tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-175772272024-03-13T06:36:21.070-04:00HG Essays+ReviewsProse about poetry and poetics by Henry Gould.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.comBlogger41125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-43576466845494259322023-11-29T11:58:00.005-05:002023-11-29T11:58:37.193-05:00Rhapsody (and the Long Poem)<p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><i>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.</i></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There are so many simultaneous forces at play in contemporary poetry, that the attempt to make sense of them can be baffling.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s like gazing into a crystal with infinite facets, or watching some cybernetic algorithm spitting out riddles.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And one of the most challenging phenomena in this respect is the long poem.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Even basic labels are elusive.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Long poem?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Epic?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Narrative?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sequence?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Serial poem?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Where to begin?</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The question of form as a means toward definition is obviously pragmatic, but it can quickly become problematic.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Obviously, poets have applied formal, technical means to liberate and sharpen their work.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Critics have evaluated such innovations as criteria for registering wider political, philosophical, aesthetic aims.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Yet questions of form and chaos are crucial in ways that transcend narrow technical factors.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Revolutionary modernization in the arts over the last 150 years can be understood as an artistic response to rapid and overwhelming historical change.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He juxtaposes the ambitious “epic” themes of Modernist long poems, with the more playful, heterodox and anti-hierarchical approaches of the Postmodern.(1)</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Yet in my view the long poem itself exhibits inherent difficulties which are challenging in the extreme, and not amenable to merely technical solutions.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I think there is evidence of such difficulty in the very limited audience for such works.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What is the ontological meaning of a “logical” or “natural” response in a universe which exhibits neither?</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A long poem is long because it knits together disparate episodes or discourses in order to present an over-arching theme or message.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Such baldly categorical statements can be criticized as merely simplistic and provocative.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>That term is <i>rhapsody</i>.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The etymology of <i>rhapsody</i> is very curious.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It has essentially three separate but intertwined meanings.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>For the ancient Greeks, a rhapsody was a name for a long or epic poem.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It comes from two Indo-European roots meaning “to turn” – to weave, or stitch – and “song”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A second meaning appeared sometime in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A rhapsody was a hodge-podge – a random compendium of notes, quotes, and writings.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The third meaning arrived in the 19th century : a rhapsody was a highly emotional, and perhaps (therefore) somewhat irrationally exuberant, musical composition.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This third meaning consequently seeped into our more colloquial sense of rhapsody or the rhapsodic, as a kind of gushing expression of joyful feeling.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A rhapsody is a epic song – woven, stitched together.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A rhapsody is a hodge-podge.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A rhapsody is a musical peak of emotion, a summation.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I find the combination of these to be a pretty good description of both the modernist verse epic, and the postmodern long poem. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The key here for me, however, is contained in that third definition.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Because, as previously asserted, the rationale or motive force of the long poem, as opposed to the short lyric, is its social, communal context.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And the ecstatic emotion of joy – the rhapsody – is the implied or tacit goal of all long poems.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Poetry is always a mixture of, or an oscillation between, celebration and critique, praise and warning, utopia and doom.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But to achieve rhapsody in a social, communal context requires some kind of balance of these opposing poles.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It calls for <i>wisdom</i>, in other words.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The didactic aim; the edification of people as a civic community, as a social whole.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This is the ultimate motive for long poems, both ancient and contemporary.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But as I mentioned at the outset, the contemporary long poem is a thing of multifarious facets and forces.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>One of the heuristic strengths of this tripartite concept, <i>rhapsody</i>, is its fusion of objective multiplicity – the stitching-together of a hodge-podge of episodes – with subjective emotion : the expressive dimension of joy, rapture. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Yet he endeavored to balance that with the demand for justice and equality, celebrating a national, communal democracy.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The imperfect equilibrium of these dimensions – Adamic egoism and political egalitarianism – was the engine of his particular lifelong rhapsody.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ezra Pound, in his own way, was a rhapsode as well : the <i>Cantos</i> are a stitched-together “rag-bag” of historical chronicles, interspersed with moments of archaic music and mystical rapture. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Charles Olson also can be seen, in <i>The Maximus Poems</i>, to be shifting abruptly between these different ranges. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>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 <i>true</i>, as if for the first time.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And I think this is one way to approach the reading of our contemporary in the epic/serial long poem arena, Nathaniel Mackey.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In Mackey’s vast, seemingly boundless, intermeshed sequences, we can descry the different aspects of rhapsody as so defined.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There is the endless, repetitive weaving-together of characters and storytelling, by means of twisted, patched and re-patched words – riddles, neologisms.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There is also the dimension of music and song : a constant improvisation, wavering between mournful blues and choral, resonant exaltations.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">1)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Conte, Joseph M., <i>Unending Design : the Forms of Postmodern Poetry</i>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ithaca, NY : Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.</p>Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-53300586502748985022023-11-29T11:52:00.005-05:002023-11-29T11:59:16.717-05:00Epic Finish<p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><i>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.)</i></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p3" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><b>1</b></p><p class="p4" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Chief Iffucan of Azcan in caftan</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Of tan with henna hackles, halt!</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">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.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I am the personal.</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Your world is you.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I am my world.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">Nevertheless, here we also find a faint echo of Walt Whitman (both “kosmos” and “simple separate person”).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">The Pound vortex resonates with a thematic parallelism, a rhyme of dimensions.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Chronological time, historical development, and the pilgrim’s progress of the epic hero, reinforce each other, suspended amidst a mythical journey.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This pattern amalgamates quest, chronicle, and diary – drawing readers along wide-rambling, spun-out trails : <i>Cantos, Paterson, Maximus Poems.</i></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Yet there is a recurrent critical perception of something unfinished about this epic project.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Joseph Conte, in <i>Unending Design</i>(2), would supplant modernist aspiration toward totality with postmodern serialism – aleatory, improvisational.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This contrast recalls the ancient rivalry between Virgil – epic, imperial – and Ovid, with his “continuous song”,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>his <i>Metamorphoses</i>.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Yet these binaries are quite porous.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>On the one hand, Whitman tried to rake together his <i>Leaves</i>, reducing it to 52 sections – yet its prospect is an “open road”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Pound envisioned a method for magisterial totality – but suggested an incapacity to “make it cohere”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Williams tacked on a late fifth chapter to <i>Paterson</i>, to present some enfolding resolution.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>On the other hand, the serialism of “modules” is actually applicable to any structure, closed or open.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Think of the framing trellises in Berryman’s serial <i>Dream Songs</i> : line, stanza, song, part, book.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Moreover, the alleged openness of serialism can be quite linear.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Old legends become radiant gists, enlivened by the pathos of embodied players.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“But the art itself is nature”, Hamlet notes.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Themes radiate allusively through such “closed” forms, echoing in the mind after the play is done. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Crane’s <i>Bridge</i> appears, among modernist epics, the odd one out.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The poem’s diurnal framework (modeled on Joyce’s <i>Ulysses</i>?) encapsulates a series of American myths – a quasi-Shakespearean panorama in microcosm.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It also shapes a miniature quest : returning whence it began, to the rail of the bridge-grail, with metaphysical hosannahs at the end.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Unlike its rivals, <i>The Bridge</i> satisfies an aesthetic desire for wholeness, amplitude, finish.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It is compact, with that particular strength of compositional integrity – producing a pleasing after-effect, despite its weaknesses.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It hovers somewhere between the mythical ironies of Ovid and the imperial determinism of Virgil – a plangent equilibrium.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A forgotten masterpiece of literary criticism is Roy Harvey Pearce’s <i>Continuity of American Poetry</i>(4).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Pearce set the long poem firmly at the center of his story.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>His schema is based on two conjoined ideas.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>First, the essential role of the American poet is a struggle on behalf of creative imagination, against a fundamentally anti-poetic reality.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The epic task is simply the embattled making of the poem. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Thus Pearce portrays the situation of American poets as a tension of overlapping resistances.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>First, there was the Puritan resistance to medieval Christianity, based on a fervor for Scripture alone.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Then followed an upsurge of antinomian spiritualism, at the edge of Puritanism – a veering to the limits of its own creed (Quakerism is one<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>example).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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 <i>anti-poetry</i> in the wider culture – the transactional, pragmatic, workaday world of Enlightenment America.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So, with <i>Leaves of Grass</i>, 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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>At which point, according to Pearce, Pound and Eliot set a dialectical “counter-current” in motion.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Not the egocentric celebration of the Self, but its renunciation; not the defense of equality but its critique, on behalf of tradition.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ultimately, not democracy, but monarchy – or Confucian dictatorship.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This powerful reversal sparked another resistance, by Crane, Williams, Moore, Stevens, et al. – a return (characteristically, individually) to antinomian roots.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Pearce’s model offers what he calls an “inside story” of American poetry. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And this scenario of resistances exudes a faint scent of its own mythical meta-drama.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Finished. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">But then, what is ever finished in American poetry?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The hero?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The self?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Our only king is Martin Luther King</i>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.”</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p3" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: center;"><b>2</b></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We have offered a neat picture of epic as finished object, as rounded totality.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“Literature is hero-worship”, propounded Pound; his <i>Cantos</i> present a transfer of American egoism into a Dantesque <i>summa</i> of world history : a parade of iconic, “factive men”, culminating in the bloated corpse of Mussolini – the dictator as sacred victim.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And we have framed epic as a reiteration of the rivalry of mythical kings.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>But what does that rivalry concern?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ultimately it was about a woman.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“Who will have the succession?” cries Pound, in <i>Canto</i> 80.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It was about woman as royal consort, generative mother.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It was a succession crisis : who shall continue the line?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Who shall be Queen Bee, Queen Mother?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Robert Graves, of course, with H.D., Robert Duncan, and Ted Hughes, delved into this implicit primal matter.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The neatness of my outline obscures an underlying false consciousness, rooted in male narcissism.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Each of these offers more feminine versions of cultural heroism.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Finally, perhaps a more fruitful way to approach the poetry of Nathaniel Mackey might be under a Zukofskian, rather than Poundian, aegis.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Power is turned inward, into song; history is raveled and unraveled, like Penelope’s tapestry, or Anansi’s web.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>And the duel for success – for succession – stretches into an infinity of <i>suspense</i> : a questioning ambivalence, a teetering see-saw, a ship (loaded with abandoned children, exiles from Atlantis).</p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span class="s1" style="text-decoration-line: underline;">Notes</span></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">1) Bernstein, Michael André, <i>The Tale of the Tribe : Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic</i>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1980.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">2) Conte, Joseph M., <i>Unending Design : the Forms of Postmodern Poetry</i>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ithaca, NY : Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">3) Conte, Joseph M., “Seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem”.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Sagetrieb,</i> 11 (Spring-Fall 1992), pp. 35-45.</p><p class="p2" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p class="p1" style="font-family: "Iowan Old Style"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;">4) Pearce, Roy Harvey, <i>The Continuity of American Poetry</i>.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1961.</p>Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-14221191523310830042018-07-23T13:00:00.003-04:002018-07-23T13:00:19.492-04:00Reading Gabriel GuddingLink to <a href="http://www.criticalflame.org/verse/0310_gould.htm" target="_blank">review</a> of two books by Gabriel Gudding, first published in <i>Critical Flame</i>.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-68812994279106245802018-07-23T12:56:00.004-04:002018-07-23T12:56:47.250-04:00Stuart Blazer's Ruffled SurfLink to a <a href="http://criticalflame.org/verse/0512_gould.htm" target="_blank">poetry book review</a> of Stuart Blazer, first published in <i>Critical Flame</i>.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-89194521302076810722018-07-23T12:54:00.002-04:002018-07-23T12:54:18.855-04:00Jerusalem & AlbionLink to a <a href="http://www.criticalflame.org/verse/0112_gould.htm" target="_blank">poetry book review</a> of John Beer and Ben Mazer, first published in Critical Flame.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-71822980786628429322018-07-23T10:33:00.000-04:002018-07-23T10:33:56.009-04:00An Amateur Defense of Poetry<br />
What follows has no footnotes, no scholarly apparatus. Just my own faulty memory and groundless, amateur speculations. <br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
When did poets begin writing "defenses"? My guess is that Philip Sidney's was one of the first, in Elizabethan England, around 1600. The Renaissance (or post-Renaissance) was in full swing, the Reformation was underway, the Enlightenment would be arriving soon. The Middle Age of faith was giving way to the Modern Age of reason & science. Prose was splitting off from poetry. Prose leaned toward facts, practical utility, rational argument, scientific evidence and explanation. Poetry leaned toward Art & Beauty (in caps), toward the emotional life, the life of the spirit, toward everything that could not be quantified & examined with objective detachment. The "defensive" stance, signaled by essays like Sidney's, represented a reaction against new pressures brought to bear on the traditional role of the poet-as-seer, as bearer and enunciator of ancient & communal knowledge - an <span style="font-style: italic;">immediate</span> kind of understanding, outside the frameworks of rational argument or scientific proof. & I would say the division, the polarization, between the rational & the poetic approaches came to a head, was crystallized, in the shift from the discursive rationalism of the Restoration poets, to the imaginative vision of the Romantics (epitomized & defended perhaps most stoutly by Coleridge & Blake, with some help from Wordsworth).<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
But why does any of this matter now? The Romantics were a long time ago. Modern and Postmodern thought found other & seemingly more relevant ways to challenge any simplistic versions of rationalism or scientific positivism. But perhaps that is the crux of the problem. Poets have relinquished the debate to philosophers, physicists, biologists, commentators, theologians... to everybody except poets themselves. A defense, then, would have to involve a re-assertion, a new expression, of the cultural-intellectual <span style="font-style: italic;">authority</span> of poetry. & poets themselves are variegated into all sorts of distinct groupings based on style, or on poetic theory, or by specific ethnic-cultural-historical-linguistic identifications. Often it is claimed that there is no such thing as <span style="font-style: italic;">poetry</span>, only <span style="font-style: italic;">poetries</span>. An intellectual defense such as I am suggesting, then, sounds like a tall order. <br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
There will be no "return to Romanticism." But there might possibly be a return to something more venerable than the Romantics : a sense of poetry as matrix of cultural understanding, as source of vision. It seems to me that there are ways to step tentatively in this direction, from various points on the circumference. So here I will toss around a few hunches in that regard.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
We could start by thinking of poetry as a kind of living monument or textual distillation of a culture's language. This is not a popular notion in these times. The focus today is on the immediacy of vernacular engagement : people find odious the idea of poetry as a kind of textual crypt of language. Yet something in the back of the mind nags every real poet like a guilty conscience : the language we speak is <span style="font-style: italic;">objectively beautiful</span>; thus poetry ought to build lasting containers, expressions, exemplifications, of that language. Poetry ought to seek both the exquisite & the necessary - the <span style="font-style: italic;">best </span>verbal equivalents of both experience & thought.<br />
<br />
But to accept that challenge is to be confronted with considerably difficult consequences : for it means that new (or perhaps old) thematic demands are applied to poets & poetry. The "beauty of language" is not just sound-music, not just elegant wit & ornamentation. There is also the profound dimension of meaning & thought - forsaking which, poetry has already relinquished any claim to cultural authority. <br />
<br />
To meet these demands, however, poetry brings to bear some surprising strengths. Because a poem is a kind of playful, seemingly-purposeless end-in-itself, it is capable of <span style="font-style: italic;">modeling the ends of things</span> : forms, shapes, distinct entities, in their particularity, their integrity, their wholeness : in their identity as <span style="font-style: italic;">ends</span>. The integrity, the self-fulfillment of things is echoed, modeled, sanctioned by the harmonious, inherent integrity of poems. This is a specific kind of verbal modeling (Aristotle called it <span style="font-style: italic;">mimesis</span>) which is peculiar to poetry.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
For Blake & Coleridge, Wordsworth & Whitman, Keats & Dickinson & others, poems are the verbal distillation of human acts of imagination. Imagination is a specific faculty, a power of the human mind : essentially a power of <span style="font-style: italic;">invention & synthesis</span>. The human power of invention is likened (especially by Coleridge) to a supernatural creative Power (the origin of reality itself, as a cosmic whole, in the divine "I Am"). The problem that these Romantics had with the rationalism of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, et al.) was what seemed to them a split between mind & heart, mind & soul, mind & spirit - between the reasoning, analyzing, abstracting mind, & the inspired imagination - its "sacred" representations of the whole of life, of life as wholeness.<br />
<br />
The modern development of free-standing scientific rationalism, as the centerpiece of human thought meant the inevitable sidelining of the imagination, and hence of the purpose of poetry and the role of the poet. These are, of course, far from new ideas! But I think they represent the fundamental cause for the essentially ornamental & trivial social status of poetry in the contemporary world. It is, in sum, a question of two things : 1) the growing alienation of poets themselves from a sense of poetry as a distillation of the <span style="font-style: italic;">best (most memorable) language</span> of their culture; and 2) the historical shift from <span style="font-style: italic;">imaginative (verbal) modeling </span>of truth, to its rational analysis & (mathematical) verifications.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
Is it possible today to counter these two trends - to rebuild, in a new mode, some of the intellectual confidence of, say, a Blake or a Coleridge? Many poets, in very distinct ways, have certainly made the effort. My own sense is that there is no <span style="font-style: italic;">method</span>, no workable approach built on rational discourse or stubborn will-power. I think back, rather, to Wallace Stevens' notion, expressed in many of his poems & prose "adagia", that individual written poems are merely traces of something larger, more pervasive - some "poetry" inherent in the marrow of life itself. Poetry is thus some kind of basic aspect of "nature" or of the human, which comes to the fore by its own power - the faculty of imagination somewhat in Coleridge's sense. The human mind synthesizes experience - its ultimate or "authorized" expression - not in discursive prose tracts nor in mathematical formulae - but in poetic invention, the insight of the human imagination, the vision of the whole. The All (though of course poetry, being pervasive, is also visible, lurking, active, in prose & science & mathematics too).<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
& I predict that as historians, anthropologists, archaeologists & scientists persist in digging through the deep layers of human origins and the history of the planet, they will discover more & more evidence of the imaginative leaps of the human mind, which have emerged even in prehistory, to visualize & foresee amazing, "incredible" phenomena of the future (the vast, galactic, cosmic future), which we today find difficult to conceive or conceptualize.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-57978099104718344232018-07-23T10:16:00.002-04:002018-07-23T10:19:10.698-04:00Why Poetry, by Matthew ZapruderA review of Matthew Zapruder's book <i>Why Poetry</i> was published in <i>Rain Taxi</i> #89 (Spring 2018). Here's a <a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/volume-23-number-1-spring-2018-89/" target="_blank">link to the issue's table of contents</a>.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-50676487263658402302018-07-23T10:12:00.000-04:002018-07-23T10:12:02.508-04:00Equipment for Living, by Michael Robbins<a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/equipment-for-living-on-poetry-and-pop-music/" target="_blank">A review</a> of Michael Robbins' <i>Equipment for Living : on Poetry and Pop Music</i>, published in <i>Rain Taxi</i> online edition, Winter 2017-2018Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-49240845473515182242014-05-10T22:51:00.002-04:002014-05-10T22:51:18.652-04:00"I gather the limbs of Osiris" : Notes on the New GnosticismWrote an article about a group of poets who call themselves the New Gnostics; it's been published in <i>Coldfront</i> magazine, <a href="http://coldfrontmag.com/i-gather-the-limbs-of-osiris-notes-on-the-new-gnosticism/" target="_blank">here</a>.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-35671113594182419242013-09-16T14:47:00.004-04:002013-09-16T14:47:24.946-04:00Preface to Lissa WolsakMy review of <a href="http://criticalflame.org/preface-to-the-poetry-of-lissa-wolsak/" target="_blank"><i>Squeezed Light</i></a>, by Lissa Wolsak.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-31911773332526516532013-05-16T16:23:00.001-04:002013-05-16T16:30:52.845-04:00Conceptualism.... blah<br />
<b>I</b><br />
<br />
I have this animus against the "Conceptual Poetry" phenomenon. It's
not reasonable, it's not informed, it's just a visceral dislike. My
attitude reminds me of my attitude back in the '90s toward Language
Poetry. It's not fair, it's just there. So, being so terminally bored
by the ponderous pronouncements of Kenneth Goldsmith & Vanessa
Place - bored enough not to read much of it at all - I probably have
little light to shed on this matter. But I just thought I'd vent a
little.<br />
<br />
The whole movement seems to stem genetically
from philosophical discourse. The attitude of amused contempt displayed
by the Conceptuals toward ordinary "poems" seems similar to that of
Plato. Plato's worldview was fundamentally binary and divided. Mind
was separate from Body; the material Cosmos is an imperfect reflection
of the perfect, immaterial, transcendent, shaping Ideas which formed
it. Poetry, that unaccountable verbal what-not, that irrational chaos,
that disturber of Plato's perfect (authoritarian) Philosopher's State,
was to be dismissed, shunned, outlawed.<br />
<br />
The Conceptuals
don't want to outlaw poetry. But they seem to have a parallel bias
toward intellectual constructs over actual works of art. Their progress
through the authorizing institutions of Poetryland resembles Plato's
dream of a philosophical coup, a take-over of ordinary this-world
governance. King Kenny & Queen Vanessa, the Conceptual Royals,
institute their theoretical reign over the last tattered vestiges of the
post-Romantic "lyric I".<br />
<br />
Plato considered art to be
fundamentally a matter of imitation, a mirror (a tarnished mirror). But
it's possible to conceive of other framing analogies. One does not
have to accept Plato's dualistic cosmos, split between matter and mind.
