Rhapsody (and the Long Poem)

Note : This essay was included in a seminar, hosted by Norman Finkelstein, at the 2022 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, on the contemporary long poem and the work of Nathaniel Mackey.

There are so many simultaneous forces at play in contemporary poetry, that the attempt to make sense of them can be baffling.  It’s like gazing into a crystal with infinite facets, or watching some cybernetic algorithm spitting out riddles.  And one of the most challenging phenomena in this respect is the long poem.  Even basic labels are elusive.  Long poem?  Epic?  Narrative?  Sequence?  Serial poem?  Where to begin?

The question of form as a means toward definition is obviously pragmatic, but it can quickly become problematic.  Obviously, poets have applied formal, technical means to liberate and sharpen their work.  Critics have evaluated such innovations as criteria for registering wider political, philosophical, aesthetic aims.  Yet questions of form and chaos are crucial in ways that transcend narrow technical factors.

Revolutionary modernization in the arts over the last 150 years can be understood as an artistic response to rapid and overwhelming historical change.  Modern poets of the early 20th century were living through the seemingly violent collapse of Western social order, the shaking of previous religious certitudes about the cosmic order, and the obsolescence of antiquated literary modes – all at once.  Pound and Eliot can be seen as taking their stand in a nostalgic, traditionalist or reactionary direction; Williams and Stevens in a more existential, naturalist, and agnostic direction; but neither of these modern tendencies seemed completely relevant to poets of the postmodern late-20th century.  

Joseph Conte outlined, in a systematic way, how specific postmodern technical approaches applied new kinds of formalism – serial, aleatory, procedural – to a reality which seemed increasingly chaotic, disordered – no longer amenable to simple answers or totalizing configurations.  He juxtaposes the ambitious “epic” themes of Modernist long poems, with the more playful, heterodox and anti-hierarchical approaches of the Postmodern.(1)

Yet in my view the long poem itself exhibits inherent difficulties which are challenging in the extreme, and not amenable to merely technical solutions.  I think there is evidence of such difficulty in the very limited audience for such works.  The idea that decentered, non-Euclidean serialism is a logical reflection of a cosmic reality which denies rational, authoritative or logocentric order is in a sense self-contradictory.  What is the ontological meaning of a “logical” or “natural” response in a universe which exhibits neither?

The basic, underlying distinction between the short lyric and the long poem is this : the lyric is personal, subjective; while the long poem is didactic, thematic, and communal.  A long poem is long because it knits together disparate episodes or discourses in order to present an over-arching theme or message.  Both the modern verse epic and the postmodern serial poem combine modular elements; but the epic has a theme or story to tell, whereas the postmodern serial poem is ultimately autotelic or self-reflexive – it is the expression of the creative freedom of expression.

Such baldly categorical statements can be criticized as merely simplistic and provocative.  In their defense I would like to bring forward a little-used term, which nevertheless provides another window on the problematics of the long poem.  That term is rhapsody.

The etymology of rhapsody is very curious.  It has essentially three separate but intertwined meanings.  For the ancient Greeks, a rhapsody was a name for a long or epic poem.  It comes from two Indo-European roots meaning “to turn” – to weave, or stitch – and “song”.  A rhapsody, as opposed to a stanzaic lyric, consisted of stitched-together lines extending a story or discourse which was just long enough for a “rhapsode”, or performer, to recite at one go.

A second meaning appeared sometime in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance.  A rhapsody was a hodge-podge – a random compendium of notes, quotes, and writings. 

The third meaning arrived in the 19th century : a rhapsody was a highly emotional, and perhaps (therefore) somewhat irrationally exuberant, musical composition.  This third meaning consequently seeped into our more colloquial sense of rhapsody or the rhapsodic, as a kind of gushing expression of joyful feeling.

A rhapsody is a epic song – woven, stitched together.  A rhapsody is a hodge-podge.  A rhapsody is a musical peak of emotion, a summation.  I find the combination of these to be a pretty good description of both the modernist verse epic, and the postmodern long poem.  

The key here for me, however, is contained in that third definition.  Because, as previously asserted, the rationale or motive force of the long poem, as opposed to the short lyric, is its social, communal context.  And the ecstatic emotion of joy – the rhapsody – is the implied or tacit goal of all long poems.  Poetry is always a mixture of, or an oscillation between, celebration and critique, praise and warning, utopia and doom.  But to achieve rhapsody in a social, communal context requires some kind of balance of these opposing poles.  It calls for wisdom, in other words.  The didactic aim; the edification of people as a civic community, as a social whole.  This is the ultimate motive for long poems, both ancient and contemporary.

But as I mentioned at the outset, the contemporary long poem is a thing of multifarious facets and forces.  One of the heuristic strengths of this tripartite concept, rhapsody, is its fusion of objective multiplicity – the stitching-together of a hodge-podge of episodes – with subjective emotion : the expressive dimension of joy, rapture.  

