Post modernist poetics: Four views

Post modernist poetics: Four views Kevin Power Poetry as creation, turning over the ground of the man, 'the plot', 'the great myth' is the fiction of what man is. H. D. ... the arduous path of appearances. Heidegger A poetic is not merely a writing code but an attitude towards life. It hews vision & pushes language towards its frontiers. American poetry explores possibilities &produces poets that share the audacity that typifies their society. Cultural, military, & economic superiority on a world scale gives their language its edge & confidence. The Ame¬ rican poet speaks the tongue of power. The world has to listen. His verbs threaten economic sanctions or V-8 bombers. He has a technology that gives him immediate access to information & leaves the world's image-bank at his disposal. In an affluent society the rules are inva¬ riably crass & simplistic: do what you like but don't rock the boat. Although the individual poet can do little to corret the crazed antics of this particular jumbo jet, he can, at least, use its energy for his own ends, making of it the occasion for discovering the latent meaning of his world. In the sixties the poet shared in the protest against a series of social & political injustices. Ginsberg, Bly & Levertov all wrote againt the mur¬ derous emptiness that fuelled the Vietnam War. LeRoi Jones refused to use white publishers or white distribution circuits & thus echoed the black withdrawal from the 'Great Society'. Yet poetry has no power 51 to implement what it advocates, & sincerity all too easily subsides into gesture. A sharper focus was required, something where word & act could merge. The poet returned inwards towards the roots of his life & language, to the place in which a man lived & to the contours that formed his speech. He sought to define a base from which he could mark out his limits. Paradoxically a society cushioned by transient illu¬ sions & built on unrestrained material ambition has given birth to a poetic vision demanding clarity & spiritual regeneration: a poetic of immanence. The move is, then, towards an active language, to what Creeley has called a process of writing that made both the thing said & the way of saying it an integral event': the proposition, Gerhardt is to get it straight, right from the start (Olson) They want, in other words, a language that enacts rather than one that describes. Yet the fact remains that at a time when poets have, as Robert Duncan puts it, a responsability not to seek effect, a great many of them continue to do precisely that in almost every line. The 'poetry establishment' is still all too often dominated by concerns for inte¬ llectual dazzle, of providing texts for an 'explication de texte'. Richard Howard's Alone in America, one of the few extensive studies we have of American poetry after 1950, shows just how entrenched this attitude is In a list of forty-one poets he manages to exclude Duncan, Olson, Porn, McClure, Rothenberg, Oppen, Zukofsky in favour of such names as Bowers, Finkel, Moss & Weiss. It's a perverse selection with a marked preference for skating on brilliant but brittle surfaces. I would like in this essay to talk of poets who argue that a poetry without energy is a poetry without need, of poets who advance towards an adventure. A poem, like a man, is a becoming, part of the 'will to change'. Every moment of life is a struggle to come to life, & the poem shares this struggle to achieve a form that convinces. Form, consequently, ma¬ nifests itself as an immediate relationship with a particular in process. Creeley wants us to deal with the primary terms of experience. He wants us 'naked' in our own condition, 'in that necessary freshness, however exposed, because all things are particular & reality itself is the specific content of an instant's possibility'. We can find, perhaps, numerous examples of the energy charge behind this notational proce52 dure in Fielding Dawson's collection of short, stories, The Man who Changed Overnight. Dawson makes the American idiom act as a coun¬ terpoint to the sheer presence of the black & Puerto Rican kids on the street: They all streamed along the street loud mouthing & badmouthing a lot of things & people, in their theater of the streets, as they moved to stoops & luncheonettes, & the IRT & BMT subway at Union Square. They were loud, aggressive, & sexually flagrant. The black & PR girls were plump, fat, skinny & well-built, too, in tight sweaters & mini-skirts, as the boys freaked in sneak, tee-shirts, & tight black pants walking tall, keeping the neighbourhood on edge. Similarly Olson makes of the act of speech a 'high-energy construct' : He left him naked the man said, and nakedness is what one means that all start up to