ON FORM & INFINITY IN POETRY
Have been reading some beautiful things by 20th-cent. physicist Erwin Schrodinger (Nature and the Greeks). What a witty, wonderful writer he is! Philosopher-scientist. Interesting how the crisis of the 2 world wars & the Nuclear Age sent so many different kinds of thinkers & personalities back to origins of civilization (Schrodinger, TS Eliot, Chas. Olson, to name just a few...).
Anyway, reading his description of the encounter of earliest Greek science (Pythagoras, Thales, others) with the riddles of mathematics... it occurred to me that this all might have some pertinence in relation to poetry wars...
The thrust of the "new" (contemporary) formalists - & beyond formalism, the thrust of Poetry-as-Craft in general - is grounded in a concept of elegance : elegance, rooted in "number" in the poetic-mathematical sense. The poem is a sleek sort of toy - a verbal isometry between the concept & its expression (wit) - in which the evidence of mastery takes the form of elegant numbers...
Well, the problem I'm having with all this at the moment is that the idea of number... allied with the notion of craft & finish... & connected thus with the idea of elegance, mastery &, basically, success... (or authority)... well, all this runs head on into an aspect of Nature (that Nature with which Art is supposed to be elegantly married) which we might call either the Continuum... or Infinity... or Irrational Numbers...
an aspect of number which was a conundrum & embarrassment for the Greeks, & a mystifying puzzle for Cantor & other great mathematicians...
In my book, poetry is connected very substantially with the diagonal to the square of value "1" (ie. sq root of 2) - an irrational number... - & infinity - which scares & has frightened so many sophisticated poets, craftspeople, thinkers, calculators & operators - since it seems to open up again what they thought they had so elegantly counted out, measured, numbered, & closed off -
& why so? because infinity & the irrational are connected with the much-maligned "I" - that mysterious Subject - Shakespeare behind the arras - God - Keats' (negatively-capable) negrido - the Soul... & the great inimitable poets of all times are searching (elegantly, sublimely) beyond elegance... toward the (irrational square) root, the supra-elegance of... the ultimate Workshop (of the supernatural Author's... spiral jetty, or... Book of J...)... ie. the steep, the vertiginous, the vanishing point, that dimensionless point in Dante (& Joyce) wherefrom all the elegant magnitudes of creation proceed...
&, paradoxically, the oh-so-fumbly-stumbling quality of their (metaphysical, experiential) searching is precisely that dimension which allows the personal, the characteristic, the improvisational, to shine forth (very American) in their poetry... & make it inimitable & great... what they used to call Sublimity...
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it...
Friday, June 19, 2009
Thursday, March 05, 2009
JOURNEY TO HOBOKEN
This essay was first published in Witz, issue #4.3 (Fall 1996)
Hoboken, New Jersey is what is known in biology as a salience, a
kind of protuberance or growth with characteristics of an entity;
an appendage of Manhattan, crossing state lines. Layers of
sedimentation (technical college, gentrified commuter haven,
industrial ghetto echoing back through the decades) produce an
impacted image of America--especially for certain Russian poets,
planed over here briefly from their own continent, at the end of
May 1996, to attend a conference. A kind of empyrical model,
though not as dazzling as that Potemkin village panorama one
beholds from the campus ridge, there, across the Hudson.
* * *
Temporary bivouac in Penn Station. Heavy book-filled bags. The
directions say: "Take the PATH train to Hoboken." Shouldn't it
read, "train PATH"? Has a conspiracy of Russian syntax invaded
New York?
* * *
Huffing with my bags up college hill to Stevens Institute of
Technology. Suddenly hailed from behind by a Russian accent, a
piercing timbre. It's Irina, the blonde and druzkeskii
journalist from Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea--recent transplant
to Hoboken. She wants to know where is Peirce Hall (pronounced,
in English, like "purse"--Charles S. Peirce, inventor of
semiotics, one and only black-sheep American philosopher, taught
here briefly before his academic casting-out. . .). Irina wrote
a dissertation in Astrakhan, on Anna Akhmatova. Her mother and
father are philologists. We xerox the conference schedule--she
serves me tea and grapes, a Crimean meal. This confab is off to
a good start. . .
* * *
What's it all about? Well, frankly, it's a conspiracy, hatched
by a cabal made up of Ed Foster, poet, editor of Talisman,
publisher of Talisman House books, and Vadim Mesyats, Russian
poet and musician currently on the humanities faculty with Foster
at Stevens. This second Festival of Russian and American Poetry
and Poets is just one cog in an ongoing multivalent cultural
hob-nob cooked up by these two, and their friends there in
Hoboken, which includes readings, lectures, films, and a number
of translation activities, including bilingual anthologies of
Russian and American poets, and a series of contemporary Russian
poetry in English translation (the first volume, by Ivan Zhdanov,
is at the presses).
The schedule of events reads like a roster of the American poetry
loft (I lean left. I mean lift), with some Russian, Chinese, and
Turkish poets thrown in for good measure. Three full days of
three-ring readings, scholarly paper-deliveries, films (on
Brodsky, Akhmatova, and a number of less well-known-in-America
Russians), two massive evening poetry songfests, a staged reading
of a parlor-piece masque by Robert Duncan (complete with stylish
Akhmatovian feathered headpieces), roundtables on translation,
the state of Russian and American poetry, little magazines,
Chernobyl and Gertrude Stein (in the same roundtable). . . and
more, and more. Here's the catalogue of ships: the Americans
include John Yau, David Shapiro, Leslie Scalapino, Eileen Myles,
Bruce Andrews, Jackson Mac Low, Juliana Spahr, Barret Watten, Ron
Silliman, Kristin Prevallet, Leonard Schwartz, David Rosenberg,
and many others I should name; the Russians include some of the
most interesting and important contemporary poets, including Lev
Rubinshtein, Elena Shvarts, Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Ilya Kutik,
Maria Maksimova, Vadim Mesyats, and Ivan Zhdanov. It's an
intense gathering--and it costs, yes, thirty-five dollars. It's a
conspiracy! Imagine all those people in one place for three
days, talking, reciting, discussing, laughing, vodkayaking,
vodkayaking etc. . .
Now I'll tell you what it all means.
* * *
At the "tail end of the 17th century", the "vast Russian
Empire"--"ancient, Orthodox", "xenophobic, hidebound"--had but one
seaport: the "little town of Archangel", on the Arctic Ocean.
Then "Peter the Great" built "St. Petersburg", modeled by himself
and "his French architect" on "Amsterdam and Venice".
Meanwhile, "America" was "colonized"; Salem had its "witch
trials", and "Anne Bradstreet". The "first American sea-going
vessel" was built in "Portland, Maine"--while Peter ("deeply,
steadfastly in love with ships and the sea") was doing the same
(while torturing and executing the "mutinous Streltsy"--an
"endless" bloodbath).
* * *
Saturday night. The endless reading in the dingy
chemistry hall, seats slanting up like some very provincial
Coliseum over the blackboards. While the Americans read, the
Russians go out into the spring night to smoke (not wanting to
offend). They are our guests--we translate their readings (as
best we can); it doesn't work the other way, unless some upstart
(like Eileen Myles) jumps out of her poems to address them
directly. But then, it doesn't have to work the other way! The
Russians, unlike us, understand us already! (They speak
English.)
Along the Coliseum aisles, Leslie Scalapino encounters Elena
Shvarts. Two shy poets, circling each other hesitantly, wary as
a pair of songbirds in the jungle of tongues.
* * *
Ivan Zhdanov. Tom Epstein, one of the few Americans here who
actually knows something about Russian poetry, calls him "one of
their best, a force of nature." He looks like a thoughtful
lumberjack, sparse jet black hair slicked down, glasses, rangy
strength. In fact, his translator, John High, looks like a
lumberjack too. Maybe they met in Alaska.
Zhdanov, like the other Russians, doesn't read. He recites.
Recites from memory. They know their poems by heart. The
Russian language has some similarities to English--it beats,
iambic, trochaic, unlike French--but the differences are also
great. English smoothness accents the rough chewing of
consonants, like a chard clarinet; whereas Russian is more like a
caged animal, a bear, trying to tame itself. Everything would be
full-throated--if the vodka-inflamed, heart-swelled throat would
only permit such a thing. . . if only a bear could sing. (But
you know this is stereotype. Russian is actually a lot like
Latin or Hindu--an oratorical, ceremonious organ-voice, given to
verbal and nonverbal festa, hilaritas.)
* * *
Jackson Mac Low and Bruce Andrews. Like father and son, a pair
of riders. "Language Poetry." Finally, I'm starting to
understand something, because I'm hearing it, out loud. These
are the angels, pouring out their vials of wrath and glee and
remorse at the apocalypse of syntax. Glee and wrath and remorse
are all that remain when the bridges to Disney World are burned,
and the enlightened conscience. . . flips: the craziness of pure
American products. But under the tongue the individuality of the
verbum replaces the commodious self, and syllables wrap around
alpha and omega of each blip with a kind of loving farewell.
* * *
It's Sunday morning, lovely. I decide to take a walk, clear my
head of the vodka and mistakes of the previous 3 am. Down
through the seemly garden-walks below campus, Hoboken. Across the
street, a shy small Russian, head down, glancing furtively from
one eye, bangs over her forehead, eating her constant cigarette
(the Russian's best friend). She's taking a walk, too. It is
Elena Shvarts.
We walk together. Finally I get a chance to talk to her (today
is the last day). She understands, speaks English.
