crusherrun

what's form for 1

2009-09-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

A series of observations through which I hope to get into this subject.

Start, I think, with Aristotle. Form is a way of treating so-called chaos, as one would treat a patient. It was an accepted fact in fifth century BC Athens that reason could be applied to life so as to improve it, Plato's REPUBLIC being an obvious gesture in that direction. The underlying assumption of the Athenian mind (and much mind since) seems to have been that in its natural state life is disorganized and hence to a degree incomprehensible. Hence the need for form. Art may be an imitation of reality, as Aristotle says, but it is also an improvement on it, if only because it allows for an understanding of it. No surprise that the persons saying such things were thinkers, i.e., philosophers. The poets were not allowed in Plato's republic, as Stanley Diamond has told us, because poetry as practiced in Plato's time eschewed reason, in fact celebrated irrationality, believing I would gather in the viability of all that we know in imagination and fear in madness.

Two and a half millenia later, having come to many understandings of life, deep insights, and made many improvements on life or nature as given, we have begun to question the wisdom of human reason. Many scientists, Darwin included, have given us reason to think that nature is by nature logical and that it might be best for us to see the so-called chaos of life as something we have still not reached a sufficient understanding of. That there is form "out there." We even have a name for some of it: Chaos Theory.

This is starting from a long way out, I realize, but I want to suggest that form in poetry is tied to some of the oldest and deepest arguments we've had with ourselves. We have an almost instinctive sense that form is good and formlessness is not, and where we have our greatest differences is in knowing where the boundary between the two lies. It is perhaps a reasonable question to ask, Is anything formless? It is too soon to say, perhaps, but my sense is that if it occurs in language, it probably can't be.

still looking

2008-08-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

Still looking for the point of it all? Writing poetry, that is. The looking is either a sign of serious derailing, never having known to begin with, or, more likely, the point of it all.

Try this, from Stanley Plumly's latest book, POSTHUMOUS KEATS. "If poetry 'makes nothing happen' [Auden's lament] and if we despise any poetry 'that has designs' upon us[Keats's complaint], then what are we left with? If poetry is dreaming, what makes it real?" Plumly, of course, is trying to locate the function of poetry as Keats saw it, and since Keats thought of poetry as dreaming--waking dreaming, dreaming done with something like a purpose, not a 'design', behind it--, to what end? Plumly concludes: to see. "To see as a poet, a true dreamer, is to see as a healer and a knower." The seer being a visionary, not a photo-journalist. This idea has big arms, arms with which to clasp a great deal, hence room for not a little difference.

Which is why we have poetry.

besmilr brigham

2008-02-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

Every now and then you stumble into a poem that gets it right. I mean the kind of poem that wants to "tell" something and manages to do that with deftness and quickness. The nice irony in Besmilr Brigham’s "Our Sons," from RUN THROUGH ROCK, ed. C.D. Wright (Lost Roads, 2000), is that what she wants to tell us is that maybe the best thing you can do in bringing up boys is teach them to find out things, as she says, "by watching." Don’t tell them anything, she tells us. Ignore, or at least start by ignoring, the old ways and conventions. Sweep the over-riding abstractions out of the way, and just look.

Our Sons

tell them
nothing
it is best to start with

not the value of money
obedience
or power
or what it is to be a man

let us
find out a few things
by watching

aren’t we
getting tired of reproducing

ourselves

it is best
to take the uninformed
approach
look at the rock
how firm it stands
yet when the rain
touches its sides
how the hidden colors
show

it is best we tell our sons nothing

[Blogger’s comment.] Not too many parents have tried this, I believe.

some thoughts on Garrigue's "Grand Canyon"

2008-02-09T08:22:00.000-08:00

The poem that came to typify or best represent Jean Garrigue was one that tried to present essences or states of perception and feeling just beyond the reach of language, almost always of a kind that called for exuberant joy. To try to reach beyond language means, paradoxically, that what we finally hold in our minds is not so much a thing in nature as a construct of language or, as we used to call it, thought. "Grand Canyon," for instance, is not a portrait of that geological marvel. Rather, it is a rapture about being in the world, the occasion for which is experiencing this most unusual example of what she calls "the brute Sublime." That state is oxymoronic, brutal but sublime, as the condition of being is both exhilarating and terrifying. Garrigue makes no allusion to herself in the poem except the simple (and repeated) statement, "I am lonely," a bald utterance which looms larger once we know that she had just been diagnosed in California with cancer. Out there on a short teaching assignment, she nevertheless rushed back home to New York City to ready herself for what little life she had left. The poem, of course, turns immediately away from its bald utterance toward an elaborate, operatic performance of astonished joy.

Taking the switchback trail,
slipping and sliding,
forever slantwise descending
into new confrontations of parapets,
chimneys, mantels, segments of angles,
modelings of rock of slacknesses and accidental tensions
combined with the effects of its weight--
the total effect never total for never can you see it all, not even guess
at mazes of the proliferation...

To take an almost random sample which nevertheless conjures up a Dantesque descent into death.

In discussing "Grand Canyon" in her excellent review of SELECTED POEMS [Parnassus, 18/19 (1993)], Lorrie Goldensohn reminds us that in line 11 Garrigue begins a sentence that doesn’t end till 108 lines later. This is one way to push beyond the representational purposes or boundaries of most language, loading it down with detail, qualification, and repetition to the point where we lose touch of what "point" is being made or even what the subject of the current verb might be. Or, we come to believe that the point is less to make a point than to sustain a rhythm, a feeling, a verbal equivalent of the thing which is brutal in being without consciousness or language and perhaps for that reason also sublime.

This is a strategy in several of Garrigue’s best poems and reminds me of an exercise Marguerite Young used to give her students in fiction, namely, to write a sentence that went on for two or three pages. Jean and Marguerite, of course, were old acquaintances from girlhood days in Indianapolis and roomed together for a while as students at the University of Chicago. Pure coincidence, I realize.

JEAN GARRIGUE: A Fitness of Things

2008-01-21T17:15:00.000-08:00

Jean Garrigue’s "Amsterdam Letter" partakes of a number of ancient modes in the writing of poems, two of which are indicated in the title, the letter poem and the poem of travel, both of which received considerable impetus in the poetry she came to as a young poet. Pound’s "River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter" revived a kind of poem that certainly thrived in ancient China, though of course that particular poem was written not by the traveler but by the one who stayed at home. The letter poem may have gotten its impetus from Petrarch’s invention of the sonnet, a form that mixed description of the loved object with appeals to her. It also owed something to the dedicatory epistle poets wrote in the Renaissance hoping to secure patronage from the wealthy. "Amsterdam Letter" represents a sub-category of this genre in that it is addressed to no one, meaning everyone, in the manner of a journalist’s letter from a foreign capitol, Edward R. Morrow’s from London, say, during the Blitz.

Travel gave the writer an opportunity to report back on the marvels of distant lands, as in "Amsterdam Letter." A non-fictional genre originally, which still thrives, it also gave structure to the novel in its early days as the examples of Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Moby Dick would indicate. Poetical traveling, though perhaps begun in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, would have to wait for Wordsworthian rambles, journeys to Renaissance Italy conducted by Browning and, in Garrigue’s day, the post-World War II Fulbrighter who, having fought in Europe, returned after the war to study the culture he had tramped over only a few years before in uniform. Jean Garrigue had the additional desire to travel in wanting to recover as much as she could of her European, particularly French, heritage. In such poems as "Pays Perdu" and "Cortege for Colette," she did just that.

"Amsterdam Letter," however, is one of many (and one of her best) celebrations of travel alone. Her first publication, Thirty-Six Poems and a Few Songs, included "From Venice Was That Afternoon." Other poems followed, including "Swiss Altitudes," "Primer of an Italian Journey," "Soliloquy in Pere Lachaise," "For the Fountains and Fountaineers of Villa d’Este," "Discourse From Firenze," the whole of Chartre, and Prose Poems, "French Country Circus," "The Water Wheel by the River Sorgue," "St. Sulpice," "Of a Provincial City," "Country Junction," "Song for ‘Buvez Les Vins du Postillon," "Cannes," "The Grand Canyon," "Song in Sligo," "Grenoble Café," "Beaucaire," to which I would add "After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs" and "On Going by Train to White River Junction, Vt." The little girl who grew up in Indianapolis in the 1920's wanted desperately to see the world, and a poem like "Amsterdam Letter," as we’ll see, was giddy with delight at what for her was the newness and particularity of that place.
"Amsterdam Letter" also participates in one of the most ancient of poetical practices, the list. From Homer’s catalogue of ships in The Odyssey to the present day, the list has served many poets well as an underlying structure. E.B. Browning’s "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," for one. Garrigue’s letter begins,
Brick distinguishes this country,
And broad windows–rather, rectangles
Of wide and glittering scope--
And cabbages.
Cattle a specialty, and cheese, storks–if they are not all dead
Or abandoned–and flowers, oh, flowers!
Some say as well, quick humor.
Brick, windows (rectangles), cabbages, cattle, cheese, storks, flowers and humor. A capricious list, but that will be the form that her "delight" takes in the poem, reminding us not so vaguely of that other Manhattanite’s celebrations of the city, Frank O’Hara. Garrigue, for all her travel, was a lifelong citizen and resident of Greenwich Village, coincidentally once a part of Nieuw Amsterdam. "Amsterdam Letter" ends with another list, this time of words she was taught the Dutch versions of by an"old Frisian lady," "Horse, sky, cow, tree, thank you," followed by the two large abstractions that emerge from her experience of Amsterdam itself which come to anchor the poem, namely, "Beauty, and love." I take this as a small but serious correction to Keats’s famous ode, love replacing truth in his short list of "all ye need to know."

Garrigue’s poem, of course, is written in free verse with lines ranging from four to twenty-one syllables, a liberty with line-length that mirrors the wandering and distracted delight of her attention. But, rather than producing a poem that operates at a purely sensuous level, seeing, smelling, tasting only what is put immediately before her, she draws past–perhaps the word is "through"–such experiences a series of observations that reflect an enlarged, abstract sense of what the good life contains. Out from behind a surface arbitrariness emerges something resembling an essay on right living, one conducted in an abstract and formal diction that contrasts with the concrete imagery of the poem. Beginning with the word "distinguishes" in the first line, we are gradually introduced to features of life in Amsterdam that make it highly civilized. The windows of line two are said to be of "wide and glittering scope," a quality that one could easily apply to many aspects of life catalogued here. The old Frisian woman becomes a model citizen of the city in being "affable," "amusing and helpful." Even the cab driver proposed to her, an act she likens to a "specimen of humor." The sky is "dense, heavy, fragrant," the water "rich." While the gabled houses are "sedate," the bicyclists, six abreast, "skimming around corners like swallows," display quickness, as the Dutch do humor, and quietness. "How quiet they are! Even the trolleys!"

