Check this out.... amazing collection of digitized images of original manuscripts and papers of Osip Mandelshtam, with material also from Nadezhda Mandelstam & others. Includes the "Voronezh Notebooks" ms.... Happy Thanksgiving!
11.27.2013
Jesus thoughts
Today I give thanks that I'm not a prominent bishop or theologian, pressed to take "positions" and provide pastoral guidance on every moral issue of the day. Some of the moral questions of the day seem truly murky to me - but that might just be me. I'm just glad to be a lowly layperson poet & blogger; I don't have to engage - not "professionally", anyway - in the high profile debates among clergy & theologians & scholars. I feel sort of the same way about not "teaching" poetry or poetry-writing. It's a very honorable and important thing to do - to spread the knowledge and appreciation of good writing and literary history - but I'm glad I don't have to do it professionally. It leaves me some freedom to write whatever I like, however I like - eccentric as it may be sometimes.
Writing this after post here yesterday in praise of a book I'm near finishing, by Anglican theologian N.T. Wright, called Surprised by Hope. It's a summary (for a general audience) of his interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. I'm finding it extremely cogent and fascinating, much in line with my own vague intuitions about these matters. Wright argues - as I have too, in a way, here on HG Poetics - for the historical concreteness and actuality of the mysterious actions of Jesus, despite the fact that much of that actuality remains shrouded in inexplicable darkness. He urges a shift away from what he calls a neo-Gnostic attitude (prevalent in some fundamentalist strains of American Protestantism, as well as in mainstream and Catholic medieval traditions) : an otherworldly division between spirit and flesh, between the destiny of "this fallen world" and an individual's eternal soul. Wright brings back into force the Hebraic and Gospel understanding of the "kingdom of God" as a restitution of divine sovereignty in this world : a "setting right" of the whole cosmos, a true victory over death - starting with the "new creation" of Jesus' bodily return to life (in a new, & different, "spiritual" body - Paul's "glorified body"). This is what he means by theological Hope : that Christ's victory over the cross is meant to transform completely our sense of reality and human history. By believing, we are not simply "saved" from this planet into some eternal soul realm : we are conjoined to save the whole planet - make the cosmos worthy again of its transcendent, creative origin.
I'm summarizing inadequately what seems to me a very acute and far-ranging presentation, with which I almost completely agree. So I posted a brief comment about it here yesterday, including links to the book, and a link to Wright's Wikipedia biography. This was before I actually read the Wikipedia entry. There I learned that Wright has been described as an advocate of "Christian mortalism" - that is, a theology which dissents from a belief in a sort of "detachable" immortal soul. Wright argues that a dependence on this kind of spirit-body split goes back, not to the Gospels, but to Plato and the Gnostics, and that this very ancient tendency has led to a sometimes complacent, otherworldly individualism, when it comes to grasping Christ's prophetic message and challenge. As far as that goes, I think he's correct : but I would never be able to accept something termed "Christian mortalism". This is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I think the power and freedom of the human soul depend to some extent on our sense of the soul's cosmic "sovereignty" over time and space. I'm reminded in this context of Vladimir Nabokov's playful parable, in his novel Bend Sinister, of the human soul's inherent dignity - when he has his main character, the old professor Adam Krug - who is embattled and persecuted by an Orwellian parody of a dictatorship - "rescued" from his torment and tormentors by the "transcendent" author of the novel himself. I'm also reminded of this statement of Jesus, in one of the Gospels, which goes something like : "Fear not those who can harm the body, but not the soul : rather fear Him who can destroy both body and soul in hell!" This seems to me like a pretty clear distinction between the two dimensions.
I do like and find fascinating Wright's notion that the "kingdom" of God" is not "up there" in the stars somewhere : but is a hidden dimension of our own earthly timespace, which occasionally makes its presence felt on earth (which we experience as divine grace, angelic intervention, miracle, & related phenomena). This is, obviously, very fertile ground for the literary imagination...
But I was also troubled to learn that Wright, as a prominent Anglican bishop (now retired), took part in the Lambeth convocation or conference of a few years back, and argued against the blessing of homosexual unions, and against the ordination of openly gay clergy. This, to me, is one of those murky areas of social morality where judgement seems very difficult.
For me, being heterosexual, homosexuality has always been something of a puzzle, an "otherness". What I do know is that all persons have instinctual sexual drives, and that sexuality is an inalienable dimension of our life in this body. I also know that marriage, in its true sense, involves a vow of commitment and faithfulness which is made on behalf of the whole person, and the whole life of the persons who make such a vow. If we believe that homosexuality is some kind of illness - some kind of physical or psychological diversion from the "normal" or "good" path of human sexuality - then I could understand the difficulty that religious authorities would have in consenting to bless or sanction the actions of those exhibiting such "symptoms". On the other hand, if we consider homosexuality to be a phenomenon on a much wider scale of norms and normality - if we think of it as one among other forms of instinctual sexual drives - then it becomes harder to pass judgement on it as abnormal or morally wrong. The Catholic Church and the Anglican communion, at present, are striving not to "pass judgement" on the instinctual drives themselves - but only on those who express such drives in action. For many churches and denominations, sexual activity outside marriage is to be curbed, shunned, even condemned. Thus, for them, it seems, homosexual activity would be on a par with adultery or pre-marital sex.
Obviously, the churches - despite maintaining a source of spiritual authority and moral exhortation, in the call to people to abjure all kinds of worldiness and idolatry (whether of riches or vanity or worldly honors or materialistic obsessions or sexual hedonism) for the sake of God's cosmic holiness, and one's own spiritual wholeness - the churches are always going to have a few problems imposing their moral strictures on the private lives of ordinary adult human beings. If the Church is going to insist that those of homosexual inclination forsake all homosexual activity, then, to be fair, the Church is going to have to insist just as strongly on the ban on all sexual activity outside of marriage and procreation. This is a worthy call to holiness, perhaps; but it will be hard to implement in practical terms.
As I say, these questions are not for me to resolve : I confess the strong sense of not having all the information necessary to make a moral judgement in this area. But based on the limited sense of things I do have at this time, it seems to be most probable that homosexuality is not so much an illness as a part of a broader spectrum of human sexual orientation. As such, and keeping in mind my previous description of marriage (as a vow of personal commitment in human wholeness), I have the feeling that the wisest and most charitable course would be to honor and bless those people who, of whatever harmless sexual orientation (& I underscore harmless), desire to make a personal life-commitment to another person whom they love. This seems to be the dominant position of the American Episcopal church also - the church in which I was baptized and confirmed long ago. I admit that in the long run I could be very wrong - morally mistaken - on this point; but that is my present belief on this subject - contra Bishop Wright, apparently.
*Late-night-thoughts (postscript) :
The original, apostolic Gospel, as I understand it - going back to John the Baptist - presents conversion as the watershed : to be reborn, to "die to the world, and to live in the Spirit with Christ". It's a matter of complete moral re-orientation : away from selfish (temporal, earthbound) desire, and toward the realm of God's eternal dimension of love and grace. Both John the Baptist and Paul the Apostle bore witness that, in this new life of the Spirit, our former worldly arrangements are completely abrogated, transformed; & that, in this situation, it's better simply to wait for the grace of God - to accept patiently (as infants in the new life) whatever present situation in which we find ourselves. Yet, at the same time, to renounce all allegiance to our former unregenerate ways : to provide no allowance for the world, the flesh, the devil. In this context - one of ascetic renunciation - the condemnation of homosexual activity is understandable. Profane, "unnatural" behavior becomes the representative symbol (the scapegoat, in a sense) for all forms of hedonism and lust. Thus to ask for sacramental sanction for homosexual unions, or to offer episcopal authority to "openly gay" clerics, appears to contradict or offend the foundational principles of the church.
This constellation of spiritual belief and principle seems, on superficial grounds, unanswerable : in such context, the notion of "gay marriage", for example, is already beyond the pale. Yet there is an answer, a counter-argument. If indeed there is a diversity of inborn sexual orientation, as an inherent fact of human nature - then Christian baptism, and the new life it represents, should be able to redeem the whole spectrum of biological drives. In other words, one who is born with a homosexual orientation should be enabled (through the Redemption) to enter this new life, along with any other child of God. The harmony of the individual conscience with God's will takes many forms, none of which we are authorized to judge (since such grace is ipso facto beyond judgement). So, if people born homosexual hear the call of baptism and rebirth, and re-order themselves to the commitments of this new life, who are we to pass judgement? If they choose to enter into a loving, spousal relationship in the light of God's grace, who are we to outlaw them? If they are called to serve God in his church in a clerical vocation, who are we to deny? If indeed there are distinct, innate human sexual orientations, which develop in various patterns, then God will certainly find a way to lead them all into the great communion - not separate from the rest, but subject to the same ascetic, spiritual rule and moral judgement as everyone else.
It all comes down to the question of nature. If Dante is right, and homosexuality is contra naturam - a willful abrogation of God's natural law - then it deserves condemnation. But, on the other hand, if homosexuality is one ordinary, innate dimension of nature, one variation of a norm (a norm of physical, "fleshly" desire, as opposed to spiritual law) - not a matter of rebellious, quasi-demonic human will - then it will be transformed and redeemed along with the rest of human nature (the whole sum of human folly). I don't know the answer to this question (of innate nature). But this is how I would frame a preliminary (imperfect) response.
Writing this after post here yesterday in praise of a book I'm near finishing, by Anglican theologian N.T. Wright, called Surprised by Hope. It's a summary (for a general audience) of his interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. I'm finding it extremely cogent and fascinating, much in line with my own vague intuitions about these matters. Wright argues - as I have too, in a way, here on HG Poetics - for the historical concreteness and actuality of the mysterious actions of Jesus, despite the fact that much of that actuality remains shrouded in inexplicable darkness. He urges a shift away from what he calls a neo-Gnostic attitude (prevalent in some fundamentalist strains of American Protestantism, as well as in mainstream and Catholic medieval traditions) : an otherworldly division between spirit and flesh, between the destiny of "this fallen world" and an individual's eternal soul. Wright brings back into force the Hebraic and Gospel understanding of the "kingdom of God" as a restitution of divine sovereignty in this world : a "setting right" of the whole cosmos, a true victory over death - starting with the "new creation" of Jesus' bodily return to life (in a new, & different, "spiritual" body - Paul's "glorified body"). This is what he means by theological Hope : that Christ's victory over the cross is meant to transform completely our sense of reality and human history. By believing, we are not simply "saved" from this planet into some eternal soul realm : we are conjoined to save the whole planet - make the cosmos worthy again of its transcendent, creative origin.
I'm summarizing inadequately what seems to me a very acute and far-ranging presentation, with which I almost completely agree. So I posted a brief comment about it here yesterday, including links to the book, and a link to Wright's Wikipedia biography. This was before I actually read the Wikipedia entry. There I learned that Wright has been described as an advocate of "Christian mortalism" - that is, a theology which dissents from a belief in a sort of "detachable" immortal soul. Wright argues that a dependence on this kind of spirit-body split goes back, not to the Gospels, but to Plato and the Gnostics, and that this very ancient tendency has led to a sometimes complacent, otherworldly individualism, when it comes to grasping Christ's prophetic message and challenge. As far as that goes, I think he's correct : but I would never be able to accept something termed "Christian mortalism". This is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I think the power and freedom of the human soul depend to some extent on our sense of the soul's cosmic "sovereignty" over time and space. I'm reminded in this context of Vladimir Nabokov's playful parable, in his novel Bend Sinister, of the human soul's inherent dignity - when he has his main character, the old professor Adam Krug - who is embattled and persecuted by an Orwellian parody of a dictatorship - "rescued" from his torment and tormentors by the "transcendent" author of the novel himself. I'm also reminded of this statement of Jesus, in one of the Gospels, which goes something like : "Fear not those who can harm the body, but not the soul : rather fear Him who can destroy both body and soul in hell!" This seems to me like a pretty clear distinction between the two dimensions.
I do like and find fascinating Wright's notion that the "kingdom" of God" is not "up there" in the stars somewhere : but is a hidden dimension of our own earthly timespace, which occasionally makes its presence felt on earth (which we experience as divine grace, angelic intervention, miracle, & related phenomena). This is, obviously, very fertile ground for the literary imagination...
But I was also troubled to learn that Wright, as a prominent Anglican bishop (now retired), took part in the Lambeth convocation or conference of a few years back, and argued against the blessing of homosexual unions, and against the ordination of openly gay clergy. This, to me, is one of those murky areas of social morality where judgement seems very difficult.
