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On demand : Menand on de Man

Louis Menand's New Yorker essay on the notorious 20th-cent. lit. scholar Paul de Man is, like most of Menand's articles, something I read before anything else (except the cartoons).  But I found it both fascinating and disappointing.  He seems to blame the vociferous critics of the Yale School and post-structural theory (deconstruction, et al.) - like Allan Bloom, of Closing of the American Mind fame - for the decline of academic humanities & literature studies.  As if "theory" gave the whole thing a bad name.  Well, it did, to some extent.  But Menand portrays the theories of Derrida, de Man, & their cohort as a sort of "deconstruction lite".  Here's one of Menand's characterizing paragraphs :

"Deconstruction is difficult to explain in a manner consistent with deconstruction. That’s what accounts for the notorious wordplay and circularity in Derrida’s prose. (Derrida’s essay in “Deconstruction and Criticism,” for example, has a hundred-page footnote.) We could say that deconstruction is an attempt to go through the looking glass, to get beyond or behind language, but a deconstructionist would have to begin by explaining that the concepts “beyond” and “behind” are themselves effects of language. Deconstruction is all about interrogating apparently unproblematic terms. It’s like digging a hole in the middle of the ocean with a shovel made of water."

In this design, deconstruction is just a subtle and critical new way to approach literature, a "good read" in its own right.  Derrida & friends are seen as deep readers and defenders of literature & the humanities.  By the same token, Menand separates de Man's scholarly work from de Man "de man" (a criminal scoundrel, by all evidence).  But this doesn't bother me so much as does his simplistic characterization of post-structuralism/deconstruction.

Derrida doesn't strike me as the open-minded reader portrayed here.  Deconstruction depends on a systematic and neo-Nietzschean dismantling of rationality itself (branded as "logocentrism").  Derrida is an anti-Plato : his supposed "free play" of signifiers depends on a very rigid ruling-out of logic itself.  Verbal circularity and the de-humanization of "language" is a necessary boundary rule within which his games take place.

What is behind Menand's affinity for this trend?  Perhaps it has something to do with his own devotion to the American philosophy of Pragmatism (following William James and John Dewey). There is an element of relativism inherent in Pragmatism.  Nothing is really "true" except in the context of its praxis, its application.  Context in this sense trumps universality.  But it seems to me that without universality, truth itself loses its meaning.  This is not to say that either truth or universality are ever simple givens - not requiring critical context, analysis, interpretation and judgement.  But if there is no universality, there is no means of judgement or measurement whatsoever.  Maybe post-structuralism and Pragmatism are joined at the hip (or by the hip, or for the theoretically hip).

"Poetry : What's Next?" (postscript)

A few afterthoughts about the panel discussion on "Poetry : What's Next?", convened last week up in Cambridge, at the Grolier Bookshop.

Listening to Archambeau's & Burt's predictions (both the serious & the not-so), I was bemused to realize that, with respect to a number of their specific forecasts about future styles & concerns, I had already been there.  In fact I'd been doing those specific things in poetry for a couple decades.

Archambeau : 1) densely-patterned rhyming; 2) obscure, allusive, cryptic idioms; 3) extended serial/narrative poems...
Burt : 1) documentary/factual poems focused on local history in out-of-the-way places; 2) baroque, playfully pleasing, extravagantly stylized poems; slangy, idiomatic (quasi-slam) styles; 3) sober, restrained "thing" poems...

All these approaches are descriptive of what I've been doing since the 1990s.  "It's hard to predict the past," noted Archambeau.  Especially if "the past" is not being read, not taken seriously.

All these works of mine are easily available, in book form or for free.   In RI is a local-factual-documentary poem, full of obscure New England historical objects & events.  It was translated into Italian by Anny Ballardini & is available in a bilingual edition.  Forth of July (consisting of Stubborn Grew, The Grassblade Light, and July) is a vast, baroque, playful, epic explosion of rhyme, assonance, off-rhyme, near-rhyme, reverse-rhyme, inside-out rhyme... along with layers of Joycean networks of oblique, allusive references.  Lanthanum is a long serial poem which morphs into a dream-vision.

But the very last thing I want to do is turn this post into another pathetic example of special pleading.  I find the contemporary matrix or juncture of the poetry business, on the one hand, with the history of literature (or literary tradition), on the other, to be more strange and disorienting as the days go by.  All three of the speakers at the Grolier tried to address this jarring dissonance.  But the reality is more strange than any of us can comprehend.

When you set yourself to write long epic poems, or you fall in love with the high wild classics of the past... or when you notice the discontinuity between what is influential, what is paradigmatic, what is necessary, what lasts in literature - over the long span of time & times - and the obliterating/scattering power of time itself - the clash of cultures, the decay of material things, the overwhelming power of time & change ...  well, if you meditate on these things, if you live with them as you write... then the pathos and absurdity, the parochial narcissism, of your average would-be poet (me, for example) becomes glaringly obvious.