When Walt Whitman furled the heroism of traditional epic into the creative, poetic Self, he risked complete self-absorption, the inflation of the individualistic American ego.  Yet he endeavored to balance that with the demand for justice and equality, celebrating a national, communal democracy.  The imperfect equilibrium of these dimensions – Adamic egoism and political egalitarianism – was the engine of his particular lifelong rhapsody.  Ezra Pound, in his own way, was a rhapsode as well : the Cantos are a stitched-together “rag-bag” of historical chronicles, interspersed with moments of archaic music and mystical rapture.   Charles Olson also can be seen, in The Maximus Poems, to be shifting abruptly between these different ranges.  

Part of the impulse in all three of these poets is to assert a veritably Adamic poetic authority : the “making things new”, the naming of inchoate realities fully-imagined, and thus true, as if for the first time.  And I think this is one way to approach the reading of our contemporary in the epic/serial long poem arena, Nathaniel Mackey.  In Mackey’s vast, seemingly boundless, intermeshed sequences, we can descry the different aspects of rhapsody as so defined.  There is the endless, repetitive weaving-together of characters and storytelling, by means of twisted, patched and re-patched words – riddles, neologisms.  There is also the dimension of music and song : a constant improvisation, wavering between mournful blues and choral, resonant exaltations.  And in the far distance, there is the possible communal wisdom, the equilibrium of some collective human harmony – carved out of a jagged, exilic sense of hard-crushed endurance and persistent dignity.

These are very partial and sketchy illustrations of how the dimension of rhapsody enfolds the making of long poems – merging themes and episodes with human emotion; setting aside the formalist rhetoric of technical gimmickry, with its inherent manipulative detachment.  The motive for extended long poems, as noted, is public, ceremonial, communal – and the means involve the inward substance of poetry itself : an articulate confidence in affirmation, a rhapsody of ripened wisdom.

1)  Conte, Joseph M., Unending Design : the Forms of Postmodern Poetry.  Ithaca, NY : Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.

Epic Finish

Note : This essay was written as a submission for a seminar at the 2022 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, hosted by Norman Finkelstein, on Nathaniel Mackey and contemporary long poems.  (Note : this particular essay was not included in the program.)

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Chief Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Thus opens Wallace Stevens’ “Bantams in Pine-Woods” : a 10-line take-down of his giant rivals in American poetry – Eliot, Pound – with their abstract blasts, their canonical pronunciamentos.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!  I am the personal.

Your world is you.  I am my world.

Nevertheless, here we also find a faint echo of Walt Whitman (both “kosmos” and “simple separate person”).  And according to Michael Bernstein(1), there is genuine fortitude in the way Pound answered the detachment of Symbolism – and its surrender of poetry’s communal values to prose fiction – with the example of Whitman.  Pound certainly admired the novelists; but he felt poetry manifested something more vital : the passionate affirmations of the creative spirit itself, as opposed to fiction’s clinical analytics.

The Pound vortex resonates with a thematic parallelism, a rhyme of dimensions.  Chronological time, historical development, and the pilgrim’s progress of the epic hero, reinforce each other, suspended amidst a mythical journey.  This pattern amalgamates quest, chronicle, and diary – drawing readers along wide-rambling, spun-out trails : Cantos, Paterson, Maximus Poems.

Yet there is a recurrent critical perception of something unfinished about this epic project.  Joseph Conte, in Unending Design(2), would supplant modernist aspiration toward totality with postmodern serialism – aleatory, improvisational.  This contrast recalls the ancient rivalry between Virgil – epic, imperial – and Ovid, with his “continuous song”,  his Metamorphoses.

Yet these binaries are quite porous.  On the one hand, Whitman tried to rake together his Leaves, reducing it to 52 sections – yet its prospect is an “open road”.  Pound envisioned a method for magisterial totality – but suggested an incapacity to “make it cohere”.  Williams tacked on a late fifth chapter to Paterson, to present some enfolding resolution.  On the other hand, the serialism of “modules” is actually applicable to any structure, closed or open.  Think of the framing trellises in Berryman’s serial Dream Songs : line, stanza, song, part, book.  Moreover, the alleged openness of serialism can be quite linear.  Like music rooted in a key, the droning of an open string, there is repetition in the most aleatory series : the continuity of the poet’s voice, the composer’s hand.  Robin Blaser’s notion, cited by Conte (3), that serial poems are closer to “natural” successions of time and seasonal change, is a mode of naturalism or realism, imposed upon an ideal of postmodern form.

Closure – the sense of fulfillment, of seeds ripening to fruition; the beauty of beginning, middle and end – these processes are not static, but continuously unfolding.  Shakespeare, like Pound, also borrowed shiny bits of (British) history, and fitted them into a dramatic series, each with its emphatic finale – yet foreshadowing the next play.  Old legends become radiant gists, enlivened by the pathos of embodied players.  “But the art itself is nature”, Hamlet notes.  Themes radiate allusively through such “closed” forms, echoing in the mind after the play is done.  

Crane’s Bridge appears, among modernist epics, the odd one out.  The poem’s diurnal framework (modeled on Joyce’s Ulysses?) encapsulates a series of American myths – a quasi-Shakespearean panorama in microcosm.  It also shapes a miniature quest : returning whence it began, to the rail of the bridge-grail, with metaphysical hosannahs at the end.  Unlike its rivals, The Bridge satisfies an aesthetic desire for wholeness, amplitude, finish.  It is compact, with that particular strength of compositional integrity – producing a pleasing after-effect, despite its weaknesses.  It hovers somewhere between the mythical ironies of Ovid and the imperial determinism of Virgil – a plangent equilibrium.