Yesterday, during a roundtable discussion focusing on her work
(she is the most prominent contemporary poet in Russia), Shvarts
launches into a long provocative harangue (in
Russian--translated), the gist of which is, that the poetry of the
West, and especially the United States, lacks the essential
rhythmic quality of poetry--Dionysian fire, she calls it. The
Americans (including Leslie Scalapino, who's borrowed my book of
her translated poems) stir uncomfortably, shake their heads. She
reads some more poems. The moderator of this particular
roundtable never appeared. Tom Epstein does his best (and it is
very good) to fill in, giving us a brief, incisive overview of
Shvarts's labors. The roundtable breaks up--time to move on. . .
She says to me (roughly translated): Americans use the poem to
find out what they're going to say, and they take a long time
getting to it. The Russians wait until the whole poem is there,
and then they commit it to memory.
It is the difference between comedy and tragedy; opportunity and
fate.
* * *
Eileen Myles is the most Russian American poet here. Also the
most American. She speaks from herself. In spite of her
politics. Or, that is, you can't see where they divide her up.
It's all one.
What's it all about? Personism (Pessoa?)? Personalism (O'Hara?)?
Peronism (no. . .)? Eileen Myles is the only American to shout
up from the podium--hey, you Russians, where you going? (or
something to that effect) as you leave the room. . .
* * *
Let's try to be incisive too, as you leave the room. Here are two
big empire-countries, once the rivals of the earth, now like two
paired lungs or windbags (Clinton & Yeltsin) breathing heavily
out of sync almost. On either side of. . . the "old" West. The
very old West, almost as old as the East.
At a certain salience sometimes, upside Manhattan, antennae try
to touch.
* * *
Craft and personality (passion) have always been rivals,
variables. Now toss in another variable--history. Enlightened
America protects the Individual proper (properly tied), to the
"detriment" of State and Religion. Russia experiences the
reverse. In America, the Individual, so glorified, becomes
commodified; in Russia, the Individual, so abased, becomes a cog.
The old East/West yeast. . .
Modernism, experiment, avant-garde. . . these in the West mean
subsuming the Individual to Craft, for the sake of utopia.
Postmodernism, in the West, is only blurredly differentiated from
the above, a reaction. Modernism, avant-garde, etc., in Russia
mean the same thing: subsuming the Individual. Now refer back to
paragraph #1 (history). So postmodernism means. . . something
very different, in Russia. It strongly opposes modernism and the
avant-garde from beforehand. It means the tradition of the
human, the primordial, the transcendent--a utopia beyond
"utopia"--and beyond the reach of power, force, and will. Only
miracle and grace achieve utopia. This is the Russian
perspective.
Everything is reducible to Futurism vs. Acmeism. Miracle and
grace have aesthetic implications.
* * *
Still--who or what is this mysterious Person, this Personality,
this Personalism? Are we to fall back into the blasted
ego-poetries of the seventies, into the nightmare of pale baby
Shakespeares, the filigree of greed and self-promotion? (Have we
even awakened yet?)
Once, in the nineteenth century, there was a Russian thinker
named Chaadev, a bold explorer, akin perhaps to Emerson. He
journeyed into the West, but then returned, called back to his
homeland by a sense of duty; bringing with him, like an unwelcome
prophet, a Western lesson--the gospel of moral freedom.
What is this moral freedom? A word, a phrase-capsule, for a
concept of the basic dignity of the human spirit--resting on the
human being's capacity to dedicate herself or himself--out of love
and piety (in its full uncanniness) and daring--to something
better, something beyond self, some One, some Other, some others.
The vanishing point where "moral" and "freedom" fuse.
Part of the artistic and identity crisis of the West has been the
fracture of the Person: the demand, the pull from both Right and
Left on behalf of either autarkic or subliminal--either nostalgic
or futuristic--concepts of justice and the good. Like mirror
images, Right and Left command our allegiance with the full force
of both rhetoric and experience.
Yet perhaps--perhaps by some strange grace, it is Russia--that
great animal, that evil empire, beyond the pale of enlightened
democracies and the full birthright of humanism--impoverished
Russia, suffering Russia, Potemkin Russia--that will return the
gift of Chaadev's moral freedom to the West. Mandelstam wrote
that in such times as these (speaking of his pyramidal, "Assyrian
age"), Man must become the hardest thing in existence, harder
than diamond. The free, loving gift-of-self is the essence of
art and the limit of artistry: but it is another step to
recognize it everywhere as an ontological fundament of reality.
Mandelstam again (trans. Robert Tracy):
It's not Rome the city that lives through the centuries
But man's place in the universal scheme.
This is the voice one hears in the strange, ceremonious finality
of Russian recitation; it is an echo, the curve of a shell, the
arch of a wave, a ghost dance, washing up in Hoboken.
This essay was first published in Witz, issue #4.3 (Fall 1996)
Hoboken, New Jersey is what is known in biology as a salience, a
kind of protuberance or growth with characteristics of an entity;
an appendage of Manhattan, crossing state lines. Layers of
sedimentation (technical college, gentrified commuter haven,
industrial ghetto echoing back through the decades) produce an
impacted image of America--especially for certain Russian poets,
planed over here briefly from their own continent, at the end of
May 1996, to attend a conference. A kind of empyrical model,
though not as dazzling as that Potemkin village panorama one
beholds from the campus ridge, there, across the Hudson.
* * *
Temporary bivouac in Penn Station. Heavy book-filled bags. The
directions say: "Take the PATH train to Hoboken." Shouldn't it
read, "train PATH"? Has a conspiracy of Russian syntax invaded
New York?
* * *
Huffing with my bags up college hill to Stevens Institute of
Technology. Suddenly hailed from behind by a Russian accent, a
piercing timbre. It's Irina, the blonde and druzkeskii
journalist from Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea--recent transplant
to Hoboken. She wants to know where is Peirce Hall (pronounced,
in English, like "purse"--Charles S. Peirce, inventor of
semiotics, one and only black-sheep American philosopher, taught
here briefly before his academic casting-out. . .). Irina wrote
a dissertation in Astrakhan, on Anna Akhmatova. Her mother and
father are philologists. We xerox the conference schedule--she
serves me tea and grapes, a Crimean meal. This confab is off to
a good start. . .
* * *
What's it all about? Well, frankly, it's a conspiracy, hatched
by a cabal made up of Ed Foster, poet, editor of Talisman,
publisher of Talisman House books, and Vadim Mesyats, Russian
poet and musician currently on the humanities faculty with Foster
at Stevens. This second Festival of Russian and American Poetry
and Poets is just one cog in an ongoing multivalent cultural
hob-nob cooked up by these two, and their friends there in
Hoboken, which includes readings, lectures, films, and a number
of translation activities, including bilingual anthologies of
Russian and American poets, and a series of contemporary Russian
poetry in English translation (the first volume, by Ivan Zhdanov,
is at the presses).
The schedule of events reads like a roster of the American poetry
loft (I lean left. I mean lift), with some Russian, Chinese, and
Turkish poets thrown in for good measure. Three full days of
three-ring readings, scholarly paper-deliveries, films (on
Brodsky, Akhmatova, and a number of less well-known-in-America
Russians), two massive evening poetry songfests, a staged reading
of a parlor-piece masque by Robert Duncan (complete with stylish
Akhmatovian feathered headpieces), roundtables on translation,
the state of Russian and American poetry, little magazines,
Chernobyl and Gertrude Stein (in the same roundtable). . . and
more, and more. Here's the catalogue of ships: the Americans
include John Yau, David Shapiro, Leslie Scalapino, Eileen Myles,
Bruce Andrews, Jackson Mac Low, Juliana Spahr, Barret Watten, Ron
Silliman, Kristin Prevallet, Leonard Schwartz, David Rosenberg,
and many others I should name; the Russians include some of the
most interesting and important contemporary poets, including Lev
Rubinshtein, Elena Shvarts, Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Ilya Kutik,
Maria Maksimova, Vadim Mesyats, and Ivan Zhdanov. It's an
intense gathering--and it costs, yes, thirty-five dollars. It's a
conspiracy! Imagine all those people in one place for three
days, talking, reciting, discussing, laughing, vodkayaking,
vodkayaking etc. . .
Now I'll tell you what it all means.
* * *
At the "tail end of the 17th century", the "vast Russian
Empire"--"ancient, Orthodox", "xenophobic, hidebound"--had but one
seaport: the "little town of Archangel", on the Arctic Ocean.
Then "Peter the Great" built "St. Petersburg", modeled by himself
and "his French architect" on "Amsterdam and Venice".
Meanwhile, "America" was "colonized"; Salem had its "witch
trials", and "Anne Bradstreet". The "first American sea-going
vessel" was built in "Portland, Maine"--while Peter ("deeply,
steadfastly in love with ships and the sea") was doing the same
(while torturing and executing the "mutinous Streltsy"--an
"endless" bloodbath).
* * *
Saturday night. The endless reading in the dingy
chemistry hall, seats slanting up like some very provincial
Coliseum over the blackboards. While the Americans read, the
Russians go out into the spring night to smoke (not wanting to
offend). They are our guests--we translate their readings (as
best we can); it doesn't work the other way, unless some upstart
(like Eileen Myles) jumps out of her poems to address them
directly. But then, it doesn't have to work the other way! The
Russians, unlike us, understand us already! (They speak
English.)
Along the Coliseum aisles, Leslie Scalapino encounters Elena
Shvarts. Two shy poets, circling each other hesitantly, wary as
a pair of songbirds in the jungle of tongues.