the eye & soul as though it had never happened before The poet's role is to function as a nexus of energy, prehending the energies of the world about him. The laying down of the words, the phrasing, flow from the rhythms &cadences of the poet's own body. Breath acquires a new significance. It serves as a measure of our in¬ volvement in the world outside, registering both physical effort & the graph of our emotions. Etymologically breath also relates to soul & spirit. Snyder refers to 'inspiration' as a taking in of the world & to 'expiration' as the returning of ones's presence to the world. Olson in¬ sists that breath is the most intimate of registers, accurately measuring the way in which the poet's energies are engaged. It catches & weighs sounds in whatever form they take, as syllable, as word, as line: the Heart, by way of the Breath, to the Line McClure refers directly to what he terms a 'body-language': 'What comes straight through the nerves & synapses of the body without re¬ circulation & channellings of habit & custom — straight from the spirit & unbuffered'. It's a view that owes much to Olson's concept of 'Pro53 prioception', by which he means 'sensibility within the organism by movement of its own tissues', or to say it more simply the body's own knowledge of itself. Poetry pushes at the frontiers of whatever range of experience is 'visible' to an age. It's a pulse for our matrix of viewing, etching mea¬ ning from the murmuring of the shell we live in. I would like now to concentrate specifically on four poets & the notions that underlie some of their most recent texts. I. Robert Duncan For Duncan the unique contribution of poetry to man is its reenactment of the invisible order of the Cosmos. The poem is an autonomous life-form, part of the ongoing evolution of forms. It's not a mimesis of life, it has life. He defines the poem as the mode whereby we become conscious of 'things as potentials for making the universe real ... celebrating or evoking ... what is'. The poet, living within this 'shell of murmurings', hears the meanings & invisible order that surround him as potentials. He doesn't create them, he discovers them. The poem is a struggle to make life actual. The poet works with what is actually happening — as event, as memory, as imaginative association. He deals with whatever comes into the area of composition, or the 'field' as Olson accurately chooses to call it. He has to take immediate decisions con¬ cerning the tensions of the word both as sound & as idea, & the se¬ parate parts of the poem assume, in their larger identity, related & finally interchangeable roles. 'The artist ... works with all parts of the poem as polysemous, taking each thing of the composition as generative of meaning, aresponse to & a contribution to the building of form'. Duncan sees! the word as much more than simply a part of speech carrying an idea or part of an idea, as far as he's concerned the word lives & has an urge to create. 'The universe strives to be what it truly is to be. 'The poem that moves me when I write is an active presence in which I work. I am not concerned whether it is a good 01 bad likeness to some convention men hold; for the Word is for me Living Flesh & the body of my own thought & feeling, my own presence, becomes the vehicle for the process of genetic information.' The words store meanings beyond their surface sense. 'For words are not thoughts but ideas in things, & the poet must attend not to what he means to say but to what what he says means.' 54 Yet the word itself is, of course, made up of a multiplicity of ele¬ ments, & thus we are forced back again to the notion of form within form &the interdependence of all the diverse parts: The vowels are physical corridors of the imagination emitting passionately breaths of flame Despite the rhetoric Duncan simply means that the vowels can lead the movement of the poem, that the poet must listen to the particular music underhand & recognise that it has its own volition. The poem is, there¬ fore, an organism, part of an ecology of forms. Duncan speaks of it in the following terms: 'It has never seemed to me that the true form of a poem was a convention or an ideal of form, but, as in life, a form having its information in the language of our human experience, as our bodies have their information in the life-code of the species & our spirit in the creative will ... The beginning of the poem stirs in every area of my consciousness, for the DNA code it will use toward its incarnation is a code of ressources my life pattern itself carries; not only thought & feeling but all the nervous & visceral & muscular intelligences of the body are moved. Awakening, listening, seeing, sen¬ sing, — to work with the moving weight & duration of