The Inner Music

Reflections on Reading The Quark and the Jaguar

2012-02-02T12:21:00.000-08:00

The Quark and the Jaguar is a science book and, therefore, not the kind of thing I typically read, although I do venture into books other than poetry because I’m interested in nearly everything. A friend who is an engineer recommended the book and I’m happy I took the plunge. It is a great book, especially for the first 275 pages and then again for the last 45 pages—more about that later.

I could never connect the field of quantum mechanics and classical physics. In my mind, they were two irreconcilable worlds. Now I can say I understand how they relate to each other because of this book. If that were all I took away from it, I would be satisfied. But I have taken away so much more.

The title comes from a poem by poet Arthur Sze. So, this choice already has my sympathy. But more than this, that line poses a significant connection between a fundamental particle and an individual expression of the universe. This is an early question in the book: what is the relationship between the fundamental rules of the universe and individuality? It is an amazing question and one I have always been particularly interested in; questions of individuality and identity have been themes I return to since first reading Alan Watts when I was a teenager. But how do the fundamental particles that make up the universe and which are all the same (that is all electrons are identical and lack all individuality), finally result in something unique like a jaguar and even more, the particular jaguar you saw at the zoo with the funny way of walking? The connection the book makes between these two seemingly unrelated things is through probability and other elements of quantum mechanics such as frozen accidents, course-grained histories, etc. Of course, that doesn’t tell you anything about the relationship without reading the book and I’m not sure I could give a summary of such complex material even if I were a scientist.

One thing that makes that summary difficult is that the book is about a lot of different things, i.e. it is a summary of a lot of specialized fields. This is intentional since part of Gell-Mann's point is that there is a need for a more generalized view of our world that connects the many specialized fields. This is something general systems theorists like Fritjof Capra have been saying for decades. Gell-Mann is here making his own effort toward such a cohesive view. This means that, in some ways there is less detail than sometimes would be needed to fully understand a particular thing. But in the end and in spite of this flaw, the book does suggest the connection. Without explaining the science that the book explains, what becomes clear is a large scale view of how the universe evolved, how it could have been very different from what it is today, but by following certain paths among probable paths, in our corner of that universe, the path it took, along with chance events, lead to something specific, something unique like a jaguar . . . or even you. This is how Gell-Mann in the last pages finally comes to argue in favor of preservation and sustainability. He tries to root his argument for these important issues in science and in showing the fragility and uniqueness of what we know as our world.

However, there is another flaw in the book. The transition from the dispassionate and incredibly interesting explanations of quantum mechanics, quantum chromodynamics, complex adaptive systems, and super string theory to the arguments for preservation and sustainability is essentially a tirade against myths or what he calls maladaptive schemata. The ideological stance and the distaste he expresses is out of place tonally with the rest of the book and even somewhat belied by his later defense of cultural diversity. He also tries to argue that there must be a way to have the benefits of a religion without actually believing, by reducing the power of all religions to mere comforts of ritual. I have many issues with this which I will put aside and simply say, I felt he could have made a better, more amiable transition between the two sections. When he finally gets to arguing in favor of preservation and sustainability, his ideas are engaging and eloquent again, although no longer dispassionate. For here we are dealing with sustaining the importance of our fragile individuality that could have been otherwise and could be otherwise in the future.

Books like this always set off fireworks in my head as it might relate to ideas of poetry or social and political issues. For instance, as I contemplated the idea of branching histories in quantum mechanics, I wondered how this might apply to an individual life within a culture since I’ve always imagined a human life as a trajectory through time and culture. Is it possible that an individual life is also following a path that is at various stages made up of choices between mutually exclusive probabilities and as those paths are chosen, certain probabilities in the future are no longer available? Is an individual life also subject to entropy so that as a life goes along within a specific cultural timeframe, disorder increases? It seems to me that many Existentialist books are about just that fact. And it feels that way when I reflect on how full of potential life seemed in my teens and twenties and how responsibilities that have come with my choices along the way have limited the possible paths I could take in the present.

Gell-Mann gives an example of entropy with an image of a room divided by a partition. On one side is cold air and on the other is hot air. When you remove the partition, the perfect order of that situation breaks down as the two portions of air mix. This is so because, as he points out, there are more ways for the cold and hot air to mix than there are for it to stay separate. That tendency to get mixed together rather than stay neatly separated and in order is entropy and it seems true for an individual life. When young, you are just entering the world, the cultural timeframe of your life and as you mix with it, make decisions and choices, your life mixes with that cultural timeframe like the hot and cold air after the removal of the partition. The ways to organize that life then become more difficult as time goes on, as it gets more mixed up in the cultural timeframe and the consequences of choices made. That’s entropy. What dawned on me as I considered this was, if a government is going to have any real impact on something like alleviating the poverty of its citizens, it cannot treat all poor people as equal. A poor 20-year old is not the same as a poor 45-year old. In terms of quantum mechanics, the probability paths for them are different. They must be treated differently if they are to be truly helped out of their poverty.

Another thing that occurred to me had to do with what are called fitness landscapes. These fitness landscapes have to do with biological evolution but Gell-Mann also relates them to creative thinking. A fitness landscape is like a terrain of various pits with various depths. The pits represent different degrees of fitness. The deeper the pit, the more likely it—the biological creature or the idea—is to survive. An important feature of not getting stuck in shallow pits is “noise.” This is a kind of jiggling around along a path over the fitness landscape. The jiggling, if at the right level, will prevent being stuck in a shallow pit, or a place of low fitness. It occurred to me that this noise related to the playfulness involved in creating a poem and reminded me of something William Stafford said,

“If you let your thought play, turn things this way and that, be ready for liveliness, alternatives, new views, the possibility of another world—you are in the area of poetry.”

That playfulness, that possibility of another world, that is the noise that keeps you from being stuck in the place of low fitness, the place where you are not likely to survive . . . intellectually, of course. Here I feel that what quantum mechanics calls “probability” Stafford is calling “possibility.” That “possibility of another world” is, in Gell-Mann’s book what he explains as the possible alternative histories of the universe. In poetry, in a very real way, you realize those alternatives, not as science fiction, but as actual emotional realities that affect our lives each day. Because the potential of what could be influences our days as much as the consequences of what has been. And Gell-Mann would understand this. As he says toward the end of the book, “As we try to envision a sustainable future, we must also ask what kinds of surprises, technological or psychological or social, could make that fairly distant future totally different from what we might anticipate today. A special team of imaginative challengers is required to keep posing that question.” Finding those unusual connections that are “hidden in plain sight” is what poetry and all art is about, the metaphors that even Gell-Mann admits “science might ignore” and yet which “often leads the viewer to new ways of seeing.”

As our great poet Richard Wilbur put it, “What would we be without/The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,//These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?” That is a poetic statement of the need for sustainability. Nature is the language for our inner reality. That is a poetic and even spiritual reason for trying to take action to protect our environment, to protect nature and to find ways to live in it and not just off it.

I may have strayed from direct considerations of the book, but I strayed into things the book prompted me to consider deeply. In the end, a book that provokes deep thought is a successful book and one I would recommend. The Quark and the Jaguar is a great read, a source of inspiration and contemplation. It is challenging for the non-scientist but in the best way: it challenges you to think about difficult realities and to consider deeply the importance of caring for our world and our future before it’s too late.

A Dark Earthy Scrutiny: John Engels' Poetry

2012-01-23T07:40:00.000-08:00

John Engels was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1931. He was a professor of English at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont for 45 years and published eleven collections of poetry. Among his books are, Cardinals in the Ice Age, which was a National Poetry Series selection in 1986 and Weather-Fear which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. He died in June of 2007 but left us a remarkable body of work.

His diction, never overstated, turns on a Germanic earthiness. It is palpable on the tongue. One can chew his words because they are full of things: talus, chestnuts, bean vines, salty stink, and what life there is the earth feeds on with a “dogged, voluptuous swallowing,” and the darkness “gulps.” There is a meticulous scrutiny about his images, as though they were chiseled. They are presented in such a way that lines continue to modify each other. His syntax is circuitous, hypotactic, not resting, but constantly moving toward another modification of the image and the underlying metaphysics of the witness. But finally, it all ends in the dissolution of the witness or his fear of oblivion. Memory and consciousness are merely like the natural forces he observes and, like them, have limits naturally imposed. Thus the witness witnesses within all of nature his own impending dissolution:

. . . I hear
The burgeoning tumor
That will measure me.
(“Terribilis est locus iste”)

Or

. . . only season lacking source
Rolls round and round until in my turns I fall
Forever back, clutching my stone, my gun, my light.
(“When in Wisconsin”)

Or

. . . the light began

its long reach, even now,
long afterward, still
rising, widening into the body of the sky,
into the last huge widenesses of the last
meetings of light beyond which I remember this
or not, beyond which
even then fearing my life
I wished to burn.
“(At Night on the Lake in the Eye of the Hunter”)

In this, he tries to scrape away layers of false comfort and face the bare terrifying fact of imminent death, the dead raging animal desire we all feel to howl against the abyss. “Bullhead” is an amazing example, the poem’s central comparison pivoting on a gaping catfish writhing for hours in his bucket after being caught and his own desire to “cry out/into the blackness beyond/the dumb immediate blackness” his own breath like a hook “snagged/in my gullet, the tongue/in my mouth like a worm.” Since, as he says, the agony of this end is connatural, he is dumb, mute—we are all mute against it. But there is also a heroic aspect of facing the danger for the beauty of the fleeting natural world, as in “Aurora,” “Earth Tremor, the Sky at Night; or “At the Top of Blood Mountain.” Although this last poem has ambiguities of lineation that leave one wondering about the nature of the fixed still point upon which the end pivots.

There are some excesses in his poems. Sometimes he overly explains things, not allowing the implied connections to remain implied, as, for instance, in “Barking Dog.” He doesn't do this every time, but it does happen. Occasionally his syntax can become winding and treacherous, overextending lines. Sometimes he splits complex subjects and interjects prepositional phrases, such as in “The Hunters” or “Anniversary.” It sustains the movement of the poem, although, occasionally, at the cost of clarity.

Ultimately, in spite of any shortcomings, I would recommend him for his images and diction, his sharp insights and affinity for what he observes. He is a poet deserving of much more attention than he receives. The force of his themes punches you in the metaphysical gut while his linguistic textures are as delicious on the tongue as a piece of warm, buttered bread. His poems are constructed from the same dust of the earth from which man was made.

Interview with Adele Kenny

2012-01-12T06:29:00.000-08:00

Discussing her new collection What Matters.

Michael T. Young: Given that your new collection What Matters is focused around surviving cancer and how memory connects with that survival, I wondered if the poems were written independently or with the intention of making a coherent collection. What is the history of its genesis?

Adele Kenny: Before I answer, Michael, here’s a big THANK YOU for the time and attention you’ve given What Matters. So lovely and generous of you!

You asked about the genesis of What Matters … Interestingly, the collection had a title before it became a book. I had been writing the poems independently for about ten years, not thinking of them in terms of anything but individual poems that were difficult but healing to write. Like many images in the poems, the title came to me late one night. I woke up the next morning knowing that What Matters would be the title of my next book. But what book? That day I took a long look at my newer poems (revised, written, and in process), and the title powered the process of writing, tweaking, and selecting. A number of poems didn’t make the cut, and a few of the poems that first appeared in Chosen Ghosts were reworked for What Matters because they were part of a “story” that overlaps from one book to the other (just as life experiences sometimes overlap). What Matters is a book about survival and the fact that we’re all survivors of one thing or another. The details may be different, but we’re all survivors. My goal was to create a collection of poems for the collective heart as well as for the personal.

Michael T. Young: In the poem “Coming and Going” you write “You count/your losses, the wounds that//are yourself.” What relationship do you see between what we suffer and who we are?

Adele Kenny: I’m so glad that you picked up on the relationship aspect in this poem. In my life, the challenges have, in large measure, defined (and continue to define) who I am. I’ve come to believe that a purpose of suffering is discovering a relationship with it and understanding its causal effect on whether or not we become bitter or grateful.

Michael T. Young: The Poem “East Rahway” says “The past falls like water from winter boots.” And the poem “Tending the Graves,” opens with “The snow has melted, the stream remembers/how to be a stream.” These poems suggest how memory is connected to the flow of time. I wondered what you saw as the implications of this connection. How does it affect who we are and how we live? Do you see memory as a kind of redemption from the loss that time imposes?

Adele Kenny: I believe that painful memories (loss, grief, illness, failure) contribute to our survival toolboxes, and we need to carry those memories with us because they strengthen us if we let them. Good memories reassure us with hope. Most importantly, memory is what lasts—our backcloth, a sustainable “place” despite the passage of time—a shining, silvery thing that becomes redemptive and holy.

Michael T. Young: Certain images such as starlight, rain, and shadow reoccur throughout the collection. Was the movement of such elements a conscious symbolism or an unconscious language you recognized while organizing the book? If these are elements you reflected on, what do you see as their significance in the collection?

Adele Kenny: And wings! And light! The recurring images (mostly from nature) surprised me at first. Their presence is organic (not deliberate), definitely the work of a spiritually-charged language that I feel more than hear. Often, they look toward nature’s power and human connections to the natural world. In many cases, those images buttressed the poems in which they appear with a sense of “belonging” to other poems in the collection, of “belonging” to a larger world than the book.

Michael T. Young: In the poem “In Memory Of” you write “In that voice/without margin, the notes I remember most/are high and low.” What role do you see opposites or extremes playing in memory or life in general?

Adele Kenny: We live between extremes much of the time, but extremes of love and loss and grief are what we remember most.

Michael T. Young: In the prologue poem “This Living” you write “It’s not destination, but more what silence is when/you enter it deeply.” Silence and also stillness are present in other poems in the collection. What significance do you believe these qualities have? Are they spiritual, philosophical, something else?

Adele Kenny: Peter Minard (a contemplative Benedictine monk) wrote, “Real Silence begins when a reasonable being withdraws from the noise in order to find peace and order in his inner sanctuary.” The world’s “noises” trouble me and, often, I enter the silence and stillness of my “inner sanctuary” through poetry and prayer. I don’t have a label for it, but my process of writing is similar to my process of prayer.

Michael T. Young: Do you have a favorite poem in the collection? If so, which is it and what makes it significant for you?

Adele Kenny: I’ve always felt close to “East Rahway” (a poem I’ve written and re-written dozens of times over a period of many years). It’s the longest poem I’ve written (75 lines in its current incarnation), and it comes from my first and most essential heart. Second to “East Rahway” is “Somehow the Angel.” That “hardly celestial” angel lives in each of us, the winged part of the human spirit that keeps getting up, the survivor in each of us that remembers how to live. Stephen Dunn wrote, “… the angel is a complicated agent of hope, not because Kenny relies on the reader to accept an easy notion of the angelic, but because she uses the entire poem to create a kind of damaged, ‘hardly celestial’ angel, an angel who could be one of us on a day when our clumsiness trips into generosity.”

Michael T. Young: You are the author of 12 collections of poems. In what ways do you see your art as having changed and evolved over that time?

Adele Kenny: Imagery and sound have always been in the same craft-arc for me—that’s never changed, though I like to think that my command of imagery and sound has become stronger. I really don’t think about what I’m doing when I begin a poem and, most of the time, I have no idea where a poem might go. I don’t plan the poems, I just write. Later, I tighten imagery and work more consciously on sound (ways to make “music” with the words). In recent years, my poems have become deliberately shorter—more focused and compressed. Now (and I don’t recall ever thinking about this in my earlier work), I want my poems to say more than I planned for them to say. I want them to tell me something about myself, something I haven’t learned yet or something I’ve forgotten. I want them to startle and surprise me. I want them to express my astonished love for all created things, for all of life (“this wing, this living”), and I want them (always) to praise God.

Michael T. Young: On your blog, The Music In It, you often provide prompts for poets. Do you find prompts helpful for your own writing? If so, how do they serve you: as regular ways to find new material, as ways to escape writer’s block, just another way of getting started, or something else?

Adele Kenny: I’d been writing prompts for years to use in workshops, and they were always well received, so when I thought about blogging (and knew that I didn’t want to do an “about me” blog), I decided to offer a prompt each week for other poets to work with. There are times for all of us when “gift” isn’t enough, when the muse heads for an airport and disappears, and we need a jumpstart. That’s how I see prompts—jumpstarts for those times when gift and talent don’t carry us—you know, when the battery goes a little dead and we hook up the jumper cables to get things going.

Michael T. Young: Are there any prose works that have noticeably influenced your work as a poet stylistically? What are they? Can you say in what way you feel this work or works influenced your poetry?

Adele Kenny: A prose work that has influenced my thinking about poetry (and my thinking in general), is Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation—chapter fourteen (“Integrity”) in particular. The chapter begins, “Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves.” There’s an important suggestion here about developing our own styles. But to answer your question about stylistic influences, I can’t think of a prose work that has specifically influenced my poetry style. Poets and their poems—that’s another angle! I’ve been influenced by many poets, though I try not to be. I’m especially drawn (again and again and again) to T. S. Eliot, and I’ve just written a poem in the style of e.e. cummings for the fun of it (a large grin here).

Michael T. Young: What are you working on now? Do you have another overarching subject set for your next collection?

Adele Kenny: I’m working on some new poems but without a theme or specific direction. The joy for me lies in the process of writing as much as in the finished poems. Right now, I’m not thinking of a book (but I won’t say “no” if one begins to appear).

