It puzzles me why everybody keeps talking about Ashbery, O'Hara, on & on. OK, I know this will be seen as my problem. But God, these guys are so boring, with their glibness & their hipness.

Why did we go back to the early modernists in the 1st place? (Why did we go to Russia??) Ironically, to get out from under the shadow of these bland narcissistic self-satisfied mid-century guys, of the previous generation. We chose a deeper shadow.

Now that I've proclaimed the absolute superiority of poetry, I think I'm going to write some prose. (About the superiority of poetry, among other things...)

I guess the photo on the HG Poetics masthead makes a similar point. "Henry Thunder Winnebago, Recording Songs in a Grove".

An old, forgotten language. Translated (via the iron buggy) onto a disk of wax.

Aside from foolishness & silliness, wooden stanzas & awkward lines, frustrations & humiliations... isn't this the credo of the poet : not to bend?

In a nutshell, isn't the aim to show an example of Aristotle's argument, that poetry is superior to history, in that it gives life to universals and form to particulars? Doesn't the poet strive to encompass the All in the Small (as in, Rhode Island)? "My circuit is circumference." And how can poetry accomplish such, unless it's free from the demands and rewards of temporary and limited goods - willing to submit to nothing but its own inherent (mimetic or anti-mimetic) requirements?

In my way I've tried to keep clear of anything that would bend poetry toward usages other than this basic one of its own proper ends.

This alone, by itself, is the ultimate geste. The extraneous business - motivations, justifications, explanations - only dilute the force of this elementary strangeness, or wholeness - this unbending universality.

Lately reflecting on my "literary" life in 60s, 70s. Making slow headway toward some kind of prose, not sure what. Have a certain secret plan.

Wonder of the big Padgett/Shapiro NY School anthology (for a Minnesota high school student) - this was poetry-out-of-school (or seemed to be). I loitered there a long time, soaking it up. In high school english class, on the other hand, poetry was serious (ee cummings an exception). Shades of ancient times.

In high school I was active in the Literary Club. I ended up editing the literary magazine (called Talisman - before the other Talisman). Boys in suits & ties sitting around with faculty advisor, listening to each other's creative efforts. I remember one evening we met at Wendell Willkie's fancy house (he was a senior - nephew(?) of the onetime Pres. candidate). We were like a miniature clone of 40s-50s-style East Coast literati. The teacher smoked a pipe.

After that, going to college (Brown) in 1970 seemed a little like going to summer camp or second childhood. And in a way, the NY School poetry I loved encouraged that sort of mentality. But there was a subtle poison interlaced with the charm.

What was this poison? Well, I'm thinking today that the NY School shared something with Abstract Expressionism : language applied as a kind of screen or free unregulated autonomous space. And the poet who applied it was undergoing (unknowingly, for the most part) an initiation of sorts.

The odd thing is that as a junior-high & high-school adolescent I had a more "normative" or unproblematic sense of the literary artist's vocation. From a very young age I was able to write creative things in a school setting, & attract people's interest, attention & approval. It was a kind of magic, it gave me a kind of mana or social role. I was the "writer".

I think it was in college that the regressive/dreamy/childish freedom I was soaking up (through emulation of the NY poets) - the supreme autonomy of the very goofy poems I was deliberately writing in great numbers & great speed (freshman spring that year was a juvenile annus mirabilis) - I mean the social weight & implications of the direction my "vocation" was taking - started to come home to me. That was a long sentence I just wrote. What I mean is, things got (surreptitiously) more difficult.

Working on a memoir-project now. Here's some "Mayan" juvenilia from my soi-disant NY School days (ca. 1971) :

THE PRIESTS

 
We found a narrow path for each year to travel on,
the days sloping into each other, a horse steps down a hill.
Each new year trembling like a wet bird, in colors
dazzling and negative, of people and wide streets.