movement; to cooperate in the aroused process. Attending. From the first inspiration, breathing with the new breath. Man's myths move in his poetry as they move in his history, as in the morphology of his body all his ancient evolution is rehearsed & indvidual; all of the vertebrate ima gination moves to create itself anew in his spine.' Dante Etudes, his most recent work, achieves a wonderfully modu¬ lated revelation of this process at work: a poetic elaborated within 'the swarm of human speech', totally in tune with its music, an intimate flowing of ideas: he but imitates in noises that he makes this speech in every sense the world surroundng him Body & mind serve thus as sounding-boards: to speak my mind unfolds the secret of the heart breathe word of it, take soundings in the passage out 55 He moves back into his childhood, living in a surge of presences: from the language we first heard endearments whisperings infant song & reveries a world we wanted to go out into to come to ourselves into, organizations in the sound of them verging upon meaning Duncan believs that the child seizes the underlying essences rather than the surface subject matter. The story provides meanings & from them the child can make the world real for himself. The form is truly what the poet makes of what is happening: It is the ordination of the whole in each event intent our art but to articulate & know the direction of justice thru & thru He talks of this fusion! between poet & poem in his superb essay Truth & Life of Myth: 'Both poem & poet are part of an ongoing cosmic order where the body cells, the verbal units, are only part of the larger order: if I take the truth of things to be the truth of their belongingness to this form of forms, having its completion in the end of time & space, surely beyond my individual comprehension, in my poetics I let go of striving to claim some authenticity that arises from the store of human experience acknowledged in the language that gives whatever depth to my own experience, a feel of form acknowledged in ist own inception to be no more than feeling ... It is not that I take the nature of man, my own nature, to be written in a secret key, but believing all Creation to be in process an evolution & revelation of Itself, & the meaning of the parts, meaning of all definitions, to be posited finally in a totality of resonances, I hold too that the meaning & form of any poem is momen¬ tous, yes: but has its motive beyond the conscious & personal intent or realization of the poet. My poetry has, as my individual body has, its own interior systematic structure regardless of 'me'. For Duncan poetry is: 'a place of first permission' 'an eternal pasture folded in all thought' 56 II. Robert Creeley Creeley sees the poem as the immediate & intimate measure of ex¬ perience, not a reflection on it but a way of being in it: Measures ways of being in one's life happy or unhappy never dead to it The instant is both shape & law, literally the way a man defines him¬ self within the surrounding field of activity. Man lives & takes place within what Cage calls 'a total field of non-focused multiplicity'. The form of the man & of the poem are consequences of the way this field is dealt with. Creeley acknowledges how Olson succeeded in chan¬ ging his notion of the normal idea of progression in a poem: 'seeing a poem as a field ... we assume a sense that points to one basic meams of coherence; a relevant & actual tension between divers parts present, to come to (in this sense only) what we call the 'whole'. 'Man creates within a changing reality & as the terms of reality change the terms of consciousness must also change to stop man being overwhelmed. Choice produces the tension, the cohering we call 'form'. Yet Creeley rejects the poem as a vehicle for attitudes, arguing that his thoughts necessa¬ rily inform the poem & provide its essential climate. If a poem is made into a stretcher for ideas then the poem fails because the real urgency of occasion lies somewhere outside it. 'A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem. Our anger cannot exist usefully without its objects, but a des¬ cription of them is also a perpetuation. There is that confusion —one wants the thing to act on, & yet hates it. Description does nothing, it includes the object— it neither hates nor loves.' To use Pound's phrase, it's the 'quality of emotion' that matters. It's not what the poem talks about that is significant, but 'the senses & the intensity of the emotion thus engendered'. Creeley wants the poem to exist in its Own right & that's impossible as long as some subject significantly elsewhere is involved. 