* * *
Ivan Zhdanov. Tom Epstein, one of the few Americans here who
actually knows something about Russian poetry, calls him "one of
their best, a force of nature." He looks like a thoughtful
lumberjack, sparse jet black hair slicked down, glasses, rangy
strength. In fact, his translator, John High, looks like a
lumberjack too. Maybe they met in Alaska.
Zhdanov, like the other Russians, doesn't read. He recites.
Recites from memory. They know their poems by heart. The
Russian language has some similarities to English--it beats,
iambic, trochaic, unlike French--but the differences are also
great. English smoothness accents the rough chewing of
consonants, like a chard clarinet; whereas Russian is more like a
caged animal, a bear, trying to tame itself. Everything would be
full-throated--if the vodka-inflamed, heart-swelled throat would
only permit such a thing. . . if only a bear could sing. (But
you know this is stereotype. Russian is actually a lot like
Latin or Hindu--an oratorical, ceremonious organ-voice, given to
verbal and nonverbal festa, hilaritas.)
* * *
Jackson Mac Low and Bruce Andrews. Like father and son, a pair
of riders. "Language Poetry." Finally, I'm starting to
understand something, because I'm hearing it, out loud. These
are the angels, pouring out their vials of wrath and glee and
remorse at the apocalypse of syntax. Glee and wrath and remorse
are all that remain when the bridges to Disney World are burned,
and the enlightened conscience. . . flips: the craziness of pure
American products. But under the tongue the individuality of the
verbum replaces the commodious self, and syllables wrap around
alpha and omega of each blip with a kind of loving farewell.
* * *
It's Sunday morning, lovely. I decide to take a walk, clear my
head of the vodka and mistakes of the previous 3 am. Down
through the seemly garden-walks below campus, Hoboken. Across the
street, a shy small Russian, head down, glancing furtively from
one eye, bangs over her forehead, eating her constant cigarette
(the Russian's best friend). She's taking a walk, too. It is
Elena Shvarts.
We walk together. Finally I get a chance to talk to her (today
is the last day). She understands, speaks English.
Yesterday, during a roundtable discussion focusing on her work
(she is the most prominent contemporary poet in Russia), Shvarts
launches into a long provocative harangue (in
Russian--translated), the gist of which is, that the poetry of the
West, and especially the United States, lacks the essential
rhythmic quality of poetry--Dionysian fire, she calls it. The
Americans (including Leslie Scalapino, who's borrowed my book of
her translated poems) stir uncomfortably, shake their heads. She
reads some more poems. The moderator of this particular
roundtable never appeared. Tom Epstein does his best (and it is
very good) to fill in, giving us a brief, incisive overview of
Shvarts's labors. The roundtable breaks up--time to move on. . .
She says to me (roughly translated): Americans use the poem to
find out what they're going to say, and they take a long time
getting to it. The Russians wait until the whole poem is there,
and then they commit it to memory.
It is the difference between comedy and tragedy; opportunity and
fate.
* * *
Eileen Myles is the most Russian American poet here. Also the
most American. She speaks from herself. In spite of her
politics. Or, that is, you can't see where they divide her up.
It's all one.
What's it all about? Personism (Pessoa?)? Personalism (O'Hara?)?
Peronism (no. . .)? Eileen Myles is the only American to shout
up from the podium--hey, you Russians, where you going? (or
something to that effect) as you leave the room. . .
* * *
Let's try to be incisive too, as you leave the room. Here are two
big empire-countries, once the rivals of the earth, now like two
paired lungs or windbags (Clinton & Yeltsin) breathing heavily
out of sync almost. On either side of. . . the "old" West. The
very old West, almost as old as the East.
At a certain salience sometimes, upside Manhattan, antennae try
to touch.
* * *
Craft and personality (passion) have always been rivals,
variables. Now toss in another variable--history. Enlightened
America protects the Individual proper (properly tied), to the
"detriment" of State and Religion. Russia experiences the
reverse. In America, the Individual, so glorified, becomes
commodified; in Russia, the Individual, so abased, becomes a cog.
The old East/West yeast. . .
Modernism, experiment, avant-garde. . . these in the West mean
subsuming the Individual to Craft, for the sake of utopia.
Postmodernism, in the West, is only blurredly differentiated from
the above, a reaction. Modernism, avant-garde, etc., in Russia
mean the same thing: subsuming the Individual. Now refer back to
paragraph #1 (history). So postmodernism means. . . something
very different, in Russia. It strongly opposes modernism and the
avant-garde from beforehand. It means the tradition of the
human, the primordial, the transcendent--a utopia beyond
"utopia"--and beyond the reach of power, force, and will. Only
miracle and grace achieve utopia. This is the Russian
perspective.
Everything is reducible to Futurism vs. Acmeism. Miracle and
grace have aesthetic implications.
* * *
Still--who or what is this mysterious Person, this Personality,
this Personalism? Are we to fall back into the blasted
ego-poetries of the seventies, into the nightmare of pale baby
Shakespeares, the filigree of greed and self-promotion? (Have we
even awakened yet?)
Once, in the nineteenth century, there was a Russian thinker
named Chaadev, a bold explorer, akin perhaps to Emerson. He
journeyed into the West, but then returned, called back to his
homeland by a sense of duty; bringing with him, like an unwelcome
prophet, a Western lesson--the gospel of moral freedom.
What is this moral freedom? A word, a phrase-capsule, for a
concept of the basic dignity of the human spirit--resting on the
human being's capacity to dedicate herself or himself--out of love
and piety (in its full uncanniness) and daring--to something
better, something beyond self, some One, some Other, some others.
The vanishing point where "moral" and "freedom" fuse.
Part of the artistic and identity crisis of the West has been the
fracture of the Person: the demand, the pull from both Right and
Left on behalf of either autarkic or subliminal--either nostalgic
or futuristic--concepts of justice and the good. Like mirror
images, Right and Left command our allegiance with the full force
of both rhetoric and experience.
Yet perhaps--perhaps by some strange grace, it is Russia--that
great animal, that evil empire, beyond the pale of enlightened
democracies and the full birthright of humanism--impoverished
Russia, suffering Russia, Potemkin Russia--that will return the
gift of Chaadev's moral freedom to the West. Mandelstam wrote
that in such times as these (speaking of his pyramidal, "Assyrian
age"), Man must become the hardest thing in existence, harder
than diamond. The free, loving gift-of-self is the essence of
art and the limit of artistry: but it is another step to
recognize it everywhere as an ontological fundament of reality.
Mandelstam again (trans. Robert Tracy):
It's not Rome the city that lives through the centuries
But man's place in the universal scheme.
This is the voice one hears in the strange, ceremonious finality
of Russian recitation; it is an echo, the curve of a shell, the
arch of a wave, a ghost dance, washing up in Hoboken.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
CREDO
The world has always been full of random verbal noise. However, starting about a century ago, the volume seems to have steadily increased.
A poem, on the other hand, is surrounded by a kind of silence, like a town just after a very heavy snowfall. This is because a poem is a kind of distillation - the precipitation or extraction of an essence (from within the noise).
The judges & critics of poetry should be on the lookout for these distillations. They are the actual poetic record or canon (recognized or not) of their times.
I think a poem is an act of balance, equilibrium - a conjunction of opposites. Both. Unique and common; original and final; personal and universal; individual and representative. It is both sui generis and an example of a class, a period. It is new and old. It is experimental and traditional.
We laugh and deprecate anthologies, canons. But they are part of the critical and self-critical labors of the culture from which they emerge. The point is to form your own true canon out of all these efforts - and in spite of them.
A poem, as an act of equilibrium, is also a display of a positive kind of disinterestedness. In this sense, a poem should show, not tell; imagine, not lecture. If it is going to lecture - and some poems must - it should provide authentic poetic evidence (in terms of both style and exempla) for its arguments. A poem should reveal something - and let the readers exert themselves (to draw their own conclusions).
The world has always been full of random verbal noise. However, starting about a century ago, the volume seems to have steadily increased.
A poem, on the other hand, is surrounded by a kind of silence, like a town just after a very heavy snowfall. This is because a poem is a kind of distillation - the precipitation or extraction of an essence (from within the noise).
The judges & critics of poetry should be on the lookout for these distillations. They are the actual poetic record or canon (recognized or not) of their times.
I think a poem is an act of balance, equilibrium - a conjunction of opposites. Both. Unique and common; original and final; personal and universal; individual and representative. It is both sui generis and an example of a class, a period. It is new and old. It is experimental and traditional.
We laugh and deprecate anthologies, canons. But they are part of the critical and self-critical labors of the culture from which they emerge. The point is to form your own true canon out of all these efforts - and in spite of them.
A poem, as an act of equilibrium, is also a display of a positive kind of disinterestedness. In this sense, a poem should show, not tell; imagine, not lecture. If it is going to lecture - and some poems must - it should provide authentic poetic evidence (in terms of both style and exempla) for its arguments. A poem should reveal something - and let the readers exert themselves (to draw their own conclusions).
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
AIEE! (AMERICAN INTERNAL EMIGRE-EMIGRE) POETRY : an extended Goof
Too tired from late night not to blather. Pouring white stuff outside. So here goes...
What, you might ask, can be AIEE! Poetry? Well, it's a homemade branding moniker for my poetry, obviously...