Michael T. Young: What do you like to do that has nothing to do with poetry or writing?

Adele Kenny: My mom taught me how to read and write when I was four and sick in bed with what was diagnosed as “polio fever.” It was a tough summer for both of us, but somehow or other my mom (not a trained teacher) figured out ways to teach me to read and write using poetry and St. John’s Gospel. So, poetry, as something I do, goes way back, and even when I’m not actively writing, there’s always a word or an image or a line in process. That said, I love genealogical research (I’ve traced my English ancestors back to the time of Elizabeth I), book collecting, gardening, forests, antiques, and for the past thirty-five years I’ve raised Yorkshire Terriers—Dylan, Yeats, Bijou, and now my new little guy, Chaucer.

Michael T. Young: Thank you, Adele. Let’s close with one of your poems, your favorite from the collection.

East Rahway

The past is a foreign country,
they do things differently there.
— L.P. Hartley

All it takes is something familiar: the shape of a
hand or a stranger’s eyes in the sudden light of
a theater when the movie ends. Then, something
deep in memory’s birthwood calls me back.
The past is my first language, a speakable grace.

On summer nights in East Rahway, our fathers
sat on front porches in worn t-shirts, their
calloused hands wrapped around beer cans as
the last stars took their places like nail-heads
on a dark and holy board. Inside, our mothers

sang as they washed the dinner dishes, and we
went to sleep with the easy grace of children.
All of our grandmothers spoke with accents,
rolled their stockings down to their ankles like
nylon UFOs, and people shouted at them when

they spoke, enunciating carefully, as if our
grandmothers weren’t only foreign but deaf.
Different from the beginning, we were the city’s
middle children, never as though as the kids from
the projects, and only half as cool as the kids who

lived behind the high school on the other side
of town. Cut off from the rest of Rahway, we
lived between Route 1 and Linden Airport, in
a place where sleep was rubbed out of night to
the sound of trucks stumbling over potholes

and propjets taking off on runway number three.
Safe in our own society, we lived a little religion
of unlikely saints whose blood offering were
elbows and knees that scraped like autumn
leaves on the sidewalks. In East Rahway, hardly

anyone died or went away. Those were the days
before we knew what dead meant. But when
Mr. Malone, who lived in the corner house,
did it, the bagpipes wailed and skirled for
three days in his living room, a hundred octaves

higher than all the blades of grass we ever
held between our thumbs and blew against—
a different kind of party. There were no soccer
games, no little league, no one drove us anywhere.
We walked to the corner store and hiked down

lower Road to Merck’s Creek, the mosquitoed
water stained even then by chemicals we couldn’t
name; but, oh, the bright and oily rings that spread
above the stones we skipped like shivering circles
of mercury. There were forests then, across the

street, and deep. We were wood nymphs and
druids, foreign legionnaires led by my cousin
Eddie. Soldiers of whatever fortune was, we
followed into the hymned and scrawling weeds—
the underbrush belled by our footsteps, trees

tuned to prodigal birds. We were Arthur and
Guinevere, Merlin, Morgan, all the knights, and
one Rapunzel who lost her hair in a bubble gum
accident. We did things differently, then, believed
in summer’s synonymous sun, December’s

piebald light, white-maned and glistening, the
moon above us, cloud-ribbed in semi-silhouette.
The past falls like water from winter boots.
Merck’s Creek, darker, dirtier with new pollution,
moves more slowly. The streets, once so wide

and willing, are smaller. And the forest is gone,
the initials we carved lost with fallen trees,
the green spirits laid to rest beneath a block of
factories. But, still, if you cross Route 1 on
a night overworked with summer stars, and

stand on the corner of Scott and Barnett, you
will find our fathers there. Kents and Winstons
burn, beer cans shine in the baritone heat. Our
mothers and grandmothers sing, ghostly soloists,
eggshell voices—reedy, thin. And we are there,

lips pressed smugly on chocolate cigarettes; our
pockets ring with Pez candies. Listen! A child’s
voice calls Excalibur into the night, those old bones
still in the road—skull and neck, a few vertebrae
that we tossed like dice to tell our future.

Find more of Adele's books and poetry, and other information about her at her blog and website:

Adele Kenny’s blog, The Music In It: http://adelekenny.blogspot.com/
Adele Kenny’s website: http://www.adelekenny.com/

What Matters: A Review

2012-01-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

What Matters. Adele Kenny.
New York, NY: Welcome Rain Publishers, Nov. 2011. 62 pages, ISBN: 978-1-56649-079-5

(click the image to be taken to Amazon.com where you can oder What Matters)

What Matters is Adele Kenny’s twelfth poetry collection. Its poems are a beautiful balance of music and thematic sensitivity. The collection is composed of 3 sections, the middle one being that in which she confronts the difficulty of surviving cancer. The 2 flanking sections, “Where Memory is Holy” and “We Don’t Forget,” suggest that the power of memory and not survival is the main subject of this collection. Of course, the truth is that it’s the relationship between memory and survival that is intimately explored throughout.

These poems are a real pleasure to read. For the first time in a long time, I was struck by the simple enjoyment of an alliterated line, such as “At dusk, deer feed in a corner of the field.” Or “The sound rattles and rings—far from the/sea, from the stone circle” or, one of my favorites, “flung from the sun’s infallible fist.” There is also the beauty of internal rhyme such as “your heart skipped and flipped, lungs/strung like pebbles on wire.” Kenny, of course, uses more subtle techniques. She is clearly a poet with an ear trained to the beauties and subtleties of the music in our language. But she is also adept at articulating themes with striking imagery and keen sensitivity.

One is seized by the clarity of such images as “bearded yogurt,” or “frost burns the marigolds.” But what heightens these images is their service to exploring the difficult connection between memory and mortality. The book’s first section is a past, a childhood where memories are created, where life feels like “the world without end.” In the poem “East Rahway,” Kenny says, “The past is my first language, a speakable grace.” This grace has the power of resurrection, since in the first section as family pets die, as parents die, still, “you are with me because I remember.” Kenny also seems deeply aware, as I imagine most poets are, of the intimate ties among memory, imagination, desire and dreams. These are all expressions of a single faculty projecting itself in different directions: forward, backward, toward a person or an object or a goal. So in this first section there is a poem about the innocent desire in those who are too young to articulate exactly what is so stirring about the snake woman at the circus as “the snake slid/between her breasts and made its/thick descent along her thighs.” Or in “The Sap Bush” this faculty emerges as imagination when

. . . I imagine us there, called
back in middle age

to a language of stars that was larger than
logic and never quite lost.

The middle section, “Somehow the Angel,” is a door to pass through, or more strikingly, it is a fixed moment, as if within it, time slows or even comes to a stop. In fact, in two of the poems of the middle section, the last word is “through.” This section is the moment of trial, suffering and survival. We get through it with the poet, learning not just to survive, but to confront the nameless, as the title of a poem from the middle section declares, “No Word for It.” It is where “the surgeon says I have bad/news.” In confronting the cancer, the fear and the treatments, Kenny reveals how all our faculties become enslaved to the present. The poem “In Which” concludes

. . . I imagine a
stone, it’s slow wearing down, the
light in which it casts no shadow.

Here the faculty of imagination expresses itself as the focus on a fixed point, a stone—a gravestone? Perhaps but even if it isn’t a gravestone the focus closes the speaker off from the future and the past: memory fails, desire fails. The image contrasts with an image in the title poem from the final section when the survivor reaffirms her place in life and we are told

What matters is the quiet beak of a lark in the seed,
the dead tree’s shadow that stretches upstream.

One could understand these two contrasting points as being what’s outside time versus what dwells in it. Even for the dead tree, what matters is the shadow it casts upstream, i.e., into the past, which is a version of time. Thus there is a double-entendre in the title, for What Matters isn’t only what is significant but what is incarnate, embodied, what is alive in the sense that we know it here on earth. In an early poem of the last section where the one who has survived is renewed and reaffirmed in life, the poem “And Is” says,

. . . This is the world,
flung from the sun’s infallible fist, an
arrangement of light that praises the
wonder of substance.

This substance is present also in the middle section in its most ethereal manifestation: an angel. Even its presence has a terrestrial feel in the poem “Somehow the Angel” where, in the midst of the battle with cancer, considering suicide, in “taking all the pills,”

Always, then, the old angel wheezes in.
Not quite luminous, never on his knees,
his wings creak, beat at oblique angles
(all that flapping—it’s hardly celestial)
but his own

weight escapes him.

As we survive this confrontation with mortality, that faculty which connects us with all of life revives, even in the middle section. In the poem “And Nothing Less,” Kenny says, “her dreams want her back.” Surviving the cancer is not a sudden epiphany, as survival never really is, but a gradual return to the light, a slow dawning. The final poem in this section returns memory in full where the speaker looking at a jay making noises at a squirrel, “reminds me of when I was five and//something died in our drain spout.” Surviving means returning to memory, finding life echoing, resonating with other moments. That’s how survival contrasts with living. In the middle of survival, the moment resonates with nothing, there is no echo.

We enter the final section where “Life goes on.” Here we come to a realization, an insight on the other side, which is how intimately memory and death are connected. The poem “In Memory Of” says,

. . . There is always
a background (that far, this close), and what memory
does—like the dusky lines of a double shadow,
it multiplies loss.

And the poem “Coming and Going” says, “You count/your losses, the wounds that//are yourself.” Every moment that passes is a death that now is only real in memory and yet, that very memory makes us who we are. This inextricable bond means that in the end it is not forgiveness but grace that is our salvation. The final poem of the collection, “We Don’t Forget,” concludes:

Grace is acceptance—

all of it, whatever it is—as
in we live for this: love
and gratitude enough.

We don’t forget
how it feels to rejoice.

What Matters is a collection that confronts darkness and the fear of death without being ponderous. It offers hope and light without being insipid or sentimental. More than my brief review can detail, it explores the complex point at which memory and mortality, identity and death are intimately connected. And this is all accomplished with a music and imagery that will please any reader.

30: It's the Magic Number

2011-12-23T19:27:00.000-08:00

On Sunday at the end of this week I turn 43 years old and I’ve been thinking not so much about turning 43 as about the difference between turning 40 and turning 30. Our culture makes a big deal about turning 40. And it is significant. At 40 one is typically half way through a life. Taking stock of how far one has come at such a point is not only natural it seems inevitable. Failure to reach some goals by this age may result in the proverbial mid-life crisis. Though, in ancient Rome, 40 was considered the prime of life, the time to enjoy the fruits of all you had accomplished, if, indeed, you had accomplished something. But, looking back, I realize that 30 is really the age of deepest significance. 30 is when you step into time, you feel it like a friction. If we fall into life, we fall into a vacuum, drifting without effort until we hit 30, when we hit the atmosphere and start feeling the burn of entry. Many famous literary figures are 30: Hamlet, K in Kafka’s The Trial, Hugh in Under the Volcano, Roquentin in Nausea, the main character in Fight Club.

30 is when you become more than simply aware of mortality, rather it infects your soul. You don’t only realize a clock is ticking, you can now hear it. Because of it, whether you believe in a life beyond this one or not, you sense now that there will be a reckoning of some sort. If anything produces the disillusionment that comes with shedding youth, it is this thing that seizes you. And that may be another way of understanding the difference. In one’s 20’s, there is the knowledge of mortality, but once 30 comes, somehow it knows you. Here is Hugh, the nephew of the main character in Under the Volcano, reflecting on his life in his 30th year.

Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty-nine a man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty-nine. And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought at least to have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A.E. Houseman, that one could not be young forever—that indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer. For in less than four years, passing so swiftly to-day’s cigarette seemed smoked yesterday, one would be thirty-three, in seven more, forty, in forty-seven, eighty. Sixty-seven years seemed a comfortingly long time but then he would be a hundred. I am not a prodigy any longer. I have no excuse any longer to behave in this irresponsible fashion. I am not such a dashing fellow after all. I am not young. On the other hand: I am a prodigy. I am young. I am a dashing fellow. Am I not? You are a liar, said the trees tossing in the garden. You are a traitor, rattled the plantain leaves. And a coward too, put in some fitful sounds of music that might have meant that in the zócalo the fair was beginning. And they are losing the Battle of the Ebro. Because of you, said the wind. A traitor even to your journalist friends you like to run down and who are really courageous men, admit it—Ahhh! Hugh, as if to rid himself of these thoughts, turned the radio dial back and forth, trying to get San Antonio (“I am none of these things really.” “I have done nothing to warrant all this guilt.” “I am no worse than anybody else. . .”); but it was no good. All his resolutions of this morning were to no avail. It seemed useless to struggle any further with these thoughts, better to let them have their way. . .
. . . No: I am much afraid there is little enough in your past, which will come to your aid against the future. Not even the seagull? Said Hugh. . .

Notice the guilt Hugh feels, his efforts at self-justification. Suddenly, in the wake of time’s presence, in the certain knowledge of mortality that grips him, there is a need to justify the past, the way he has been living, but nothing there will save him from the future and its inevitable conclusion. Up until now, there has been no such need, life was his own, there was no time, only his choices and actions. There was no concern for consequence. “I have done nothing to warrant all this guilt” he says. “I am no worse than anybody else.” It is so brilliant, that youthful, insouciant gesture that says, “I’d rather regret what I did than what I didn’t do.” Of course, however, though I too would maintain this same stance even today, the guilt is inescapable, because from my very best intentions have sprung some deplorable consequences and fight it how we may, they partly define us.

Hugh’s efforts at self-justification could have been lifted from Kafka’s The Trial. K, on his 30th birthday, wakes to find he has been arrested. He spends the entire year trying to prove his innocence to a court whose higher judges he never meets and he is finally executed. What did he do? What is he guilty of? One never knows. But it is the weight of actions taking place in time. He, like all of us, is inescapably guilty. With the freedom of youthful potential stolen, he is now someone who is known, fixed in the continuum of the clock. Near the end of the novel, at the core of it he is confronted by a priest in a deserted church:

“You are Joseph K.,” said the priest, lifting one hand from the balustrade in a vague gesture. “Yes,” said K, thinking how frankly he used to give his name and what a burden it had recently become to him; nowadays people he had never seen before seemed to know his name. How pleasant it was to have to introduce oneself before being recognized!

Who doesn’t know the desire to be somewhere you aren’t recognized, the pleasure of this chance to transform yourself into someone else entirely, to have the possibility again to get right the correspondence between who you are and who you appear to be? It’s the desire to be someplace where there are no expectations.

Ticket
by Charles O. Hartman

I love the moment at the ticket window—he says—
when you are to say the name of your destination, and realize
that you could say anything, the man at the counter
will believe you, the woman at the counter
would never say No, that isn’t where you're going,
you could buy a ticket for one place and go to another,
less far along the same line. Suddenly you would find yourself
—he says—in a locality you’ve never seen before,
where no one has ever seen you and you could say your name
was anything you like, nobody would say No,
that isn’t you, this is who you are. It thrills me every time.

But you can’t escape your own expectations. So we are burdened by history, the weight of all the accumulated past in the moment of recognition. Before that moment, before that point in time, the future is infinitely open and there is the chance that one could become anything or anyone. But then the moment comes and doors start closing, the field of vision narrows until it’s just you, standing there inescapably carrying your history. Camus wrote too about this very dilemma in the Myth of Sisyphus:

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.” Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.

Once the bell tolls at the age of 30, there seems to be only 2 ways out: existential freedom, that is accepting that everything is already lost in your inevitable death and there is therefore no reason not to see all choices available to you, or the transcendent response found in everything from Christianity to Whitman’s Song of Myself where Whitman says of all the different events of life both good and bad:

These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
(From Section 4)

Jesus began his ministry at 30 and indeed, by Biblical reckoning, a person is not an adult until they reach 30. It is the time at which, as Roquentin in Nausea says, “Nothing has changed, but everything is different.” If there is an iconic image that captures this moment it is Hamlet staring into the skull of Yorick. A short time after, Hamlet asserts his final philosophy regarding the imminence of death. Horatio warns Hamlet to call off the dual with Laertes if he suspects any foul play but Hamlet says,

Not a whit. We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.

“The readiness is all.” Here is one point that encompasses both religious and secular insight, namely, that one cannot make wise decisions without taking into account the fact of one’s approaching demise. David in the Psalms said,

LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity. Selah. Surely every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them. And now, Lord, what wait I for? my hope is in thee. (Psalms 39:4 – 7)

Here David dispenses with worldly accomplishment, recognizing it for the temporary show it is. What is the main issue? Something that transcends the time-bound: God. David comes to this realization that he must hope in God in light of knowing that he is mortal and going to die. Similarly, Pascal in his Pansées said of death “that the only possible way of acting with sense and judgment is to decide our course in the light of this point, which ought to be our ultimate objective.”

At 30, perhaps the choices or lack of choices from adolescence finally yield their return and in that reckoning, the arc of life through time is first known, we can measure its metaphysical weight in the consequences. Then the realization seizes us that our life is not just the result of our choices, but of consequences beyond our control, that consequence breads consequence and does not end. Against those forces, those beyond control, all philosophies and theologies attempt to take arms. True identity comes into reality in this crucible, the definite shape of who we are is forged in this fire. Seize the day, amor fati, thy will be done – these are the bricks and mortar of our temple to salvation, the bulwark built to shore up our minds against the onslaught of time. At 30, whether secular or religious, we enter that temple and know ourselves as mortal.