This is why, in the previous post on the Grolier talks, I emphasized the impossibility of saying much with certainty on this subject.  What becomes popular, what becomes great, what becomes a classic - & how it becomes such - is a real mystery.  Partly, I guess, because how it actually happens is slightly different every time : there is no fits-all method.  All I think I can say is that what becomes important to a culture at large - and what retains lasting importance - is what is somehow necessary to that people or that culture.  The work provides some kind of guidance, light, pleasure, or nourishment over time. And it does not lose that flavor (at least not completely).  & secondly, I never forget the technology of literature, of the written word.  It has the potential to outlast the Pyramids.  In fact our literature consists of the shards & fragments of ancient cultures' hero myths, sagas, folktales, laws, proverbs... the thrilling mythical tales, the parents' words to the wise & happy endings... - all those alphabetical ruins of broken peoples (Celts, Romans, Hebrews, Greeks, Chinese...) which we inherit (like Borges, the spider in his infinite library).  These epic identity claims, these tribal testimonies, in all their sublimity and beauty, bump up against the a-historical nowness of the homogenizing global hive-mind.

The social media rough beasts of the future have yet to emerge.  We've seen nothing yet.  Meanwhile the hordes of Happy Poets & Artists flood the airwaves with their twittering selfies.  Aren't we lucky to live in America & own smartphones?  Meanwhile the established institutions for the advancement of literature have their megaphones on full blast - pre-recorded, targeted drone-wise directly at your head.  Aren't we smart?  We are the coolness of now. 

I think the ur-poem - the ursus-poem - the Artorius-poem - the epic of tomorrow - will have some lineaments outlined by Walt Whitman & James Joyce.  The "song of myself" - of any self - is an epic poem.  Bloom, the Everyman of Ulysses, is like each one of us.  Every human being lives within a wonder-world, so marvelous it cannot be expressed in words : only in broken Babel-bits.  We're waiting for that Pentecost of the Ur-story... the thing that unites all people without emulsifying away each person's fingerprint... distinctive quidditas.

Shakespeare also seemed to dwell on the uncanny technology of writing in the sense outlined here.  Think of Sonnet 65...

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o'er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out Against the wreckful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays? O fearful meditation! where, alack, Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?    O, none, unless this miracle have might,    That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

A Talk at the Grolier

The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, located a block or so from Harvard Square since 1927, reminds me of the late lamented  Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan.  It's a splendid little store, full of poetry books you can't find anywhere else.  It's also a sort of miniature poetry museum.  The walls are covered with old b-&-w photos of literary eminences & locals who visited or gave readings there.  A comfortable, welcoming place - yet there's a certain air of literate acuity, articulate awareness.  Intellectual.  Most of all there's a bookish whiff of time & history - of local knowledge, memory, tradition.  Sort of a rare thing - a remnant of old weird America, in the midst of young, amnesiac weird America.

Last Friday evening I took the train up to Cambridge for a panel discussion on a fascinating, though inherently impossible theme : "Poetry : What's Next?"  I feel for the 3 writers corralled to be saddled with this incorrigible subject.  But each of them - Robert Archambeau, Stephen Burt, & Ben Mazer - was up to the task, in his own way.  The passionate iconoclast Thomas Graves was also there, sitting next to me (mild-mannered poète maudit) in the back row, and he has issued his own report on these talks.

Archambeau's talk is replete with self-deprecating charm & Gallic wit.   It's a sort of spoof on the whole idea of a pompous lecture on a profound topic (Archambeau in person radiates jovial good humor).  His pseudo-argument is a scaffold of bold propositions to which "I know you will object" - & then, because he knows we will object, he revises them or shifts to a new dyad of different bold propositions.  It becomes a sort of refrain.  But there seems to be a common thread to the parade of assertions.  He sets poetry within the framework of cultural history, the long view ("the past is hard to predict," he propounds at one point).  And the long view is a gradual but inexorable constriction of the role of poetry in culture at large.  We go from the poet as culture hero and universal sage (Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare)... to the poet as middle-class Sunday fireside companion (Tennyson, Longfellow)... to the poet as maker of difficult autotelic "art objects" (Modernism)... to the poet as merely a member of one among a near-infinite assortment of "special interest groups", subcultures, hobbyists... all of them equal, all of them equally marginal.

This is a familiar story.  Archambeau gives it a twist by describing how past, seemingly passé, modes & techniques - rhyme, allusive symbolism, etc. - have become pervasive phenomena : in rap, hip-hop and spoken word verse, and in the high-symbolist, elliptically-referential methods of commercial advertising jargon.  He does this to underline the obvious difficulty in predicting the "future of poetry" - and also to suggest that the ineluctable constriction of poetry's social sphere may have reached a tipping point... or maybe a moment of dialectical reversal, a Viconian ricorso.  But that's as far as he takes the subject.  Archambeau's underlying message, perhaps, is that there exists no simple avant-garde/Darwinian system of "progress in the arts" - no foundational/revolutionary break with the past (so dear to the hearts of manifesto-writers).  As Eliot put it, "Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are what we know."