Do I need such a thing? No, probably not. Is it upstanding & ethical or even intelligent to muck & mudgeon about with such things? No, I suppose not. I've been slumming for 15 years now (since the dawn, for me, of internet poetry conversation - Buffalo Poetics List) - verbally wrassling with my sub-subcultural compeers over Important Topics in Poetry & Related Topics... while the fine upstanding & successful poets shuffled along their diurnal rounds - publishing in magazines, books, winning awards, "placing" themselves in colleges, & such like... I could have started doing that myself Forty Years Ago if I'd had any sense... instead I became successively Jesus Freak, Music Bum, Hobo, Food Coop Manager, VISTA Volunteer, Junior Politico, Mandelstam Disciple, Family Man, Divorced Family Man... you name it, I've been there. Ranch Hand. Professional Resume Writer. Wholesale Produce Delivery Person. What the heck. (mostly, Sub-Sub-Librarian.)
So, getting back to the Subject... what is AIEE! Poetry, then?
AIEE! Poetry is the poetry of an "internal emigre". This was the Soviet Writers' Union label for a social-professional outcast - basically, a criminalized person under Stalinism - those who survived to milder times to become "dissidents" later - personae non grata, those who (to use the Greek word, lanthanein) (successfully or not) "escape notice"...
& how does one become an AIEE Poet?
There are many paths (& many internalized motives) to this exalted status. I choose to focus only on that aspect of this dilemma which most directly challenges the cultural structure which arranges my placement there (ie. I'm ignoring perhaps even more important, inner, moral or psychological motives). The aspect I'm referring to is the strictly literary or artistic orientation of said emigre.
There are two primary paths in American poetry today which the AIEE! Poet has chosen not to take:
1) The Path of the Professional Poet (PPP). The Professional Poet is the poet who is capable of correlating his or her craft - which may be of a very high calibre - with the established social rewards currently offered (teaching jobs, tours, books, awards & so on). The PP is an upstanding adult member of the World As We Know It - the Institutions & Organs of same. Poetry here is Part of Our World. & a very good Part of Our World it is.
2) The Path of the Oppositional Poet (POP). The Oppositional Poet is the poet who is capable of assimilating his or her craft to an ideology of Revolt of one sort or another. (The really deft OPs combine a Revolting Worldview with the constellation of said established social rewards (see #1 above) - but this is a side issue.) In fact entire large critical-parasitical counter-constellations have arisen, which habitate (in symbiotic survival mode) with the Institutions and Organs of the World As We Know It.
& so where do I, Henry H. Gould, scribbler of long standing, fit in here? Let's ignore the first path for the time being. For 15 years or so I have engaged in dubious battle with by-night armies of the POP variety. & wherefore? Well, there may be all sorts of competitive & aspirational (vain) motives in play... But again, I will emphasize what I think is the critical difference - the disagreements over the nature of poetry & poetic style.
Let me zero in on what I believe to be the crux of the matter. It's this crux of debate which initially arose when I began piping up on the Buffalo Poetics List these many odd eons ago; and I think it has mildly resurfaced again (hence this screed of mine) in the tiffs over Flarf.
The POP trend - originating, perhaps, with the divagations of John Ashbery in Tennis Court Oath, if not before - & leading into the playful ellipses of NY School, & the not-so-playful strictures of the Language School - developed initially in opposition, not only to the Old New-Critical establishment of the 40s & 50s, but also to the simultaneous personalization & informalization (direct colloquial talk) of American poetry of the 60s & 70s, led by Robert Lowell & John Berryman.
POP arose as an effort to differentiate poetry from the undifferentiated flood of prose & prosaic free-verse - & POP tried to do this by way of formalization, abstraction & de-personalization. Hence we have the contemporary anti-dialects of postmodern poetry : the "verbal-material systems" & "procedures" we know so well.
Well, let me tell you, the AIEE! Poet rejects POP in its entirety.
Let's look at the example of Henry H. Gould, for example. How does this particular AIEE! Poet actualize an approach which differs from both #1 & 2 above?
Gould's poetry is founded on two very basic orientations or principles. Firstly, (1) he thinks of poetry as a distinct medium or mode or form of artistic expression, which by means of its roots in past & very ancient practice, maintains a kind of autonomous & healthy - one might say perennial - presence in the cultural-intellectual life of humanity. This distinct and autonomous mode operates as a kind of translating or transfiguring process : absorbing the events & discourses of real history & experience, & reconfiguring or transmuting them into its own distinct idiom. & here is the key corollary : this process of transfigurement is the radical activity of poetry per se, which brackets or supercedes both the ideological (political) and stylistic (aesthetic) dynamics of stylistic change.
Secondly,(2) - with (1) clearly in mind as a basis - Gould's poetry is rooted, along with all authentic poetry, in an inner telos or drive toward clarity, wholeness, and recapitulation (of experience). Poetry, in other words, aspires to simplicity-in-complexity : to the making of a clear & compelling mirror (the simple) of a differentiated and substantial reality (the complex). & this aspiration in turn is grounded in the sense of firm ontological ground itself : an Aristotelian-Aquinian-Maxi-musical notion of a holistic Cosmos consisting of Real, Integral Particulars (Individuals). Things are Real, and unmistakably Themselves (ie. they are not simply identifiable with, or reducible to, their various Descriptions or Labels). History is an Actual Record of the Real Process of the Change & Development of Things through Time. & Poetry is the Distinctive Expression of the Real Individual's Intellectual-Aesthetic Synthesis of the Real Actualities So Described. Personhood & Individuality are substantial and irreducible. So, also, are Intellectual Universals & the Process of History - the relation between the Individual & the Social-Historical (Common, Universal) Actuality.
Poetry, in other words, has a substantial intellectual grounding in Truth. But this grounding is not simply a given : it is the result of the Poet's own effort to discover & synthesize more General Truths. It is the grafting process of the unique & playful act of artistic making with its own wider contexts. Thus Great & True Poetry upholds this crown of artistic endeavor - this grafting process with the intellectual & experiential currents of the Real & Actual Larger World of Time, Space & History - as the real fruit - the ultimate aim & original source - of its own Traditions.
Gould's multifarious extended poetic Projects - all the long & short poems - can thus be viewed as forms of poetic Orientation toward a Larger World. Through the mode of art, poetry invests Experience with formulae of intellectual-emotional Meaning : the underlying structure or holistic arrangement of these discovered Meanings reveals a distinct Viewpoint, which simultaneously expresses Individual Personhood and World-Historical Reality. It becomes a "Henry" World, in other words : "Henry" cannot be exiled from his own verbal model of Truth.
So Henry's status as AIEE! Poet - or Internal Emigre - is like the reversible many-colored coat of that (subjective, artistic) World where Henry is always "at home". & the lights are on.
This orientation - in which Particulars & Individuals are both (1) real & Substantial & Inalienable in Themselves, and (2) part of a Real & Actual World-Historical Process or Drama which is inherently more than the sum of its Descriptions or Verbal Models - is clearly at odds with the POP trend. The POP trend, as a mode of Postmodernism, (1) denies the substantial Reality of said Realities, and (2) replaces them with a variety of Explanatory Overlays : these are the ideological-intellectual Discourses or Filters which POP has adapted to the mode of Poetry. In the process of such they must also Deny the Existence of Poetic Tradition (the mode of perennial Transfigurement I sketched out above). You might fairly ask : how does such Transfigurement differ from the Postmodern Overlay-Description? It differs in that Transfigurement bears witness to an allegiance to Realism or Truth. What Postmodernism (& the POP) denies, the AIEE Poet celebrates.
& It Has Yet to Be Noticed (lanthanein) (in the World As We Know It) that the Drama (a comedy of sorts) of the Internal Emigre-Emigre Poet - the irreducible inalienable Henry of American Poetry - is returning, is returning, is returning home again...
* ADDENDUM *
BRIEF NOTE ON THE STATUS OF THE "I" IN AIEE! POETRY
This is a deep, complex topic which I doubt I will be able to manage in the space of a few furtive key-taps at work. Let's recall, first of all, that the "I" initiates the phrase "Internal Emigre-Emigre", which suggests that the "I" inhabits a condition of (perhaps internal, inner) exile, and that the "subject", therefore, is always "on the move", traveling.
The best analysis of the self and the ambiguity of otherness, in relation to the grounding principles of AIEE! Poetry, can be found in Elena Corrigan's 2000 monograph, Mandelshtam's poetics : a challenge to postmodernism (SUNY Press). Corrigan argues that M's poetry & poetics cannot be subsumed under contemporary theories of postmodernism. For Mandelstam, according to Corrigan, the self is neither simple, essential and unitary, nor illusory and effaced by otherness. Writing is a distinctive process which synthesizes both estrangement and growth. The self, the textual "subject", grows and changes through a process of affinity or "kinship" with other textual voices (see esp. M's essay "Conversation About Dante"). AIEE! Poetry, in turn, as a kind of American offshoot of Russian-Mandelstamian Acmeism, shares and endorses the orientation outlined in Corrigan's study. We can see the outlines of this position in the very lexical and phonic attributes of "AIEE!" itself. The "I" of AIEE! is necessary, distinct and inalienable : but it is meaningless without reference to its place in the sound & spelling of the word "AIEE!" as a whole. Thus the microcosmic wholeness of the "I" is echoed in the structural wholeness of the natural forms in which it has its being (the word "AIEE!").
What must be repeatedly emphasized, however, is that the word "AIEE!", in turn, while integral and multivalent as a word-in-itself, is deracinated from its primary meaning unless we recall the first principle of AIEE! poetics itself : that is, the notion that poets, through their compositional labors, participate in a unique and distinct mode of verbal expression, whose perennial and substantial qualities - the process of "transfigurement" sketched out in the initial AIEE! Manifesto - bracket and subsume more temporary and local and timebound forms of stylistic change, within an overarching system of (worldwide, with variations) tradition. Thus the articulation of AIEE! Poetics is itself, also, merely an epiphenomenon (of self-awareness) within the larger schema or milieu of poetic transfigurement.