For me, being heterosexual, homosexuality has always been something of a puzzle, an "otherness". What I do know is that all persons have instinctual sexual drives, and that sexuality is an inalienable dimension of our life in this body. I also know that marriage, in its true sense, involves a vow of commitment and faithfulness which is made on behalf of the whole person, and the whole life of the persons who make such a vow. If we believe that homosexuality is some kind of illness - some kind of physical or psychological diversion from the "normal" or "good" path of human sexuality - then I could understand the difficulty that religious authorities would have in consenting to bless or sanction the actions of those exhibiting such "symptoms". On the other hand, if we consider homosexuality to be a phenomenon on a much wider scale of norms and normality - if we think of it as one among other forms of instinctual sexual drives - then it becomes harder to pass judgement on it as abnormal or morally wrong. The Catholic Church and the Anglican communion, at present, are striving not to "pass judgement" on the instinctual drives themselves - but only on those who express such drives in action. For many churches and denominations, sexual activity outside marriage is to be curbed, shunned, even condemned. Thus, for them, it seems, homosexual activity would be on a par with adultery or pre-marital sex.
Obviously, the churches - despite maintaining a source of spiritual authority and moral exhortation, in the call to people to abjure all kinds of worldiness and idolatry (whether of riches or vanity or worldly honors or materialistic obsessions or sexual hedonism) for the sake of God's cosmic holiness, and one's own spiritual wholeness - the churches are always going to have a few problems imposing their moral strictures on the private lives of ordinary adult human beings. If the Church is going to insist that those of homosexual inclination forsake all homosexual activity, then, to be fair, the Church is going to have to insist just as strongly on the ban on all sexual activity outside of marriage and procreation. This is a worthy call to holiness, perhaps; but it will be hard to implement in practical terms.
As I say, these questions are not for me to resolve : I confess the strong sense of not having all the information necessary to make a moral judgement in this area. But based on the limited sense of things I do have at this time, it seems to be most probable that homosexuality is not so much an illness as a part of a broader spectrum of human sexual orientation. As such, and keeping in mind my previous description of marriage (as a vow of personal commitment in human wholeness), I have the feeling that the wisest and most charitable course would be to honor and bless those people who, of whatever harmless sexual orientation (& I underscore harmless), desire to make a personal life-commitment to another person whom they love. This seems to be the dominant position of the American Episcopal church also - the church in which I was baptized and confirmed long ago. I admit that in the long run I could be very wrong - morally mistaken - on this point; but that is my present belief on this subject - contra Bishop Wright, apparently.
*Late-night-thoughts (postscript) :
The original, apostolic Gospel, as I understand it - going back to John the Baptist - presents conversion as the watershed : to be reborn, to "die to the world, and to live in the Spirit with Christ". It's a matter of complete moral re-orientation : away from selfish (temporal, earthbound) desire, and toward the realm of God's eternal dimension of love and grace. Both John the Baptist and Paul the Apostle bore witness that, in this new life of the Spirit, our former worldly arrangements are completely abrogated, transformed; & that, in this situation, it's better simply to wait for the grace of God - to accept patiently (as infants in the new life) whatever present situation in which we find ourselves. Yet, at the same time, to renounce all allegiance to our former unregenerate ways : to provide no allowance for the world, the flesh, the devil. In this context - one of ascetic renunciation - the condemnation of homosexual activity is understandable. Profane, "unnatural" behavior becomes the representative symbol (the scapegoat, in a sense) for all forms of hedonism and lust. Thus to ask for sacramental sanction for homosexual unions, or to offer episcopal authority to "openly gay" clerics, appears to contradict or offend the foundational principles of the church.
This constellation of spiritual belief and principle seems, on superficial grounds, unanswerable : in such context, the notion of "gay marriage", for example, is already beyond the pale. Yet there is an answer, a counter-argument. If indeed there is a diversity of inborn sexual orientation, as an inherent fact of human nature - then Christian baptism, and the new life it represents, should be able to redeem the whole spectrum of biological drives. In other words, one who is born with a homosexual orientation should be enabled (through the Redemption) to enter this new life, along with any other child of God. The harmony of the individual conscience with God's will takes many forms, none of which we are authorized to judge (since such grace is ipso facto beyond judgement). So, if people born homosexual hear the call of baptism and rebirth, and re-order themselves to the commitments of this new life, who are we to pass judgement? If they choose to enter into a loving, spousal relationship in the light of God's grace, who are we to outlaw them? If they are called to serve God in his church in a clerical vocation, who are we to deny? If indeed there are distinct, innate human sexual orientations, which develop in various patterns, then God will certainly find a way to lead them all into the great communion - not separate from the rest, but subject to the same ascetic, spiritual rule and moral judgement as everyone else.
It all comes down to the question of nature. If Dante is right, and homosexuality is contra naturam - a willful abrogation of God's natural law - then it deserves condemnation. But, on the other hand, if homosexuality is one ordinary, innate dimension of nature, one variation of a norm (a norm of physical, "fleshly" desire, as opposed to spiritual law) - not a matter of rebellious, quasi-demonic human will - then it will be transformed and redeemed along with the rest of human nature (the whole sum of human folly). I don't know the answer to this question (of innate nature). But this is how I would frame a preliminary (imperfect) response.
11.07.2013
Logos in the River
I seem to have lost the habit of blog-rolling here. Long intervals of silence (preserving thousands of digital trees, no doubt). May be an opportunity to recollect, review some of those simple basic ideas or axioms which come to me when I try to think about poetry.
Poetry is an expression of harmony.
What is harmony? Music offers the most obvious example : a concord of differing sounds, a combination of sometimes opposing elements in a new whole which is pleasing, beautiful. But music is not the only manifestation of harmony. In fact music, poetry and the other arts present different facets of some kind of deeper concord, inherent in reality. In this respect I think of the mythical Apollo, the Greek god responsible for music, poetry and medicine. I think of Osip Mandelstam's conviction that poetry is somehow connected with the healing arts.
The harmonics of poetry offer a sort of means of entry into the harmony of reality. I think this is what Wallace Stevens was pondering when he wrote those gnomic sayings (the "Adagia") which counterpose poetry itself with the "poetry of life" or "the poetry of reality".
Poetry differs in kind from prose.
Such an assertion has led to all sorts of academic quibbles about the "prose virtues" of poetry, the "poetic qualities" of prose, the values of "prose poetry", etc. Yet, in the end, poetry differs in kind from prose. And what constitutes the difference is the presence of harmony. The integral concord manifest in poetry is not present in prose. Prose is transitive, in that its essential purpose is to "carry over" specific meaning(s) from writer to reader. Poetry is intransitive, because, in the very process of its appearing, poetry "embodies" meaning under the aegis of harmony.
The contrast between prose and poetry is like the difference between a crowd of people congregated at a subway stop, deep in conversations with each other (or with their cell phones), and the person at the same subway stop who suddenly bursts into song.
Poetry is a powerful force.
The substance of poetry's power in human culture is also rooted in this dimension of harmony. Its particular embodiment of the logos, or harmonious order of reality as a whole, shines out as a sort of epitome or quintessence or summation of the power of human language in general. Such an "idealistic" principle has been criticized from various directions. Aesthetic purists question the simple fusion of what is seen as a demonstration of supreme artistic autonomy and freedom, with any encroachment of a broader "reality principle" (despite the poetic guise such a principle takes on here). Such a notion of poetry's potential power is also questioned by cultural traditionalists : the pitfalls of Romanticism, solipsism, antinomianism, or irrationality always shadow any personal expression of poetic "vision". In response to this objection, a passage from Wallace Stevens comes to mind : "The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate." In this regard, poetry simply distills and epitomizes the general poetic activity of the human mind. "Mankind the Maker" lives by the conjectural utterances which give shape and meaning to experience. Dante's "ben del intelletto" (the good of the intellect) is the summit of human understanding : and such understanding is shared by means of our verbal capability - by means of the Word.
Poetry is an end in itself.
If poetry is indeed a powerful cultural force, which can breathe with great impact across the times and spaces of human culture, how then could it also be an end in itself? Again, we go back to this dimension of inherent harmony. If the poem is not a pleasing whole, if it does not please and gratify its audience for its own sake, if it is not in some sense gratuitous, then it is not really poetry, but something else (prose, pose, propaganda...). The radical aspect of this situation is that poetry's wholeness, its graceful self-sufficiency, is a reflection of its origin in the harmony of reality itself. Thus every time we are gratified by the concordant beauty of a poem, we are reminded of the "sabbath" dimension of the entire cosmos : the mystery of its creative, gratuitous, playful, beautiful, ex nihilo Presence.
Poetry is personal.
We are veering toward some Coleridgean Romantic mystagoguery here... but I am going to proceed inexorably in that direction. If we look back at modern and postmodern trends in poetry, we find periodic efforts to resist or contain the "personal" - mere self-expression. Eliot with his "impersonality" and "objective correlative" and tradition; Pound with his precise, quasi-scientific Imagism; the New Critics with their ideal of aesthetic autotelism; the Language Poets with their theory-driven abolition of individual expression; the Flarfistes with their techno-travesty of same... all these efforts sought to limit the futility and powerlessness - the pathetic, abject character - of the "personal poem". In the absence or decay of cohesive social bonds, their programmatic projects sought some kind of comparable socialization or group authorization, through the application of shared methods and communal styles.
But poetry is ultimately a union of opposites. In the poem, the personal and individual comes into a harmonic concordance with the social, the communal, the traditional. What was creative, inimitable and unique comes to be seen as iconic, necessary and shared. What was an artifact becomes a quasi-natural object. Shakespeare's "trademark" style, the thumbprint of his personal voice, comes to suffuse the works of his maturity - no matter how saturated they are, simultaneously, with generic models and communal design.
This concordance of the personal and the public also reveals, for me anyway, a theological subtext. We come back to the notion of a cosmos which is manifest ex nihilo - a gratuitous, galactic wonder. We return to the centrality of the personal : whether understood on the level of the individuality of each human person, or in the projected sense of a conjectural Person - a cosmic mind-matrix, an Ancient of Days - from Whom all our personal experience proceeds.
Yet it does not follow from this that all poetry must be individualistic, "confessional". In fact the incalculable fusion of personal and universal which radiates from the greatest poems is the outcome of some kind of laborious intellectual and moral wedding, welding : a chemical, alchemical bonding of poet and people, of poem and the age. This is the high path tread by the great poets of all cultures.
Well, this probably doesn't cover all the simple axioms which I maintain... but enough for now, I guess.
Poetry is an expression of harmony.
What is harmony? Music offers the most obvious example : a concord of differing sounds, a combination of sometimes opposing elements in a new whole which is pleasing, beautiful. But music is not the only manifestation of harmony. In fact music, poetry and the other arts present different facets of some kind of deeper concord, inherent in reality. In this respect I think of the mythical Apollo, the Greek god responsible for music, poetry and medicine. I think of Osip Mandelstam's conviction that poetry is somehow connected with the healing arts.
The harmonics of poetry offer a sort of means of entry into the harmony of reality. I think this is what Wallace Stevens was pondering when he wrote those gnomic sayings (the "Adagia") which counterpose poetry itself with the "poetry of life" or "the poetry of reality".
Poetry differs in kind from prose.
Such an assertion has led to all sorts of academic quibbles about the "prose virtues" of poetry, the "poetic qualities" of prose, the values of "prose poetry", etc. Yet, in the end, poetry differs in kind from prose. And what constitutes the difference is the presence of harmony. The integral concord manifest in poetry is not present in prose. Prose is transitive, in that its essential purpose is to "carry over" specific meaning(s) from writer to reader. Poetry is intransitive, because, in the very process of its appearing, poetry "embodies" meaning under the aegis of harmony.
The contrast between prose and poetry is like the difference between a crowd of people congregated at a subway stop, deep in conversations with each other (or with their cell phones), and the person at the same subway stop who suddenly bursts into song.
Poetry is a powerful force.
The substance of poetry's power in human culture is also rooted in this dimension of harmony. Its particular embodiment of the logos, or harmonious order of reality as a whole, shines out as a sort of epitome or quintessence or summation of the power of human language in general. Such an "idealistic" principle has been criticized from various directions. Aesthetic purists question the simple fusion of what is seen as a demonstration of supreme artistic autonomy and freedom, with any encroachment of a broader "reality principle" (despite the poetic guise such a principle takes on here). Such a notion of poetry's potential power is also questioned by cultural traditionalists : the pitfalls of Romanticism, solipsism, antinomianism, or irrationality always shadow any personal expression of poetic "vision". In response to this objection, a passage from Wallace Stevens comes to mind : "The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate." In this regard, poetry simply distills and epitomizes the general poetic activity of the human mind. "Mankind the Maker" lives by the conjectural utterances which give shape and meaning to experience. Dante's "ben del intelletto" (the good of the intellect) is the summit of human understanding : and such understanding is shared by means of our verbal capability - by means of the Word.