'There had' he observes, 'to be an independence derived from the fact that words are things too': here is where there is 57 This isn't to say that Creeley doesn't have his particular obsessions: T can recognize looking back that some concerns have been persistent: the terms of marriage, relations between man & woman, sense of isolation, sense of place in the intimate measure'. It's an accurate lo¬ cating of theme. Creeley's way of experiencing emotion is to tighten it up, to make the synapses into taut springs. Personal relationships are exposed, abused even: 'I want it all, so I tend at times, understan¬ dably, to exhaust my friends — keep pushing, pushing, pushing ... I so love the intensity of people that I can't let anything stop until it's literally exhausted': I think I grow tensions like flowers in a wood where nobody goes. Each wound is perfect encloses itself in a tiny imperceptible blossom making pain. Pain is a flower, like that one like this one, like that one, like this one. The poem is not an argument but an event. The first line is a literal sensation. The flowers are tensions. They take the shape of pain. Creeley is experiencing the fearful plucking of himself by himself. The sensation can be traced back to echoes buried in the mystery & meanings of a childhood game 'I love you, I love you not'. He finds the same wild plucking, the same presence of terror right on top of him. The final line is close to the skin, its threat imminent. Olson's dictum is clearly relevant: 'that which exists through itself is what is called meaning'. And it's Creeley himself who adds further elaboration: 'that kind of meaning, that kind of signification, is what a poem is. It does so exist through itself, through the agency of its own activity: the¬ refore is, therefore, has meaning'. For Creeley words are not mannerisms of involvement but con¬ tours of self. 'Speech is an assertion of one man, by one man, since each speech has its own character that produces form'. The sound & the act of saying cannot be separated from what is said. It's the same point that William Carlos Williams makes so persuasively in his Auto¬ biography: 'The poet thinks with his poem in that lies his thought, & 58 that in itself is the profundity.' Creeley, in much the same way, stresses that the real intensity lies in the song & that he hears the melody long before he reaches an understanding as to what it all might mean: 'the organization of poetry has moved too a further articulation in which rhythmic structure now becomes not only evident but a primary cohe¬ rence in the total organization of what's being experienced: Who am I identity singing Birds singing measure distance intervals between echo silence Identity comes when the words move in the measures of song. But Creeley is not talking about some mysterious secondary level of mea¬ ning, he means an integrated act —both sound & semantic meaning: «Since words are the material, & words have meaning in other senses, that fact also has pertinence. But I do not feel that thing in language we call a poem has to do with a literal issue of semantic meaning. Yet that aspect of meaning is a material also, & clearly enters into the issue of image, or statement, or all such affects of something said': Light weighs light, to the hand to the eye feel it in two places. Meaning has to be tested & Creeley accepts Wittgenstein's proposi¬ tion that meaning is use & that usage coheres value. Tradition is in essence an aspect of what anyone is now thinking, & not what someone once thought. Redefinition takes place when the situations are tense & dramatic enough to make the old linguistic order crumble. Creeley uses not so much common words but a 'common mode of address, the way of speaking that's commonly met with in conversation ... that fact in a poem is very distinct from that fact in conversation. And I think what really was gained from that sense of source in common speech was the recog¬ nition that the intimate knowing of a way of speaking ... what's gained in that way ... offers the kind of intensity that poetry peculiarly admits.' 59 of men.' This is a crucial distinction for McClure. The intellectivity takes its essential sustenance from meditation &physical experience; information from books & media is simply a secondary source. The individual has to set about realising his own physical experience. Bioalchemical investigations — concerns with the shapes & meanings of bodies — are inseparable from poetics: we are hunters of protein grail nuevo alchemists man, woman & babe deer, bear & virus, cypress worms & bacterium ... McClure is calling for a vital destructuring of our system. He goes back to evolutionary origins in an attempt to get it right, quoting H. T. Odum in support of his argument: 'If the origin of life was a step by step capsulation of molecules in the sea ... the earliest forms