Songs, Eros, Demons, Angels

Three books have come into my possession during the course of this roadtrip that make up a kind of trilogy of considerations of creativity. Each is self-contained, written for the author's own purpose; perhaps all that links them is synchronicity, and the connections they evoke in me. Nonetheless, they bring to the foreground what has very much been in my mind while traveling.

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I haven't been conventionally happy on this trip across the Southwest and West. I have had moments of joy, and moments of real connection, real work. There have been some ecstasies. But overall my mood has been neutral to dark. Some of this is because of the reawakening in me—experienced again as insomnia gets me out of bed to write, as I spend a cold night in Jackson, WY—of emotions of violation, fear, agony, and despair: all remnants of the illness and surgery and recovery narrative of the past year. I lay awake in my bed tonight unable to stop thinking that my narrative of surgery is only half over: I am nowhere near done with this story, I am instead in the limbo between major surgeries, each them life-risking, dangerous, and powerful invasions of my corpus. My physical self finds it impossible to be cheerful just now. The rational mind, which of course, despite its delusions of grandeur, is the least aspect of the self involved in this process, finds a lot to be positive about. Indeed, many friends have been remarking how positive and life-affirming I seem to be, lately, when I talk about how I have more physical strength than I've had in literally decades. But to me that all seems like a lie: more accurately, a mask, a partial truth, a performance of partial completion. People want me to be positive, they want me to be well, and they want to avoid contamination by the angel of death still hovering over me, hovering closer than it's ever been. People want me to be cheerful, and happy, and feel good about life. The truth is: I don't. I feel neutral a lot of the time: not dark, not bad, but not jumping up and down with giddy happiness, either.

The truth is, I feel like I'm presenting a false face, like I'm lying. I'm not upset about this feeling, and I'm not feeling like there's anything wrong with talking to friends mostly about what's going well, rather than about my lingering fears and doubts. But there is a cognitive dissonance between the mask and what I feel inside, a strong disconnect between what I feel and what others want me to be feeling.

I'm still feeling distant and disconnected about art, about life. I still have no idea if anything I'm doing is any good. That doesn't mean I don't like what I'm doing: one or two photos I've made on this roadtrip will stand, I think, among my best work ever. One or two moments of inspiration, when I felt fully present, fully alive, while making art, writing, making photos: these stand out as ecstatic moments, the perfect moments that I seek out, as an artist, a musician, a writer. They stand out in high relief, more than ever, in contrast to the daily grind of mundane survival and ongoing medical narratives. (This is one thing I can't seem to get any of my medical team to understand. But then, perhaps it's so far outside their gamut that I'm speaking Martian to them. Certainly I feel like a stranger in a strange land.) So I can't really tell if anything I'm making now is any good. I just keep on doing it. That has to be enough. I can figure it out later. (The rational mind likes to think it leads, but truly it follows.)

The rational self really doesn't understand what this is about. Am I numb? Am I in some kind of ongoing PTSD-type emotional shock? Is it exhaustion? Perhaps. Certainly the blows have kept coming and coming without cease for months beyond counting. Am I just worn out by the real drama of life? I don't really know. I feel detached and disconnected even from caring too much about knowing the why of it all. I'm a little thoughtful about it, but by definition I'm not having any extreme drama about it. (At least not this week. There have been a couple of real meltdowns on this roadtrip, earlier, when basic self finally rose up and said What the frak has happened to me?!)

So I plan to just keep going. I have no answers. Other artists will let me know what they think of the art I'm producing. (Or not. Sometimes I feel a genuine vacuum of attention, and want more than I get. Then I remind myself to detach from that wanting.) Meanwhile, I just keep going. Tomorrow I will take the cameras and notebooks out into the wilds, and drive to the end of the road, and spend the day out there.

Part of me wonders if this detachment isn't part of my spiritual program, my existential post-surgery healing and life-story reassessment. I am, after all, suspended in the limbo between two major surgeries. (Again, those basic-self emotions have been coming up a few times along the road, now that I have leisure to face them: violation, shock, horror, mortality.) I wonder idly if this detachment I feel is not numbness but genuine detachment, an arrival at a Zen state, an actual detached state. It's true I have become very impatient with things that don't matter, the little unnecessary and pointless dramas of life—spiritual impatience, if you will. I get only hints of response to this question. I'm feeling unambitious about it—a lack of spiritual ambition—but rather humble.

