Not-So-Commonplace 4

The discursive writer writes as an act of conscious will, and that conscious will, along with the symbolic system he employs for it, is set over against the body of things he is describing.

But the poet, who writes creatively rather than deliberately, is not the father of his poem; he is at best a midwife, or, more accurately still, the womb of Mother Nature herself:  her privates, he, so to speak.

The fact that revision is possible, that a poet can make changes in a poem not because he likes them better but because they are better, shows clearly that the poet has to give birth to the poem as it passes through his mind.

He is reponsible for delivering it in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from all the navel-strings and feeding-tubes of his ego.

-- Northrop Frye

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Street Dharma

Before sainthood, in the Catholic Church, certain attestations must occur, stages be met.  Beatification is one such stage.  

And it's that term, picked up by the poet/novelist Jack Kerouac, himself descended from French/Canadian Catholic 'stock', that became applied to the kind of writing he did, and the kind of surprising glory he wished others to witness in the outsiders about whom he wrote.

The 'outside', for his time, were those worn thin by a major economic depression and a horrendous world war, and in particular people in urban centers, not a few of whom were of African descent, the very people who were vibrating with jazz and a sense that it was time to come 'inside'.

Many who now try to imitate his spontaneity don't do it well.

Many who dismiss his art would do well to note the seriousness and even religiosity embedded in his wildness.

He died poorly.  He lived sincerely.

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The Homecoming

This filmed Harold Pinter play was shown on PBS years ago, in the 70s.  

Despite being 'film', it gives itself away clearly as 'stage', 'theater', an art more highly dependent on actorial talent and most especially, on words.  Rarely does a movie script contain anything like poetry.  Not infrequently, drama contains ample amounts of it.  Certainly Pinter.

Despite our recent generation or two (or three) having their enthusiasm dedicated to cinema, look at what movies miss:  charged, in-your-face, real emotional conflict.

This clip handles two adjacent scenes, the first between Ian Holm and Vivian Merchant, the second between Holm and Paul Rogers.  The play itself, housing 4 men and a woman, lets us know who the outnumbered actually are.  Hint:  it's not the one who doesn't wear trousers.

You won't regret watching this.  The eight minutes you spend will spark your evening.

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Dark, Two

In first reading -- memorizing! -- some Theodore Roethke poems, I had no idea he was crazy.  Let me soften that.  He was suffering from schizophrenia of a kind.  

None of the poems say that to me.  They're observant, grounded, solid.  No extravagance, no wildness.

That idea held throughout my reading of 'In A Dark Time', housed in a volume where critics laid out their 'takes' and Roethke had a last say.  I remember nothing written by any of them on the issue of insanity.

So, even when the poem itself reads, What's madness but nobility of soul/At odds with circumstance, I take that as a comparative expression, as something nearer to what we, the sane, might imagine than what he means us to understand by the poem.  

He pushes on, then, soon, to what might be the start of a transformation, pressing the membrane of 'circumstance' to find more room:  

A man goes far to find out what he is --

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Was I instructed at the time to liken this to Teresa of Ávila, to Juan de la Cruz?  Somehow my memory connects these.

Roethke's last stanza:

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.

My soul, like some heat-maddened fly,

Keeps buzzing at the sill.  Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

This so obviously wants to read as a mystic experience.  Do we reduce it to neurology?  

Whether or not such experience might not occur if certain medications were present (or would occur if certain others were), should we eliminate the 'phenomenological authenticity' of it?

Our history is filled with myth.  Our lives are fuller for it.

There's always a price.  We can settle the bill by selling our bodies as meat.  We can also contract to pay it as adventurers to the end.

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Dark, One

When you 'do' poetry, it's a matter of writing and reading and reciting aloud, too.

When you 'do' poetry in writing,  that means you produce it or you write about others.

Being an analyst or critic -- even an appreciator commenting a bit -- carries risks.  

For one, there's seldom full agreement on anything, in no small measure because it's hard to establish anything worth saying that doesn't involve weighing subtleties or taste.  A casual position you take may deeply offend either the writer or another reader.  