The list of enviable qualities goes on. The "bravura" of carved animal heads, the "elegance" of panels, "the clear meaning" of glass. Bravura, elegance, clarity of meaning. What more could there be in such a world of perfection?
...that delicacy of manner, that responsiveness to many,
That prevalence of what seems self-possessed, contained, and easy--
Not only that, but the Dutch are "Amiable conversationalists...
Who by a manner suggested
What I have no word for--
Unfeigned it is and unblighted,
That "generous, free disposition"
That so strongly confirms
A fitness of things.
Here we enter Shakespeare’s great romance of love, Twelfth Night, where Olivia corrects the vain, curmudgeonly Malvolio (act I, scene v) to remind him of the greatest of human dispositions, one which if practiced widely enough "confirms/ A fitness of things," as Jean Garrigue found it in the city of Amsterdam. "There by the water beds/ And the ancient, calmed passions of their reflections," she (re)learned the meaning of not only beauty and love, but of calmed passions, bravura, elegance, amiability, sedateness, quickness, all summed up as a fitness of things.

"Amsterdam Letter," in other words, becomes a grid on which Garrigue can bring together a real place and her sense of a personal utopia, the real and the ideal. Notice, though, that the speaker is only a visitor to this place and that she does not speak the language. She is, in fact, the merest initiate to its secrets and, without saying it in so many words, must be content with a brief encounter, however insightful and intense.

ending and stopping II

2008-01-19T11:34:00.000-08:00

Strange how a subject once entered turns up around the next corner.

From C.D. Wright's COOLING TIME: AN AMERICAN POETRY VIGIL(2005): "I am not sure of where it is I am going. Important, I believe, to resist finality in one's own work while assiduously working toward its completeness." And, "Closure can be avoided by as many strategies as can beginning. 'Endings just drag me,' Miles Davis said in a DOWN BEAT interview."

Not being sure where one is going, but going. What is it Eliot says in FOUR QUARTETS? Does he say it in the QUARTETS? "Fare forward. The rest is not our business." Stopping is a part of continuing, just as sleep is.

Davenport, still life, the image

2008-01-18T11:14:00.000-08:00

Finally got around to reading Davenport's OBJECTS ON A TABLE, his study of still life in art. As always with Davenport, the writing is lively and the learning is vast and often arcane, assembled as one would a collage. He seems uninterested in constructing historical narrative, believing instead that the past is present and can be cherry-picked at will. So, his scholarly procedure is analogous to those artistic procedures he admires most and considers most modern.

"The art of our century is that of collage, involving quotation, parody, cultural inventory. Collage is by genre and by strategy the art of the still life, which begins as a duplication of reality in an image [Aristotle said art was an "imitation" of reality. The same thing?], grows into an enduring depiction of symbolically interacting objects in the service of one sentiment or another..."

"We can see this spirit of recycling forms and subjects in literature's propensity to follow Nietzsche in his saying that, human nature being unchanging, the same things must happen over and over again." Other bon mots include: "Reiteration is a privilage of still life denied many other modes," i.e., conserves its subjects and forms better than other modes. "It is an art that is symbiotic with civilization." Early in the book, he speaks of doing "iconographic inquiry," of which of course he is a dazzling master. But, this would seem to validate art especially (only?) as it reiterates the past, echoes it, alludes to it, cites it. As I said, art resembles and, in its extreme forms, becomes a kind of scholarship, preserving by reiterating the past. Such art is implicitly conservative, in all senses of the word. For Davenport still life is the highest form of art because it is so traditionally self-reflexive, more so than other modes. Self-relexivity in art ("recycling forms and subjects") keeps the past alive. So, when it comes to modern art, he praises first (only?) what is old in it, not what might be new. But, as Nietzsche said, human nature is "unchanging." Nothing is new. Rather, what is new is old (made new).

ending and stopping I

2008-01-15T17:24:00.000-08:00

Part of what kept me away from such a spongiform tablet as the blog was the gathering sense of not knowing what to do now. An odd shoe to be putting on after 50 years of scratching and scribbling. I suppose it has to do with some sense of age or, rather, some sense of bringing a thing like a life to some conclusion. And, as soon as said, the idea wilts, exposes its mold. I've said for years about the poem that you can bring it to an end or an ending, or you can stop. Stopping implies things that make sense, greater sense, than ending. I think Lyn Hejinian is a little harsh when she complains in "The Rejection of Closure" of "The coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry," but I understand the fatigue of being always tied to what we often find in music, the need to pull out all stops and blow the listener away with crashing, clashing chords and drums. She calls the similar thing in poetry a "negative model, with its smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth....however pleasurable its effects, closure is a fiction, one of the amenities that falsehood and fantasy provide." This from her headnote to the essay in THE LANGUAGE OF INQUIRY (U. Cal. Press, 2000) , p.41.

And, too, stopping is more natural to human endeavor. Outside of the track race, that is. Stopping is what we do when the energy goes away. And the return to energy does not always connect smoothly (or at all) with what preceded it. We are energy transmitters, and most of us pick that energy up from various places, happy to do so. We chase it down for as long as we can, and when it gets away, which I think it almost always does, we let it go. If we're smart and whether we like it or not, that is.

Merrill Gilfillan's UNDANCEABLE

2008-01-10T10:52:00.000-08:00

Called back, as Emily said. From what? I hardly know. Sorry, bloggers. Will try to do better.

Anyway, I stumbled into M. Gilfillan's latest a month or two ago, published by the excellent Flood Editions. Not exactly new, being a book of 2005. But timeless, as the muses say. Full of his cryptic ellipticals strung out on a vaguely western twang. His verbal metier is southern midwest, really. A slow focussed interest in what's in front of him of note, but with little (other) reference to his self. No interest in elegy. A low-riding humorous affection for the genuine, human or natural, which is out of the way. Hints of Dorn.

brief responses

2006-12-28T13:33:00.000-08:00

I was asked recently by a magazine called BLOOM of Bloomington, IN to answer a couple of questions: How has my work been influenced by Bloomington and its surroundings? And, how have teaching and writing partnered up in my writing? Here's what I came up with (in less than 200,00 words):

I’ve always been influenced by place in my writing. It’s a trope in Romantic and post-Romantic writing to draw feelings out on the grid of what’s in front of you, particularly if it’s the natural world you’re looking at. I don’t know what that means exactly, but it feels to me as though the self and the place it’s in–even temporarily, as in travel–aren’t really separate. We are, in some way, part of the landscape. Of course, in a very big way, we’re not, as well. I’m continually stunned at how remote the world and the earth are from me. Anyway, to have lived for more than thirty years in southern Indiana, which is longer by far than I’ve lived anywhere else, has had an inevitable and, for me, a broadening effect on my writing. And, not just because I write about the region directly from time to time, but because it has been here and in its tones and imagery that I have learned to be the particular person I am. I left a message on an old friend’s voice machine a few weeks ago, one I hadn’t spoken with in years. She left one on mine in response: "Roger, you have a southern accent. Where did you get that?" Hm, I thought. I think I know.

Teaching, it seems, is not teaching unless it’s also learning. In my twenties, when I was deciding to be a poet, it seemed a logical thing for a writer to teach writing. I chose to get a Ph.D. instead of an M.F.A., but I always thought of my training in literature as training in writing. Who else can teach you better as a writer than a great writer him- or herself? Some might answer, "a great critic," and I have certainly learned much from the critics. They taught me how to read. They showed me what was going on in works I had difficulty with. At the same time, I think you can learn essential lessons from the writers of your own time, those who are struggling with the same issues, personal, public, and writerly, as you. This is what the critic, even the great critic, of literature can’t help you with. He or she is a student of the past, of a literature which is more or less completed, if not yet completely understood. The writer lives now, in the threat of the actual. He or she is drawing maps for the wilderness of the present, maps that later writers, most especially critics, will tidy up and use to "explain" the poet’s or the novelist’s rough charts. Charts that historians and philosophers sometimes turn to for help in their descriptions of existence. I think that’s what we mean when (and if) we say that artist’s are (when they are) the "antennae of the race."

a note on christopher middleton

2006-11-19T09:03:00.000-08:00

What is it exactly that Christopher Middleton doesn't like when he says: "An eager-beaver rising literary man with "Eng. Lit." behind and abreast of every novelty I certainly was not." [CHICAGO REVIEW, 51:1/2 (Spring 2005), 13.] Eager-beavers have a penchant, often, for self-display, of their eagerness as much as whatever its content is. The kind of thing one finds at sports venues and, so I'm told, corporate boardrooms. "Rising," of course, signifies a distracting attentiveness to one's career. "Literary" is not a good word to someone who feels that the last thing literature should be is literary, i.e., self-reflexive. For Middleton's and other surrounding generations, that meant resisting the influence of the world's most grateful colonial author, T.S. Eliot. After THE WASTE LAND, that is. "Eng. Lit.," speaking of colonialism, is the American rendering of the term and speaks to/about the eagerness with which the middle generations of American poets embraced (re-embraced?) the traditions and forms of the mother tongue and, by implication, little outside it. "Eng. Lit." was a closed shop, into which you could put American or any other experience if you did it the right way. It was not very open to influences from elsewhere--David Jones, Stevie Smith, and maybe Robert Graves to the contrary--despite or perhaps because so much of the other world, outside Eng. Lit., was beginning to bear down on it. Such attitude, be it underscored, came from an Englishman (Middleton) who made his way to Texas and, of course, the German language, two zones resisted in the deep provincial recesses of Englishness, there and abroad. Though one can't help but point out the love of jazz (the other?) in the writings of Philip Larkin, John Wain and Kingsley Amis. "Novelty" probably explains itself. The spuriously new, the trendy, whatever prevents focus on what matters. I don't know whether America made all this happen for Middleton or whether indeed it was England that drove him from England, but the need for The New was as strong in him as it was in the man who left Crawfordsville, Indiana for Venice in 1908. And who never came back except to spend twelve years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.

an old philosopher in cambridge

2006-11-10T07:08:00.000-08:00

It’s odd reading Frank Kermode’s NOT ENTITLED: A MEMOIR. On the one hand, it’s the description of the rise of a working-class Manxman (already an outsider to British life by coming from a quaint cul-de-sac of its imperialist sprawl) to be the holder of the King Edward VII Professorship of English Literature at Cambridge, an eminence one would have thought so stratospheric as to make the holder of it winged. But the point of the book seems rather to suggest that the eminence won in this life had less to do with the obvious rise than with the simultaneous resistance to it, with, in fact, the sense that the customary avenues to success, to say nothing of the palaces at the ends of their drives, were little more than clubs. The book’s title comes from a phrase once common in the British navy whereby common sailors lined up for their monthly wages were sometimes said to be "Not Entitled" to some part of their pay for one misdemeanor or another, often trumped-up by their superiors. As the term hovers over the whole book, however, it suggests Kermode’s own sense of his not deserving the reputation that came his way and that largely for his turning critic by default (he would rather have been a poet), where he spent most of his efforts writing literary journalism rather than the "serious" scholarship and/or criticism expected of him.