Stephen Burt's presentation was more ambitious and serious.  Burt is a rarity in this country : a real poetry critic, and an enthusiast for the new and the little-known.  He honors the poets he discusses, by way of the sheer energy and passion he brings to "unpacking" them - tracing their lineage,  interpreting their "near-nonsense" for ordinary readers.  Burt is also something of a taxonomist.  He classifies scattered species of poets and comes up with resonant family names for the trends they represent (see his essays on "the Ellipticals", or "the New Thing").  This is also a way of foregrounding the oft-unremarked vitality of what's happening now, of the very contemporary American scene.  Burt is quite gifted and discerning in pursuit of these aims.  He can frame in a few paragraphs, for example, the philosophical viewpoints influencing the incursion of "Language Poetry" in the 70s and 80s; their effect (as models for both imitation & resistance) on the innovative poets of the 90s and the past decade; and the socio-cultural forces which impel the emergence of the very latest styles.  True to form, Burt concludes this talk with a taxonomy of four very new and distinct stylistic-technical trends among young American poets, which he reads as growing future influences - because they address, with originality and energy (as Hamlet says they should), "the form & pressure of the time" - giving to "airy nothing" a "local habitation & a name."

Ben Mazer's talk was quite different, as Thomas Graves has already pointed out.  His lecture was a species of what they used to call "poet's prose" - creative, evocative, impressionistic.  As if in light mockery of Archambeau's and Burt's enumerations and categories, Mazer proposes "eight points" which seem to dissolve into cloudy ether at the end.  Yet he issues a categorical challenge - a sort of high-Romantic toss-down of the gauntlet - to any reductive intellectualizing or sociological bracketing of the poet's exalted mission and role.   For Mazer, poetry is both spiritual vocation and craft tradition.   If you don't know and absorb the incarnate, embodied, and unitary tradition of Poetry - a mode of encompassment and renewal which only a bona fide poetic Genius can accomplish - then you have missed the essence, the quiddity, the soul of poetry - and all your pedantic critical intellectualizing about it is pettiness and vanity, is bound for the dustbin.

It is kind of refreshing and incredible to listen to Ben Mazer's resonant poet's voice proclaim such unseasonable articles of faith.  In an age of the populism of creativity - everybody is a star - such quasi-elitist views are going to meet with much scorn.  Yet there is a certain logic to Mazer's position, too.  Poetry is the in-breaking of the ecstatic and supernatural.  It is the voice of the Muse - of an inspiration which cannot be rationalized or paraphrased.  On these grounds the vatic Druid, the sage-mage-shaman, lurks just beneath the surface of the poet's incantatory charism.  There is something definitely archaic and slightly liminal about Ben Mazer's way.  Here it peeks up from beneath the shelves of ye olde Cambridge bookshoppe, like a corpse-flower, or a skunk cabbage, a lily-of-the-valley, or some other shy New England sign of spring.

My own two cents on "What's Next" - which I tried, unsuccessfully & pretty inarticulately, to formulate as a question to the panel that night - is as follows.   I think it's too soon to write off poetry as a marginal hobby or irrelevant throwback.  And I think it's a mistake to solder the Balkanization of contemporary poetic trends onto the Babel-like diversity of contemporary American culture.  This is ultimately based, I think, on a very American, yet also very parochial, attitude toward history.  America's wonderful rainbow-like infinitude of ethnic & cultural & psycho-social identifications is folded within what I believe is a more global and, and yes, universal human history.  The mother of the Muses was Mnemosyne - Memory.  The poet's vocation is to gather up the common threads of our history - what binds us to past generations - and to make sense of them.

We live in a polarized nation : the Right is possessed by a nostalgia for the certitudes of the past, combined with a fundamentalist/Puritan suspicion of the arts; the Left is suffused with an idealism and a passion for social justice as a set of abstract principles - which often unites with a petty scorn and hatred for its political "other" which exactly contradicts the very ideals so cherished.  Such is today's red/blue and very stale purple stalemate.

I think the poet is the dissatisfied one.  She cannot abide the brackets & distinctions of the minor trends in style : she sees them as more of a problem than an opportunity.  The great poetry of the past inherited the narrow trends & techniques : and transmuted them by an uncanny, irreducible process of alchemical synthesis (we call this "making poetry").

What's next?   I look toward a future for poetry without so many qualifying adjectives.  I look to a poetry which is passionately drawn to what we hold in common, as well as to that which is irradicably unique, personal, & unrepeatable.

By the wall

Spring chords

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Cosmic frame

I watched the first episode of "Cosmos", the science TV program hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Tyson made a brief appearance in my long poem Forth of July, 10 years ago.

The initial episode laid out a fairly superficial and standard historical contrast between science and established religion.  But the focus on Giordano Bruno was interesting, and the facts of that case (& other such examples of the persecution of free thought) are pretty much beyond dispute.

What occurs to me, though, is that the program seems to project some implicit philosophical or perhaps spiritual aspects.  We watch Mr. Tyson sail through cosmic space and time, alone, in his cute spaceship, which looks like a sleek little smartphone.  & at the conclusion, the host pulls out an old datebook belonging to his mentor, Carl Sagan, & shows us Sagan's note scheduling his upcoming meeting with Tyson, a young student at the time.  Tyson expresses much love & respect for Sagan, who took a personal interest in him & helped launch his own science career.

So Cosmos, in a sense, projects the image of a somewhat "personal" cosmos.  Whether gazing from the cockpit of his private spaceship, or memorializing his old friend (& prior cosmic explorer), Tyson gives us a universe framed & shadowed by himself - he personalizes it.

