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.
No comments:
Post a Comment