Interview with Hilary Sideris

2011-12-15T10:01:00.000-08:00

Discussing her new poetry collection, Gold & Other Fish.

Michael T. Young: You indicate that the book, 77 Great Fish of North America inspired some of the poems in Gold & Other Fish. Were there other sources of inspiration for the collection? What were they?

Hilary Sideris: I’d written a series of poems based on dictionary definitions of four-letter words, and I started thinking about the word “bass,” with its various meanings and connections to depth, and then, as I discovered, to the word “kiss.” That led me to pike, and I got very caught up in the tactile language around fish and fishing—I imagine the same thing happened to Hopkins when he described the landscape’s “pied beauty” and the tools of human industry—he must’ve fallen in love with the words: “fold, fallow, and plough;/And all trades, their gear, and tackle and trim.” It’s almost as if he’s praising the language itself.

Michael T. Young: I particularly like the poem “Monk.” It applies grace to a moment of a predator killing his prey. So it inverts what we expect when looking at such a moment. How do you define “grace” and how does it work in the context of the collection here?

Hilary Sideris: Monkfish are terrifically ugly animals. But the way they do their work is admirable—full of grace. They hold their caught prey with what looks to us like great patience, before they swallow it whole. I enjoy the contradiction in our love for its sweet flesh and our deep disgust with its appearance.

Michael T. Young: The collection as a whole made me think of our sanitized relationship to predation, how we try to pretend we are above it. Did you have this in mind while writing some of the poems and what are your thoughts on it?

Hilary Sideris: I grew up in a very conservative, evangelical Christian atmosphere, so I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of all the human and animal suffering I saw around me. I fought a lot—physically fought—with my siblings as a child and adolescent. I remember when I was about sixteen, going to school with two black eyes, which I tried to cover up with make-up. My youngest sister, Lisa, is an environmental ethicist. She’s written about what Christian theologians make of “nature red in tooth and claw.” I think we’re both driven to write about predation and violence because of what we experienced as kids in a very aggressive and religious household.

Michael T. Young: You allude to Shakespeare’s Tempest in the poem Cod. I wondered if anything from Hamlet may have been in the back of your mind as you wrote, specifically when he says, “A man may fish with the worm that has eaten a king, and eat the fish that has fed on that worm.”

Hilary Sideris: It was fun to use Shakespeare’s language, but I was more focused on the fish as a symbol of vulgar sexuality, and the implied revulsion in the use of the word “bacalao,” which is something I overheard (spoken in Spanish) in the classrooms of South Brooklyn as a young high school teacher. In Ariel’s song the body, through drowning, “suffer[s] a sea-change/into something rich and strange” but there’s also the sea-change of adolescence, when the female body becomes an object of lust, fear and derision.

Michael T. Young: Jung saw the sea as an image of the collective unconscious and as I read Gold & Other Fish, I imagined diving into the depths of the unconscious. Did you find that searching the traits of these different fish was like searching different aspects of the psyche? That some people are like a pike who “tastes his best/after a bitter fight”? or others are like a goldfish, “a muddy bed, and a bit of privacy/are all he wants.”

Hilary Sideris: Yes, but the nice thing is that these selves or aspects of the psyche tend to emerge when you don’t set out to find them. Writing is kind of like fishing. You use your tools—your language—to try to catch something. With this series, I found that by not trying to write personally or autobiographically, by borrowing the language of biology and fishing, I would often catch something very personal, very true to my own experience.

Michael T. Young: What led you to decide on four tercets as the form for these poems? Was it a conscious decision or something that came organically and then you decided to stick with it?

Hilary Sideris: It’s hard to know the difference between what happens organically and what’s volitional. I think the tercets happened organically, but maybe I willed them into being. I tend to write either in couplets or in tercets, but tercets seemed to work better because there was so much enjambment and slant rhyme going on.

Michael T. Young: Do you have a particular poem or several, in the collection that are especially meaningful to you? Which are they and why?

Hilary Sideris: I’m fond of “Sturgeon” and “Red Snapper”—“Sturgeon” because of its humility, and its ability to exist in several worlds, the salt and the fresh, the kosher and the traif. I also identify with the Sturgeon’s ancient immaturity. “Red Snapper” is a sadder story about being seen through human eyes, being labeled and managed—“under our auspices”, which is to say, doomed.

Michael T. Young: Your poems are highly compressed, like Kay Ryan, Charles Simic or Louise Bogan. Who do you consider your most significant influences?

Hilary Sideris: I’m a fan of Theodore Roethke and Philip Larkin. I like poets who write in the voices of people from particular places. I love Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie, D. Nurkse’s Voices Over Water, and Maurice Manning’s A Companion for Owls.

Michael T. Young: Are there any prose works that have noticeably influenced your work as a poet stylistically? What are they? Can you say in what way you feel this work or works influenced your poetry?

Hilary Sideris: I don’t know about influence, but I loved Lydia Davis’ books Break It Down and Almost No Memory. When I was young I was crazy about writers like Salinger and Vonnegut who wrote short, punchy sentences. Now I’m more drawn to the Elizabethan—David Milch’s Deadwood comes to mind.

Michael T. Young: What are you working on now? Do you have another overarching subject like fish set for your next collection?

Hilary Sideris: I wrote some poems about Renaissance artists, based on Vasari’s Lives, which was really fun. Then I started reading stories about saints. I’m working on a saint sequence right now, and trying hard to avoid being clever. I’m fascinated by how illogical and successful Christianity has been.

AUGUSTINE

What did he love
in those days but

his theft? Not for
their shape & taste,

but for the act
of plucking them

did he devour
those stolen pears,

sweetened by sin.
Itching with passions

in his sixteenth year,
he would confess,

he was enamored
of error—error

itself, not what
he erred for.

“Augustine” appeared in Southern Poetry Review, issue 49.1, fall 2011

Gold & Other Fish, A Review

2011-12-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

Gold & Other Fish. Hilary Sideris.
Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, Nov. 2011. 22 pages, ISBN: 1-59924-896-4 / ISBN 978-1-59924-896-7

(click the image to be taken to Finishing Line Press's website where you can order the book)

Gold & Other Fish is Hilary Sideris’s third poetry collection and her second collection with Finishing Line Press. The 20 poems in it are all named for fish and though each poem distills the essence of these fish with a beautifully compressed lyricism, they are not mere portraits. It is not just a collection of nature poems. Humans enter the picture from the beginning and return throughout as hunter, cook, eater and this leads us beyond mere observation into deeper questions.

The opening poem, Fluke, concludes, “To reel her in,/I’ll need a hunk of killifish/wriggling on my hook.” The third poem, Bass, closes by saying of the fish,

he blackens in my cast-

iron pan, lobster eater on
the rocky bottom, my large
mouth’s deep dish.

There is a pull in these poems between the marine world and the human. Our relationship to predation is put under a clarifying aquatic lens. We don’t like to think of how life feeds on life, and we shield ourselves from it by myths and platitudes that soften it for us. But this also means we project onto the natural world an inappropriate moral judgment. The poems in Gold & Other Fish question both of these points. Perhaps there is a beauty or even divinity to the way fish survive, a divinity in feeding on flesh. I might even say it documents a kind of communion. In Monk, Sideris asks,

can we know the grace

it takes to cradle prey
between clenched jaws
until it stops jerking,

who seek the denser
texture of a scavenger
whose spine ends in a lure?

Our moral judgments and our secret desires mix to blind us to the simple grace of what it means to be a predator, to the actual beauty of it. Our moral high ground is here inverted and we are the dupes of our own needs, lured to feed on a scavenging fish.

Within these poems that marine grace is not merely an argument but an aesthetic. Sideris has a beautiful ear. The sound textures of these poems are brilliant, delving into subtle phonetic expressions beyond just internal rhymes, assonance and consonance. Consider what happens in

with hide & seek, a brackish
world not hard to fathom
dark devoid of history
[“Grouper”]

Here it is not simply the assonance of “hard” and “dark.” There is a phonetic connection running from “hide” through “history,” a beautiful transformation that arcs and joins it all together from “seek” and “brackish,” through “world” and “hard” to reach finally through “dark” and “devoid.” This kind of brilliant phrasing runs through the whole collection, mirroring the flash of a fish leaping from the water for a moment to plunge back into the depths.

The final poem, Tuna, leaves us with the real focus: what we, at a distance admire for its beauty, is at its core an act of survival.

. . . Not for pleasure
but to shake off parasites,

he arcs into our air,
admired from afar
if not for long.

It is sometimes difficult for scientists to determine the specific function of beauty, but whatever it might be, they know that beauty serves a purpose: it helps a species in some way to survive. Gold & Other Fish shows us that even our connection to predation is in some way connected to beauty and grace.

Most collections have some small flaw, some small deviation from the goal, but not this one. It’s the kind of collection that is a pleasure from first to last, delivering aesthetic and intellectual enjoyment. What Sideris says of the Sturgeon, these poems do, they forage “at the interface” and bring brilliant gems to the surface.

Linda Gregg's First Two Books

2011-12-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

I came to Linda Gregg’s poetry after reading Jack Gilbert’s work and learning of their marriage. Then I read the superlative comments on her work by some of my favorite poets: Joseph Brodsky, W.S. Merwin, Czeslaw Milosz. I was almost tingling with excitement as I began to read her first two collections: Too Bright To See and Alma, which were printed in a single volume by Knopf in 2002. There were poems along the way, and a few of them, that I found quite interesting, even profound and moving. But there were others that stumbled, tripped on an imprecision here and there, seeming inconsistent with the praise and the deep, underlying insights, so that I wondered if I was being pedantic. But there was a vagueness even about some of those successful poems, as if her ability lie not in precision, but approximating a feeling. An example is something like “Summer in a Small Town.” It’s a small beauty that touches on an amazing subtlety of real love, a love that so completely answers the heart’s needs and desires, so outstrips articulation, it leaves the heart empty. The conclusion reinterprets the beginning where her lovers have left her and in that leaving, have renewed her, so she is “happy alone.”

But then I read a poem like “Not Singing.” The first real issue I had with it was the line “the more it rains the less flowers there are.” The “less” grated on my grammatical nerves. But I’m a poet and willing to forgive such things if the music and insights of a poem really take me in. Also, poets shouldn’t be slaves to grammar. If they need to break a rule, they should, especially when it serves a better end than following rules. There’s even a figure of speech for such things: synesis. That’s when you break a grammatical rule in order to make sense of a statement which correct grammar cannot carry. I looked and looked but found no justification for Gregg’s departure. So I moved on, trying to give her obvious intelligence the benefit of the doubt. Then only two lines later she writes, “Like the branches thrown down before the little donkey feet/of Christ on the way to glory.” Suddenly I had the image of Christ as a satyr with little donkey feet. Again I stopped to consider if she really wanted this image in my head. Nothing in the rest of the poem or other poems indicated she would want to create such an image. Then why the truncated phrasing that led to it? I could only conclude that it was sloppiness, an imprecision that might be more subtly entrenched in the other poems. And to adopt Dickinson’s definition of poetry (my favorite definition), I realized that none of the other poems made me feel as if the top of my head were taken off.

From then on I found myself less tolerant of other imprecisions: line breaks that forced me to reread a sentence to make sense of it, or splitting up a phrasal verb as in “turn on one foot around with my arms lifted,” rather than simply saying “turn around.” In this second example, the phrasal split doesn’t add anything to the poem and, in fact, makes the line feel chopped up, like bits of thought that have been cut up and put in the wrong order. She also uses periods excessively, resulting in sentence fragments. In the same poem with the split phrasal verb, she has the sentence “Between tobacco fields empty in February/except for the wooden stakes and the wires.” This sentence – actually a fragment – modifies the sentence that precedes it but is punctuated to make two separate sentences. She does this often, and it is a common technique among modern poets. In deft hands it works, sounds right, it's a way of controling rhythm. But Gregg’s use of it constantly makes me feel interrupted. I searched for the reason behind such a tactic, but neither her subject matter nor her rhythms necessitate it. She may be trying to convey a sense of hesitancy and doubt in the psyche of someone wounded by divorce, since much of her poetry is about that. But so many of the poems embrace the fragmentation and, in fact, assert the fragmentation as life itself, that the strategy is belied by the themes.

I had every intention of rereading these two collections for the poems I did like, “Goethe’s Death Mask,” “With a Blessing Rather than Love Said Nietzsche,” “Lovers,” “Alma in the Woods,” and “Different Not Less,” but feel in the end glad to put the book down and be done with it. I feel the whole is diminished by the flawed details. There is an imprecision in the poems that leaves me lukewarm, even when they are obviously deeply felt.

Exclusion:

2011-11-28T12:50:00.000-08:00

A Consideration of Louise Bogan’s Poetry

One of the striking features of Louise Bogan’s poetry is how little of it there is. Another is how short those poems are. No more than twelve of her poems are over a page long. Even when compared to the modest work produced by poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Barbara Howes and Philip Larken, Bogan’s body of work is small and her poems short. Yet her voice is as powerful as her vision is unique.

It’s impossible to read such poems as “The Romantic,” “The Portrait,” “Statue and Birds,” and not see that Bogan attempts to break down the stereotypes of deified female beauty. In doing so, she struggles toward something more profound than a sociopolitical statement. In an early poem called, “The Alchemist,” the subject of the poem searches for “a passion wholly of the mind,” but ultimately discovers:

With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind’s avid substance—still
Passionate beyond the will.

These are the first traces of a pursuit encompassing most of Bogan’s poetry: the pursuit of a concept of the eternal different from the deification of female beauty and also different from the projection of the mind or will into infinity.

The search for a new concept of the eternal was common to her time in poets like Rilke, H.D. and Wallace Stevens. However, more radically than any of these poets, Bogan sought to find a concept of the eternal that outstripped the mind’s tendency to create a mere projection of itself and especially to outstrip the heart’s tendency to find false comfort. The mind and the heart are both temporal. The eternal endures far beyond either of them. It is a landscape that excludes them.

In an apostrophe to her dead brother she says she can reassure him that everything endures, “save of peace alone.” We are forever restless and suffering the grief of things passing away. The heart wraps itself tightly for protection, so tightly, in fact, it suffocates itself in the body.

See this fine body, joined
More cleanly than a thorn.
What man, though lusty-loined,
What woman from woman born,

Shaped a slight thing, so strong,
Or a wise thing so young?
[“Homunculus”]

This also applies to Bogan’s style. Her poems are slight and strong like the homunculus. Her typically short lines are slowed and tensed by clusters of equally-stressed monosyllables. Reciting Bogan’s poems out loud the voice strains, thrown to a pitch very near to breaking. Her lines burn with the rage to endure, with the fury of what it means to suffer.

Now, only to mock
At the sterile cliff laid bare,
At the cold pure sky unchanged,
You look upon the rock,
You look upon the air.
[“Late”]

Thinking: Now we hear
What we heard last year,
And bear the wind’s rude touch
And its ugly sound
Equally with so much
We have learned how to bear.
[“Zone”]

The limit already traced must be returned to and visited,
Touched, spanned, proclaimed, else the heart’s time be all. . .”
[“Didactic Piece”]

Her most forgiving poems, like “Cartography,” “Musician,” and “Roman Fountain,” move with the pressure and caution of someone in a laboratory. Enjambed lines encumber the heart with all it must bear. At other times they mirror the heart’s withdrawal before its new vision of the eternal, the “permanence of the impersonal.” The phrase is Richard Eberhart’s but easily could have been Bogan’s. Her poems attempt to reveal a world beyond the heart and beyond the eyes.

Few poets have so thoroughly conceived of a universe that doesn’t include them. But “the heart’s time” is all we know. A world whose essence is the absence of a witness cant’ be revealed. So the comfort offered by a poem like “Night” isn’t accessible and, paradoxically, that inaccessibility is offered as comfort.

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;

—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.

The limits of Bogan’s pursuit are its realization, the limits of exclusion itself. One cannot avoid comparing these limits to those that Cartesian science set by factoring out human perception from its picture of the universe. The Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel said, “Science has made for man a world to which he doesn’t belong.” Perhaps Bogan paid a similar price for a correspondent poetic vision. Her own vision excluded her. Her own voice tended toward silence. We are left with but a small sampling of her nearly perfect experiments.

A Shiny Unused Heart by J. A. Tyler

2011-11-22T13:34:00.000-08:00

Black Coffee Press, 9780982744055, $12.95

A Shiny Unused Heart is a novella written by a poet, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say by a novelist with a poet’s sensibility. This is not straight narrative, but a story propelled by language itself, by sound and simultaneous meanings, by an undercurrent of symbolism. To read of the main character’s wife on her “bruising cruising rituals of couch sleep”, or the main character “resting on his back, his skin monstrous tracks. Leaning on the bricks of buildings, subsiding. The rain, in continuum, begging him off, early every next morning” is to follow a kind of musical score. And even in these few bars, these few notes, we catch the drift of a very different kind of story, not one in which there are events that simply happen or characters that simply act, but a story that questions what events and actions are. At bottom A Shiny Unused Heart is an ontological meditation, that is, a poetic fiction on the nature of existence. This is seen even in the musicality of the prose, for within each chapter or movement the music is beautiful, but the movements are jumbled.