As I've written before, the events of the past year and more have me seeing everything in my life from a new perspective. Everything has changed, and all the old maps are gone, while the new maps contain many obscure regions, many mysteries. That's probably the way it's supposed to be: Mystery and humility lie at the core of this distance I feel from life and art: this unknowing. In some ways my "I" has been taken away—that personality-ego upon which the rational mind is built—or greatly diminished. Certainly I know my own limits, my own mortality, as never before. Which is neither complaint nor praise, merely observation.

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So the Universe provides me with reflections on life and art, and adds resonance to my unknowing in encounters with three books on creativity that resonate deeply with my process at the moment. I feel deep responses in myself to each of these three books, different as they are in subject, constant as they are in wonder. Each of these are books I want to engage with more thoroughly, individually; I group them here because of the synchronicity of their arrival in my life at this time (a crisis time in my creative life? or a post-crisis time?), and here I can give at most a taste of why they each are worth responding to individually.

Daniel J. Levitin: The World In Six Songs: How the musical brain created human nature. (Dutton, 2008)

I am increasingly skeptical of claims made by neuroscientists about anything, as there has been a growing tendency in neuroscience and brain studies to want to explain every aspect of human life through the lens of biochemistry. (While simultaneously explaining away the mysteries that remain.) The resurgence of militant "new atheism" has gone hand in hand with this. The problem is, neuroscience typically assumes a biological explanation for every facet of human experience, of human existence, and is unable to comprehend the synergy of body-mind: in other words, that the brain doesn't determine what we experience, it reflects and records it. It's not an operating system on a hard drive, it's a holographic storage device. In other words, in the language of Tron, we are users, not programs.

So I approached The World In Six Songs with this skeptical attitude in mind. I have to say, I was entirely won over by Levitin's approach, which is not to explain away life, but to embrace it. This is an artist's book as much as a scientist's. Levitin is himself a jazz musician, and brings that viewpoint to his brain studies. He extensively discusses creativity with many musicians from many walks of life: songwriters, composers, singers, jazz players, dancers, and more. The six "songs" the book is divided into are huge themes: friendship; joy; comfort; knowledge; religion; love. This is overall a very positive and life-affirming (and arts-affirming) book, not at all reductionistic, and not at all afraid to admit that there are mysteries we don't comprehend. Music (as I am quick to agree) has a power for us quite beyond the conceptual: music and dance are intimately linked, and go back to the origins of civilization, the founding of our species as self-aware. Religion grows out of our desire to make sense of the world: the dance and music we use as part of our religious practices are ways of organizing, of shaping our understanding: religious ritual is nothing if not performance of foundational myth, nothing if not reenactment of core faith. (Contemporary organized religion is often hollow precisely because it has become detached from the body, from the experience of contemporary life, and the enactment of myth rather than its mere recitation.) One other aspect of this book that deserves mention is its appealing use of pop songwriting lyrics to make its points about our biology; this is not only quirky fun, but quite convincing. And there are extensive interviews with great contemporary songwriters, including some profoundly relevant quotes from Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, and Sting, among others. I find myself agreeing with Levitin's responses to pop music a lot; for example, he shares my respect for Bob Dylan as a songwriter while also sharing my distrust of the slavish devotion of many fans.

William Everson (edited by Albert Gelpi): Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader. (Santa Clara University Press, 2003)

Everson was one of the great California Coastal poets, and writers about poetry. He was the self-proclaimed "lone acolyte" of Robinson Jeffers for many years, championing Jeffers even when his popularity was at low ebb. (Disclaimer: I am a member of the Robinson Jeffers Association, and have been deeply affected by Jeffers' writings myself. So I bristle slightly at the "lone disciple" attitude, even when it was merited.) Everson lived a dramatic, charged life, went through the equivalent of three religious conversions, and wrote darkly-muscled, often violent poetry that is nonetheless powerful, beautiful, and resonant.

This volume is an excellent, thorough introduction to Everson's work and life. In addition to a generous selection of his poetry, it also contains long prose sections of Everson's writings about poetry, about Jeffers, about hand-press printing—he was a master printer of fine editions of poetry, and founded several small presses during his lifetime—and about his personal cosmology regarding erotic mysticism: the truth that mysticism is rooted in the body more than in the mind. There is also a generous sampling of other poets writing about Everson, a posthumous selections of responses and appreciations. (Robert Hass gives one of the most revealing here.) I've been exploring Everson's writings about Jeffers for a little while, as part of my expanding research into Jeffers—my responses to the poet are mostly artistic, not scholarly in an academic sense, nonetheless I appreciate reading literary criticism about his work—and this is not my first delving into Everson's own work, although this is a deeper delving than prior visits.