& it struck me today, that this notion rhymes with several strands of the "poetics" I have projected on this blog over the years.  I have noted, for example, that Osip Mandelstam's interpretations of the Russian Acmeist poetic - which repeatedly proclaim poetry's alignment with this world, and the deep process of poetry involving something like helping Mankind feel at home on earth - I think this stance bears a kinship with Walt Whitman's epic project.  Whitman's Song of Myself is an effort to construct a believable "I" which binds together every dimension of experience - spiritual & material, minute & vast, local & universal.  There is a bond here between the American effort to "frame" Romantic idealism within a very down-to-earth idiom, and the Acmeist focus on poetry as the spiritual sanction of an earthly norm.  Mandelstam :

It's not Rome the city that lives on,
but Man's place in the universe.

These elliptical lines are not a denial of the eternity of the Eternal City, but rather a description of that eternity's underlying (humane) logic.

This attitude is also declared, I think, in the philosophy of scientist Michael Polyani (which I've written about before, here & elsewhere).  Polanyi asserted, & reiterated, the fundamental personal quality of all human knowledge.  He found a way to do this without hedging or corroding the objectivity and universality of science.  I see Polanyi's worldview as resistant to the theoretical trends (structuralism, post-structuralism) which reject the integrity of the person, which require the deconstruction of human subjectivity in order to propose their explanations of reality.

The major chords of Romantic idealism, of course, were splintered on the rocks of 19th- and especially 20th-cent. history.  The skeptical Marxism of Adorno, the materialist mysticism of Walter Benjamin, the existentialist irony of Kierkegaard & Sartre - the awareness of human limits and human capacity for evil - find more intellectual assent, seem more "realistic".  We inhabit an intellectual climate of ironic disbelief, doctrinaire politics, and disenchanted (often cynical) prose.

But poetry is a sort of spiritual animal.  It grows out of sensibility, intuition and hope.  It persists there, irrationally, despite the"thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to".  The benevolent shadow of the mystery Person - like Proust in his cork-lined room, whispering his vast, integral life - transcends the whole cosmic theater.  I think this viewpoint must stand near the center of the entire "Henry doctrine".

Corinna, Corinna

[to the tune of "I Pity the Poor Immigrant"]

I pity the poor prof-poet,
whose words were so contained.
Who traveled in kaleidoscopes
and worried when it rained.
Who hugged his pals, and blurbed along
until the train arrived
which carried him to Omaha
for his last conference-jive.

All poetry is super-conceptual

Today I was handling some materials for the library's digital archive, & happened upon a quote from Sol Lewitt (from this paper):

"When an artist uses a multiple modular method he usually chooses a simple and readily available form. The form itself is of very limited importance; it becomes the grammar for the total work. In fact, it is best that the basic unit be deliberately uninteresting so that it may more easily become an intrinsic part of the entire work. Using complex basic forms only disrupts the unity of the whole. Using a simple form repeatedly narrows the field of the work and concentrates the intensity to the arrangement of the form. This arrangement becomes the end while the form becomes the means."

Instantly I felt he was talking about things that happen with me in the world of long poems.  The "form is of limited importance, it becomes the grammar for the total work".  The stanza, the mathematical structures of different parts... they are basically simple, and become a sort of second nature - allowing things to take form in unexpected directions.

I went into the stacks to skim some of Lewitt's art work (in catalogs).  They have an unassuming, graceful quality : not imposing, but creating designs which encourage exploration.  Mental constructs.  Some, in the photos, also seem a bit too much like miniature replicas of the giant glass buildings behind the park scenes & public settings.  Maybe a little cold.  You have to bring your own happiness, if you have any.  But I like what I saw.

Reducing visual art to a conceptual presentation poses some problems for the artist, which may be the opposite of those confronting a poet.  All poetry is already super-conceptual.  It's not a matter of reducing the expressive content & the physical materiality to a concept.  "The Word is Psyche," as Mandelstam wrote.  A spoken or written word is nothing but the whisper of an idea.  A word is a packaged message - & a message is a concept-in-transmission.  A hidden, perhaps infinite, conceptual realm (of meanings) hovers around and through the sound & feeling delivered in the poetic utterance.  The problem for the poet is to project that psychic realm in a concrete image (or structure of images).  The word is a spiny, feathery milkweed seed... in what soil will you plant this?  & will it actually produce a milkweed, eventually (with monarchs arriving)?  Or will it remain merely the dried-up husk of an idea...

The visual artist constructs forms in space (got that, kids?).  Poetry builds conceptual spaces out of invisible messages : speech, sound, time.

Lewitt's white geometries rest with calm elegance in the grass.  They are always now (though they may recall prior constructs, progenitors).   Poetry also strives to be now : but in the very process, calls "now" into question.  How so?

I think there exists a primal ur-concept, which underlies & grounds all the conceptual artifice, all the constructions of poetry.  But what this ur-concept actually is, is hard for me to describe...

Mandelstam's "the Word is Psyche" gets close, though.  Ezra Pound, in "The Spirit of Romance", wrote this : "The study of literature is hero-worship. It is a refinement, or, if you will, a perversion of that primitive religion."  This also seems apropos, somehow.  Our own personal reception of poetry - that "refinement" somewhere hidden in the obscure corners of our own psyche, of our sensibility - rooted maybe in our initial enthusiasm for our mother's bedside stories, or the children's hymns we sang in church, or our first adolescent encounters with particular poems - is bound up somewhere with our state of being in the world as a whole : that is, with the ways in which we relate to and respond to other people and to experience throughout our lives.  There is no escape (& no need for escape) from the "subjectivity" of this dimension : it is inherently personal (just as it is inherently a process of communication, of shared experience).