Instead, one can imagine a more holistic universe, an "incarnational"
cosmos, in which mind and body, spirit and matter, may indeed be valid
ontological <i>distinctions</i> - but not irreconcilable divisions.
Reality may be less like a system, and more like a story. Poetry may be
less like a mirror, a reflection, and more like a building - a
construct rising out of the primal process of <i>naming</i>. The act of
giving a name to something involves more than reflection, mirroring.
Wallace Stevens called poetry "the sanction of life". I think this gets
closer to essence of the process of verbal shaping and ordering, its
final purpose, than Plato's formulae.<br />
<br />
The Conceptuals
would like us to believe they have a special theoretical angle on
poetry. They apply a pseudo-radical tactic : debunk the hoary Romantic
concept of poetry, as subjective, lyric expression, by attacking the
notion of personal identity itself. Replace composition with the
functionalism of meaningless, evacuated "text". They might do better by
recognizing that poetry is an integral activity which surpasses its own
(or the philosophers') theoretical abstractions. The Romantic theory
that lyric expression is the essence of poetry - a theory which also
stems from philosophical speculations, in this case those of J.S. Mill -
may be long out of date. But their attempt to replace poetic
"substance" by theoretical concept, combined with an attack on personal
subjectivity itself, seems more like a promotional gimmick than a real
change in poetry or poetics.<br />
<br />
<b>II</b><br />
<br />
It's fun to think about poetry, which presents a lot of mysteries, conundrums. It's fun to talk about it. But <i>making</i>
it is something else. The activity of making poems resists theoretical
frames & boxes. Take, for example, the postmodern thesis that
the lyric Subject is an illusion, a mirage of false consciousness driven
by repressed class-historical-material forces, or by a mis-perception
of the de-centered insubstantiality of the Real. Yet,<i> au contraire</i>,
what the actual labor of making poems reveals to the maker, is that the
poem is the outcome of a personal struggle with an unaccountable
something or someone <i>other</i> than the "lyric I". And the very
process of dialectical making - this struggle - tends to carve both poet
and "other" into high relief - to bring on a greater intensity of
conscious presence or being. The process itself becomes primary : a
process which involves the shedding or transformation of abstract
preconceptions of every kind.<br />
<br />
Poetry is conceptual by
the very nature of its medium, language - so the phrase "conceptual
poetry" is redundant. But the "concepts" in poetry are secondary. The
primary power of poetry resides in <i>names</i> : the originary
soundings of enunciation, evocation, expression. The words, that is,
the beginning and end of the poem, do not "represent" things : they <i>establish</i>
things. The dualisms of mind and body, thought and action, spirit and
matter are transmuted within a sort of explanatory harmonics : earth is
(figuratively speaking) transported to heaven. Prose and poetry,
innocence and experience, are not divided, but implicated with each
other, woven together in unbreakable knots.<br />
<br />
There are a
lot of anti-poetic forces at work within American Poetryland. There
have been for a while. Groups with agendas to promote at the expense of
actual poetry. But poetry is a stubborn, resistant, ineradicable
thicket of laborious making. It will not be undone by superficial
theoretical make-overs. Notions like the "obsolescent lyric Subject"
are glib reductions from a much more complex actuality. Strong poetry
actually builds on the "I" of the solitary lyric - branches out from
this seed into more expansive forms - dialogue, satire, narrative, epic,
drama... The whole ancient "wheel of Virgil" (eclogue/georgic/epic)
still awaits contemporary fulfillments.<br />
<br />
<b>III </b><br />
<br />
This annoyance with Conceptual Poetics... could it be because I'm
jealous? Doubt it. Because I'm secretly one of them? Possible, I
guess. I certainly like to speculate & natter on endlessly <i>about </i>"poetry", as every reader of this blog already knows. <br />
<br />
Walking
along Morris Ave. on my way to the library on a brilliant mid-May
morning, I asked myself what is my concept of poetry? And I thought, I
conceive of poetry, and art generally, as a sort of disk, or circle. A
circle, in turn, can be conceived as an infinite series of congruent
half-circles, each bounded or held together by an invisible straight
line (its diameter), the center point of which is also the center of the
circle as a whole.<br />
<br />
Follow that? The half-moon shape
of a semi-circle resembles a bridge, or a bow held taut by a
bow-string. This circle, then, is a round of infinite half-moons or
bridges.<br />
<br />
The bow held by the string is an ancient
metaphor for metaphor. For Metaphysical "wit" : the yoking-together of
contraries (night and day) in harmony (think of Hart Crane's symbol of
his <i>Bridge</i> : "power in repose"). Harmony is the mean between
extremes : the force that makes peace between warring opposites, the
magic alchemy which transmutes <i>difference</i> into <i>complementarity</i>.<br />
<br />
Of course this is a fundamental aesthetic concept, underlying some of the great monuments of Modernist poetry (Crane's <i>Bridge</i>; Eliot's Chinese vase, in <i>Four Quartets</i>, still moving in its stillness, "at the still point of the turning world").<br />
<br />
But
then of course the time of modernism has passed, and postmodernity is
here. The atrocious 20th century has eroded modernism's idealizations,
its heroic icons of order and power. We recognize the irrational
violence, the sense of global/cosmic displacement, the total futility of
human grandeur as never before. Violent History (gloomy Spengler's <i>metier</i>) is the master frame - bracketing all our rusty icons, our ideals, of what is good and pleasant to behold.<br />
<br />
But
I'm not surrendering my magic circle, my secret totem, my spell. We
only need to expand the two prongs of these moon-calipers, to enclose a
wider, deeper spectrum of opposing forces. Art is meshed in a circle
with Life - the circle of human seasons, of birth and death, weakness
and strength, suffering and joy. We try to remember and seek to
re-establish that Golden Age which lingers somewhere in the heart of a
happy child - out of an equilibrium of natural life, the shelter of the
family house, the "dwelling", the tent, the dome (a circle of circles).
These speculations are only another illustration of the worldview of
Russian Acmeism - Mandelstam's notion that poetry is fundamentally a
form of "domestic hellenism", a means by which mortal Man on earth
surrounds herself with "teleological warmth"- makes himself at home. It
lingers in Joseph Brodsky : "Man was put on this Earth for one purpose :
to make civilization." Art sinks back, sinks its foundations, into the
deeper circle of normative life, the most basic "golden mean", our
shared well-being. And a metaphysical hope remains in the poetic work
of "naming" : the nominative, inventive, perspicuous, originary act of <i>joining word and thing</i>.
Adam, in the beginning, gave names to every creature. The poet, in the
end, brings this process to fulfillment, a flower in bloom - its rose
window, circling in stone... the Word does not merely represent : the
Word <i>establishes</i> (anew).<br />
<br />
So I recall Emily Dickinson's aphorism for her poetic work : "my Circuit is Circumference".<br />
<br />
<b>IV </b><br />
<br />
Blah, blah, blah... not sure how much longer I can yoke these
contraries (Concept & Blah) without giving us all the blahs.
But I think of things, walking to work, so I'll try to note it down.<br />
<br />
Taking a long (wide?) view, Conceptual Poetics, Uncreative Writing, etc. may be irremediably trivial : yet it's curious how the <i>concept</i>, in connection with poetry, necessarily leads to the nearby endeavors of Literary Criticism. <i>What is poetry?</i>
has been the question. As it happens I've been wading through a
magisterial tome which used to be required reading for every English
major, M.H. Abrams' <i>The Mirror and the Lamp</i>. A historical study
of critical theories of poetry, focused on the Romantic era, but
analyzing it as one phase in a development stretching back to Plato and
forward (for him) to the New Criticism of the 20th century (his own
era). And maybe beyond (I'm less than half way through).<br />
<br />
For Abrams, the interesting thing is how the history of critical
theories about poetry (in the West, anyway) reveals a procession of
world-views, of philosophical eras, of chapters in the "Western mind",
which determine in every way the specific aesthetic notions - about
poetry and art in general - of each era. Abrams develops a simple
diagram, with "the Work" (the poem) at the center, from which arrows
extend in 3 directions - "World", "Audience", "Poet" - which correspond,
respectively, to 3 succeeding approaches to poetry : Mimetic,
Pragmatic, Expressive. (These in turn correspond to particular leading
theorists : Plato/Aristotle for the mimetic; Horace and the
neo-classical authors of the 18th century for the pragmatic; and the
Romantics for the expressive.) A fourth theoretical mode, which
corresponds to the "Work" alone, Abrams calls "Objective". I haven't
gotten to those chapters yet, but I think he's referring to 20th-century
Modernist and New Critical approaches, which highlight the integral,
autotelic, self-contained "objectivity" of the work-in-itself.<br />
<br />
Still awake, dear blahdom companions?<br />
<br />
You
get a sense, reading Abrams, of poetry as an ongoing, curious
phenomenon, a puzzle, a conundrum, around which thinkers down the
centuries have tried to attach their conceptual pincers. With only
partial success ; the thing remains a riddle, and what critics say about
it often says more about assumptions and enthusiasms of their own era,
than about this elusive what-not itself. And the pattern of Abrams'
argument seems to be leading toward some kind of crux, or cul-de-sac,
since if you walk through his historical chart geometrically, you see a
kind of swirl or spiral, of theories - absorbing the outer three in
succession (imitative, pragmatic, expressive) and then turning inward to
the center, to the last element, the Work itself (objective theories).
Where do we go from here?<br />
<br />
Should we ask Helen Vendler?
Harold Bloom? The Academy of American Poets? A.W.P., maybe? or the
Poetry Foundation? I asserted previously in this little series that
poetry does more than represent reality - it (somehow) <i>establishes</i> same. But I want to distinguish this phenomenon itself from its professional American expert <i>establishers </i>of literary <i>establishments</i>. Poetry tends to get buried under the eager thundering of its mobs of advocates, all trained in their various ways to<i> integrate literature into society</i>, to<i> promote the arts</i>, to <i>laud, praise and p.r. its established practitioners</i>
under compost piles of laurels and mountains of award grants. It's a
gradual smothering process out of which swarms of compost-insects rise
and dance and do battle (winners & losers & bettors
& publicists & kibbitzers). Bye-bye, poetry. Hello,
symposia, festivals & funeral orations.<br />
<br />
Much has changed in the 70 years or so since M.H. Abrams composed his subtle <i>summa</i>
of Romantic poetics. The critical ground has shifted, or given way
completely. Postmodernity rejects the unproblematic essentialism of all
critical terms. History and cultural identity are relativistic,
contested fields of competing discourses. The New Critical icon of the
"poem itself" shattered and crumbled quite a while ago. Ron Silliman,
the Language Poet, for example, pronounced that "there is no such thing
as poetry - only poetries." So-called avant-garde programs (Flarf, the
Charles Bernstein Unit, Uncreative Writing, etc.) are structurally
self-corroding, designed and promoted through tongue-in-cheek
technique. Sincerity is for simpletons. In a sense, these
theory-driven or concept-based movements (arm-in-arm with most of the
sub-critical poetries at which they poke fun) dramatize the
hollowing-out of traditional literary criticism - dancing on its grave.<br />
<br />
So...
? Abrams' spiraling template ends (I'm guessing) at the summit of the
"Work". The poet's job used to be to imitate Nature in a wise &
pleasing way (Mimetic). Then it evolved into an Horatian mode of
rhetorical suasion - leading readers to Goodness by way of Charm
(Pragmatic). Then the Romantics came along - resurrecting a
neo-Platonic (Plotinian) spirituality, replacing the attenuated Deism of
the rationalist Enlightenment with a new enthusiasm, grounded in the
lamp of divine Imagination (Expressive). Finally, once the ruinations
of industrialism and war put paid to Romantic ideals, new forces of
reactionary/revolutionary Modernism arose, grounded in the autotelic
power of the Work itself (Objective). Then at last came the great
deconstructive fibrillations of the late 20th century. & here
we are.<br />
<br />
Versions of all five of these approaches are still with us. The whole Coliseum of professional American literary <i>praxis</i>
continually justifies itself through apologetics based on some or all
of these critical angles. (Mimetic : " Poet X provides an excruciating
but finally enthralling account of what it's like to live in Y."