There is, funny enough, a beginning, middle and end, but they are out of joint. Every chapter is either a piece of the beginning, of the middle or the end. The story opens with the end, so we know where we are going because the end is not the point, the end is inevitable, as it is in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In fact, as in that story, in this one not even the how is very important. What is of the essence is the why. Why are things unraveling toward that inescapable end? So the logic of time and sequence are irrelevant. What is relevant is the psychology of deconstruction that is the reality of the character. What is within the character is becoming the reality of his life and so there is a blurring of boundaries. When his wife is pregnant, it is also, “Him, pregnant.”

One of the great poetic truths retold by countless great poets from Spencer, Milton and Blake, to Stevens and Richard Wilbur, is that “The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n” (Book I, lines 254 & 255, Paradise Lost). This is the basis of many of the great modern works from masters such as Virginia Woolf, Hermann Broch and Fernando Pessoa. A Shiny Unused Heart is a part of this same exploration, a story that takes place in the head, where we are made and unmade, where the reality of what didn’t happen or what we would like to happen has as much presence and force as what did happen. This is so because the mind, or the imagination, is a kind of primordial place where all potentials coexist. As the main character of A Shiny Unused Heart indulges his inner desires within his imagination, he unravels the reality of his daily life: matter and antimatter collide.

The poet Philip Larkin said, “Nothing, like something, happens anywhere” and A Shiny Unused Heart is the nothing that happens to a person in the act of his unwinding, his unbecoming. The story is a stripping down, not only of character, but of style and psychology. No one is named in the story and no one should be because we are on a plane on par with essences.

“The hole in his insides stayed, stood, him, feeling less, less, less. Her, unhappening now, fading and fickle. Her, that girl, the one who drug him up from the bottom, the daughter, the wife, her, she was becoming unbecoming. Sharing herself out, pieces and bits and bobs, herself, trinkets, sparkling laughter unringing, shredding smile, peeling, peeling.”

Here again we see how the boundaries are blurred. “That girl” is daughter, wife and also the woman he cheats with who is called “the girl in the black sweater.” All are “becoming unbecoming.” All are “peeling, peeling” because the story is one long unmaking, one long un-existing. The story is about the main character’s slow un-happening. And it is remarkable how well it works, how the general drift of the story is understood below the current of discordant unmaking. The story seems to emerge slowly from a larger general flow, a stream of essences chaotically mixed and pregnant. From the vast drift of this river, we spy a fish swimming, we follow it with our eyes and realize the story playing out under the flashing surface.

But there is always an underneath that’s below the underneath. Or, as Nietzsche pointed out, there is always something in the unconscious no matter how much we bring up to consciousness. So underneath the tug-of-war between the real and the unreal there is the basic narrative of how a couple implodes after their daughter is stillborn. But the story under that, and the real one, is how that birth of nonexistence becomes the reality of their existence. How the birth of that nonexistence ignites all the unacknowledged potentials within the main character’s imagination making him, as Tyler says, “pregnant with unchances.” The main character becomes “existence unbecoming.” Or his central desire shifts to “wanting to embrace the things that were beginning to stop, or cease existing, or never having existed at all.”

But don’t be mistaken; though this is a profoundly philosophical and lyrical book, there are emotional roots that run deep. There are issues of fatherhood and the consequences of failing to live up to that role, the disillusionments of a fractured relationship and the constant pain of regret. The pain of the marriage dissolving is like witnessing someone dismembered with a butter knife.

There are only four characters: the main character, his wife, his daughter and the woman he cheats with. But all of these exist only in so far as they exist as projections of his imagination, as realities corresponding to his needs, even as symbols. Beyond this they are each only negative spaces unmaking his life in their own way. Him “undreaming himself from a life he never lived, couldn’t, didn’t want to.” The most fascinating of these is the girl in the black sweater who is a kind of dark Donna Angelicata. The Donna Angelicata is the figure who leads the poet into his beatific vision of the divine. For Petrarch it was Laura, for Dante it was Beatrice. For the main character of A Shiny Unused Heart it is the girl in the black sweater. But she leads him not into a vision of the divine, but returns him to a vision of the primordial chaos that is the first and final cause, it is what Goethe called “the realm of the mothers.”

“But her eyes looked above him, over him, down into him where the depths were, where things were, where pieces of him lay in pieces. She wasn’t supposed to look there but she did, and then she was gone. Seconds, minutes, days, months, years. She pulled and he sank, deep in depths, swallowing water, arms aflame.”

It is a place within, where, Blake told us, all gods reside. And it is a terrifying place. Here it is important to realize the connection between the daughter and the woman in the black sweater. They are first and final causes, one and the same figure leading him into his impossible grasping at the primordial chaos, the root of imagination.

“His daughter, she didn’t exist. She should have, but she didn’t. She was a figment of him, taunting, tempting him, like the girl in the black sweater.”

The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin wrote that “wanting to see the soul face to face, you go down in flames.” This is what happens to the main character of A Shiny Unused Heart. He fixes his gaze on the chaotic source and is dissolved in a violent unmaking. But the boundaries, as I’ve said, blur here. The penultimate chapter is simply the sentence “A baby is born, a baby is crying.” The main character’s potential redemption is mixed in among the bottomless bottom of potentials that consume him and thus his death is paralleled with the birth of another life. In the primordial chaos out of which all things emerge, his daughter is there reaching out toward the light of existence. And who is to say if his daughter wasn’t, in fact, born and outlived him? There is no certainty where existence is all potential, at the threshold of death, which is the same threshold as life. It is only a question of the direction one is traveling.

A Shiny Unused Heart is the kind of story we should read. It is the kind of book that cracks the shell of what we think we know about ourselves and our lives and lets us escape into a new understanding of how we relate to the world. It shows us that we are not only the consequence of our choices but the consequence of all our hidden desires, that we are simultaneously what we say we are and what we refuse to acknowledge in the dark, secret land of our imagination.

On Reading

2011-11-16T09:55:00.001-08:00

To invent a theory of reading would be an intellectual gesture commensurate with a tyrant's salute. It is taking an experience that is highly private and coercing or presuming its commonality. However, I imagine that those who enjoy reading at least have in common the enjoyment without coercion or presumption. This delight is the first and most important principle. Without enjoyment there is no understanding, at least not in the literal sense Webster renders the etymological meaning of the word. To understand is “to stand among.” But what is disliked is avoided. One avoids repugnant company but one "stands among" delightful company, becomes a part of it. One loses one's self in it. This moment of abandon to the enjoyment, whether of literature or another art, is one half of the total function of art. It is a moment of self-transcendence that leads ultimately to the other half which is a deeper self-awareness.

On my bedroom wall is a postcard. It is a miniature reproduction of a painting called "Reader." It is by a German painter by the name of Michael Sowa. It depicts the small, mid-distant figure of a man reading. His hands are thrust into his pockets. The book levitates in the air at eye level, suggesting that it, like its reader, has transcended its physical nature. It defies gravity. The man too defies gravity. He stands atop the thick, oily blue water of a sea that stretches from horizon to horizon. Threatening, white-crested waves rise all around revealing the intensity of wind. The man is oblivious and unaffected. He is secure in his book. The great dangerous expanse of the seascape is nothing to him. The very words he reads protects him against the elements. He is as confident as Christ astride Gennesaret.

Of course, one can interpret the water as symbolic of the unconscious. Yet this only intensifies the realization of the reader's complete absorption. He is unaware of his actual surroundings, which probably are a study, a porch, or maybe even a beach where people play volleyball only a few hundred feet away. Time passes and he doesn't notice. The light of late afternoon dims into the early evening, then dims into the darkness of night. He doesn't notice. He grows hungry and doesn't notice. One might say he is out of his senses except for the fact that he is highly concentrated, highly aware. What has happened is that the timing of his own day has been replaced by the timing of the book he reads.

The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky said, "Song is, after all, restructured time." I would take this a step farther. All art, whether poetry or otherwise, is an embodiment of a certain timing, a certain rhythm. The difference between time and timing is the difference between when your alarm clock goes off and when you actually wake up. Timing is the pace at which you move through the day. The "morning person" moves at a different tempo than the "night owl." And what these two perceive in their world and what they make of it will correspond to the pace at which they move through it. Even if they live in the same neighborhood, they will see and understand that neighborhood differently.

In The Republic, Plato notes that the modes or rhythms of music in a given city never change without a corresponding change in that city's laws. Although the uses to which Plato puts this insight have been heavily disputed for centuries, the insight itself is nonetheless a remarkable one and one generally accepted. The insight is that the pace at which one moves manifests itself as a philosophy, as a way of understanding the world. Rhythm is a kind of wisdom.

Losing oneself in a novel, a painting, a piece of music is to lose one's own rhythms in those of the artwork. It is to get hungry and not notice, to actually grow tired, have an itch, or have your foot fall asleep and not notice. Then you finish the poem, the novel, or the essay. Your stomach growls. The digital clock winks to an unreasonably late hour even though you are the "morning person." But you still haven't emerged completely. The world looks different from the last time you glanced at it. The angles and curves of the furniture in the room appear strangely sharper, more distinct. It is as though one's sense of perspective were heightened. You are still looking with the eyes of the narrator of the book. It is what a friend of mine calls "book shock." It is the other half of the total effect of reading. It is the return to the self, the moment of self-awareness or self-remembrance.

This "book shock" doesn't happen with all books and for any number of reasons which this essay isn't about. What is important is that the experience doesn't depend upon whether you agree or disagree with the work or author. My own most extreme experience of this was after reading the novel, The Recognitions, by William Gaddis. The novel depicts many pitifully twisted characters, most of whom deceive themselves as much as they deceive others. The sense of their pain and desperation is pervasive. But no description of the novel will impart what I experienced for more than a week after reading the novel. I saw people differently. I was acutely aware of the self-deception in others and in my self.

Eventually my own way of seeing returned. My own rhythm of living came back to me. But from the vantage point of having read the novel, I gained a perspective on other people and myself. It is not a way I typically live. It is not the rhythm of my walk or the tenor of my dialogue. The novel's assumptions and rhythms are ones I find unfair and unforgiving. However, a rhythm is not truth. It is only a means to reveal truth. So I carry this rhythm from the novel in my head and sometimes a person will say something or gesture a certain way and remind me of the tune, of some character from The Recognitions or some event in it. There are even times I will say or do something that stops me in mid-motion because I am reminded of the insights granted through the perspective of the book. I wonder, "Have I fooled myself all this time? Has my desperation blinded me to such an obvious self-deception?" Through the book I have gained a perspective on my own motives and intentions.

For those who spend their energy trying to locate the meaning of a text either in an author's intentions or motives, this way of reading will appear strangely to leave the author out of the equation. I'm not suggesting that learning about an author's life can't enlighten one's understanding of his work. However, the majority of books available to us are by authors who are dead. Whatever intentions or motives these authors have are now only real to us through the works they've left behind. They are embodied only in the rhythms, diction and syntax of the actual work, just as unconscious activities are typically "read" from someone's body language and inflections.

But honestly, no distinction is as blindly habitual as the modern distinction between conscious and unconscious minds. It is probably more clarifying to talk about attention. What one pays attention to one invests with both the conscious and unconscious minds. In other words, the whole mind is invested into the object or person toward which the active attention directs itself. A work of art is invested with an immense amount of attention. What that attention leaves behind is not only meaning but also love. Quoting Joseph Brodsky again, this time from the poem “In England” in memory of W.H. Auden, he writes:

Subtracting the greater from the lesser—time from man—
you get words, the remainder, standing out against their
white background more clearly than the body
ever manages to while it lives, though it cry "Catch me!"—

thus the source of love turns into the object of love

This way of reading is admittedly lofty. It is not the way one reads everything, especially not instruction manuals or road signs. But reading is a private experience and the way one reads is equally private. We all come to a love of reading under different circumstances and for different reasons. Those differences will manifest themselves in how one reads and what one reads. But for all that privacy, the one thing all avid readers share is their delight. This delight is the seduction that leads to insight, a greater understanding of oneself. In an essay called, "The Necessity of Poetry," Paul Valéry said the same thing. He wrote, "art gives us the means to explore at leisure that part of our own sensibility that remains restricted in its relation to reality." As I have suggested, this is true in spite of what a text means. If a person who delights in reading reads a book he disagrees with, the common delight of reading counterpoints his disagreement. That counterpoint is a kind of reconciliation with the rhythms of the self and is manifest as a deeper self-awareness, a profounder understanding of who one is and how one lives.

Breaking the Line

2011-11-10T11:54:00.001-08:00

I recently heard poets discuss line breaks and assume that they are easier in free verse than in formal verse. This seems logical since you can break a line anywhere in a free verse poem but in a formal poem line breaks are fixed. However, I would argue that this is not so. In fact, the freedom to break a line anywhere makes it a more onerous task to find the right one.

What purpose do line breaks serve in poetry? The primary purpose is to control pacing, which in turn contributes to the overall musical effect. Line breaks also help to emphasize or deemphasize the significance of a theme or element of a theme. Line breaks help create tension or drama or, contrariwise, create ease and comedy. This is all true whether in free or formal verse. But nearly everything else is different.

With most formal verse line breaks are fixed. That is, with a standard sonnet, you have five meters to complete your line. After the fifth foot, there will be a line break, whether that line is enjambed or end stopped will be a consequence of syntax and diction. What image will be lingering in the mind of the reader as he makes his way to the next line will be determined, again, primarily by how syntax and diction shape the line toward its fifth and final foot. What will confront the reader at the beginning of the next line is also controlled by these two elements of syntax and diction. Manipulation of these two elements is really the only way a line break in a formal poem can be adjusted.

I have written and published a number of formal poems. One thing I learned is that the meter, or more generally, the rhythm, can guide you to the right syntax and diction, or at least to the right syntax. (Diction is not as intrinsically related to rhythm.) The difficulty of line breaks in a formal poem is when the rhythm clashes with the semantic need for significant terms to fall at the end and beginning of lines. But as often as not — or actually more often than not, the rhythm guides the poet to the best syntax for good line breaks. Rhythm, pacing and line breaks play off each other so intimately that one can lead you to the other if you can't concentrate on all three at once. In fact, when I write formal poems, I am primarily led by the rhythm; all the other elements are conjured from it almost as if by magic. This is where a poet writing free verse is at a disadvantage.

In a free verse poem, the line breaks help control the pacing as in a formal poem, however, the line breaks aren’t fixed. The breaks can be made anywhere, theoretically, but to make the best musical effect, they can’t be made haphazardly.

It’s important to remember that the total musical effect is not just a consequence of the rhythm, but is the relationship of every element working in concert: the grammatical structures, the syllabic structures, the phonetics, the syntax and diction, the images and ideas. It’s how all these elements relate to each other and unfold.

Since there is no fixed point at which a free verse poem ends a line, the poet has to listen to the total effect of all its elements to determine each line ending. It’s like needing to hear all the other instruments in an orchestra playing in your head to determine what next note the flute should play in the symphony you’re composing. This very difficulty is what made W. H. Auden remark to Stanley Kunitz that he couldn’t write free verse because his ear just wasn’t good enough. Elsewhere, Auden said to Michael Newman, “I think very few people can manage free verse – you need an infallible ear, like D. H. Lawrence, to determine where the lines should end.”

As a regular practitioner of free verse, I find myself constantly revising lines to find the right line breaks. Sometimes I hear them right off and sometimes I don’t. When I don’t, it can take me weeks of trial and error to find the right ones, especially because the syntax and line breaks are independent of each other, unlike in formal verse. In a free verse poem, I could have the right syntax but the wrong line breaks. In a formal poem, if my syntax doesn't create good line breaks, the pacing will be off and I will need to change the syntax. There is an intimate connection among these three elements that can guide you. There is no such echolocation in free verse; all these elements are independent and must be heard distinctly and simultaneously to get them right.

Who Teaches You What You Mean?

2011-11-02T18:39:00.000-07:00

I am a poet and therefore obsess about language. How language is constructed and what those constructs mean and imply occupy a lot of my thinking. Because of this obsession, the novel 1984 strikes me as the greatest book written about the abuse of language. True, it is a novel about political power and oppression and is a warning of a kind to those of us who take a free society for granted. But the way that political power asserts itself is primarily through the power of language. The abuse of language in the novel comments inevitably on the right use of language and ultimately has something to say to the role of the poet in our world.

1984 shows through a claustrophobic world of political oppression how the ability to articulate is controlled by the scope of our language, how we are always subject to the limitations of the language at our disposal. The whole point of Newspeak, the official language of the Party, is to reduce the available range of meaning and comprehension, to make it impossible for people to think something that is not approved by the doctrine of the Party. This language coupled with an endless rewriting of public records means both that it is impossible to know the truth about the past and that the individual is incapable of articulating the meaning of his individuality. Inevitably, the Party defines who and even what an individual is. In only the most limited sense does any individual exist in 1984 . To contradict the impulsive thought that this is merely science fiction, something futuristic and beyond reality, one only has to look at a poem by George Oppen in which he shows us that it is something we battle every day. In “Of Being Numerous,” a figure

. . . wants to say
His life is real,

No one can say why
It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public
Of rootless speech

Oppen here distills the competition between language used as a means of the most profound existential realization and language used as a means for commercial manipulation. When we acquire our language, our expressions, our definitions from corporations and the commercials they make, then the language we have for expressing our deepest feelings or insights, our ideas about who we are or want to be, is shaped by them, at least to the extent that they – excuse the word – repurpose language to manipulate us for quite specific ends and in so doing, distance us from other associations. One of the primary ways the Party in 1984 controlled language was to diminish the number of associations related to any given word. This was attained by various methods. But this same diminishment is, in Oppen’s poem, what causes the man to be unable to find the words to express his inner being, the reality of his life. As I said in a previous essay about Oppen’s poem, “The man trying to speak the meaning of his life has no language to speak it. It is unreal because politics and public life have appropriated it for ends other than an existential dialogue.” This is precisely what the Party in 1984 does.

