I haven't done the homework, but I suspect that a lexicon of Robert Creeley's poems would be surprisingly small in comparison the the girth of the two chunky volumes that comprise his Collected Poems. Creeley gravitates to a handful of small, seemingly innocuous words, words like "this" (he has several poems bearing that title), and his poems and conversation returned often to a set of abstract nouns like "company," "circumstance," and, most oddly, "etc."
Out of this modest lexicon, Creeley built a body of work that seemingly rejects the weight of lyric tradition yet fully embraces its history of craft, of the well-wrought urn. Creeley saw himself as part of a company with his fellow Black Mountaineers working in the open field. Yet reading his prose statements, one doesn't find antagonism toward the other side of the 'poetry war' of which which the NAP was a major front. While he notes that "a division of method appears between those who make use of traditional forms, either for discipline or solution, and those who, as Olson, go "By ear... " he does in this passage note good reasons for using traditional forms. Tradition continues in his company; it is "an aspect of what anyone is now thinking, --not what someone once thought. We make with what we have..." The difference between his company and those who use traditional forms is described in this passage: "They [the traditionalists] argue the poem as a means of recognition, a signboard as it were, not in itself a structure of 'recognition' or--better--cognition itself. Some, then, would not only not hear what Olson was saying, but would even deny, I think, the relevance of his concerns. The great preoccupations with symbology and the levels of image in poetry insisted upon by contemporary criticism has also meant a further bias for this not-hearing, since Olson's emphasis was put upon prosody, not interpretation." Olson and Creeley's emphasis is on prosody, perhaps the strongest tradition in poetry that there is.
For this company, prosody is what Pound said: "the articulation of the total sound of the poem." Creeley uses the surprisingly traditional method of rhyme over and again. In this selection, 11 of his 14 poems use some sort of end rhyme, including slant rhyme and irregular patterns. The question I want to turn to now is simply "why?" To limit my investigation I'm concentrating on the poem "The Warning," though I will also open myself up to the more traditional realm of prosody, meter, to better graph the "total sound of the poem."
Since I'll be discussing the poem in detail, here it is in its entirety:
The Warning
For love – I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.
Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.
There it is: eight lines, 32 words not including the title. The dominant meter is iambic dimeter, but expressively varied--the shocking second line starts with a decisive dactyl and grows an extra foot. The seventh line complicates the poem and is also longer, though a smooth iambic tetrameter. The seventh line lets out some hidden context before the eighth line pulls it quickly back. The final rhyme, reaching back to the last line of the first stanza, is the most pronounced rhyme, but looking back you see it is not the only rhyme. While the first stanza is unrhymed (a, b, c, d), the fifth line slightly echoes the fourth (eyes/us) and the sixth and seventh don't only rhyme with one another but pick up "put" from the second. Broadening the definition of rhyme, the rhyme scheme of the poem might be seen as (abcd d'b'b'd), though more conservatively as (abcd effd). Beyond rhyme, the poem is tightly knit together by recurring sounds in these unassuming words: l and d sounds in the first three lines, n sounds in lines 2-5, z sounds in lines 3-4 and 6-7, and r sounds in the last three lines. Particularly impressive is the n, d, l pattern in the first stanza, and how all three sounds cluster around the mysterious "candle" in the skull. Finally, its worth noting that almost every word is closed--begins and ends with a consonant. You might say this sound pattern is a guarded, close-mouthed one.
After the gruesome imagery of the first stanza, the second stanza twists away ending with an in-itself-surprising "eyes"/"surprise" rhyme. The second stanza is in itself a "surprise" that as with a lot of Creeley poems I can't quite resolve. The most unusual word in the poem is perhaps "amulet." Not an uncommon word except when compared to the rest of the word in this poem, amulet is taken up in its shamanic sense as a charm against evil. But that must be read ironically--in the name of love, I will kill you to make a charm to protect love? But what is the "quick surprise" of the last line? Is it a new love? As I recall, the book this eventually appeared in, For Love, is largely concerned with the disintegration of a marriage and specifically the complications of infidelity. That may sound like the kind of confessionalist crap that was starting to be churned out at the time, but note that "The Warning" doesn't describe anything at all, but enacts a state of mind.
To (re)read: For Love, Words, Pieces. A Quick Graph.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
STL #69: Paul Blackburn
Paul Blackburn is a poet I've heard of, and I've read some of his poems in, I think, the Origin anthology. But I don't know his work well at all. He is a hanger-on at the edge of biographies I've read, most recently turning up pretty devotedly in the second half of the Zuk bio. Judging from the gathering in NAP, Blackburn writes in two modes: short wry jokes in contemporary urban (usually) settings ("The Continuity, "The Assistance, "The Problem," "The Once Over," "The Encounter"), and longer poems drawing on medieval traditions ("Night Song for Two Mystics," "Sirventes"). Though my tastes generally run to the former, I'm drawn by "Night Song for Two Mystics." The two mystics are W.B. Yeats and "Llull," who Wikipedia suggests is Ramon Llull (1232-1315), also known as Raymond Lully. Llull was a scholar of astonishing breadth, writing on theology, mathematics and logic (his work forecasts modern information science) and the author of the first prose narrative in Catalan (and arguably the first European novel.) He lobbied for the study of Hebrew and Arabic in the universities, and sought the conversion of Muslims through his system of logical argument. Renowned in this time, the man Duns Scotus nicknamed "Dr. Illuminatus" (there's a comic book name for you!) was parodied by Swift and condemned by Popes until 1858. Though I've seen the name "Raymond Lully" here and there, I think it's safe to say he isn't now widely known.
The Llull that Blackburn writes about is both a mystic and a philosopher of love. There's a longish quotation in the first half of the poem which describes "the light of the beloved's room" illuminating (this key term for Dr. Illumunatis is stretched out over a line by Blackburn: "t o i l l u m i n a t e") the lover's room. "[T]hen/all the shadows are thrown back,/then he is filled and surfilled/with his peculiar pleasures/the heavy thoughts, the languors." The light of the beloved overtakes and inhabits every corner of the lover's room and mind. He changes his life and his habits for the beloved, but she "remains forever/far enough removed/and in a high place/ as to be easily seen from a distance." I'm not sure of the source of this quotation, but in the end this love story seems to transform into a theological parable.
The second half of the poem questions the other mystic, Yeats, on what lesson we might learn from Llull, from the distant perspective of the twentieth century. The second half starts with two quesions, one rhetorical "you see where we stand?" and one critical "must it always lead to gods?" In other words, must earthly love be divinely transformed to be worthwhile? Is Llull still meaningful in an age that has outstripped his philosophy? Llull is gone and nearly forgotten: "The man's shadow dissolves in shadows./Most men go down in obliteration/with the homeliest of remembrances." Blackburn opens a parenthesis on the seven deadly sins, asking what are the positive virtues with as much force, and then opens another suggestive parenthesis ("down, sailor/blow the man/c o i l e d d o w n t h e r e") that at once recalls the spacing of "illuminate" on the previous page and also invokes the serpent "in the dark pools of the mind." The poem ends with a classically ambivalent take on mortality: "Dust, Yeats, all dust,/tho Llull remain a lover." It's not overreaching to say that the mysticism of Yeats and Llull is transient and trendy, but love (or really their lyricism that conveys it) is what will endure.