A forgotten masterpiece of literary criticism is Roy Harvey Pearce’s Continuity of American Poetry(4).  Pearce set the long poem firmly at the center of his story.  His schema is based on two conjoined ideas.  First, the essential role of the American poet is a struggle on behalf of creative imagination, against a fundamentally anti-poetic reality.  And second, Whitman made a discovery pivotal to this enterprise : he dared write a completely new kind of epic, which replaced the traditional adventures of a representative, semi-divine paragon, with a new hero for the age of democracy – the poet in person, the creative Self.  The epic task is simply the embattled making of the poem.  

Thus Pearce portrays the situation of American poets as a tension of overlapping resistances.  First, there was the Puritan resistance to medieval Christianity, based on a fervor for Scripture alone.  Then followed an upsurge of antinomian spiritualism, at the edge of Puritanism – a veering to the limits of its own creed (Quakerism is one  example).  Then evolved the fusion of Transcendentalist and antinomian impulses, in the writers of the American Renaissance (Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson) – and finally, the fully-formed resistance of American poets, armed with these spiritual weapons, to the ambience of anti-poetry in the wider culture – the transactional, pragmatic, workaday world of Enlightenment America.  In sum, the spirit of Transcendentalist poetry – and even more so, paradoxically, of the Symbolists’ progenitor, Edgar Poe – was a struggle for the imagination against anti-poetic reality.  

So, with Leaves of Grass, epic becomes the heroism of egalitarian vision… until the 20th century, when forces of scientific positivism and industrialized society consigned that vibrant legacy to Whitman’s lesser imitators.  At which point, according to Pearce, Pound and Eliot set a dialectical “counter-current” in motion.  Not the egocentric celebration of the Self, but its renunciation; not the defense of equality but its critique, on behalf of tradition.  Ultimately, not democracy, but monarchy – or Confucian dictatorship.

This powerful reversal sparked another resistance, by Crane, Williams, Moore, Stevens, et al. – a return (characteristically, individually) to antinomian roots.  Stevens, for Pearce, represents the high terminus of this struggle : a quasi-philosophical endeavor to enunciate completely humanist grounds for imaginative freedom – without any need of divine sanction.

Pearce’s model offers what he calls an “inside story” of American poetry.   And this scenario of resistances exudes a faint scent of its own mythical meta-drama.  Here are reverberations of archaic kingship, duels around the sacred oak; shades of the enfeebled Fisher King, expecting the Grail; Stevens’ cock-fighting bantams, each with its own idiom for the emblematic hero.  Berryman, lying in his Minneapolis sickbay, mourning absent friends and old masters… Pound, incarcerated across from the Capitol, kowtowing to towering icons of the past (Dante, Homer).  Finished.  

But then, what is ever finished in American poetry?  The hero?  The self?  Our only king is Martin Luther King.  And perhaps today, in our time, the musing, crooning, abiding Nate Mackey is – to anagrammatize – America’s “native son of the Key, son of the K.”

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We have offered a neat picture of epic as finished object, as rounded totality.  “Literature is hero-worship”, propounded Pound; his Cantos present a transfer of American egoism into a Dantesque summa of world history : a parade of iconic, “factive men”, culminating in the bloated corpse of Mussolini – the dictator as sacred victim.  And we have framed epic as a reiteration of the rivalry of mythical kings.  But what does that rivalry concern?  Ultimately it was about a woman.  “Who will have the succession?” cries Pound, in Canto 80.  It was about woman as royal consort, generative mother.  It was a succession crisis : who shall continue the line?  Who shall be Queen Bee, Queen Mother?  Robert Graves, of course, with H.D., Robert Duncan, and Ted Hughes, delved into this implicit primal matter.  The neatness of my outline obscures an underlying false consciousness, rooted in male narcissism.  There are other voices, left out of my scheme : Dickinson; H.D.; Joyce; Zukofsky; Neidecker; and more recently, Lisa Robertson; Lissa Wolsak; Rachel Blau DuPlessis.  Each of these offers more feminine versions of cultural heroism.  Finally, perhaps a more fruitful way to approach the poetry of Nathaniel Mackey might be under a Zukofskian, rather than Poundian, aegis.  Power is turned inward, into song; history is raveled and unraveled, like Penelope’s tapestry, or Anansi’s web.  And the duel for success – for succession – stretches into an infinity of suspense : a questioning ambivalence, a teetering see-saw, a ship (loaded with abandoned children, exiles from Atlantis).

Notes

1) Bernstein, Michael André, The Tale of the Tribe : Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic.  Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1980.

2) Conte, Joseph M., Unending Design : the Forms of Postmodern Poetry.  Ithaca, NY : Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.

3) Conte, Joseph M., “Seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem”.  Sagetrieb, 11 (Spring-Fall 1992), pp. 35-45.

4) Pearce, Roy Harvey, The Continuity of American Poetry.  Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1961.