It may put you in a world of polemics radically far from the poetry itself.  Academic departments and personal reputations stake out territory.  Even outside the professional area, egos always hang in the balance.

Another risk is being flatly wrong.  Misreadings happen.  Things fly far over one's head, sometimes, and observers evaluate analysts as well as poets.  It's your dignity lost, you goof!

With that as minimal preface and humble, innoculating defense, let me catch a bit of Emily Dickinson's  #419 We grow accustomed to the Dark.

Into the poem, she ends: 

And so of larger -- Darknesses --

Those Evenings of the Brain --

When not a Moon disclose a sign --

Or Star -- come out --within --

The Bravest -- grope a little --

And sometimes hit a Tree

Directly in the Forehead --

But as they learn to see --

Either the Darkness alters --

Or something in the sight

Adjusts itself to Midnight --

And Life steps almost straight.

Are we dealing with contemplative seriousness or depression?  Are we solving a metaphysical problem or coming to grips with ailment?  Not sure there's a solution given the word 'almost'.  

Right.  We can adjust, we can learn anew.  But 'darkness' isn't handled, necessarily, isn't finished-off or tamed.  When we think so, we may just be convincing ourselves that it's changed when in actuality we've changed.  

This could be a kind of 'making-do'.  This could be a 'caving-in', adopting the other side as one's own, making the best of a bad thing.  If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.  Calling defeat victory; diminishment, growth. Deceiving oneself in order to 'move on'.  Making league with forces sinister because that's life.

Maybe without fully admitting any of that.


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Listen. Do You Want To Know A Secret?

Although titled 'T.S. Eliot', the video's reader is Michael Gough, a British actor whose imdb CV fails to show an appearance on one or some episodes of The Loretta Young Show in the 1950s where I remember Loretta featuring him as an honored player.

He's had a very durable career, and I do remember him in some of the horror films shown on his list and also in the more somber or sinister roles he's otherwise done.

Here he voices Eliot's 'Prufrock', a modern fool for love, a model of dull despair, of loneliness, a manipulee in the sophisticated hands of sexual puppetry, ripe for risible gossip, a man deadened to the prospect of anything but ironic response to his outreach.

When a trained British actor -- Gough, in this instance -- recites that which is -- though memorable on the page, in the mind's ear -- depressing, it is the high delivery that carries the poetry to us.  Consonants crackle and pop and kick.  Vowels open abysses and squeeze to a shriek.  All that within a classical containment.

Americans.  I'm one.  We do not have this music.  Our English can be welcoming or plain-spoken or hushed or rowdy or sincere;  it can have brute poetry -- at its best, for example, in David Mamet.  Southerners come close to the lyricism:  Tennessee Williams, Capote, and (his greatness!) William Faulkner.  

Americans.  I'm one.  We do not have this music.  It's in our basic culture to despise aristocracy.  Try as British working class heroes might, in their closer resentment, want to make His Lordship or Her Ladyship kiss their own Arses, these mates are still rooted more directly to Shakespeare, his modeling of great mankind, than they may be comfortable to admit.  

His breath.  Shakespeare's breath.

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My End Of It

In nature, there is also ‘nothing poetry’. (That is, nothing that is p.)

There’s stuff ‘out there’, all right (as I am to you, for instance).

But we name it. In ‘reality’, it’s the No-Name Stuff.

Let me qualify that, even.

‘Reality’ is what we see it to be. Perhaps in many situations what we agree it to be?

As a language gal, you even sing and act it!

Coleridge, a man of his Romantic time. Coleridge, whose words helped create how people felt the ‘reality’ of their time to be. Even though it was and wasn’t.

(This is a response to Coleridge poem lines that begin 'In Nature there is nothing melancholy' posted on dara weinberg's blog: style over substance)

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Daughter Lines, Enlarged

In the numberless numbers, the late night of their weight,

Lie philosopher puzzles, a jumble of man's talk

As if somebody listened.  Men strolled along porches

And taught, not what they knew, but what they yearned --

The head for the heart, waiting for love to appear.