Everson was a strong personality. As strong as his poetic master's, in many ways. As independent and uncaring about critical reception. Everson alienated a lot of poets and readers, though, with his often violent rhetoric, his dramatic changes of direction—all of them, in the end, religious responses to erotic embodiment as a spiritual path; which is one reason I find him so intriguing, as the mystical/erotic path is one I feel myself following as well. Everson remains in some ways as controversial as Jeffers. (These endless comparisons are brought in part through his own fault of identifying himself as Jeffers's disciple.) I find myself responding to his prose writings about mysticism and poetry, and their connection, as I do to the poems themselves. I have two or three other books just of his poems; I find this sampler gives me a way into the other books of poems which had sometimes been daunting.

Basically, what Everson left us with is a life-long passionate encounter with poetry, which engages you even where you disagree with him in some details. (As a gay man who has long felt sex and spirit to be one, I celebrate Everson's erotic mysticism and explicit depiction of sex in his poetry, even where I find his worship of the archetype of Woman, his imago dei, sometimes a bit difficult to appreciate.) In all phases of his life and work, Everson was fierce, passionate, and questing. I feel very much the same: I feel as Everson did that one thing contemporary poetry is severely lacking is enthusiasm, passion, and commitment. A lot of "cool" and cerebral poetry, a lot of ironic mannerism, still dominates the scene. Everson's writings are a tonic, a reminder that a genuine, sincere, non-ironic, unsentimental, and fiercely engaged poetry is not only possible, but necessary.

Edward Hirsch: The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the source of artistic inspiration. (Harcourt, 2002)

Unlike most art critics, poet/critic Hirsch does not begin and end with the artistic product, he is interested in how the artist creates, in what the sources of artistic inspiration are. He does not question whether inspiration exists—which is a somewhat unpopular critical stance in these Mannerist days of replication, sampling, and ironic distance from inspiration. I have every reason to recommend this book, as it goes a long way towards synthesizing everything I have ever talked about in terms of my own sources of creativity.

Hirsch begins with Federico Garcia Lorca's engagement with the duende, the "dark self" that Lorca saw as the source of artistic power and inspiration. (A translation of one of Lorca's seminal writings on the duende can be read here.) The duende is the demon, or more properly daimon, the ancient Greek term, of the book's title. Then angel is RIlke's terrifying angel of The Duino Elegies. Many artists and writers from ancient days through to Modernism have talked about feeling "taken over" by inspiration, almost having their work dictated to them—an experience I have had myself numerous times. I've written before how sometimes my most surprising, best, and most challenging work is written at white heat. There's a feeling of inevitability to what emerges, as though some greater part of the self was in charge, completely bypassing the everyday consciousness we normally work from.

The Demon and the Angel is a book of critical synthesis, a book of many short chapters in which different aspects of the duende and the daimon and the angel are considered in detail. In addition to a thoughtful, thorough response to Lorca, Hirsch discusses how the duende appears in all the arts. He discusses Yeats' daimon; Martha Graham's expressive solo choreographies; Rilke's angels; the American angels of Walt Whitman William Carlos Williams; Robert Bly's engagement with the duende in his essay Leaping Poetry; and much more. What I find exciting about this book is to read many of the same sources being discussed that have opened up the same questions in my own thinking, over the years. I almost feel as though Hirsch and I have been on parallel tracks. (Being a known poet and critic, he gets to publish his thoughts in book form; I on other hand just get to ramble on about them here.)

For me, one of the most telling of chapters here is where Hirsch discusses the late, black paintings of Mark Rothko. I've had numerous arguments with poets and artists about Rothko, about how to approach his work, and how not to dismiss it out of hand, as it so often is. This chapter on Rothko is ammunition in my future arsenal for conveying Rothko's essentially spiritual goals as reflected in his paintings. Hirsch discusses several of the other Abstract Expressionists, as well, as they are prime Modernist examples of artists who sought both abstraction and emotional content in their work. One of Robert Motherwell's famous "Black and White" paintings graces the book's cover.