I may have been attracted to writing about this poem simply to find out who Llull was. Most of the poetry I read is densely allusive, a quality that leads people to the conclusion that the poetry is difficult, or 'hard.' The assumption, erroneous I am sure, is that if you don't know who Llull is, then you don't know what the poet is talking about (or plug in other examples from Eliot, Pound, etc.). Blackburn doesn't offer in any cribs of notes, yet read with attention the poem yields up a great deal of intellectual pleasure. The cited Llull is really all the Lllull you need--such was Pound's argument about The Cantos. ("It's all there.") The minimal background I dug up on Llull revealed the illumination joke, and I'm sure further acquaintance with his work might deepen my understanding, but these two night mystics have been brought into the field of the poem so that we might learn from them and converse with them, as the poet himself does. They aren't there to make us feel deficient or confuse us. The "hard" poetry I like is not elitist; quite the opposite I think. A poem like this embraces seven centuries, and welcomes any reader who cares to stop in.
To read: Journals, praised in Sorrentino's excellent essay on Blackburn in Something Said. Also Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry.
The Llull that Blackburn writes about is both a mystic and a philosopher of love. There's a longish quotation in the first half of the poem which describes "the light of the beloved's room" illuminating (this key term for Dr. Illumunatis is stretched out over a line by Blackburn: "t o i l l u m i n a t e") the lover's room. "[T]hen/all the shadows are thrown back,/then he is filled and surfilled/with his peculiar pleasures/the heavy thoughts, the languors." The light of the beloved overtakes and inhabits every corner of the lover's room and mind. He changes his life and his habits for the beloved, but she "remains forever/far enough removed/and in a high place/ as to be easily seen from a distance." I'm not sure of the source of this quotation, but in the end this love story seems to transform into a theological parable.
The second half of the poem questions the other mystic, Yeats, on what lesson we might learn from Llull, from the distant perspective of the twentieth century. The second half starts with two quesions, one rhetorical "you see where we stand?" and one critical "must it always lead to gods?" In other words, must earthly love be divinely transformed to be worthwhile? Is Llull still meaningful in an age that has outstripped his philosophy? Llull is gone and nearly forgotten: "The man's shadow dissolves in shadows./Most men go down in obliteration/with the homeliest of remembrances." Blackburn opens a parenthesis on the seven deadly sins, asking what are the positive virtues with as much force, and then opens another suggestive parenthesis ("down, sailor/blow the man/c o i l e d d o w n t h e r e") that at once recalls the spacing of "illuminate" on the previous page and also invokes the serpent "in the dark pools of the mind." The poem ends with a classically ambivalent take on mortality: "Dust, Yeats, all dust,/tho Llull remain a lover." It's not overreaching to say that the mysticism of Yeats and Llull is transient and trendy, but love (or really their lyricism that conveys it) is what will endure.
I may have been attracted to writing about this poem simply to find out who Llull was. Most of the poetry I read is densely allusive, a quality that leads people to the conclusion that the poetry is difficult, or 'hard.' The assumption, erroneous I am sure, is that if you don't know who Llull is, then you don't know what the poet is talking about (or plug in other examples from Eliot, Pound, etc.). Blackburn doesn't offer in any cribs of notes, yet read with attention the poem yields up a great deal of intellectual pleasure. The cited Llull is really all the Lllull you need--such was Pound's argument about The Cantos. ("It's all there.") The minimal background I dug up on Llull revealed the illumination joke, and I'm sure further acquaintance with his work might deepen my understanding, but these two night mystics have been brought into the field of the poem so that we might learn from them and converse with them, as the poet himself does. They aren't there to make us feel deficient or confuse us. The "hard" poetry I like is not elitist; quite the opposite I think. A poem like this embraces seven centuries, and welcomes any reader who cares to stop in.
To read: Journals, praised in Sorrentino's excellent essay on Blackburn in Something Said. Also Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry.
STL #68: "Beyond whatever ends"
On Denise Levertov
In the run-up to the this new "Test of Poetry," I think I said Denise Levertov did not have a statement on poetics included in the NAP. That is incorrect. I made the mistake because the order of the poetics section does not quite follow the order as the poetry roster. Robert Creeley jumps the line from fifth in the poetry section (based on his age) to third in the poetics section (based, probably, on his stronger identification with Black Mountain.)* I'm glad Levertov's statement is there, because it brings up her enticing idea of organic form: "I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the poem's life." She also believes that "content determines form, and yet that content is only in form. Like everything living, it is a mystery." In these few lines we can see the strong intellectual identification with the other Black Mountaineers, especially Duncan and Creeley who she considers the "chief poets among [her] contemporaries."
With her thoughts on organic form in mind, "Beyond the End" reads as an ethical defense of how that form emerges in free verse. It begins "In 'nature' there's no choice --" which seems to argue against the 'organicism' of free verse. Free verse offers infinite choice, so how can it be called organic, in the sense of 'natural'? If "flowers/swing their heads in the wind, [and] sun & moon/are as they are," then why should the poet presume not to similarly confine verse to the boxes of sonnets "as they are"? The answer will rely on those inverted commas around "nature" that I will work my way back to. While "nature" operates without "choice," "we seem / almost to have it." Choice is Olsonian "energy: a spider's thread: not to / 'go on living' but to quicken, to activate: extend:" The energy is creative, one that reaches out to contribute to ("quicken" or "activate" as opposed to simply represent) that which exists. 'That which exists' surely must be nature-- a spider web as much as "the girls crowding the stores." Although this creative energy exists in and affects "nature," "[i]t has no grace like that of/the grass." It is "barely/a constant" like other natural forces. It does not only manifests in work, although "every damn / craftsman has it while he's working / but it's not / a question of work: some shine with it, in repose." Rather it is a Stevensian "will to respond"--again, not to represent--that shapes poetry. The poet, in a sincere response to "nature," creates further "nature" that is "beyond the end/beyond whatever ends: to begin, to be, to defy."
This creative defiance, in a poetics descending from Pound to Zukofsky to Olson, is defined in by poetic line. The line, the organic unit of breath in the Black Mountain/Projectivist program, is often linked to the poet's integrity or sincerity. Levertov specifies the poet's decision of the line break to be essential to craft. I touched on line breaks when discussing Olson, and indeed I'm always fascinated by line breaks in both open and closed forms. But as interesting in open forms is lineation itself. The poem has stanzas of 6, 6, 4, 6, and ends either with one of 11 or probably two of 7 and 4 (there's a page break that confuses the issue.) I could hit my prosody handbooks to come up with closed forms with 6-4 line patterns, but it's the variation-- the shift from 6-6-4 to 6-7-4, that is most important. The 7-line stanza, concerned with craft, incorporates the Stevens quotation which overflows into the next stanza, the only stanzaic enjambment of the poem. This construction echoes the pushing "beyond the end" of the poem's argument.
