|
|
| |
|
"In a period of American poetry in which the most visible and indeed much of the very best poetry has been written with hooks galore - whether outrageous or flamboyant or hip or morally uplifting, the arrogant or agonized or transcendent - Barbara Guest has used no hooks - and this has allowed her to create a textually saturated and satisfying poetry that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, the flickering in translucent surfaces that we call painterly for lack of a term to chart the refusal of a pseudo-depth of field that remains a ghostly presence in much of the poetry of our time."
[You can read Charles Bernstein's essay
As a poet, what do you think about "depth"? And while you are at it, what do you think, as a poet, about ghosts? Please relate your answer to the matter of poetic form. | |
|
Beth Anderson wrote an essay called Imperturbable Things : On Still-Life Poetics (which was #5 in the Impercipient Lecture Series put out by Evans & Moxley). She looked at some "painterly" poems by Stevens, Guest & others from standpoint maybe similar to Bernstein here. The idea is that poetry is a progressive force for a demythologized, egalitarian materialism - by analyzing and rejecting all forms of idealizing/poeticizing rhetoric. I thought it was really well-written, though I disagreed with its premises all the way through. Maybe if you take these premises to the limit, as Bernstein tries to do, it can be understood as "revolutionary": in a rationalist post-Enlightenment sense, uprooting all remnants of antique, medieval and romantic spiritual "aura" around language on behalf of the demystified human will. So Bernstein & others attach themselves to abstract expressionism in painting (doing away with the "hooks"), to deconstruction in criticism (doing away with the "aura"), and will round up any stray calves in the field of outsider & marginal art (even if those strays are from a different ranch) to forward this project. | |
|
How does all this relate in terms of as you ask, poetic form? I guess for me, beauty in poetry reflects & absorbs both music and the visual arts. These are stirred at a depth-level you might call "the sublime" - and it's this depth itself which I think I respond to, in Mandelstam particularly. It goes down to some kind of uncanny sea - bottom of human speech, where the blind seer expresses cosmic relations - "deep speaks unto deep". This is real, and it's beautiful in the sense of speed, shorthand, concision - the way scientists describe the "beauty" of a theorem, and maybe it's something you would relate to certain aspects of Zen or Asian art (which I don't know much about). "Oh please. The 'sublime aura' you feel to emanate from the surface - quite flat by the way - of a Giotto is nothing but the ghostliness of a nostalgic surplus washed up by Capital onto the littered beach of an alienated culture. Aura, too, at the millennium, is a commodity."In responding, please speak to the notion of avant-gardeness in light of the medieval ideal you evoke. Henry Gould: There's nothing more Scholastic than asserting the liberating power of Reason, as your Buffalo-scholar is doing. Reason, laughter, and demystification will always be avant-garde. The century (the millennium?) just past, I don't need to repeat, was marked by acceleration - the accelerated debunking of aesthetic & cultural shibboleths, and the often brutal reactionary counter- attacks which followed. But I guess I must simply reiterate in slightly different words what I consider my own experience in making poetry. Art operates both below and above the level of the rational intellect. Not necessarily in conflict with it - in fact the process seems to be a matter of synthesizing on all levels. The conflict comes when rationalist ideologues pretend to "explain" what should be considered important or relevant art. You have to be more than an over-all "critic" to be a good ART critic. Kent Johnson: So among poets of this accelerated century, who are most important to you? A good seven or nine, if you will, with perhaps a few words on what moves you in each. Please include within your answer (without attribution or quotation) four or more of your favorite lines from any of these poets. Henry Gould: When I was young I took piano lessons, and my teacher Mrs. Elledge would give me little plaster busts of great composers each time I finished a music book to her satisfaction. It's getting dark, everybody's gone home. I'm not very articulate about these matters. You feel an affinity, a personal closeness, a sense of conviction or rightness emanating from the poems. Hart Crane, in spite of his occasional over-reaching, has a very refined ear. Accolade thou dost bestow / Of anonymity time cannot raise . . . Vallejo is another tremendous poet. I hate pantheons, favorites. I love Montale. Felicita del sugghero / Abbandonata alla corrente . . . Mandelstam is my all-around best. There are things in Stevens which are utterly adorable . . . other things that just seem tired & sad. Still, he's up there for me. I'm not a good reader of poetry. Akhmatova has sent chills up my spine, which I agree with Emily is a good test of poetry. And ships sail slowly down the Neva. Indescribable intensity of presence, greatness shining through all their exaggerations, foibles & lapses - that goes for all of them. Presence, heart, HEART. That's what makes song - the gift itself and FORTITUDE. Lots of famous poets think they're singing heart but it's testosterone most of the time. Tsvetaeva's prose - I haven't figured out her poetry yet. Elena Shvarts - "Leonardo". She's building a magnificent sound there, pretty much unrecognized, in Petersburg. Pound had a big impact. Olson to a lesser extent. Zukofsky is amazing, but I haven't come to grips with him yet. I think his popularity among his arcane followers put a damper on my interest. These are big shot names. There are quieter voices I like - Ivan Zhdanov. A swarm of crows / were discussing my fate. Fantastic