Pragmatic : "Poet J reminds us, with moving memories of home, that we
need to return to our roots." Expressive : "Poet Q is a magician, an <i>alchemiste du Verbe </i>-
revealing a wonderworld of fantastic visions." Objective : "Poet Z is
an uncompromising formalist, who cannot be tagged with any of the
current labels. Neither traditionalist nor experimental, her austere,
formidable style is literally incomparable." Postmodern : "Poet M.
unravels poetry from his shoelaces down, and builds it up again - as <i>video</i>.")<br />
<br />
Yet
poetry, the thing itself, slithers along like Montale's eel, some
subterranean life-force, beneath the flimsy fabrications, the droning
roar of the pros of the status quo. Some of the most gifted
20th-century poets, including Stevens, Crane and Berryman, struggled
against the complacent New Critical <i>dicta</i> regarding the autotelic
"poem itself". They were searching for some firmer sanction. Stevens,
often portrayed as the paragon of a neo-Romantic sublime (Bloom) or as a
master of the self-pleasing, self-sufficient work of art (Vendler),
might instead be understood as someone engaged in a relentless, rather
tense intellectual struggle to find a justification for his work, for
the making of poems.<br />
<br />
Poetry and worldview : I think we
can say these depend on each other. But maybe the poet doesn't so much
articulate or express a worldview, as <i>respond, obliquely, to the existent worldview, the reigning zeitgeist</i>.
And maybe within this response are encrypted some intimations of
futurity - of a future human ambience, or common sense of things, <i>which hasn't happened yet. </i>Thus when I proposed that the poetic Word not only represents, but<i> establishes</i>, maybe this could be understood in this kind of future tense. Here I'm reminded once more of Emily Dickinson....<br />
<br />
I dwell in Possibility--
<br />
A fairer House than Prose--
<br />
More numerous of Windows--
<br />
Superior--for Doors--<br />
<br />
Of Chambers as the Cedars--
<br />
Impregnable of Eye--
<br />
And for an Everlasting Roof
<br />
The Gambrels of the Sky--<br />
<br />
Of Visitors--the fairest--
<br />
For Occupation--This--
<br />
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
<br />
To gather Paradise--
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-23209344209482409402012-11-26T12:16:00.003-05:002018-07-23T12:55:32.351-04:00Wiman's Mandelstam (and Mine)Here's a link to my <i>Critical Flame</i> <a href="http://www.criticalflame.org/verse/1112_gould.htm" target="_blank">review</a> of <i>Stolen Air</i> - a book of versions/translations of Osip Mandelstam, by Christian Wiman. Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-86912461544378688342011-05-20T15:05:00.004-04:002018-07-23T12:38:48.812-04:00Rapture and Poetry<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">My time is still unbounded.<br />And I have accompanied the rapture of the universe<br />As muted organ pipes<br />Accompany a woman's voice.</span><br />
- Osip Mandelstam, trans. by James Greene<br />
<br />
Until today (the day before the predicted Event) I haven't paid any attention to all the yap about <span style="font-style: italic;">The Rapture</span>. It seems to be of more (comic) interest to the irreligious gabbosphere, than to <span style="font-style: italic;">soi-disant</span> "people of faith."<br />
<br />
One way to think about some statements of Jesus in the Gospels about the Day of Judgement, and what is called "the Rapture" (ie., to paraphrase : <span style="font-style: italic;">keep watch : no one knows when the end is coming : "on that day, one will be taken, and one will be left behind"</span> etc.), is that they fall within a general Gospel/Biblical emphasis on a distinction between soul & body, spirit & flesh, invisible & visible, heaven & earth, eternity & time. Contrary to prevalent stereotypes - most of them originating with Christian monastics & preachers themselves - this distinction, in both Judaism & Christianity, is just that : a <span style="font-style: italic;">distinction</span>, no more no less. It does not mean a <span style="font-style: italic;">denigration</span> of the earth, the body, the visible, the flesh, etc. All these things from the latter half of the equation are to be accepted with joy & gratitude as gifts of the Creator. What the emphasis on this distinction of Spirit is meant to do is to restore the balance : to bring humanity back to spiritual wholeness & health, in a world overwhelmed by the fleeting & changing things of "this world." Thus the reminder of an End-Time - & the focus on individual alertness & awareness (ie. "let your loins be girded", for "one shall be taken & one left behind") - is again a kind of <span style="font-style: italic;">memento mori</span>, and a reminder of the <span style="font-style: italic;">nearness</span> (though invisible) of the "kingdom of heaven."<br />
<br />
This is just one way (a low-key, common-sense way) to approach what is implied by the "Day of Judgement" exhortations in the Gospels. But I want to foreground this distinction (earth/heaven, body/spirit, visible/invisible) as an entry into what follows. I want to talk a little about poetry and "rapture". Osip Mandelstam points toward this theme, in the stanza above - from a late poem, written (not long before his final trip to Siberia & death) after listening (from exile in provincial Voronezh) to a recording of Marian Anderson, singing gospel music on Moscow Radio. Poets - in their visionary, enthusiastic, prophetic, charismatic, shamanic modes - have been associated with "raptures" from the beginning of time (isn't <span style="font-style: italic;">rhapsode</span> a name for "poet" in Greek?). Plato memorably contrasted the "reasonable" discourse of the philosophers with the Muse-inspired, unpredictable flights of poets. The ancient kinship between <span style="font-style: italic;">poem & oracle</span> was a cross-cultural given. What is involved here is the charisma of <span style="font-style: italic;">possession</span> - of the in-coming of the God, the Divine, the Spirit : of a somatic/intellectual experience which transports the poet into a "harmonic" state, resulting in <span style="font-style: italic;">song</span> : the expression, the narration of the holistic, visionary experience itself : Mandelstam's "rapture of the universe." We are reminded here of the apostle Paul's account of his sudden transport to "the third heaven" (ie. above the clouds, and also beyond the stars), where he saw things he could not put into words; and of Dante's journey to Paradise with Beatrice (which explicitly adumbrates Paul's confession). These are what you might call canonical examples in the history of "rapture." They are akin as well to the Gospel episode, when the disciples witness Jesus' Transfiguration - standing on the hill with Elijah and Moses - from earthly man into heavenly being.<br />
<br />
Many people - maybe everyone, really - have experienced, at one time or another, brushes with the <span style="font-style: italic;">inexplicable</span> : the uncanny, the marvelous, the serendipitous, the wonderful, the mysterious... the spiritual, the numinous, the <span style="font-style: italic;">holy</span>. Encounters or events which one cannot (or will not) reduce to some rational explanation or verbal equivalent. For the rare saints & holy people among us, ordinary life, whatever it brings, is perhaps transformed into the "bread & wine" of spiritual understanding : for the rest of us, most of the time, we're O.K. if we can just stave off trouble & get through another day.... <br />
<br />
But I've had my share of such rare & extraordinary experiences. Some of them have profoundly shaped the direction my life has taken. As I've written about before - when I was about 20 yrs old (in 1972-3) I underwent a series of seismic psychological events - uncanny, charismatic experiences - which seemed to mingle faith, vision & poetry. As a result I was shaken out of my practical life and rational pursuits : I dropped out of college for three years; I hitchhiked around the country (& England) in a kind of cloud of pondering & meditation on the mystery of things. & in a sense I have never stopped seeking that understanding : in 1973 I was brought up short by a kind of rational enigma, which spurred my curiosity about metaphysical, spiritual things. But I misrepresent what I went through, if I narrate this as merely some sort of gnostic search for occult knowledge. It was really an experience of being moved & changed in the heart of my personality : morally & emotionally as well as intellectually. My <span style="font-style: italic;">life</span> was changed.<br />
<br />
One of the consequences of this - & because what I went through was all tangled up in my mind with my sense of myself as a poet, with a literary vocation - was that I was unable to return to academics & the pursuit of a career in a "normal" way. I felt I had been through something which no teacher or classroom could explain to me; moreover, I felt motivated to find a way to express what I was "seeing" & learning directly in poetry. Poetry, vision & experience seemed irreducibly entwined. And I think at least one part of the reason I've worked at a kind of low-level job in a library for 25 years, is that I needed that independence from any kind of "worldly" demands on my ability to express things in poetry. I couldn't <span style="font-style: italic;">teach</span> writing, I couldn't <span style="font-style: italic;">study</span> or pursue an academic degree in a "sensible" way, because the intellectual & vocational responsibilities involved would be more than I could bear. (I realize there might be other, less charitable ways of evaluating such diffidence on my part. I'm sure there are many sides to it - "character issues"... I'm explaining just one of them.)<br />
<br />
But setting aside the autobiographical vein : what I mean to suggest is that these extraordinary events - these strange spiritual promptings (nudgings?) - have provided me food for thought now for a long time : a food which has never run out. & over the past few weeks & months I've sensed a sort of integration in my mind, of longstanding notions & new researches - connected with the long poem I've been struggling with (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=xm7JKjema7oC#v=onepage&q&f=false">Lanthanum</a>). Integration, synthesis... it's a sense of certain ideas becoming substantial, & harmonized with each other, so that they provide a sort of confirmation, a weight or substance, http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifwhich I can carry around with me... in a state of mild <span style="font-style: italic;">rapture & joy</span>! <br />
<br />
This is really not easy to explain without degrading it in the process. I've been searching for images & rational analogues of something at the root of the poem (<span style="font-style: italic;">Lanthanum</span>), which was an unusual dream I had a few years ago about the Gateway Arch monument, in St. Louis. I've been reading about architecture (Padovan,<span style="font-style: italic;"> Proportion</span>; Van der Laan; Smith, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Dome</span>). I've been reading various things on the literature of the Holy Grail (<span style="font-style: italic;">Gemstone of Paradise</span> by Murphy was especially interesting, as was an old book by Helen Adolf, <span style="font-style: italic;">Visio Pacis</span>). I've been reading some theology, especially the Byzantine church father, Maximus the Confessor. I've been reading some physics & cosmology. From these & many other books I've been drawing nourishment, I think, for a sort of productive <span style="font-style: italic;">way of seeing</span>, or way of understanding things in general. & out of all this there was not a single "Eureka!" moment - but a kind of drawn-out, successive, gradual, gradually-expanding & growing & strengrthening <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">E-U-R-E-K-A !</span>-sense</span>... a real "rapture of the universe", as Mandelstam put it.<br />
<br />
How can I <span style="font-style: italic;">say</span> it? I can't. I've been trying to say it & express it & sketch it out in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Lanthanum</span> sequence & other poems. But since tomorrow's supposed to be "The Rapture," let me on this special occasion try to articulate my own intellectual joy-glee-rapture as I seem to feel it & see it.<br />
<br />
Murphy, in his book on the grail, sets himself the task of explaining why the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (in <span style="font-style: italic;">Parzival</span>) describes the grail as a "stone." He explains how the tomb of Christ was considered to be carved out of stone - to be a rock tomb. He explains that the Church began sanctifying portable eucharistic tables, so that pilgrims & soldiers could receive Communion even away from churches proper. These tables were little boxes or stands, made out of stone & gems, beautifully designed, with small hollow sections - miniature replicas of the Holy Sepulchre - which held the sanctified eucharistic bread (Christ's body). He shows how Wolfram's descriptions of the grail seemed based on such portable eucharistic containers - Murphy even discovers a specific box (in a museum in Bamberg, Germany) which he believes may have served as Wolfram's model. <br />
<br />
The implication of these affinities is that the grail is equated with Christ's eucharistic Body : which itself (the eucharist) stems from, is <span style="font-style: italic;">part</span> of, the body of Christ himself (in the Sepulchre, and resurrected on Easter). The Sepulchre today rests under a domed building in Jerusalem. Domical structures (as Smith relates) are a very basic & global figure for the human "home" (being a microcosmic representation - from nomadic tent structures to Hagia Sophia - of the "dome of heaven" arching over the earth). Thus we have the image of the mortal/risen Man/God - Jesus - located in the symbolic "center of the earth" (Jerusalem) - beneath the microcosmic dome-home - & replicated in a portable eucharistic "grail", available to anyone who seeks it.<br />
<br />
Thus far we are discoursing on symbolic-religious symbols (which, taken by itself, could be criticized, I suppose, as a species of mystico-antiquarianism). So let me try to explain how I understand a sort of philosophical analogue or parallel to these symbols. And I want also to try to relate all this to <span style="font-style: italic;">poetry</span>.<br />
<br />
I think the human mind & imagination have an inborn orientation toward <span style="font-style: italic;">understanding</span>. The discipline of science subjects this drive, this orientation, to the demands of analysis, experiment & proof : but the drive itself - to understand - came first. The mind - the imagination - is synthetic : aiming for wholes, for completeness, for the <span style="font-style: italic;">integration</span> of disparate facts & experiences. The urge to wonder seems primordial to me : and what it answers, what it responds to, is an awareness of the basic difference between <span style="font-style: italic;">nothing</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">something</span>. The vast universe - <span style="font-style: italic;">something</span> - stands against nothingness, non-existence. I remember pondering these things in adolescence - but it probably starts in childhood : wondering, questioning the origin of life, of the universe.<br />
<br />
Further, I think there is a basic consequence of this original human wondering, which is a state of what used to be called "natural piety". It is a deep and mostly-unconscious <span style="font-style: italic;">gratitude for being</span> : an attitude of thanksgiving for the joy of mere existence, of being-alive. Of course, many things (we all know them) work to crumble & debilitate this attitude of gratitude : but this doesn't mean it's not still lurking there, beneath all our fears & disappointments. It is too basic, too primordial, to be destroyed.<br />
<br />
Now let me try to pull some of these threads together toward some sort of conclusion. Here's what I say : the true "holy grail" is a kind of <span style="font-style: italic;">portable state of awareness</span>. An awareness of what? A sense of an underlying harmony. What is this harmony? It is a harmony of proportion : a proportion (ratio, <span style="font-style: italic;">logos</span>) between the human & the divine, between humanity & God. In a stance of gratitude. Gratitude stemming from an awareness of the "createdness" of the visible universe : of something born out of nothing. And not only that : but also gratitude stemming from an awareness of <span style="font-style: italic;">this central proportion itself</span> : that human persons - in the "architecture" or "ecology" (the dome) of their lived lives on earth - represent visible <span style="font-style: italic;">images</span> of divine Personhood. The earth, as Mandelstam, put it, is a "mansion" - & we are "God's grateful guests". This is a very basic (& fairly traditional) insight - shared by another Petersburg poet, Gumilev, & by Anna Akhmatova : it was part of the "chaste vision" of the Acmeist poetic project of the early 20th century. On this most simple foundation of gratitude or thanksgiving, the whole normative structure of civilization is seen to be constructed. It is stated most clearly in the Gospels, when Jesus explains that all the law & commandments hang on two basic commands : "To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind & strength, and what is like unto it, to love your neighbor as yourself." This is the core activation of the most basic sense of faith in a divine or metaphysical or dream or dramatic order of cosmic reality : this is the "bread & wine" of the poetic vision of the universe - its "rapture." Under the estrangement of time, and change & mortality, this is the promise of a kind of Easter metamorphosis : a resurrection of the mind & spirit through a mysterious Approach of living Consciousness - the dramatic victory of "sacred history" - its epic plot, you might say - its "divine comedy" : the victory of spirit over matter, of immortality over death. This, you could say, is what Mary Magdalen "saw" when she found Jesus - "the gardener" - near the empty tomb. In another late poem, Mandelstam put this kind of deep rapture into words again, a poem which is one of my all-time favorites (translated here by Richard & Elizabeth McKane). The "clarity of a concept" - <span style="font-style: italic;">this is it</span>.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">To Natasha Shtempel</span><br />
<br />
1.<br />
<br />
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,<br />
with uneven, sweet steps,<br />
she walks just ahead<br />
of her swift friend and her fiance.<br />
The restraining freedom<br />
of her inspiring disability pulls her along,<br />
but it seems that her walking is held back<br />
by the clarity of a concept :<br />
that this spring weather<br />
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault,<br />
and that this is an eternal beginning.<br />
<br />
2.<br />
<br />
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,<br />
their every step is a loud mourning,<br />
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,<br />
and be first to greet the dead.<br />
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,<br />
and it is impossible to part from them.<br />
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,<br />
and the day after, just an outline.<br />
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.<br />
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.<br />