An accomplished social satirist, Kermode’s description of his tour of duty in the navy during World War II contributes considerably to our wonder that the allies managed to win it. Life aboard a converted merchant ship, captained by a succession of sometimes charming alcoholics but more often by pilferers, hoarders, and those drunk not only on pink gin but on authority as well, meant that Kermode kept his head down and followed the orders of the day, week or month, often at complete odds with the orders of the prior day, week or month. When coughed up on England’s dingy shore at the end of the war, he hardly knew what to do with himself. He was hired into the English Department at Reading by a professor who knew him whom he describes with great relish as essentially an actor who regarded the lecture hall as a kind of theatre. From there he moved to Newcastle Manchester, Bristol, University of London, and finally Cambridge (and I may have skipped a post or two), always bemused at those who hired him for not seeing that he was not quite the real right thing.

No charlatinism here, of course. It’s that he preferred, quoting Tristram Shandy’s father, to sleep diagonally in his bed, a literal fact of his old age but also a habit of mind that kept him from being the kind of scholar/ critic he obviously was supposed to have become and could have become if he had wished. He was an awkward boy, he says, particularly with women, and though married twice, he slept diagonally in that bed as well by "saluting" both of them in his book but otherwise leaving them entirely out of it. When I read the relevant paragraph to my wife, you could see her hackles rise. But then he did not write the book to please anybody but himself, and the "pleasure" to be had was in part the need to get his version of certain damning episodes in his professional life before the public, but more deeply the need to tell the truth of experience and of himself with all the necessary admissions of error that go with that. His life was, and still is, filled with an intellectual omnivorousness virtually absent from our time. One hardly knows what to call him, since teacher, critic, writer, scholar all fit him, as I think would something like esthetician. The book’s final chapter concerns his "flight" from the organized life of the universities where he had "the sense of being, too painfully, where one is not entitled to be, doing what one is not entitled to do." Though he lives in Cambridge, visited by friends and by his children, this old "philosopher" in his version of Rome looks out over his back garden at a statue of Diana, and writes, under the guise of book reviewing, descriptions of our cultural life that one is tempted to say ARE our cultural life slouching toward whatever it is to become.

a few new books

2006-10-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

I used to try to keep abreast of things, read all the leading journals, the latest or newest books of poetry. I wanted to know what was going on, what was possible in the language I was participating in. I had to find out what had happened, too, in all the receding layers of the past. It was impossible, and I think I knew that, but when did impossibility ever stop anyone from trying a thing? I was relieved, though, when a poet friend said to me quite a few years ago that she had stopped trying to "keep up." The quest had moved inward, I gather, and that seemed a more reasonable place to be in at a "certain age." Part of the problem, too, was that I had come to poetry at a time when everyone believed, as Eliot had instructed us, that one had to have read everything that mattered to be a poet. Poems grew out of poems, plus a dash of experience. Poems have always done that, of course, but not quite to the extent that we felt they had to be back in the middle of the last century. Are we in a better place now? I don’t know. Maybe. We’re in a different one, certainly. And, so am I. I probably know most of what I’ll ever know that will make a difference to me, and it’s out of that residue of reading and experience that I’ll be able to grasp what lies ahead. Have I seen it all and done it twice? No, of course not. But the tools I have for coping with the future are not far away and, hopefully, not too rusty.

Which is a long-winded way to say that a few good books have come my way recently, almost by accident, one sent by a friend, one sent by a friend of a friend, one from having just learned that a friend’s wife was also a poet, one from looking for this last book on the publisher’s website (a friend from many years ago, long unheard from or about, was on the same website), and finally a book I got from being a member of a poet’s organization. So, let me tell you something about them. They’re all wonderful books.

Off the Grid Press (see www.offthegridpress.net) has just published Henry Braun’s LOYALTY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, a beautifully-produced book by a press devoted to publishing poets of a "certain age." Braun belongs to the generation that dropped out of mainstream culture in the sixties by demonstrating against the government’s policies in Viet Nam and later by constructing a life that was, in fact, off the electric, as well as the political, grid. The result in these poems is a tone of unwavering mildness, a kind of stern placidity, in the face of so much that is misguided and downright wrong with the way we inhabit ourselves and the world. The poems, like the life they mirror, stay close to the earth and, too, to a language that evokes the astral vastness as well as the feel of the local. Here’s "Coming From Childhood":

When I come from childhood
with all my bridges alight behind
the stars are already named.

Pages of readouts
bulk in the observatories
with enough stars to shame Sumer.

I slow my breath to name
the burning bridges stars
still shining as my own.

Sumer (the civilization that gave us writing) and the astounding discoveries of the most modern science, and between them the small flame of a life kept burning.

Tom Hansen, a poet from South Dakota, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize this year with FALLING TO EARTH, published by BOA EDITIONS. This is a first book, as I understand it, from a man in his mid sixties, one who has served a long and careful apprenticeship to his craft and his life. The poems are as artful as they are apparently effortless, these meditations on the obscure purposes and the equally clear endings. This one is "Walking the Dogs in January":

We stumble out into winter.
Half a foot of new snow.
It squeaks when we walk and
keeps track:
who comes and who goes and where
and whether or not they turn back.

Cold crawls up my nose.
Snakes its way down my throat.
With every breath I see
a piece of my soul leak away.
None of it ever comes back.
What if I use it all up?

But the dogs are happy,
they bound on ahead,
and what can I do but follow?
We have nowhere to go
and race through the snow
to get there as soon as we can.

When we arrive
we will become
citizen-inmates of winter:
a country so cold only four words
of its lost language survive:
WIND and SNOW and DESOLATION--

and one there is no
human sound for.
Soon enough, we will be fluent
in that unspeakable tongue--
our footprints limping in circles,
dying to follow us home.

Hansen makes you feel as though the meaning of your life is always right there in front of you in the things you do every day. All you need to do is understand that and then write it down. Except that it takes a lifetime of looking and another lifetime of writing to be able to do that.

JAM is also published by BOA, in 2001. It is by Joe-Anne McLaughlin. Go to: www.boaeditions.org. Here is a dramatic, funny, dead serious voice that borrows from several corners of the world, as good poets must. Also a sense of form that’s as tight as a noose. The "take" in these poems is almost always from a position of severe strain, i.e., the earth and its heaven-sent arbiters leaning hard on mortal flesh. Hence her borrowings from jazz, the blues, and in a succession of poems, from Frost. Not the Frost of birch-bending, but the one who glanced once in the direction of Abishag. Little did he know what else she had up her sleeve. McLaughlin show’s us, though. Here’s "Abishag’s Brag" (which should be centered on the page, not aligned to the left):

Girl, in my foxtails
and fishnets, I was all
city. Exotic
as a Vatican
bagel, accessible
as Port Authority.
I wiggled, lightning
would fork,
sidewalks buckle,
wrong numbers ring,
Earth speak. I was
so out of this world
gorgeous men had to
use raincoats and
boilermakers
for protection.
And cool?–Sister,
I was Antarctica Express.
One night of me
and a fellow would
be lonely
all ways.

No time for lament here. These poems show us a woman who’s thrown herself into and at life in the same gesture.

Another poet who waited. How I admire the patience. Mary Rose O’Reilly published her first book this year, HALF WILD (LSU Press), and with it won the Walt Whitman Award. Where’s she been? Well, she’s written five (5) books of essays, and as the jacket copy says, is "active in Quaker ministry" and "also taken Buddhist precepts as a lay practitioner." A long lineage, that: Herbert, Hopkins, Merton, Snyder. The poems are narrow and quiet and don’t let go. "Scene of the Crime Photos" is aligned to the left:

I know
the trajectory
of this crumpled doll
to the bathroom floor.

I know
why the suicide
dropped his glasses.

I know
where you lie
with a rinse of darkness
under your head

in a ruin of faces
tried on,
discarded

in the uncontrollable gush
of words
you should never
have said.

This is a poet who has traveled far. I’m tempted to say, far FROM anything resembling concord. Only, thankfully, to return to it. When she starts a poem, "This might be considered/ a waste of time: to sit/ still at a window, telling/ one bud from another," as she does in "Durham," you know someone is lost and about to be found again.

Rochelle Ratner’s BALANCING ACTS just came out from Marsh Hawk Press (www.marshhawkpress.org). If I count right, this is her fifteenth book. She dedicates the book to her students "who have continually pushed me to redefine the borders of poetry," and it is always "out there" that we find her, trying to get further dimensions of life into poetry, trying to make poetry as big as life. BALANCING ACTS is a book of prose poems that hangs clearly but loosely on a narrative of the speaker’s life. It is funny and terrible at the same time, which is one of the balancing acts of this work. Here’s "Going to Bed Alone":

Whenever she sleeps with her lover she doesn’t wear anything, so it’s just as well he’s out of town. Or in town, actually, she’s the one who’s away for the summer. As far away as she can get from noise and drunks and streetlights. So when the speeding car leaves the road, clips a telephone pole, ruptures a gas main, airborne, crashes through her bedroom wall, flies over her bed, then partly out through the bathroom wall, pinning her under it only momentarily, its tires leaving deep impressions on the mattress but her body sinking even further (it’s one of those pillow-top mattresses), she’s virtually unharmed except for cuts here and there, but she’s extremely glad she has an old T-shirt and panties on.

Was the lover driving the car, in a rush to see her? Probably not. Is the crash through the bedroom symbolic? I leave that to you, dear reader.

Well, this was fun. I wonder what the future weeks and months will bring.

standing by

2006-10-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

Arthur Gregor, in his memoir, A LONGING IN THE LAND, describes what it felt like as a teenager in Vienna in 1938 to have the Anschluss, the Nazi takeover, suddenly dropped on you. A friend of his had to leave the country almost at once, at a time when thousands were getting out and the train stations were filled with weeping parents sending their children away, etc. Here's his description of that feeling:

"Even his departure had for me that curious aspect of unreality--or is it reality?--we experience when confronted by something beyond our control, something that runs entirely counter not only to our wishes but to what we are able to comprehend, and we stand by, utterly helpless, letting what is happening happen as though will had been wiped away, choice an illusion, and something we sense dimly as destiny has taken over, and what must be, is, and we can do nothing about it."

the costless average, divine, original concrete

2006-10-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

What is SPECIMEN DAYS but a life as told by blogging? Here's Whitman's last entry:

Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air, is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature--just as much as Art is. Something is required to temper both--to check them, restrain them from excess, morbidity. I have wanted, before departure [that's "death," in case you missed it], to bear special testimony to a very old lesson and requisite. American democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices--through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophicticated life--must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will certainly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose of America,) on any less terms. [Does anyone even understand such an utterance any more, much less believe in it?] I conceive of no flourishing and heroic elements of Democracy maintaining itself at all, without the Nature-element and beauty-element--to really underlie the whole politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World.

Finally, the morality: "Virtue," said Marcus Aurelius, "what is it, only a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature?" Perhaps indeed the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same--to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete.

[I'm not sure what "free skies" are, but I'm pretty sure we ought to go find out.]

Early Fall Report

2006-09-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

Much reading of late, off in many directions. Whitman's SPECIMEN DAYS, for one. Elinor Langer's bio of Josephine Herbst, which does the great service of re-acquainting me (again) with the radical past which we have nearly erased from our consciousness. I read Herbst's last book, NEW GREEN EARTH, three or so years ago. A well-written, informed biography of John and William Bartram which ought to be better known than it is. I trust the scholars of "nature writing" know it, but they need to get it into their canon, in the hopes, of course, that it will get into the larger canon. (Do we still have them? Canons, that is.)