Another of the methods for controlling thought through language is to reduce the number of words. The Party eliminated the word “bad.” They used, instead, “ungood.” This sounds farfetched but even today it isn’t uncommon to find an attitude of relying on a limited vocabulary for expression or assuming the superfluity of the abundant synonyms in English. However, in reality subtle denotative shades and deep connotations make words like “evil,” “miscreant” and “villainous,” though synonyms, all different from each other. Additionally, meaning is not merely semantic or intellectual, but is also emotional. The many associations and feelings a word or series of words evokes make even the closest synonyms still different from each other. Then consider there are many words in foreign languages that signify feelings and thoughts for which there are no English equivalents. What do we do with those thoughts and feelings? To assume they will be expressed in some way in the existing language is to make a dangerous assumption. In fact, I would guess that most of those feelings and thoughts go unarticulated, because it takes more than an act of will to find the right words to give them shape, it takes knowledge and the willingness to take risks, to sound foolish or even crazy. But if, as Jefferson said, “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” this holds true also for safeguarding language and ensuring that its growth and change is for the expansion of articulation, thought and meaning.

Newspeak also attempts to reduce ambiguity. Here especially I see the playground of the poet because it is precisely at the edge of linguistic clarity that poets live and breathe. We have all had feelings we couldn’t put into words or thoughts that we just couldn't express. That’s because the range of human imagination and experience is greater than the range of our existing language and this is likely always to be so. That’s why there will always be poets and other artists trying to give shape and articulation to those very feelings and thoughts, those human experiences that haven’t come into the range of our history because we haven’t been able to document them in any way. That’s why poets are always toying with the obscure, not to be evasive or sound smart, but to get at something that’s just out of reach, to extend the light of articulation just a little farther into the darkness. This is the worthiest use of language and one that opposes other uses such as TV and magazine ads, billboards, the news media, and all other forms of mass production or corporate manipulation. It is not a self-righteous call to arms; it is simply the natural consequence of two opposing uses of language vying for control of a singular consciousness.

Parallels

2011-10-28T08:34:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading 1984, one of many classics on my to-read list. I had what I’m pretty sure is a common experience in that I thought, as I read, that anyone who sees this as merely a science fiction novel doesn’t understand it. In fact, as O’Brien tortured Winston and explained the nature of reality from the point of view of the party, I recalled words from a senior aide to the Bush administration. It was unnerving how similar their thinking was.

Here is the paragraph from Ron Suskind’s article “Without a Doubt” published in 2004.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Here is how O’Brien characterizes reality in 1984:

But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

In other words, as the senior Bush aide put it, “we create our own reality.”

2011-10-19T07:55:00.000-07:00

Well, for the few people out there who follow this – “fit though few” as Milton said – I decided I should start trying to keep this blog going a little. Instead of insisting that I must always and only post completed essays, which is prohibitive, I’m going to include updates on readings, publications and random thoughts on art, poetry, history, music, and anything else that I simply find interesting. I can only hope you find it interesting too.

It’s been so long since I’ve posted anything, that far too much has happened to post all at once. But to begin with what’s happened in my publishing life, my next 2 books have been accepted for publication: Living in the Counterpoint will be published by Finishing Line Press in January. This book is available now for prepublication purchase on their website: http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm.

I will here confess that I’m nervous about this period of purchasing. From now until November 10th, the number of people who order will determine how many copies will be printed in January. It is a nail-biting affair to receive e-mails of sales on a weekly basis and see how few have come in. Sadly, I have a long way to go. But my nerves aside, I’m very pleased with the cover. The photo was provided by my friend, Kaitlyn Chow.

Also, the people who blurbed the book were very generous in their comments:

“Michael T. Young has crafted a metaphysics of memory in all its ache and luster. These poems pin down ghosts; finger the stirrings of nostalgia and its seeming perpetuity. Through a yearning to define those feelings most elusive, Young succeeds in unveiling them. Living in the Counterpoint coaxes introspection and haunts like a summer dusk, it is a true achievement.”

-- Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

“With the deftness of a magician, Michael T. Young moves us seamlessly between point
and counterpoint, so seamlessly that we are almost unaware of the shifts from the living to the dead, from light to dark, near to far, and early to late. In tightly crafted gem-like poems, he contemplates fossils, diamonds, headstones, rivers, bridges, and even a slug, ultimately achieving and imparting ‘a deep knowledge of the earth.’”

-- Diane Lockward, Poet Laureate of West Caldwell, NJ and author of Temptation by Water

My next full-length collection, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, will be published by Black Coffee Press in 2013. It’s listed on their website under their imprint, Eight Ball Press: http://www.blackcoffeepress.net/shop/page/6?sessid=VBfK8qiGV1UzGi4VrtyR8KLHcJzKCBpuAAj4urE9wByNr7wbwT8COTYreCj1LNPK&shop_param=.

In addition, many poems have recently been accepted for publication in print and online journals. The Potomac Review, Off the Coast, Edison Literary Review, Mayday and Eskew all took work recently. I’m currently in the online journals: Scythe, The Literary Bohemian, The Fine Line and Jellyroll. Links to them are below. My poem “Counting Apples” will be in the forthcoming issue of Meadowland Review.

Scythe: http://scytheliteraryjournal.com/
The Literary Bohemian: http://www.literarybohemian.com/poetry/poem/renewing-my-passport-by-michael-t-young/
The Fine Line: http://thefineline00.wordpress.com/issues/
Jellyroll: http://www.jellyrollmagazine.com/currentissue.html

Well that’s a brief update of the year. Next week, I will try to post something more interesting than a laundry list.

Michael

A Critique of Pure Imagination

2010-02-10T16:55:00.000-08:00

Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is worthy of a dissertation. I return to it often to consider its subtleties of diction, lineation and thought. Its nuances are endlessly provocative. Recently I was considering the entirety of the imaginative movement of the poem and the speaker’s final state and in that final state I saw a consequence unique among the Romantic poets.

The speaker of the Ode imaginatively projects qualities onto the bird throughout the poem, the first is happiness. This projection of happiness is the speaker’s tenuous connection to the bird, his means of escaping the heartache and sorrows of human life. The listener’s ability to find this escape in the bird’s song is dependent upon his ability to project onto the bird what he imagines its song means. This imaginative projection or fancy is simultaneously a movement toward death in its most intoxicating characteristic, which is as a way of escaping pain. It is Hamlet’s desire

To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,

This is the core of Ode to a Nightingale. The Ode’s speaker simply wishes to fantasize himself into nonexistence, “to cease upon the midnight with no pain.” It is here, in desiring death that he then projects onto the bird the quality of immortality. This immortality is insinuated primarily through the realization that the bird’s song today is the same as in ancient times and will be the same tomorrow after the speaker is dead.

The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:

The speaker doesn’t think to partake of the bird’s immortality as he does of the happiness. The consequence is that, by the end of the poem, the happiness seems to be stolen from the listener when the word “forlorn” invades his musings and returns him to the human world of thought and sorrow. But the projected immortality of the bird remains intact and flies off with the bird as the song fades into the distance. Thus the imaginative projection splits and the speaker is stuck in a kind of in-between where his imagination still projects the immortality of the bird outward into the deepening silence but the happiness ends as his mind recoils inward to the thoughts of pain, aging, sickness and death that plague daily, mortal life.

Here, at the end, the poem enters a realm that is unique among the Romantic poets. Unlike other poems of other Romantic poets, especially Blake or Shelley, the Ode is a kind of critique of pure imagination. The whole imaginative effort of the speaker to posit happiness in the nightingale and then take part in that happiness, to posit immortality in the bird and then, in that context of ecstatic, immortal, joyful song desire death almost to the pitch of willing it true, finds its end in the reality of individual suffering and the limits of human thought. Once again, as the Ode so often does, it recalls Hamlet. In this instance it recalls Hamlet’s comment that, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” For the Ode’s speaker, the human condition is one of bad dreams bounded in a nutshell. The imaginative effort is to free oneself from it. But the freedom is temporary and when it ends, leaves in its wake a feeling of betrayal because “the fancy cannot cheat so well/As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.” The dreamscape the speaker inhabits at the end of the Ode is not the enchanted, mythological dreamscape of most of the Romantics, even Keats in his other poems, but instead it is a dreamscape of suspicion, where everything is haunted by scrutiny and doubt.

The Long Walk Out of Suburbia

2010-01-07T07:21:00.000-08:00

In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear
– Blake

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
– Unamuno

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means as a poet to have grown up in suburbia. What foundation was set for my sensibility in that first landscape? It is more specific than that since I grew up in the suburb of a very small city. I didn’t grow up on the outskirts of New York or Chicago. I grew up in Pennside, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Reading, itself only just meeting the definition of a city in terms of its population when I was young. But a suburb nonetheless that must have impressed in me its tailored landscapes, those manmade terrains that are different from either the parks of a city or the untamed edge of the truly rural.

The word itself, “suburbs” is from the Latin “sub” meaning “under” and “urbs” meaning “city.” It comes from Roman times when the poor lived at the foot of the city hill outside the wall. But in modern times that “under” means something else and has a weighty significance, at least, as I reflect on it. For all its scenic advantages, the suburban sensibility feels inferior to its urban brother, feels less savvy, less witty, less cultivated. It lives in the shadow of the urban and it may contribute to why, when I was young, I preferred the eccentric to the accepted. I had rather sit alone and think than talk with my peers. It’s why I felt a kinship with a thin tree at the crest of one of the surrounding mountains. It stuck out crookedly, a bald patch on its right side, but even from miles away it was beautifully distinguishable from the monotony of the level ridge of maples.

That need for distinction has long impaired my poetic voice, loaded it with a self-conscious groping that I still labor to overcome every time I write. Any poet worth his salt is beyond the need to impress and is instead driven by the need to realize his vision. But finding that vision requires confronting life right on the spot, at its dirtiest. This is not something the suburban sensibility is trained to do. If suburbia is anything, it’s a place to learn how to evade, to dodge the shadows in the corner, to avoid ever saying what is really meant. Stating the unequivocal truth could disturb the clean-cut image of life among the trimmed lawns and hedges, the neat streets and manmade lake. In suburbia, even rage and neurosis are ordered and pretty.

That clean order — even nature itself tamed — might be what led me to first desire order in art, which is not the same as clarity. Beauty ruled all themes; the music of a poem exempted it from making sense. I could not then have conceived of aspiring to Lowell’s prayer, “Pray for the grace of accuracy/Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination,” at least not semantically. The pulse of a genuine moment was something too real for me to dare touch, not that I wasn’t aware of it. But the suburb is an adult version of a childproofed environment, all the edges are sanded down or cushioned, all the hazards are locked away. Like a child, you know the forbidden is in the locked drawer; you just come to accept the rules of the house because you don’t know any other world. These are the dark distances between people in suburbia, distances astutely explored by the poet Carl Dennis.

Within me that distance has been the long stretch between the artificial voice of my expected self and the authentic voice of my real life. All my effort since starting to write has been to bridge that distance, to close the gap between them. The best poetry I’ve written in recent years has been about how to dodge expectations, not only of others but also and perhaps especially those of oneself. Henry Miller said that for the writer attempting something new, nothing is worse than his friends. In struggling to realize an authentic voice for my poetry, no friend has been a greater enemy than that one in my head who keeps telling me how I should sound, who I should be, what I should say.

How Freudian this comes off is not lost on me. But my concerns are aesthetic and philosophical, not psychological. I refuse to call that friend my superego, though he has helped me be a better person, that is, to not say everything on my mind since that isn’t always helpful. He is the master diplomat, but this makes him a poor poet, since the poetic voice is not really about right and wrong or even kindness, but rather it’s about clarity, insight, articulation of the fully realized moment. But the fully realized moment cannot be abridged, even if it is edited. That is to say, it must be complete even if it has only one, true articulation, the way Coleridge defined poetry as “the best words in the best order.” So I must use every means to stifle that unpoetic diplomat, to arrive at the truly poetic moment and simply write. This has not been easy.

Between Keats’s idea that poems should come as leaves on a tree and the truism that the real art in a poem is hiding the art, there is the suburb. The suburb is the artificial wearing the natural as lingerie. It wraps itself in green and decorates its hair with flowers. It’s a seduction and a siren’s song because it is a nowhere, an in-between world that’s neither wild nor tame, neither urban nor rural. It cannot disrobe and show itself in naked honesty because its beauty, indeed, its very substance is in its apparel. It may be why, as a young poet, I was obsessed with form but was equally nagged by the dread that I didn’t have the mind to be a poet. I always felt that one day I would be found out, that, like the suburb, I was actually all appearance.

The border of a suburb is not wild. This is not because there are no untamed animals, no skunks or deer ducking behind nearby pines. It’s because between nature and such communities there are enough artificial hurtles that one is free to romanticize nature. So from my street to the nearest woods, the transitions — the community pool, the football field and tennis courts, the creek and surrounding road — were obstacles to any entrance into both the wild and the creative. I sometimes think it may be why I’ve struggled with transitions in my poetry. By contrast, the urban sensibility doesn’t feel the need to connect the dots or supply bridges. From stanza to stanza, either you’re smart enough to keep up or this poem isn’t for you. And it’s important to realize this isn’t snobbery but simply apprehending the world on your own terms, being oneself without apologies. But I’ve always been afraid of losing people along the way, and so tediously laid the groundwork for every step. The problem with such carefulness is that it crowds out the reader’s imagination. A reader should find a home for his imagination within a poem; it should be a place for him to breathe deeply and settle down, even if it’s into the mystery of what it’s all about. This means the total picture includes untamed elements, some invasion of the dark and disordered into the context of the ordered creation. Without it, there is no perspective or context and thus no true insight or cause for wonder.

For the urban sensibility, the edge of the city is not the edge of order, but the edge of civilization. This differs from the suburban sensibility in that it is not mere landscape, but an expression of our humanity. Civilization lies within us. So, for the urban dweller, the edge of the city is the edge and end of humanity. But for the suburban sensibility, the neat, clean order of the landscape is not an indwelling reality. It is, rather, imposed on both the outward and inward landscapes. The edge of suburbia becomes the edge of the safe world. It is not that humanity ends there, but that understanding ends there. Beyond is the incomprehensible, the unpredictable. So my poems have always had a laborious, plodding need to be understood, to be safe. The problem with this is that the best poems of the day are born in liminal spaces, in the outskirts, beyond the longstanding definitions. They risk being misunderstood even by the majority. It is Blake being called mad at the end of his life and his work waiting until the 20th century to be given its just admiration.

I left suburbia for New York City nearly twenty years ago. But suburbia stayed in me. It limited my art, my growth as a poet. I could never escape the logic of its layout. It infected my lines and stanzas, ordering them into a beautiful, sanitary banality. Then I read George Oppen’s poetry. He was dense, difficult and passionately struggling toward clarity. I had never before been enthralled by any objectivist poet. But he was someone who took me in thoroughly. In that rapture, I read prose about him and interviews and came across his idea of a poem as a certain “sequence of disclosure.” This idea was new to me since I had always measured a poem’s movement not by its semantic unfolding but by its phonetic modulation. I lived by Joseph Brodsky’s dictum that “for the poet, phonetics is semantics.” But this dictum had been too native to me to help me grow. I had to abandon it in favor of a “sequence of disclosure,” a modulation of meaning that was itself the music and movement of a poem.

At the same time, I had been reading a number of other poets and had recently read Horace’s 13th Ode from the second book. It was a poem that startled me by its seamless progression. It starts simply with Horace contemplating contemptuously a tree on his property and ends among the shades in Hades. I remember the shock at the end of the poem, of realizing where I was and how Horace had taken me there without jarring my senses. I had been transported from the simple earthly reality of his yard to the netherworld of shades and no charm was invoked or Sybil consulted. There were no hurtles as in suburbia. I found in this poem an example of that sequence of disclosure, something I found I then had to master, because it was a way of escape, not away from reality, but into reality.

A few other poets, modern poets, helped me cut the key to that door: Gerald Stern, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dobyns and Derek Walcott. These were the major stars in that guiding constellation. What was interesting was that, as I wrote the first poem of escape ten years ago, the realization of this new aesthetic, this new philosophy, occurred to me in geometric terms.

The idea that a poem should come full circle was not only axiomatic because of its long tradition but inevitable to my suburban sensibility. Although everyone in suburbia works elsewhere, life there is self-contained. Work is merely what you do to support life in suburbia. But life in suburbia is suburbia and all roads there lead back to its center. This was a form of circling the wagons. A poem then was always about redemption. However, now my desire, my driving need, was for something parabolic, something arcing out and away and ending as far from where I started as possible and arriving there with an inevitability that should not resemble logic. Logic is only one kind of meaning, but all meanings and, in fact, most meanings are not logical. And the most meaningful material is at the edge of what we know and just beyond. It is only here that poems matter, have an almost life or death significance, because it is only from here that one can look back on where you came from, and have the perspective to see the immense battle for identity involved in each moment taken for granted. From here it is possible to reenter the streets of suburbia and not be governed by them.