Poetry is an end in itself.
If poetry is indeed a powerful cultural force, which can breathe with great impact across the times and spaces of human culture, how then could it also be an end in itself? Again, we go back to this dimension of inherent harmony. If the poem is not a pleasing whole, if it does not please and gratify its audience for its own sake, if it is not in some sense gratuitous, then it is not really poetry, but something else (prose, pose, propaganda...). The radical aspect of this situation is that poetry's wholeness, its graceful self-sufficiency, is a reflection of its origin in the harmony of reality itself. Thus every time we are gratified by the concordant beauty of a poem, we are reminded of the "sabbath" dimension of the entire cosmos : the mystery of its creative, gratuitous, playful, beautiful, ex nihilo Presence.
Poetry is personal.
We are veering toward some Coleridgean Romantic mystagoguery here... but I am going to proceed inexorably in that direction. If we look back at modern and postmodern trends in poetry, we find periodic efforts to resist or contain the "personal" - mere self-expression. Eliot with his "impersonality" and "objective correlative" and tradition; Pound with his precise, quasi-scientific Imagism; the New Critics with their ideal of aesthetic autotelism; the Language Poets with their theory-driven abolition of individual expression; the Flarfistes with their techno-travesty of same... all these efforts sought to limit the futility and powerlessness - the pathetic, abject character - of the "personal poem". In the absence or decay of cohesive social bonds, their programmatic projects sought some kind of comparable socialization or group authorization, through the application of shared methods and communal styles.
But poetry is ultimately a union of opposites. In the poem, the personal and individual comes into a harmonic concordance with the social, the communal, the traditional. What was creative, inimitable and unique comes to be seen as iconic, necessary and shared. What was an artifact becomes a quasi-natural object. Shakespeare's "trademark" style, the thumbprint of his personal voice, comes to suffuse the works of his maturity - no matter how saturated they are, simultaneously, with generic models and communal design.
This concordance of the personal and the public also reveals, for me anyway, a theological subtext. We come back to the notion of a cosmos which is manifest ex nihilo - a gratuitous, galactic wonder. We return to the centrality of the personal : whether understood on the level of the individuality of each human person, or in the projected sense of a conjectural Person - a cosmic mind-matrix, an Ancient of Days - from Whom all our personal experience proceeds.
Yet it does not follow from this that all poetry must be individualistic, "confessional". In fact the incalculable fusion of personal and universal which radiates from the greatest poems is the outcome of some kind of laborious intellectual and moral wedding, welding : a chemical, alchemical bonding of poet and people, of poem and the age. This is the high path tread by the great poets of all cultures.
Well, this probably doesn't cover all the simple axioms which I maintain... but enough for now, I guess.
10.11.2013
Preface to Lissa Wolsak
Just a reminder... here's a recent essay on this fabulous poet, & her book, Squeezed Light.
9.11.2013
E-strangement
Writing is a method of engraving (as the makers of cuneiform scratches & hieroglyphs & prehistoric wall graffiti understood). Lots of writers, philosophers, critics, theorists, poets have carved deep ruts in the clay covering this theme, of course. Monuments outlasting bronze, & all that. "That in black ink my love may still shine bright." (Shakespeare, Sonnet 65)
The writer is a cave painter too, with his or her own private grotto. We cast our voices into the shady well, wait for faint echoes.
I'm jotting this down here today as a kind of complaint, though I have nothing to complain about. It's just that I feel pressured by the noise of the journalism of poetry - the constant roar of ambitious young author-seekers, the rusty screech of the Fame ferris wheel. As if writing is all about what lies in front of us, now. Whereas it sometimes seems to me the mob of scriptorians has it all backwards. Writing & poetry are not for now, for the daylight. They are an imaginary escape from the daylight and its noise. They form a sort of alternate dream-space. Maybe some explorer will chance upon it centuries later - but for the time being it's not available, there is no public access. Writing is a sort of revenge against the way things are.
Understood : this is a pretty defeatist-elitist attitude. A bad attitude. Self-defeating. The useful poems of social uplift will never emerge from this attitude (though maybe Isaiah's three years of public nakedness in prophetic protest is a sort of photo-negative of what I mean). Mayhap. Anyway, it's just a feeling. Poetry is a sort of scar tissue, a tattoo scratched in pain, a long time ago.
Or possibly I'm just discouraged, & resentful. Bad boy, Henry.
I think of the Bible in this way, and of the haunted authors of the Gospels. They understood the Bible as the great whale - Melville's gargantuan palimpsest of scar tissue - layer upon layer of memoir and misprision, hint & double-meaning. & then they - the Gospel writers - tied it all into a knot : the knot of a God-man. A haunted Personage.... the Person as telos - as ultimate, cosmic "end" (purpose & finality). Jesus was the "antitype" of all the scrawled prefigurings of the Bible, generation after generation. The strange fruit of a long memory. This is the Christian argument, anyway (debatable, of course). And we are all - all persons, everywhere - minor local antitypes of the high Divine Antitype.
I wish there were, I guess, a critical-philological room somewhere, to get away from the noise of ambitious, aspiring "social media" poets (I'm one of them). Some occluded garden, very private. Eugenio Montale's rustling backyard. Very Gongorismo.
Maybe poetry likes to evade all our surveillance systems, promo-megaphones. Maybe the muse is off the grid.
The writer is a cave painter too, with his or her own private grotto. We cast our voices into the shady well, wait for faint echoes.
I'm jotting this down here today as a kind of complaint, though I have nothing to complain about. It's just that I feel pressured by the noise of the journalism of poetry - the constant roar of ambitious young author-seekers, the rusty screech of the Fame ferris wheel. As if writing is all about what lies in front of us, now. Whereas it sometimes seems to me the mob of scriptorians has it all backwards. Writing & poetry are not for now, for the daylight. They are an imaginary escape from the daylight and its noise. They form a sort of alternate dream-space. Maybe some explorer will chance upon it centuries later - but for the time being it's not available, there is no public access. Writing is a sort of revenge against the way things are.
Understood : this is a pretty defeatist-elitist attitude. A bad attitude. Self-defeating. The useful poems of social uplift will never emerge from this attitude (though maybe Isaiah's three years of public nakedness in prophetic protest is a sort of photo-negative of what I mean). Mayhap. Anyway, it's just a feeling. Poetry is a sort of scar tissue, a tattoo scratched in pain, a long time ago.
Or possibly I'm just discouraged, & resentful. Bad boy, Henry.
I think of the Bible in this way, and of the haunted authors of the Gospels. They understood the Bible as the great whale - Melville's gargantuan palimpsest of scar tissue - layer upon layer of memoir and misprision, hint & double-meaning. & then they - the Gospel writers - tied it all into a knot : the knot of a God-man. A haunted Personage.... the Person as telos - as ultimate, cosmic "end" (purpose & finality). Jesus was the "antitype" of all the scrawled prefigurings of the Bible, generation after generation. The strange fruit of a long memory. This is the Christian argument, anyway (debatable, of course). And we are all - all persons, everywhere - minor local antitypes of the high Divine Antitype.
I wish there were, I guess, a critical-philological room somewhere, to get away from the noise of ambitious, aspiring "social media" poets (I'm one of them). Some occluded garden, very private. Eugenio Montale's rustling backyard. Very Gongorismo.
Maybe poetry likes to evade all our surveillance systems, promo-megaphones. Maybe the muse is off the grid.
8.30.2013
American Scene
Walking to work this morning, I started sketching out very haphazardly some general comments on the "situation of poetry" in the United States. An heir's fool-land, if there ever was. Then I get into the office & learn that a fine, much-loved, old-fashioned poet of Ireland, Seamus Heaney, has died. Rather put the kibosh to my nascent burbling.
But since it's a quiet day here before Labor Day weekend (Edwin Honig was born on Labor Day, in 1919), maybe I'll ramble on anyway.
With so much marvelously shallow, vulgar & pretentious nattering "about" poetry now, on Twitter, & Facebook, & social media et al., it seems a crime to add to the noise. But I have a long record of such criminal foolishness here on HG Poetics myself, so I might as well continue scrounging in my rut.
A shibboleth about contemporary American poetry : it's balkanized, divided into camps, a babel of quarreling discourses. & the cliche-corollary is that poets themselves are to blame : their petty vanity & narcissism, their "arty" personalities. I disagree. I think there are more impersonal social-historical factors in play, which tend to push the "situation of poetry" in America to the edge of disorientation.
Being a poet in vast, open-society America is more confusing than difficult. Compared to the American scene, the traditional role of the poet in, say, Paris, London, Dublin, Berlin, Rome, or even Moscow/Petersburg, seems rather uncomplicated. In those places, if you are talented, intelligent, bohemian, perhaps politically forthright, you will fit right in : you will be recognized for what you are, you will find a place at the cafe table.
It's different here. Without getting too schematic about it, let me suggest some of the clashing dimensions involved.
First, you have a nation which is deeply "prosaic" in its bones. Anti-poetic in many ways. It goes back to the practical, pragmatic character of an immigrant, invading people, engaged with a wilderness, whose real natives (the Native Americans) are not them. The American land in this sense is a kind of stepmother, rather than motherland, to the newcomers. Secondly, it goes back to the very old Protestant-Puritan mind... the struggle to distance that mind from its medieval/Catholic roots. The doctrine of "sola scriptura" (Scripture only) had a sort of dual impact : first, an intent focus on the written word (always good for poetry); second, a tendency to build whole cultural forms & communities - the forms of Protestant fundamentalism - around heterodox interpretations of the Bible. What this meant was that the scriptural culture of the Bible become so important, so central, that secular expressions of art became exiled, somewhat suspect. So for poetry, we have sort of a double exile from our own environment : the stepmotherly native earth, and the doctrinaire Puritan inheritance. (This is not intended to judge or to blame the Puritans, who are my own ancestors : it is only a very reductive abstraction, for the sake of argument).
One consequence of this, & a phenomenon which seems ubiquitous today, is the strenuous effort by poets and the "poetry community" to compensate for this ingrained dissonance - by trying to acculturate poetry to America programmatically. There are all sorts of efforts to win over the general public to poetry : the foremost at the moment being the multifarious projects of the Poetry Foundation, which seems bent on injecting poetry into the veins of America (perhaps using some special inoculation needles supplied by Lilly Pharmaceuticals). More importantly, the constellation of MFA degree programs in Creative Writing are there to encourage, to jump-start a decent cultural presence for poets & poetry in this nation of engines & rust.
Then there is the massive horde of established American poets, and the many public institutions and awards which honor them. We have Poets Laureate, we have the Societies and the Medals, we have the prestigious magazines which publish the honored, great, well-known poets, who've been around now for decades, whom we all know & love, & repeatedly praise, quote, emulate.
Then, of course, we find yet another confusing element & factor of the current scene : what I would call the "establishment-experimentalists". These are the heirs of modern & post-modern waves of the European avant-garde, the believers in progressive, politically-charged poetry, the inventors of ever-new and ever more-scintillating technical innovations - poured forth as from some chemistry lab on the top floor of a Madison Avenue office suite, directly into the English departments of our major universities.
So we have this huge jumble of contrastive factors and forces in play. On top of this we have hundreds, maybe thousands, of quite talented and devoted poets, whose actual work gives the lie to any reductive bracketings or explanations - mine or anyone else's. They are makers of original art, good poems. They will not be judged by me, or anyone - will not be pigeonholed.
So much confusion - can't get no relief! mopes Bobbi Dylan Hendrix. And the most bewildering dimension of this scene emerges with the nagging sense that, underneath all the promotional & organizational & advocational & educational efforts on behalf of American poetry in America, there is... still something missing, some essential element. What is it?