But, I was in fact on my way to a getting-to-know Jean Garrigue when I ran into Herbst, a poet who has not got her due. She and Herbst were an item for a while in the early fifties. Anyway, the dazzle of this poet's best work also needs greater circulation. She was, at her best, an ecstatic, barely able to control the rush of her wit and enthusiasm (and so not easy to read in large doses). But, read her "Amsterdam Letter" or the inimitable "Grand Canyon." She wrote the latter on her drive back to New York from UC-Irvine, where she was a visiting poet, and where she had just learned she had Hodgkin's disease. She died a year later (1972).

I leave you with this small jewel from an immensely large rock, called "For the Fountains and Fountaineers of Villa D'Este."

...we are more water than earth
And less of flesh than a flame
Bedded in air and run by the wind

re-railed

2006-08-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

Whoever you are, and whether you really exist or not, you might have begun to wonder where I’ve been these past weeks, and the truth is, trying to find out if there is an external world (a world external to my thinking mind, including you) and if there is some way I might prove it. I.e., I got caught in the biggest philosophical web around. Try reading Timothy Chappell’s The Inescapable Self and see if you, too, don’t disappear for a few weeks, if not forever. At any rate, philosophy has this language game (a term Wittgenstein likes) in which you try to prove to yourself or another that there is no ground for doubting the existence of a world exterior to your mind. Here’s how it goes:
1. We seem to know about the external world by experiencing it.
2. But our experience could be exactly the same even if there were no external world.
3. We don’t know that our experience has been produced directly by an external world, rather than by a dream or an evil demon, or by the Matrix, or by Putnam’s (a philosopher) nefarious neurosurgeons manipulating brains in vats.
4. If we don’t know that crazy sceptical hypotheses like the one like the ones in step 3 are false, then we don’t know anything much about the external world.
5. So scepticism is justified.
[Be it noted that my spell-checker has never heard of the word "sceptical."] I just woke up from a nap, and here’s what collected in the puddle of my mind as I was sleeping. The problem here is with the mechanism of proof. That mechanism is language. The fact that even the best philosophical minds in the world can’t get language to bridge this gap and prove conclusively that there is a world external to the mind (Descartes painted himself into a famous corner on this one, you’ll recall: I think, therefore I am. He could make no further reliable proof of anything.) does not, logically, mean that it is not there. All it means, logically, is that our minds, using our language(s) can’t conclusively and rationally prove the existence of the external world. But, you and I know it is there. Our senses show it to us every day. And, too, we do not need to fall back on that worn-out word "faith" to prove it. We need no proof. We have it in our sensory tentacles all the time. Now let’s get back to work.

peter o'leary's DEPTH THEOLOGY

2006-06-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

Peter O’Leary, author of GNOSTIC CONTAGION: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, is author also of DEPTH THEOLOGY, a book of poems published by University of Georgia Press. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. It is no surprise, then, that his poems are learned and theologically driven. In a long endnote called "Notes and Acknowledgments," he explains that depth theology is "a religious knowledge of the unconscious." The four parts of the book are "components" of this theology. Explanation is revelation in these poems, except that what is revealed is usually mysterious or remains at the level of human poetic incomprehensibility, a kind of highly charged stammering before the divine. To pick a passage at random, here’s the opening of "A Supersensual Utility in the Sun, and Stars, Earth, and Water."

Confined to the innermost shrine, something gentle settles, homotropic buzz.
Fertile. Theologic. Glue burns inhalant throughout the minor swale of
divination. Objects on the altar decorated with shells of crabs &
freshwater pearls.
What phantom hugs your breath to its chest, motionless?
In conjuring the image of God, dislodged by a turbulence
from a pinched diaphragm, I have chosen
a transcendent lammergeier massive with alpine
strength.

Even the poetry explains, even in the midst of its fevered rush to capture the ineffable. That’s where the excitement and tension lie in these poems. This is a poetry of instruction in religious mystery delivered by a modern-day priest with no orthodoxy, as we imagine early desert hermit monks to have been, other than what can be assembled out of a good library. What other poetry than Milton’s, were he alive today, would give us such words as petrific, theophony, psalterium, limbic, prolactin, theriomorph, thurifer, Torahtic, insufflating, etc.? Or, to put it in more recognizable terms from our intellectual life, this is another poetry committed to "primitive," pre-industrial consciousness AND knowledge of a sort we have had since industrial man discovered the noble savage or Robinson Crusoe found himself almost alone on a southsea island. Direct homage is paid in these poems to that aspect of Charles Olson’s thinking, its Mayan incursions, its defenses of the pre-Socratic mind, its allegiance to Carl Sauer and Stanley Diamond.

Guy Davenport gives a quick digest of this movement in the arts in his essay, "The Symbol of the Archaic" from The Geography of the Imagination (1981). It was part of Modernist (call it Romantic and post-Romantic) thinking to disparage what we had become. We no longer make "our clothes or houses or anything at all." We have "drained our symbols of meaning," "divorced poetry from music, language from concrete particulars." "Modernity" has become "a kind of stupidity." Davenport is here speaking of Olson, but it’s a condition he says we find at the heart of the work of Joyce, Pound, Lawrence, several movements in painting beginning with cubism, and so on. Hence the yearning backwards we find in so much Modernist work. "If we say, as we can, that the archaic is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century, we mean that as the first European renaissance looked back to Hellenistic Rome for a range of models and symbols, the twentieth century has looked back to a deeper past in which it has imagined it sees the very beginnings of civilization." (Pp.20-21) This is the ideology, if you will, out of which these poems spin, rather than, as one might suspect from much of the material quoted and discussed, the contemporary re-interest in standard religions.

One of the late poems, "Lux Contemplatio," offers a description/explanation of "prayer." Given the book’s Modernist roots, this description is quite ecumenical, trans-orthodox, but steeped in texts out of which Christianity arose. Said to be a form of migration (much of the book’s information and imagery comes from birds), prayer, now that the physical globe has been seen, must be understood as an "inward" migration. No more outwardness. Antarctica, the last wild place reached by man "means now an interior domain." Not, not certainly, to be reached by Freudian means, but by prayer.

Prayer is our migration; stillness is our movement....
Come then to the house of your own knowledge:
strive to confine
your incorporeal being within
your bodily house.

Strong echoes here of Olson’s essay, "Projective Verse."

Fine, but at some point, it seems, someone has to say, wait a minute. The Enlightenment has been villified enough. Modernism continues early Romanticism’s critique of the Industrial Revolution, what the Enlightenment achieved in the area of industrial production. No one denies that the Enlightenment was not as fully informed as we would like it to have been. Mistakes (and worse) were made in its name. Man’s intellect can only reach so far. Man’s desire for improving the lot of humanity, like everything else, runs up against what is perhaps too easily called the lust for power. Pound called it usury, Williams cupidity. As the conservatives among us are quick to say, everything is corruptible. That being true, shouldn’t we have expected things to go awry when ideas and inventions were found to improve man’s lot? Must we conclude that what the philosophes unleashed came to absolutely nothing? Should we revoke ether, return electricity to the sky, tear up the U.S. Constitution because we had the guillotine in France and the Cultural Revolution in China? Is "progress" simply a dirty word, a euphemism that hides brutality and not very well? These are, perhaps, over-heated questions to be putting to Peter O’Leary’s poetry, but his book brings us to these issues in ways that raise questions. As a poem with the telling title, "The Revival of the Religious Sciences," says,

We’ve spent millennia chasing the outward world, hapless
experts at exploring it. We need now to look inside. In exchange
for any lost progress, I will give you one hundred years of inwardness, a century
of the soul’s spiral movement, labor,
prayer, reading, inner energies coalescing from lower domains,
a private flaming ministry, the most Miltonic knowing.

I’m sorry, but this being a platform, albeit a poetic/spiritual one, it is thereby arguable. I don’t see how it will address our "outward" needs, which seem to me to be as large as they ever have been. Extinction is in the wind, and I don’t mean just for the spotted owl. Of what use are "a hundred years of inwardness" or "inner energies coalescing from lower domains" to people dying of starvation, aids, and genocide in Africa? To a family of six in West Virginia living in a mobile home on $18,000 a year? To a species that is running low on safe drinking water? And what of real science which today probes deeper into our physiology and brain function? I remember, in the collapse of political consciousness in the 70's, those who said hopefully that if we just took care of our inwardness, the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, that turned quickly into a platform for looking out for number one and a license for greed.

Well, ok, we can’t expect poetry to address all issues. But we can expect a poetry to know the limits of its reach, its own futility, if it comes to that. I like the crazy energy in O’Leary’s best poems, his fascination with arcane and unpronounceable diction, his faith in persuasive utterance. It reminds me at times of Christopher Smart. But Smart was commitably crazy when he wrote his best, and his appeal to us comes from our seeing and knowing the limits of his mind (he would appear not to have known them) and, surprisingly, his joy inside it.

interruptions

2006-05-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

"Mosley cannot tell a story because there never is a story; the interruptions are what interest him. He wants to track the orbits of thought, each of which constitutes its own stab at the truth." Mark Rudman describes the writing of Nicholas Mosley, son of the British fascist, Oswald, in his (Nicholas’s) Catastrophe Practice series. Right away, three pages into it, I want to stop reading Rudman’s essay on Nicholas, skip the reading of Nicholas himself, whom I’ve never heard of (Oswald I do know), and go where the interruptions live with the orbits of thought in the land of the stabbed-at truth. I’m convinced that it’s right next door, where I have poached many a poem merely by driving by and waving at the man leaf-blowing his lawn into submission. He wears those dark glasses that airline pilots and state troopers wear and never smiles. Never has grass been clipped so close to the ground. It makes me want to pet it.

a poetry

2006-05-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

a poetry that doesn't blink when the world/life rears up in all its voraciousness.

a poetry that comes from/goes to feeling, but knows the snares of self-delusion contained therein.

a poetry committed to seeing whatever is real, whatever can stand up to a scepticism as to its (reality's) nature.

a poetry, however private and individual, that knows no experience is either.

a poetry gentle with the gentle, quick with the cruel, uncompromising with those who hide their cruelty under a veneer of gentility or ignorance.

If we have to choose between truth and beauty, let it be truth. But let us look forward to the day Keats thought had arrived two hundred years ago, when they become the same.

A poetry unafraid of ideas or the mind (one cannot see without them), but one that recognizes that "things" can sometimes be ideas. Sometimes; not always.

And, experiment, the new? It's included above, along with the archaic. Not foregrounded; included. "True imagination makes up nothing; it is a way of seeing the world." (G. Davenport)

other matter

2006-04-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

The demands of blogging are severe, and we must not falter further.

So, how about Guy Davenport, 1969, introducing Ronald Johnson's VALLEY OF THE MANY-COLORED GRASSES: Speaking of 'the ideal western poem,' he says, "the credentials of this [kind of poem] tend to lurk not in the poem but in the personality of the poet. All that Byron wrote is somehow not as great as Byron. This illusion, fostered by the scandal-mongering of professors and the Grundyism of psychology, is a lazy and essentially indifferent view of poetry. The poet, who writes not for himself but to provide the world with an articulate tongue, longs to be as absent from his finished work as Homer."