 
We built resting places for old cripples with sacks.
Disgust or joy slides like surf across the faces of the poor.
Temples were piled up with small, touching objects
which we gave to girls on the street.
More and higher stone delights rise into the sky,
which rains.  Sampans and ketches bobbing in the blue harbor.

 
In the country, vague tremors in the well-yard, odd clouds.
Finally, just as he predicted, as he sighed his last
out through the hut door:  white ships glide into the bay.
Stars bump quietly.  Wooden docks, the boulders on the shore.

Maybe I should call this my "buddhist" phase. Adolescent detachment.

On my lunch break, trying to read article about Siena buildings, actually thinking haphazardly about post of earlier this morning, about my life's "silliness", thinking all writers are silly, their work is hidden from sight, their lives - their real life - goes into their writing-work... which reminded me of my grandfather, the engineer, whose life was hidden in building projects in the midwest almost 100 years ago... thinking of writers as engineers, then chanced to read in the Siena book that the top of the famous Mangia tower in the Campo was designed by Lippo Memmi... which was a nice little thing for me to find, since it revealed some continuity in my work, by way of this poem, written long before the current "Siena" project (Fontegaia)... now I realize that Lippo Memmi's model for his icon of the Magdalen (in the RISD museum down the hill) was probably Sienese...

...one of the things I found in the old files. From Pawtucket Times, 1986. That's me next to Galway Kinnell. Janet Sullivan (on his other side) edited Nedge with me. Forrest Gander, seated.

Spent weekend packing & moving books & files from a room we want to paint... cleaning out old papers... opportunity to look back, old correspondence & correspondents about poetry, in the pre-9/11 & pre-blog (even pre-internet!) era... Nedge, The Poetry Mission, old local & distant literary friends & allies, many of whom I've lost touch with, old family stuff, photos, letters...

- good thing to reflect on all this; fleeting ephemeral aspect of things... (I know I'm being vague). The feathery lightweight silliness of my track in life... dreamworld of books & words, & the endless/intermittent laboring to articulate, enunciate...

- probably without realizing it I've become much more impersonal, abstractly "ambitious" (ambition in an inverse proportion to time divided by nonentity)... I don't blame the internet, it's me, me. The weight & inertia of seemingly ineffectual literary activity. Would like to reconnect somehow, on a new plane.

Thinking about a kind of memoir-opus, but must keep plan under my hat for the moment.

Some (unusual) reservations about a John Latta post of Friday. Julien Gracq is good on prose dynamics, but he's registering them in terms set by poetry. I don't see the value, myself, in having a rivalry between poetry & prose, or in eliding genuine differences between them. Valery's not the best advocate for poetry's case. Dichten = condensare has less to do with his "precision" than with Celan's ever-more-concise formulations, or perhaps with Zen. That is, poetry absolute zero : the vanishing point where art folds into truth. The "simplicity axiom" in theoretical science (ie. the simplest theories are the best) has its analogue in literature. Prose can be complex indeed; but nothing is more simultaneously massive and light than poetry (cf. Mandelstam : "beneath its modest exterior, a terrifying density").

p.s. I know, I know, you can say I myself set up the rivalry between poetry & prose, why, just last Monday (post of 8.20). Main non, this is no rivalry : simply the categorical & absolute superiority of poetry.

(p.p.s. ...then, today, he, the Latta, writes an encomium to Nabokov, so much more scintillating & particular than I ever could....)

Jonathan presses me on some seeming contradictions in the good ol' comment box below. I really should go back and read that prose piece by Celan ("Conversation in the Mountains") before saying anything, but, hey, what the heck, this is blogging...

As I recall, Celan's little story of a walk & conversation in the Alps with a mysterious interlocutor is very playful and elliptical. But they circle around some deep questions about the nature of poetry, art and truth - the relations between these three.