On the main points about the duende that recurs again and again in Hirsch's book is how a sense of elation, of heightened liveliness, of ecstatic leaping, occurs in art whenever death enters into the room. I relate to this from my own sense of mortality and urgency to get more done, following recent brushes with death, surgery, etc. Perhaps the duende does come down to the truth of eros and thanatos, love and death, in the end. Lorca believed strongly that the duende was present when poetry or song fiercely chose to face and defy Death. In my own case, a literal encounter with dying and being reborn has led to many changes in the way I do my art, and the ways I perceive it. I was always attuned to the duende, though; it's just become more foregrounded now.

Hirsch points out that Lorca correctly identified the danger to art from the overly-rational intellect—the reason so much cerebral poetry is in fashion nowadays—but Hirsch also points out how evoking unreason risks evoking the deep strain of anti-intellectualism present especially in American culture. What I find contradictory about much American poetry nowadays is how it flirts with unreason, but uses rational control of its tools to strictly control it at the same time, often ending up with a dry, intellectually-rooted poetry that claims to be populist and anti-intellectual. Perhaps one reason that non-poet audiences feel unable to engage with poetry nowadays is that on some level they sense they're being lied to, that a game is being played at their expense.

The Demon and the Angel is a very rich book. I feel I could on about it at length. (Which I will do at another time.) It speaks to me on a very deep level, partly because Hirsch has gone exploring for the sources of creativity in many of the same place that I have myself. Perhaps this book will resonate more with artists and poets than it will with the general reader, nonetheless I would recommend it to anyone. It touches on so many necessary bits of knowledge about the creative process that I wouldn't hesitate to loan it to a non-artist friend who wanted to know more how what they discover in my own art got there.

I have said more than once that there are mysteries in the artistic product: things in there that I didn't know where there, that some audience member discovered and told me about—which is something I like. I like the fact that some smarter part of me put that in there, that my rational mind didn't know about. This book is a big help to all involved, towards a deeper understanding of how that actually works, how it happens. I will need to spend some serious time with this book, myself, as it has already clarified my own thinking.

Poem Without a Category

Browsing the thrift store bookshelves today, found a few treasures, old and new.

The real find of the day was Arthur Laurents' autobiography Original Story By, since Laurents has only just now died at age 93. I came home and immediately sat down to read, finishing about a third of the book in one afternoon. Very smart, very crisp, and completely open about his own life as a gay man, triumphs and mistakes included. It's fascinating to read about his Broadway and film work, the many people he knew and worked with. I suppose on some level this is gossip, but it doesn't read that way; it reads as memoir and revelatory memoir at that. One gets a real feel for what it was like to live as an artist in the closet during the McCarthy years, for example, which Laurents always refers to as the Witch Hunt years. He spends a lot of time on the psychology of informers, and the suffering caused, concluding, I think quite rightly, that someone who can betray their friends by informing on them will ultimately commit other betrayals, because they are at core incredibly focused on themselves first and foremost. One of the most interesting parts of Original Story By, to me, is the chapter on the genesis and first stagings of West Side Story, a story I've read before from Sondheim's and Bernstein's viewpoints. To hear it again from Laurents' viewpoint is fascinating, interwoven as it is with several other threads.

Also acquired were some backup or loaner copies of some other books: ones I often loan or give away. It's always good to have spares of those, and at thrift store prices they're easy to acquire. One of these was a pristine paperback copy of Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression, one of the best books I've ever read about depression; the book is truly encyclopedic, even including some good background information on related spiritual conditions such as acedia and the dark night, and how they can look like depression but aren't, really.

And I found another pristine copy of The Enlightened Heart: An anthology of sacred poetry, ed. by Stephen Mitchell, which is a good anthology for eclectic students of the poetry of spirituality and vision. I opened the book at random, and this is the poem that I read first, which today has rather deep resonance for me—especially after my recent comments about categories, boundaries, critical boxes, and the avoidance of same:

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Poem Without a Category

Trailing my stick I go down to the garden edge,
call to a monk to go out the pine gate.
A cup of tea with my mother,
looking at each other, enjoying our tea together.
In the deep lanes, few people in sight;
the dog barks when anyone comes or goes.
Fall floods have washed away the planks of the bridge;
shouldering our sandals, we wade through the narrow stream.
By the roadside, a small pavilion
where there used to be a little hill:
it helps out our hermit mood;
country poems pile one sheet on another.
I dabble in the flow, delighted by the shallowness of the stream,
gaze at the flagging, admiring how firm the stones are.
The point in life is to know what's enough—
why envy those otherworld immortals?
With the happiness held in one inch-square heart
you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.
—Gensei (trans. Burton Raffel)

Written in classical Chinese form by a Japanese Buddhist monk, a loose wander of the mind through the day, avoiding all categories typical for the classification of poems. The poem's own restlessness is part of the avoidance. Not a nature poem, not a Zen poem, not an urban bustle poem. A poem of simple observation of an afternoon's wander.