What will be is only a promise.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-46855723368217588122011-05-09T16:48:00.000-04:002018-07-23T12:38:35.550-04:00Pushkin & US (U.S.)<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Individual poets, whatever their imperfections may be, are driven all their lives by that inner companion of the conscience which is, after all, the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds. I speak of a companion of the conscience because to every faithful poet, the faithful poem is an act of conscience. </span> - Wallace Stevens<br />
<br />
Have been reading interesting book on Pushkin and other Russian poets of his generation (<span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=9dD4E1Yv8dsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22esoteric+tradition+in+russian+romantic%22&source=bl&ots=Y_N_vnQrqQ&sig=sheq9kihG5h4ezKffbsREfnXjfo&hl=en&ei=duORTbvvEsm4twex2rBY&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false">The esoteric tradition in Russian Romantic literature</a></span>, by Lauren Leighton).<br />
<br />
Leighton explores the background in Freemasonry which, for the poets, included some knowledge & application of numerology, "cabalistics", and other esoteric codes in their poetry. She quotes Pushkin : "How fun it is to guide one's lines / with ciphers precisely row by row." & she investigates the incredibly sophisticated numerical design in Pushkin's gambling story, "The Queen of Spades". (Anna Akhmatova : "how complex, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Queen of Spades</span>. Layer upon layer.") <br />
<br />
But the numbers games of Pushkin and fellow poets (such as Bestuzhev, .a.k.a. "Marlinsky") were motivated not only by aesthetic "fun", but by a need for secrecy. In the early 19th century, revolution was in the air - Romantic poets (inspired by French & American models) expressed heroic aspirations for liberty, democracy, the end of autocracy.... & naturally, came up against the Czar & the secret police (cf. the Decembrist revolt, on which Leighton elaborates).<br />
<br />
In fact, what strikes me, reading this study, is how (apparently) seamlessly knit-together were aesthetics and civics in the vocation of <span style="font-style: italic;">poet</span> - in the poet's self- and public image. Poets were (re-)tellers of popular tales, romantic novelists, <span style="font-style: italic;">vox populi</span>, "public intellectuals." They were also tangled up in webs of intrigue and complicity with the Czarist government, and the small (& murky) world of elite aristocracy. The oppressive might of a centralized, unaccountable government, in dialectical fashion, clarified the moral position of the liberal intelligentsia : & this continued even into the 20th century (see Mandelstam's remark - in one of his essays(?) - confirming his "sacred vow to the Fourth Estate").<br />
<br />
I started thinking in a vague way, walking to work this morning, just how much this world of poets & literature differs from our own. Here, today, in the U.S., we tend to take political liberty for granted : the temptation is not so much in the direction of conspiracy or extremism, as toward a complacent kind of factionalism. The basic principles of government are not in question; instead, the debates are over how to apply them, and on what ethical-pragmatic-political grounds. We do not have so much a "liberal intelligentsia" as a political class, divided by party affiliation & allegiance to contrasting ideals. We have a nation polarized by partisanship, more interested in one-upping the opposition than in finding common ground. We have professional political careers maintained primarily by lobbyists & the media. Meanwhile, in poetry world, we have a sort of institutionalized "poetry class", dedicated to the idea of differentiating "poetry" as a special kind of substance and activity which requires special treatment, and distinct professional-academic institutions for its support. What is involved is a sort of abdication of the role of "poet" as free intellectual, of the poet as engaged <span style="font-style: italic;">writer</span>. <br />
<br />
I don't mean to assert this in order to cry "j'accuse" : I'm just as implicated in this abdication as anyone else - perhaps more so. I'm just trying to understand it. We hear the seasonal calls for <span style="font-style: italic;">more political engagement</span> from poets and poetry : poetry should be more clear, more sincere, more virtuous, more <span style="font-style: italic;">popular</span>. Meanwhile, in counterpoint, we have the seasonal & generational developments of <span style="font-style: italic;">special techniques & styles</span> by means of which poetry is supposedly enabled to promote a more enlightened politics (cf., in their various ways, Language Poetry, the Cambridge School, Flarf, Conceptual Poetry...) . <br />
<br />
Somehow I find something basic missing from both these wings of the poetry scene. Poetry is only hobbled by a dependence on either institutions or technique. Both of these approaches reduce poetry to a craft, a career, or a cabal. I tend, rather, to conceive of poetry as a<span style="font-style: italic;"> gift</span> and a <span style="font-style: italic;">spirit</span>. The free-standing autonomy of the process of making art (& poems) is allied with imagination, a profoundly <span style="font-style: italic;">synthetic</span> faculty of human intelligence. Yet this constellation of forces is not driven or motivated toward <span style="font-style: italic;">more</span> autonomy (ie., indifference), but in the other direction : toward deeper <span style="font-style: italic;">participation</span>. Here art is allied with science as free intellectual activity : and it's this essential freedom which allows art & poetry to bridge partisan divides, to question & evaluate political slogans & vested interests, to find common ground (often ironic) between supposedly bitter ideological opponents.<br />
<br />
The kind of literary activity I am idealizing can only be developed on the fertile ground of literary tradition. We have to get beyond the knee-jerk experimentalism of the <span style="font-style: italic;">nouveau-nouveau</span> (which is profoundly shallow & uninformed), as well as from the marketable brands of traditionalism which reduce poetry to a set of learnable skills. Poetry is a gift & a calling toward engagement. Craft is inseparable from intellect & worldview, as larger, holistic dimensions. On this basis, the dignity of poetry is something sustained by the inner, moral discipline of individual poets (integrity : Stevens' "conscience"), and granted by society at large : it is not an attribute of professional networking or social cliques.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-81072668528238314722011-05-09T16:44:00.002-04:002018-07-23T12:36:51.604-04:00Odd High Formalism<span style="font-weight: bold;">ODD HIGH FORMALISM</span><br />
<br />
As the talking wheels of American Poetry World wring their hands over various issues (including hand-wringing), and gaze up at the unanswering blue sky crying "whither Poetry?" and such, I would like to outline, briefly, my prediction - not prescription, but prediction - for the general shape of the future, based on the general shape of the past. The past and future of American poetry lies with OHF, or <span style="font-style: italic;">Odd High Formalism</span>.<br />
<br />
Not "New Formalism," a 90s movement which called for a return to formal rhyme and meter and received forms (sonnets, sestinas, etc.). The generally reactionary attitude of that trend inhibited more profound experiments with form : as long as we went back to the good old tennis net so sadly neglected since Robert Frost's day, poetry would revive... no. <br />
<br />
Nor do I refer to the formalism of the professional avant-garde, primarily represented by the descendants of the NY School, the Language Poets, and various offshoots of experimental Modernism. The formalism of these groups was terribly overshadowed by two influential & contradictory notions drawn from 20th-century philosophy and "theory," namely : 1) reality is <span style="font-style: italic;">constituted </span>by language, and 2) language does not, cannot, really represent or refer to anything outside itself. It's not hard to see where such ideas might lead with regard to poetry : straight into very formal but also highly-mannered self-enclosed & solipsistic literary entities ("language poems" & such).<br />
<br />
The perceived ailments & frailty of contemporary American poetry - it's academic effeteness, its anemic detachment from the larger, living world, its introverted fishbowl solipsism & narcissism, its loss of a public audience & the ordinary reader, etc. & so on - might be remedied by a clearer recognition of the main tradition in American poetry, which is none other than... <span style="font-style: italic;">Odd High Formalism</span>.<br />
<br />
What is the nature of Odd High Formalism? Here I can only sketch its main elements in a minimal way. Perhaps the best way to understand OHF is to consider the kinship between poetry, music, and public dancing. An era's leading styles of social dancing are paralleled in its poetry. A generation ago, in a series of books, Alastair Fowler analyzed the design properties of Renaissance poetry - combining number mysticism, seasonal or calendrical measures of time, the occasional thematics of major holidays, public events or persons. Poems were shaped to mimic the stately, ceremonial movements of social dancing. Think, on the other hand, about today's social dancing styles : mostly anarchic wiggle, bump & jump. & though fancier, more formal dancing seem to be making a comeback, it is still mostly limited to individual dancing couples, rather than the elaborate group dances of the past. And <span style="font-style: italic;">anarchic wiggle & hop</span> seems like a pretty fair description of the formal approach of much contemporary poetry. <br />
<br />
The poet launches into the poem : the audience or reader has no idea where it's going in a formal sense. It's free, it's experimental... it's <span style="font-style: italic;">of the moment</span>, it's <span style="font-style: italic;">raw</span>, it's <span style="font-style: italic;">real</span>... these are the current values. Poetry wants to <span style="font-style: italic;">blend in</span> with the prosaic activities of the world around it. It wants to be liked for blending in. But it will never be liked on this basis : it will only be held in slight contempt. Odd High Formalism accentuates poetry's difference from prose and ordinary life, by lifting its intricate and elegant formalities to another, higher, more intense dimension. Not a dimension of obscurity or elitism : rather a realm of highly-articulate order and elegance. The world of hip-hop and rap is closer to the ancient and Renaissance sense of poetry than anything being produced by the mainstream poetry factories. One may reject the hip-hop artist's often bleak, violent, selfish, cynical and misogynist worldview, yet still learn from hip-hop's focus on formal differentiation and intricacy (the meter, the rhymes, the word-play) - its <span style="font-style: italic;">separation</span> from prose.<br />
<br />
Most of the really great American poets of the past have been Odd High Formalists : that is, they have developed a highly-ordered & articulate formality which easily distinguishes itself from prose of any kind. It is inventive, personal, and suited to its own unique aims, rather than patterned on traditional schemes for tradition's sake (hence its "oddness"). Think of Marianne Moore's <span style="font-style: italic;">sui generis</span> formal patterns; Elizabeth Bishop's elegant & playful designs; Emily Dickinson's construction of a poetic universe within a strict and minimalist formal pattern; Whitman's careful development of his own unique cosmic-bardic metrical form and manner; Melville's re-invention of the philosophical travel poem; Poe's highly-mathematical and calculated sense of poetry's rhythmic/tonal mesmerism; Hart Crane's re-invention of the Pindaric praise-song; John Berryman's manic formalism in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Dream Songs</span>... the list could go on for pages. What these poets have in common is a bold - almost extreme - conception of poetry as an intense, highly-differentiated formal dance of sound, meaning, theme, occasion. The OHF poetry of the future will set a new standard of <span style="font-style: italic;">difficulty</span>. This is not a poetry that will "blend in" easily with the prose world : it will be <span style="font-style: italic;">very much harder to write</span> than what is offered at present in schools & literary communities. It will have to <span style="font-style: italic;">distinguish itself </span>- by its formal qualities - from prose. It will have to offer a very high and strange dancing music, a <span style="font-style: italic;">relief</span> - both from prose and from the mannered allusive theoretical academic obscurities which passed for "difficulty" in the last century. Only American <span style="font-style: italic;">Odd High Formalism</span> will set the measures of the dance to come.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-64945550389982698572010-12-03T14:42:00.001-05:002018-07-23T12:38:24.538-04:00Retro-Futurism and its Children<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">1</span><br />
<br />
In an early essay, Mandelstam wrote : "for an artist, a worldview is a tool or a means, like a hammer in the hands of a mason, and the only reality is the work of art itself." On the face of it, an eminently modernist sentiment. On a similar branch, Wallace Stevens, in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words", writes : "... above everything else, poetry is words... A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words." Yet for both these poets, "worldview" stood for something more : call it "reality", call it "truth", call it "history", it is that dimension which exists distinct from, and in tandem with, poetry itself. For both of these poets, the relation between poetry and "worldview" helped determine the poet's attitude or stance within/toward the wider culture - & this was something both of them took very seriously. What is the role of the poet? What (if any) is the social sanction for poetry? For Stevens, these questions prompted a sustained, even relentless search for understanding. For Mandelstam, they underwrote his forthright, polemical stance toward the "worldviews" which grounded contemporary Russian literature & politics : his commitment to Acmeism vs. Futurism, to "unofficial" vs. "official" writing, to intellectual freedom vs. loyalty to the State.<br />
<br />
In today's America (as in yesterday's) we sense an absolute allegiance to the values of success, achievement, superiority, wealth, fame... We are a nation of driven, workaholic strivers, a people obsessed with those mechanical short-cuts to bliss known as "gadgets." We are surrounded by tall wobbly ladders of rules, protocols, steps, points, scores, levels, etc. etc., which everybody is eager to either follow or circumvent. In fact the rules offer themselves as intriguing & ambivalent amalgams of both obedience & circumvention. Kafka would understand. Lots of contemporary novels are structured around such Janus-faced rules. The only rule this nation descended from the Puritans seems to have forgotten, is an unambiguous one, a rule those Puritans held sacrosanct : to keep holy the Sabbath; ie., to rest from striving, to sit still, to be, simply, thankful for existence...<br />
<br />
I don't exempt myself from these typical American obsessions (or demonic possessions). I'm just as driven as the next scurrilous wannabe-squirrel. But I'm interested in how "worldview" coalesces with "poetry" in forms which sometimes offer resistance. I am skeptical of the culture of MFA networks & "workshop" self-improvement; I am equally skeptical of the worldviews suggested by literary experimentalism & the busy, much-loved avant-garde. Both trends seem finally indistinguishable from the culture of hard-driving lemmings I have described. MFA systems offer poetry as something measurable & objective, a professional "field" one can pursue, step by vocational step, like a degree in law or engineering. Experimentalism promotes the aesthetics of the gimmick. We see this trend across the spectrum of literary publication, from the New Yorker to the tiniest lit-zine. This is the poetry of the one-shot deal, the hit, the gag, the stunt : its presence is pervasive, its technical versatility & wit are irreproachable & immediately "winning" (the whole aim, after all, is to be winning). The style involves speed, cunning, sarcasm, transparency, readability, immediacy : conversely, it downplays depth, feeling, continuity, profundity, complexity, irony... & because it draws on a now-traditional (& predictable) set of alienation-effects and scandalous subversions, I would christen this omnipresent set of techniques "retro-futurism".<br />
<br />
On the other hand, there is also a mode of resistance to the frantic polemical side-taking in poetry circles, which might be summarized as simply anti-theory . This is the strategy of the deliberately-inclusive, the dogmatically-uncritical and non-judgmental, the Big Tent approach, the cowbell "Come an' Get It!" communal-table method, the "just poetry, no ideas" attitude, the "just paint, no Cubism" mantra. No such thing as good or bad in art. The trouble with this entire approach is that it morphs so seamlessly into its opposite : the "this is what we're having for dinner so just eat it!" answer to all questions of value & taste. Do you really want to read this lousy poetry? With its shrunken, tattered & abused vocabulary, its second-hand & obvious ideas, its shallow or non-existent feeling? Its essential crudeness, its vulgarity - its aggression, its assault on human dignity? Is this what you want? This is the meal awaiting you in the Big Tent, friends. I think that underlying the all-inclusive, non-critical mode is a fundamental aestheticism : a set of art-for-art's-sake assumptions, a kind of monochrome vision, which cannot recognize the basic dialectic of art & worldview (which so absorbed Mandelstam & Stevens).<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">2</span><br />
<br />
Art & worldview. I have asserted their importance, their necessity : so where do I stand myself in this regard? But I have rambled at length & with much incoherence & tedium, elsewhere, on the subject of my own worldview : so here I will just suggest a possible avenue of pursuit.<br />
<br />
Eliot, Pound, Stevens : Medieval, Renaissance, Modern. As if in this trio we have a kind of exemplary recapitulation of the history of the West. Eliot the medieval man : for whom the measure of Man is only to be found in her relationship with God. Eliot's God is in many ways remote & elusive, and he compensates for this by emphasizing the objectivity of dogma, the absolute quality of both the articles of faith & the cultural traditions for which they are the foundation. Pound the Renaissance man : for whom "Man is the measure of all things." In such a situation, calm, peace & stability are elusive, & Pound compensates for this by emphasizing the objectivity of Nature, and the supremacy of the men of inherent power & natural wisdom (Malatesta, the Founding Fathers, Confucius...). Stevens the modern : for whom nature is fundamentally immeasurable & mysterious, and therefore Man-within-nature must imagine her own order (since order is to be found nowhere else).<br />
<br />