Many also ask : is I the "I" in "AIEE!" really just... Henry? The answer is : this depends on your definition of "Henry". Obviously my own view (as a Henry) might be blurred by proximity - however, I can state with some confidence that the "Henry" delimited by AIEE! Poetry is only a symbolic model for the distinct, inalienable quiddity of every single poetic subject and object. Thus univeral Henrification is simply an abstract index of the mysterious actuality & architecture of created & creative Nature. It might be appropriate to characterize AIEE! Poetry as not exactly "Henryesque", but rather "henotic" - ie., "harmonizing, irenic" - deriving from the Greek work for "one" (Hen).
Too tired from late night not to blather. Pouring white stuff outside. So here goes...
What, you might ask, can be AIEE! Poetry? Well, it's a homemade branding moniker for my poetry, obviously...
Do I need such a thing? No, probably not. Is it upstanding & ethical or even intelligent to muck & mudgeon about with such things? No, I suppose not. I've been slumming for 15 years now (since the dawn, for me, of internet poetry conversation - Buffalo Poetics List) - verbally wrassling with my sub-subcultural compeers over Important Topics in Poetry & Related Topics... while the fine upstanding & successful poets shuffled along their diurnal rounds - publishing in magazines, books, winning awards, "placing" themselves in colleges, & such like... I could have started doing that myself Forty Years Ago if I'd had any sense... instead I became successively Jesus Freak, Music Bum, Hobo, Food Coop Manager, VISTA Volunteer, Junior Politico, Mandelstam Disciple, Family Man, Divorced Family Man... you name it, I've been there. Ranch Hand. Professional Resume Writer. Wholesale Produce Delivery Person. What the heck. (mostly, Sub-Sub-Librarian.)
So, getting back to the Subject... what is AIEE! Poetry, then?
AIEE! Poetry is the poetry of an "internal emigre". This was the Soviet Writers' Union label for a social-professional outcast - basically, a criminalized person under Stalinism - those who survived to milder times to become "dissidents" later - personae non grata, those who (to use the Greek word, lanthanein) (successfully or not) "escape notice"...
& how does one become an AIEE Poet?
There are many paths (& many internalized motives) to this exalted status. I choose to focus only on that aspect of this dilemma which most directly challenges the cultural structure which arranges my placement there (ie. I'm ignoring perhaps even more important, inner, moral or psychological motives). The aspect I'm referring to is the strictly literary or artistic orientation of said emigre.
There are two primary paths in American poetry today which the AIEE! Poet has chosen not to take:
1) The Path of the Professional Poet (PPP). The Professional Poet is the poet who is capable of correlating his or her craft - which may be of a very high calibre - with the established social rewards currently offered (teaching jobs, tours, books, awards & so on). The PP is an upstanding adult member of the World As We Know It - the Institutions & Organs of same. Poetry here is Part of Our World. & a very good Part of Our World it is.
2) The Path of the Oppositional Poet (POP). The Oppositional Poet is the poet who is capable of assimilating his or her craft to an ideology of Revolt of one sort or another. (The really deft OPs combine a Revolting Worldview with the constellation of said established social rewards (see #1 above) - but this is a side issue.) In fact entire large critical-parasitical counter-constellations have arisen, which habitate (in symbiotic survival mode) with the Institutions and Organs of the World As We Know It.
& so where do I, Henry H. Gould, scribbler of long standing, fit in here? Let's ignore the first path for the time being. For 15 years or so I have engaged in dubious battle with by-night armies of the POP variety. & wherefore? Well, there may be all sorts of competitive & aspirational (vain) motives in play... But again, I will emphasize what I think is the critical difference - the disagreements over the nature of poetry & poetic style.
Let me zero in on what I believe to be the crux of the matter. It's this crux of debate which initially arose when I began piping up on the Buffalo Poetics List these many odd eons ago; and I think it has mildly resurfaced again (hence this screed of mine) in the tiffs over Flarf.
The POP trend - originating, perhaps, with the divagations of John Ashbery in Tennis Court Oath, if not before - & leading into the playful ellipses of NY School, & the not-so-playful strictures of the Language School - developed initially in opposition, not only to the Old New-Critical establishment of the 40s & 50s, but also to the simultaneous personalization & informalization (direct colloquial talk) of American poetry of the 60s & 70s, led by Robert Lowell & John Berryman.
POP arose as an effort to differentiate poetry from the undifferentiated flood of prose & prosaic free-verse - & POP tried to do this by way of formalization, abstraction & de-personalization. Hence we have the contemporary anti-dialects of postmodern poetry : the "verbal-material systems" & "procedures" we know so well.
Well, let me tell you, the AIEE! Poet rejects POP in its entirety.
Let's look at the example of Henry H. Gould, for example. How does this particular AIEE! Poet actualize an approach which differs from both #1 & 2 above?
Gould's poetry is founded on two very basic orientations or principles. Firstly, (1) he thinks of poetry as a distinct medium or mode or form of artistic expression, which by means of its roots in past & very ancient practice, maintains a kind of autonomous & healthy - one might say perennial - presence in the cultural-intellectual life of humanity. This distinct and autonomous mode operates as a kind of translating or transfiguring process : absorbing the events & discourses of real history & experience, & reconfiguring or transmuting them into its own distinct idiom. & here is the key corollary : this process of transfigurement is the radical activity of poetry per se, which brackets or supercedes both the ideological (political) and stylistic (aesthetic) dynamics of stylistic change.
Secondly,(2) - with (1) clearly in mind as a basis - Gould's poetry is rooted, along with all authentic poetry, in an inner telos or drive toward clarity, wholeness, and recapitulation (of experience). Poetry, in other words, aspires to simplicity-in-complexity : to the making of a clear & compelling mirror (the simple) of a differentiated and substantial reality (the complex). & this aspiration in turn is grounded in the sense of firm ontological ground itself : an Aristotelian-Aquinian-Maxi-musical notion of a holistic Cosmos consisting of Real, Integral Particulars (Individuals). Things are Real, and unmistakably Themselves (ie. they are not simply identifiable with, or reducible to, their various Descriptions or Labels). History is an Actual Record of the Real Process of the Change & Development of Things through Time. & Poetry is the Distinctive Expression of the Real Individual's Intellectual-Aesthetic Synthesis of the Real Actualities So Described. Personhood & Individuality are substantial and irreducible. So, also, are Intellectual Universals & the Process of History - the relation between the Individual & the Social-Historical (Common, Universal) Actuality.
Poetry, in other words, has a substantial intellectual grounding in Truth. But this grounding is not simply a given : it is the result of the Poet's own effort to discover & synthesize more General Truths. It is the grafting process of the unique & playful act of artistic making with its own wider contexts. Thus Great & True Poetry upholds this crown of artistic endeavor - this grafting process with the intellectual & experiential currents of the Real & Actual Larger World of Time, Space & History - as the real fruit - the ultimate aim & original source - of its own Traditions.
Gould's multifarious extended poetic Projects - all the long & short poems - can thus be viewed as forms of poetic Orientation toward a Larger World. Through the mode of art, poetry invests Experience with formulae of intellectual-emotional Meaning : the underlying structure or holistic arrangement of these discovered Meanings reveals a distinct Viewpoint, which simultaneously expresses Individual Personhood and World-Historical Reality. It becomes a "Henry" World, in other words : "Henry" cannot be exiled from his own verbal model of Truth.
So Henry's status as AIEE! Poet - or Internal Emigre - is like the reversible many-colored coat of that (subjective, artistic) World where Henry is always "at home". & the lights are on.
This orientation - in which Particulars & Individuals are both (1) real & Substantial & Inalienable in Themselves, and (2) part of a Real & Actual World-Historical Process or Drama which is inherently more than the sum of its Descriptions or Verbal Models - is clearly at odds with the POP trend. The POP trend, as a mode of Postmodernism, (1) denies the substantial Reality of said Realities, and (2) replaces them with a variety of Explanatory Overlays : these are the ideological-intellectual Discourses or Filters which POP has adapted to the mode of Poetry. In the process of such they must also Deny the Existence of Poetic Tradition (the mode of perennial Transfigurement I sketched out above). You might fairly ask : how does such Transfigurement differ from the Postmodern Overlay-Description? It differs in that Transfigurement bears witness to an allegiance to Realism or Truth. What Postmodernism (& the POP) denies, the AIEE Poet celebrates.
& It Has Yet to Be Noticed (lanthanein) (in the World As We Know It) that the Drama (a comedy of sorts) of the Internal Emigre-Emigre Poet - the irreducible inalienable Henry of American Poetry - is returning, is returning, is returning home again...
* ADDENDUM *
BRIEF NOTE ON THE STATUS OF THE "I" IN AIEE! POETRY
This is a deep, complex topic which I doubt I will be able to manage in the space of a few furtive key-taps at work. Let's recall, first of all, that the "I" initiates the phrase "Internal Emigre-Emigre", which suggests that the "I" inhabits a condition of (perhaps internal, inner) exile, and that the "subject", therefore, is always "on the move", traveling.