But then the shock of those last four lines:

The point in life is to know what's enough—
why envy those otherworld immortals?
With the happiness held in one inch-square heart
you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.

Fill infinite space with even the smallest happiness held in the smallest heart's vessel. I feel that way a lot, lately. I feel both very small and insignificant, and yet the whole Universe cannot contain what I am feeling. Certainly words cannot. Sometimes what is being contained is serenity: unexpected, quiet, it comes upon me at the least likely moment.

Another Japanese Buddhist poet, from the same anthology, the same period, writes simply:

Die while you're alive
and be absolutely dead.
Then do whatever you want:
it's all good.
—Bunan

That's the heart of Zen for me at the moment: dying while you're alive, right now, no waiting. Then, you're completely free, and everything is everything. Mountains become mountains again, after having been illusions for awhile, and sudden;y whether or not you ever climb to their summits is a matter of no importance. If you do, that's good. If not, that's also good.

The Enlightened Heart is a diverse tapestry of spiritual wisdom in poetic form—certainly heretical to the contemporary poetry yen for "words for words' sake"—ranging from the Upanishads and Lao Tze to Emily Dickinson and Rilke. The anthology ends with Robinson Jeffers' poem "The Treasure," with its long lines summing up many truths in a few poetic phrases:

. . . That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it;
    interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence. . . .

Art Therapy and Art Not Therapy

Spent the night last night mostly in a turmoil. Personal fears, medical fears, the uncertainty of the future. Not knowing anything more than I do now about outcomes. Some part of you always wants to control what can't really be controlled, or even known. Wants to put a reconciling face on chaos. Wants to find predictability as comforting security where there is none.

Life's too unpredictable. I'm worried about things in the future, while I could die today in an accident. You never know. Every little setback seems magnified to giant proportions in the face of my recurrent fears about my own future.

You don't know what's going to happen. You really only have mastery over today. The rest of it, no matter how upset we make ourselves over worrying about it, isn't really in our power to control, no matter how dire, no matter how graceful. Faith and trust come into play at just such moments. I don't hope for anything. Hope is a toxic word that lets you build castles of expectations in the sky, which are doomed to crash on the mountains of inchoate reality. Faith is the irrational belief, sometimes supported by experience, that no matter what happens, you'll be all right in the end. Trust is the irrational sense that things do mean something, after all, even if you don't know what, and never do. That things mean something, that there is a point to all this random suffering, that somehow it does all mean something. Even if the only meaning to life you can ever grasp is the meaning you make for yourself, the meaning you invest in whatever seems random and meaningless.

I only mention any of my personal dilemmas because it leads to a discussion of art and therapy.

I hope, no doubt about to be disappointed, that art-making is not only therapeutic. Certainly making art can be therapeutic. "Art therapy" as a practical psychological discipline has a long history, and has helped many people. But there's more to art than therapy.

I grew up being taught by my birth-tribe (the Norwegian-American Lutherans) that expressing any strong emotion, much less anger, was forbidden. Even expressing too much joy was looked down on as aberrant. The ideal man was laconic and stoic. But I was always a passionate person, with very strong feelings, who had a problem with conforming to those expectations. I bottled a lot of anger in my youth, which came out very badly. When pushed too far, I lashed out far in excess of provocation. I scared myself with the intensity of my own emotions, which led to a renewed cycle of suppression.

As an adult, I learned and now still believe that expressing strong feelings directly is not only good, it's healthy and necessary, and can be done in appropriate ways. There are appropriate ways to express anger, and inappropriate ways. Most people, it seems to me, get tangled up about how to express their feelings, not whether they have them or not. Many people have a lot more emotions than they think they do, because they live in their heads, disconnected from their soma, living life virtually rather than immersed in it.

The stoic and laconic archetypal hero is sometimes afraid of his own feelings; he might be able to kill the monster with dispatch, but he has a hard time saying "I love you." The entire genre of popular "action" movies can be framed as artistically-sublimated male rage, in which blowing things up and cracking wise are deflective substitutes for genuine personal expression of one's feelings. Far easier to watch someone else fight the battles onscreen that you are fighting internally; it's supportive of one's fragile ego, attacked on all sides by life, to see the hero win the battle onscreen, when you feel like you're losing it in real life.