& I think (& I could be way wrong) that the story emphasizes a certain coldness and inhumanity involved in the nature of artifice - its creation of models, of simulacra. He's thinking, maybe, about Plato's suspicions (the cave of images, & all that), &/or about the Biblical prohibition of images of God. The problem - which penetrates to language itself, and through all kinds of social/intellectual "constructs" - is that, in the very activity of art-making and symbol-making and image-making, humanity both alienates and reifies life - creates a spurious reality - loses touch with the roots of authentic being - loses its soul...

The poet is involved in a paradoxical activity. Perhaps Celan's concept shows some similarities to Simone Weil's "decreation", and Wallace Stevens' "ignorance" ("you must become an ignorant man", etc.). To the idea that poetry - compared to the other arts - is simple or "poor" art - "abstract", as with a mathematical theorem or a piece of Shaker furniture.

We are talking about a streak of deep iconoclasm in the spirit of poetry.

About the idea that the poet somehow absorbs and perfects all the other arts - absorbs them back into the primordial "word". And in the process, shakes off all the reifications of artifice : reveals the "nakedness" of human (& divine) truths. (Think William Blake.)

This is the deep paradoxical coil wherein poetry both perfects and inverts prose, art, etc. Radical truth-speaking at the source of the charming masquerade of rhetoric, artfulness and ornamentation.

Reading along in PK Dick's novel Valis. Odd parallels to Henry's wacky 70s adventures.

In the novel Valis, protagonist (and author's alter ego) "Horselover Fat" [Philip = greek for "lover of horses"; Dick = german for "fat"] has strange "theophany" in 1974, sending him on a sort of time-warp quest for God, which includes contacting the rock star & film-maker "Eric Lampton" (Eric Clapton, get it?) with secret information about time-traveling Christian world-savers.

In (so-called) real life, poet "Henry" has strange theophany in the fall of 1973, sending him on a sort of time-warp quest for God, which includes traveling to London to see rock stars (& film makers) Rolling Stones (Keith Richards, in particular) with "information" about time-traveling (UFO) Christian world-savers.

(- there's also the parallel (in fate & plot) between Fat's "Gloria" and Henry's Juliet.)

PK Dick is great at evoking the period flavor...

"Horselover Fat". I may have to try to work this into the Fontegaia/Palio sequence, somehow. S.F. is already in there - but I thought it was more San Francisco than Science Fiction.

Actual poets speed like phantom Sanskrit steeds over the sleepy valley of dutiful rote-prose & professional writerdom. It's another dimension. Unthinkable. Incalculable.

(I remember Joseph Brodsky say, at a reading in Providence, something like this : "We Petersburg poets thought of ourselves as the air force. Prose was for the infantry.")

I'll say it over & over again, in a variety of ways, until I get it right or until someone corrects me :

1. Poetry is defined as that form of speech or writing which surpasses prose.

2. The beautiful or artistic aspect of a work of prose is its poetry.

3. Poetry cannot be learned or taught because its source, the experience of imaginative inspiration, is unwilled and unwillable.

4. Authentic poetry simply surpasses ordinary writing. The effect is obvious and immediate and tangible. Only willful writers, mediocre writers, writing programs, journalists, editors and academia obscure this fact. They blur and muddle this reality in countless ways.

5. Don't worry or argue about #4. Teaching poetry to young people is a fine vocation. & authentic poetry will shine no matter what anybody does to hide it. Its nature is to shine.

reading Philip K. Dick's "novel" Valis with enormous pleasure. The quintessential sad clown - morose, but hilarious.

& it's a good thing I didn't read it when it first came out, 30 yrs or so ago. Far too many similarities to my own history & wacky obsessions...

Gabriel Gudding has a big new book out (Rhode Island Notebook).

Obscure spider threads seem to bind the fate of these two former-Minnesotan poets (that is, Gabriel & me). Members of the School of Embodied Poetry. Minnesota, midwestern homesickness, the wedding (I was their best man), the amazing "Clio" poem serendipity (according to that other RI visitant, Ange Mlinko, sort of a Kieslowski film in embryo), Rhode Island, family history, long poems, epic journeys. Rhode Island is a small cosmos.