I understand Pound's "hero worship" as the reader's sense of the distinctly personal & historical origin of the poem he or she reads.  It is not ours : it is that poet's world.  & as we read, we sense how the language of the poem represents both a comprehension of, & a resistance to, that very rocky other world which the poet conveys.  So when we encounter, say, the mournful music of a poem by Leopardi, or the fiery sparks let fly by Dickinson, or the profound equilibria in Shakespeare, it's not simply the "words themselves" or "the language" which compels our devotion - it's the intuition of another person, another poet, offering us their whole world in the manner of a friendly storyteller.

So maybe the ur-concept has to do with some kind of human frame which is the preconception for every work of (verbal) art.  All poetry is conceptual, indeed.  But more than that, all poetry is super-conceptual : because there is a mysterious someone who is signalling to us behind, before, beneath the words themselves.

Poetry is the transmutation of time and history into this strange - yet heimlich, affectionate, humane - mode of presence & exchange.  You have to listen carefully for that rich music - from a shade, from a time-dimension, beyond the flat, denatured idioms of utilitarian discourse (& all its "social media").  (Yes, it might just be a shade, cast by the musical intonations of your mother's bird-voice, once upon a time, warbling that story about Frisbee, the tiny explorer, as she sits nearby on the bed, as you fall asleep...)

Mandelstam, from a late poem :

But in caressing books, in children's games,
I shall rise from the dead to say: the sun!

Sophie plays the piano

Babble & frame

1.

The chatter-world envelopes the speechless day.  The graph, the aggregate, the algorithmic overlay : millions, nay, billions of contending stories, sorties.  The articulated bark of the logic-trees... the directives, the spin-cycles... this being one of them (minute & indistinct, or vast & bulbous).

2.

The Logos might be a name for the ur-narrative, the frame of frames.  What makes for form and equilibrium on the one hand... & for petrified cocoons, thoughtless verbal armatures, on the other.

3.

Frame of frames... serious concept.  Danger of idolatry, of predatory totalism ("One ring to rule them all" etc.).

4.

Yet if the frame - empowered to shatter/comprehend all the wind-tunnels of history - if this tale were actually benevolent...

5.

We might want to listen to it, deep in the monsoon-shelter.

6.

If there were such a frame, an ur-story, it might be about a very quiet, mysterious, and universal victory over death.  It might bring peace of mind, courage, joy... & it might even be true.

7.

It might be the story we find ourselves telling, in our own way.

8.

It might have happened, once.  There might be evidence.  But what it means... (up to us to find out).

Verbal Promontory

Integritas, consonantias, claritas : dimensions of beauty, according to Thomas Aquinas.  In James Joyce's translation : "wholeness, harmony, radiance."  Claritas : radiance, brilliance, intelligibility.

The work of art - if it's a thing of beauty, then it's a "whole" thing, an integral thing, a distinct, whole something.

Beginning, middle, end.  Shape, design, coherence.

Philosophers, of course, have chewed over aesthetics forever.  "Our aesthetic response is subjective, but the beauty to which we respond is universal."  Or so one argument goes.

And humanity displays something called "common sense" - sensus comunis.  We share sensibility (response to experience) and understanding (comprehension of same).  Whether or not these are "transcendental" or somehow otherwise determined.

Philos. 101.

Why am I going on like this?  I have ten minutes before I leave the building.

Poetry is one of the modes of human art-making.  We make whole objects, which manifest their own integrity, their coherence, their radiance.

The poet's sense of history differs slightly, perhaps, from that of the historian or the philosopher.  Because the poet responds especially strongly to the aesthetic dimension of a poem - no matter when the poem was produced.  Poets, of course, may have a more or less acute critical sense (say, of the social/existential/political differences between today and 200 B.C.) - which can affect their responses to poems of past ages.  But I think there is always a basic (or maybe residual) artistic response to the "poem as such".  This is why they (the poems) keep getting translated anew.  There is something integral which inheres in them.

I have to shut down now.  So why am I going on like this?  I have no general advice for writers (all those would-be poets in Seattle this weekend).  But for me, the adventure of making poems has a lot to do with responding - in my own stuff - to miraculous writings of long ago (or not so long ago).

Claritas, radiance, intelligibility... there is always hope for the sensus comunis of world civilization.  But maybe we need the detachment from the gamesmanship (our own, & our crowding contemporaries).  We need to sense the objectivity of art, and find our own mode of detachment.

I have built a sort of stony promontory in words.  It's lonesome out here.  But I'm hoping it will last, after the cookie-cutter parade has passed on by.

Concert for school & community center near Clarksdale

I'll be performing at this benefit concert in March with my son-in-law, Khaled (as "The Islanders").  Please join us - should be fun.

The Paradigm

Imagination is the irrepressible revolutionist.
- Wallace Stevens

Toward the end of the last century, the mind of the West (if you can call it that) showed forth the lineaments of a void of nothingness, an abomination of desolation.

*

First philosophy did away with God; then it was Man's turn.  Goodbye to humanism, goodbye to the human...