I learned through hard personal work to express my anger in the moment, and then it's done. I have ways to do so that don't cause problems. Many of my friends have mutual understandings and agreements about venting. Sometimes you just have to vent, to get it out of your self, and blow off some steam. Blowing off steam, reducing the internal pressure, keeps you from blowing up, later, more forcefully, and more inappropriately.

Of course one can do this with one's art, and I occasionally do so. I write the occasional poem that is nothing but emotional dumping. I write the occasional piece of music that expresses strong emotion artistically.

But I'd hate to think that art-making was only therapeutic. And in fact I don't think that for even one minute.

I have no problem with the occasional poem being used for deflecting anger, or blowing off steam, such as my own (controversial) poem "Kenosis." But I don't think it's something one can build an entire poetics on, no more than one could build on any other form of purely therapeutic behavior. Of course, that is exactly what many who practice the poetics of the post-confessional lyric believe that poetry's major function is: therapeutic. But this turns poetry into just another tool of (therapeutic) self-expression, and that narrows and limits poetry's scope unnecessarily.

Poetry must express all of the conditions and experiences of life, even beyond just human life, or it becomes too simplistic, even reductionist. Art must joyfully praise as well as be a source of solace. I think Robert Lowell, the poet most associated with the origins of confessional poetry, was unable to make this leap out of pure self-expression; although I think Philip Larkin started from a similarly splenetic place, he occasionally did make the leap past the purely confessional into something more universal. I'm not a big fan of Larkin, I find him generally too dour and misanthropic, but I do appreciate his ability to take nasty bits of life and make art from them. By contrast, I view Robinson Jeffers as not misanthropic, but focused, rather, beyond the human drama, onto a larger canvas, in which human drama plays a part, but not the central, most important role. Confessional poetry leads all to quickly to narcissistic mannerisms, whereas the poetry of Jeffers—and of some who followed in his footsteps, like Gary Snyder—leads us towards transcending the human tendency towards self-regard with the knowledge that we are part of a larger world, and not always the most important part.

There are some performance artists who, in using themselves, their own bodies, as part of their artistic process, who speak of stepping out of themselves into a kind of trance, or other transcendent state. When you watch one of their performances, when they are totally engaged with what they're doing, it becomes almost ritualistic. Is it therapeutic? I think for some performance artists, it's like shape-changing: changing the self. For others, I think they never get out of their heads, really; they sort of distance themselves from life by enacting their art. I think artists who live in their heads can be found in every genre. The psychology of this is interesting.

I've heard it said, since we're on to psychology now, that sociopaths are never creative. I think that's wrong. I think it comes from some wrong definitions, although that may be open to discussion.

Sociopaths are a specific kind of personality trait and set of behaviors. It's not yet known if there's an organic component; there may be, but childhood environment also contributes. I've known a few sociopaths in my time; one of these was my paternal grandmother. To a sociopath, other people are not really real. Sociopaths know that it's not right to hurt other people, they know that their actions have consequences, but they can't perceive other people as being as real as they are themselves, so they often hurt others without realizing it. It's not always malicious, but it can be manipulative in the extreme. To sociopaths, only their own emotions and needs are real; other people aren't perceived as having similarly authentic feelings. A sociopath is perfectly capable of being creative, and more than one artist-sociopath has become famous or considered a great artist. What sociopaths seem incapable of feeling is empathy, even sympathy, for others, and unable to really understand others' feelings and needs. A sociopath still knows right from wrong, however, which is something a genuine psychopath cannot understand. It's a matter of degrees.

Art can be a way of enabling empathy. It can be political, which often evokes little more than the empathy of mutual revulsion, it can be personal within the larger context of being social, which to me seems more nuanced, more capable of making connections. If you ask artists what they're to do, they might discuss their politics, or their craft (technique), or what they're trying to do in a social or theoretical context. But artists can't be entirely trusted to reveal themselves, or their core selves, in anything but their art. A lot of art criticism by artists is about hiding the self, rather than revealing it. Even the poet of total honesty and self-celebration, Walt Whitman, edited and censored himself, when talking about his poetry. Artist often have large egos, and both painters and performance artists can be notoriously self-involved. It's not just ego, though: it can be using one's own self as raw material for exploring larger meanings. You start with the self, but you end up in a larger space. Except for course, for some artists, their process stays stuck in self-regard: and that can end up as therapy-art, confessional art, and never reach transcendence. Is that egotistical confessionalism? Sometimes, perhaps, it ends up there.