After working the numbers, after accounts for the who who reads them,

I took a midnight walk, and, with you, conversed 

As if you were there.  We passed in the halogen halo of lamps 

And laughed, not at the wit, as at the fact that it was we,

We who walked as the night reared its ear.

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Daughter Lines

After working the numbers, after accounts for the who who reads them,

I took a midnight walk, and, with you, conversed

As if you were there.  We passed in the halogen halo of lamps

And laughed, not at the wit, as at the fact that it was we,

We who walked as the night reared its ear.


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Guest Of Shakespeare, Ghost Of Stevens, Geist Myself

Mastery:

The realization that even a master sometimes can't strike fire from a wet match.

That no one's reading.

That reading never was what it was thought to be and that only now that glancing is the skill do we see that it was all along.

That art skips from its focused impulsion to artifact at c speed, and back from shard to inspiration at the stillbirth rate of neolithic dirt men.

That stumbling and tumbling to sing every day without pain is what we want

Waking without a weight

That any idea may just be rationalization.

That the zen of it is that the world both isn't and is

That we're both here and not

Blinking and mugging and ruling it all


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Unused Words Worthy

(Have been waiting for a poem to come by)

:

Shim

Gavotte

Spaniel

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The Echo Of The Classic Voice

After hearing a piece and shutting it in the closet of my head,

After the mark of three full days, its melodies rise.

An art, containing spirit, might make quick, but never be, the dead.

Like a holy corpse, what matters never really dies. 

'Indian Winter'

Silveira, his gusto.  The travel his fingers take, pan-frying linguisa. 

On the concrete food-load dock, his kitchen crew, 

Marcelo himself, the whole bunch, angling-up their face --

The animals -- toward the bright, blond, false-Spring sun.

East

Six upright trunks

6 fates

Six bamboo

God-cane walking sticks

Bamboo break

Tame wind

Six-tree above the dale

Six-tree create the dale

Six thin trees were moved

And by mere that, all China

All nature pushes 6 bamboo

And six remain

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A First Kensho

When things abruptly shift

Like part of the body misaligned by a sharp move

When the house goes, or the he or she,

Any room at once gets a new look

And old familiar chairs are instantly antique

A trip to the kitchen strewn with the rubble of routine.

What's left when things get quiet, the certainties leave?

The reality of 'you' and what to do with that.


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Material Modality

Trying to sleep on an afternoon with dark cloud

A day before the winter solstice --

A car horn honks impatiently, long and loud --

My body lurches coldly up at the injustice.


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My Hour Now Like His

Unknown, a single Eskimo word (of the putative hoard) for snow.

Ago, I found no thing around the quiet lit carrel

Quiet like that rural canoe-stretch of lost Maine

Lost within the grey, unopened, hard cover copy of Thoreau,

'Mizzle' his Yankee word for the light rain.


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Keys To The 20th Century

Weldon Kees.

Kees van Dongen.

Trying to fit the two.

One, a long-lived, successful fauviste and society portraitist, dead at 91 at home in Monte Carlo.

One, one of 'the disappeared', his car at one end of the Golden Gate bridge, his body never found, his poems rough and naturalistic in the 40s/50s loosely noirish, Beatnik way.

Life's still a puzzle.

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Spearesques 10

Virago: What now? Three cabbages that claim to be heads.

Say business.


Inch: Is a russet for Your Grace's table.


Virago: Not a chew's value. You -- pay out my moment's worth.


Ounce: Colored pebbles quarried for Your Hi'ness' jars.


Virago: Keep for thy gargle. And you, dog? What's clutched in your paw?


Thumb: A crush of fine-smelled rose.


Virago: Polluted by the oils of your breath.

(aside) One half-man is not half a man.



...

Electric Off

Other people's talk: inane and bored.

Voice inside the head: the caged 'me'.


Rare ambient sound outside

Snow thuds from a branch


Prayer to the waning light, up.

Down, a crow's mock sound.


Without a clock, but like one

The earth hour moves to dark






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