The best analysis of the self and the ambiguity of otherness, in relation to the grounding principles of AIEE! Poetry, can be found in Elena Corrigan's 2000 monograph, Mandelshtam's poetics : a challenge to postmodernism (SUNY Press). Corrigan argues that M's poetry & poetics cannot be subsumed under contemporary theories of postmodernism. For Mandelstam, according to Corrigan, the self is neither simple, essential and unitary, nor illusory and effaced by otherness. Writing is a distinctive process which synthesizes both estrangement and growth. The self, the textual "subject", grows and changes through a process of affinity or "kinship" with other textual voices (see esp. M's essay "Conversation About Dante"). AIEE! Poetry, in turn, as a kind of American offshoot of Russian-Mandelstamian Acmeism, shares and endorses the orientation outlined in Corrigan's study. We can see the outlines of this position in the very lexical and phonic attributes of "AIEE!" itself. The "I" of AIEE! is necessary, distinct and inalienable : but it is meaningless without reference to its place in the sound & spelling of the word "AIEE!" as a whole. Thus the microcosmic wholeness of the "I" is echoed in the structural wholeness of the natural forms in which it has its being (the word "AIEE!").
What must be repeatedly emphasized, however, is that the word "AIEE!", in turn, while integral and multivalent as a word-in-itself, is deracinated from its primary meaning unless we recall the first principle of AIEE! poetics itself : that is, the notion that poets, through their compositional labors, participate in a unique and distinct mode of verbal expression, whose perennial and substantial qualities - the process of "transfigurement" sketched out in the initial AIEE! Manifesto - bracket and subsume more temporary and local and timebound forms of stylistic change, within an overarching system of (worldwide, with variations) tradition. Thus the articulation of AIEE! Poetics is itself, also, merely an epiphenomenon (of self-awareness) within the larger schema or milieu of poetic transfigurement.
Many also ask : is I the "I" in "AIEE!" really just... Henry? The answer is : this depends on your definition of "Henry". Obviously my own view (as a Henry) might be blurred by proximity - however, I can state with some confidence that the "Henry" delimited by AIEE! Poetry is only a symbolic model for the distinct, inalienable quiddity of every single poetic subject and object. Thus univeral Henrification is simply an abstract index of the mysterious actuality & architecture of created & creative Nature. It might be appropriate to characterize AIEE! Poetry as not exactly "Henryesque", but rather "henotic" - ie., "harmonizing, irenic" - deriving from the Greek work for "one" (Hen).
Friday, September 19, 2008
AMERICAN ACMEISM : AN IMPROVISATION
... & so what do I mean exactly by "American Acmeism"? Here are some free-form disorganized top-of-the-head answers to that question.
1
What is/was Acmeism? The Acmeists were a small informal group of mostly St. Petersburg poets in pre-Revolutionary Russia, led by Nikolai Gumilev, and expounded/expanded-upon in a couple of interesting essays by Osip Mandelstam. There's a brief Wikipedia entry here. The Acmeists emphasized craft, clarity, neo-classicism, respect for history and cultural tradition, a suspicion of mysticism and vague other-worldliness (Symbolism), as well as of radical nihilism or a-historicism (as in some flavors of Futurism).
Mandelstam built a very baroque and imaginative superstructure on this simple platform, which involved both a "longing for world culture" and a kind of Bergsonian or Nietzschean enthusiasm for ana-chronism, the Eternal Return, a Renaissance-like sense of the infinite possibility of renewal through ancient texts and poets (Ovid, Villon, Dante...).
Mandelstam's this-world optimism, his gusto for reviving the Classic - a kind of millennialist desire for a new Golden Age - can be usefully compared to the "New America" enthusiasm of Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, & in particular the Hart Crane of The Bridge : this was a neo-classicism with a folk-America, nationalist strain, a very deliberate counter to TS Eliot's Anglophile, reactionary & disillusioned stance. However, at least in Crane's case, it was also different from the radicalism of some of the more "futurist" moderns like Pound, Stein, WC Williams. Crane, as with Stevens, put less weight on the "experimental" surface of style.
2
Lots of things have changed since the heady days of the early 20th century; in fact the entire "climate of reception" of today, and literary culture as a whole, might be fairly unrecognizable to those antique Twenties scriptonauts.
But history in the larger view is still history; Reality with a capital R is still Reality, however mysterious; and some of the underlying philosophical and artistic ground remains similar to what it was in those days, if not exactly the same. And if history and Reality are relatively unchanged benchmarks, then it would, I think, be possible to reconstruct, reconfigure, and restore, in some ways, an Acmeist literary approach.
In other words, if I call myself an Acmeist, what do I wish this to mean? What would "my Acmeism" be?
An American Acmeism - my Acmeism - would be a name, for one thing, for a certain set of general beliefs about nature, culture, art, poetry, history, religion... a working philosophy, a pragmatics. We live in a polyvalent and polyvocal world, where poetry means different things to different people - and in many cases, poetry involves a reflection of very diverse and variant worldviews and ideologies.
For me, anyway, this notion of "worldview" is important, because I think poets participate in the broader activity of culture-making. Nothing happens in a vacuum; art is original because it is aware of its conditions and the context of its making - it is, actually, the process of reflecting, and reflecting on, those conditions.
Basically, the model of Russian Acmeism appeals to me, because in my reading of Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and others who followed them (such as Joseph Brodsky), I find a harmony between basic cultural-historical attitudes, artistic allegiances, and the artworks themselves. In other words, the worldview and the poetry mutually support and guarantee one another; the "ideas" are manifested and "proven" in the works.
Scholars (& Russians!) might not find my reception of these writers to be sufficiently critical; but then, to be critical is their calling and business. For me, these writers serve as benchmarks, models and inspiration. Indeed, it is Mandelstam's "longing for world culture", and the poetic models he derives from that longing, which in turn provide a new lens for perceiving the weights and values of American poetry - the affinities and differences which impinge on the understanding of our own (American) cultural history and poetic developments (for example, the affinities and differences between the "classicism" of Frost and Crane and H.D., and the visions and allegiances of Akhmatova and Mandelstam).
3
In thinking about the appeal which M's "longing" has for me, I am brought unavoidably to certain philosophical or religious underpinnings of my own - my own "worldview". But I hesitate to dilute or debase the concepts themselves, by way of a glib summary, a reduction to tags and slogans.
So in sketching this out, I want to say that I seem to hold two contrary attitudes in suspension. Let's say that Eliot and [Crane/Stevens/Joyce] stand as figures for the two ends of this spectrum.
On the "Eliot" end, I believe in a supreme order or logos in-forming Time, Nature and History : what Mandelstam referred to, obliquely, as "the Christian calendar". History itself is a story : incarnational, actual, irrevocable, ineluctable. As such, the vocation of Israel, and the Christian Incarnation and Redemption - no matter how confused and in the dark we may be about their "final" meaning(s) - are the pivotal points of reference for human knowledge and experience.
This is a cultural order, which immediately contextualizes the meaning of more local or national historical events and artistic developments. Culture as such fuses and transmutes the ordinary and "natural" growth of poetic making and artistic activity. This is one way of representing M's "longing for world culture", his (very Petersburgian) desire to unite Russian destiny with European and world culture as a whole. Eliot, in this sense, represents a somewhat similar impulse in relation to the culture of the United States, though their personalities and underlying vision of things could hardly be more different.
Then, on the (so-to-speak) "Crane/Stevens/Joyce" end of my view of things, stands the role of the poet as original maker, as Orphic-Romantic visionary. Here the poet (and reader) is a free and independent interpreter of the given : that is of the historical given, of the script of history. Nothing means anything without interpretation : I take very seriously the Gospel statement that "the Truth shall make you free". There is a playful spiritual optimism lurking in these three writers, a whiff of absolute freedom - something that was snuffed out in Eliot and Pound, as a consequence (or a symptom) of their authoritarianism and reactionary world-weariness (post-WW I). This optimism is also in Mandelstam and Akhmatova (despite her grief-filled, elegiac sensibility) : a spirit of confidence and endurance. There is no poetry at all without this point of absolute, self-sufficient, spiritual originality : only for me this is complicated by an underlying "Trinitarian" understanding of the human person (that is, we are, in the most basic sense, the children of God : the living images of God : and we depend on the "Spirit of the Creator" in the very substance of our being). So it's a "relational" notion - not a Renaissance-ubermensch-Romantic idea - of creative originality. This is why, in my mind at least, I situate myself spiritually between Eliot and Crane/Stevens/Joyce.
4
So what would American Acmeism be about, besides representing a sort of boilerplate for my own poetry? It would be about re-reading and re-valuing the American poetic inheritance in the light of its affinities with the Russian Acmeists and their own allegiances (to world culture, to Hellenism, to historical memory). It would read Stevens' celebrations of this-world and of poetry itself ("the poetry of life"; "poetry is the sanction of life"; etc.) in the light of Acmeist culture-making. It would hear Mandelstam in Frost's line about "one could do worse than be a good Greek"; it would read M's "domestic Hellenism" in Crane's renovation of Pindar. It would see the devotion to craft and the spiritual optimism of the Acmeist ethos in some of the early American modernists. And these readings, in turn, would provide a new ground for understanding where we are in American poetry now. It would go to the neo-Aristotelianism of the Chicago Critics, and find affinities with Gumilev's concept of the poem as a dramatic-cultural act (as opposed to simply a "verbal construct", in the too-familiar terms of the Russ. Formalists and the New Critics and the Language Poets and the post-structuralists etc.). In Aristotelian fashion, it would re-think "form" as something far deeper and more elusive than the surface elements of meter, rhyme or stanzaic design : something much more closely interfused with both "meaning" and "plot".
The consequences of these basic orientations call for much more, and more imaginative, exploration : here I'm just re-formulating and restating ideas the readers of this blog have encountered before. But as they well know, I never tire of re-affirming my allegiance to those famous Petersburgians.
... & so what do I mean exactly by "American Acmeism"? Here are some free-form disorganized top-of-the-head answers to that question.