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Fatalists all : Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, De Man, Derrida...  Mankind is the toy of unconscious linguistic rules and structures of control.  The idea of freedom is meaningless.

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Of course, without freedom, there is no struggle whatsoever, no point.  Pointlessless was the great moral alibi.

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I suppose one could concede that these theorizers were struggling at least to convey a truth : but it's the truth of the fixed idea, the reigning mantra, the "control" itself.

*

Since the imagination was either the autotelic master of its own domain (modernism) or the abject scapegoat of parodic cancellations (postmodernism), ambitious poets could choose from a wide range of phony genres, methodologies, attitudes, etc.  It was an expanding market at the time.

*

Beckett, Pynchon, D.F. Wallace... after Kierkegaard & Sartre, a plangent pessimism about the human condition became ingrained in culture.  Then appeared the neo-Nietzschean option : structuralist anti-humanism (see above).

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Language Poetry, Flarf, Conceptualism... the poets strummed variations on seductive discourses emanating from the shambles of Western thought.

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Meanwhile the hawkers continued hawking their wares.  Poetry is a special case.

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The new paradigm will somehow rebuild what was destroyed, without going back...

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I imagine the imagination will be recovered, on behalf of both mankind and God.

*

It might be a new kind of geometry.  The imagination will emerge from human freedom again, just as Kant envisioned; yet mankind will not displace God.  Perhaps there will be a new Trinitarian concept.

*

God will allow humanity the freedom to imagine Her.  But imagination is one thing, an actual encounter is another. (God, after all, is HOLY : while Woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips.)

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The source of poetry's strength is its freedom.  Not license or egotism, but moral freedom.

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Moral freedom is a limb of conscience.  The poet's freedom appears under the aegis of truth.  We trust the poem because we recognize its authenticity - we hear it ring, so to speak (as in Mandelstam's "gold coins of humanism").

*

This freedom branches from something like Sartre's notion of the phenomenology of the image.  The image is purposeful - the creation of a phantom form.  Not for illusion's sake, but to say something to us.  The freedom of the beautiful image engenders a kind of absolute joy.

*

The spontaneity of the image is allied to the underlying dramatic essence of reality.  All the world's indeed a stage : poetry grasps this, and offers, not discourse, but an event.  And this is, moreover, where poetry & history coincide.

*

Angst of postmodernity : hegemony of the pervasive, manipulative, vacuous, dehumanized, amoral, inauthentic image.  But poetry is conscience, presence, authenticity.  The poet utters (somehow!) an authentic image.

*

Kant's transcendent imagination may be universal and a priori : but in order to create, the little light bulb over your head must still switch on.

*

Sartre, by way of his disenchanted, pessimistic phenomenology, explained just how frail, ephemeral, abject, solipsistic, unreal - yet motivated, conscious - are the mental "images" we construct (every moment of our waking/dreaming lives).

*

Yet (absurdly enough) the poet, Plato's ethereal, winged creature, foolishly shares those most vulnerable, abject phenomena - those useless dream-images - so that we understand them, a little... recognize ourselves in them (enthusiastically, reservedly, begrudgingly).  This is what the poet does (all day & night).

*

"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us... full of grace and truth."  (The Word we imagine... conceptualize... perceive.)

*

Like a dream, the muse, a moment of blessed grace, Proust's involuntary memory... from the deep.  (I think Kant said so himself : imagination is rooted in the unknown depths of the soul.)

*

I have a hunch that Wallace Stevens pondered, confronted and resolved in advance almost all of the cruxes of the postmodern impasse.  (Imagination and reality, artifice & truth...)  Almost all of them.

*

...& David Jones solved the rest.

*

Poetry signals consciousness & presence : personal, human, divine, and in relation (to its interlocutors, its crossroad, its time & place).  That relation, essentially, is Love.

*

Whence comes the special freedom & authenticity of poetry?  The short answer (pace, Military-Industrial Writer Complex) : poetry is not for sale.

*

Not for sale.

*

An escapee from the kingdom of Mammon.

*

Mammon, planetary heir-apparent : controlling both authoritarian & democratic systems (China, Russia, USA).  Mammon, burning up the earth : the idol of human greed.

*

This is the short answer.  But there is a more precise answer.  Poetry's freedom, to repeat, proceeds from conscience, per se.  In other words, its substance is an innate, ethical response : compassion.

Watch the years (take 1)

Snowbelt doodle

A sigh is the sword of an angel king

I

Love, love... Valentine's Day.  The main legend (and it is only a legend) of the first St. Valentine portrays someone whom we would call a "prisoner of conscience".  Jailed, and eventually executed, for his religious activities by the Emperor Claudian, the hagiography tells how Valentine sent a note (or notes) to a loved one, signed "your Valentine".

We are quite familiar with prisoners of conscience these days.  Think of the young Iranian poet Hashem Shaabani, recently tortured and hanged for speaking out against abuses of power.  Just one example among thousands.  The globe today, a battlefield of exploitation, fanaticism, brutality and violence.

Sad thoughts on Valentine's Day.

II

I was never much for philosophy.  The teachers, textbooks put me in a drowse.   When you don't really study a subject, it's likely you'll produce banal travesties of ideas which have been stated (or refuted) with greater exactitude and force in years or ages past.  In other words you won't discover or relate anything new.