At this stage in her writing career, Levertov that the "social function" of poetry, if it has one at all, "is to awaken sleepers by means other than shock." (Her Vietnam-era poetry might suggest she reconsidered this position.) Perceiving the craft in this poem and meditating on its significance could be just such an awakening. There's a small lexicon for the awakened mind in the second and the final stanzas. The two triads map onto one another nicely: quicken=to begin, activate=to be, extend=to defy.
To read: the Poems 1960-1967 I've had on the shelf for a dozen years.
*Levertov and Creeley are the only poets in the NAP I ever met. ("Met" is an exagerration; I was in the same room as Levertov once and Creeley twice.) Some time later than this writing, Levertov became a Northwesterner, writing at least a few poems about Mount Rainier. I went to a poetry reading of hers sometime in the early 90's. She was a dignified kindly presence, with a slight British accent remaining and, I remember, a slight lisp.
In the run-up to the this new "Test of Poetry," I think I said Denise Levertov did not have a statement on poetics included in the NAP. That is incorrect. I made the mistake because the order of the poetics section does not quite follow the order as the poetry roster. Robert Creeley jumps the line from fifth in the poetry section (based on his age) to third in the poetics section (based, probably, on his stronger identification with Black Mountain.)* I'm glad Levertov's statement is there, because it brings up her enticing idea of organic form: "I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the poem's life." She also believes that "content determines form, and yet that content is only in form. Like everything living, it is a mystery." In these few lines we can see the strong intellectual identification with the other Black Mountaineers, especially Duncan and Creeley who she considers the "chief poets among [her] contemporaries."
With her thoughts on organic form in mind, "Beyond the End" reads as an ethical defense of how that form emerges in free verse. It begins "In 'nature' there's no choice --" which seems to argue against the 'organicism' of free verse. Free verse offers infinite choice, so how can it be called organic, in the sense of 'natural'? If "flowers/swing their heads in the wind, [and] sun & moon/are as they are," then why should the poet presume not to similarly confine verse to the boxes of sonnets "as they are"? The answer will rely on those inverted commas around "nature" that I will work my way back to. While "nature" operates without "choice," "we seem / almost to have it." Choice is Olsonian "energy: a spider's thread: not to / 'go on living' but to quicken, to activate: extend:" The energy is creative, one that reaches out to contribute to ("quicken" or "activate" as opposed to simply represent) that which exists. 'That which exists' surely must be nature-- a spider web as much as "the girls crowding the stores." Although this creative energy exists in and affects "nature," "[i]t has no grace like that of/the grass." It is "barely/a constant" like other natural forces. It does not only manifests in work, although "every damn / craftsman has it while he's working / but it's not / a question of work: some shine with it, in repose." Rather it is a Stevensian "will to respond"--again, not to represent--that shapes poetry. The poet, in a sincere response to "nature," creates further "nature" that is "beyond the end/beyond whatever ends: to begin, to be, to defy."
This creative defiance, in a poetics descending from Pound to Zukofsky to Olson, is defined in by poetic line. The line, the organic unit of breath in the Black Mountain/Projectivist program, is often linked to the poet's integrity or sincerity. Levertov specifies the poet's decision of the line break to be essential to craft. I touched on line breaks when discussing Olson, and indeed I'm always fascinated by line breaks in both open and closed forms. But as interesting in open forms is lineation itself. The poem has stanzas of 6, 6, 4, 6, and ends either with one of 11 or probably two of 7 and 4 (there's a page break that confuses the issue.) I could hit my prosody handbooks to come up with closed forms with 6-4 line patterns, but it's the variation-- the shift from 6-6-4 to 6-7-4, that is most important. The 7-line stanza, concerned with craft, incorporates the Stevens quotation which overflows into the next stanza, the only stanzaic enjambment of the poem. This construction echoes the pushing "beyond the end" of the poem's argument.
At this stage in her writing career, Levertov that the "social function" of poetry, if it has one at all, "is to awaken sleepers by means other than shock." (Her Vietnam-era poetry might suggest she reconsidered this position.) Perceiving the craft in this poem and meditating on its significance could be just such an awakening. There's a small lexicon for the awakened mind in the second and the final stanzas. The two triads map onto one another nicely: quicken=to begin, activate=to be, extend=to defy.
To read: the Poems 1960-1967 I've had on the shelf for a dozen years.
*Levertov and Creeley are the only poets in the NAP I ever met. ("Met" is an exagerration; I was in the same room as Levertov once and Creeley twice.) Some time later than this writing, Levertov became a Northwesterner, writing at least a few poems about Mount Rainier. I went to a poetry reading of hers sometime in the early 90's. She was a dignified kindly presence, with a slight British accent remaining and, I remember, a slight lisp.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
STL #67: Melees and Mosaics
On Robert Duncan's "Poem beginning with a line by Pindar"
"There is natural mystery in poetry. We do not understand all that we render up to understanding."
Duncan writes that a poem "is an occult document" subject to "x-rays and vivisection." In this sense, "occult" means that a poem resists and it yields, in Stevens's sense that it resists the intelligence almost successfully. This happens because the poem is a "field" into which the poet brings his or her materials. In the case of his long, famous "Poem beginning with a line by Pindar," the materials are not only the Roman poet's Third Pythian Ode, but the myth of Pysche and Cupid (as represented by Goya), a poetic lineage from Whitman to Williams and Pound, and American Presidential history.
The poem is in four parts: the first begins with a mishmash of Pindar, the beautiful but nonsensical "The light foot hears you and the brightness begins," quickly clarified as "god steps at the margins of thought." In some ways, this poem provides evidence of the numinous: a foot cannot hear in any way we understand, but the lingering occult presence brings with it luminosity. Most of this first section describes Goya's painting of Pysche and Cupid, the troubled story of a god in love with a human. The second section transitions from myth to the imperfect present, using the strokes of President Eisenhower and William Carlos Williams to represent the rupture of poetry from public policy (a public poetry being possible from before Pindar to Whitman). The stroke victims' language is a distorted, mis-signifying stutter: "The present dented of the U/nighted stayd. States. The heavy clod?/Cloud. Invades the brain." At this point in history, "The smokes of continual ravage/obscure the flame." A catalogue of presidents is a list of graceless "idiots fumbling at the bride's door." In the third section, dedicated to Charles Olson, we see Ezra Pound, an inspiration for such a jeremiad against "liars in public places." Pound as Olson came to know him at St. Elizabeths is the broken "old man at Pisa," though, unlike WCW, his language is untouched and stronger than ever, even if he a "A man upon whom the sun has gone down." Pound transforms into a mythic figure, "the hero who struggles east/widdershins to free the dawn." He is against the grain of the American myth, in which "West/from east men push." The fourth section is a diffuse return to the misreading of Pindar, punctuated by the footfall of a "boundary walker," his "foot informed/by the weight of all things." This walker traverses a wilderness and dissolves into a ring of children dancing. Near the end of the poem, Duncan represents its genesis: "the information flows/ that is yearning. A line of Pindar moves/ from the area of my lamp/ toward morning." The poem ends with the children dancing "In the dawn that is nowhere... clockwise and counterclockwise turning."
