the suspended shank,
the spot of blood (the day's cartoons)...

 
Or like a dozing nation in a car
on the long ride home, bored
with the billboards' borrowed
flowers.  Floored it (too far).

 
Far, far into the prodigal forest
fled the knife-like stream of silver
nail-filings.  The cleft delver,
the Gold Glider, the last

 
train to St. Paul (1935 or so) -
fanned out across the iron prairie
where you lost yourself, Hobo - we
lost you.  Now, time flowers (slow,

 
slow).  And we'll go with you, Little King;
your anonymous loneliness, your meadow's
remorsefulness, your sorrowful shadow,
your lowness, Highness.  You times everything.

Roll on, Columbia.

25

 
Thirsty numbers square with a dreamy
stream beneath the earth : sanguine
Siena's Diana, Hobo's Big Rock Brandy-
wine - Sinai-ycleft and cliffed Jerusalem.

 
Remote sky-colored source (Itasca, Tuscany?)
whence horses, chariots, amassed, proceed.
Hippocrene ripple in a clouded pool (mead-
fed) of soil : iambic caesura of golden honey...

                               
                    *

 
And to fold a mirror into the heart of reality
is not the least Platonic or Plutonic rage.
Orbit of comet or black comedy - strange
will to laughter in (extreme) obscurity -

 
likened to parable, parabola, fitful absurdity -
The Unknown Soldier on an Horse (dragged
from his funeral to the heroine).  Fagged
Fall Guy; autumn's Pumpkin King.  A Mystery.

                                
                    *

 
A one-ring circus shimmers at the edge of town.
Not far from the ferris wheel, among crickets,
in the meadow, among fireflies.  No one forgets
your music, mock-orange (riverside, wind-blown).

 
Your heart a wine-fed river too, Hobo.
Lonesome, lengthened by rainbow stream
(slow Milky Way).  Sown with a flighty flaw;
raised in a figurehead (her thunder-bough).

Fontegaia chapt. 2 is dawdling toward a close...

24

 
Hobo swings home, after senseless miles
drawn by the umbel of a Queen Anne's lace.
My weedy galaxy... your lonesome grace
rises from umbered earth to meet his smile.

Fontegaia... today's draught.

23  (a Masque)

 
The dogwood colors gradually, blushing
plum and russet, slowly reddening
to holly scarlet, then fading... til
each leaf, like kiln-fired clay, goes drifting

 
along the ground.  So many stray horses,
lost in an autumn wood, all flames!
And the chill in the air - the seraphim!
Terrific echoes from the future race

 
- boomerang into the past - the chariots
of Israel and her horsemen!  Elijah
leans near the gleaming throne, a grail-
ship in his hand - Lord, suspended - floats!

 
The dark drops quickly now, a silvery
wrinkle of late-summer crickets (curtain
of homely sound).  Soon my labyrinthine
morris dancer will emerge (memory

 
a buried well).  Fleet companion,
lightfoot arborist... whose brook
slips past a forest door - dark book
of frittery wings (dried myrmidons).

House Organ #60, edited by Kenneth Warren, arrived today. I feel lucky to be getting this in my mailbox. The funny thing is how this little folded-over xerox-style magazine, full of quiet poets you've never heard of, mostly, is the best thing going in hopped-up, expensive America. Tom Epstein put me on to it, several years ago.

Fontegaia ripples along...

22

 
Another year leans down toward autumn.
Steadfast whine of Palio gone quiet now.
Stubborn yarn of hilltop-town (plow
upending vineyard-wake) only the hum

 
of absent hornets over a fallow stream.
Race of a twining J, milled (purling,
providential) through my veins.  Preening
yearlings, tender feet in a mural scheme -

 
young scouts in alder labyrinth -
gnarled sign of constancy in suffering
(St. Kate, cartwheeling). 
Siena gathers toward a last July.  Absinthe

 
wormwood, rain; pale horses
neighing nigh, near splintered
almond tree (blooming anachronism).
My muttering (tracing their courses).