These are obviously over-simplifications. All three poets remain elusive themselves, their attitude & work can be read from all three cultural-historical "positions" (& more). As for my own worldview, I think I oscillate between something like Eliot's & something like Stevens' sense of things. What Stevens suggests - & which essentially modifies both Eliot's and Pound's tendency toward dogmatism - is the key role of the imagination : the imagination of the human species as a whole, as a kind of unity. In this Stevens descends directly from that earlier trio of poet-thinkers, from whom both Eliot & Pound took pains to distance themselves : Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats. What both Stevens & Eliot, in their greatest work, share with Coleridge & Wordsworth & Keats, is a recognition of the shaping power of the human mind within experience : that we live, as the Renaissance thinker Nicolas of Cusa wrote, in a "conjectural" world, a world of fundamentally human shaping. "The Word is Psyche," as Mandelstam put it. As for my own worldview, maybe I stand closest to Nicolas of Cusa, then : for this was someone who could synthesize & integrate both : 1) a Renaissance sense of the powers of the human mind, and 2) a recognition, an acknowledgment, of a loving relationship with a universal God, the ultimate ground of all existing things, who is also a "personal" Spirit (of whom Man is the "image & likeness").Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-32069851080876517022010-10-22T16:24:00.002-04:002018-07-23T12:38:08.336-04:00Reunion in Byzantium<br />
<br />
T.S. Eliot's famous concept, the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_of_sensibility">dissociation of sensibility</a>", articulated a benchmark for Modernist poetry : the new writing would seek to overcome that split between thought & feeling, reason & experience, sense & sensibility in literature, which was in part a consequence of the Enlightenment (see his essay, "The Metaphysical Poets"). <br />
<br />
Since at least the Romantic era, up to our own day, overcoming this basic division has been a project not only of the arts, but of certain sectors of science, social science, psychology & even politics. The dissociation of thought and feeling in literary style shares broad parallels with myriad polarities : theory/practice, reason/emotion, mind/body, intellect/sensation, thought/action, idea/thing, conscious/subconscious, human/animal, divine/human, male/female... and one could delineate the central motivation for numerous intellectual and socio-political agendas in the overcoming of one or another of these basic binaries.<br />
<br />
Central strands of ancient thought, on the other hand - both Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion, for example - insisted on the substantial actuality of, and necessity for, these basic polarities. Even with a "monistic" thinker like Aristotle, for whom polarities and distinctions were perhaps more epistemological than ontological - that is, they were abstracted <span style="font-style: italic;">aspects</span> of actual whole & unitary objects of knowledge - such <span style="font-style: italic;">differences</span> were nevertheless necessary for an adequate comprehension of the thing itself. For Plato, for the Biblical writers, reality was grounded in a central borderline : between intellect and sense. The intellect was aligned with the invisible and eternal : mind, soul, God or gods, changelessness, eternity, universality, Ideas. Sense was aligned with all the related polarities : body, movement, animality, change, things, mortality.<br />
<br />
Eliot's career can be seen (in simplified fashion) as following a certain trajectory : beginning with a <span style="font-style: italic;">literary</span> allegiance to the Metaphysical poets, motivated by a <span style="font-style: italic;">literary</span> strategy (to overcome the "dissociation" in style); and culminating in a personal conversion to Christianity, and the development of a sort of neo-medieval vision of the restoration of European culture <span style="font-style: italic;">in toto</span>. As such, his path can be seen as a recapitulation of the historical arc of ancient thought in general. For the central polarity between intellect and sense culminated, in the ancient world, in Byzantium : in a theological elaboration (and defense) of the Christian announcement. <br />
<br />
What that proclamation amounted to was this : there is an infinite distance between the invisible Creator and the creation he has made; there is a fundamental distinction to be drawn between divine intellect and mortal sense. Man divided himself from God by an original act of will : a turning from his intellectual source of being (God) to the things of sense (the material world). God, out of love for Man and his creation, intervened : becoming Man himself, in the Person of his Son. The Incarnation - and the person of Christ - is the <span style="font-style: italic;">matrix of union</span> for all the polarities, the center of human time and space. In the divine-providential process, the world-historic drama enacted by the Trinity, intellect and sense, mind and body, thought and feeling, mind and heart, sense and sensibility, one and many, order and chaos, wholeness and contingency, part and whole, male and female, individual and community.... all these polarities are reunited and harmonized - as Maximus the Confessor put it - "without separation and without confusion".<br />
<br />
We are some distance from Byzantium, today. For many, these concepts no longer have any meaningful reference in reality : they are allegorical, mythological formulae. This is understandable. <span style="font-style: italic;">Most</span> of the words we read, the signs we apprehend, skim by in a sort of abstract streaming.... only actual experience strikes us as whole, as real. And we are rather far from the actualities, and the thought-worlds, of Palestine in the time of Emperor Augustus. <br />
<br />
Our scepticism (or incomprehension) is also understandable from another, theological, angle, if you will. As Maximus might have put it (much more elegantly) : <span style="font-style: italic;">created things cannot, by their own capacities, comprehend that which created them</span>. The basic division between intellect and sense - and its resolution by divine action - is essentially a mystery, illuminated for us by revelation (divine grace).<br />
<br />
Again, I realize I am using concepts and terminology many would find terminally obsolete. My own ability to explain anything is hobbled and strictly limited. I can only (metaphorically) raise my hands, shrug my shoulders at my own incapacity. Can only say that I, along with some others, find personal, existential, experiential meaning in the scriptural record of long-ago events. I find testimonies from ancient & mythological ages which echo and ring with events from my own life, with the thoughts & feelings that arise in my own mind and heart. I find believable the radical & fantastic idea that <span style="font-style: italic;">consciousness</span>, in its mysterious depths, rests at the <span style="font-style: italic;">foundation</span> of the entire cosmos : we don't so much know anything, as <span style="font-style: italic;">we are known</span>. In such manner, I guess, I have experienced, to some limited degree, the reconciliation of polarities, the overcoming of dissociations. And I continue to try to relate & express these experiences in my own fashion, in the belief that what I have experienced is <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> strictly private or personal or unique or inimitable, but rather is part of something real for all. As that metaphysical poet-preacher John Donne put it : "no man is an island..."Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-63085130469580810062010-04-23T10:58:00.006-04:002021-01-12T15:21:10.614-05:00Restoration Day (the harmony is there)<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiRPE6-ppcNEvjAQGTBU1pZVrjIPYoiT2i7KWS5YjD1p3JbuMGnRAXfMN9HPhNY1Ou7irmmCgOxylLDwreBVyKgHGErtdkAFYL10rnTM9jfmifuW7drYS7tlQouGw8oMolhe4S5w/s1600/hg_stone%5B1%5D.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5463340988659043474" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiRPE6-ppcNEvjAQGTBU1pZVrjIPYoiT2i7KWS5YjD1p3JbuMGnRAXfMN9HPhNY1Ou7irmmCgOxylLDwreBVyKgHGErtdkAFYL10rnTM9jfmifuW7drYS7tlQouGw8oMolhe4S5w/s320/hg_stone%5B1%5D.JPG" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 187px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 136px;" /></a><br />
It's Friday, it's <a href="http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/2004/10/kent-johnson-sent-query-to-comment-box.html">Shakespeare's birthday</a>... Henry will talk some more about poetry...<br />
<br />
Henry has been let us say struggling with poetry & with <span style="font-style: italic;">being a poet</span> nigh on 40 years now. I started <span style="font-style: italic;">being a poet</span> in earnest just 40 years ago, in 1970 - when I came to Rhode Island & the East from Minnesota, for school (though I started writing it before, in the 60s... composing my first poem in 1959 - my father scribbled it down on a key card as he went out the door to work).<br />
<br />
& a struggle it has been... for recognition, for validation, for publication, for fending off failure & shame & fear & oblivion... but mostly a struggle to write well, to keep at it, to find a way to keep making poetry... when the pressures & temptations & distractions of life are sometimes all against it...<br />
<br />
& why? It's a calling. I find a certain superficiality, a thinness, a lightweight quality to much of the current <span style="font-style: italic;">talk about</span> poetry in US circles... a forced & slightly fevered tone that comes mostly from the anxiety of trying to make poetry a career... that's one of the factors, anyway. Another might be the typically-American obsession with technique, technology, gimmickry : the poem is treated as a cool gizmo rather than an utterance emerging from the real stress of human experience, of life & death, of time & history. The "realism" of poetry is not some kind of photographic or documentary replication (another<span style="font-style: italic;"> technique</span>) : it's the product of the poet's confrontation with the trials & sufferings & perplexities & joys & marvels of actual life, in the struggle to <span style="font-style: italic;">answer the call</span> of the poetic vocation itself - to <span style="font-style: italic;">fulfill the claim</span> of that calling. The Greeks named memory the "mother of the Muses" - & what is memory, if not the reflection of the conscience - on life lived, choices made, crimes & sins committed, love & charity given & received, punishment, ignorance, foolishness, mistakes, wisdom, & grace? The inward field of the human drama - in this "vale of soul-making," as Keats put it. This is partly what I think Wallace Stevens meant when he wrote about the "conscience" of the "faithful poet" - the poet faithful to conscience & memory & the truths they bear. Every true poem is an accounting, part of someone's last will and testament. This is one of those affective dimensions which a literary world trimmed to the latest gizmo-circus spectacle simply cannot <span style="font-style: italic;">see</span>.<br />
<br />
& there are other dimensions missed, too - aspects of poetry seen from a more impersonal or philosophical (aesthetic) perspective. I understand poetry most basically as <span style="font-style: italic;">song</span>. By "song" here I'm referring to <span style="font-style: italic;">harmony</span>, in its essential (not simply musical) sense. A poem, as a work of verbal art, is an entity in harmony with itself. In other words, it is a <span style="font-style: italic;">thing of beauty</span> : it displays an integrity & wholeness & proportion & brilliant originality (Aquinas' & Joyce's requirements, basically). As a thing of harmony, it <span style="font-style: italic;">resonates</span> : in the poem, language reverberates, stands free, returns upon itself in generative reflection & depths of meaning. This is the magnetism of the work of art in general : we are drawn to its resonance, as something with inner integrity & life, as something with inherent value.<br />
<br />
But is poetry, then, an end in itself? Is it art for its own sake? Not in my view. The poet's vocation - the vocation to "sing"- stems from an inward (often-unconscious) faith in the <span style="font-style: italic;">ultimate harmony of life itself</span>. How is this possible? Is poetry, then, essentially a throwback to pre-Enlightenment civilization? Is not the Modern era defined by the term <span style="font-style: italic;">disenchantment</span>? Is there not a fundamental chasm between modern and medieval consciousness?<br />
<br />
If there is such a chasm, then poetry spans it. Because neither atheism nor religious faith can be <span style="font-style: italic;">proven</span>, we are faced with a pragmatic choice : we must think, that is, inductively - gather up our inferences, order our incomplete knowledge, and live by means of a "working theory," an hypothesis. This gets to the crux of my understanding of poetry's highest purpose and the poet's ultimate vocation. Poetry's song is - at its most basic and its most exalted - primarily a <span style="font-style: italic;">song of thanksgiving</span>. A celebration of the ultimate (unknowable, but sensed) harmony of reality. And (for me) this harmony is ultimately Personal : human & divine. Reality is Creation : God is Personal : and the God who created all from nothing will also <span style="font-style: italic;">save</span> that creation, and us along with it - in fact, has already done so. This is the ur-drama, the play-within-the-plays, of the history of the earth (theologian Hans Küng has described all this better than I can, in his great book <span style="font-style: italic;">Eternal Life?</span>). To the sceptic this will sound like typical neo-medieval mystification; but, as anyone who has followed the theism/atheism debates over the last decade will know, there are many intelligent people today, with impeccable intellectual credentials in various professional fields, who are also theists. To repeat, neither side can <span style="font-style: italic;">prove</span> its case : but what I am arguing is that the harmony of poetry bears witness to a greater harmony at the silent, hidden heart of reality itself. It is the imagination of an inexpressible dimension (a dimension, as Küng suggests, that humanity must go <span style="font-style: italic;">through death</span> to find - the way of the Cross, and of Everyman).<br />
<br />
The objections to all this are already clear. Henry, you do a disservice to the autonomy and variety of art and poetry (not to mention of life) by yoking it to a theological rationalization. You narrow poetry down, you squeeze the life out of it : poetry is <span style="font-style: italic;">more</span> than pious vision. This is another unending, irresolvable debate. I respond : yes, poetry is various, secular, impertinent,<span style="font-style: italic;"> im</span>pious, impish, unpredictable, free. But I also say this : <span style="font-style: italic;">harmony is the heart and soul of poetry</span>; and harmony is something inherent within life itself, within reality as a whole. My own explanation for the presence of this harmony is theological : there may be other, and differing, explanations for it : but I, as poet, assert that <span style="font-style: italic;">the harmony is there</span> - and <span style="font-style: italic;">that is why I sing</span>.<br />
<br />
This, in my view, is the essential difference between poetry and prose : you can have prose without art, but not poetry. For a long time, the modern, post-Enlightenment temper has reflected disenchantment; and as a result, we have had a flood of dense, reductive prose "explanations" for life's phenomena. But what if the ultimate truth is harmonious, is harmony? This is what the Romantic poets asserted (Coleridge, Blake) - this was at the heart of their protest. I am not a Romantic, but something a little older (let's say, a Christian humanist) : put me with Donne, and Milton, and Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. This is the true Restoration (check out the photo of young Henry, in NYC, ca. 1975, at his Royal typewriter). I was born on Restoration Day, by the way - May 29th; also Rhode Island Statehood Day, and the date on which my gr-gr-...grandfather Zaccheus Gould established the town of Topsfield, Massachusetts (1637 or so). Poetry has been a long struggle, for me - but I will top the field. I live by the River Okeanos; Rhode Island is the <a href="http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/2006/04/our-local-paper-providence-journal.html">Ocean State</a>. My poetry is not so well known, yet - but it's out there; its endless surf of <span style="font-style: italic;">abba</span>-soundwaves will penetrate the atmosphere, someday.<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-29943581504046451902010-04-16T12:11:00.003-04:002018-07-23T12:39:48.660-04:00A Dissociated Writing Program (or, the Quiddity of Things)<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">1</span><br />
<br />
April 2010 ushers in the conjunction of <span style="font-style: italic;">National Poetry Month</span> with the vast and bulbous <span style="font-style: italic;">Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Conference</span> (in Denver this year), and so, under the lights of such stars, we non-attenders and outsiders are tempted to assess the national state of the art. But the first question is, <span style="font-style: italic;">is there</span> such a “national state”? Should we call it “America” or “the United States,” or neither? I’m going to use “America” and “American” here for the sake of convenience. But simply deploying a name is not enough : you have to prove the name corresponds to something in nature. Presently we Americans are enduring a time of extraordinary divisions, partisan disputations, multiple balkanizations, political and economic stress, upheavals and dislocations, war and terrorism, (man-made) ecological threats, poverty, uncertainty, change and anxiety; is it possible even to speak of a single American nation and culture anymore?<br />
<br />
I’m not going to try to answer that question directly. My interest here is in the character of poetry, especially American poetry, now – another vast and diffuse and elusive phenomenon; it seems the only proper way to begin talking about that subject is to try to describe the limits of one’s own perspective and method of approach. My method and perspective in this essay are going to be deliberately eccentric. I’m going to look at our subject through the lens of a single critical concept, which was articulated just 100 years ago by a Russian poet in St. Petersburg, a founding member of the fleeting Russian literary movement called “Acmeism” – Nikolai Gumilev. The concept or hermeneutic tool was something he called “chasteness.” Gumilev identified chasteness with a general sense of <span style="font-style: italic;">the integrity of individual, actual things in the world</span>. The concept has religious, Biblical roots (the earth and universe are a creation, which God “saw was good” : the divine is present through God’s “incarnation”), but it is primarily (in Gumilev’s hands) a philosophical idea, with cultural and artistic consequences. <span style="font-style: italic;">Chasteness</span> is akin to Joyce’s aesthetic of the “epiphany” : the artist’s sense to recognize, and to express, the brilliant, distinct particularity of individual things – their <span style="font-style: italic;">quiddity</span>.<br />
<br />
The philosophical roots of Gumilev’s notion are clearly planted in Aristotle. Aristotle’s intellectual modesty – that is, the essential humility of the scientific investigator, empirical, inductive – allowed for the substantiality of distinct things, for the “concrete universals” of poetic representation. In Aristotle’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Poetics</span>, the integral wholeness of dramatic plot (beginning, middle, end) undergirds the unique architectonic of each work of poetic art, which in turn mirrors the chaste and distinct integrity of the matter which it represents.<br />