In this final section, Duncan comments on his line from Pindar in a prose paragraph aside that also describes the poem: Pindar's art "was not a statue but a mosaic, an accumulation of metaphor." It is an inspiration for Duncan's poetics of the field. He, like Olson and others in NAP is not pursuing a well-wrought urn, but initiating a sometimes occult process, or creating a field where thinking and music can occur. Found within his "Pages from a Notebook" is a statement enclosed in quotation marks but not attributed: "I do not seek a synthesis but a melee." This uncontrolled "melee" is as apt a description of field poetics as the accumulating mosaic. It is a poetics of action and of presence--poems are not objects for readers to enjoy but fields of participation. They are energy transfers (Olson's) or "passionate dispersions" of magic (Duncan).
While working through this poem, I have begun to identify with Duncan the same way I identify with Olson. Personally, politically they are far apart, and they have different intellectual interests too. But each seems on first blush a little ludicrous. They have large ambitions that seem to have been accomplished by others in styles that seem dated. But I'd encourage any one interested enough to have read this far to give both consideration. Though I've read and liked his Opening of the Field, studying "Pindar" at length is driving me to further study of his work.
Recommended: The Opening of the Field
To Read: Lisa Jarnot's bio (forthcoming), Bending the Bow, Roots and Branches, Selected Prose
"There is natural mystery in poetry. We do not understand all that we render up to understanding."
Duncan writes that a poem "is an occult document" subject to "x-rays and vivisection." In this sense, "occult" means that a poem resists and it yields, in Stevens's sense that it resists the intelligence almost successfully. This happens because the poem is a "field" into which the poet brings his or her materials. In the case of his long, famous "Poem beginning with a line by Pindar," the materials are not only the Roman poet's Third Pythian Ode, but the myth of Pysche and Cupid (as represented by Goya), a poetic lineage from Whitman to Williams and Pound, and American Presidential history.
The poem is in four parts: the first begins with a mishmash of Pindar, the beautiful but nonsensical "The light foot hears you and the brightness begins," quickly clarified as "god steps at the margins of thought." In some ways, this poem provides evidence of the numinous: a foot cannot hear in any way we understand, but the lingering occult presence brings with it luminosity. Most of this first section describes Goya's painting of Pysche and Cupid, the troubled story of a god in love with a human. The second section transitions from myth to the imperfect present, using the strokes of President Eisenhower and William Carlos Williams to represent the rupture of poetry from public policy (a public poetry being possible from before Pindar to Whitman). The stroke victims' language is a distorted, mis-signifying stutter: "The present dented of the U/nighted stayd. States. The heavy clod?/Cloud. Invades the brain." At this point in history, "The smokes of continual ravage/obscure the flame." A catalogue of presidents is a list of graceless "idiots fumbling at the bride's door." In the third section, dedicated to Charles Olson, we see Ezra Pound, an inspiration for such a jeremiad against "liars in public places." Pound as Olson came to know him at St. Elizabeths is the broken "old man at Pisa," though, unlike WCW, his language is untouched and stronger than ever, even if he a "A man upon whom the sun has gone down." Pound transforms into a mythic figure, "the hero who struggles east/widdershins to free the dawn." He is against the grain of the American myth, in which "West/from east men push." The fourth section is a diffuse return to the misreading of Pindar, punctuated by the footfall of a "boundary walker," his "foot informed/by the weight of all things." This walker traverses a wilderness and dissolves into a ring of children dancing. Near the end of the poem, Duncan represents its genesis: "the information flows/ that is yearning. A line of Pindar moves/ from the area of my lamp/ toward morning." The poem ends with the children dancing "In the dawn that is nowhere... clockwise and counterclockwise turning."
In this final section, Duncan comments on his line from Pindar in a prose paragraph aside that also describes the poem: Pindar's art "was not a statue but a mosaic, an accumulation of metaphor." It is an inspiration for Duncan's poetics of the field. He, like Olson and others in NAP is not pursuing a well-wrought urn, but initiating a sometimes occult process, or creating a field where thinking and music can occur. Found within his "Pages from a Notebook" is a statement enclosed in quotation marks but not attributed: "I do not seek a synthesis but a melee." This uncontrolled "melee" is as apt a description of field poetics as the accumulating mosaic. It is a poetics of action and of presence--poems are not objects for readers to enjoy but fields of participation. They are energy transfers (Olson's) or "passionate dispersions" of magic (Duncan).
While working through this poem, I have begun to identify with Duncan the same way I identify with Olson. Personally, politically they are far apart, and they have different intellectual interests too. But each seems on first blush a little ludicrous. They have large ambitions that seem to have been accomplished by others in styles that seem dated. But I'd encourage any one interested enough to have read this far to give both consideration. Though I've read and liked his Opening of the Field, studying "Pindar" at length is driving me to further study of his work.
Recommended: The Opening of the Field
To Read: Lisa Jarnot's bio (forthcoming), Bending the Bow, Roots and Branches, Selected Prose
Thursday, May 22, 2008
STL #66: "Image, therefore, is vector" (on Charles Olson)
My fascination with the big American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) began with a line break. As an undergraduate with some time between Fall and Winter quarters, I read through the whole anthology I had used in my Intro to Poetry class, and I came across a poem headed "Maximus, To Himself" which begins with the two lines, "I have had to learn the simplest things / last. Which made for difficulties." That sequence "simplest things / last" instantly became a sort of motto, both for the truth of the notion (it speaks to my habit of struggling with complexities at length to eventually step back and say "oh, I see") and for the energy inherent in the lines, energy that derives from that line break. The meaning of that first sentence hinges on the last word, and starting the line with it relays it with astonishing power. (And no small verbal irony, in that the last becomes first.) There's much to admire just in the very beginning of the poem: the temporal precision of the verb tense (present perfect, which "suggests the process is not complete and more actions are possible") and the pattern of declarative ("I have had to learn...") and parenthetical elaboration ("Which made for difficulties"--truncated but poignant). (Olson uses parenthesis (often nested and/or unclosed) to open new lines of energy
"New lines of energy..." What does that mean? I mentioned "energy" twice in that paragraph, in part because in Olson's own poetics, energy plays a defining role. In "Projective Verse" (1950), he argues that that a poem is a "high energy-construct” and so reading and writing is a matter of transmitting and receiving that energy by means of breath and eye, syllable and line. In a sense, Olson is the father of modern poetics, as I alluded to in my previous note. In his work, theory and practice are nearly indistinguishable. Likewise, work and life are identical too. Personal letters (famously and lengthily to Creeley, but in NAP to Elaine Feinstein) serve as public statements of practice. Olson's "Letter to Elaine Feinstein" follows his more well-known essay in the anthology, and although it is less well-known than the former, it is explicitly a continuation of "Projective Verse." There's a special focus on the image (actually "Image") I want to focus on. It depends on a special definition of "image," which he never articulates. Common ideas of visual and auditory images aren't useful to him: Poetry's truth is not accessible by description. The Image has to be taken by a double (the reader)=its seems to be the conduit by which energy in transferred. "Image, therefore, is a vector," meaning that it is a magnitude (of force) coupled with a direction (to a reader). (This thinking is actually very close to the constructivist pedagogy I'm getting into via John Dewey: An idea can't be given to someone, it merely takes the form of an accepted fact. To be an idea, the learner needs to enact the thinking that leads to it. Teaching as creating a vector. Olson said that "what you find out yourself ('istorion) keeps all accompanying circumstance.")