Thoughts on Refusing Heaven, Poems by Jack Gilbert

2009-08-27T20:21:00.001-07:00

Although not a perfect collection, this collection is worth a permanent place on everyone’s bookshelf. Winner of both the LA Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, it is deserving of these awards for the sheer life-affirming quality of the poems. These are a wondrous celebration of life not only in spite of its brevity and flaws but precisely because of its brevity and flaws. What, in the mind of others are failures, within this collection, are transformed into the substance of happiness and beauty. Memory becomes the storehouse of a future life and lazy days doing nothing, the substance of the most joyful times.

Gilbert has assimilated much of Eastern thinking more intimately, more personally, than many other poets. They are not mere stylistic tactics or adopted stances, but insights reaped by living through them, seeing how life affirms the mysticism of Taoism and Buddhism. Thus they are coherently westernized. This is so because Gilbert doesn’t always open with simply accepting their terms. Some of the poems are the struggle toward realization told from the point of view of a western mind.

However, on the whole, his poems are not parabolic, moving from point to point to a final destination, and they are not circular in reaching a resolution or redemption. They are more like a tetherball circling closer and closer to a central point. The iterations the poems cycle through may, at times, lack the peremptory quality that is typically valued in poetry, but they make up for it with their exuberance and joy, in finally transforming the daily and pedestrian into gold, in observing the overlaps of places and identity through time, in noticing the interpenetration of histories within a single life. So his poems may resist memorization because they lack inevitability, but his poems are, in spite of it, memorable.

Not a poet of great music, but a wonderful poet of insight, of the turn of thought that startles or delights. This is the music of reflection, not the right note but the well-articulated idea. If he were a painter, he would be Magritte. Because of this remove, that he is an idea poet and not a musical poet, he is fond of simile. His use of simile does not always please, but it does often provoke. And this is the point. If his similes produce a pause in reading, this does not stall the poem since it causes a consideration of the insight that constitutes the poem. That is, Gilbert does not employ simile as a mere lyrical comparison but as a way to inspire us to think and notice. But thinking means considering, pausing, lingering, which a poem called “Burning (Andante non troppo)” is all about. This is a collection worth lingering over, worth allowing yourself to enjoy. It may actually help you to enjoy life more. Few collections can claim such a triumph.

Skating with Heather Grace -- Poems by Thomas Lynch

2009-07-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

Skating with Heather Grace
Poems by Thomas Lynch

This book has been on my shelf for a number of years. It was a collection I occasionally pulled down in passing, read a poem or two, and then returned to its ledge among the other titles in my library. Recently I took it down and carried it with me for several days, reading it from cover to cover a few times. It is something I should have done long ago.

Published in Knopf’s Poetry Series in 1986, this is Thomas Lynch’s first book. As such, the biographical information doesn’t say anything about his poetic career but highlights the fact that he makes his living as an undertaker. Although heavy-handed in pointing this out, it clearly informs every poem.

Robert Frost’s cool philosophical understanding of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion is here heightened to a pitch to hold off despair in the face of death and loss. Lynch has an almost desperate desire for cohesion.

sing the same song over and over
because the sound it makes keeps me intact.
(“Noon on Saturday”)

This is the ars poetica of these poems. But it’s not an existential cry, as Matthew Arnold saying, “I am fragments.” It is not his psyche he fears will disintegrate, but his actual body.

I’m frightened witless at the prospect of
some bomb or cancer out there with my name on it.
(“Damage”)

What underlies these poems is an acute feral vulnerability, a profound awareness of how tenuous our hold on life really is.

you and your song rise in the leafy air
chancy as bass spawn in a mallard’s underwings.
(“A Clearing in the Woods”)

All of this plays into his adroit manipulation of rhyme, assonance and repetition. There may be the occasional and slight drift away from thematic elements in favor of a phonetic choice, but never enough to spoil the tone and eventual progress into these meditations that are rooted in earth and blood. Considering the tack taken in his poem “A Note on the Rapture to His True Love,” the identities that comprise its rhyme scheme work in conjunction with the idea that the rapture will bring a second life to those taken, a kind of repetition that the poem subtly rebuffs with the final identity being broken where “leaves” is not repeated but transformed into “left,” the final word. It plays on the double-entendre of “left” allowing those who are not taken up in the rapture to find their own salvation in moments of transcendence, which, in the end, like everything else, are finite.

All of these poems are full of the longing for the ethereal, a life beyond the earthbound and what birds, and gulls in particular, in the collection come to symbolize:

out where the gulls glide on the edge of weather
songs in praise of rootlessness and wayfare
(“Learning Gravity”)

And in another poem there is the desire to

join them in the air beyond the land
and make my life with them diving between islands.
(“A Dream of Death in the First-Person”)

But this cannot be. We are all bound by

laws
whereby things rise and fall, arrive and take
their leave according to their gravity.
(“Learning Gravity”)

Those birds and what they represent and everything beyond them are finally

a new life form light-years removed from me.
(“I Felt Myself Turning”)

Or as Lynch puts it in the penultimate poem of the collection

we, none of us survives
our awful will to live or will to die.
(“Damage”)

It’s said that every elegy is really written about the writer’s own fear of death. This may be the case, but for Lynch, an undertaker by trade, he sees death as random and omnipresent, an ever looming threat against everyone. When, in the poem “Damages,” he invokes the collective pronoun, it’s not to summon an authority he doesn’t have, the way a bad poet might. Instead, it’s to truly touch on something affecting us all. It’s why what is so attractive in these poems is their deep compassion. They are heartbreakingly compassionate. And in this context, other elements, the moments within life, those transcendent but doomed moments, are prized in their fragile brilliance, such as where he tries to remember the naked body of a friend he once slept with years ago, or he watches his young daughter skate and realizes he will gradually need to let her go as she gets older. These are the moments of meaning, of history, of personal significance that are given such deep poignancy against the relentless and inevitable triumph of the meaningless. It saddens them but increases the attention given to them.

Skating with Heather Grace is one of those collections where the poet faces our common abyss and it is a more honest collection than you will typically find because it is not angry but worried, concerned in the way one is when you know such terrible things happen daily, when you see that everyone around you is standing at the edge of the same inescapable end. Here, the resigned faith that “life goes on,” is a poetic principle, it is an amor fati that demands we sing and sing loudly. To paraphrase Roethke, who is invoked in the longest poem, it is the kind of shaking that keeps us steady. It is the precarious balance between two polarized dreams. It is where we live and where these poems take place. This is not only a collection worth reading, it a collection worth rereading.

Tomorrow’s Living Room -- A Review

2009-06-30T21:23:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow’s Living Room
Poems by Jason Whitmarsh

This is Jason Whitmarsh’s first book. It is winner of the 2009 May Swenson Poetry Award. And it is a deserving collection. One that may at first mislead you with its wit and simplicity. His deft casualness makes it possible to breeze through these poems without thinking of the odd statements being made. Indeed, in his citation, Billy Collins, who chose the book for the award, points out the “pleasurable disorientation” of the language, its “mixture of directness and imaginative surprise.” And the back of the dust jacket describes them as “alternately wry and dark.” These are all accurate observations of the surface textures, but to some extent, miss the point, miss why these poems are such a surprising tonal blend.

The opening poem is called “Forecasts” and is a grouping of four quatrains, all involving some sort of evasion, distance or submerged emotion controlling the actual moment. For instance, the second quatrain goes,

The rock fell from a great and far-off height
and plummeted silently through the roof
into bed, where it replaced your heart.
That’s what I think. It’s why you’re so aloof.

This distance, heightened by the internal monologue, foretells the rest of the collection. Indeed, that insistent, “That’s what I think” is at the core of Whitmarsh’s linguistic landscape. The poems are often pivoting on people so involved in what they think, they fail to make any real connection with others. Another poem, early in the book, is “One Art.” It is a satire of the famous Bishop villanelle, brilliantly using the exact same rhymes in the sequence of Bishop’s original. But in this version, the speaker is talking about wishing to be Bruce Lee when he was young so he could hit his “way out of disaster.” The poem concludes,

It’s evident
why I wanted to be a kung fu master,
as though desire alone could prevent disaster.

This desire is at the heart of the original Bishop poem, a speaker who is aching to convince themselves of something they don’t truly believe. This resonates to the key struck by the rest of Whitmarsh’s collection, which, on the whole, addresses the disasters that come from entertaining our fantasies too much, the emotional traumas of too much indulgent daydreaming. It’s why the tone is such a peculiar blend of humor and loneliness.

The title of another poem is “He Said These Things, Not Even I Could Forgive Him.” The first line of this poem goes

I’m kind of reluctant to mention the superhero powers
I’ve acquired since last we talked.

This is an opening line that leaves one expecting to laugh the rest of the way through. But the poem ends with the speaker saying,

In my dream
I grabbed an electric fence and when I woke I said
how strange to be in pain in a dream and you said
I was lucky it wasn’t worse, those fences are dangerous.

Oddly, it seems, dream and reality are beginning to blend by the conclusion of the poem. The person spoken to is almost accepting the terms of the “superhero” who is speaking. However, we can’t forget the title. The person spoken to resents the speaker. Why? Perhaps for no other reason than that the superhero is talking about what should remain unspoken.

If Whitmarsh’s poems are about the dramas that result when our unspoken fantasy lives break in and distance us from our real lives, these unspoken fantasies are also the source of what drives us to need each other or what makes us interesting or even who we are. One poem says it’s

Better, maybe, to let the guilt metastasize
than to cancel by good intent
any chance to surprise.

A couplet says,

Everything weak in us survives. It’s meant to.
If not, not a day would go by where I’d want you.

This couplet is from a poem titled “Three Curses.” The implication is that this is a curse, that our weakness is what drives us to want others, to desire. It is also what creates our fantasies and the distances between us. Or as Whitmarsh says in another poem, “One begins ever after and ends upon a time.”

It is a wonderful debut collection, inventive in its forms, from villanelles, triolets, and ghazels to prose poems and all handled with a casual fluency. He writes with compressed intensity; only a handful of his poems are longer than half a page. But all glitter like well-cut gems.

Rereading Walter Pater

2009-06-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

Rereading Walter Pater’s The Renaissance I’m struck how the sheer pleasure of reading the book breaks hard against the abundance of thought it provokes. It makes it difficult to decide if I should rhapsodize about the beauty of his prose or delight in the many connections his work has to other writers and thinkers both before and after him. Perhaps a little of both.

His aesthetic, as he describes it at the beginning of his essay on Giorgione, accounts for how he allowed himself the luxury of such a poetic style. For Pater, the all important element in a work of art is its impression. When he says, “in its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall” he frees himself to enter a painting or poem or the life of an artist and permit his own reactions to form the meaning. He can suggest the sound of poured water mixing with played pipes in Fête Champêter or the smile of the Mona Lisa “defining itself on the fabric of [Leonardo’s] dreams” and I take these in without any hesitation that they are not good scholarship since that is not the intention. Pater is not trying to get at some objective message or meaning, but at what it means to him to inhabit a certain space.

Pater argues that it’s neither the senses nor the intellect that art addresses, but the “imaginative reason.” I immediately understand this to correspond to what I call the sensibility. It is an odd organ of perception. But it is Pater’s effort to describe how this vague organ registers aesthetic reality that makes his descriptions so beautiful and why it is not accurate to understand him as simply a critic or hedonist. In fact, so many of his attitudes and ideas seem to foreshadow much in modernism and existentialism.

As I read him, I have strong but undefined feelings that he stands on the narrowest and subtlest bridge dividing what is Romantic from what is modern. Or that he breathes the air of both atmospheres without fully inhabiting either. Certainly, much of what is in the major existentialists and major modernists can be seen as the evolution of the Romantic stances, their natural consequence and end. When Blake asserts that the imagination is the Holy Spirit, there is no significant progress made when Stevens proclaims “God and the imagination are one.” When Keats said negative capability is “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” he defined exclusively for artists what Camus would define as the absurd man. So when Pater describes Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin, it registers as more than an aesthetic disagreement, but a metaphysical one. That’s because Pater had already made a step toward that fragmented landscape of modern life. But he doesn’t seem to step fully into it or, if he does, he’s wearing some kind of protective armor, something that keeps his mind intact where later minds are in pieces. What Pater says of Goethe could be said of himself, “he defines, in clearest outline, the eternal problem of culture — balance, unity with one’s self.”

One sees his method of unity in how he portrays what the mind does to satisfy its need “to feel itself alive.” He said it “must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation between itself and them. It struggles with those forms till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall back into its place.” This reaches back to Blake who said,

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.

And it reaches forward to Simone de Beauvoir when she defines freedom as being “able to surpass the given toward an open future.” Between these two metaphysics of freedom, Pater defines his technique to give the intellect the completeness he said it demanded. However, this technique contains the seed of its own dissolution. In the very notion of the “divided form of culture” is everything that gives him his uniting focus and what transformed, for later minds, into a multiplicity that fragmented the psyche itself.

For Pater, there are discrete aesthetic moments offered to the intellect to construct its own unity, forms yielding definitions and boundaries of cultural discourse. But in the 20th century, the existentialists rejected the mere play of such forms. Again Simone de Beauvoir said, “We repudiate all idealisms, mysticism, etcetera which prefer a Form to man himself.” The divided object presented to the mind in the 20th century was not culture, but man himself, his fragmented psyche. As the poet George Oppen put it, “we have chosen the meaning, of being numerous.” The self no longer felt the unity it once did and could no longer contrive it. Walter Pater’s mentor, Matthew Arnold, exemplified this fragmentation quite dramatically. In fact, the teacher stood on the other side of that bridge dividing and distinguishing the Romantic sensibility from the modern one.

Pater was not driven, like his mentor, to proclaim, “I am fragments” because aesthetic appreciation was a uniting principle for him. He was not a hedonist, but an aesthete. In his famous conclusion to The Renaissance, Pater writes, “Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, in this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.” It is staggeringly beautiful and poignant, another of the infinite renderings of carpe diem. But we see here the idealism Beauvoir rejects; we see Pater’s unity in gathering together these moments. He is the central self bringing his singular experiences into the whole of his guiding intelligence. And this divides him from the 20th and 21st centuries; this keeps him from being wholly modern. As close to the doorstep as he comes, he remains outside. But he is so wonderfully there, an almost reassuring figure — if only we could be more like him — the favorite grandfather of many artists and intellectuals, a source of wisdom too remote to follow but close enough to relish quoting.

The Sensible and the Meaningful

2009-06-03T21:42:00.000-07:00

To begin June on my blog, I decided to post some current thoughts on poetry. Lately I’ve thought about Wallace Stevens’ remark that, “a poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.” It seems to me that a poem should actually succeed in this resistance, but only just. The intelligence should fail but be so consistently close to succeeding that it can’t resist renewing the effort to bring it under its dominion. A poem should be the perfect seduction of the intelligence. I think of a poem like Joseph Brodsky’s “Kalamaki” as a perfect example, at least for me. It is a poem I have felt always on the verge of fully comprehending. I could sense the boundaries of its meaning as I neared its end, just as it slipped away. It’s like someone whose hand is big enough to almost palm a basketball, but not quite. Portions of it leap out at me as I go along; I gather a thread here and a thread there. I’m about to tie them in a neat little bow when, right at the end, it unravels. And I never fail to return to the poem at some point and renew the journey because it is so amazing, so deeply meaningful, although inexplicable. And that is the subtle distinction that has brought me to this idea of how a poem should function.

Though a thesaurus will show them as synonyms, there is a difference between what makes sense and what is meaningful. Of course, the sensible has many definitions. What I mean by sensible here is: that which is of sound judgment or good sense, something that is fitting. But what we typically consider sensible is so only according to our given understanding of the world. However, the realm of possible meaning is much larger than this. That is, what is meaningful is larger than what is sensible. So, while everything that makes sense is meaningful, there are a vast number of things that are meaningful which make no sense. This is the realm poetry should explore. It is where such poets as John Ashbery, Marvin Bell, even Mallarme and sometimes Fernando Pessoa make their homes or pitch a tent.

It recalls another thought I’ve frequently had, a definition of a poem that has recurred to me throughout the years: that a poem is the clearest explanation of something. The consequence of this is that the explanation of a poem is both a movement away from clarity and a redundancy. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should abandon literary criticism, only that, the best literary criticism should, in itself, approach the nature of poetry. It’s why writers like Walter Pater and Edward Dalhberg are preferable to simple critics like Harold Bloom or Helen Vendler: as admirable and interesting as they are. It is in this spirit that I continue to write my own thoughts on poetry and poets and look forward to shortly publishing my thoughts on Walter Pater after having recently reread The Renaissance.

Matthew Arnold: Man that is Not

2009-05-29T20:14:00.000-07:00

This essay on Matthew Arnold was an attempt to do at least two things. It was first, a consideration of Matthew Arnold’s place within the context of modern literature and the modern psyche as a whole. Second, it was an attempt to develop a more discursive voice for my prose. This second purpose meant handling the material differently than with a simple academic focus, but rather with a kind of poetic rhapsodizing. Thus the essay is a meditation on the fragmentation of the modern psyche using Matthew Arnold as the focal point around which that consideration revolves. Disparate elements play into it, but return to him as a leading representative at the beginning of its manifestation in the world.