Here's my suggestion. At the deep root of American culture lies a problem, not a solution : an unresolved conflict, a subliminal unease. Thus the situation of poetry and the poet in America is Janus-faced, as if resting on the razor of a double-edged sword. America's attitude toward poetry is a cloudy reflection of America's relationship to its native land (the American soil). It will never be "fixed" - it will never be "solved" - it will never be "celebrated" - not finally, not completely, anyway - without an agon, without a dramatic struggle. America does not want to be comfortable with its poets and its poetry - because America is not (yet) comfortable with itself. Thus, "established American poets" is a kind of awkward oxymoron. "America's best-loved poems" has a somewhat hollow ring to it. The game is not over. The drama is not foretold - it is unfolding. Poets and poetry are a part of this historical mystery : but their role is excruciating, unsettled. And this is a reflection of the "trouble in mind" at the heart of the national experience. It is a work-in progress : an unwritten poem. The great iconoclasts of the American Renaissance - Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Poe - understood this in their bones, expressed it in their work. & they are our true inheritance, signs pointing the way (into the wilderness).
But since it's a quiet day here before Labor Day weekend (Edwin Honig was born on Labor Day, in 1919), maybe I'll ramble on anyway.
With so much marvelously shallow, vulgar & pretentious nattering "about" poetry now, on Twitter, & Facebook, & social media et al., it seems a crime to add to the noise. But I have a long record of such criminal foolishness here on HG Poetics myself, so I might as well continue scrounging in my rut.
A shibboleth about contemporary American poetry : it's balkanized, divided into camps, a babel of quarreling discourses. & the cliche-corollary is that poets themselves are to blame : their petty vanity & narcissism, their "arty" personalities. I disagree. I think there are more impersonal social-historical factors in play, which tend to push the "situation of poetry" in America to the edge of disorientation.
Being a poet in vast, open-society America is more confusing than difficult. Compared to the American scene, the traditional role of the poet in, say, Paris, London, Dublin, Berlin, Rome, or even Moscow/Petersburg, seems rather uncomplicated. In those places, if you are talented, intelligent, bohemian, perhaps politically forthright, you will fit right in : you will be recognized for what you are, you will find a place at the cafe table.
It's different here. Without getting too schematic about it, let me suggest some of the clashing dimensions involved.
First, you have a nation which is deeply "prosaic" in its bones. Anti-poetic in many ways. It goes back to the practical, pragmatic character of an immigrant, invading people, engaged with a wilderness, whose real natives (the Native Americans) are not them. The American land in this sense is a kind of stepmother, rather than motherland, to the newcomers. Secondly, it goes back to the very old Protestant-Puritan mind... the struggle to distance that mind from its medieval/Catholic roots. The doctrine of "sola scriptura" (Scripture only) had a sort of dual impact : first, an intent focus on the written word (always good for poetry); second, a tendency to build whole cultural forms & communities - the forms of Protestant fundamentalism - around heterodox interpretations of the Bible. What this meant was that the scriptural culture of the Bible become so important, so central, that secular expressions of art became exiled, somewhat suspect. So for poetry, we have sort of a double exile from our own environment : the stepmotherly native earth, and the doctrinaire Puritan inheritance. (This is not intended to judge or to blame the Puritans, who are my own ancestors : it is only a very reductive abstraction, for the sake of argument).
One consequence of this, & a phenomenon which seems ubiquitous today, is the strenuous effort by poets and the "poetry community" to compensate for this ingrained dissonance - by trying to acculturate poetry to America programmatically. There are all sorts of efforts to win over the general public to poetry : the foremost at the moment being the multifarious projects of the Poetry Foundation, which seems bent on injecting poetry into the veins of America (perhaps using some special inoculation needles supplied by Lilly Pharmaceuticals). More importantly, the constellation of MFA degree programs in Creative Writing are there to encourage, to jump-start a decent cultural presence for poets & poetry in this nation of engines & rust.
Then there is the massive horde of established American poets, and the many public institutions and awards which honor them. We have Poets Laureate, we have the Societies and the Medals, we have the prestigious magazines which publish the honored, great, well-known poets, who've been around now for decades, whom we all know & love, & repeatedly praise, quote, emulate.
Then, of course, we find yet another confusing element & factor of the current scene : what I would call the "establishment-experimentalists". These are the heirs of modern & post-modern waves of the European avant-garde, the believers in progressive, politically-charged poetry, the inventors of ever-new and ever more-scintillating technical innovations - poured forth as from some chemistry lab on the top floor of a Madison Avenue office suite, directly into the English departments of our major universities.
So we have this huge jumble of contrastive factors and forces in play. On top of this we have hundreds, maybe thousands, of quite talented and devoted poets, whose actual work gives the lie to any reductive bracketings or explanations - mine or anyone else's. They are makers of original art, good poems. They will not be judged by me, or anyone - will not be pigeonholed.
So much confusion - can't get no relief! mopes Bobbi Dylan Hendrix. And the most bewildering dimension of this scene emerges with the nagging sense that, underneath all the promotional & organizational & advocational & educational efforts on behalf of American poetry in America, there is... still something missing, some essential element. What is it?
Here's my suggestion. At the deep root of American culture lies a problem, not a solution : an unresolved conflict, a subliminal unease. Thus the situation of poetry and the poet in America is Janus-faced, as if resting on the razor of a double-edged sword. America's attitude toward poetry is a cloudy reflection of America's relationship to its native land (the American soil). It will never be "fixed" - it will never be "solved" - it will never be "celebrated" - not finally, not completely, anyway - without an agon, without a dramatic struggle. America does not want to be comfortable with its poets and its poetry - because America is not (yet) comfortable with itself. Thus, "established American poets" is a kind of awkward oxymoron. "America's best-loved poems" has a somewhat hollow ring to it. The game is not over. The drama is not foretold - it is unfolding. Poets and poetry are a part of this historical mystery : but their role is excruciating, unsettled. And this is a reflection of the "trouble in mind" at the heart of the national experience. It is a work-in progress : an unwritten poem. The great iconoclasts of the American Renaissance - Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Poe - understood this in their bones, expressed it in their work. & they are our true inheritance, signs pointing the way (into the wilderness).
8.01.2013
Reply to Curtis Faville
It's gratifying to find Curtis Faville's thoughtful, articulate response to one of my squibs (Note contra Conceptualism), posted at his blog Compass Rose on July 29, 2013. As an ordinary poet, who's been laying such eggs & thinking about them since way back in 1959, I often feel like an amateur wilderness crying out in a scholastic voiceland. The footnotes are pre-programmed, the silence is collegiate.
Curtis begins agreeably enough by stating that he doesn't disagree with me. It's only at the end of his post, in the final paragraphs, that reservations emerge.
He first outlines, clearly and persuasively, some basic factors, which have befuddled countless artists & critics : ie. the cultural watershed represented by World War I, and the subsequent character of such phenomena as modernism, avant-gardism, conceptualism. These have all played into debates over recent "Conceptual Poetry" (the Harriet blog tallied several contributions, here ). Kent Johnson, Calvin Bedient, and Keston Sutherland have questioned the credentials of the Conceptualists, as in any sense new, radical or revolutionary, since much of the work seems intent on re-presenting conceptual moves which are actually 50 or 100 years old. It may be the case that Conceptual Poetry, in the U.S. at least, is merely an academic phenomenon : an attempt to spoof what are understood to be outmoded and parochial Creative Writing shibboleths, centered around methodologies of the "personal lyric voice." In other words, a little game of petty provocations, carried on in safety 'neath yon high-walled ivied gates. But this critique, true or false, is not the focus here. Curtis is addressing something more substantial, ie., the geometry of relations between sensibility, concept, technique, and art object. This within a context both historical and ontological : the tension between tradition and change.
In his closing three paragraphs, Curtis gets at the crux of his reservations about my piece. He defends the "conceptual" as inherent in all art. As poet David Jones emphasized, art is a "fitting together" of things into a whole - an activity which only homo sapiens/homo ludens, among earth's creatures, appears to have both intellect to conceive, and free will to accomplish. "Concept" stems from the shaping, inventive imagination : yet, as Curtis writes, "All art is technical." Here he is revising my note's perceived derogation of technical craft. Conceptualism, in Curtis's view, is a kind of lever of renewal and change : one of the tools of expression, a sort of making manifest or self-conscious what is already integral to any art work (ie., technique).
Finally, he asks : "Would it be possible to write a poetry or paint a picture unconsciously?--living within the dream of language or within the known colors and shapes of our reality? Possibly. But we cannot not know what we know." Well put - and it reads like a riposte (probably unintended) to my own follow-up statement (Natural Poetry).
I provide all this inadequate paraphrase, as a way of gathering my own sense of things by way of reply.
Curtis argues that conceptual art, in general, is a practice of standing outside accepted and traditional modes & purposes of art-making - treating these traditional processes with detachment - in order to invent something new, to see what we've always seen with new eyes. In this endeavor, experiment is indeed a kind of quasi-scientific operation. Such art can be understood as participating in, and representing, the scientific and industrial revolutions of modernity in general. It is this very participation which grants avant-garde/conceptual art its authority : it is relevant, it is realistic with regard to modern conditions.
All this I find impossible to quarrel with. It states the modern case. But in order to present my sense of things, I must, ineluctably it seems, stand outside the "progressive" theory of modernity. Art, again to follow David Jones, is a "making of signs" - the shaping of some significance out of its materials. But poetry, then, is a making of signs out of signs : the art of the word. And words, ultimately - in their fullness (which is poetry) - cannot be alienated from the human speaker who shapes, evokes and voices them. In this view, poetry is the "art of arts" : for a sign made of signs returns to, is seamlessly bound up with, its maker. Paul Celan explored this mysterious reflexivity, this circular labyrinth, in a complex, jocular short story "Conversation in the Mountains" : a conversation about, among other things, how poetry, finally, is detached from the very "alienation effect" which Curtis describes as the hallmark of modernity. Poetry becomes, in this sense, a kind of art beyond art : circling back to nature, to our common "sensibility" - to the human/divine spirit - to the ghost in the machine.
Osip Mandelstam, as usual with me, comes to mind : he put this more gracefully in a poem from the very dawn of the "Modern movement" (1910), titled "Silentium". Here's the final stanza, translated by Robert H. Morrison :
Remain foam, Aphrodite,
and, word, turn back into music,
and be ashamed, heart's heart,
poured out from fundamental life!
Curtis begins agreeably enough by stating that he doesn't disagree with me. It's only at the end of his post, in the final paragraphs, that reservations emerge.
He first outlines, clearly and persuasively, some basic factors, which have befuddled countless artists & critics : ie. the cultural watershed represented by World War I, and the subsequent character of such phenomena as modernism, avant-gardism, conceptualism. These have all played into debates over recent "Conceptual Poetry" (the Harriet blog tallied several contributions, here ). Kent Johnson, Calvin Bedient, and Keston Sutherland have questioned the credentials of the Conceptualists, as in any sense new, radical or revolutionary, since much of the work seems intent on re-presenting conceptual moves which are actually 50 or 100 years old. It may be the case that Conceptual Poetry, in the U.S. at least, is merely an academic phenomenon : an attempt to spoof what are understood to be outmoded and parochial Creative Writing shibboleths, centered around methodologies of the "personal lyric voice." In other words, a little game of petty provocations, carried on in safety 'neath yon high-walled ivied gates. But this critique, true or false, is not the focus here. Curtis is addressing something more substantial, ie., the geometry of relations between sensibility, concept, technique, and art object. This within a context both historical and ontological : the tension between tradition and change.
In his closing three paragraphs, Curtis gets at the crux of his reservations about my piece. He defends the "conceptual" as inherent in all art. As poet David Jones emphasized, art is a "fitting together" of things into a whole - an activity which only homo sapiens/homo ludens, among earth's creatures, appears to have both intellect to conceive, and free will to accomplish. "Concept" stems from the shaping, inventive imagination : yet, as Curtis writes, "All art is technical." Here he is revising my note's perceived derogation of technical craft. Conceptualism, in Curtis's view, is a kind of lever of renewal and change : one of the tools of expression, a sort of making manifest or self-conscious what is already integral to any art work (ie., technique).
Finally, he asks : "Would it be possible to write a poetry or paint a picture unconsciously?--living within the dream of language or within the known colors and shapes of our reality? Possibly. But we cannot not know what we know." Well put - and it reads like a riposte (probably unintended) to my own follow-up statement (Natural Poetry).
I provide all this inadequate paraphrase, as a way of gathering my own sense of things by way of reply.
Curtis argues that conceptual art, in general, is a practice of standing outside accepted and traditional modes & purposes of art-making - treating these traditional processes with detachment - in order to invent something new, to see what we've always seen with new eyes. In this endeavor, experiment is indeed a kind of quasi-scientific operation. Such art can be understood as participating in, and representing, the scientific and industrial revolutions of modernity in general. It is this very participation which grants avant-garde/conceptual art its authority : it is relevant, it is realistic with regard to modern conditions.