Have been playing catch-up, a little bit, reading a very absorbing book by Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination.  Explores the changing notions of "imagination" through the history of Western philosophy, from ancient/classical Greek and Jewish thought, through the Middle Ages, into the modern age (Kant, Romanticism, Existentialism... to the present).

My knowledge of German idealist philosophy has not really been knowledge at all, just sketchy third-hand references (say, in texts on Coleridge's philosophical background).  Kearney's book puts aesthetic issues in the larger context. 

Kant was pivotal : the origin of Romanticism.  His theory of the imagination - so radical that he himself drew back from it (in the revised 2nd ed. of Critique of Pure Reason) - shifted the ground in a fundamental way.

Ancient philosophy was rooted in theology.  Plato's idealism was structured around the assertion of a universal Being, a first principle, the cosmic Logos, the source of reality in a divine realm of living Ideas, a transcendental Mind.  In similar (though not congruent) fashion, Jewish monotheism asserted a transcendental, invisible Creator- and Sustainer-God.  The imagination, for both cultures, was corroded by sin and revolt : for Judaism, the heart's turning away from its source led to destruction; for the Greeks, feeble mortals required the aid of a rebellious Titan, Prometheus (avatar and scapegoat for all human capability).

The Medieval era synthesized the legacy of Athens and Jerusalem, but the basic theocentric cosmic design remained.  The human imagination was a fallible instrument, a likely source of (moral and intellectual) error.

The Renaissance, followed by Reformation and Enlightenment eras, began the transposition from theocentric to anthropocentric worldviews.  Kant revolutionized philosophy by bringing this slow development to a theoretical summation.  The imagination was the vital center of human being, the root of both experience (perception and sensibility) and knowledge (intellect and understanding).  Moreover, the imagination was transcendental : not in a theocentric sense of divine, or heavenly, but in the sense of prior or formative.  Imagination shapes all human knowledge and experience : we, in this sense, make our world.  The "logocentrism" of a prior, exterior cosmos no longer holds : Man is the origin of his/her own reality.

Kant himself drew back from some of the epistemological consequences of his own critique.  But his most radical position was the basis for the entire Romantic movement. Human creative subjectivity was now the world-fashioning source of all experience; the ultimate order was rooted in the human mind.

The history of western philosophy since Kant is a tale of the shattering of Romantic idealism.  Naturalism, Existentialism and the various strains of Postmodernism express the belief that, although God is no longer relevant, and human consciousness is the center of experience (just as Kant asserted), nevertheless, that consciousness is faced with an external actuality, a real world of chance and meaninglessness, which is beyond human comprehension or control.  The mind's constructs are fictions, founded in nothingness (Nietzsche, Sartre).  Creative idealism is not a source of nobility, but rather of moral evasion and betrayal (Kierkegaard, Marcuse).  We may recognize God's presence only in the absurd, by an irrational leap of faith (Kierkegaard, again) - everything else is rationalization, complacency, bad faith.  There is only heroism and fellow-feeling in the stoic acceptance of our mutual fate, in a random, absurd cosmos (Camus).  Symbolism and Modernism attempted to salvage aesthetic experience by constructing an autotelic world of art; but the shadow (or the joke) of the actual world (of injustice, pain and absurdity) always impinged.

This then is my rough, amateurish travesty (courtesy of R. Kearney) of the philosophical background to our own time, the Postmodern era.  Maybe you can characterize Postmodernity as the absorption of both the lessons of 20th-century history, and of existentialist thought.  The autotelic engine of the modernist imagination broke down about 50 years ago.  The strongest intellectual trends which replaced it involve either various modes of historicism or historical materialism, or various forms of neo-Nietzschean thought.  Derridean deconstruction, for example, is a sort of parodic Platonism, a Plato in an inverted mirror.  The cosmic Logos of rationality is inverted by universal non-identity, by a rational structure of irrationalism (very Nietzschean in spirit).  Even the disillusioned heroism of Existentialism is rendered impossible, since the human imagination is no longer merely absurd or futile, it is not itself.

There are also distinct, perhaps more "positive" trends - the paradoxes of Lacanian psychology (desire grounded in the imaginary presence of another) or the tentative affirmations of Levinas (ethics grounded in an unknowable divine Interlocutor).  The landscape is appropriately confusing.  But the history of imagination seems to present a central plot.  The ethical/ontological fences around the imagination - whether Judaic, Platonic, or Christian - were knocked down.  The formative capacities of the rational comprehension of experience are faculties of human subjectivity.  Man assumed many of the ordering functions once assigned to God.  Then, in Acts Two through Four, the authority of that human subjectivity was thoroughly dismantled.  Relativity in all modes reigns supreme (block that metaphor!).

III

Professional philosophes & knowledgeable people must forgive the howlers embedded in the above.  It's my naive subjective take on a wonderful book (Wake of Imagination) which I haven't finished reading.  But what is my response to the basic plot, so rashly hammed together here?

I'm going to improvise.  It's Friday afternoon.  (There will be no rationally-secured syllogisms, unfortunately.)

The mind : is it a lamp or a mirror?  It's a lamp in a mirror (as in a lighthouse).

Kierkegaard's extremity seems rooted in the idea that God is strictly unfathomable, that the paradox of the God-Man is inherently absurd.  More than absurd : it is abjection, it is scandal.  He believes in God, but it requires a leap of faith to even begin to believe.  There is no synthesis of reason and faith.