bitter brevity & wit in Zhdanov - beautiful, beautiful, like the ravens in Andrei Rublev. "This is the icon of St. Michael - he will protect you." I've left a lot of poets out too: Yeats, Bishop, Berryman, Berrigan . . . pantheons tend to leave out the subtle helping hands, nearby & invisible. Plus I'm at work & not thinking very calmly . . . Kent Johnson: Nearly all the poets you mention were or are masters, and deeply so, of traditional prosody. Do you think there are too many young poets today who want to "make it new" without having first learned to (figuratively speaking) draw? In answering, please tell us what you, as a poet deeply attentive to form, think about the New Formalists. Henry Gould: There have always been too many young poets, but they weed themselves out. New Formalism is a snore. Too many isms - all of them forms of literalism. The language poets & postmods want to harp the materiality of language - well, I say the word isn't material, the word is Psyche, it's a meaning-flash made of SENTENCES, not words. Humboldt would agree with me. Just as a painting isn't only paint - it's an image or a dream. The New Formalists want to have a movement in the bowels of the beaneries . . . well, I say technique is never "literal". Mandelstam said future critics would study the "impulse" of the text, the pre-text: I think one way of thinking of that is in terms of generic & rhetorical framing arguments - what is the poet trying to get across, & with what rhetorical & literary resources? These things come BEFORE the grain of meter or rhyme-patterning (so boring today from every vantage point, avant-garde or traditionalist, metered or "free"). And the fact is . . . the fact is . . . experience is allegorical & symbolical down to the wee hairs on your earlobes - that "green man" John Clare expressed his lines lying on the sod through bones & stars - the poet "speaks" and the "speech" surrounds the "letter" of the "spirit" like a frame - so intricate, beyond "explanation" - Shakespeare's finesse . . . voodoo of sound - what Ed Dorn in an interview called the ultimate poetic demand - ie. the dedication not to "expression" but to the imperatives of the spirit - "divining". Orthodox or heretical, it's all voodoo. | |
|
Kent Johnson: Which seems to make it a kind of poetic ecumenism you're proposing, this "voodoo of sound, orthodox or heretical" - that there is something pre-material, pre-language running beneath all the sects and denominations of philosophy and prosody . . . Not form or theory as the defining issue, but something else. Actually, Pessoa would be an interesting example, wouldn't he: The orthodox Reis, the heretical de Campos, their master, the "formless" Caeiro, each a singular speaking, as you say, arising in ways ultimately mysterious to the poet and "his" readers. Do you think? Mention in your answer, please, those Russian dolls inside dolls that are inside dolls. Language SchoolThis seems to me, in good part, about those mysteries of poetry's provenance. Could you comment on the third stanza and tell us if the poet is the one who throws the ball or if she or he is the ball that is thrown? In answering, please speak about translation, mention Walter Benjamin, and quote something from Mandelstam. Henry Gould: Ah, yes, that is such a beautiful poem, I don't even know why. It speaks about the distances between languages & between peoples, but in terms of tenderness - the distance between experience in general and language in general. Walter Benjamin - I'm sure Walter Benjamin would understand. I heard an interview with James Kugel, a Harvard prof who just published a book called "Great Poems of the Bible" - focuses on the specific problem of poetry-in-translation. He happened to quote some beautiful lines from Jeremiah, about when the "almond flowers out of season". Now you know the almond flowers in midwinter. Midwinter spring is its own season, someone wrote. And how important the almond is symbolically in Judaism (Aaron's staff was a flowering almond - the almond is also the "eye", etc.). And how important Mandelstam was for Celan. And the fact that Mandelstam means "almond stem". And the fact that "mn" or "mndle" or "mnt" meant axle or pivot - "Min" was also the (mythical?) "first" Egyptian king. Now you asked for a Mandelstam line: I could quote the one about "os" (Osip, wasp) - wanting to be like the wasp in summer listening to "the axis (or buzzing) of the earth, the axis of the earth". Or the line describing the brotherhood of all people like a bee's eye: "maybe we are Hagia Sophia, with a million eyes". But I think in the context of the Honig (German for "honey") anthology & the Amichai poem I will simply quote: "Sisters - heaviness and tenderness - the same insignia." But to answer your question, I think the ball in Amichai's poem is the poetic word, growing softer and deeper each time it hits the hard wall of experience; as Mandelstam put it "Time silvers the plow / and the poet's voice." Kent Johnson: At the beginning of "The Task of the Translator" - that astonishing poem masquerading as essay - Benjamin says, "No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener." What is the relationship between being a poet and not caring about what the living think of you? In answering, please refer to Dante, gothic cathedrals, and your long work, "Stubborn Grew the Rose." Henry Gould: Well, there are at least 2 ways of looking at that blackbird. Somebody asked Mandelstam for a definition of poetry and he said: "The poet's sense of being right." Ed Dorn similarly wrote in Gunslinger: To a poet all authorityThe word feeds the poet; as Jesus says in the Gospel, "I have bread of which you do not know." & it can breed the most excruciating arrogance as well as the most abject devotion to the sources of that nourishment. Everybody cares what people think of them, everybody's got feelings & so on. But gothic cathedrals like the Divina Commedia are incitements to build. Poetry in general is such an incitement. It's got its own agenda, believe me. I've shortened the title of that long poem, to Stubborn Grew. It's volume I of a 3-volume work. I'm at work now on the final volume, called July. I'm thinking of titling the whole thing The Forth of July. What I mean by poetry having its own agenda is that the design of this poem, its motivations, were hidden from me when I started it - but I was articulating them in the very first pages of Stubborn, unknowingly. I mean IT had designs on ME. Kent Johnson: Tell us more here. Can you describe your Stubborn Grew undertaking in more detail? Your response to this question need mention neither God nor cathedrals. But please talk about Pound, Crane, and Olson in relation to your engagement with the building of a long poem. | |