<br />
It is indeed the <span style="font-style: italic;">architectonic</span> dimension of Gumilev’s Aristotelian approach which seems particularly interesting and potentially fruitful. Like an Escher drawing, or a series of mutually-supporting vaults, this notion of chaste integrity bridges the distance between the distinct integrity of the poem, and the normative qualities of human experience, the ethos, which it expresses, guards and celebrates. It is an exercise in equilibrium. And there was (and is) a democratic or egalitarian aspect to this projected ethos, since, as Gumilev put it, chasteness represents <span style="font-style: italic;">the inherent dignity of each person and thing</span>, as it is : that is, its right to be itself. (As Mandelstam wittily put it, Acmeism celebrated the “beautiful Law of Identity : A = A.”)<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: bold;">2</span><br />
<br />
So then – how do we apply this imported Russian aesthetic concept to contemporary American conditions? As noted above, we inhabit a time of particular storm and stress, of ideological polemic and conflict, of multiple challenges to any claim to authority or consensus. But the Gumilevian/Aristotelian idea of <span style="font-style: italic;">chasteness/integrity</span>, when used as a lens, brings surprising things to light. First of all, it can possibly justify our concern for a specifically <span style="font-style: italic;">American</span> poetry, in that, by the law of “epiphany” and chaste integrity, every culture has a unique history – a particular set of circumstances, characteristics, traditions, choices, events, which go into defining its <span style="font-style: italic;">quiddity</span>. To base one’s approach on such a quasi-scientific, disinterested method is to push back against both ends of the current spectrum of polemics : that is, one the one hand, against neo-classical formalists and traditionalists, who center the norms of poetry in English, and the richness of culture <span style="font-style: italic;">per se</span>, in the great works of past times and places; and on the other hand, against the anti-historical and anti-traditional relativism of the postmodern “permanent revolutionaries.” Our poetry, in such “chaste” light, will be seen as inevitably the expression of a distinct culture and nation (which will also, of course, inevitably include its own set of borrowings, hybridities, endurances, etc.). <br />
<br />
Such might be viewed as a statement of the obvious; but then, lost in our byzantine labyrinth of literary jargon, polemics, and the Emperor’s ever-new clothes, sometimes the obvious becomes the necessary. Moreover, Gumilev’s concept rhymes to a striking degree with something very characteristic of American poetry : the sharp-eyed, down-to-earth affection for, and attention to, <span style="font-style: italic;">things-in-themselves</span>. Robert Frost rendered this strain (out of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson) memorably and perhaps best : “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” In his introductory essay to the very popular (and still in print!) mid-20th century anthology, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Mentor Book of Major American Poets</span>(1), Edwin Honig focused on the <span style="font-style: italic;">fond attention to particulars</span> – the confluence of humble, everyday reality and poetic metaphor, in imagery – as the defining characteristic of American poetry (beginning with the Puritan poet Edward Taylor, and growing stronger from there). Imagistic realism, by itself, is an insufficient measure of American poetry (or any poetry) as a whole (in the same way that the Imagist movement of the early 20th-century had inherent limitations); however, when subsumed within the more general concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">integrity</span> (as presented by Gumilev, Aristotle, Joyce), the architectonics of a national literature begin to become visible again (in outline or sketch) through the polemical mist. <br />
<br />
In a recent study of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams(2), Harold Kaplan projects a similar sense of American poetry as integral and distinct, by contrasting Eliot’s and Pound’s attachment to traditional European cultural authority, with Stevens’ and Williams’ bent toward democratic humanism. Without referencing the Acmeists, Kaplan describes how Stevens’ notion of human “nobility” was part of an effort to define the social purposes of poetry in relation to more general ethical norms – that is, grounded in a similar “chaste integrity” of persons and things. (Interestingly, in an appendix, Kaplan underlines an affinity between the argument of his book, and a study by Michael Eskin, on the ethos and poetics of Emanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, and… Osip Mandelstam(3)). The integrity of both things and poems, according to Kaplan (and Levinas), is underwritten by the fundamental integrity of <span style="font-style: italic;">persons</span> : and this ontology has consequences for theories of literature – for the status of reading, writing, language and meaning. Kaplan outlines a philosophical realism, grounded not in systemic abstraction, but in a sense of reality that begins, ends, and centers in consciousness – the reflective, affective, ethical, and expressive consciousness of the human person. Again, this affirmation of the distinct personhood of authors and readers is in harmony with what we have called the American (and Acmeist, and Joycean) affirmation of the chaste integrity of things-in-themselves – things, including art works.<br />
<br />
Things, including poems. Rather than carry these proposals further into the realm of polemic, here I only want to suggest that such polemic might prove necessary, eventually. By this I mean that the more deliberately one defines the characteristics of an American literature, the more inevitably will disagreements follow – since we inhabit a contentious democratic culture, subject to change, growth and decline. Furthermore, as a critical perspective is articulated, its application to actual works (by both critics and poets) becomes more self-conscious and differentiated. The more it becomes possible to see the outlines of a particular poetic phenomenon, the more one begins to distinguish between the inherently aesthetic and the ideologically (or otherwise) tendentious. What I believe Gumilev’s Russian Acmeism(4) and Kaplan’s American humanism offer us are the beginnings of a “way of seeing” our own poetry – as independent art, grounded in imaginative freedom, in the substantial dignity of persons, and in the <span style="font-style: italic;">quiddity</span> of things.<br />
<br />
1) <span style="font-style: italic;">Mentor Book of Major American Poets</span>, ed. by Oscar Williams and Edwin Honig (NY : Signet, 1962)<br />
2) Kaplan, Harold. <span style="font-style: italic;">Poetry, politics, and culture : argument in the work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams</span> (Brunswick, NJ : Transaction, 2007).<br />
3) Eskin, Michael. <span style="font-style: italic;">Ethics and dialogue : in the works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan</span> (NY : Oxford Univ. Press, 2001)<br />
4) For an invaluable study of Acmeism and the poetics of Gumilev and Mandelstam, see : Justin Doherty, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Acmeist movement in Russian poetry : culture and the word</span> (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995)Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-21602825782921023582010-03-25T14:33:00.001-04:002018-07-23T12:40:13.485-04:00Poetry, Religion... & Maximus<br />
Poetry & religion, two different things... I think of religion as social-collective behavior - a cultural phenomenon made up of countless social orientations, commitments, actions. It is belief consolidated - substantiated in social formations : ethical traditions. This is obviously not poetry. Poetry is the verbal expression of the artistic imagination (or simply, the imagination). There is no sanction or requirement for the vagaries & dreams of free imagination.<br />
<br />
Poetry (some poetry) might be closer to theology, though. I think of theology as intellectual reflection upon (& maybe insight into) the "givens" of religious tradition. There's a range - let's call it "vision" - where such endeavors can overlap.<br />
<br />
In the modern era, religion is often represented as irrational, oppressive, & silly. I suppose modernity could even be defined as "the critique - & mockery - of religion." Novels & various discourses since the Enlightenment abound in satires on Medieval ritual, dogma, superstition, & the general <em>moeurs</em> of churchgoing folk. Certainly much of the critique was (& is) indeed liberating & enlightening; but the secular ideological-political formations which then sought to <em>replace</em> religion resulted in the vast desolations & conflicts of the 20th-century. So who gets the last laugh, so to speak (aside from the Devil...)?<br />
<br />
Our local hero, Roger Williams, was an avatar of a different kind of cultural equilibrium between sacred & secular. By advocating tolerance of all faiths, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech, and the separation of civil and religious Authority, Williams set the stage for the Enlightenment, and for the balance of secular government & religious freedom as we know it today. Yet Williams' Puritan innovations had deeper roots in the cultural development of the West. Even medieval Catholicism recognized that peace & order depended on harmony between the "two swords" - the two Powers of Church and State, Church & Empire. The authority of the Church was an ethical counterbalance to the power of the King : they were never fused into one. This balance of the two had a scriptural basis in the New Testament - in Jesus' command, "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, & to God what is God's". The apostle Paul, in his letters, took up this theme, when he described how God's Providence works through all things, including the State & its ministers, "for our good" (an argument often used to justify passivity & conformity in the face of State-sponsored evil : but not necessarily or entirely false, in spite of this.) It was this conception of Providence working through all things, Christian & non-Christian, sacred & secular, which informed Williams' political vision.<br />
<br />
And one could trace this tradition back much further. It's possible to think of Judaism as a religion which is a theological reflection & critique - a re-working, or overturning - of Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion. The God of the Hebrews - the primal & universal Creator of all things, who allies himself personally, not with the rulers of mighty nations, the immortal god-kings atop their ziggurats & pyramids, but with humble shepherds & slaves. This God does not merely issue obscure demands (though He does issue demands) - but comes down to dicker & argue with his adopted people. & the main aim of this Hebrew God is to provide liberation from oppressors, & from human wrong-doing in general. So we can see the historical consequence of this basic stance of Biblical religion : a theological challenge is offered to oppressive rule. A line is drawn between sacred & secular. The authority of the divine is set up in <em>opposition to</em>, rather than conjunction with, the secular or theocratic power of nations. Thus the seeds of individual conscience - the ethical demand of a divine & infinite universality, above and beyond any earthly power - were planted, long ago.<br />
<br />
Recurrently in my poetry (esp. in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lanthanum-book-one-Henry-Gould/dp/0557274710/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_9">Lanthanum</a></em>) the figure of "Maximus" shows up. This could be taken as an allusion to Charles Olson's epic <em>persona</em> of the same name, but I'm referring to another Maximus : Maximus the Confessor, a Byzantine theologian. This Maximus was enmeshed in controversies over the Trinity and the nature of Christ's Person, with which Orthodoxy, centered in Constantinople, was engaged for centuries. A profound & creative thinker, Maximus synthesized Greek philosophy & Christian faith, to produce an affirmation of the Orthodox sense of the union of divine & human Persons. That the universal Godhead would manifest on earth as a particular human person was a mystery, a conundrum & a scandal from the very beginning - a scandal involving first of all the splitting apart of Judaism and Christianity, & then, within Christianity itself, at least a thousand years of polemics over its exact meaning (& of course, those debates have not yet concluded).<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNtryU2VvD_a7KAKOMniv1SVOnRMqMwBGiTDr7IT328Va_iDfUHoeET3KZr8Z2On5E3aJbLj7xwH9ebfgEmpFSUNVWvfQDv-Dmhy5jUwXtBhii5ZCyCuTEeFlbh3-EZLMt4WowHA/s1600/st-maximus-the-confessor-235x300%5B1%5D.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452610043824576082" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNtryU2VvD_a7KAKOMniv1SVOnRMqMwBGiTDr7IT328Va_iDfUHoeET3KZr8Z2On5E3aJbLj7xwH9ebfgEmpFSUNVWvfQDv-Dmhy5jUwXtBhii5ZCyCuTEeFlbh3-EZLMt4WowHA/s320/st-maximus-the-confessor-235x300%5B1%5D.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 300px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 235px;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
But poetry <em>per se</em> is not so formalized (logical) or realistic (descriptive) as theology claims to be. Poetry, as an (artistic) end in itself, is to some extent free from the claims of realism and denotative meaning. It's more concerned with modelling or representing "possible" realities : and in doing so, poetry is able to express deeper, more elusive, less systematic, more subtle layers of sense, feeling & experience. These "free, unsponsored" dimensions of psychic & emotional life themselves reflect back on the formal, "official" records of history, & dogmas of religion, & assertions of ideology, the oppressive superstitions of hide-bound culture. & that "reflecting back" is the substance of poetry's immemorial radicalism : the prophet's challenge to arrogant priesthoods, the poet's rebuke to overweening state authorities, the critique of "realism" offered by the imagination.<br />
<br />
But protest and politics aside... I see a sort of harmonic affinity between theology and poetry, in the likeness between : 1) Maximus' synthesis of divine and human consciousness within the form of the <em>Person</em> - ie. the whole reality of experience is keyed to a human scale, and 2) the Petersburg/Acmeist poetic tradition of Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam - hewing to Mandelstam's idea of poetry as "domestic hellenism" : the humanizing, civilizing, & domesticating of life on earth with a "teleological (human) warmth." Both represent an architecture of existence based in <em>confidence</em> : a deep confidence in "Providence", in the eventual working-out of "faith, hope & charity" (history as Redemption).Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-87791747065423155702010-02-12T14:24:00.003-05:002018-07-23T12:40:42.583-04:00Mandelstam, by way of Michael Eskin<br />
<strong>1</strong><br />
<br />
In an appendix to his book <em><a href="http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=12384">Poetic Affairs</a></em> (on Paul Celan, Durs Grunbein, Joseph Brodsky, and the kinship each poet shares with Osip Mandelstam) Michael Eskin deftly draws together some logical threads of Mandelstam's "Acmeist" poetics :<br />
<br />
1. aesthetic : "Mandelstam's notion of the 'living word' ties in with the overall Acmeist endeavor to create 'an organicist poetics... of a biological nature' - a poetics predicated on biology and physiology, on 'the infinite complexity of our inscrutable organism,' and on the basic notion that a 'poem is a living organism'" [<em>Poetic Affairs</em>, p.139]. More than that : "The breathing, moving human body is the ultimate ground of poetry. The 'poetic foot,' Mandelstam notes, is nothing but 'breathing in and breathing out.' The poem is literally animated into existence by 'the breathing of all ages' to the extent that it is the articulation of the breathing, moving bodies of countless poets 'of all ages' [<em>ibid.</em>].<br />
<br />
The image of poetry projected here is strikingly reminiscent of the ecstatic "speaking-in-tongues" event on the day of Pentecost, as described in the New Testament : poetry here is akin to the descent of the Holy Ghost, by means of which people from "all lands" begin speaking together, each in their own languages, yet mutually understanding each other.* Poetry is a physiological embodiment, shared "inscrutably" across time & space.<br />
<br />
2. ethical : The Acmeist movement developed in the early 20th century as a dialectical response to the otherworldliness of Russian Symbolism. Eskin explains : "'Acmeism is not only a literary phenomenon,' Mandelstam notes in 1922... This new ethical force... consists first and foremost, in the reversal of the Symbolist denigration of the real, phenomenal world of the here and now... Mandelstam emphasizes the world's very reality and materiality as the Acmeists paradigm and horizon...<br />
"A love for the here and now, for 'all manifestations of life... in time and not only in eternity' - a love for this world and this reality, for one's 'own organism,' for one's singularity, cannot fail to bear on sociopolitics. What kind of sociopolitical setup will foster and secure the possibility of this kind of Acmeist existence?... Mandelstam lays out his own sociopolitical vision:<br />
<br />
'There are epochs that maintain that they are not concerned with singular human beings, that human beings must be put to use, like bricks, like mortar... Assyrian prisoners swarm like chicks under the feet of a gigantic Tsar; warriors personifying the power of the state inimical to the human being shackled pigmies with long spears, and the Egyptians are dealing with the human mass as if it were building material... But there is another form of social architecture who scale and measure is... man... It doesn't use human beings as building material but builds for them... Mere mechanical grandeur and mere numbers are inimical to humankind We are tempted not by a new social pyramid, but... by the free play of weights and measures, by a human society... in which everything is... individual, and each member is unique and echoes the whole.'" [ibid., pp. 139-140]<br />
<br />
Eskin notes how this stance had consequences for Mandelstam's personal fate, & which was echoed by Brodsky in his remark that the poet "is a democrat by definition" (& here we further note the shade of Pushkin, standing behind both Mandelstam & Brodsky).<br />
<br />
Finally, Eskin reiterates Mandelstam's supremely <em>dialogical</em> concept of poetry. M's famous essay "On the Interlocutor" likens the poem to a message in a bottle, set afloat on the sea toward an unknown friend/reader in the future; when conjoined with the charismatic ("Pentecostal") sense of poetry outlined above, we understand that each reader, <em>each one of us</em> - when we truly encounter a poem - <em>has become the intended recipient of the message</em>. We are conjoined - in a kinship of friendly dialogue & companionship, across the sea of time & space - with the poet in person.<br />
<br />
[*Note : these references to the Pentecost are my own interpolations, not not discussed in Eskin's text.]<br />
<br />
<strong>2</strong><br />
<br />
& how would I relate all this to our Plumbline? <br />
<br />