Okay, I think we need to stop and figure out what "Image" means. Olson, despite his decidedly liberal politics, is closely identified with Pound in matters of technique, and rightly so. With the help of Hugh Kenner's astounding The Pound Era, we can hear the influence of EP on Olson's idea of Image. Pound calls the poetic image "...a radian node or cluster... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." Upon which quote Kenner elaborates: "A patterned integrity [knot] accessible to the mind." From his early days as Imagiste to his last poems, we can see in EP's work the intention that "An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." The Pound/Olson poetic is essentially fractal (no doubt chaotic) in that an image is an irregular piece of larger whole that reflects that irregular whole.
There are only one or two traditional "images" in "Maximus, to Himself." The second verse paragraph reads
It is undone business
I speak of, this morning,
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet
The assymetry of the 1st/2nd stanzas strikes me as powerful: it implies this short passage has the commensurate energy of the first one. This image, then, ought to be a vector (the magnitude of the sea does stretch out from his feet) or a radiant node through which his ideas rush. And in fact, the longer first stanza resonates in every word of this one: he has received his mission or "business" from his insight, (the simplest thing he has learned is that "we grow up many / And the single / is not easily / known") the sea, which was not his trade, lies before him, immense but conquerable. This is a vector that points to the future, to a newly defined reality.
I haven't begun to dig into the magnitude of “Maximus, To Himself." There are layers of linguistics and history, all realized on the level of the syllable. I finally discovered, while thinking about Olson these past few weeks, what he meant by identifying the poetic line with the poet's ear and the syllable with the mind when the opposite would seem to be true. Cory Greenspan’s 1972 article "Charles Olson: Language, Time and Person" ends with an Appendix of “Words Governing ‘Maximus, to Himself” that lists entomological touchstones that Olson used in constructing this poem. (To Feinstein, Olson wrote of "the line of force" one can discover by "tracking any word... to Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, and out to Sanskrit.") The morphem "reg" means “moving in a straight line”; “to direct to rule” in Greek (oregein) and Old English (gerecenia) and is heard in the poem in “arrogance” “sharpness” and “stretching out”
You can effectively parse my motto "simplest things / last") this way too. “Simple” relates back to Old Norse “Soemr” making one, or reconciling ; “things” relates to German and Old English words for throw, mark, and teach (Olson has found "what pleasures / doceat allows and Greenspan notes the relation to "tokens"); while last is governed by “leis,” to learn. Leis also means "footprint" which links the first sentence of the poem with the final image of the sea at Olson's feet.
I've become fascinated by Olson's life and work. I've read much of his prose, and read his lengthy Maximus Poems Though his writing is can be chaotic and convoluted, it promises a generative cosmos of meaning. Some how it's larger than a cosmos=it's a supercosmos in which you can invent your own universe. "Supercosmos." That's the perfect note to end on for a note on Olson-- a freshly coined term, halfway between poignacy and embarrassment, and far away from where I began.
Further reading: short poems (esp in Archaeologist of Morning and The Distances) and his prose The Special View of History another time through Maximus and A.N. Whitehead, an important influence.
"New lines of energy..." What does that mean? I mentioned "energy" twice in that paragraph, in part because in Olson's own poetics, energy plays a defining role. In "Projective Verse" (1950), he argues that that a poem is a "high energy-construct” and so reading and writing is a matter of transmitting and receiving that energy by means of breath and eye, syllable and line. In a sense, Olson is the father of modern poetics, as I alluded to in my previous note. In his work, theory and practice are nearly indistinguishable. Likewise, work and life are identical too. Personal letters (famously and lengthily to Creeley, but in NAP to Elaine Feinstein) serve as public statements of practice. Olson's "Letter to Elaine Feinstein" follows his more well-known essay in the anthology, and although it is less well-known than the former, it is explicitly a continuation of "Projective Verse." There's a special focus on the image (actually "Image") I want to focus on. It depends on a special definition of "image," which he never articulates. Common ideas of visual and auditory images aren't useful to him: Poetry's truth is not accessible by description. The Image has to be taken by a double (the reader)=its seems to be the conduit by which energy in transferred. "Image, therefore, is a vector," meaning that it is a magnitude (of force) coupled with a direction (to a reader). (This thinking is actually very close to the constructivist pedagogy I'm getting into via John Dewey: An idea can't be given to someone, it merely takes the form of an accepted fact. To be an idea, the learner needs to enact the thinking that leads to it. Teaching as creating a vector. Olson said that "what you find out yourself ('istorion) keeps all accompanying circumstance.")
Okay, I think we need to stop and figure out what "Image" means. Olson, despite his decidedly liberal politics, is closely identified with Pound in matters of technique, and rightly so. With the help of Hugh Kenner's astounding The Pound Era, we can hear the influence of EP on Olson's idea of Image. Pound calls the poetic image "...a radian node or cluster... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." Upon which quote Kenner elaborates: "A patterned integrity [knot] accessible to the mind." From his early days as Imagiste to his last poems, we can see in EP's work the intention that "An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." The Pound/Olson poetic is essentially fractal (no doubt chaotic) in that an image is an irregular piece of larger whole that reflects that irregular whole.
There are only one or two traditional "images" in "Maximus, to Himself." The second verse paragraph reads
It is undone business
I speak of, this morning,
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet
The assymetry of the 1st/2nd stanzas strikes me as powerful: it implies this short passage has the commensurate energy of the first one. This image, then, ought to be a vector (the magnitude of the sea does stretch out from his feet) or a radiant node through which his ideas rush. And in fact, the longer first stanza resonates in every word of this one: he has received his mission or "business" from his insight, (the simplest thing he has learned is that "we grow up many / And the single / is not easily / known") the sea, which was not his trade, lies before him, immense but conquerable. This is a vector that points to the future, to a newly defined reality.
I haven't begun to dig into the magnitude of “Maximus, To Himself." There are layers of linguistics and history, all realized on the level of the syllable. I finally discovered, while thinking about Olson these past few weeks, what he meant by identifying the poetic line with the poet's ear and the syllable with the mind when the opposite would seem to be true. Cory Greenspan’s 1972 article "Charles Olson: Language, Time and Person" ends with an Appendix of “Words Governing ‘Maximus, to Himself” that lists entomological touchstones that Olson used in constructing this poem. (To Feinstein, Olson wrote of "the line of force" one can discover by "tracking any word... to Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, and out to Sanskrit.") The morphem "reg" means “moving in a straight line”; “to direct to rule” in Greek (oregein) and Old English (gerecenia) and is heard in the poem in “arrogance” “sharpness” and “stretching out”
You can effectively parse my motto "simplest things / last") this way too. “Simple” relates back to Old Norse “Soemr” making one, or reconciling ; “things” relates to German and Old English words for throw, mark, and teach (Olson has found "what pleasures / doceat allows and Greenspan notes the relation to "tokens"); while last is governed by “leis,” to learn. Leis also means "footprint" which links the first sentence of the poem with the final image of the sea at Olson's feet.