|
Henry Gould: Well, I may have to mention Mandelstam again too. Must seem like a true idée fixe I have on that Russian. But I'm not always thinking about him - he's just been there at some crucial moments over the last 20 years or so. One such moment was about 3-4 years ago, when I started this long poem. I've been interested in the long poem since the early 80s. People consider the whole serial/magnum opus thing boring & pretentious, I can understand that. But if you refer back to my "Shakespeare/Bible" episode I mentioned to you, you might see how somebody like me might need a Big Poem to lever that kind of experience. I was reading Pound, Olson, Zukofsky, Williams - & a lot of 2ndary material - curious how The Long Poem seems like such unfinished business in the U.S. & I had a couple trial runs - wrote a long complicated sequence called Spring Triptych, very structured mathematically & otherwise. Followed that a few years later with something more Olsonian & open, called In RI. But I wasn't really satisfied. Stubborn Grew began pretty much in desperation. I needed to break out of my own long-term over-arching "ideas". & then I happened to re-read Mandelstam's late Voronezh poems, so saturated with "black earth", earthiness - so "formally-informal", so heavy-light, so happy-sad. & I started writing these short connected passages with that sound in mind - semi-connected passages, in quatrains, abba, roughly. I tried to loosen up my speech & my whole approach. | |
|
Kent Johnson: Well, I have to admit that you've lost me a bit on the Jubilee thing. But how about this: You've read Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum and commented on it at Poetics. To my mind, Rasula is one of the most brilliant writers around - both as critic and poet. In an essay, he says, "(T)here have been texts, episodes of writing, concentrated and unremittingly sent from beyond my local and partial resolve or will." I'll take the liberty of expanding on this comment by telling you that once I had a drink with Rasula and he told me (soberly), that his magnificent poem, "The Field & Garden of Circe" had its genesis on an afternoon when a ghostly hand appeared before his eyes and began to write the first lines of the poem on his study wall. No drugs, apparently, were involved. I want to ask you: Do you believe him? How important to poetry is an openness to supernatural experience? In answering, please refer to at least three poets you admire where (as in the case of Rasula) "linguistic experiment" and a predisposition to mystical vision overlap. from One Evening (Early Spring)Kent Johnson: I hope you're right about the loving heart. Anything you'd like to a add in conclusion? Thank you, and in doing so, please end with an allusion to music. Henry Gould: Well, I'd hate to close on a major chord of triumphal idealism. Your SUNY graduate interlocutor has reason to doubt. The seamless non-Hegelian flow from patriarchal Tradition through nucleic Family and Gradgrind Economics and confidence-Man Capitalism into supra-rational Poetic Mumbo-Jumbo to a hermetically-sealed Aestheticism is a tasty Millennial Potpourri of rotten eggs: New Age Wonder!! Cream- Colored 3-piece Suit!! No, the only Jubilee involves Lent. Unleavened. "I shall not drink wine with you again until the Kingdom of God has come." Whatever is spiritually genuine isn't a matter of words only, but hands backing up words - handshakes, promises. And whatever is genuine in poetry has to do with an asceticism of the spirit and solidarity of the body and service of the whole person on behalf of the future beyond anything the pretentious intellect has yet "imagined". A humane civilization. Another great poet of this century was Joseph Brodsky. I met him once when he read in Providence: during the discussion session after his reading, I got up & naively asked: "Do you have a favorite poem of Mandelstam?" Brodsky said with a sly grin: "Yes. I do." The audience laughed, I felt like a fool. But I brought him some wine in a plastic cup after the reading, and he was warm, on the level. I asked him if he'd be willing to look at some of my poems (the poor guy) & he kindly said: "Sure. It will give me something to read back at the hotel." Brodsky wrote once: "Humanity was put on earth for one purpose: to make civilization." He was a great Russian poet, much touted & blandly misunderstood in the west. His civilization is the one I am talking about, with an added dose of American equality. (Minor chord: three notes, in a descending pattern, played for blonde Heidi Johnson, across the street) (at her own piano) (in Hopkins, Minnesota, "Mendelssohn" neighborhood, in 1961, when I was nine). | |
|
Kent Johnson is editor of Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala), and Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry (Michigan). He is translator of A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua (West End Press). You can read his translations of some poems of Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz (translated with Forrest Gander) in Jacket # 8. Photo, left: Kent Johnson, left, with friends Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith. (Photo by Frank, bartender.)
| |
|
|