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Matthew Arnold: Man that is Not
By Michael T. Young

“You must be something to be able to do something.”
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Matthew Arnold was the reluctant modern. “Resolve to be thyself” he pleaded because he was unable to embrace his own spirit. He longed for unity but wrote to his sister, “I am fragments.” These expressions seem excessive to us only because we are its natural descendents. “Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is” said Camus. And George Oppen wrote, “We have chosen the meaning of being numerous.” The multitudinous and fragmented world that daunted Arnold can no longer overwhelm us because we are it. Arnold was among its firstborn, for what Arnold the critic resisted, Arnold the poet embraced. He refused to be wholly himself, and this war with himself made him as modern as any poet writing today.

Arnold was appointed to an inspectorship of schools in 1849. He valued education and knowledge perhaps as highly as we value information. That he turned to the Greeks as models of the best in poetry and thought was all too instinctive. For the Greeks understood ignorance as the enemy of integrity. The Delphic Oracle said, “Know thyself,” to help conduct people to a noble life. But modern man is beyond the Delphic dictum for he has foregone integrity for multiplicity. The modern person in quest of self-knowledge does not seek to know himself; he seeks to “find himself.” And Arnold was such a man because he knew “who finds himself, loses his misery!” Modern man is not ignorant but lost. A labyrinth of constant self-analysis confounds him. He is the Daedalus of his own mind, an inventor of mazes and convolutions of thought for which his conscience imprisons him. It does not let him rest. It drives him to circle his cell, to ever move and never get anywhere, to ever learn and never come to a definite knowledge.

Hither and thither spins
The wind-borne, mirroring soul,
A thousand glimpses wins,
And never sees a whole;
Looks once, and drives elsewhere, and leaves its last employ.
("Empedocles on Etna," 2.82-86)

This same spirit is why Hamlet remains contemporary. He is one of the first modern characters not because he is petrified with inaction but because he must unpack his heart to the air and holds a mirror up to the heart of all around him. He is a mind discovering itself, haunting the world with his brooding confessions, a voice of enchantment echoing inside each of our privately bounded nutshells. This is relevant because Arnold, recognizing Hamlet as a type characteristic of his own age, said, “The dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.”

Modern man’s identity is a series of momentary stays against confusion. He is perpetually asserting his psyche’s identity to withstand the threat of other identities. Arnold noted that “Hardly have we, for one little hour,/been on our own line, have we been ourselves.” Keats could not have conceived of the numberless selves springing up and dissolving in the modern psyche because negative capability was, to him, a poetic talent or character trait. But to the modern mind it is either its nature or its neurosis. This dualistic psychology gives birth to our multiple warring personalities. Seeing this multitude rising in himself and in the world, Arnold was one of the early thinkers to conceive of “the masses.” He knew man was getting lost in the multitudes both in the world and in himself. “Each half lives a hundred different lives” he said. And none of those halves are in harmony, but moving in a growing discord. Sartre’s remark that “hell is other people” was foretold when Arnold said, “Other existences there are, that clash with ours.” Feeling the perpetual struggle, Arnold looked at nature with envy.

And with joy the stars perform their shining,
And the sea its long moon-silver’d roll;
For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul.
(“Self-Dependence,” 21-24)

The stars were not only tranquil but joyful in their shining because they were not the victim of a “differing soul.” They remained themselves, always shining, always there, reliable enough to navigate by. Arnold labored to order the flying fragments of the new world, the multitudinous scatterings of industrial society. He pressed images of nature hoping to transform them into symbols of man’s potential ideal. The stars were

A world above man’s head, to let him see
How boundless might his soul’s horizons be,
How vast, yet of what clear transparency!
How it were good to abide there, and breathe free;
How fair a lot to fill
Is left to each man still!
(“A Summer Night, “87-92)

But all the exclamation points belie his passion to believe his own words. Arnold was not an optimist in his taste or his sentiment. He admired the melancholic poetry of Leopardi and ended his own most famous poem by saying of modern man’s condition that,

. . . we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(“Dover Beach,” 35-37)

Arnold in his social criticism chastised British society for “the anarchical tendency of [their] worship of freedom.” He knew that some authority must exist to which people answer, even if it were only his cherished “right reason.” But Arnold was, as Blake said of all true poets, “of the Devil’s Party without knowing it.” In his prose Arnold knew where poetry was going and why, and in his prose he struggled against it with all his might. But his poetry was authentic as his prose was desperately sincere. His prose demanded guidance from right reason, but his poetry enshrined the boundlessness of man’s soul and the endless struggles it was condemned to engage.

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!
(“The Last Word,” 13-16)

Torn by the force of the indifferent mechanism which modern society has become, he is in fragments. But driven by the rage to assert his integrity or charged by the very power that rips at him, modern man tries to understand himself, hoping enlightenment or knowledge will save him.

But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves. . .
(“The Buried Life,” 45-55)

It’s to “know thyself.” But at some point the quest becomes a red herring. Faust sold his soul for knowledge and for all he knew, it could not save him. Solomon proclaimed, “The fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself.” He turns and turns in himself to understand his own fragments, to gather them into some organized whole. It was the poetic project of Stevens who was always diving and mining for “Words of the fragrant portals dimly-starred,/And of ourselves and of our origins.”

Modern man does know himself. He is better informed than all before him about psychology, physics, and the numberless scattered trivia that compose his external and internal worlds. His failure is that he “isn’t” himself.

. . .we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ‘tis not true!
(“The Buried Life,” 64-66)

To the problems he saw in the world, Arnold tried to interject solutions, but his poems ring true when he simply records his observation of the discord that he cannot resolve. Even in his prose, when he defines culture “not in resting and being, but in growing and becoming” he has already embraced the spirit of an age he condemned. While he warned against the “unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality,” he hoped to fill a cultural need by “spontaneity of consciousness.” Like us, Arnold had enough self-knowledge to know the faults if his time but not enough inspiration to know the way to resolve them. His ultimate abandonment of poetry was inevitable.

Arnold excluded “Empedocles on Etna” from later collections of his poetry. He said it was because its sufferings had no release in action, that there was no relief from the pain through hope or resistance. And this is partly true because Arnold already understood what Sartre said in the 20th century, that for modern man “there is no reality except in action.” Empedocles’ most assertive self-expression was self-destruction, the most valid action for the man “whose insight has never born fruit in deeds” (“The Scholar-Gipsy,” 174). That is, a violent action becomes the only action for those whose self-knowledge has no expression in their being.

Empedocles leaps into the fires of Mount Etna,

My soul glows to meet you.
Ere it flag, ere the mists
Of despondency and gloom
Rush over it again,
Receive me, save me!
(“Empedocles on Etna,” 2.412-416)

“Empedocles on Etna” is the earliest expression of Amor Fati, the only control left for the non-existent. Death is Empedocles’ salvation.

A character in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano says, “What is a lost soul? It is one that has turned from its true path and is groping in the darkness of remembered ways.” It is caught in a circuit of habit and recollection, reiterations of yesterday which it mistakes for tomorrow. This is what produced the nostalgic poetries of Leopardi and Hood. In them, it was innocent and young but in Arnold, it was a spirit of self-knowledge and fragmentation. For us, in the 21st century, it is simply the nature of things. As Larkin said, “nothing like something, happens anywhere.” The non-existent has taken place of our being. Arnold was the first poet to register this displacement with something like conscience. His struggle against it became part of the discord which made him one of its primary representatives in the Victorian age. In his poetry he affirmed the fragmentation, the fears and the self-assertions that he denied in his prose, but not because he lacked self-knowledge but because his self-knowledge could not change what he was.

Charles O. Hartman: New & Selected Poems

2009-05-22T08:28:00.000-07:00

On
Charles O. Hartman
New & Selected Poems
Review by Michael T. Young

I happily discovered this poet through Facebook. The Ahsahta Press sent a publication notice for his New & Selected Poems along with one sample poem. The sample poem was short, but stimulating, a poem that, as a poet myself, I thought after reading it, “I wish I had written that.” Consequently, I ordered his New & Selected Poems and am truly glad to have encountered this poet’s intelligence.

He is a jazzy sensibility. This is clear in the variety of his forms. He seems to endlessly experiment. His poems range from metrical to free verse to prose poems. You can see stylistic undercurrents from such diverse sources as William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Patchen and Francis Ponge, which is not to say these are direct models, but simply atavistic ancestors. You hear them faintly, in the distance, since Hartman makes the forms his own, extending them, working them into his personal vision and exploration of meaning. In each form he shows himself capable of transforming his material into the search for the limits of what might be said. However, testing these boundaries always carries risks that few ever escape all the time.

Sometimes his poems lose their emotional tie, lose the sense of a definite speaker and become simply linguistic artifacts. These perhaps result from struggling too hard to reach his end. But at his best, when he allows his instinct to carry him a little of the way, these ties hold and thread together his deep curiosity, his intelligent wanderings and make for sometimes unexpectedly moving poems. Such startling examples are “Over a Cup of Tea,” “Joinery,” “The Theory of Sunday,” and “Landscape with Marmots: Quasimodo Unstraps His Hump.” Such extremes in his work come from his daring, his willingness to take risks, exploring the boundaries of meaning as other poets such as James Tate, John Ashbery or Marvin Bell. For Hartman, this exploration is bound up with the vague landscapes of memory and the fragile constructions of the self, both of which are not solid, but fluid, a movement rather than an object. As he says in “The Long View,” “Who we are is where we have been going.” Memory and identity are verbs, not nouns and time in this context is part of a puzzle that is perpetually constructed by the attentive intelligence. “Time is pieces to adjust” he says in “The Lens.” Because of this fluidity the self that suffers the flux has a singularly important lesson to learn: compassion. As much as Hartman’s poems are full of risk and experimentation, they are also full of forgiveness. Rather than suffering making us stronger, it has instead the potential to make us more understanding, more accepting.

We for whom the hardest lesson is that no virtue
inheres in being uncomfortable or unhappy
may suffer on a day like this
the vertigo of a stair missed in the dark.

Easier to offer thanks for the afternoon
once we know we could not deserve it,
as when the hunter with the groundhog in his sights
decides gracefully never to have existed.
(“Landscape with Marmots: Quasimodo Unstraps His Hump”)

It is the willingness to go on in the common effort beyond our endless error.

Having made
errors of all kinds, we have learned one another

approximately. We feel our way between two mysteries
into a third. Night rises, and with a common motion we gather in
each other, all we can hold.
(“Over a Cup of Tea”)

This is an intelligence striving to accept its own limits and extend that as grace, a mind creating a kind of faith by the power of its imagination. We do what we can with the limits of our minds and hearts. We struggle toward each other and always failing, accept and hold what we can of the approximations we make of each other’s presence. So, if Hartman’s poems sometimes get lost in their own discourse, it is only because they are like these approximations, which are ultimately believable and beautiful in their efforts and rhythms, delightfully intelligent in their experimentation and exploration.

New & Selected Poems was published by Ashatha Press in 2008.
http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu/books/hartman2/hartman2.htm

The Secular Sublime

2009-05-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

Ten or fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have given a poet like Gerald Stern a second thought. Today he is one of my favorite poets, one of those liberating voices I am constantly refreshed by. The following essay grew out of a particular poem of his that kept coming back to me after reading his collection This Time. The poem “June Fourth,” even months after I’d read the collection, kept reviving in my mind: it’s imagery and tone, a kind of quiet rebelliousness. This gentle obsession ultimately led me back to his work and a deeper consideration of it. Out of that reconsideration, I discovered a poet whose work connects to a long history.

(Please note: I have written permission from the author to reproduce “June Fourth” in its entirety.)

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The Secular Sublime: An Appreciation of Gerald Stern
By Michael T. Young

There are experiences and perceptions that change us so completely that when we look back at how we lived and saw things before, it is as if looking at another person. It seems that an old self is sloughed like a snakeskin and a new self emerges. It is a refinement. It is an experience of what some call the sublime. Such moments are the center of Gerald Stern’s poetry. His poems almost always take place at a moment of transformation, the instant of breakthrough. He is America’s consummate poet of the modern sublime.

Stern’s poems are deceptively simple. He writes in a language completely devoid of pretense and yet dignified with the elegance of profound meditation. He thinks and thinks deeply and through thought, the sublime is registered. We are transformed. As he says in the poem “The Thought of Heaven,” “I let it change me, that/is the purpose of thought—I call it all thought, whatever/changes you” (239. ln. 71, 72).

This change occurs to a figure in his poem “June Fourth.” It is a short poem that gathers all the major threads of Stern’s project: experience of the sublime, mourning of the past, and exhilaration of the emerging self. These threads all rise or recede in Stern’s poetry as his sensibility is sensitive to one, now another of them. But in “June Fourth” these threads come together with a subtle neatness.

Today as I ride down Twenty-fifth Street I smell honeysuckle
rising from Shell and Victor Balata and K-Diner.
The goddess of sweet memory is there
staggering over fruit and drinking old blossoms.
A man in white socks and a blue T-shirt
is sitting on the grass outside Bethlehem Steel
eating lunch and dreaming.
Before he walks back inside he will be changed.
He will remember when he stands again under the dirty windows
a moment of great misgiving and puzzlement
just before sweetness ruined him and thinking
tore him apart. He will remember lying
on his left elbow studying the sky,
and the loss he felt, and the sudden freedom,
the mixture of pain and pleasure—terror and hope—
what he calls "honeysuckle" (90).

One of the attractions of this poem is the articulation of the man’s experience as “honeysuckle.” Not only does the poem articulate an inner reality through a sensual experience; it was a stroke of genius to have chosen a smell as the vehicle. Physiologically, smell is the most closely connected to memory. But memory isn’t only relevant to this poem, as we shall see later it is also a relevant characteristic of the modern sublime.

Over a long period of time I was haunted by the poem’s simple and beautiful articulation. It slowly seduced me. Part of that seduction was the realization of its connection to another transformation beginning at least as far back as Milton. It seemed necessary to compare the figure in Stern’s poem to Satan in Paradise Lost.

The most obvious connection between them was the use of metaphorical language to articulate an inner experience. As the man in Stern’s poem uses “honeysuckle” to express his transformation, Satan expresses his transformation with the famous line, “Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell” (bk. 4, ln. 75). “Hell” becomes the term that articulates his internal reality. But this merely scratched the surface. Their kinship is deep and rooted in the drastic, even violent change both experience and how that experience is of the sublime.

“Sublime” derives from the Latin word “sublimis” and means “to lift high.” In Medieval Latin it meant “to purify” or “to refine.” The original Latin implies a change of place. The Medieval Latin implies a change of quality. But both imply a change of some kind. Although it is not reducible to change alone, change is the term common to every experience of the sublime and is a reasonable starting point for comparing the figures.

The man in “June Fourth” is ruined by sweetness and torn apart by thinking. Not only is it a change but it’s described as a violent one. The violence of Satan’s transformation is obvious enough: cast from Heaven to eternal damnation in Hell. But Satan’s change is also initiated, like the man in Stern’s poem, by a moment of taking thought.

Lifted up so high,
I ‘sdained subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest.
(bk. 4, lns. 49-51)

This moment of thinking to take God’s place on the throne of Heaven initiates Satan’s fall and subsequent transformation. Though what the figure in Stern’s poem is thinking isn’t clear, it is thinking that initiates his transformation. In the words of the poem, it tears him apart.

The man in “June Fourth” feels misgiving and puzzlement. He feels loss and freedom, terror and hope. Satan shares this confusion of emotions. He is tormented by the thought of “lost happiness and lasting pain” (bk. 1, lns. 54-56) but in defiance cries, “Here at least/we shall be free.” (bk. 1, lns. 258, 259). He feels the same exhilaration of “loss and freedom.” He describes the other fallen angels as being “astonished.” Thus both figures are filled with an apprehensive anxiety, a wonder before what has happened to them. Interestingly, 18th century critics, especially Edmund Burke, tied these same emotions to the sublime.

Burke wrote, “A mode of terror, or of pain, is always the cause of the sublime” (136. Part 4, Section 7). Furthermore, and more importantly for Stern’s poem, Burke said,

“As common labour, which is a mode of pain, is the exercise of the grosser, a mode of terror is the exercise of the finer parts of the system. In all these cases, if the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine, or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome incumbrance, they are capable of producing delight. Its object is the sublime. Its highest degree I call astonishment” (136. Part 4, Section 7).

That Burke should identify the highest realization of the sublime as astonishment is significant since it is the very emotion Satan applies to the fallen angels. However, I want to focus on Burke calling “labour” a mode of pain and, consequently, a “grosser” type of the sublime. The man in Stern’s poem is a laborer. He works for Bethlehem Steel. Though it is of the grosser type, his pain is thus an experience of the sublime and it connects him to Satan’s pain, for like Satan he inwardly rebels against his condition.

Satan, before his decision to aspire to God’s throne was the highest angel. He was the morning star. But he was in this position because God, his creator, placed him there. Satan himself said, “Lifted up so high.” Having been “lifted” implies an external force, i.e., God, put him there. What this means is that Satan before his fall and transformation deferred his will to God, he obeyed God, he was in subjection to God. The man in Stern’s poem also defers his will. He is a worker at Bethlehem Steel. He defers his will to those who employ him: his supervisors, managers, and, more importantly, the shareholders and board members of the company. It is the owners of the company who are the secular version of God. It is they who hold the highest power in the company and determine its standard practice or laws.

Part of the worker’s change is that he is ruined by sweetness. Honeysuckle, the term used to identify the figure’s transformation, has a sweet smell. The association is with all that is outside: sunlight, fresh air, and open space. These are set in implied opposition to the factory where it is dirty, claustrophobic and hot. What he aspires for is nothing less than freedom from an oppressive job, freedom to enjoy the sunlight, fresh air and open space. But what he requires for that freedom is the money and power of those over him, especially of those like the shareholders. Implicitly, the man aspires, like Satan, to the position of those in power over him. This quiet rebellion, this opposition, during the 18th century, became an intimate part of the modern definition of the sublime.