must have been so large & had so little structuring that they have left little in the fossil record': And so we stretch out it is a muscular sensation from the neck & shoulders through the arm And we are not in search of poetry but luck that in ten trillion Milky Ways that make a molecule within our chest or a billion feathered songs sung from horseback on a bison hunt were beams of light flash here & there & make new colors out of dust what we emit in Fields of Thought The human organism still possesses clear traces of its paleolithic past. We hardly know amything of the way in which traits, needs, urges, retained from evolutionary experience condition our behaviour today. So far as innate responses are concerned they are still the ones that had developed aeons ago to adapt mankind to conditons that then pre¬ vailed but which have long ceased to exist. Evidence of this can be seen, for example, in the way the body mobilises itself before fear or danger: €6 Mycelia Pluck out mycelia of social personality from mamml style Neolithic acts in mime of torture Turning, twisting, very fast. Pain distorts from pain. Politics is doomed & meat is free to feel soft pleasures beams scents tastes & inheritance of self from selves. The intersections of the memory are points. A net. Within — forgotten things McClure's poetry takes in the surrounding world & whatever is taken in is given back in altered condition. As Dubos observes 'everything we perceive & interpret by thinking processes 'becomes translated into organic processes'. McClure seeks to reveal & to explore the language of these processes. His 99 Theses bring the eye to focus: 1 12 17 23 35 51 60 68 70 81 99 Man is a carnivore experiencing himself The societx is a cage for the mammal. The wolf sings The physiological body is pure spirit There is not intelligence but intelligences Meat is thought Revolt is biological There is one languace — gesture, voice, & vibration of body The body is elf land Madness is temporary & natural Meat is moving cave in the solid air Let me conclude my remarks with a brief mention of two other works that have appeared in the last few years that also explore the possibilities of 'open' form. Paul Blackburns's Journals are an intimate record of how he faces up to the tragic issues of his life. They show us his love of place & person, & his knowledge of approaching death from illness. The perceptions flow, the instant is the event. Robert Kelly notes in his introduction to the Journals: 'What form can be disco¬ vered as one moves through life? So his forms are always innovative, sometimes mimetic (because he loved descriptions & people & simple 67 alinements & catalogues), but more often directly expressive of their interaction of the thing seen with the man seeing's. He might have been talking of Blackburn's 'La Lisiere': How we move about the wealth of friendships: too often at the edge of it How rare, the move to center where we live Salvage, that word. Each of us stands shyly at the edge of woods fearing the valley chary of the sun waiting This essay has argued a preference for the poem as process rather than as the objetive correlative of a complex experience where the poem represents something outside itself & can be recognised by any reader equipped with similar knowledge. The notion of poem as pro¬ cess insists on the fact that the poem refers to nothing outside itself. It is ontologically unique, & is the issue of a primary activity of the mind or creative imagination. In the Loom Kelly shows, for example, how in the strands of language the activity of love can find its mate: a poetry that discovers its meaning in the act: But the shape of love like the loom of morning could cast before it a light on the shape of things made realer by the goal towards which it & I & all hopeful things were moving. To make love. The pain was real, & warps me still — but that was realer everything led to you. The connection is too delicate to stress €8 THE TEXTS Robert Duncan: Dante, The Institute of Further Studies, Buffalo, 1974 The Truth & Life of Myth, Sumac, 1968. Robert Creeley: Thirty Things, Black Sparrow, Santa Bárbara, 1974 Away, Black Sparrow, 1976. Quick Graph, Four Seasons Foundation, 1970. Con¬ texts of Poetry, Four Season® Foundation, 1973. Ed Dorn: Gunslinger, Wingbow, 1976. The Poet, The People, The Spirit, Talonbooks, 1976. Recollections of Gran Apacheria, Turtle Island, Berkeley, 1974. Michael McClure: Rare Angel, Black Sparrow, 1974. September Black¬ berries, New Directions, 1975. Jaguar Skies, New Directions, 1976. Meat Science Essays, City Lights, 1966. Paul Blackburn: Journals, Black Sparrow, 1976. Robert Kelly: The Loom, Black Sparrow, 1976. Fielding Dawson: The Man Who Changed Overnight, Black Sparrow, 1976. 69