Well, now, there's a point of view. Anyone care to respond?

Or, how about Wittgenstein: "Philosophy is a battle against the betwitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

more on voice

2006-04-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

Helen Vendler’s Coming of Age as a Poet (2003) has one of the best discussions of voice in poetry and what it means to come into or “find” one’s voice. She doesn’t quite subscribe to the descriptions of this process given by Yeats in his “General Introduction” or by Hayden Carruth: “Before a man can create a poem he must create a poet.” [Working Papers: Selected Essays and Reviews (1982), p. 145], though in her essay on Plath’s “Colossus,” she says, at one point, “Suddenly, one is reading the person who became “Plath”.” (p.126) Here, she seems to separate the person from the poet, Plath from “Plath,” but her basic metaphor, as the book’s title indicates, is that what happens to a poet is that he or she “comes of age,” a standard, if unscientific, term of child development. Such a term strongly implies that becoming a poet is a process, however slow and difficult, of maturation. It is a natural, if not biological, transformation found in all life forms, one that, in announcing that transformation, also implicitly preserves the idea of a natural continuity or evolution of selfhood. There is no serious wrenching of the self, nothing that would allow a critic to say, for instance, that the man who wrote the River Duddon sonnets was different from he who wrote the Intimations Ode.
Vendler’s definition of voice comes to have many dimensions. She uses the word “style” interchangeably with “voice,” and describes four “discoveries in style” that a poet must make to come into full voice. They are: “the accurate expression of inner moods and attitudes,” an ability to identify “the salient elements of the outer sense-world that speak to his idiosyncratic imagination,” the devising of “particular axes of time and space” (the “living and non-living beings who will populate his work”), and finally, finding “a convincing cosmological or metaphysical frame of being within which the activity of the poem can occur.” (pp.4-5) While I agree that all of these discoveries have a relation to voice, to call them the vital components of voice blurs the meaning the word can have.
When she stays closer to what I think of as more evident components in a definition of style, she claims that a poet’s coming of age is a matter of forming “a coherent personal style.” (p.1) This corresponds to the “psychological search for identity—that is, for an authentic selfhood.” (p.1) “Coherence” (of character or self) and “authenticity,” along with “individuality” are her repeated terms for measuring or describing voice. “What sorts of discoveries in style does the youthful poet need to evoke? A governing stylistic decorum.” (p.4) I would have thought Eliot’s work—one of her four poets—would have given these criteria serious problems with its intense polyvocality (I’m referring only to the work he took the effort to preserve), but Vendler rightly finds the most readable, but not the only, version of Eliot in “Prufrock.” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “The Waste Land,” the Sweeney poems, the cats, these all seem to be either holidays or vaguely psychotic departures from the authentic, and this despite the fact that Prufrock is, however similar, not Eliot, just as Pound was not Mauberly nor Browning Fra Lippo Lippi. When Vendler says that “a poem can’t veer uncontrollably from attitude to attitude, tone to tone. It must discover a fit governance of its evolving material.” (p.5), I hear a kind of fear of loss of control that reminds me of Arnold, say, or John Crowe Ransom reviewing “The Waste Land,” a kind of nineteenth century longing for fitness and governance and evolution (not revolution), which is the very set of attitudes that spurred the upheaval in the arts that gave us the twentieth century.
We are talking about voice, but it comes as no surprise that we are also talking about cultural value and its preservation. To Vendler, authenticity relates to consistency and coherence (being a predictable, coherent self) or at least to a comprehensible evolution of tone. Governance and control are keys to preserving the kind of familiarity that makes for idiosyncratic individuality. Individuality is, indeed, the cornerstone to this aesthetic, which is, at once, the ground on which our political life is said to be built.
But, what if it isn’t? What if our political life is no longer what we hoped it was and would continue to be? It would seem we would then be confused. We might not know who we are. We might think the idea of a “governing stylistic decorum” did not fit an age where individuality is a quant throwback like the butter churn. We would, instead, if we still thought poetry worth writing, think that other things than “one’s own voice” would matter more. (On the other hand, we might think that we had nothing to cling to but that old, but now unmoored, self of the past.) One of the things that might matter more would be our voicelessness. Another concern might be to avoid a “governing stylistic decorum” if it fit too unchallengingly into a social and political condition where consistency, coherence, governance and control became the
ideals under which we, in fact, lose our individuality rather than discover and preserve it.

Seidel

2006-03-07T04:41:00.000-08:00

Who said confessionalism was dead? Just about everyone. Read Frederick Seidel and learn the limits of one's awareness. Here is a poetry larger than most everything written these days that comes straight from the planet Lowell-Berryman-Plath. "Straight" may be the wrong word for so knotted a consciousness, one so cosmically and personally tormented. "He hid his life away in poetry," says the poem "Frederick Seidel." Boring? It's like being bored at a beheading, bored at the final judgement of what we have amounted to. If they find anything in the dust millennia from now (whoever or whatever "they" are), the only chance the best of us has to be is what we had the courage and perception to see and say about ourselves. The "confessors" wont be alone out there, but they'll up there at the front of the parade. As Seidel shows us in THE COSMOS TRILOGY, we're caught between a cosmos that can't see us or care for us and an ego we can't turn off except by self-laceration.

proust's sentence

2006-03-04T08:39:00.000-08:00

Not all of Proust's sentences are alike, but there is one he's fond off which, by its behavior, suggests that P. grew weary of the limits of the sentence. He wants so badly at certain monents to include everything, thought, feeling, plus some sense of the physical world where the thought and feeling are taking place, that the sentence begins to distend, hemmoraging with parentheses, backpedaling into the past with dependant clause inside dependent clause, to the point almost of bursting. It seems as though he's showing us that the sentence can't really contain what there is of life, and yet he will not quite break it, believing, I would assume, that no other communicative protocol can approach the sentence's omnivorous jaws.

on (or near) the floe edge

2006-02-28T08:14:00.000-08:00

Too many days since I weighed in. Blogging makes demands, one of which might be to get out on the floe edge of perception and see what might be there. There's always the stuff out the window. Today, very cold. And white. Snow spread across the field like a butter by the wind. I like sliding across the field on skis. Why am I not doing it? I try sliding across the page, too. That, too, feels like a disappearance into essentials. What do I mean? Maybe that beyond meaning is something better than meaning. Which, of course, is a meaning, too. The wind has no obstacle to itself today. It blows and blows. The little white pines out front shiver.

on voice: work in progress

2006-02-05T09:20:00.000-08:00

"The idea of the ‘works of a poet’...corresponds to a real object, a grouping of texts that have stylistic homogeneity (as well as heterogeneity). A problem arises only when criticism tries to make an ‘individual’ poet the origin or cause of this stylistic unity....Another embarrassment follows from the convention of treating the author as a single, unified individual. The assumption means that stylistic heterogeneity cannot be countenanced. It has to be made over into a unity at all costs, even if there are a number of different ‘selves’ at work in the poetry assigned to one author, even if there are perhaps as Pound suggests ‘complete masks of the self in each poem’."
Antony Easthope, Poetry As Discourse (1983)

I want to begin with a long series of quotations which I’ve been accumulating for a few years now. The angle of approach is different for each of them, but they all address some aspect of the question of voice in poetry or the assumptions most of us make about it. As I said in an essay twenty-five years ago (ABR, 6:4(1984), 10.), I’ve always felt that voice, as I understood it, was less an individual thing than something that belonged to a period. Most Elizabethan sonnet writers sound like Shakespeare, and vice versa. Most eighteenth century poets sound like Pope or Dryden, and vice versa. Voice seems more like a period style than anything quintessentially individual. Some poets stand out, particularly in the nineteenth century, where serious challenges were made to contemporary esthetics at a time when poets knew they were struggling against the supremacy of the novel. I’m thinking of Whitman, Hopkins, Swinburne, Stephen Crane, and if you include the French, Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud. My hunch, too, is that the current interest poets have in eliminating voice from their work, or muting it, is in fact creating another period style, but I will save speculations on that for a later time.

I am large; I contain multitudes.
Whitman

My verse is the true image of my mind,
Ever in motion, still desiring change;
And as thus to variety inclined,
So in all humours sportively I range.
Michael Drayton in "To the Reader of These Sonnets," from his sequence, Idea

I don’t understand myself, only segments
of myself that misunderstand each other.
John Ashbery

The poem is the cry of its occasion.
Wallace Stevens

There is not a more perplexing affair in life to me, than to set about telling anyone who I am, for there is scarce anybody I cannot give a better account of than myself; and I have often wish’d I could do it in a single word and have an end to it.
Laurence Sterne

The poet, tuned to the immense variety of his or her experience, to the many forms in which such experience might be cast, can find in no one method the means to objectify, in poetry, his or her life.
Michael Heller

Have your odyssey
How many voiced it be
Louis Zukofsky

I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight.
A.R. Ammons

The best ideas come with someone else’s
having previously "had" them.
Lyn Hejinian

[I] let my own contradictions find their voices.
Aaron Shurin

–That’s enough of that, Mr Bones. Some lady you make.
Honour the burnt cork, be a vaudeville man.
John Berryman