Hume, in The Treatise of Human Nature, wrote, “any opposition which does not entirely discourage and intimidate us, has rather a contrary effect, and inspires us with a more than ordinary grandeur and magnanimity. In collecting our force to overcome the opposition, we invigorate the soul, and give it an elevation with which otherwise it would never have been acquainted . . .. Opposition not only enlarges the soul; but the soul, when full of courage and magnanimity, in a manner seeks opposition” (qtd. in Boulton l, li).

This “elevation” of the soul, obviously associated with the sublime, in Hume, is also associated with opposition itself. The association gained acceptance among critics through the 18th Century and in the Romantic poets was embraced in the images of the rebel and outcast as hero: Shelley’s Prometheus, Byron’s Childe Harold, Blake’s Los. In fact, Blake not only claimed Satan was the true hero of Paradise Lost but also expressed Hume’s point epigrammatically, “Opposition is true friendship” (42).

A curious historical fact lends credence to this point for the Stern poem. After Bethlehem Steel closed in the mid-90’s, a theater troupe took the unemployed workers and staged a performance of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. This gives us the analogy that, in Stern’s poem, Bethlehem Steel is the Zeus-like power against which the Prometheus-like worker thinks to rebel. The opening of Demogorgon’s final speech in the play is relevant.

This is the day, which down the void abysm,
At the earthborn’s spell, yawns for heaven’s despotism
(130. lns. 554, 555).

We live in a secular age and in such an age, heavenly despots are replaced with a board of shareholders, hell with earth, and Satan or Prometheus with the ordinary, working man who, like those figures, aspires toward the better life of those who employ him. The man in Stern’s poem is “the earthborn” yawning for “heaven’s despotism” and he experiences all the mixed exhilaration of those other independent, self-determined figures.

The man in Stern’s poem doesn’t openly rebel against his employers. He doesn’t quit his job, try to steal from them or to kill them. His rebellion is internal, an epiphany, a moment of insight. However, it is not spurious for being so. Most of us go to jobs we care little for, in fact, probably hate. We inwardly rebel against a condition to which necessity forces us to acquiesce. This does not make the disparity between our actions and feelings, between our outward circumstance and inward reality any less real or less painful. Each of us determines in some way, we are not defined by our job, we are something else. This is also to say that the essence of the rebellion is the desire for self-determination and the power used to define that self is the imagination or memory.

To the assertion that God created him and to him Satan owes his being, Satan says,

Who saw
When this creation was? Rememberest thou
Thy making? While the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quickening power
(bk. 5, lns. 856-863)

Satan is invoking the power of memory to claim his past. What he can’t remember, he denies, thus reducing his sense of self to what his memory dictates. He is attempting an act of self-creation. He wants to be “self-begot, self-raised.” Memory is the faculty by which he tries to claim that power and it is the same power invoked at the beginning of Stern’s poem.

The goddess of sweet memory is there
Staggering over fruit and drinking old blossoms.

Memory defines the boundaries of the poem. But there is a hint that something isn’t quite right. The peculiar phrase “staggering over fruit” implies something of a stumbling block, perhaps a kind of alcohol, intoxicating the mind. The “drinking” of old blossoms reinforces the assertion. It is reminiscent of taking the fruit in Genesis, for there the temptation was that “ye shall be as gods.” That is, you shall become like your creator, becoming, in a way, self-created.

Satan, for the same desire, was cast into Hell. The worker in “June Fourth” suffers no less. Though we never see him in a heaven from which to be cast, we see him in his desire for the heights of it. He lies “on his left elbow studying the sky.” “Left” has always had unfavorable implications. The word itself derives from an Old English word meaning “idle,” “weak,” and “useless.” The word “sinister” derives from a Middle English word meaning “on the left side.” The worker in Stern’s poem, by this gesture, is aligning himself with the rebellious, with the sinister.

The man also is “studying the sky.” He is not simply looking distractedly in its direction. It implies that he isn’t thinking of something else, he is thinking about the sky, for one studies something in order to master it. Quietly, and symbolically, the figure follows in the footsteps of Satan, Prometheus, Los, the rebels of literary history. For his ambition, he is banished to labor “under the dirty windows.” The word “under” is telling for it could have easily been “behind.” But “under” suggests a vertical direction for the worker in relation to it. That is, the worker has been cast down. The factory is hell. But he has our sympathy, for he is the hero of our age. He is the underdog. He is our co-worker. He is each of us going to work everyday.

Works Cited
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Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986.

Milton, John. John Milton Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1957.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Selected Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Ramdon House Inc., 1951.

Stern, Gerald. This Time: New and Selected Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.

The Cindery In-betweens of Charles Tomlinson

2009-05-17T19:39:00.000-07:00

My essay on George Oppen, the inaugural posting in my blog, opened with a poem Oppen wrote to the British poet, Charles Tomlinson. The following essay is a consideration of the poetry of Charles Tomlinson, a wonderful poet in his own right.

One thing I should alert my readers to is that I am, so far, unable to make the poems properly post with their indentations. I apologize for this and hope to shortly rectify this problem.

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The Cindery In-betweens of Charles Tomlinson
By Michael T. Young

A poet is a type of geographer charting verbal countries in rhythms and metaphors. Some note the unobserved details of previously visited terrain while others discover altogether new islands. What the British poet, Charles Tomlinson, does is bring this metaphor of mine closer to an identity. That is, his verbal explorations are most often of literal geographic locations and their metaphysical depths. Tomlinson is deeply attuned to the landscapes he has visited in his lifelong travels, whether it’s Venice, Rome, Oaxaca or New York.

Although Charles Tomlinson has a name less recognizable than Philip Larkin or possibly even Thomas Gunn, he is their contemporary and as much a masterful poet. He was born in Stoke-on Trent in 1927 and educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge. A professor of English at Bristol University for thirty-six years, Tomlinson is also a successful visual artist, with some of his works published in 1976 under the title In Black and White: The Graphics of Charles Tomlinson.

In Tomlinson’s poetry his visual facility keeps pace with his poetic ear. This combination of eye and ear makes for lushly and subtly textured lines such as

. . . water, seeping up to fill their pits,
Sheeted them to lakes that wink and shine
Between tips and steeples, streets and waste

or

A trout, facing upstream, hangs
Balanced against the current he is riding:
Tail and fin countervail the force
Which keeps compelling him into acquiescence

These are delectable syllables, tasteful on the tongue and easy to relish. In fact, it might be enough to simply bask in the pleasure of his sound if that were all his poetry offered. But it isn’t. In early and late poems alike he returns to locations to meditate upon them and Tomlinson is a profound thinker. Buildings, events, moments in his travels are carefully and caringly traced through collections ranging from The Necklace in 1955 to Skywriting in 2003.

In the telling poem, “At Stoke,” about his childhood landscape, he writes,

I have lived in a single landscape. Every tone
And turn have had for their ground
These beginnings in grey-black: a land
Too handled to be primary—all the same,
The first in feeling. I thought it once
Too desolate, diminished and too tame
To be the foundation for anything. It straggles
A haggard valley and lets through
Discouraged greennesses, lights from a pond or two.
By ash-tips, or where the streets give out
In cindery in-betweens, the hills
Swell up and free of it to where, behind
The whole vapoury, patched battlefield,
The cows stand steaming in an acrid wind.
This place, the first to seize on my heart and eye,
Has been their hornbook and their history.

Indeed, the characteristics of this landscape intimate the interests and traits of his poetry, its color, its lights, a poetic life spent exploring all the “cindery in-betweens.” I tend to imagine Stoke with the “lights from a pond or two” serving as single points of certainty, of definition in a gray landscape, and I think this may be true for Tomlinson himself. One sees it in the care he takes with the structure of his poetry, the abundance of internal music, the rhyme, and the ease with which he moves through his meters. One sees it in the occasions of his poetry when “Light stilled the mind, then showed it what to do.”

Like his contemporaries such as Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie and Philip Larkin, Tomlinson responded stylistically, and even thematically, to those excesses found in a poet like Dylan Thomas. His poetry is not grandiose and passionate but thoughtful and controlled. This is not to say that Tomlinson’s poetry is cold and indifferent. Rather, his poetry shows the complexities of a mind and heart equally bound up in its responses to the world. These elements—heart, mind and world—so mingle and mutually make each other, none govern absolutely. But together they engender a form and structure in Tomlinson’s work that is not only poetic technique but insight into universal principles. In “Swimming Chenango Lake” the light playing on the water “is a geometry and not/A fantasia of distorting forms.” It is this same impetus that inspires a poem like “Against Extremity” or “Roma: Monte del Gallo” where the nature of two cypresses sit in “deep/Arboreal indifference to unsleeping Rome.” To Tomlinson, structure, form, and artifice are healing powers and the way to “wish back Eden.” But it would be wrong to think there is no conflict or struggle. We are, in fact, the dispossessed, living in a world expelled from Eden.

The fact that we need the healing powers of art implies our sickness and struggle. But what that art discloses is that the balances we strike simultaneously are points of great conflict and convergence. Here, equal and opposite forces become one another as often as they balance. In fact, the definition of balance may be not where equal and opposite forces cancel each other out but where they seamlessly become one another. Thus scavenging birds in “The Faring,”

. . . intent
On nothing more than the ploughland’s nourishment,
Brought the immeasurable in

Conversely, the poem “In Arden” discloses a manifest world echoing the transcendent and moves to that unseen rhythm as

. . . Arden’s springs
Convey echoic waters — voices
Of the place that rises through this place
Overflowing, as it brims its surfaces
In runes and hidden rhymes, in chords and keys
Where Adam, Eden, Arden run together
And time itself must beat to the cadence of this river.

With a poet like Tomlinson, it is not easy to plumb the depth of a poem, for multiple currents run through them, mingling, merging and separating in a constant dance of light and shade. It might seem like evasiveness if it weren’t for the fact that life hangs perpetually at the edge of revelation. Forces simultaneously disclose and cover the depths, like the gull in The Way of a World that “Swayed toiling against the two/Gravities that root and uproot the trees.” Or more overtly in Snow Signs, where, although the snow covers the landscape, rather than hiding the world, it leads to a revelation of contours that were otherwise unnoticed,

It is written here in sign and exclamation,
Touched-in contour and chalk-followed fold,
Lines and circles finding their completion
In figures less certain, figures that yet take hold
On features that would stay hidden but for them:

These are other forms of the cindery in-betweens, places where we stand before “the competing geometries of shore and sky,” or watch a jet trail

. . . beneath
this no-man’s territory to see
How far that fringe of vapour can prolong
Its fading signature against space

This territory has been Tomlinson’s poetic homeland from the beginning. His exploration of it for more than fifty years has made him one of its most accurate geographers, one of its most revealing historians, and one if its most sensitive poets. It is a rich country full of details and subtleties to which this visitor’s brief journal entry can only hint.

Intro and Appreciation of Oppen

2009-05-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

The most difficult thing about starting this blog has been determining what to call it. I settled on The Inner Music only because the Capote quote from which I took it strikes a chord with my own aesthetic. There is something deeply satisfying about good writing and though I might not always call it music, that word suggests enough of a larger country beyond its simpler definitions. At some point I’ll post a brief essay on why I write. That essay engages this question of what in us is satisfied in the aesthetic experience.

My intention here is simply to share my thoughts on poetry, books, writing, and art in general. I’ve been writing for twenty-five years and over that time I’ve read and commented on many books and authors, jotted down many thoughts on art and writing. Unlike poetry, which is my first passion, I don’t really try to publish my prose. I’ve published a few book reviews and even fewer essays, but decided a blog would be a good forum for sending my prose work into the world.

I’ll try to revise so things don’t read as dated works, although, sometimes this will be unavoidable. For instance, I wrote on the movie Fight Club and will post that here at some point. Since the movie is now ten years old, it’s impossible for the essay not to be dated. Although the significance of it still seems relevant.

To kick off this site, I’ve posted a brief appreciation of the poet George Oppen that I wrote a few years ago. Although he’s gained more recognition in recent years, it’s still safe to say he’s not as well known as his contemporaries, or as well known as he deserves.

For those who visit, I hope you find here something engaging, something thought provoking.

Michael T. Young

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The Pleasure of Being Heard:
An Appreciation of George Oppen
By Michael T. Young

In a poem to Charles Tomlinson, George Oppen wrote,

I would like,
as you see,
to convince
myself
that my pleasure in your response
is not
plain vanity
but the pleasure of being heard

The irony of Oppen’s desire is that he seems largely unheard by poets born beyond the mid-60s. Like his fellow Objectivist, William Carlos Williams, Oppen won a Pulitzer. In 1976, his Collected Poems was nominated for a National Book Award. But in spite of these recognitions, in standard college surveys of major American poets, while Williams receives great attention, Oppen receives relatively little. His work was not even included in The Norton Anthology until the most recent editions.

In an attempt to understand this neglect, I was drawn to a comment by Eliot Weinberger. Talking of Oppen’s importance to poets in the 60s, he said “There were, first of all, the facts of his life, which had particular resonance in the era of the Vietnam War and of hectically mutating events and values.” Though Weinberger’s essay, first published in American Poet in 2002 and then used as the introduction to the New Collected Poems of Oppen, was most likely meant to renew interest in Oppen’s work, it seemed possible that Oppen’s political significance skewed the reading of his admirers and limited his audience. With too much emphasis on his political and social appeal, his significance as a poet passed away as those circumstances did. What intrigued me was Oppen had not only served in World War II but, in order to take political and social action, stopped writing for about twenty-five years, in what is probably one of the most famous poetic silences.

Grounded as I am in formal poetry, coming to Oppen’s work was a complete surprise. My natural affinity was for the poetry of James Merrill, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht: a different generation and altogether a different sensibility. I had read poets like Williams, but the aesthetic never engaged me. I read it. I knew it. However, I had no interest in it. That is, until I came to George Oppen. His poetry not only engaged me, it enlightened me. Here was a modern voice that never said anything for the simple beauty of a phrase, indeed, never dared speak except to utter in the clearest words its most exacting vision. Here was a poet with an integrity that could be located in every line.

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity.
("Route")

To the mind of some readers, Oppen’s concern for clarity is possibly belied by his syntax. It is perhaps the most peculiar of any major modern poet, even more difficult than the philosophical phrasing of Wallace Stevens or the intellectually dense formal lines of Edgar Bowers. But it is Oppen’s desire to make every word take part in a meaningful creation that accounts for his syntax. When the words used to manipulate me in advertisements, politics, and social events are called on to express my most intimate experiences—my sense of being, my sense of identity—they are, by the time I come to use them, emptied of any potency by their trivialization in the everyday world of buying and spending. Words are

Ghosts
Which have run mad
In the subways
And of course the institutions
And the banks.
("A Language of New York")

By the time I come to speak of myself, I can say nothing.

He wants to say
His life is real,
No one can say why

It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public
Of rootless speech
("Of Being Numerous")

This rootless speech is what the poem calls a speech of “anti-ontology.” It has no being. The man trying to speak the meaning of his life has no language to speak it. It is unreal because politics and public life have appropriated it for ends other than an existential dialogue. The implication is that the ontological use of language must precede or take precedent over all other uses or the consequence is the loss of our ability to articulate being. We will be left always trying to recover the ontological use of language against the erosion of meaning by these other, less significant, uses.

And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.
("The Building of the Skyscraper")

The battle to recover these words for ontological use is what accounts for Oppen’s syntactic oddities. A further implication is that even poetry becomes ineffectual for certain things. Simply put, it has limits. If I think that language can accomplish everything, whether as an advertiser or a poet, I rob the true ontological root, which is everyday life, and render language ineffectual in its true and most valuable role: as an instrument for creating meaning.

Who are the people? that they are

That force within the walls
Of cities

Wherein the cars
Of mechanics
And executives

Echo like history
Down walled avenues
In which one cannot speak.
(Part 3, "A Language of New York")

It is only treating words with the utmost care, even as ghosts, that maybe,

Carefully they will restore
I hope to meaning
And to sense.
("A Narrative")

This is why Oppen’s poetry needs no politics or prose, but caries its integrity and dignity all on its own. Ontology precedes politics and art in every situation for Oppen. Ontology is the ground of everything. Thus he takes no word, no matter how slight, for granted. Oppen does not simply use words, he employs them. That is to say, he pays a price for them. Nothing is said unless his personal experience teaches the meaning of a word and that word comes to maturity through his personal experience of it in life. The significance of a word is restored through the experience of it in daily life.

It is the business of the poet
‘to suffer the things of this world
and to speak them and himself out.’
("The Building of the Skyscraper")

Thus we know in Oppen’s poetry, he is the speaker. The artful persona is nowhere in Oppen, for it is contrary to everything in his poetics. He does not separate his aesthetic concerns from daily ones, his life as a poet from his life as anything else. Thus, that famous, long silence was not without its poetic validity even though it was a consequence of pursuing a goal beyond the capacity of poetry. During that time Oppen experienced language and recovered it for his later poetic projects. Without that rescue in actual life experience, his poetry would have been mere linguistic exercises. But as we have them, they are one of the greatest authentic poetic pronouncements of 20th Century American poetry.