1
What is/was Acmeism? The Acmeists were a small informal group of mostly St. Petersburg poets in pre-Revolutionary Russia, led by Nikolai Gumilev, and expounded/expanded-upon in a couple of interesting essays by Osip Mandelstam. There's a brief Wikipedia entry here. The Acmeists emphasized craft, clarity, neo-classicism, respect for history and cultural tradition, a suspicion of mysticism and vague other-worldliness (Symbolism), as well as of radical nihilism or a-historicism (as in some flavors of Futurism).
Mandelstam built a very baroque and imaginative superstructure on this simple platform, which involved both a "longing for world culture" and a kind of Bergsonian or Nietzschean enthusiasm for ana-chronism, the Eternal Return, a Renaissance-like sense of the infinite possibility of renewal through ancient texts and poets (Ovid, Villon, Dante...).
Mandelstam's this-world optimism, his gusto for reviving the Classic - a kind of millennialist desire for a new Golden Age - can be usefully compared to the "New America" enthusiasm of Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, & in particular the Hart Crane of The Bridge : this was a neo-classicism with a folk-America, nationalist strain, a very deliberate counter to TS Eliot's Anglophile, reactionary & disillusioned stance. However, at least in Crane's case, it was also different from the radicalism of some of the more "futurist" moderns like Pound, Stein, WC Williams. Crane, as with Stevens, put less weight on the "experimental" surface of style.
2
Lots of things have changed since the heady days of the early 20th century; in fact the entire "climate of reception" of today, and literary culture as a whole, might be fairly unrecognizable to those antique Twenties scriptonauts.
But history in the larger view is still history; Reality with a capital R is still Reality, however mysterious; and some of the underlying philosophical and artistic ground remains similar to what it was in those days, if not exactly the same. And if history and Reality are relatively unchanged benchmarks, then it would, I think, be possible to reconstruct, reconfigure, and restore, in some ways, an Acmeist literary approach.
In other words, if I call myself an Acmeist, what do I wish this to mean? What would "my Acmeism" be?
An American Acmeism - my Acmeism - would be a name, for one thing, for a certain set of general beliefs about nature, culture, art, poetry, history, religion... a working philosophy, a pragmatics. We live in a polyvalent and polyvocal world, where poetry means different things to different people - and in many cases, poetry involves a reflection of very diverse and variant worldviews and ideologies.
For me, anyway, this notion of "worldview" is important, because I think poets participate in the broader activity of culture-making. Nothing happens in a vacuum; art is original because it is aware of its conditions and the context of its making - it is, actually, the process of reflecting, and reflecting on, those conditions.
Basically, the model of Russian Acmeism appeals to me, because in my reading of Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and others who followed them (such as Joseph Brodsky), I find a harmony between basic cultural-historical attitudes, artistic allegiances, and the artworks themselves. In other words, the worldview and the poetry mutually support and guarantee one another; the "ideas" are manifested and "proven" in the works.
Scholars (& Russians!) might not find my reception of these writers to be sufficiently critical; but then, to be critical is their calling and business. For me, these writers serve as benchmarks, models and inspiration. Indeed, it is Mandelstam's "longing for world culture", and the poetic models he derives from that longing, which in turn provide a new lens for perceiving the weights and values of American poetry - the affinities and differences which impinge on the understanding of our own (American) cultural history and poetic developments (for example, the affinities and differences between the "classicism" of Frost and Crane and H.D., and the visions and allegiances of Akhmatova and Mandelstam).
3
In thinking about the appeal which M's "longing" has for me, I am brought unavoidably to certain philosophical or religious underpinnings of my own - my own "worldview". But I hesitate to dilute or debase the concepts themselves, by way of a glib summary, a reduction to tags and slogans.
So in sketching this out, I want to say that I seem to hold two contrary attitudes in suspension. Let's say that Eliot and [Crane/Stevens/Joyce] stand as figures for the two ends of this spectrum.
On the "Eliot" end, I believe in a supreme order or logos in-forming Time, Nature and History : what Mandelstam referred to, obliquely, as "the Christian calendar". History itself is a story : incarnational, actual, irrevocable, ineluctable. As such, the vocation of Israel, and the Christian Incarnation and Redemption - no matter how confused and in the dark we may be about their "final" meaning(s) - are the pivotal points of reference for human knowledge and experience.
This is a cultural order, which immediately contextualizes the meaning of more local or national historical events and artistic developments. Culture as such fuses and transmutes the ordinary and "natural" growth of poetic making and artistic activity. This is one way of representing M's "longing for world culture", his (very Petersburgian) desire to unite Russian destiny with European and world culture as a whole. Eliot, in this sense, represents a somewhat similar impulse in relation to the culture of the United States, though their personalities and underlying vision of things could hardly be more different.
Then, on the (so-to-speak) "Crane/Stevens/Joyce" end of my view of things, stands the role of the poet as original maker, as Orphic-Romantic visionary. Here the poet (and reader) is a free and independent interpreter of the given : that is of the historical given, of the script of history. Nothing means anything without interpretation : I take very seriously the Gospel statement that "the Truth shall make you free". There is a playful spiritual optimism lurking in these three writers, a whiff of absolute freedom - something that was snuffed out in Eliot and Pound, as a consequence (or a symptom) of their authoritarianism and reactionary world-weariness (post-WW I). This optimism is also in Mandelstam and Akhmatova (despite her grief-filled, elegiac sensibility) : a spirit of confidence and endurance. There is no poetry at all without this point of absolute, self-sufficient, spiritual originality : only for me this is complicated by an underlying "Trinitarian" understanding of the human person (that is, we are, in the most basic sense, the children of God : the living images of God : and we depend on the "Spirit of the Creator" in the very substance of our being). So it's a "relational" notion - not a Renaissance-ubermensch-Romantic idea - of creative originality. This is why, in my mind at least, I situate myself spiritually between Eliot and Crane/Stevens/Joyce.
4
So what would American Acmeism be about, besides representing a sort of boilerplate for my own poetry? It would be about re-reading and re-valuing the American poetic inheritance in the light of its affinities with the Russian Acmeists and their own allegiances (to world culture, to Hellenism, to historical memory). It would read Stevens' celebrations of this-world and of poetry itself ("the poetry of life"; "poetry is the sanction of life"; etc.) in the light of Acmeist culture-making. It would hear Mandelstam in Frost's line about "one could do worse than be a good Greek"; it would read M's "domestic Hellenism" in Crane's renovation of Pindar. It would see the devotion to craft and the spiritual optimism of the Acmeist ethos in some of the early American modernists. And these readings, in turn, would provide a new ground for understanding where we are in American poetry now. It would go to the neo-Aristotelianism of the Chicago Critics, and find affinities with Gumilev's concept of the poem as a dramatic-cultural act (as opposed to simply a "verbal construct", in the too-familiar terms of the Russ. Formalists and the New Critics and the Language Poets and the post-structuralists etc.). In Aristotelian fashion, it would re-think "form" as something far deeper and more elusive than the surface elements of meter, rhyme or stanzaic design : something much more closely interfused with both "meaning" and "plot".
The consequences of these basic orientations call for much more, and more imaginative, exploration : here I'm just re-formulating and restating ideas the readers of this blog have encountered before. But as they well know, I never tire of re-affirming my allegiance to those famous Petersburgians.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
THE POET AND THE NAME
As everyone knows, we take language for granted. There's a reason for this. A lad carting a wheelbarrow doesn't want to stop & contemplate the invention, design, and special virtues of the wheelbarrow's wheel. In a world of struggle and necessity, we have to get on with things as efficiently as we can.
But life is more than work. As Welsh poet David Jones liked to point out, our aptitude for making non-utilitarian aesthetic objects (art) is what distinguishes the uniquely human from the generally animal. Poetry, too, is situated within that magic (playground) circle. And play itself grants access to otherwise disregarded elements of reality.
Goofing around with words, the poet stumbles upon a hidden treasure : language's native spring - the substance of naming itself. Who among the professional linguists and philologists has comprehended the intellectual wonder of Adamic naming?* When human mind, heart, lungs, throat and mouth first formed the intelligible signs for things? And gathering these signs and keeping them in mind, ordering them by imaginative precedent and law, began to articulate the grand, vast logical-rhetorical sea-going vessel of human speech?
What the poet does, in playing with words, is strike those original sparks of imaginative apprehension - the first (& prehistoric) Promethean fire. Thus the poet reiterates verbal representation with the flavor, the sharp scent of that first encounter. This primal imaginative-intellective labor is what accounts for poetry's famous vividness; what Mallarme (and Eliot) meant when they spoke of their vocation as Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu (to render a purer sense to the words of the tribe).
Mankind the Word-Maker, the Playing Animal... one could go so far as to say that the poet, through free verbal play, recapitulates the human image - polishes it, in order to shine - a kind of microcosm of the human essence.
The poet must walk a tightrope between prosaic, utilitarian usage (which manacles naming under the sign of Necessity), and that arrogant artistic egoism and vanity which treats words as building material, as means not ends (splitting off words from their original naming function, and in doing so, deforming them).
*Giambattista Vico, for one.
As everyone knows, we take language for granted. There's a reason for this. A lad carting a wheelbarrow doesn't want to stop & contemplate the invention, design, and special virtues of the wheelbarrow's wheel. In a world of struggle and necessity, we have to get on with things as efficiently as we can.
But life is more than work. As Welsh poet David Jones liked to point out, our aptitude for making non-utilitarian aesthetic objects (art) is what distinguishes the uniquely human from the generally animal. Poetry, too, is situated within that magic (playground) circle. And play itself grants access to otherwise disregarded elements of reality.