I've become fascinated by Olson's life and work. I've read much of his prose, and read his lengthy Maximus Poems Though his writing is can be chaotic and convoluted, it promises a generative cosmos of meaning. Some how it's larger than a cosmos=it's a supercosmos in which you can invent your own universe. "Supercosmos." That's the perfect note to end on for a note on Olson-- a freshly coined term, halfway between poignacy and embarrassment, and far away from where I began.
Further reading: short poems (esp in Archaeologist of Morning and The Distances) and his prose The Special View of History another time through Maximus and A.N. Whitehead, an important influence.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
STL #65: ATOP II: NAP
I've decided to undertake another "test of poetry," this time over Don Allen's seminal anthology New American Poetry 1945-1960. [Thus is uncoded the obtuse title of this edition of Simplest Things Last.] In worrying over whether I "passed" the last test, I noticed that in my reading practices, "I accept the [Poundian] model of melopeia, judged on criteria of suitability (sound that echoes sense), vigor, and mellifluousness; phanopeia, judged by resonance [and] freshness; and logopeia, judged by aptness, pacing, and soundness. I find that my taste responds to complicated surfaces, luminous details, competing systems (frames, registers, etc), slight shifts (when I can detect them), assonance and consonance, and reserved mystery" (STL #48). In this second test, I am seeking to deepen and enrich that framework. The anthology in question is well-suited for this purpose. The poets represented in all respond in some ways to Pound's poetics (sometimes to contest or reject it, but never in ignorance of it) and the anthology was the first to include a "poetics" section (it might mark the birth of that discipline, but that's a question for other scholars.) My question for this test is "In what terms, and by what terms, should poetry be judged?" I'll coordinate between the statements on and enactments of poetry and in each post develop some key terms of my poetics.
In coming weeks you can expect to see pieces on the first four poets in the anthology, the Black Mountaineers Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley. The anthology include statements on poetics by all of these except Levertov. I plan on writing between the two sections of the book as much as possible: I've started on Olson, using his idea of the Image as Vector to think about "Maximus, To Himself." I'll follow suit with Duncan, but with Levertov I've decided not to seek out any poetics. I did once write a short essay on this model, drawing on material in Paul Hoover's Postmodern American Poetry, a volume from the 1990's very much modeled on Allen's anthology. However, I've decided to strictly limit myself to materials included in NAP. I reserve the right to respond however I wish--if inspiration leads me back to Zuk's or Pound's ideas, I will follow it.
With that procedural stuff out of the way, I'll concluded this long-delayed, awkwardly formed note with some further thoughts on the anthology. It's often pitched against Donald Hall's traditionalist New Poets of England and America which appeared a few years earlier. I only know that book by reputation, but judging on titles alone you can see that Allen's interest is in creating a new distinct tradition--not only the geographical refinement but even the movement from Poets to Poetry does that. This anthology therefore is an argument--that there is a strong and variegated community of poets at work in the U.S.A. He divides the 44 poets he selected into five groups: Black Mountain, San Fransisco, the itinerant Beats, New York, and an odd "other" group that no seems as easy to sort into the existing categories as the others. No matter--the geographical groupings suggests a period of ferment about to mature, that "something is happening but you don't know what it is." And indeed, much did happen subsequent to this anthology. In the 1960's many new poetries made an impact on American and world culture. In the seventies, the poetics section of the anthology had grown into the first poetics programs in universities--spearheaded by Olson's and Creeley's work at Buffalo. To say that NAP defined a field is no overstatement. I'm now beginning to see how it's a touchstone to my own scholarship, and surely Olson more than any one refined the understanding of poetry as an intellectual nexus, creating a space for poets as researchers, fitting in as poets at research universities. (That's an influence he has had apart from what I fear is a generally declining poetic influence.)
I'll end a good way--abruptly. I see I've started to talk about one of my favorite topics, Olson, and so I'll pick up with his poem that gives this blog its name next time.
In coming weeks you can expect to see pieces on the first four poets in the anthology, the Black Mountaineers Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley. The anthology include statements on poetics by all of these except Levertov. I plan on writing between the two sections of the book as much as possible: I've started on Olson, using his idea of the Image as Vector to think about "Maximus, To Himself." I'll follow suit with Duncan, but with Levertov I've decided not to seek out any poetics. I did once write a short essay on this model, drawing on material in Paul Hoover's Postmodern American Poetry, a volume from the 1990's very much modeled on Allen's anthology. However, I've decided to strictly limit myself to materials included in NAP. I reserve the right to respond however I wish--if inspiration leads me back to Zuk's or Pound's ideas, I will follow it.
With that procedural stuff out of the way, I'll concluded this long-delayed, awkwardly formed note with some further thoughts on the anthology. It's often pitched against Donald Hall's traditionalist New Poets of England and America which appeared a few years earlier. I only know that book by reputation, but judging on titles alone you can see that Allen's interest is in creating a new distinct tradition--not only the geographical refinement but even the movement from Poets to Poetry does that. This anthology therefore is an argument--that there is a strong and variegated community of poets at work in the U.S.A. He divides the 44 poets he selected into five groups: Black Mountain, San Fransisco, the itinerant Beats, New York, and an odd "other" group that no seems as easy to sort into the existing categories as the others. No matter--the geographical groupings suggests a period of ferment about to mature, that "something is happening but you don't know what it is." And indeed, much did happen subsequent to this anthology. In the 1960's many new poetries made an impact on American and world culture. In the seventies, the poetics section of the anthology had grown into the first poetics programs in universities--spearheaded by Olson's and Creeley's work at Buffalo. To say that NAP defined a field is no overstatement. I'm now beginning to see how it's a touchstone to my own scholarship, and surely Olson more than any one refined the understanding of poetry as an intellectual nexus, creating a space for poets as researchers, fitting in as poets at research universities. (That's an influence he has had apart from what I fear is a generally declining poetic influence.)
I'll end a good way--abruptly. I see I've started to talk about one of my favorite topics, Olson, and so I'll pick up with his poem that gives this blog its name next time.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
STL #64: writing, memory, and knowledge
"a clock clink hardly the solid links/and retell, more retell, and all retell"
This post has been taking up time I don't really have right now, so I am posting it in less than finished shape. I hope to revisit and extend it sometime, probably into some other form.