It’s when one hasn’t recognized oneself anymore that one has arrived.
Rene Char

What follows is an attempt to say something about what Richard Poirier has called "the vexed issue of voice and presence" in poetry. (See The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections, 1988, p. 204.) Voice is a particularly privileged property in contemporary esthetics–I should say, contemporary mainstream esthetics--which, the longer I have lived with, the less I have been certain what it describes. It is tied to things like individuality and originality and so concerns the nature of the self or at least that part of it that comes to speak in a poet’s poems. As such, it would seem also to involve conceptions of the real and of knowledge itself, since it is only through our selves that we can know the world. At the moment, I’m not invoking that contemporary bugaboo, the "death of the author," though I am often puzzled by the notion of who a poet is or is supposed to be in a poem. Yeats reminded us in the mid ‘30's that the poet is not the same person who comes downstairs in the morning and has breakfast. The poet is related to, but larger than, the person. For Yeats, being a poet meant assuming a mantle or cloak, producing in the poem a "phantasmagoria." The New Criticism long ago warned us not to confuse the "I" of a poem with the author for fear of committing "the autobiographical fallacy." The apparent requirement in these injunctions that the poet be other than the self is more than a little palpable. And yet, in many, if not most, writings on esthetics, we run into one version or another of Sir Philip Sydney’s famous advice, "look in thy heart and write." The heart, I gather, is the bodily vault of true feeling and hence the self. If you unlock it, the presumption is, you will speak the truth of your feelings, the depths of your self, which esthetics since the time of Wordsworth has equated with originality, the single separate personhood which that esthetics believes belongs uniquely to us all. Behind the Romantics sits Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding which tells us that all people are born unformed, as a blank slate, and come to be who they are through their particular experience which is different for everyone (and which, incidentally, is likened to writing). One does not need the help of those who believe in heredity as character’s primary determinant to wonder at the curious categorical presumption of the Lockeans. Am I my experience? Hume said we had selves because we have memory, the self being a conglomerate of its memories, which I suppose have to be based in experience. If one is memoryless, as those with Alzheimer’s come to be, is one no longer a self?
To begin with, then, we have the slippery notion of what a self is. It seems, at least for writers, perhaps for everyone, a mix of fact and fiction or what the New Historicists once called the product of "self-fashioning". Jane Hirshfield, in one of the better-known of the current books on practical esthetics, says "much is revealed about creative change when we recognize art as an ancient bazaar in which the same pieces of jewelry are continually stolen, polished up, and resold." (See Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, 1997, p. 46.) Pound implied as much in his famous adage, "Make it new," the central word of which implies that the subjects of poetry are always the same, never new. How in a field of endeavor so conceived is one to obtain or locate a voice? Perhaps a poet’s voice is a deliberate construction, as well, though the common use of the term, as in "so-and-so has found his voice," strongly implies that so-and-so has got down to the bedrock of his self and is now able to speak authentically. The further implication is that, until this moment occurs, the writer is less than authentic and hence, in some residually moral way, insincere or unreliable. {See Helen Vendler’s Coming of Age as a Poet.)
The trouble with sincerity and authenticity is that they are terms which suggest there is a "natural" way to be and therefore to speak. But, is anything natural? Nature certainly isn’t, especially in a world that has to protect and, in certain cases, create wilderness areas. Anything said to be natural is likely, to the person saying it, to be used to convince someone that what he or she is doing or saying has no program or motive, no social intention or ambition. It’s just plain, straight talk. Here is where Barthes is helpful. When he says that myth "transforms history into nature" (See his essay "Myth Today" in Mythologies, selected and translated by Annette Lavers (1975), p. 129.), he is at the same time warning that whatever is described as nature or natural occurrence is apt to conceal an interpretation of history, which he likens to myth. This is not done underhandedly but through a mental process by which a person convinces himself that what he feels is natural when in fact it hides some sort of social agenda. What could possibly be hidden in the word "authentic" as it applies to poetic speech? To begin with, the concept of originality. Nothing seems more desirable and essential to a person than believing that he or she is original and unique. It is the door through which we gain access to the world, to jobs, to money, to agency of all kinds. Authors, as authorship is routinely described and, one has to say, packaged, invest deeply in these twin concepts, originality and authenticity. However discredited Marx may be in certain circles, his theories of social formation and the ideologies behind them still have weight. The ideology of capitalism is an ideology of the middle classes and was founded on the "discovery" of the individual and its rights. Capitalism sustains itself on an aggressive, determinative definition of selfhood and individuality and does all it can to remove restriction and regulation from what it describes as the "free" individual, most of whom in the course of competitive struggle wind up as "slaves" to the capitalist system, earning increasingly lowered wages while their superiors take home gargantuan salaries and not very small raises. Few authors that I know are capitalists. Most of them, if asked, would disparage capitalism. But, authorship as we know it fits snugly into the definition of selfhood that sustains that system. As Antony Easthope says, "what makes poetry poetry is what makes poetry ideological." (22)
At the same time, the creation and defense of individual rights represented an advance over feudal arrangements when it began to be seen and understood in the 16th and 17th centuries and is something we should not let go, simply because the forces of capitalism have found ways to put it at their disposal. Both Barthes and Foucault claim that the author, like the individual, is a fairly new invention, arising, as Barthes says, with "English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation." (See "The Death of the Author," Image - Music - Text, selected and translated by Stephen Heath (1977), pp. 142-43.) So, where are we? Can we be authentic and original, or should we resist it? I think we can be, but only if we know what we’re doing. As Yeats’s observation implies, authenticity is, paradoxically, a construct. There is no "real" self of any consequence until we have, as Locke said, written for a while on our tabula rasa. And, in the manner of writing poems and stories, we have to write a great deal, throw most of it out, rewrite the rest nine times over, and then, maybe, we have something like originality (a self) as underlayment to the few writings of consequence we can squeeze out in a lifetime.
Another point. Is it the originality we go back to when we’ve read something that moves us, or is it something more basic, more important, more, as we used to say, universal? Did the poet who took the top off our heads do it by being original or by seeing something clearly? More clearly? For us, and in our language. Not his language, or hers. Our language. Perhaps, of course, seeing something clearly is, by definition, an original act.
If we approach our language the way Gertrude Stein did, are we being original? Are we sacrificing everything else to be original? Is it possible that Stein carried the notion of originality to the extremes she did to make the case that originality is a concept that leads to confusion and coercion if pursued for its own sake or to the exclusion of other things found in poetry? The answer to all these questions is, no. If we write like Stein, we’re imitators. We’ve decided that there is something more important than originality, such as continuing to do what Mallarme encouraged us to do: epater les bourgeois. The trouble is that the bourgoisie seems to have successfully absorbed or ignored the savage blows dealt it by–and here you can name your own anti-hero(es).

[more later]

more char

2006-01-26T12:58:00.000-08:00

In "Hunters of Herbs" (Susanne Dubroff’s translation), Rene Char says, "it’s when one hasn’t recognized oneself anymore that one has arrived." Whatever else is hidden in this observation, or meant by it, it suggests that "arrival" (a loaded word), coincides with a kind of erasure of the self or an inability to recognize oneself, perhaps an enlargement of the self beyond its known boundaries. You have stepped into a realm of awareness you hadn’t known was there or didn’t think was accessible to you. Something strips away the self you had, momentarily I suppose, revealing it to be just a costume, fashionable at the time of your living, but little more than a way for you to be in benign relationship to others of your time, recognizable to one another as fellow creatures and not the secret alien you and all others might actually be, a being you could hardly identify as your self or any other object in the world as you’ve come to know it, and so something of a threat to your fellow creature. From which perspective, though, as Char hints, real life might be seen/known/lived. As "Aversions" has it, "Here’s what we have to keep asking ourselves: how can we restore to mankind its night of dreaming and where can we find it? And how can we cheat the horrors haunting men: with the help of what magical properties, with what advanced and millienial love?" This is a man who fought in the Resistance during World War II. He knew something of the horrors haunting men and knew that something more than poetry was needed to push them back. I would assume that this why his poetry seeks to be "more" than poetry.

rene char

2006-01-21T11:51:00.000-08:00

Hello, blogworld. Rogger the Blogger here. Who, as you see, has been away for a time. But, he has been reading, and in fact stumbled into translations of Rene Char recently, one of which gave him the best poetry jolt he's had in some time. The translator is Susanne Dubroff, and the poem in question opens with these lines:

"You feel pressed to write
As if you were behind in life"

Rushing to catch up to the present, you might say. A feeling, I'm sure, more common than any of us would like. The presentation of a fixed condition, always about to reach the receding shirttail of the faster racer. But, then, what would it be like to be "ahead in life?"

I hope to have more to say about Char when I finish reading the book.

chorin' round

2005-12-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

I think I begin to see the days getting longer. No more than a couple of nanoseconds per day, maybe, but already moving. Christmas came. And went. It was miraculously unfussy once it arrived. I keep reading Proust. Those close to me think I'm trying to impress somebody. Who, I wonder. I'm still amazed--even in translation--at the endless carpet of words that come off the roller, the microscopic examination of everything, beginning (and sometimes ending) with the examination of the examining. All that looking keeps one at a remove or twelve from what the rest of the world might call living. I'm sure I'll disagree with myself in a few days.

c.d. wright's "rising, falling, hovering"

2005-12-18T08:50:00.000-08:00

Ron Silliman suggested a few blogs ago that we gather round C.D. Wright’s poem, "Rising, Falling, Hovering" to see what it was about and to sing its praises. It took me a week or so to get a copy of Chicago Review (Autumn 2005) where it appears, but, having read it three times, I think it an interesting experiment, at least, to try to see a brand new poem as one fully in the cultural bloodstream. Given the usual practice, this is highly–what?–tendentious, but fun. And, as Ron indicates, it might just be deserved.

So, briefly, I see the poem, first, as an anti-war poem, specifically anti-the current Gulf War. It is a feature of the culture that we live in that this anti-war poem is not coming from a soldier, but the mother of a son who, in the worst of all possible worlds, might find himself one day in a uniform shooting and being shot at. More than anti-war, this poem, for me, folds those sentiments into a more generalized, and anguished (the tone is tight and subdued, almost mournful), assessment of "what’s happened to America," much of which has to do with our ingrained racism and imperialism. The title, I feel, is meant to echo The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Lines that stand out in this regard include:

What’s going to become of us Is the beauty used up then

The momentum of lives shifts into the absence of thought
The first task is to recover the true words for being

In the event of our death You will have to roll your own poetry

I am willing to take "the beauty" as a term for what our culture promised and, as she sees it, promises. I put it that way, since having asked if the beauty is used up, she answers her own question by assigning us our "first task." Which is to "recover the true words for being," a fascinating term for a project of many years, if not decades, and of many minds, not just poets.

One of the most killing moments comes with her use of Akhmatova’s famous line, put to her by an old woman outside the huge prison in Leningrad: "Can you describe this?" This move throws that image and state of being, from Stalinist Russia, back at us, as people who are possibly (probably) under a kind of siege like that endured in the Soviet Union. Terrible thoughts to have, but in the current circumstances, certainly warranted.

I would like to mention, in the shadow of this, a review I just read in North Dakota Quarterly (Summer 2005, which just came out) of an anthology of war poems, Old Glory: American War Poems From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terrorism, ed. Robert Hedin. The review is written by James Scully and is one of those writings that I think all of us should read. Scully has much to criticize about the anthology, but he is just as vocal on the state of our poetry and behind it, of course, the state of our national mind. Here’s a fair sample:

"Despite declared political values, most American poets have trained themselves as poets not to see, never mind deal with, the historical, social, and political realities that inform and condition everyone’s existence including their own. The immaturity induced by compartmentalization, the constriction of vision and context, disables the poetry. Having put on blinders, yet faced now with significant social, moral, and spiritual crises, that poetry can only twist its head every which way, trying desperately and too late to make out what is happening all around it. "

Praising Baraka’s "Somebody Blew Up America," which is not included in the anthology, Scully reminds us that Baraka was talking, not about two buildings being blown up, but "civil rights, human rights, constitutional rights in general, habeas corpus, separation of military from police, insulation of criminal law system from that of military law, Geneva Convention, Nuremburg precedent, legal constraints on torture, etc." Parts of the "beauty" that we hope will always belong to America. Ways toward, perhaps, the "true words for being."