Yet I can hear the distant trumpets of affirmation in both Kant's optimism and Kierkegaard's pessimism.  Kant affirms mankind's noble freedom and power; Kierkegaard sets a limit to human pride and self-delusion.

Kant's transcendental imagination, capable of fusing sensibility and understanding, and logically prior to experience, is like Aristotle's definition of the soul, but in a modern mode.  Kierkegaard's iconoclastic leap of faith, his anguish reaching out a hand, is an intuition of the ultimate ground beneath the scintillating, shuttling clay of Mind.

That ultimate ground (or firmament) is Love.  Under the aegis of love, we can comprehend the conjunction of logical opposites, the "absurd" incarnation of the God-Man.  And here is when we need to remember : the imagination is only a faculty, a power, a capability, of a more fundamental entity : the Person.  The imagination is not yet the "form of forms" - the person comprehends this form in an integral totality.

It is this assertion, combined with a recognition of the historical actuality of Jesus, the God-Man, which allows us to build a synthesis of experiential reality on solid ground.  How so?

The mind is both mirror and lamp.  We must apply the lamp, in order to see ourselves (less darkly) in the mirror.  What does Jesus himself, that historical individual, say about God?  Jesus suffuses the "concept" of God in personhood, relationship, love.  We cannot see God, we cannot understand divine infinity : yet, using the lamp, we can form a conjecture, construct an hypothesis.  This is beyond Kierkegaard's absurd leap in the dark.  Yet it's not merely abstract philosophizing.  We acknowledge the irreducible historical actuality of the particular human person; at the same time, we hypothesize the benevolent personal nature of the divine source of all experience.

Christianity proposes a Trinity.  In the Gospels, Jesus is "anointed" Son of God under the auspices of the Holy Spirit (in the form of a dove, the ancient symbol of love).  Jesus, in his "official" role as Messiah and Son of God, posits a Father-Son relation of absolute authority.  But the Holy Spirit is a legitimate third Person in this design.  The Holy Ghost is designated as "the Spirit of Truth" in the Gospel of John.  And the Truth is made known to us only gradually.  What if we think of the "monarchical" design of monotheism as an imaginative projection, a partial figuration of something more complex?

I speculate that Judaism developed in a dialectical opposition to ancient monarchy (Egyptian, Babylonian).  The kingship of Yahweh is an anti-kingship.  The "royalty" of Jesus is another twist in the pattern.  Jesus is the anti-king : the servant of servants : the humble, the rejected one.  Jesus is the human being who overcomes all the violent powers of worldly kingdoms.  He is killed - and rises from the dead.  He is the ultimate sign of life defeating death : of the actual Power lurking in the human soul (and in the human imagination).  Everyman as spiritual hero : God as the author of divine tragicomedy.

How can God be personal?  Observe the vast dark cosmos of galaxies.  How can God be personal?  Use your imagination.

We think we know what "persons" are, don't we?  We depend on them : they are the most integral entities we know (starting with our own subjectivity, and that of all those persons who affect our lives).  Yet we see as in a glass, darkly.

Kant's imagination is transcendental, a priori, like Aristotle's soul.  Yet I'm saying the imagination is a faculty of a more integral entity (the Person, the "incarnate" soul).  Why is the soul incarnate?  Why do persons exist?  Because our life, our world, is caught up in a kind of obscure drama.

Imagination : Persons :: Faith : God

This is an imperfect diagram.  What I'm trying to suggest is that, just as the imagination is a transcendental faculty of persons, who are embodied, individual, existential actors - so faith is a transcendental act of such integral persons.  It's transcendental, in that this act of choice, of commitment to a hunch, cannot really be explained.  Not merely an absurd leap, however - but a reasonable hypothesis, grounded in gathered evidence, synthesized by the imagination's own sensibility & understanding.

Stolen Air

I put this up a few days ago, and then had second thoughts. But after a protest from Chris Kraemer, I worked on it a little more, & here it is again. This is the original video. The revised poem is printed below.

          STOLEN AIR

                                               to Yevgeny Vitishko

         There are many in Athens who’d rather not hear you

         speak, Olympian.

         Plato, perhaps.  And Putin.

         Judges in Sochi (policemen, too).

         Go back to your Sunday tea, they pray.

         Give it a rest.  Poetry

         in polite society

         is not taken seriously – & hurray

         for that! expound the hoi-polloi.

         Punctiliousness is de rigueur

         whatever that means.  Sure,

         it’s about stuff that matters... oh boy.

         Show me the riot.  What’s your game?

         Causeries des chimps.

         Gambling works – hence the

         full Monty (my life, sorry).  Shame

         on innocence, or chumps.  Sex

         is Pharaoh’s mask, Yahweh’s unisex,

         anyone who genuflects

         otherwise... go figure!  What next?

         A naked lancer skims toward Thermopylae.

         Naiads flank across frozen

         lake.  Siberian ozone...

         Pyrrhic destination, puppy.  Hey,

         my soul’s on fire.  Let’s put ‘em there,

         where they won’t cause no trouble.

         All’s Romany rust or ruble,

         Homs, seriozhne.  Griots vein stolen air.

                                               2.10.14