Like a lot of people, I know Lyn Hejinian's work primarily through My Life, which is probably the only book in the so-called "Language" tradition to achieve anything like a 'breakthrough success' or become a 'beloved classic.' It is taught, though probably less than widely, in colleges and high schools. My Life is read and liked by people who have the curiosity to pursue the Language poet's critique of language as a representational medium, but who aren't consumed by that critique to the point where all language is inevitably about language. (And therefore can live a normal life.) I am more than the casual fan--I find language-oriented writing, which can sometimes but not always be sorted into the categories of theory and poetry, to be very powerful and a necessary mode for understanding the world today--yet I had never read Hejinian beyond My Life. I corrected that oversight by reading her earlier volume Writing Is an Aid to Memory yesterday, and since the edition was not in a fit condition to keep, I thought I should type up my notes for posterity (to put that memory into writing).* Where My Life was written in 37 blocks of prose (expanded to 45) that all relate to the title, Writing is written in 42 lineated blocks that explore the important relationship of writing to memory, and of both to knowledge. As readers of My Life and her theoretical writings (though it's all theory: ""writing constitutes the mind of the/theorist in the mind/Latin is a very genteel business") know, writing, memory, and knowledge all exist within the same medium--language.
In the Preface to Writing, Hejinian writes that she is "always conscious of the disquieting runs of life slipping by, that the message remains undelivered, opposed to me..." Memory, which follows along this rush of experience is "the girth, or again." Because the reliving the past again through language struggles to embrace the whole missing past (the girth of it), writing is not so much an aid to memory as a supplement, adornment, or extension of the past, or "a gain." The memorial function of language cannot fill in the gaps of onrushing time, but, paradoxically, it overfills these gaps: "Argument demonstrates that truth cannot end. Continuous quantities, like continuous qualities, are endless like the truth, for it is impossible to carry them." Prefiguring the images of cats and dogs in her poem, Hejinian ends the Preface with the suggestive line "Though we keep company with cats and dogs, all thoughtful people are impatient, with a restlessness made inevitable with language." This image of restlessness shows the pull of writing against the memorial function--though equipped to memorialize life gone by, it just as soon charge ahead.
Any individual section of this poem might be described by "that sweet little block/the taste of a larger pattern." The larger pattern is Hejinian's argument about memory and language which by nature of subject and medium is "endless like the truth. Like language, "memory only mimics/paint." Memory works, supposedly, by removing a part from a whole, and preserving it--but these blocks are necessarily pieces of the whole. Memorials, ruins, diaries, --these are seen again and again in her text. The complete sixth section reads
you must show yourself to catch
to be amused, to equate the man, to
shoot his autobiographical work.
This equation of the record and the subject is the idealized goal of language and memory, but is unattainable. Is the job of writing then "recognizing patterns or pruning the truth"? A lot of pruning happens in Writing. Periods of ellipses are broken down into physical images in the poem ("link rule dots"), and in fact the poem is brimming with conceptual "ellipsis [that] makes its promise leaving us to get out." Faced with these gaps, we are forced to ask "how did this happen like an excerpt"?
The question is difficult to answer, and difficult to ask. This writing is less than pellucid. The first line, "apple is shot nod" is uninterpretable as sentence, and followed immediately by non-signifying morpheme ("ness"). Throughout the poem, Hejinian incorporates little known words and coins nonce words like "ting," "persion," "guage". She truncates existing words ("guage" from "language") , and coins reasonably acceptable terms like "pensated change" (presumably thoughtful change), but because none of these are in dictionary, the poem moves along resistant to exterior authority. At one point she writes "I remember a very good joke, something which everyone/can understand/as thoughts should be." But aren't.
As a forty-two block poem unified by thought if not action, Writing, like any longish poem, begs comparison to other long poems, most notably for Hejinian are Pound's and Zukofksy's. LZ seems manifest in several places in this poem. In the Preface, Hejinian evokes Zukofsky in a passage, which sounds like a quotation from Bottom: "Knowledge is part of the whole, as hope is, from which love seeks to contrast knowledge with separation, and certainty with the temporal." LZ almost manifest in Block 19, from its numeric/alphabetic incantations to its violin music:
number city and numerical the alphabet
do trees in the thickness of thoughts
glides out of the minute
across as through thread
fiddle by the rough of hidden music
it were otherwise quickly and hours each rate
rough most better of recent dark
two borders a series takes
as through thick bits to any limit
fixing do trees glide two rates
trot of taught beauty
hour my daily connection like an edge trod
every blind fuddle something sweet.....
Block 32, on the other hand, might be an undercover appearance by Ezra Pound. On rereading, I find many potential references:
"all small colors have colors with an infinite number of/images" (Pound's gold)
"we may take the smoke between the eye/and a background" (historical backdrop)
"The mess of air rises five times bluer
of the same size
between the great variations and a background
veiled from a bench and without precise
limits vaguely economic
populist: sum at the daily paper is a little volume
bandit through chew deal abstract lack" (lateness in history, closer to Zuk's diction tho)
but what really struck me where these lines which I think acknowledge the weight of the cultural archive that is everywhere in Pound:
"history lovers look backward at the daily paper/thrown to a better philosophy"
"yellow-papered thousands but tacks/in depth or to speak to the house of a great man/chosen were from tent quotations"
"many other are luscious mentioned
chant ships may happen
cooper different wooden stack and pin.... goats and high wages
trade each social busily... ideas a happy little opera"
While Pound thinks of knowledge as the production of history, that can be combed through and sorted, as a "happy little opera" that can be contained in time and space. Zuk sees it as a function of language that is always rife with connection, with continuous quantities and qualities. I think that it is to Zuk's mission that Hejinian relates late in the poem:
"I suppose a dictionary with a rhythmic base
an impulse of remembering
could show what I could"
and in the final block
"I study is material
thoughtfulness collage bit river
the test apple bank as material think is
sense difference later differ doubt the
shape"
***
I mentioned that Writing predates My Life, but Hejinian had already started work on it as several hints divulge. She seems to refer to its structure: "nothing less is done in one year block/cut it only in dark reduction/how ness posites/autobiography sees the world." And she is more specific in referring to the thirty-seven annual blocks in "the more regretted cozy paradise/the nature of my thirty-seven of whom/my own astonished sequel." (The astonishment of My Life is seen in Writing as well, occasionally as "wonderment." Even as she was working on the volume at hand, it's evident that she had a sense of a major work in the offing: "I am impatient to finish in order to begin." Like many of the so-called Language poets, Hejinian has a sunny disposition toward her work and her world. The complications of language which prevent memory from definitively preserving the past aren't something to despair over: "memory is a trick of coincidence/which overturned has invisibly legible/use." That "legible use" is the always astonishing creation through language of memory and knowledge.
*If these notes seem more disjointed than usual, it is probably due to the fact that in getting rid of the book, I became intent on "saving" all the "good" parts I marked. I've tried to weave these into something coherent, but no doubt failed again.
**Cats and dogs appear throughout the poem. As an example, section 9 begins with allusion to the jazz idiom: "a cat is 'in time'/ between wind and water a queer character" while the first line of section 10 combines the wind and water into "rough plays smooth the surface of dogs"
This post has been taking up time I don't really have right now, so I am posting it in less than finished shape. I hope to revisit and extend it sometime, probably into some other form.