All this I find impossible to quarrel with. It states the modern case. But in order to present my sense of things, I must, ineluctably it seems, stand outside the "progressive" theory of modernity. Art, again to follow David Jones, is a "making of signs" - the shaping of some significance out of its materials. But poetry, then, is a making of signs out of signs : the art of the word. And words, ultimately - in their fullness (which is poetry) - cannot be alienated from the human speaker who shapes, evokes and voices them. In this view, poetry is the "art of arts" : for a sign made of signs returns to, is seamlessly bound up with, its maker. Paul Celan explored this mysterious reflexivity, this circular labyrinth, in a complex, jocular short story "Conversation in the Mountains" : a conversation about, among other things, how poetry, finally, is detached from the very "alienation effect" which Curtis describes as the hallmark of modernity. Poetry becomes, in this sense, a kind of art beyond art : circling back to nature, to our common "sensibility" - to the human/divine spirit - to the ghost in the machine.
Osip Mandelstam, as usual with me, comes to mind : he put this more gracefully in a poem from the very dawn of the "Modern movement" (1910), titled "Silentium". Here's the final stanza, translated by Robert H. Morrison :
Remain foam, Aphrodite,
and, word, turn back into music,
and be ashamed, heart's heart,
poured out from fundamental life!
7.29.2013
Natural Poetry
Today, July 29, 2013, marks the advent of a new Poetry University, which I am founding this morning, and which is established on the following simple principle :
The "poetry of life" is the origin of poetry. Poetry is innate, pre-existent, both in reality and imagination. Fossil poetry, mute poetry, visual poetry, sound poetry, verbal poetry... the poetry of experience, of history, of tragedy, comedy, of shame, glory, of sin, redemption... the poetry of fantasy and invention, of newness, oldness...
- it's all there. You won't "learn how to write" by appropriating certain academic or anti-academic techniques. Poetry pre-exists : it hovers in the shapes of all things & events. La vida es sueño. The poet taps into it. As Edwin Honig phrased it, in a brochure for the national Poets-in-the-Schools program, back in the 1970s : "Poetry is a buzzing in the air. It's everywhere. Poets listen to that sound, and write it down." (rough quotation from memory)
The Old Masters understood this. The old Hebrew & Chinese poets & prophets understood. One does not "learn" poetry as a set of techniques. Instead, one becomes attuned to it : one must be found worthy to express it. "Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips!" cried the prophet. This is the ethos of the poet in a nutshell. In fact every sort of education is ultimately rooted in this moral-spiritual sense. The learning is not an acquisition : it is a benevolence, a mystery. & this is also the ethos, the groundwork of humane civilization as a whole. Poetry inheres in actuality : so prepare yourself, poet, to be worthy to express
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
- Wallace Stevens, "The Planet on the Table"
The "poetry of life" is the origin of poetry. Poetry is innate, pre-existent, both in reality and imagination. Fossil poetry, mute poetry, visual poetry, sound poetry, verbal poetry... the poetry of experience, of history, of tragedy, comedy, of shame, glory, of sin, redemption... the poetry of fantasy and invention, of newness, oldness...
- it's all there. You won't "learn how to write" by appropriating certain academic or anti-academic techniques. Poetry pre-exists : it hovers in the shapes of all things & events. La vida es sueño. The poet taps into it. As Edwin Honig phrased it, in a brochure for the national Poets-in-the-Schools program, back in the 1970s : "Poetry is a buzzing in the air. It's everywhere. Poets listen to that sound, and write it down." (rough quotation from memory)
The Old Masters understood this. The old Hebrew & Chinese poets & prophets understood. One does not "learn" poetry as a set of techniques. Instead, one becomes attuned to it : one must be found worthy to express it. "Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips!" cried the prophet. This is the ethos of the poet in a nutshell. In fact every sort of education is ultimately rooted in this moral-spiritual sense. The learning is not an acquisition : it is a benevolence, a mystery. & this is also the ethos, the groundwork of humane civilization as a whole. Poetry inheres in actuality : so prepare yourself, poet, to be worthy to express
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
- Wallace Stevens, "The Planet on the Table"
7.26.2013
Note contra Conceptualism
While the literary circuits of the nation are mostly on vacation, the pro/con debate over the value & credentials of Conceptual Poetry has been heating up of late. Calvin Bedient just published an impassioned attack on Conceptualism; others, in defense, look to Marjorie Perloff's sophisticated essay from 2011.
With much of Bedient's erudite slam I agree : the approach of Goldsmith, Place, Perloff ("the conceptualist's conceptualist") et al. feels like a systematic shut-down of the emotional dimension of literature. The trouble is, Bedient's argument tends to emphasize the supposed dichotomy between thought and feeling in poetry, upon which the Conceptualist movement constructed itself in the first place.
I think there might be firmer ground on which to make an argument. The limitation, as I see it, in both the theory and practice of the Conceptualists, is very similar to that of its predecessors, Flarf and Language Poetry : all three were (and are) mere theory, mere practice.
By this I mean that Conceptualism reduces and reifies the art of poetry into a craft, which uses materials (words) and techniques (mostly theft and mimicry). And by reducing poetry to a system of techniques, the essential thing slips through their fingers.
And just what is this essential thing? The imagination.
Perloff, in her essay, writes in shockingly condescending cadences about the young would-be poets attending a White House celebration of the arts : they have no language! they speak in cliches! She criticizes their mentors for offering the illusory path of "self-expression", and a utilitarian notion of poetry (serving purely functional notions of social welfare). Her solution to these philistine embarrassments, however, is purely technical : teach the kids to parrot the language of their betters; show them how to shape interesting collage-works out of the shards of verbal material.
There is a submerged desperation here, since the whole platform of the Conceptual movement requires the denial of the individual creative subject, the person - and of the human imagination, which (as Coleridge made clear long ago) is that synthesizing power, capable of harmonizing thought and feeling, concept and emotion, experience and its interpretation (or judgement).
I think Perloff's problem, and that of the Conceptualists generally, is a very American difficulty, shared to some extent by all of us. We tend to reduce every problem, in no matter what sphere of existence, to a technical issue. We are a nation of the quick fix (from duct tape to the war in Iraq). Thus the problem of poetry is merely a question of how we are going to define what language is, rather than something more deeply rooted, more stubbornly contradictory - say, for example, how the human imagination comes to grips with the painful riddle of individual & collective, self & society, history & soul.
"The poetry doesn't matter", wrote TS Eliot, in a line from Four Quartets. Paradoxically, I think Eliot meant something very similar to what Wallace Stevens meant by "The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate." ("Men Made Out of Words") What matters is the inherent capability of human beings to respond imaginatively to reality - and thus to comprehend it, to survive in it, maybe even to "prevail" (in Faulkner's sense). Communication follows vision (be it visual, aural, tactile, the whole sensorium) - not the other way around.
It will undoubtedly be argued that Conceptualism is itself a creative, imaginative, inventive new development of the art form - a fresh challenge to hackneyed styles in the sentimental, individualist, "lyric" mode. But you can't have it both ways. The techniques of the Conceptual poets - and the obsession with technique itself - are structured around a denial of poetry's pre-existence - its inherent givenness - in the dream-life of the human imagination. "In dreams begin responsibilities." And "we are such stuff as dreams are made on..."
Set against this "concept" of poetry, the Conceptualists come across as purveyors of technical tricks and gimmicks, quack doctors, hucksters, promoters, (very) used-car salesmen... familiar figures... the real American philistines.
With much of Bedient's erudite slam I agree : the approach of Goldsmith, Place, Perloff ("the conceptualist's conceptualist") et al. feels like a systematic shut-down of the emotional dimension of literature. The trouble is, Bedient's argument tends to emphasize the supposed dichotomy between thought and feeling in poetry, upon which the Conceptualist movement constructed itself in the first place.
I think there might be firmer ground on which to make an argument. The limitation, as I see it, in both the theory and practice of the Conceptualists, is very similar to that of its predecessors, Flarf and Language Poetry : all three were (and are) mere theory, mere practice.
By this I mean that Conceptualism reduces and reifies the art of poetry into a craft, which uses materials (words) and techniques (mostly theft and mimicry). And by reducing poetry to a system of techniques, the essential thing slips through their fingers.
And just what is this essential thing? The imagination.
Perloff, in her essay, writes in shockingly condescending cadences about the young would-be poets attending a White House celebration of the arts : they have no language! they speak in cliches! She criticizes their mentors for offering the illusory path of "self-expression", and a utilitarian notion of poetry (serving purely functional notions of social welfare). Her solution to these philistine embarrassments, however, is purely technical : teach the kids to parrot the language of their betters; show them how to shape interesting collage-works out of the shards of verbal material.
There is a submerged desperation here, since the whole platform of the Conceptual movement requires the denial of the individual creative subject, the person - and of the human imagination, which (as Coleridge made clear long ago) is that synthesizing power, capable of harmonizing thought and feeling, concept and emotion, experience and its interpretation (or judgement).
I think Perloff's problem, and that of the Conceptualists generally, is a very American difficulty, shared to some extent by all of us. We tend to reduce every problem, in no matter what sphere of existence, to a technical issue. We are a nation of the quick fix (from duct tape to the war in Iraq). Thus the problem of poetry is merely a question of how we are going to define what language is, rather than something more deeply rooted, more stubbornly contradictory - say, for example, how the human imagination comes to grips with the painful riddle of individual & collective, self & society, history & soul.
"The poetry doesn't matter", wrote TS Eliot, in a line from Four Quartets. Paradoxically, I think Eliot meant something very similar to what Wallace Stevens meant by "The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate." ("Men Made Out of Words") What matters is the inherent capability of human beings to respond imaginatively to reality - and thus to comprehend it, to survive in it, maybe even to "prevail" (in Faulkner's sense). Communication follows vision (be it visual, aural, tactile, the whole sensorium) - not the other way around.
It will undoubtedly be argued that Conceptualism is itself a creative, imaginative, inventive new development of the art form - a fresh challenge to hackneyed styles in the sentimental, individualist, "lyric" mode. But you can't have it both ways. The techniques of the Conceptual poets - and the obsession with technique itself - are structured around a denial of poetry's pre-existence - its inherent givenness - in the dream-life of the human imagination. "In dreams begin responsibilities." And "we are such stuff as dreams are made on..."
Set against this "concept" of poetry, the Conceptualists come across as purveyors of technical tricks and gimmicks, quack doctors, hucksters, promoters, (very) used-car salesmen... familiar figures... the real American philistines.
7.15.2013
Occasional poem : on (the former) St. Henry's Day
SCARABESQUE
Backyard evening, noticed by
mosquitoes – little winged
lancers (rusty, tinged
with ragged tears). St. Henry’s
Day, ex domicile (Jardin
des Mousquetiers). Boom,
boom. Little room
on high (full of eaglets’ din).
Level with me – let us speak plainly
now. Fluked in a net
among flags, words – let
this servant-surf unroll. Mary,
your wide fling-sponge... cathedral
hecatomb of feral
air (on fire). All
shall be welcome here (the moral
of the tale) – even the big-eared
rabbits of San Francisco.
This is America, you know.
A 51st state-of-mind’s geared
toward Port-au-Prince : tres
riche tresses are hers,
her sails soft whirrs
(hummingbirdings)... Say,
Juan Fernando... those stars...
ringed round a beam
en face... trireme?
Isis barge? Rainbarrel, house?
7.15.13
5.16.2013
Conceptualism... blah four
Blah, blah, blah... not sure how much longer I can yoke these contraries (Concept & Blah) without giving us all the blahs. But I think of things, walking to work, so I'll try to note it down.
Taking a long (wide?) view, Conceptual Poetics, Uncreative Writing, etc. may be irremediably trivial : yet it's curious how the concept, in connection with poetry, necessarily leads to the nearby endeavors of Literary Criticism. What is poetry? has been the question. As it happens I've been wading through a magisterial tome which used to be required reading for every English major, M.H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp. A historical study of critical theories of poetry, focused on the Romantic era, but analyzing it as one phase in a development stretching back to Plato and forward (for him) to the New Criticism of the 20th century (his own era). And maybe beyond (I'm less than half way through).