Dean Young, Elegy on Toy Piano

2005-12-16T04:40:00.000-08:00

Reading another Dean poem ("Rabbit, I Love you"), I'm once again thrown out the window--a great ride. The connection between language and feeling "skids." Feeling is there, usually sadness, but there is a refusal of sadness. This may be because coherence itself is a lie, particularly the kinds of coherence that allow poetic posturing, usually around sadness, as in "I'm a terribly sensitive (read, "sad") person with feelings out to here" (add gesture). "Having feelings allows us to do nothing/ but still feel something is getting done." A comment on poetry? You bet, but also a comment on a culture driven by narcissism. Note, too, that it IS a comment. In the middle of a poem in which a glacier "demurs," an octopus is glad, and Superpoet, even in a dream, fails to "grab the arrow/ about to pierce [his] father's chest." Death of the father: a large occasion for sadness. Further comments on poetry include the ironic use of "poetic" inversions to "elevate" feeling, as in the opening line, "The capacity to feel is good to have." ("Something there is that doesn't love a wall," too.) The poem then goes on to show us what shaky ground feeling is on which to stand. "Feeling--you can have it/ under control them wham-o..." the point being that you can't. Unless, that is, you make it your life's goal to be sure you do have it under control and speak only the partial truths ("the best that has been thought and said," as Arnold said) that makes up most of literature. If, as Yeats said, the poet is not the same person who comes downstairs for breakfast, but some enhanced version thereof, is it any wonder "nobody reads poetry." Dean's poems, among other things, take on the job of dismantling this deceit. Notice I did not say "deconstruct." The book is in many ways an homage to Kenneth Koch, who had similar incentives. Dean's elegy itself--the title poem--pulls the rabbit of happiness straight out of the hat of sadness.

static

2005-12-11T11:47:00.000-08:00

Just to let the world know that I haven't fallen off the end of the pier, let me mention some of the things that have kept me away. A stretch of compulsive poetry writing, one of those "visitations" one dare not get in the way of (or away from), plus reading my usual mass of mixed stuff: more Proust (of course), Lorine Niedecker, Ted Kooser, Dean Young, plus a few mags. None of this has yet jelled into anything, though I am, as always, astonished at what Niedecker was able to strip away from perception and still perceive. More than that, the getting close to the geology and plant/bird life of her place, which makes her work sink down in. And, of course, said he realizing it, this is one of the reasons the human presence in her poetry is, though definitely there, thin. As in, thin as a knife blade. The outlines of a hard life are certainly there, but hardship aside, the hard life turned into the lens through which she could see.

Proust/Niedecker

2005-11-29T05:30:00.000-08:00

I want to put two things side by side. I just finished Swann's Way, and I'm reading Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works. A sort of literary double-take.

"But when a belief vanishes, there survives it--more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena--an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause--the death of the gods."

"The death of my poor father
leaves debts
and two small houses.

To settle this estate
a thousand fees arise--
I enrich the law.

Before my own death is certified,
recorded, final judgement
judged

taxes taxed
I shall own a book
of old Chinese poems

and binoculars
to probe the river
trees."

That two such writings can exist in the same world is, I suppose, cause for celebration. The long driven accuracy of the mourning Proust, trying to hold onto a dream. The short, uniflected, down-to-earth "poverty" of Niedecker. No superstructure of belief for her, things that can't be held still. Instead, glimpses of the natural world and poetry. One would have thought Proust would be the greater champion of art, which of course he does become, but it's all in the past, made out of memory. The world of the present has no value, is, with its automobiles, debased.

review of Michael Heller's new book

2005-11-27T17:00:00.000-08:00

This review will appear in an upcoming issue of American Book Review.

CERTAIN UNCERTAINTIES

Michael Heller’s Uncertain Poetries (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005) concludes with two statements on poetics, but these being a poet’s essays, it is really the search for a poetics which drives them all, however much they might be investigations of individual poets. As he says in the preface, "These essays ought to be read as something of an intellectual biography of a working poet." Farther from being ancillary to a poet’s needs, this search among the chosen monuments of the past for a place from which to speak as a poet is central to the tradition out of which he writes, namely Modernism. Pound and Eliot insisted in their different ways that the poet’s first task was to increase one’s learning, mostly through a study of the past. Heller’s allegiance belongs to the Pound/ Zukofsky/ Olson side of Modernism, which demanded a radically shuffled tradition in which history was a mega-store where one could pick and choose at will, often from sources at great remove from those typical of literary practice of the times. On the other hand, the Eliot/ Auden side of Modernism called for a deep steeping in existing systems and traditions, the chief of which came to be known, disparagingly, as the canon.

As such, Heller is a fish on land. The time he lives in has seen the giants of his tradition discredited or ignored as elitists or fascists, where they weren’t, like Lorine Niedecker, unseen and unknown. Kinds of Romanticism came to displace Modernism as cultural authority passed from the old elites to the masses themselves, or, to put it differently, from the authority of a tradition to that of the feeling self. Heller relates an interesting encounter between the products of these two cultures when he describes a question put to him by a young poet after one of his (Heller’s) lectures on poetics. The young poet had said that "plenty of poets do not write a poetics, but only write poems." This gave Heller the chance to say, in the essay if not to the poet that night, "I don’t believe we can say with any surety that poets "only write poems," for such a notion of innocent composition flies in the face of what we do know: that each of us...[is a] product of traditions, of wars with traditions, impulses and hopes, and that we are informed, inhabited, guided, even unconsciously, by such traditions and psychologies."

As tempting as it is to call Heller the last of the Modernists, two obstacles stand in the way. The first is his familiarity with a broad array of postmodernist thinking, including language theory, and, in certain carefully-chosen instances, particularly in the work of Benjamin and Bakhtin, his acceptance of it. He also opens the Modernist cabinet wide enough to make room in it for some elements of Surrealism (I’m thinking of his essay on Lorca and "deep song," as well as "Avant Garde Propellents of the Machine Made of Words"), which early Modernists like Pound and Eliot had little or no interest in. Eliot’s flirtation with that medium in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and The Waste Land was the exception. Also, as his previous writings on the Objectivists make clear, Heller’s view of Modernism, even the Pound side of it, insists that Zukofsky and the others clearly departed from their Imagist beginnings. Where the Imagist branch of Modernism stressed the image as metaphor or symbol, thereby subsuming the thing seen to the poet’s imaginative power (the act of seeing), the Objectivists insisted first that the thing be seen and not blurred by too aggressive or enlarged an act of seeing on the part of an ego-driven poet or one subscribing to, as Heller calls it, a "missionary poetics." "Words are real, in the Objectivist formulation," says Heller, "because they instate an existence beyond the words." One can hear in this comment, I think," a veiled criticism of language poetry, perhaps also of contemporary forms of surrealism. Hence, the dogged insistence on the real we find in the work of Niedecker, Oppen, and others he admires. The Objectivists also were less interested in history, literal or literary, and insisted always on looking at the world as given them, in a manner that distantly echoes Emerson in "The American Scholar."
The title of Heller’s book gives us the word "uncertain" to consider in relationship to contemporary poetry. This, too, is a note sounded in his study of the Objectivists where he says in the concluding chapter that "The Objectivists, and this is a critical if not poetic difficulty, lean into uncertainty." A larger understanding of this term emerges in the new book in his review of Henry Weinfield’s translations of Mallarme. Weinfield sees Mallarme as facing "the crisis of modernity," which lies in the difficulty of establishing "meaning in a meaningless universe–that is, in a universe from which the gods have disappeared, with the result that meaning cannot be transcendentally conferred." In the essay on Ignatow, in fact, Heller says that we live in "a period of powerful secularization in all walks of life." This is the central dilemma in Stevens’ poetry as well, which he solves by the simple insistence that humans must invent their own gods, or as his adage ("The gods of China are always Chinese") strongly suggests, they always have. Heller and others see the problem as more than theological; they see it in ontological and epistemological terms as well, where the poet wrestles, to use Eliot’s word, to know the self and, for that matter, anything at all with something approaching, but falling short of, certainty. The supreme achievement in a world so described comes to be the act of clear description, of a thing that first of all exists outside language. In such an act the poet does not lull us into thinking that his or her descriptive skill, metaphoric extravagance, compulsive self-involvement, need for placation and assurance, and other platforms on which contemporary poetry rests, hides the fact that the thing at the center of the poetic act can be seen only with difficulty and fragmentarily.

Heller’s ideal poet, then, would be one who made little display of the self and took on, as principle task, the effort to know in a world where, not only is that difficult to impossible, but one in which the knowing or knowledge must be achieved on one’s own. Homemade worlds, as Hugh Kenner called them. Most of the poets discussed in the book are poets of microscopic realism and/or philosophical speculation: Moore, Niedecker, Ignatow, Bronk, Schwerner, Oppen, etc. The two essays on diasporic poetics, of course, have as their central problem the extreme need for accurate witnessing of events that very nearly defies language itself. Such kinds of poetry call for modesty and a quality he finds central to the Objectivists, sincerity, at least as much as it does individuality.

It is never Heller’s intention in these essays to survey the poetic scene, but phrases and terms unavoidably drop from his pen from time to time which reveal his dismay at one or another trend in our poetry. His chief concern is that the world not be locked up in some sort of fixed ideological view, that certainty or pre-judgment about matters not shut down perception and thinking. Very nearly the greatest praise he can give a poet is, as he says of Rilke, that he forswore "intellectual or psychological certainty." Against this openness to uncertainty, Heller ranks "the icy constructs of the language centered schools or the halls of the totally aleatory," by which I think he means contemporary surrealisms, and "the overplowed farmlands of academia." The essay on Oppen describes his poetry as being "at odds not only with the gelid wastes of official literary culture but also with the programmed experimentalisms of much of the avant-garde," a comment, the first part of which, that echoes Charles Bernstein’s denigration, "official verse culture." In a totalizing gesture, Heller speaks in the essay on Mallarme of "the progressivist climate of contemporary poetry." This must be what he means by "missionary poetics," poetry written to improve our condition or at least our understanding of our condition or poetry written out of a programmatic or technique-driven notion of what poetry should be. Very different is the "constant" aim he describes in Lorine Niedecker’s poetry: "to disabuse herself of the sin of self-regard by maintaining an attitude toward the world...where ‘external’ things have a more objective truth value than ‘internal’ things," a condition whereby the eye wars against "the erring brain."

As much as I am taken with Heller’s zeal, his taste, his "high seriousness," as much as I agree with many of his observations and conclusions, I am left with questions, in large part because of the not-so-vague outline of a missionary behind them. That figure is most visible to me in the essay "Poetry Without Credentials," where he says the poem "shakes up and disrupts our certainties. We could say it introduces uncertainty where perhaps there was none before....What is actually true is not the certainty but the uncertainty." As the passage continues, the tone becomes increasingly spiritual. "If we are willing to recognize that moment, to live thoroughly in that understanding, we recognize that it is just as we give up our views and our values, give up ourselves and our credentials that poetry takes place." It is a similar sort of giving up of the self that most religions ask of us, which is the exact opposite of what a progressive politics, as well, I presume, as a progressive esthetics, asks. I, too, would like to see a poetry that saw what could be seen clearly (and no more) and that did not see the physical universe subsumed by language, but I would not want, in making such a bargain, to give up my certainty that the world we live is threatened and the need for that to be known and expressed in poetry invalidated. We need to remember, as Charles Bernstein has said, that "Poetry, like war, is the pursuit of politics by other means." The danger here is that an esthetics of "uncertainty" can, in trying to avoid ideology, become ideological and, as John B. Thompson has said, help "sustain relations of domination" by implying that certainty is impossible or inconsequential.

etc.