Like a lot of people, I know Lyn Hejinian's work primarily through My Life, which is probably the only book in the so-called "Language" tradition to achieve anything like a 'breakthrough success' or become a 'beloved classic.' It is taught, though probably less than widely, in colleges and high schools. My Life is read and liked by people who have the curiosity to pursue the Language poet's critique of language as a representational medium, but who aren't consumed by that critique to the point where all language is inevitably about language. (And therefore can live a normal life.) I am more than the casual fan--I find language-oriented writing, which can sometimes but not always be sorted into the categories of theory and poetry, to be very powerful and a necessary mode for understanding the world today--yet I had never read Hejinian beyond My Life. I corrected that oversight by reading her earlier volume Writing Is an Aid to Memory yesterday, and since the edition was not in a fit condition to keep, I thought I should type up my notes for posterity (to put that memory into writing).* Where My Life was written in 37 blocks of prose (expanded to 45) that all relate to the title, Writing is written in 42 lineated blocks that explore the important relationship of writing to memory, and of both to knowledge. As readers of My Life and her theoretical writings (though it's all theory: ""writing constitutes the mind of the/theorist in the mind/Latin is a very genteel business") know, writing, memory, and knowledge all exist within the same medium--language.
In the Preface to Writing, Hejinian writes that she is "always conscious of the disquieting runs of life slipping by, that the message remains undelivered, opposed to me..." Memory, which follows along this rush of experience is "the girth, or again." Because the reliving the past again through language struggles to embrace the whole missing past (the girth of it), writing is not so much an aid to memory as a supplement, adornment, or extension of the past, or "a gain." The memorial function of language cannot fill in the gaps of onrushing time, but, paradoxically, it overfills these gaps: "Argument demonstrates that truth cannot end. Continuous quantities, like continuous qualities, are endless like the truth, for it is impossible to carry them." Prefiguring the images of cats and dogs in her poem, Hejinian ends the Preface with the suggestive line "Though we keep company with cats and dogs, all thoughtful people are impatient, with a restlessness made inevitable with language." This image of restlessness shows the pull of writing against the memorial function--though equipped to memorialize life gone by, it just as soon charge ahead.
Any individual section of this poem might be described by "that sweet little block/the taste of a larger pattern." The larger pattern is Hejinian's argument about memory and language which by nature of subject and medium is "endless like the truth. Like language, "memory only mimics/paint." Memory works, supposedly, by removing a part from a whole, and preserving it--but these blocks are necessarily pieces of the whole. Memorials, ruins, diaries, --these are seen again and again in her text. The complete sixth section reads
you must show yourself to catch
to be amused, to equate the man, to
shoot his autobiographical work.
This equation of the record and the subject is the idealized goal of language and memory, but is unattainable. Is the job of writing then "recognizing patterns or pruning the truth"? A lot of pruning happens in Writing. Periods of ellipses are broken down into physical images in the poem ("link rule dots"), and in fact the poem is brimming with conceptual "ellipsis [that] makes its promise leaving us to get out." Faced with these gaps, we are forced to ask "how did this happen like an excerpt"?
The question is difficult to answer, and difficult to ask. This writing is less than pellucid. The first line, "apple is shot nod" is uninterpretable as sentence, and followed immediately by non-signifying morpheme ("ness"). Throughout the poem, Hejinian incorporates little known words and coins nonce words like "ting," "persion," "guage". She truncates existing words ("guage" from "language") , and coins reasonably acceptable terms like "pensated change" (presumably thoughtful change), but because none of these are in dictionary, the poem moves along resistant to exterior authority. At one point she writes "I remember a very good joke, something which everyone/can understand/as thoughts should be." But aren't.
As a forty-two block poem unified by thought if not action, Writing, like any longish poem, begs comparison to other long poems, most notably for Hejinian are Pound's and Zukofksy's. LZ seems manifest in several places in this poem. In the Preface, Hejinian evokes Zukofsky in a passage, which sounds like a quotation from Bottom: "Knowledge is part of the whole, as hope is, from which love seeks to contrast knowledge with separation, and certainty with the temporal." LZ almost manifest in Block 19, from its numeric/alphabetic incantations to its violin music:
number city and numerical the alphabet
do trees in the thickness of thoughts
glides out of the minute
across as through thread
fiddle by the rough of hidden music
it were otherwise quickly and hours each rate
rough most better of recent dark
two borders a series takes
as through thick bits to any limit
fixing do trees glide two rates
trot of taught beauty
hour my daily connection like an edge trod
every blind fuddle something sweet.....
Block 32, on the other hand, might be an undercover appearance by Ezra Pound. On rereading, I find many potential references:
"all small colors have colors with an infinite number of/images" (Pound's gold)
"we may take the smoke between the eye/and a background" (historical backdrop)
"The mess of air rises five times bluer
of the same size
between the great variations and a background
veiled from a bench and without precise
limits vaguely economic
populist: sum at the daily paper is a little volume
bandit through chew deal abstract lack" (lateness in history, closer to Zuk's diction tho)
but what really struck me where these lines which I think acknowledge the weight of the cultural archive that is everywhere in Pound:
"history lovers look backward at the daily paper/thrown to a better philosophy"
"yellow-papered thousands but tacks/in depth or to speak to the house of a great man/chosen were from tent quotations"
"many other are luscious mentioned
chant ships may happen
cooper different wooden stack and pin.... goats and high wages
trade each social busily... ideas a happy little opera"
While Pound thinks of knowledge as the production of history, that can be combed through and sorted, as a "happy little opera" that can be contained in time and space. Zuk sees it as a function of language that is always rife with connection, with continuous quantities and qualities. I think that it is to Zuk's mission that Hejinian relates late in the poem:
"I suppose a dictionary with a rhythmic base
an impulse of remembering
could show what I could"
and in the final block
"I study is material
thoughtfulness collage bit river
the test apple bank as material think is
sense difference later differ doubt the
shape"
***
I mentioned that Writing predates My Life, but Hejinian had already started work on it as several hints divulge. She seems to refer to its structure: "nothing less is done in one year block/cut it only in dark reduction/how ness posites/autobiography sees the world." And she is more specific in referring to the thirty-seven annual blocks in "the more regretted cozy paradise/the nature of my thirty-seven of whom/my own astonished sequel." (The astonishment of My Life is seen in Writing as well, occasionally as "wonderment." Even as she was working on the volume at hand, it's evident that she had a sense of a major work in the offing: "I am impatient to finish in order to begin." Like many of the so-called Language poets, Hejinian has a sunny disposition toward her work and her world. The complications of language which prevent memory from definitively preserving the past aren't something to despair over: "memory is a trick of coincidence/which overturned has invisibly legible/use." That "legible use" is the always astonishing creation through language of memory and knowledge.
*If these notes seem more disjointed than usual, it is probably due to the fact that in getting rid of the book, I became intent on "saving" all the "good" parts I marked. I've tried to weave these into something coherent, but no doubt failed again.
**Cats and dogs appear throughout the poem. As an example, section 9 begins with allusion to the jazz idiom: "a cat is 'in time'/ between wind and water a queer character" while the first line of section 10 combines the wind and water into "rough plays smooth the surface of dogs"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