For Abrams, the interesting thing is how the history of critical theories about poetry (in the West, anyway) reveals a procession of world-views, of philosophical eras, of chapters in the "Western mind", which determine in every way the specific aesthetic notions - about poetry and art in general - of each era. Abrams develops a simple diagram, with "the Work" (the poem) at the center, from which arrows extend in 3 directions - "World", "Audience", "Poet" - which correspond, respectively, to 3 succeeding approaches to poetry : Mimetic, Pragmatic, Expressive. (These in turn correspond to particular leading theorists : Plato/Aristotle for the mimetic; Horace and the neo-classical authors of the 18th century for the pragmatic; and the Romantics for the expressive.) A fourth theoretical mode, which corresponds to the "Work" alone, Abrams calls "Objective". I haven't gotten to those chapters yet, but I think he's referring to 20th-century Modernist and New Critical approaches, which highlight the integral, autotelic, self-contained "objectivity" of the work-in-itself.
Still awake, dear blahdom companions?
You get a sense, reading Abrams, of poetry as an ongoing, curious phenomenon, a puzzle, a conundrum, around which thinkers down the centuries have tried to attach their conceptual pincers. With only partial success ; the thing remains a riddle, and what critics say about it often says more about assumptions and enthusiasms of their own era, than about this elusive what-not itself. And the pattern of Abrams' argument seems to be leading toward some kind of crux, or cul-de-sac, since if you walk through his historical chart geometrically, you see a kind of swirl or spiral, of theories - absorbing the outer three in succession (imitative, pragmatic, expressive) and then turning inward to the center, to the last element, the Work itself (objective theories). Where do we go from here?
Should we ask Helen Vendler? Harold Bloom? The Academy of American Poets? A.W.P., maybe? or the Poetry Foundation? I asserted previously in this little series that poetry does more than represent reality - it (somehow) establishes same. But I want to distinguish this phenomenon itself from its professional American expert establishers of literary establishments. Poetry tends to get buried under the eager thundering of its mobs of advocates, all trained in their various ways to integrate literature into society, to promote the arts, to laud, praise and p.r. its established practitioners under compost piles of laurels and mountains of award grants. It's a gradual smothering process out of which swarms of compost-insects rise and dance and do battle (winners & losers & bettors & publicists & kibbitzers). Bye-bye, poetry. Hello, symposia, festivals & funeral orations.
Much has changed in the 70 years or so since M.H. Abrams composed his subtle summa of Romantic poetics. The critical ground has shifted, or given way completely. Postmodernity rejects the unproblematic essentialism of all critical terms. History and cultural identity are relativistic, contested fields of competing discourses. The New Critical icon of the "poem itself" shattered and crumbled quite a while ago. Ron Silliman, the Language Poet, for example, pronounced that "there is no such thing as poetry - only poetries." So-called avant-garde programs (Flarf, the Charles Bernstein Unit, Uncreative Writing, etc.) are structurally self-corroding, designed and promoted through tongue-in-cheek technique. Sincerity is for simpletons. In a sense, these theory-driven or concept-based movements (arm-in-arm with most of the sub-critical poetries at which they poke fun) dramatize the hollowing-out of traditional literary criticism - dancing on its grave.
So... ? Abrams' spiraling template ends (I'm guessing) at the summit of the "Work". The poet's job used to be to imitate Nature in a wise & pleasing way (Mimetic). Then it evolved into an Horatian mode of rhetorical suasion - leading readers to Goodness by way of Charm (Pragmatic). Then the Romantics came along - resurrecting a neo-Platonic (Plotinian) spirituality, replacing the attenuated Deism of the rationalist Enlightenment with a new enthusiasm, grounded in the lamp of divine Imagination (Expressive). Finally, once the ruinations of industrialism and war put paid to Romantic ideals, new forces of reactionary/revolutionary Modernism arose, grounded in the autotelic power of the Work itself (Objective). Then at last came the great deconstructive fibrillations of the late 20th century. & here we are.
Versions of all five of these approaches are still with us. The whole Coliseum of professional American literary praxis continually justifies itself through apologetics based on some or all of these critical angles. (Mimetic : " Poet X provides an excruciating but finally enthralling account of what it's like to live in Y." Pragmatic : "Poet J reminds us, with moving memories of home, that we need to return to our roots." Expressive : "Poet Q is a magician, an alchemiste du Verbe - revealing a wonderworld of fantastic visions." Objective : "Poet Z is an uncompromising formalist, who cannot be tagged with any of the current labels. Neither traditionalist nor experimental, her austere, formidable style is literally incomparable." Postmodern : "Poet M. unravels poetry from his shoelaces down, and builds it up again - as video.")
Yet poetry, the thing itself, slithers along like Montale's eel, some subterranean life-force, beneath the flimsy fabrications, the droning roar of the pros of the status quo. Some of the most gifted 20th-century poets, including Stevens, Crane and Berryman, struggled against the complacent New Critical dicta regarding the autotelic "poem itself". They were searching for some firmer sanction. Stevens, often portrayed as the paragon of a neo-Romantic sublime (Bloom) or as a master of the self-pleasing, self-sufficient work of art (Vendler), might instead be understood as someone engaged in a relentless, rather tense intellectual struggle to find a justification for his work, for the making of poems.
Poetry and worldview : I think we can say these depend on each other. But maybe the poet doesn't so much articulate or express a worldview, as respond, obliquely, to the existent worldview, the reigning zeitgeist. And maybe within this response are encrypted some intimations of futurity - of a future human ambience, or common sense of things, which hasn't happened yet. Thus when I proposed that the poetic Word not only represents, but establishes, maybe this could be understood in this kind of future tense. Here I'm reminded once more of Emily Dickinson....
I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--
Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--
Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--
Taking a long (wide?) view, Conceptual Poetics, Uncreative Writing, etc. may be irremediably trivial : yet it's curious how the concept, in connection with poetry, necessarily leads to the nearby endeavors of Literary Criticism. What is poetry? has been the question. As it happens I've been wading through a magisterial tome which used to be required reading for every English major, M.H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp. A historical study of critical theories of poetry, focused on the Romantic era, but analyzing it as one phase in a development stretching back to Plato and forward (for him) to the New Criticism of the 20th century (his own era). And maybe beyond (I'm less than half way through).
For Abrams, the interesting thing is how the history of critical theories about poetry (in the West, anyway) reveals a procession of world-views, of philosophical eras, of chapters in the "Western mind", which determine in every way the specific aesthetic notions - about poetry and art in general - of each era. Abrams develops a simple diagram, with "the Work" (the poem) at the center, from which arrows extend in 3 directions - "World", "Audience", "Poet" - which correspond, respectively, to 3 succeeding approaches to poetry : Mimetic, Pragmatic, Expressive. (These in turn correspond to particular leading theorists : Plato/Aristotle for the mimetic; Horace and the neo-classical authors of the 18th century for the pragmatic; and the Romantics for the expressive.) A fourth theoretical mode, which corresponds to the "Work" alone, Abrams calls "Objective". I haven't gotten to those chapters yet, but I think he's referring to 20th-century Modernist and New Critical approaches, which highlight the integral, autotelic, self-contained "objectivity" of the work-in-itself.
Still awake, dear blahdom companions?
You get a sense, reading Abrams, of poetry as an ongoing, curious phenomenon, a puzzle, a conundrum, around which thinkers down the centuries have tried to attach their conceptual pincers. With only partial success ; the thing remains a riddle, and what critics say about it often says more about assumptions and enthusiasms of their own era, than about this elusive what-not itself. And the pattern of Abrams' argument seems to be leading toward some kind of crux, or cul-de-sac, since if you walk through his historical chart geometrically, you see a kind of swirl or spiral, of theories - absorbing the outer three in succession (imitative, pragmatic, expressive) and then turning inward to the center, to the last element, the Work itself (objective theories). Where do we go from here?
Should we ask Helen Vendler? Harold Bloom? The Academy of American Poets? A.W.P., maybe? or the Poetry Foundation? I asserted previously in this little series that poetry does more than represent reality - it (somehow) establishes same. But I want to distinguish this phenomenon itself from its professional American expert establishers of literary establishments. Poetry tends to get buried under the eager thundering of its mobs of advocates, all trained in their various ways to integrate literature into society, to promote the arts, to laud, praise and p.r. its established practitioners under compost piles of laurels and mountains of award grants. It's a gradual smothering process out of which swarms of compost-insects rise and dance and do battle (winners & losers & bettors & publicists & kibbitzers). Bye-bye, poetry. Hello, symposia, festivals & funeral orations.
Much has changed in the 70 years or so since M.H. Abrams composed his subtle summa of Romantic poetics. The critical ground has shifted, or given way completely. Postmodernity rejects the unproblematic essentialism of all critical terms. History and cultural identity are relativistic, contested fields of competing discourses. The New Critical icon of the "poem itself" shattered and crumbled quite a while ago. Ron Silliman, the Language Poet, for example, pronounced that "there is no such thing as poetry - only poetries." So-called avant-garde programs (Flarf, the Charles Bernstein Unit, Uncreative Writing, etc.) are structurally self-corroding, designed and promoted through tongue-in-cheek technique. Sincerity is for simpletons. In a sense, these theory-driven or concept-based movements (arm-in-arm with most of the sub-critical poetries at which they poke fun) dramatize the hollowing-out of traditional literary criticism - dancing on its grave.
So... ? Abrams' spiraling template ends (I'm guessing) at the summit of the "Work". The poet's job used to be to imitate Nature in a wise & pleasing way (Mimetic). Then it evolved into an Horatian mode of rhetorical suasion - leading readers to Goodness by way of Charm (Pragmatic). Then the Romantics came along - resurrecting a neo-Platonic (Plotinian) spirituality, replacing the attenuated Deism of the rationalist Enlightenment with a new enthusiasm, grounded in the lamp of divine Imagination (Expressive). Finally, once the ruinations of industrialism and war put paid to Romantic ideals, new forces of reactionary/revolutionary Modernism arose, grounded in the autotelic power of the Work itself (Objective). Then at last came the great deconstructive fibrillations of the late 20th century. & here we are.
Versions of all five of these approaches are still with us. The whole Coliseum of professional American literary praxis continually justifies itself through apologetics based on some or all of these critical angles. (Mimetic : " Poet X provides an excruciating but finally enthralling account of what it's like to live in Y." Pragmatic : "Poet J reminds us, with moving memories of home, that we need to return to our roots." Expressive : "Poet Q is a magician, an alchemiste du Verbe - revealing a wonderworld of fantastic visions." Objective : "Poet Z is an uncompromising formalist, who cannot be tagged with any of the current labels. Neither traditionalist nor experimental, her austere, formidable style is literally incomparable." Postmodern : "Poet M. unravels poetry from his shoelaces down, and builds it up again - as video.")
Yet poetry, the thing itself, slithers along like Montale's eel, some subterranean life-force, beneath the flimsy fabrications, the droning roar of the pros of the status quo. Some of the most gifted 20th-century poets, including Stevens, Crane and Berryman, struggled against the complacent New Critical dicta regarding the autotelic "poem itself". They were searching for some firmer sanction. Stevens, often portrayed as the paragon of a neo-Romantic sublime (Bloom) or as a master of the self-pleasing, self-sufficient work of art (Vendler), might instead be understood as someone engaged in a relentless, rather tense intellectual struggle to find a justification for his work, for the making of poems.
Poetry and worldview : I think we can say these depend on each other. But maybe the poet doesn't so much articulate or express a worldview, as respond, obliquely, to the existent worldview, the reigning zeitgeist. And maybe within this response are encrypted some intimations of futurity - of a future human ambience, or common sense of things, which hasn't happened yet. Thus when I proposed that the poetic Word not only represents, but establishes, maybe this could be understood in this kind of future tense. Here I'm reminded once more of Emily Dickinson....
I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--
Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--
Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--
5.15.2013
Conceptualism.... blah three
This annoyance with Conceptual Poetics... could it be because I'm jealous? Doubt it. Because I'm secretly one of them? Possible, I guess. I certainly like to speculate & natter on endlessly about "poetry", as every reader of this blog already knows.
Walking along Morris Ave. on my way to the library on a brilliant mid-May morning, I asked myself what is my concept of poetry? And I thought, I conceive of poetry, and art generally, as a sort of disk, or circle. A circle, in turn, can be conceived as an infinite series of congruent half-circles, each bounded or held together by an invisible straight line (its diameter), the center point of which is also the center of the circle as a whole.
Follow that? The half-moon shape of a semi-circle resembles a bridge, or a bow held taut by a bow-string. This circle, then, is a round of infinite half-moons or bridges.
The bow held by the string is an ancient metaphor for metaphor. For Metaphysical "wit" : the yoking-together of contraries (night and day) in harmony (think of Hart Crane's symbol of his Bridge : "power in repose"). Harmony is the mean between extremes : the force that makes peace between warring opposites, the magic alchemy which transmutes difference into complementarity.