2005-11-27T07:10:00.000-08:00

I have to confess that Proust begins to drag heavily on the mind. Am I a Philistine? Deep down, perhaps. But the whole social scene among those who live by its rules gets to be wearisome. Better to have a neurotic child acting out his own neuroses while observing those of others. But, as they say, I will try to stay the course.

When I get into this sort of funk, I start picking up other books to read. Chase Twichell's fine new book, Dog Language. And I'm finally getting to Jenny Penberty's edition of Lorine Niedecker's complete poems. As noted earlier, too, Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist. I tend to put the big ones off till I get my mind into some sort of focus. It did help that I just reviewed Michael Heller's Uncertain Poetries, he being the author and champion of the Objectivists. I've been looking into Ron Silliman's blog every day, as well. A very good, "encyclopedic" might be the better word, critic of what you might still be able to call the alternative poetries of the last century.

Lyn Hejinian's THE FATALIST

2005-11-22T15:40:00.000-08:00

Finally got to The Fatalist by Lyn Hejinian (Omnidawn, 2003), where I found the word "merriment," which is darn near a word that can't come out of the mouth of an American anymore, and indicates what is the greatest shift in this work over her previous, i.e., a willingness to accept that "Happiness is possible in unhappy times." No giddy hippy, she, esp. as she is looking into (I want to use quotes around many words when I talk about her work) fate, which at one point she equates with uncertainty (""). Inside the deeply soliloquistic structures of her mind and art is, in fact, a sense of exuberant, shared delight in the day-to-day. "A sense of the uniqueness/ and interrelatedness of things is fundamental here."
It's about time
that we got to someplace that we don't know
anything about knowing that we don't
and if we do we should leave it
unknown.
Sounds like the Sierra Club urging us all to tread lightly in the woods. Leave it as you found it, not quite wild. But what the passage and the whole poem urges itself toward is the unknown (read, among other things: death). Whatever is fated, I suppose, along with "the desperately ungraspable vastness of meaning."

But, all this is to try to extract a point, or a central thrust, in the work, and that I feel certain I've not done. And, if I had, it would have missed the point. What is most felt at the end and throughout is a stabilizing playfulness of intellect, a "merry" investigation (not a good word), insertion would be better, into something like the flow all things find themselves in.

Try this:
Sure modernism
claimed authority on the grounds of certainty and genius,
but Lorine Niedecker often asserted powerlessness
from folklore that's devoid of pathos. She was specific
and being specific is one of the things that is required
of a poem as it is of Santa's elves who quite properly go about
namelessly nonetheless to us and to each other since naming
is impossible -- there is, properly speaking, nothing to name
except your "tiny riot of contiguity and separation"
capable of taking its chance (and its chances)
to produce its own contingency, necessity, suspense. Many nouns fail
to remind us of the ideas they were intended to prompt. It wasn't "fate"
nor "memory," "the live oak tree," "Pythagoras," nor "this" I meant
the other day but there we were, "in and of" the moment
that related us to each other, bringing us face to face
like the "if" that arrives with its "when" or the "once"
that occurs in "awhile."

Needless to say (said he saying it), she does not "believe" in either certainty or genius.

Swann Song

2005-11-21T13:25:00.000-08:00

Proust is wearing me down. It's a real seat-squirmer to watch poor old Swann disintegrate, but then his love, if that's the word, is so mixed up with vanity and status, being seen, etc. Still, he suffers, and I do want to see how he comes out of it. Odette? We may never learn much about her. She seems to be a kind of social parasite of the sort that women in the nineteenth century might well have had to be in order to keep head above water. An entrepeneur of flirtation. But, I must wait and see. Swann is no better, of course. He merely has money. Odette has some, we are told, but nothing to match Swann.

The big difference between the first two chapters and "Swann in Love" (no.3) is that the latter seems to be entirely given over to the third person. Certainly the narrator is not Swann, and certainly he knows Swann's inmost thought. That's omniscience. But about 100 pages into the chapter comes an aside using the word "I." Suddenly, we have what I've been calling Marcel speaking, not a figure of true omniscience. So, having moved from the mode of memoir in chs. 1 and 2, he seemed to have moved into fictional narrative. That illusion shatters when "I" speaks up.

SWANN SONG

I can't watch Swann too long,
except out of the side of my eye.
Even now I want not to be
cantilevering down this line
to see the scales come off a fish.
I'm sure I have some email
I'd much rather complain about
having to read than watching
this rickety construction bleed
through the pores of his abject
but deeply manipulative need--
to what? Screw some equally
infantile member of the tribe
in hopes that love might emerge,
full-formed, out of the froth
of his fevered member? He would
shudder to hear such talk. I do myself,
watching him fumble, not only
with Odette's diaphanous bodice,
but with the language of stammer
and sweated confusion (how can
it be so terrifying unclear which
emotion is real or comes first,
ardor or the narcotic of needing
to dine at a fashionable address?).
I don't yet know how it will turn out,
but I know from the movies the yowl
of hounds that have caught the scent,
the scrambling for cover under a bush,
and from a moment or two in the past,
the smell of there being nothing
inside my shirt, not even me,
just that stuttering muskrat, the heart.

A few quotes, a few comments. From SWANN'S WAY.

2005-11-17T13:36:00.000-08:00

"I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book." Thinking while asleep would seem to be in dream, and while the sentence has its cloying, self-regarding aspect, it has a dream aspect as well. Dream, despite what Freud and others have said, does have a kind of curious objectivity to it. You're there, if only as observer, but the world of dream has little or no interest in the dreamer, drags the dreamer by the scruff of his fears over a rough road often.

"the vast structure of recollection." Not willy-nilly and, of course, not complete. A structure, which implies a builder. At the moment, we might think of Proust as the structurer, but maybe there's another.

"an unceasing monologue which was her [Aunt Leonie's] sole form of activity." No comment. Well, maybe this is the other structure.

Another moment where I think we get a glimpse of the author in one of his characters: "My grandmother alone found fault with him [M. Legrandin] for speaking a little too well, a little too much like a book."

In praise of the novelist, he says: "for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them." What he doesn't say is the same holds true for the novelist, or any good writer. He/she, too, has to wait AND to pursue the joys and sorrows for a long time to be able to write well of them.

proust encore

2005-11-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

Hard to imagine Proust as a gripping read, but so far his strategies intrigue me for being stagey and loose. Plot? Not very much in that area. This may be the way memoir works, but when he gives you 100 plus pages of "Combray," the small provincial town the family retires to in the summer, we get a succesion of observations on what life consists of when they spend time there. They seem to be in no compelling order, or none that a good thumping plot would demand. Great social satire. Few are spared the barb of little Marcel's eye, while he of course pursues his impossible pre-adolescent needs and dreams of holding everything as still as possible so that it will not slip off the map of being and into the past. No luck, of course. Everyone is on the treadmill of life, ignoring Marcel's need for eternal incipience, that is, a life always about to be because it is a life forever in the tall shadow of his parents' life.

And the sentences! Never start one that you can't qualify at least four times with parenthetical insertions. Life, after all, is infinitely perceptible. Or, what can be perceived of life knows no end. Is that good? Wrong question, perhaps.

More later on the tight claustrophobia of French middle-class life, the thing that creates Marcel's jail, a jail he and others would not leave if they could. Or so it seems.

proust

2005-11-15T07:30:00.000-08:00

Once again, I embark on Proust. This time, though, I hope to finish it. Why? As Louis Armstrong is said to have replied to someone who asked, what is jazz: If you have to ask, I can't explain. I guess that's really two questions. Why read Proust, and why finish it? In my youth, of course, it would have been only one, since I always (almost) finished everything I started to read. It's why I know so little today. But, there it sits like a doorway to the twentieth century which I never passed through. (I came in through an upstairs window.) Reading it seems like reviewing my life or checking to see what parts of it I missed. Little Marcel is a precious soul, to the point of annoyance, but then he can report that about himself, too. The quest embarked on seems almost heroic, to see how much can be remembered, sparing no detail. For that, however, there must be long hours, months and years of elegant boredom, spaces in a large house to which one can retreat and to which one is sent when one is an annoyance (which is often). Ah well, life has no single platform. But can I live the next few months tangled in the convoluted sentences of a narcissist, even one who knows he is one? Winter is coming on. It will help.

who reads sholokhov today?

2005-11-14T15:15:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don (1929). Why, you might ask. Because I bought it 30 years ago and thought at the time I should read it. It seemed like it might be informative to find out, if I could, why I bought it. The answer wasn't hard to find. Here was the first great attempt at Soviet epic in the novel. It only took us up to the moment when the Bolsheviks were about to take over, but it tried manfully to suggest that the Bolshevizing of Russia was also going to coincide with and preserve the cossack tradition of the Don River area. Sholokhov was at least honest in portraying the easy violence which that old form of life was given to slipping into, and he was not very flattering to the early revolutionary Reds who, in more than one incident, massacred their prisoners. But, the book does finally do its social realist duty and portray a coming heroic nation rising out of the abuses of czarism and the massive slaughter that was World War I. The most "real" thing in the book for me was Sholokhov's grasp of the old life of the Don River area where cossacks and peasants acted out the roles assigned for them under czarist rule. A rough life, a rough read.

2005-11-14T14:00:00.000-08:00

Monday, November 14, 2005

related matters
Poetry being as wide as it is, matters that relate to it would seem to be similarly wide. Winter's coming on. Clouds are crossing at a good clip, going east. It's morning. Here in the Adirondacks, we have to have everything nailed down this time of year or else find it rotted and twisted under the snow when spring arrives. To that effect, I built a woodshed this summer. No more blue tarp shredded by the wind. No more soggy logs. Building a woodshed turned out to be something like a practice, one I've been aimed at most of my life. Not unlike the practice of writing poems, one could say. Certainly as satisfying. Stabilizing. I look at it from time to time.
posted by roger mitchell @ 7:55 AM 0 comments
Friday, November 11, 2005

crusherrun
Bear with me, world. I'm still figuring out the ways and means of getting about in this vast system, though I have already decided that the name of the blog needs to be changed, and one of the things I have to learn is how to change a blog's name. Yes, I live near the Ausable River, but I'm not, I think, here to sing its beauties or mine its ores. "Crusherrun" appeals to me more because it's what I put on my road to keep it from sinking into the mud. My first thoughts are to see if I can organize thoughts around the issue of voice in literature, particularly poetry. Then, it's on to a reading of Gertrude Stein.
posted by roger mitchell @ 4:30 PM 0 comments
Thursday, November 10, 2005

world-altering phrases for all time
I did this on a whim, after reading a friend's interview on a blogsite. Do I want to do email, you might say, one-way email every day in the manner of Ron Silliman? I guess we'll have to see. There seems to be no rule which says you have to post every day, and there certainly seems to be no limit to subject, length, degree of gravity, etc. So, this is the tentative gesture of someone who writes poetry and who learned to do it before the ditto machine was invented and is still a little afraid of his computer. More to come, as they used to say when they interrupted the Johnny Carson Show for commercials. The world-altering phrases will come later.
posted by roger mitchell @ 7:23 PM 1 comments