Goofing around with words, the poet stumbles upon a hidden treasure : language's native spring - the substance of naming itself. Who among the professional linguists and philologists has comprehended the intellectual wonder of Adamic naming?* When human mind, heart, lungs, throat and mouth first formed the intelligible signs for things? And gathering these signs and keeping them in mind, ordering them by imaginative precedent and law, began to articulate the grand, vast logical-rhetorical sea-going vessel of human speech?
What the poet does, in playing with words, is strike those original sparks of imaginative apprehension - the first (& prehistoric) Promethean fire. Thus the poet reiterates verbal representation with the flavor, the sharp scent of that first encounter. This primal imaginative-intellective labor is what accounts for poetry's famous vividness; what Mallarme (and Eliot) meant when they spoke of their vocation as Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu (to render a purer sense to the words of the tribe).
Mankind the Word-Maker, the Playing Animal... one could go so far as to say that the poet, through free verbal play, recapitulates the human image - polishes it, in order to shine - a kind of microcosm of the human essence.
The poet must walk a tightrope between prosaic, utilitarian usage (which manacles naming under the sign of Necessity), and that arrogant artistic egoism and vanity which treats words as building material, as means not ends (splitting off words from their original naming function, and in doing so, deforming them).
*Giambattista Vico, for one.
Monday, September 17, 2007
THE GARDEN OF THE FORKING IDEOLOGIES
Ten years ago, after a furious email melodrama, I along with a few others was expelled from the Buffalo Poetics Discussion List (SUNY Buffalo). At the time this was interpreted by Kent Johnson et al. as a free speech/censorship issue (while others debunked it as a ridiculous tempest in a teapot). However, underlying those events, for me, was a kind of agonistic relationship which I was maintaining, against what seemed to be the stance of both the founders & the majority participants of that list. There was a difference of opinion, of approach, of "poetics", if you will.
I had developed a deep suspicion and dislike of the phenomenon known as "language poetry" and related strands of experimental writing. What I sensed was a particular motivation rooted in the language school : an attack on the ontological status of the individual, of the person. This attack included what seemed (and seems) to me a paradoxical consequence - a parallel attack on, or degradation of, poetic language itself. The very term "language poetry" seemed like a frivolous affront to the poetic word. Though the language poets themselves denied originating this label for their movement, they went on to adopt it - which was, in a sense, for them, a validation of its use.
It seemed like the application of ideology to poetics. Now, as everyone knows, the current notion of ideology is that everyone has one (or many). It's inescapable. Nevertheless I want to consider some of its characteristics.
Ideology is like a mental mold or crust, a reification - a hardening of the mind along specific channels of vocabulary, definition, identification. Once this hardening process takes place, the resulting loaf or dry crust can be applied as a kind of template - an overlay for interpreting phenomena. It can also be used as an intellectual club, to force the mind in certain directions. The club or weapon stands outside of the object to be forced. It's a tool - a powerful one, an Archimedean lever, providing a useful alienation from the object under consideration.
Poetry's elusiveness, its waywardness, its ad hoc, improvisatory quality, its ex nihilo creative rawness - all these aspects help protect it (and the other arts) from the automatic or utilitarian, the ideological uses of language. At least this is the wished-for ideal.
As I pointed out in another essay (Integral Poetry), the history of poetry reveals an oscillation around the crucial problem of subjectivity and solipsism. In American poetry, we witnessed one of those watershed shifts, around 1980, when the somewhat standardized "Life Studies" model of the personal, anecdotal lyric was attacked, from two directions : first, by the proponents of "identity literature", for whom the self is fundamentally the product of an embattled socio-cultural group identity, rather than the sum of familial characteristics or universal human qualities; second, by the language school and related postmodern trends, which denied any essential ontological status to the individual self, the person.
As Carol T. Christ makes clear (Victorian & Modernist Poetry), these oscillations were a consequence of the Romantic foregrounding of the unitary subjective self, as source and end of consciousness, perception, art. Here, of course, I am oversimplifying. Coleridge's position, for example, was far more nuanced in this regard. For Coleridge the unity of the self was ultimately rooted in the unitary ground of the Spirit, the Godhead, the great "I Am", with which the creative Imagination fused. But the development, in Western culture (and not just in poetry), of self-reflexive human subjectivity, was the paramount factor in the dilemma (of solipsism) we are considering.
The problem was that the Romantic Self seemed grounded on the void. When the autotelic self came to the fore, in modern, Enlightenment culture, the seeds of its inevitable disintegration were already planted. Wordsworth's Egotistical Sublime prefigured T.S. Eliot's ritualistic religious self-renunciation, his formal (and ceremonial) return to a medieval ideology.
I would locate my own attitude, however, somewhere between these poles - close to Coleridge's dual concept. The person is neither a phantasmal construct of ideological/historical determinisms, nor the embattled tribal-social being of identity politics, nor the imperial Self of modern scepticism. Reality as we know it is fundamentally structured by Personhood; but human personhood is rooted in some utterly mysterious spiritual Personhood. It is essentially relational; it is inter-personal. (Akin to the Byzantine notion of the icon, the Imago Dei.) What for the Language Poets is an obstacle to the abstract and impersonal mechanism of an ideal (Marxist) social justice, is for me the ground of a spiritual life : that is, a moral and political life, devoted (ideally, anyway) to truth and to the common good, rather than to merely materialist and opportunist ends. This is the moral vision underlying our literature, going back to Langland and Chaucer, & probably long before.
Ten years ago, after a furious email melodrama, I along with a few others was expelled from the Buffalo Poetics Discussion List (SUNY Buffalo). At the time this was interpreted by Kent Johnson et al. as a free speech/censorship issue (while others debunked it as a ridiculous tempest in a teapot). However, underlying those events, for me, was a kind of agonistic relationship which I was maintaining, against what seemed to be the stance of both the founders & the majority participants of that list. There was a difference of opinion, of approach, of "poetics", if you will.
I had developed a deep suspicion and dislike of the phenomenon known as "language poetry" and related strands of experimental writing. What I sensed was a particular motivation rooted in the language school : an attack on the ontological status of the individual, of the person. This attack included what seemed (and seems) to me a paradoxical consequence - a parallel attack on, or degradation of, poetic language itself. The very term "language poetry" seemed like a frivolous affront to the poetic word. Though the language poets themselves denied originating this label for their movement, they went on to adopt it - which was, in a sense, for them, a validation of its use.
It seemed like the application of ideology to poetics. Now, as everyone knows, the current notion of ideology is that everyone has one (or many). It's inescapable. Nevertheless I want to consider some of its characteristics.
Ideology is like a mental mold or crust, a reification - a hardening of the mind along specific channels of vocabulary, definition, identification. Once this hardening process takes place, the resulting loaf or dry crust can be applied as a kind of template - an overlay for interpreting phenomena. It can also be used as an intellectual club, to force the mind in certain directions. The club or weapon stands outside of the object to be forced. It's a tool - a powerful one, an Archimedean lever, providing a useful alienation from the object under consideration.
Poetry's elusiveness, its waywardness, its ad hoc, improvisatory quality, its ex nihilo creative rawness - all these aspects help protect it (and the other arts) from the automatic or utilitarian, the ideological uses of language. At least this is the wished-for ideal.
As I pointed out in another essay (Integral Poetry), the history of poetry reveals an oscillation around the crucial problem of subjectivity and solipsism. In American poetry, we witnessed one of those watershed shifts, around 1980, when the somewhat standardized "Life Studies" model of the personal, anecdotal lyric was attacked, from two directions : first, by the proponents of "identity literature", for whom the self is fundamentally the product of an embattled socio-cultural group identity, rather than the sum of familial characteristics or universal human qualities; second, by the language school and related postmodern trends, which denied any essential ontological status to the individual self, the person.
As Carol T. Christ makes clear (Victorian & Modernist Poetry), these oscillations were a consequence of the Romantic foregrounding of the unitary subjective self, as source and end of consciousness, perception, art. Here, of course, I am oversimplifying. Coleridge's position, for example, was far more nuanced in this regard. For Coleridge the unity of the self was ultimately rooted in the unitary ground of the Spirit, the Godhead, the great "I Am", with which the creative Imagination fused. But the development, in Western culture (and not just in poetry), of self-reflexive human subjectivity, was the paramount factor in the dilemma (of solipsism) we are considering.
The problem was that the Romantic Self seemed grounded on the void. When the autotelic self came to the fore, in modern, Enlightenment culture, the seeds of its inevitable disintegration were already planted. Wordsworth's Egotistical Sublime prefigured T.S. Eliot's ritualistic religious self-renunciation, his formal (and ceremonial) return to a medieval ideology.
I would locate my own attitude, however, somewhere between these poles - close to Coleridge's dual concept. The person is neither a phantasmal construct of ideological/historical determinisms, nor the embattled tribal-social being of identity politics, nor the imperial Self of modern scepticism. Reality as we know it is fundamentally structured by Personhood; but human personhood is rooted in some utterly mysterious spiritual Personhood. It is essentially relational; it is inter-personal. (Akin to the Byzantine notion of the icon, the Imago Dei.) What for the Language Poets is an obstacle to the abstract and impersonal mechanism of an ideal (Marxist) social justice, is for me the ground of a spiritual life : that is, a moral and political life, devoted (ideally, anyway) to truth and to the common good, rather than to merely materialist and opportunist ends. This is the moral vision underlying our literature, going back to Langland and Chaucer, & probably long before.
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