I feel a sense of <em>weight</em> : of the earthly weight of material things, and the weight of lived experience. & I relate this first of all to all those dimensions of poetry which remain unspoken : the submerged portion of the iceberg, so to speak : all the overtones & undertones & inexplicable feeling-tones & hidden meanings & unknowables which help give a poem its resistance, its resonance, its own specific gravity. & further, I relate this to living specificity and particularity, that vividness and local accuracy which are part of the glory of poetry - a synthetic brilliance of referential & evocative vision : faculties of Mandelstam's "infinite complexity of our inscrutable organism." These are dimensions which weight the "middle path" of our plumbline : tied deep down in the heart of faithful utterance, Wallace Stevens' "spirit of poetry" as the "companion of the conscience." & then I think of all this as impelling the poet to strive for a poetry that can speak... like this :<br />
<br />
<em>It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. <br />It has to face the men of the time and to meet <br />The women of the time. It has to think about war <br />And it has to find what will suffice. It has <br />To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, <br />And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and <br />With meditation, speak words that in the ear, <br />In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, <br />Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound <br />Of which, an invisible audience listens, <br />Not to the play, but to itself, expressed <br />In an emotion as of two people, as of two <br />Emotions becoming one.</em> (- Wallace Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry")Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-44765432750033847432009-09-19T14:57:00.016-04:002018-07-23T12:41:05.315-04:00Human Manifesto<br />
<strong>I. Poetry & Worldview</strong><br />
<br />
I sent a letter to <em><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/letter.html?id=237514">Poetry</a></em> magazine, in response to <a href="http://www.samizdatblog.blogspot.com/">Robert Archambeau</a>'s essay on manifestos.<br />
<br />
Poetry & Worldview. There's a tension in the idea of poets' <em>manifest</em>ing a worldview - since art & poetry are, basically, a constructive escape from abstraction. And a manifesto is a strategic reduction or formula ("My poetry is....")<br />
<br />
On the other hand, certain very creative periods (say, 12th century France, or Renaissance Italy, or Eliz. England) seem to have so much energy that philosophy & poetry, abstractions & particulars, find their way into productive chemical (alchemical?) bondings...<br />
<br />
As regards poetry, I'm a maximalist. I'm drawn to the deep thinking of Wallace Stevens & Mandelstam, on the spirit of poetry & the poet's vocation. The "theory of poetry" is about the relationship between poetry and the world, between poetry and worldview. It assumes that underneath all the differences, somehow, poetry is "one thing" : and that mysterious something is distinct from other modes of human thought, action and art.<br />
<br />
So what marks it out, distinguishes it? To put it baldly : in poetry, <em>language is most alive</em>. If you think of the power, the effect of words & conversation & storytelling upon the mind & senses of a young child - & the child's desire to respond with a substantial message or articulation of his or her own - you are getting closer to the motives & effects of poetry. The Word in this sense is simultaneously Order (the world making sense), Meaning (communicating that sense), & Pleasure (having fun with that newfound power). Mandelstam's theme of "domestic hellenism" - poetry's capacity to domesticate & civilize the world, to help us be <em>at home</em> in reality - gets at this also. <br />
<br />
If I were to write yet another(!) manifesto this afternoon, I would push for something like an <em>integral poetry</em>. This would be a bent toward understanding the poem & the work of art as an utterance which synthesizes, rather than alienates, its own background. By this I mean something like Mandelstam's voting for Potebnia over Saussure & the Russian Formalists, in terms of the linguistics source of poetics - Potebnia's notion of the underlying <em>image-basis</em> of language, the ur-image. Language in this sense is not an autonomous shuttling of symbolic differences, disconnected from their origins in primitive pointing & representation.<br />
<br />
The poem is an enacted <em>recapitulation</em> or summation of experience, as well as a free & self-contained art-work. It must <em>balance</em> these two, if it wants to be fully integral - that is spilling over with both meaning and (emotional, perceptual) sense. It must both breathe and be complete (exhibit finish, shape, fulfillment - the forms of beauty).<br />
<br />
Poetry is the human race throwing itself bodily into vocal, dancing evocation. It is the embodiment of language by (the human) spirit. This is how - by being "maximal" - poetry becomes what Wallace Stevens calls "the sanction" of life. The epic impulse - the Bible, Virgil, Homer - is the impulse to an integral fulfillment - in language - of a time & a culture as an entity, as a whole. Northrop Frye writes about this.<br />
<br />
Emily Dickinson : "my circuit is circumference".<br />
<br />
<strong>II. Mindful Consequences</strong><br />
<br />
"The letter killeth; the spirit giveth life." If poetry is the human spirit entering, reviving & giving life to the twilight realm of dead letters - & this, of course, is a big & debatable <em>if</em> - what are the consequences? What implications can we draw for both worldview & poetics?<br />
<br />
In the current intellectual climate I suppose my terms & formulae will not find much traction. No, they will be ignored, if not rejected out of hand. Because by using such terms as "spirit", I'm implying an idealist worldview - something of a throwback, akin to the Romantics, & to much earlier thought. One of my heroes indeed is Bishop George Berkeley, a one-time Rhode Island (Newport) dweller (who turns up in the long poem <em><a href="http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/stubborn-grew/884878">Stubborn Grew</a></em>) - an idealist if there ever was one, the idealist's idealist, an object of practical Samuel Johnson's mockery.<br />
<br />
How can I characterize or summarize my perspective? Our experience of reality and the universe is grounded in consciousness. The human mind is a manifestation (a Human Manifesto) of some more universal & substantial form of Mind. This substantial consciousness is the underlying ground (the sanction, if you will) for world civilization (in Mandelshtamian terms, the global well-being of "domestic hellenism"). <br />
<br />
So again, what are some of the consequences for poetry? I can only speak for the small sliver of my own point-of-view & my own enthusiasms; there are as many such perspectives as there are poets. & my perspective, to put it awkwardly, is something like <em>incarnational</em>. I wish I knew the technical theological term for my sense of this : it has to do with the logical "architecture" of the manifestation of human thought & language in time, culture & history. One term close to what I'm thinking of might be <em>recapitulation</em>.<br />
<br />
Mandelshtam, quoting some 19th century thinker whose name escapes me (Darwin? Lamarck?), writes somewhere : "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." In other words (I think) the individual of a species recapitulates, in its features & characteristics, all the prior stages of evolutionary growth. It carries the signs of its own species-history like scars (or tattoos).<br />
<br />
One philosophical implication or analogy I draw from this is, that the individual can be viewed in a "teleological" way : that is, speaking of human beings, the Person is viewed as bearing the signs of <em>an end, a fulfillment</em>, of all prior time & development. Each person an encyclopedia, a microcosm of the species (Whitman harps on this idea in every line of "Song of Myself").<br />
<br />
One literary-theological implication or analogy I draw from this notion (of recapitulation) is as follows : each Person is the <em>telos</em> or end or fulfillment of the language expressed in relation to him or her. The Person supercedes or fulfills or embodies or surpasses all the text, scripture, language within which he or she is enmeshed. In this sense, the Christian concept of the "fulfillment of Scripture" is a kind of <em>symbolic norm</em>, referring to an actuality which applies to <em>all</em> persons. One does not have to be a doctrinal believer in order to at least entertain, philosophically, the idea that Jesus' & the Church's <em>playing</em> with the notion of completing, fulfilling Scripture, in Christ's own body & person, is a symbolic representation or acting-out (in a kind of Northop-Frye sense) of a cultural reality which is universal (keeping in mind that the historical record of such theological "play" has included some violent & absolutely tragic results).<br />
<br />
I realize I'm getting into some deep & controversial waters - a seeming roadblock to my readers, to anyone who is trying to follow how this gnarled idea relates to poetry itself. Let's go back to the primary assertions here : <br />
1) Poetry is language brought to life by a kind of joyful, expressive energy - of assimilation, representation, & recapitulation of experience. <br />
2) The human spirit proceeds from consciousness, mind - which is the ground of any reality we know.<br />
3) The person, as a kind of epitome or manifestation of this Mind, can be understood in teleological terms as End and Microcosm.<br />
<br />
To these basic ideas, let us add the reminder that human language is partial, imperfect, often mistaken : so that that personal "epitome" - the Person from whom, to whom, and around whom language proceeds & gathers - appears in a kind of shroud or disguise of error. Eliot (for one) repeatedly refers to this dimension, with his references to the poet's "faulty equipment, always breaking down" (<em>Four Quartets</em> - if I'm quoting correctly!).<br />
<br />
As the Person is the epitome of the species, and Mankind a kind of microcosm of the universal elements, so Poetry aims to epitomize experience in the mirror of language. This is what Frye describes as literature's "epic" drive toward totality, the aim to include <em>everything</em> (see Whitman, Dante, Homer, the Book of Genesis...). Poetry is the <em>telos</em> or <em>summa</em> of language in general; it is speech brought to measure, harmony (& there is no harmony without wholeness, completion).<br />
<br />
So, an "integral poetry" would manifest as such on both a micro and macro level : that is, on the micro level, its language would be <em>integrated</em>, synthesized, with prior experience, rather than closed off from it; while on a macro level, its language would aspire to, or at least reflect the presence of, that epic totality which mirrors the substantial wholeness of the original, universal grounding in consciousness itself.<br />
<br />
Some of these ideas are glanced at in this stanza of a poem called "Letter to Emily D." (publ. in <em><a href="http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/dove-street/908263">Dove Street</a></em>) :<br />
<br />
<em>For Scripture precedes history - your insight<br />precedes Scripture - April's alpha and omega<br />purl playfully from your soul-saga.<br />Who finds you meets a palm-tree full of light.</em><br />
<br />
<strong>III. Song of Songs</strong><br />
<br />
I focused in previous sections on some philosophical or religious background/worldview for my own concepts of what the poet is about. Spirit, mind, idealism, totality... & yet I think I've neglected a vital part of poetry's distinctive range : that is, not so much <em>mind</em> (in the somewhat Platonic sense I've been sketching), as <em>heart</em>, & <em>soul</em>.<br />
<br />
Maybe it's the time of year. These beautiful last days of summer & incipient fall somehow help to bring that autumnal phantom, "soul", into view.<br />
<br />
If it's permissible to generalize... I don't think our culture is very capable these days of distinguishing between the physical and the psychic, desire and feeling, body and soul. We live in a cultural marketplace of the body - its functions, desires, natural cycles, & illusions - in the midst of which the feelings & intuitions of the soul grow more elusive & estranged.<br />
<br />
In the prior sections I talked about how an "integral poetry" would recapitulate experience & suffuse it with meaning, feeling. This is the goal of its voracious inner energy. By this I would not want to exclude experience in any of its ranges or registers; but I also think poetry's deepest impulses have to do with the life, the searchings, the intuitions of the soul. Our tumultuous, painful, exalted, terrible, tragic, comic, sublime, & ridiculous dramas of love, in all its forms, are the substance of that life which poetry aims to recapitulate, represent & celebrate. Thus the "Song of Songs" takes this name because it represents an <em>epitome</em> of song, song reaching toward its fundamental purpose or <em>telos</em>. The rabbinical & monastic hermeneutics which came after - all the interpretations of this sensuous love-song, as a spiritual allegory of the soul's loving search for God - are also paradigmatic, with regard to poetry's expressive purposes. <br />
<br />
I'm not trying to <em>canonize</em> the Song of Songs (certainly it doesn't need me for that!) - only aiming to suggest how it represents a central aspect of poetry <em>per se</em> : the search for wholeness, integration - the attunement, the harmony of male & female, parent & child, sibling & sibling, neighbor & stranger - of love with life, soul with body, soul with God.<br />
<br />
It can be argued that I'm singling out only one aspect of poetry. True, but there's no help for it : this "manifesto" is an effort to describe my own experience. & what I'm suggesting is that <em>the impulse to write poetry cannot be separated from the impulse to love</em>. Song, as such, is an effusion, an emanation from a state of harmony, or an intuition about possible harmony. It is a back-&-forth, reciprocal drama, which happens as a kind of conversation or encounter, within the creative imagination of the poet. <br />
<br />
The affective pathos in individual poems, those qualities which <em>move</em> us, emotionally, are like mini-dramas, off-shoots from the central energy of this creative "love-impulse". The poet, echoing & re-echoing an inward "song of songs", is actually <em>wooing</em> some sweet dimension of life, earth & reality. The song of the poet is analogous in this sense to the "bride" or "bridegroom" (as symbolized in the <em>Book of Revelation</em>).<br />
<br />
I think it can be said that the two great (unmatched, unmatching) towers of Western poetry, Shakespeare & Dante, share one central concern : to delineate the nature of love, to measure its whole scale of motives & effects - from blind self-regard to the patient kindness of other-centered <em>agape</em> (rooted fundamentally in the joy & gratitude of life).<br />
<br />
These are "soul" matters : not so conducive to scientific analysis or determinate calculation. But that's why poetry happens, anyway : because "there are more things in heaven and earth than are met with in your philosophy, Horatio."<br />
<br />
<em>LOVE is anterior to life,<br />Posterior to death,<br />Initial of creation, and<br />The exponent of breath.</em><br />
- E. Dickinson<br />
<br />
I want to mention one further consequence of the state of affairs I am trying to evoke here. It seems to me that, if the life of poetry consists in a kind of soul-courtship, or in Mandelstam's terms, a "playful hide-&-seek with the Father", then maybe we have to try to set aside some of the more pedantic, deterministic, superficial, in-house, or otherwise quantified & utilitarian critical approaches to literary reception. Just as the poet's creative labor is subject to the mysterious impulse of the "muse" of soul-searching love - so the reader's reception of the fruits of that labor will echo these deeper dimensions or concerns. & these things are difficult to judge & quantify. The relationship between a poet and his/her culture is analogous to the unpredictable and dramatic dance of courtship. For every culture, this can result in a very long "crane dance" - over centuries, even - at the gate of a very complex labyrinth.<br />
<br />
<strong>IV.</strong> <strong>Microcosmic Recapitulation</strong><br />
<br />
From various villas of the poetry blogoshphere (not a typo) - from John Latta's periodic jeremiads against deracinated poetic sophistry, to Stephen Burt's <em>New Thing</em> essay, to Kent Johnson's article on an incipient Chicago School - from these directions & others, we are presently witnessing poets taking note of a new bent toward objectivity & real things, of poetic perception <em>as well as</em> expression. So how might a Berkeleyan Idealist-Maximalist-Christian-Platonic Recapitulationist-Poet, a partisan of "integral poetry", with a lot of conceptual baggage (obviously), connect (if at all) with this new trend?<br />
<br />
American poetry since the beginning has exhibited strong "Adamic" tendencies - ie. the drive (very Emersonian) toward <em>origination</em>. To call it the "reinvent the wheel" syndrome would be cynical; the idea is that poetic perception returns the poet & reader to a sort of dawn-time, a spiritual & intellectual inner freedom where all things are made new. This is visible across the spectrum, from Whitman to Dickinson, from Frost to Olson - extending, in Olson's case, to a kind of megalomaniac liminal region, psychologically both risky & exciting (Kenneth Warren has been exploring this aspect of Olson in an extended, complex series of essays, in his journal <em>House Organ</em>). Jungian, inward, soulful.<br />
<br />
Here, actually, we might find an area of overlap between what I'm calling "integral poetry" and these current trends. That ideal "maximalist-recapitulationist" poet, whom I've been attempting to delineate in previous sections of this essay (let's call him Henry, for short) once upon a time took very much to heart the epic & totalizing ambitions of Pound & Olson. He admired Pound's vivid, witty, shorthand notation of historical events, the way he strove to blend them into vast frescos of civilizational flowering & decay; he took to Olson's injunction (offered to Ed Dorn once upon a time) to steep oneself in the cultural history of one region, one locality - become an expert; he saw this carried out beforehand in an interesting, sometimes-graceful way in WC Williams' <em>Paterson</em>. The challenge posed by these masterful poets was Janus-faced : a call both to emulate & to differentiate - since he found a great deal to disagree with in their underlying worldviews...<br />
<br />
We have tried to characterize an integral poetry as rooted in experience, not deracinated : that is, a recapitulation, a synthesis of both lived (historical, biographical) and literary past. Here is the point I'm trying to make : <em>the only way to achieve this level of integration is by drawing on the epic dimension, the epic mode</em>. The poet is "maximalist" because totality, wholeness, universality are active, essential elements in the poetic construction.<br />
<br />
The "things", the "minute particulars", which surface in the kind of poetry I'm talking about, are not simply particulars of the world in general : <em>they are distinct things within the microcosmos created by the poem</em>. The integral poet evokes and summons up holistic imaginative worlds, within which particulars are surfacing all the time, on many narrative levels - exhibiting a multitude of facets, <em>harking back to the Biblical/Dantean/Joycean richness of fourfold meaning : literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical</em>...<br />