Of course this is a fundamental aesthetic concept, underlying some of the great monuments of Modernist poetry (Crane's Bridge; Eliot's Chinese vase, in Four Quartets, still moving in its stillness, "at the still point of the turning world").
But then of course the time of modernism has passed, and postmodernity is here. The atrocious 20th century has eroded modernism's idealizations, its heroic icons of order and power. We recognize the irrational violence, the sense of global/cosmic displacement, the total futility of human grandeur as never before. Violent History (gloomy Spengler's metier) is the master frame - bracketing all our rusty icons, our ideals, of what is good and pleasant to behold.
But I'm not surrendering my magic circle, my secret totem, my spell. We only need to expand the two prongs of these moon-calipers, to enclose a wider, deeper spectrum of opposing forces. Art is meshed in a circle with Life - the circle of human seasons, of birth and death, weakness and strength, suffering and joy. We try to remember and seek to re-establish that Golden Age which lingers somewhere in the heart of a happy child - out of an equilibrium of natural life, the shelter of the family house, the "dwelling", the tent, the dome (a circle of circles). These speculations are only another illustration of the worldview of Russian Acmeism - Mandelstam's notion that poetry is fundamentally a form of "domestic hellenism", a means by which mortal Man on earth surrounds herself with "teleological warmth"- makes himself at home. It lingers in Joseph Brodsky : "Man was put on this Earth for one purpose : to make civilization." Art sinks back, sinks its foundations, into the deeper circle of normative life, the most basic "golden mean", our shared well-being. And a metaphysical hope remains in the poetic work of "naming" : the nominative, inventive, perspicuous, originary act of joining word and thing. Adam, in the beginning, gave names to every creature. The poet, in the end, brings this process to fulfillment, a flower in bloom - its rose window, circling in stone... the Word does not merely represent : the Word establishes (anew).
So I recall Emily Dickinson's aphorism for her poetic work : "my Circuit is Circumference".
Walking along Morris Ave. on my way to the library on a brilliant mid-May morning, I asked myself what is my concept of poetry? And I thought, I conceive of poetry, and art generally, as a sort of disk, or circle. A circle, in turn, can be conceived as an infinite series of congruent half-circles, each bounded or held together by an invisible straight line (its diameter), the center point of which is also the center of the circle as a whole.
Follow that? The half-moon shape of a semi-circle resembles a bridge, or a bow held taut by a bow-string. This circle, then, is a round of infinite half-moons or bridges.
The bow held by the string is an ancient metaphor for metaphor. For Metaphysical "wit" : the yoking-together of contraries (night and day) in harmony (think of Hart Crane's symbol of his Bridge : "power in repose"). Harmony is the mean between extremes : the force that makes peace between warring opposites, the magic alchemy which transmutes difference into complementarity.
Of course this is a fundamental aesthetic concept, underlying some of the great monuments of Modernist poetry (Crane's Bridge; Eliot's Chinese vase, in Four Quartets, still moving in its stillness, "at the still point of the turning world").
But then of course the time of modernism has passed, and postmodernity is here. The atrocious 20th century has eroded modernism's idealizations, its heroic icons of order and power. We recognize the irrational violence, the sense of global/cosmic displacement, the total futility of human grandeur as never before. Violent History (gloomy Spengler's metier) is the master frame - bracketing all our rusty icons, our ideals, of what is good and pleasant to behold.
But I'm not surrendering my magic circle, my secret totem, my spell. We only need to expand the two prongs of these moon-calipers, to enclose a wider, deeper spectrum of opposing forces. Art is meshed in a circle with Life - the circle of human seasons, of birth and death, weakness and strength, suffering and joy. We try to remember and seek to re-establish that Golden Age which lingers somewhere in the heart of a happy child - out of an equilibrium of natural life, the shelter of the family house, the "dwelling", the tent, the dome (a circle of circles). These speculations are only another illustration of the worldview of Russian Acmeism - Mandelstam's notion that poetry is fundamentally a form of "domestic hellenism", a means by which mortal Man on earth surrounds herself with "teleological warmth"- makes himself at home. It lingers in Joseph Brodsky : "Man was put on this Earth for one purpose : to make civilization." Art sinks back, sinks its foundations, into the deeper circle of normative life, the most basic "golden mean", our shared well-being. And a metaphysical hope remains in the poetic work of "naming" : the nominative, inventive, perspicuous, originary act of joining word and thing. Adam, in the beginning, gave names to every creature. The poet, in the end, brings this process to fulfillment, a flower in bloom - its rose window, circling in stone... the Word does not merely represent : the Word establishes (anew).
So I recall Emily Dickinson's aphorism for her poetic work : "my Circuit is Circumference".
5.14.2013
Conceptualism... blah two
It's fun to think about poetry, which presents a lot of mysteries, conundrums. It's fun to talk about it. But making it is something else. The activity of making poems resists theoretical frames & boxes. Take, for example, the postmodern thesis that the lyric Subject is an illusion, a mirage of false consciousness driven by repressed class-historical-material forces, or by a mis-perception of the de-centered insubstantiality of the Real. Yet, au contraire, what the actual labor of making poems reveals to the maker, is that the poem is the outcome of a personal struggle with an unaccountable something or someone other than the "lyric I". And the very process of dialectical making - this struggle - tends to carve both poet and "other" into high relief - to bring on a greater intensity of conscious presence or being. The process itself becomes primary : a process which involves the shedding or transformation of abstract preconceptions of every kind.
Poetry is conceptual by the very nature of its medium, language - so the phrase "conceptual poetry" is redundant. But the "concepts" in poetry are secondary. The primary power of poetry resides in names : the originary soundings of enunciation, evocation, expression. The words, that is, the beginning and end of the poem, do not "represent" things : they establish things. The dualisms of mind and body, thought and action, spirit and matter are transmuted within a sort of explanatory harmonics : earth is (figuratively speaking) transported to heaven. Prose and poetry, innocence and experience, are not divided, but implicated with each other, woven together in unbreakable knots.
There are a lot of anti-poetic forces at work within American Poetryland. There have been for a while. Groups with agendas to promote at the expense of actual poetry. But poetry is a stubborn, resistant, ineradicable thicket of laborious making. It will not be undone by superficial theoretical make-overs. Notions like the "obsolescent lyric Subject" are glib reductions from a much more complex actuality. Strong poetry actually builds on the "I" of the solitary lyric - branches out from this seed into more expansive forms - dialogue, satire, narrative, epic, drama... The whole ancient "wheel of Virgil" (eclogue/georgic/epic) still awaits contemporary fulfillments.
Poetry is conceptual by the very nature of its medium, language - so the phrase "conceptual poetry" is redundant. But the "concepts" in poetry are secondary. The primary power of poetry resides in names : the originary soundings of enunciation, evocation, expression. The words, that is, the beginning and end of the poem, do not "represent" things : they establish things. The dualisms of mind and body, thought and action, spirit and matter are transmuted within a sort of explanatory harmonics : earth is (figuratively speaking) transported to heaven. Prose and poetry, innocence and experience, are not divided, but implicated with each other, woven together in unbreakable knots.
There are a lot of anti-poetic forces at work within American Poetryland. There have been for a while. Groups with agendas to promote at the expense of actual poetry. But poetry is a stubborn, resistant, ineradicable thicket of laborious making. It will not be undone by superficial theoretical make-overs. Notions like the "obsolescent lyric Subject" are glib reductions from a much more complex actuality. Strong poetry actually builds on the "I" of the solitary lyric - branches out from this seed into more expansive forms - dialogue, satire, narrative, epic, drama... The whole ancient "wheel of Virgil" (eclogue/georgic/epic) still awaits contemporary fulfillments.
Conceptualism... blah
I have this animus against the "Conceptual Poetry" phenomenon. It's not reasonable, it's not informed, it's just a visceral dislike. My attitude reminds me of my attitude back in the '90s toward Language Poetry. It's not fair, it's just there. So, being so terminally bored by the ponderous pronouncements of Kenneth Goldsmith & Vanessa Place - bored enough not to read much of it at all - I probably have little light to shed on this matter. But I just thought I'd vent a little.
The whole movement seems to stem genetically from philosophical discourse. The attitude of amused contempt displayed by the Conceptuals toward ordinary "poems" seems similar to that of Plato. Plato's worldview was fundamentally binary and divided. Mind was separate from Body; the material Cosmos is an imperfect reflection of the perfect, immaterial, transcendent, shaping Ideas which formed it. Poetry, that unaccountable verbal what-not, that irrational chaos, that disturber of Plato's perfect (authoritarian) Philosopher's State, was to be dismissed, shunned, outlawed.
The Conceptuals don't want to outlaw poetry. But they seem to have a parallel bias toward intellectual constructs over actual works of art. Their progress through the authorizing institutions of Poetryland resembles Plato's dream of a philosophical coup, a take-over of ordinary this-world governance. King Kenny & Queen Vanessa, the Conceptual Royals, institute their theoretical reign over the last tattered vestiges of the post-Romantic "lyric I".
Plato considered art to be fundamentally a matter of imitation, a mirror (a tarnished mirror). But it's possible to conceive of other framing analogies. One does not have to accept Plato's dualistic cosmos, split between matter and mind. Instead, one can imagine a more holistic universe, an "incarnational" cosmos, in which mind and body, spirit and matter, may indeed be valid ontological distinctions - but not irreconcilable divisions. Reality may be less like a system, and more like a story. Poetry may be less like a mirror, a reflection, and more like a building - a construct rising out of the primal process of naming. The act of giving a name to something involves more than reflection, mirroring. Wallace Stevens called poetry "the sanction of life". I think this gets closer to essence of the process of verbal shaping and ordering, its final purpose, than Plato's formulae.
The Conceptuals would like us to believe they have a special theoretical angle on poetry. They apply a pseudo-radical tactic : debunk the hoary Romantic concept of poetry, as subjective, lyric expression, by attacking the notion of personal identity itself. Replace composition with the functionalism of meaningless, evacuated "text". They might do better by recognizing that poetry is an integral activity which surpasses its own (or the philosophers') theoretical abstractions. The Romantic theory that lyric expression is the essence of poetry - a theory which also stems from philosophical speculations, in this case those of J.S. Mill - may be long out of date. But their attempt to replace poetic "substance" by theoretical concept, combined with an attack on personal subjectivity itself, seems more like a promotional gimmick than a real change in poetry or poetics.
The whole movement seems to stem genetically from philosophical discourse. The attitude of amused contempt displayed by the Conceptuals toward ordinary "poems" seems similar to that of Plato. Plato's worldview was fundamentally binary and divided. Mind was separate from Body; the material Cosmos is an imperfect reflection of the perfect, immaterial, transcendent, shaping Ideas which formed it. Poetry, that unaccountable verbal what-not, that irrational chaos, that disturber of Plato's perfect (authoritarian) Philosopher's State, was to be dismissed, shunned, outlawed.
The Conceptuals don't want to outlaw poetry. But they seem to have a parallel bias toward intellectual constructs over actual works of art. Their progress through the authorizing institutions of Poetryland resembles Plato's dream of a philosophical coup, a take-over of ordinary this-world governance. King Kenny & Queen Vanessa, the Conceptual Royals, institute their theoretical reign over the last tattered vestiges of the post-Romantic "lyric I".
Plato considered art to be fundamentally a matter of imitation, a mirror (a tarnished mirror). But it's possible to conceive of other framing analogies. One does not have to accept Plato's dualistic cosmos, split between matter and mind. Instead, one can imagine a more holistic universe, an "incarnational" cosmos, in which mind and body, spirit and matter, may indeed be valid ontological distinctions - but not irreconcilable divisions. Reality may be less like a system, and more like a story. Poetry may be less like a mirror, a reflection, and more like a building - a construct rising out of the primal process of naming. The act of giving a name to something involves more than reflection, mirroring. Wallace Stevens called poetry "the sanction of life". I think this gets closer to essence of the process of verbal shaping and ordering, its final purpose, than Plato's formulae.
The Conceptuals would like us to believe they have a special theoretical angle on poetry. They apply a pseudo-radical tactic : debunk the hoary Romantic concept of poetry, as subjective, lyric expression, by attacking the notion of personal identity itself. Replace composition with the functionalism of meaningless, evacuated "text". They might do better by recognizing that poetry is an integral activity which surpasses its own (or the philosophers') theoretical abstractions. The Romantic theory that lyric expression is the essence of poetry - a theory which also stems from philosophical speculations, in this case those of J.S. Mill - may be long out of date. But their attempt to replace poetic "substance" by theoretical concept, combined with an attack on personal subjectivity itself, seems more like a promotional gimmick than a real change in poetry or poetics.