(Stubborn Grew, In RI - TWO MORE excessive poems by a Minnesotan about Rhode Island, family break-ups, history, politics, epic journeys (Henry, Bluejay, Roger Williams) - they're companion volumes to Gabriel's book. We're somehow akin in that Eliotic (idiotic?) tradition-realm. Read all 3 together. Teach them in class. That's an order. We're re-writing American culture as Rhode Island poetry.)

Fontegaia rambles on.

20

 
On a straw-strewn Campo ring, beneath
the inching shadow of a clocktower,
horses and horsemen display their power -
hearts hoofpounding for a laurel wreath.

 
A snoozing hobo in the clocktower
rotating away from the hubbub below
forges a dream-rim out of molten snow.
Its iron heart will win the race this hour.

Funny to think of "creative spark" in terms of Oliver Sack's article in last week's New Yorker, about the surgeon who was struck by lightning & suddenly became obsessed with music & musical composition.

I don't read this event as another invitation to biological determinism. I read it as a parable written by the ghost of Philip K. Dick.

Want to follow up a little on yesterday's notes.

If we assert that poetry (and creative artistic work generally) has its roots in some kind of "elsewhere", a place to some extent detached from our will, intellect, & rational calculation - well, this is a big step & has a lot of consequences.

The desire is always to integrate these three - will, intellect and imagination. But cultural history bears a lot of scars, a lot of evidence for the struggle, one way or another. Apollo vs. Dionysus. Ben Jonson (master craftsman) vs. Shakespeare (native genius).

What does it mean that ancient poetry - in its "serious" (not comic, not satiric) modes, anyway - invariably invoked the Muse? The muse is a kind of personification of the imagination's elusive unaccountability.

Probably no critical essay has been dismissed and derided in the last 50 years as has Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent", which includes statements like : "The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." The basis for such dismissals is usually social in nature : American society in particular is more diverse and divided, less certain of its foundations or overall unity, that it was (or at least seemed to be) when Eliot wrote this 80 years ago.

But if we think of Eliot's order of poetic tradition as primarily imaginative, rather than social, or even aesthetic, then his position becomes more persuasive. Starting with Augustine's classic tripartite map of conscious - will, intellect, and imagination - let's say that in art, the imagination moves into a position of priority. The phenomenon of original invention in art - the appearance of a new concept or new vision of relations, which seems to organize all the rest of the artistic material around it - is the fruit, the product, the telos of imaginative activity. What we find beautiful in the products of art then forms or is a part of this pre-existent "ideal order". It is not an order of history or culture so much as an order of originality, an order of beauty.

Which brings me back to the idea of poetry's "otherness". No one can predict the workings of the imagination, of imaginative invention. It is a spark which ignites the whole mind and being of the artist.

One can respond to this phenomenon in diverse ways. There are those who love and serve the imagination; there are others who calculate and strive to force it into channels for their own selfish purposes. The latter route, of course, is ultimately self-defeating. Cultural history is an immense garbage dump of such vain efforts : cultural history is a joke played on us by the Muse.

Many are the critical writings which try to rationalize talent and aesthetic judgement on the basis of social frameworks and determinations. & far be it from me to suggest that poetry exists in a rarified absolute realm, distinct from ordinary social life. It seems perfectly legitimate to explore the socio-historical and generally human context, which illuminates motives and meanings implicit in the artwork itself. But if, in this endeavor, one neglects the original, instinctive spark of imaginative conception - the seed and basis of the whole process - then one has indubitably missed the boat.

I'd just finished posting previous, when poet David Cashman stopped in to see me. He had come back from a trip, visiting his daughter in Amsterdam; & told me how he was walking around there with his friend Anne, when she noticed a small plaque on a run-down hotel. It turned out to be a memorial to Chet Baker, marking the spot where he fell to the pavement.