<br />
& I should mention that one examplar of this approach happens to be the maximalist-recapitulationist poet, "Henry" - who has been spinning layered <a href="http://www.lulu.com/henry_gould">worlds</a> for some time now out of the history & psycho-cyclobiography of the little state of Rhode Island, in various modalities of short & lengthy works...<br />
<br />
<strong>V. Afterthoughts</strong><br />
<br />
I've probably overshot the mark, & want to hedge my remarks a little. My insistence on the epic impulse, on totality, might be taken for sheer grandiosity, magnitude for its own sake. Or for a mandarin complacency, weighed down with pedantry rather than experience : out of touch, out of air. To burden <em>all</em> poets & modalities of poetry with the elaborations of epic would be unrealistic, to say the least; in fact, it would represent an all-too-familiar form of eccentricity. One remembers, inevitably, Stevens' (very 20th-cent.) lines from "Poems of Our Climate" :<br />
<br />
<em>Note that, in this bitterness, delight,<br />Since the imperfect is so hot in us,<br />Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.</em><br />
<br />
No : all I want to suggest is that the "integral", integrated vision - the epic impulse, the whole story - lies at the roots of poetry considered as a whole itself, as "one thing". It's there, as a dimension which can't be left out (ie. poetry is not reducible to Sergeant Satire & Private Lyric). A sort of underground spring, a possibility, an impulse, an aspiration - a potential source of nourishment. <br />
<br />
The human search for wholeness, love, & freedom is not reducible to either American-style Adamism or European-style existential deracination. The search for truth also involves memory - historical, literary, poetic - & the recognition of continuities, returnings, recapitulations - strange/familiar echoes - <em><a href="http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/mudlark06/hg50.html">deja-vu</a></em>...Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-33131280287490014352009-06-19T20:38:00.003-04:002018-07-23T12:41:30.943-04:00On Form & Infinity in Poetry<br />
Have been reading some beautiful things by 20th-cent. physicist Erwin Schrodinger (<em>Nature and the Greeks</em>). 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...).<br />
<br />
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... <br />
<br />
The thrust of the "new" (contemporary) formalists - & beyond formalism, the thrust of <em>Poetry-as-Craft</em> in general - is grounded in a concept of <em>elegance</em> : 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 <em>numbers</em>...<br />
<br />
Well, the problem I'm having with all this at the moment is that the idea of <em>number</em>... allied with the notion of <em>craft</em> & <em>finish</em>... & connected thus with the idea of elegance, mastery &, basically, <em>success</em>... (or authority)... well, all this runs head on into an aspect of Nature (that Nature with which Art is supposed to be elegantly <em>married</em>) which we might call either the <em>Continuum</em>... or <em>Infinity</em>... or <em>Irrational Numbers</em>...<br />
<br />
an aspect of number which was a conundrum & embarrassment for the Greeks, & a mystifying puzzle for Cantor & other great mathematicians...<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
& why so? because infinity & the irrational are connected with the much-maligned "I" - that mysterious Subject - Shakespeare behind the arras - God - Keats' (negatively-capable) <em>negrido</em> - the Soul... & the great inimitable poets of all times are searching (elegantly, sublimely) <em>beyond</em> elegance... toward the (irrational square) root, the supra-elegance of... the ultimate Workshop (of the supernatural Author's... spiral jetty, or... <em>Book of J</em>...)... ie. the steep, the vertiginous, the vanishing point, that dimensionless point in Dante (& Joyce) wherefrom all the elegant magnitudes of creation proceed...<br />
<br />
&, 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 <em>shine forth</em> (very American) in their poetry... & make it <em>inimitable</em> & <em>great</em>... what they used to call <em>Sublimity</em>...<br />
<br />
<em>You must become an ignorant man again<br />And see the sun again with an ignorant eye<br />And see it clearly in the idea of it</em>...Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-15397790307396980462009-03-05T14:17:00.002-05:002018-07-23T12:41:54.801-04:00Journey to Hoboken<br />
This essay was first published in <em><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/ezines/witz/4-3.html">Witz</a></em>, issue #4.3 (Fall 1996) <br />
<br />
<br />
Hoboken, New Jersey is what is known in biology as a salience, a<br />
kind of protuberance or growth with characteristics of an entity;<br />
an appendage of Manhattan, crossing state lines. Layers of<br />
sedimentation (technical college, gentrified commuter haven,<br />
industrial ghetto echoing back through the decades) produce an<br />
impacted image of America--especially for certain Russian poets,<br />
planed over here briefly from their own continent, at the end of<br />
May 1996, to attend a conference. A kind of empyrical model,<br />
though not as dazzling as that Potemkin village panorama one<br />
beholds from the campus ridge, there, across the Hudson.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Temporary bivouac in Penn Station. Heavy book-filled bags. The<br />
directions say: "Take the PATH train to Hoboken." Shouldn't it<br />
read, "train PATH"? Has a conspiracy of Russian syntax invaded<br />
New York?<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Huffing with my bags up college hill to Stevens Institute of<br />
Technology. Suddenly hailed from behind by a Russian accent, a<br />
piercing timbre. It's Irina, the blonde and druzkeskii<br />
journalist from Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea--recent transplant<br />
to Hoboken. She wants to know where is Peirce Hall (pronounced,<br />
in English, like "purse"--Charles S. Peirce, inventor of<br />
semiotics, one and only black-sheep American philosopher, taught<br />
here briefly before his academic casting-out. . .). Irina wrote<br />
a dissertation in Astrakhan, on Anna Akhmatova. Her mother and<br />
father are philologists. We xerox the conference schedule--she<br />
serves me tea and grapes, a Crimean meal. This confab is off to<br />
a good start. . .<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
What's it all about? Well, frankly, it's a conspiracy, hatched<br />
by a cabal made up of Ed Foster, poet, editor of Talisman,<br />
publisher of Talisman House books, and Vadim Mesyats, Russian<br />
poet and musician currently on the humanities faculty with Foster<br />
at Stevens. This second Festival of Russian and American Poetry<br />
and Poets is just one cog in an ongoing multivalent cultural<br />
hob-nob cooked up by these two, and their friends there in<br />
Hoboken, which includes readings, lectures, films, and a number<br />
of translation activities, including bilingual anthologies of<br />
Russian and American poets, and a series of contemporary Russian<br />
poetry in English translation (the first volume, by Ivan Zhdanov,<br />
is at the presses).<br />
<br />
The schedule of events reads like a roster of the American poetry<br />
loft (I lean left. I mean lift), with some Russian, Chinese, and<br />
Turkish poets thrown in for good measure. Three full days of<br />
three-ring readings, scholarly paper-deliveries, films (on<br />
Brodsky, Akhmatova, and a number of less well-known-in-America<br />
Russians), two massive evening poetry songfests, a staged reading<br />
of a parlor-piece masque by Robert Duncan (complete with stylish<br />
Akhmatovian feathered headpieces), roundtables on translation,<br />
the state of Russian and American poetry, little magazines,<br />
Chernobyl and Gertrude Stein (in the same roundtable). . . and<br />
more, and more. Here's the catalogue of ships: the Americans<br />
include John Yau, David Shapiro, Leslie Scalapino, Eileen Myles,<br />
Bruce Andrews, Jackson Mac Low, Juliana Spahr, Barret Watten, Ron<br />
Silliman, Kristin Prevallet, Leonard Schwartz, David Rosenberg,<br />
and many others I should name; the Russians include some of the<br />
most interesting and important contemporary poets, including Lev<br />
Rubinshtein, Elena Shvarts, Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Ilya Kutik,<br />
Maria Maksimova, Vadim Mesyats, and Ivan Zhdanov. It's an<br />
intense gathering--and it costs, yes, thirty-five dollars. It's a<br />
conspiracy! Imagine all those people in one place for three<br />
days, talking, reciting, discussing, laughing, vodkayaking,<br />
vodkayaking etc. . .<br />
<br />
Now I'll tell you what it all means.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
At the "tail end of the 17th century", the "vast Russian<br />
Empire"--"ancient, Orthodox", "xenophobic, hidebound"--had but one<br />
seaport: the "little town of Archangel", on the Arctic Ocean. <br />
Then "Peter the Great" built "St. Petersburg", modeled by himself<br />
and "his French architect" on "Amsterdam and Venice".<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, "America" was "colonized"; Salem had its "witch<br />
trials", and "Anne Bradstreet". The "first American sea-going<br />
vessel" was built in "Portland, Maine"--while Peter ("deeply,<br />
steadfastly in love with ships and the sea") was doing the same<br />
(while torturing and executing the "mutinous Streltsy"--an<br />
"endless" bloodbath).<br />
<br />
* * * <br />
<br />
Saturday night. The endless reading in the dingy<br />
chemistry hall, seats slanting up like some very provincial<br />
Coliseum over the blackboards. While the Americans read, the<br />
Russians go out into the spring night to smoke (not wanting to<br />
offend). They are our guests--we translate their readings (as<br />
best we can); it doesn't work the other way, unless some upstart<br />
(like Eileen Myles) jumps out of her poems to address them<br />
directly. But then, it doesn't have to work the other way! The<br />
Russians, unlike us, understand us already! (They speak<br />
English.)<br />
<br />
Along the Coliseum aisles, Leslie Scalapino encounters Elena<br />
Shvarts. Two shy poets, circling each other hesitantly, wary as<br />
a pair of songbirds in the jungle of tongues.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Ivan Zhdanov. Tom Epstein, one of the few Americans here who<br />
actually knows something about Russian poetry, calls him "one of<br />
their best, a force of nature." He looks like a thoughtful<br />
lumberjack, sparse jet black hair slicked down, glasses, rangy<br />
strength. In fact, his translator, John High, looks like a<br />
lumberjack too. Maybe they met in Alaska.<br />
<br />
Zhdanov, like the other Russians, doesn't read. He recites. <br />
Recites from memory. They know their poems by heart. The<br />
Russian language has some similarities to English--it beats,<br />
iambic, trochaic, unlike French--but the differences are also<br />
great. English smoothness accents the rough chewing of<br />
consonants, like a chard clarinet; whereas Russian is more like a<br />
caged animal, a bear, trying to tame itself. Everything would be<br />
full-throated--if the vodka-inflamed, heart-swelled throat would<br />
only permit such a thing. . . if only a bear could sing. (But<br />
you know this is stereotype. Russian is actually a lot like<br />
Latin or Hindu--an oratorical, ceremonious organ-voice, given to<br />
verbal and nonverbal festa, hilaritas.)<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Jackson Mac Low and Bruce Andrews. Like father and son, a pair<br />
of riders. "Language Poetry." Finally, I'm starting to<br />
understand something, because I'm hearing it, out loud. These<br />
are the angels, pouring out their vials of wrath and glee and<br />
remorse at the apocalypse of syntax. Glee and wrath and remorse<br />
are all that remain when the bridges to Disney World are burned,<br />
and the enlightened conscience. . . flips: the craziness of pure<br />
American products. But under the tongue the individuality of the<br />
verbum replaces the commodious self, and syllables wrap around<br />
alpha and omega of each blip with a kind of loving farewell.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
It's Sunday morning, lovely. I decide to take a walk, clear my<br />
head of the vodka and mistakes of the previous 3 am. Down<br />
through the seemly garden-walks below campus, Hoboken. Across the<br />
street, a shy small Russian, head down, glancing furtively from<br />
one eye, bangs over her forehead, eating her constant cigarette<br />
(the Russian's best friend). She's taking a walk, too. It is<br />
Elena Shvarts.<br />
<br />
We walk together. Finally I get a chance to talk to her (today<br />
is the last day). She understands, speaks English.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, during a roundtable discussion focusing on her work<br />
(she is the most prominent contemporary poet in Russia), Shvarts<br />
launches into a long provocative harangue (in<br />
Russian--translated), the gist of which is, that the poetry of the<br />
West, and especially the United States, lacks the essential<br />
rhythmic quality of poetry--Dionysian fire, she calls it. The<br />
Americans (including Leslie Scalapino, who's borrowed my book of<br />
her translated poems) stir uncomfortably, shake their heads. She<br />
reads some more poems. The moderator of this particular<br />
roundtable never appeared. Tom Epstein does his best (and it is<br />
very good) to fill in, giving us a brief, incisive overview of<br />
Shvarts's labors. The roundtable breaks up--time to move on. . .<br />
<br />
She says to me (roughly translated): Americans use the poem to<br />
find out what they're going to say, and they take a long time<br />
getting to it. The Russians wait until the whole poem is there,<br />
and then they commit it to memory.<br />
<br />
It is the difference between comedy and tragedy; opportunity and<br />
fate.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Eileen Myles is the most Russian American poet here. Also the<br />
most American. She speaks from herself. In spite of her<br />
politics. Or, that is, you can't see where they divide her up. <br />
It's all one.<br />
<br />
What's it all about? Personism (Pessoa?)? Personalism (O'Hara?)?<br />
Peronism (no. . .)? Eileen Myles is the only American to shout<br />
up from the podium--hey, you Russians, where you going? (or<br />
something to that effect) as you leave the room. . .<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Let's try to be incisive too, as you leave the room. Here are two<br />
big empire-countries, once the rivals of the earth, now like two<br />
paired lungs or windbags (Clinton & Yeltsin) breathing heavily<br />
out of sync almost. On either side of. . . the "old" West. The<br />
very old West, almost as old as the East.<br />
<br />
At a certain salience sometimes, upside Manhattan, antennae try<br />
to touch.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Craft and personality (passion) have always been rivals,<br />
variables. Now toss in another variable--history. Enlightened<br />
America protects the Individual proper (properly tied), to the<br />
"detriment" of State and Religion. Russia experiences the<br />
reverse. In America, the Individual, so glorified, becomes<br />
commodified; in Russia, the Individual, so abased, becomes a cog.<br />
The old East/West yeast. . .<br />
<br />
Modernism, experiment, avant-garde. . . these in the West mean<br />
subsuming the Individual to Craft, for the sake of utopia. <br />
Postmodernism, in the West, is only blurredly differentiated from<br />
the above, a reaction. Modernism, avant-garde, etc., in Russia<br />
mean the same thing: subsuming the Individual. Now refer back to<br />
paragraph #1 (history). So postmodernism means. . . something<br />
very different, in Russia. It strongly opposes modernism and the<br />
avant-garde from beforehand. It means the tradition of the<br />
human, the primordial, the transcendent--a utopia beyond<br />
"utopia"--and beyond the reach of power, force, and will. Only<br />
miracle and grace achieve utopia. This is the Russian<br />
perspective.<br />
<br />
Everything is reducible to Futurism vs. Acmeism. Miracle and<br />
grace have aesthetic implications.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Still--who or what is this mysterious Person, this Personality,<br />
this Personalism? Are we to fall back into the blasted<br />
ego-poetries of the seventies, into the nightmare of pale baby<br />
Shakespeares, the filigree of greed and self-promotion? (Have we<br />
even awakened yet?)<br />
<br />
Once, in the nineteenth century, there was a Russian thinker<br />
named Chaadev, a bold explorer, akin perhaps to Emerson. He<br />
journeyed into the West, but then returned, called back to his<br />
homeland by a sense of duty; bringing with him, like an unwelcome<br />
prophet, a Western lesson--the gospel of moral freedom.<br />
<br />
What is this moral freedom? A word, a phrase-capsule, for a<br />
concept of the basic dignity of the human spirit--resting on the<br />
human being's capacity to dedicate herself or himself--out of love<br />
and piety (in its full uncanniness) and daring--to something<br />
better, something beyond self, some One, some Other, some others.<br />
The vanishing point where "moral" and "freedom" fuse.<br />
<br />
Part of the artistic and identity crisis of the West has been the<br />
fracture of the Person: the demand, the pull from both Right and<br />
Left on behalf of either autarkic or subliminal--either nostalgic<br />
or futuristic--concepts of justice and the good. Like mirror<br />
images, Right and Left command our allegiance with the full force<br />
of both rhetoric and experience.<br />
<br />
Yet perhaps--perhaps by some strange grace, it is Russia--that<br />
great animal, that evil empire, beyond the pale of enlightened<br />
democracies and the full birthright of humanism--impoverished<br />
Russia, suffering Russia, Potemkin Russia--that will return the<br />
gift of Chaadev's moral freedom to the West. Mandelstam wrote<br />
that in such times as these (speaking of his pyramidal, "Assyrian<br />
age"), Man must become the hardest thing in existence, harder<br />
than diamond. The free, loving gift-of-self is the essence of<br />
art and the limit of artistry: but it is another step to<br />
recognize it everywhere as an ontological fundament of reality. <br />
Mandelstam again (trans. Robert Tracy):<br />
<br />
It's not Rome the city that lives through the centuries <br />
But man's place in the universal scheme.<br />
<br />
This is the voice one hears in the strange, ceremonious finality<br />
of Russian recitation; it is an echo, the curve of a shell, the<br />
arch of a wave, a ghost dance, washing up in Hoboken.Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17577227.post-8035333416646331272009-02-05T15:04:00.001-05:002018-07-23T12:42:12.295-04:00Credo<br />
The world has always been full of random verbal noise. However, starting about a century ago, the volume seems to have steadily increased.<br />
<br />
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).<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 <em>sui generis</em> and an example of a class, a period. It is new and old. It is experimental and traditional.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 <em>is</em> going to lecture - and some poems must - it should provide authentic <em>poetic</em> evidence (in terms of both style and <em>exempla</em>) for its arguments. A poem should reveal something - and let the readers exert themselves (to draw their own conclusions).Henry Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06763188178644726622noreply@blogger.com1