3.27.2013
One-room dovecote
I've been adding curricula over at the Dove St. School - intros/ruminations on various books. Have covered most of them now : Lanthanum next, soon.
Tell your friends! Another America in miniature.
Tell your friends! Another America in miniature.
3.12.2013
Freelance librarian-hobo
I am going to be a freelance writer, by gum. Here are downloads of some of my poetry books for sale (pdf. format).
Am pondering a new blog, where I would present myself as a kind of free literary operator, in the wandering bard or peripatetic scholar mode, charging a nominal fee for my writings.
Of course I have some qualms about this : it goes against the grain of so much in both poetry & general internet culture ("everything is free!"). My whole orientation toward poetry has been to keep myself and my work at arm's length from any motivations which are not purely creative, artistic, detached, and free.
It's complicated. I composed my first poem in 1959, when I was 4 years old. My father immediately wrote it down on a little cardboard key card. My mother mailed the card to me, 50 years later. Over the ensuing decades of my writing life, I have been helped and befriended by so many kind, sweet, warm-hearted, generous people (starting with my parents), and fellow writers. On the other hand, the elite literary world of publication and acknowledgement has often amounted to many closed doors. Yet I'm something of a DIY fellow... I began long ago to craft my own doors of various kinds (this blog being one of them).
Moreover, I've worked at a 9-to-5 desk job now for almost 30 years, 12 months a year. As a writer, I don't get out much. My wild youth of musical hitchhiking and spiritual searching and bardic wandering is my somewhat repressed Other. This idea of freelancing (very abstract and Platonic for the moment) appeals to me... the Open Road calls to the ancient librarian....
So I may copy & paste this into my new small literary businessman/scholar blog, and see what happens. See you over there.
Am pondering a new blog, where I would present myself as a kind of free literary operator, in the wandering bard or peripatetic scholar mode, charging a nominal fee for my writings.
Of course I have some qualms about this : it goes against the grain of so much in both poetry & general internet culture ("everything is free!"). My whole orientation toward poetry has been to keep myself and my work at arm's length from any motivations which are not purely creative, artistic, detached, and free.
It's complicated. I composed my first poem in 1959, when I was 4 years old. My father immediately wrote it down on a little cardboard key card. My mother mailed the card to me, 50 years later. Over the ensuing decades of my writing life, I have been helped and befriended by so many kind, sweet, warm-hearted, generous people (starting with my parents), and fellow writers. On the other hand, the elite literary world of publication and acknowledgement has often amounted to many closed doors. Yet I'm something of a DIY fellow... I began long ago to craft my own doors of various kinds (this blog being one of them).
Moreover, I've worked at a 9-to-5 desk job now for almost 30 years, 12 months a year. As a writer, I don't get out much. My wild youth of musical hitchhiking and spiritual searching and bardic wandering is my somewhat repressed Other. This idea of freelancing (very abstract and Platonic for the moment) appeals to me... the Open Road calls to the ancient librarian....
So I may copy & paste this into my new small literary businessman/scholar blog, and see what happens. See you over there.
2.15.2013
Another old-fashioned notion
Ron Silliman's blog post of today argues that the explosion of contemporary poetry production, the exponential growth in the population of good poets, makes anthologies as we know them obsolete. He suggests that new kinds of web-based aggregators and reference tools for collating & organizing access and attention to all these poets are on the horizon.
Today, it seems, the advocates for multiplicity (in all its forms) are many. Not only are more and more poets acknowledged and recognized, but more and more diverse forms of artistic and quasi-artistic activity are now called "poetry" (see : conceptualism, flarf, uncreative writing, performance poetry, visual poetry, and many more new types of digital/intellectual games-playing).
I would like to sketch out (very sketchily) an unfashionable, diametrically-opposed position.
These days we have difficulty imagining the notion of semi-hierarchical framing structures, which shape the world of human culture and intellect. But I think it might be important for the health of contemporary poetry if we were able to do so.
Poetry is subsumed by a larger cultural/intellectual system we call civilization or history. The professional poetry factory (perhaps especially in the U.S.) tends to forget this. Poetry comes to the fore when it engages with these deeper, more universal entities. Shakespeare and Dante are considered masters and touchstones, not simply because they developed beautiful and intricate poetic styles, but because they fashioned their art in order to engage with the deepest intellectual, historical and moral currents - the structuring historical "problems" facing human civilization in their age.
Poetry's interaction with culture & history is not determined by numbers or headcounts. There's an element of intellectual/artistic leadership involved (as there is in science, or politics...). The individual poet sets his or her seal on this larger dimension - by means of conscious, critical engagement with a shared, common, communal world of general culture and history - of fact and event.
Unity and synthesis require choice & judgement. It's an unfashionable notion in an age of multiplicity and relativism. The problem is not too many poets for decent anthologies. The problem is that we lack the intellectual tools and the moral fortitude to conceive of poetry within a larger (historical) frame, both unitary and fateful.
Today, it seems, the advocates for multiplicity (in all its forms) are many. Not only are more and more poets acknowledged and recognized, but more and more diverse forms of artistic and quasi-artistic activity are now called "poetry" (see : conceptualism, flarf, uncreative writing, performance poetry, visual poetry, and many more new types of digital/intellectual games-playing).
I would like to sketch out (very sketchily) an unfashionable, diametrically-opposed position.
These days we have difficulty imagining the notion of semi-hierarchical framing structures, which shape the world of human culture and intellect. But I think it might be important for the health of contemporary poetry if we were able to do so.
Poetry is subsumed by a larger cultural/intellectual system we call civilization or history. The professional poetry factory (perhaps especially in the U.S.) tends to forget this. Poetry comes to the fore when it engages with these deeper, more universal entities. Shakespeare and Dante are considered masters and touchstones, not simply because they developed beautiful and intricate poetic styles, but because they fashioned their art in order to engage with the deepest intellectual, historical and moral currents - the structuring historical "problems" facing human civilization in their age.
Poetry's interaction with culture & history is not determined by numbers or headcounts. There's an element of intellectual/artistic leadership involved (as there is in science, or politics...). The individual poet sets his or her seal on this larger dimension - by means of conscious, critical engagement with a shared, common, communal world of general culture and history - of fact and event.
Unity and synthesis require choice & judgement. It's an unfashionable notion in an age of multiplicity and relativism. The problem is not too many poets for decent anthologies. The problem is that we lack the intellectual tools and the moral fortitude to conceive of poetry within a larger (historical) frame, both unitary and fateful.
2.12.2013
The Next Big Thing: A Meme about New Books
What is the working title of the book?
I'm calling it Ravenna, just in order to keep track of it. But it doesn't really have a title yet. So that's its non-working title.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
Well, it came from many directions. But let's say I was at loose ends, having finished a very large book-length poem called Lanthanum - latest in a series of long poems I've been writing since the late 1980s. I'm trying very hard not to do that again. I want to write single, stand-alone poems now, and to actually get them published (rather than publishing them myself).
Yet old habits are hard to shake. There were some paths I'd been taking in Lanthanum, and before, which were my own sound, original - and I wanted to keep building, somehow, on that. Take it another step.
And there were some subjects attracting me - big, comprehensive ideas - I wanted to pursue in an extended way, with variations. These ideas, themes, emotions seemed to be constellating, strangely, around Dante and the city of Ravenna (where he spent his last years, and is buried). Dante, that is, in connection with some of the architecture and mosaics there, which filter into the Divine Comedy. However, the immediate catalyst, which precipitated this project, was (as often the case with me) a kind of pun. Last fall I also happened to be diving back into some favorite old poets of my school days, especially Apollinaire. When I discovered that Dante's Paradiso had been infused with images from the mosaics in the Byzantine church of St. Apollinaris, I felt a kind of "subject rhyme" - a hunch that I might be striking a vein. This is in part anyway how the idea began to percolate. There are some other hugely essential puns involved, as well.
What genre does your book fall under?
Hermetic, riddling, unnoticed, ignored poetry.
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. Or Geraldine Fitzgerald and Woody Allen (as Dante).
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Ravenna is an archipelago of geographical, historical, psychological, spiritual, and phonological landscapes, evoked or epitomized by the word Ravenna.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I started this project in December, 2012. It's ongoing.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
The Holy Ghost, and her avatars Osip Mandelstam, Dante Alighieri, and Monica Vitti. Oh, and Geraldine Fitgerald, too.
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
Ravenna produces a "wall of sound" effect, which blocks out and wards off anyone who doesn't belong there.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Hopefully neither. But I'd like to find a publisher, if I ever finish this language experiment.
*
Warm thanks to Don Share for tagging me in this game. The only response I've had to a tag of my own came from my dear friend (and translator into Italian) Anny Ballardini. Your turn, Anny!
I'm calling it Ravenna, just in order to keep track of it. But it doesn't really have a title yet. So that's its non-working title.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
Well, it came from many directions. But let's say I was at loose ends, having finished a very large book-length poem called Lanthanum - latest in a series of long poems I've been writing since the late 1980s. I'm trying very hard not to do that again. I want to write single, stand-alone poems now, and to actually get them published (rather than publishing them myself).
Yet old habits are hard to shake. There were some paths I'd been taking in Lanthanum, and before, which were my own sound, original - and I wanted to keep building, somehow, on that. Take it another step.
And there were some subjects attracting me - big, comprehensive ideas - I wanted to pursue in an extended way, with variations. These ideas, themes, emotions seemed to be constellating, strangely, around Dante and the city of Ravenna (where he spent his last years, and is buried). Dante, that is, in connection with some of the architecture and mosaics there, which filter into the Divine Comedy. However, the immediate catalyst, which precipitated this project, was (as often the case with me) a kind of pun. Last fall I also happened to be diving back into some favorite old poets of my school days, especially Apollinaire. When I discovered that Dante's Paradiso had been infused with images from the mosaics in the Byzantine church of St. Apollinaris, I felt a kind of "subject rhyme" - a hunch that I might be striking a vein. This is in part anyway how the idea began to percolate. There are some other hugely essential puns involved, as well.
What genre does your book fall under?
Hermetic, riddling, unnoticed, ignored poetry.
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. Or Geraldine Fitzgerald and Woody Allen (as Dante).
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Ravenna is an archipelago of geographical, historical, psychological, spiritual, and phonological landscapes, evoked or epitomized by the word Ravenna.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I started this project in December, 2012. It's ongoing.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
The Holy Ghost, and her avatars Osip Mandelstam, Dante Alighieri, and Monica Vitti. Oh, and Geraldine Fitgerald, too.
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
Ravenna produces a "wall of sound" effect, which blocks out and wards off anyone who doesn't belong there.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Hopefully neither. But I'd like to find a publisher, if I ever finish this language experiment.
*
Warm thanks to Don Share for tagging me in this game. The only response I've had to a tag of my own came from my dear friend (and translator into Italian) Anny Ballardini. Your turn, Anny!
2.08.2013
Old poem in which snow makes an appearance
Blizzard night here in Providence. Thought of opening lines of simple old poem, published 40 yrs ago in Where the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day.
A LITTLE CART
It's dark out, the snow
lies endless miles around the house.
I hear words inside me like a little cart
as it rumbles away through fog.
They escape my hand. One time
I met a friend in the city,
and something heavy fell from the buildings --
we shake tight hands
and escape each other down the street.
Now the line runs on,
my hand moves, my head sleeps.
Before dawn it will begin to snow again,
people will climb out of bed
scattered all over the world;
here I can smell that day and the street
that ends in my thoughts,
dreaming of my friend with no empty hands.
A LITTLE CART
It's dark out, the snow
lies endless miles around the house.
I hear words inside me like a little cart
as it rumbles away through fog.
They escape my hand. One time
I met a friend in the city,
and something heavy fell from the buildings --
we shake tight hands
and escape each other down the street.
Now the line runs on,
my hand moves, my head sleeps.
Before dawn it will begin to snow again,
people will climb out of bed
scattered all over the world;
here I can smell that day and the street
that ends in my thoughts,
dreaming of my friend with no empty hands.
1.04.2013
Henry Thoughts
Note to self : we don't know how our writing comes across, until it's too late.
New Year's resolution : stop sounding so insipid, ingratiating. This might be a generic issue with "blogging" - but it's also my own problem.
That's a tough resolution. "But if salt has lost its savor, how shall its saltness be restored?"
New Year's resolution : stop sounding so insipid, ingratiating. This might be a generic issue with "blogging" - but it's also my own problem.
That's a tough resolution. "But if salt has lost its savor, how shall its saltness be restored?"
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