If you surmise that I'm biased towards transcending the personal self, say rather that I think it's a greater life-goal, not just an artistic goal. Art reflects life, which reflects art, and so on. I'm more interested in art that goes beyond: beyond my own limits, and conceptions; beyond the ego, beyond self-representation, beyond involvement with the self. If that's transcendence, well and good.

The bottom line is that confessional art just isn't very interesting to anyone but the artist, if it doesn't somehow get past the personal and into the universal. The ego tends to love itself so much that it can't see past the mirrors it has set up around itself to regard itself in.

That would be an interesting performance art project: to have an artist, naked, stuck inside an eggshell-shaped container made of mirrors, which she would have to break to get out of. Until then, all she could see would be herself. Breaking through to the outside world might involve cutting oneself by accident on the mirrors. (Just like my own nighttime worries about my future.) A little blood might be shed before she could escape into the outside world—which might be like being born.

But once you realize, with your greater self, that there is much more to both your self and the world than the ego, or the personality-ego, you start to see a bigger picture. You start to have faith, perhaps even trust, that something more than yourself is out there, and is worth paying attention. Artistic self-regard might open up into artistic splendor. This is harder than it seems, as the personality-ego is tenacious: even nature poets have a tendency to simply use nature, as a set of images or events, as a reflection of self. The worst kinds of political poetry, the bathetic "I feel your pain" political poetry that tries to generate empathy through associating lists of atrocities with one's personal dramas, never get past self-regard, because the only person the poet can really see is the one in the mirror. It is a laudable attempt to generate or recreate empathy. But it's not genuine. It gets stuck in the mirror.

Breaking the mirror is possible, though. The best political poets recreate the experience of empathy in the reader, and in themselves, not with mirror-tricks but with simple reportage. Whitman's poems of long lists manage, through sheer accumulation, to pull the reader in by direct connection. The best poets who sometimes get labeled nature poets give us an experience of true empathy, by evoking life directly: by giving us what the hawk feels, soaring on the wind, rather than telling us what the soaring hawk makes the poet feel, which we ought to feel as well. The simplistic, clichéd workshop formulation for this evocation in poetry is "show, don't tell." I would rephrase it as "evoke." Get me inside the experience. I am become the deer nibbling the sedge in the mountain glade. I am become the world turning slowly. This requires imagination, not only narration. In fact, the best "nature poems" often have a sense of time that is eternal, timeless, not bound to linear progression, the Now in which most animals live. Do wolves spend sleepless nights, as I do, worrying about their futures? No. The wolf rules for life are ever more useful to me as a role-model.

Art can be therapeutic, in this sense, too: that it takes us out of ourselves, away from our petty concerns, for even a little while. It can be a brief vacation. That's perfectly valid, although again it's not all that art is, or can be. It's okay to take a break, though. Which is why "escapist art" like occasionally reading your average blandly-styled beach thriller novel is nothing to feel guilty about. You can't survive on a diet of only "art" literature; a little trash fiction, or doggerel, is good for the digestion. I sometimes go back and re-read a well-thumbed favorite SF novel just to have a break from myself and my daily life.

But art cannot be limited to the therapeutic purposes, the relief of psychological pressures, anxieties, or needs. It must be more than that. Just as with my domineering birth tribe, the Norwegian-American Lutherans of the Upper Midwest, just as with my passionate later-life rebellion against those social constraints, art can container joy as well as sorrow, ecstasy as well as suffering. The rebellious boy who feels so much joy at being alive that he can't contain it, it will certainly blow his heart right out of his chest at any moment—that's a feeling that can come from great art, too, no matter what it's theme or subject matter might be. Art is a container. Not just for what's judged valuable, but for everything.

Sea Horses & Sea Dragons

images from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Monterey, CA, February 2010



After the morning spent at Point Lobos, I met a friend at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and took in the marvelous show currently on display, The Secret Lives of Seahorses. The last time I was at the Aquarium, I had seen the amazing jellyfish program, and this experience was just as well-done, just as beautiful. I made a few photos of the seahorse show, but also of the Aquarium in general. And it was interesting to encounter a quote from Robinson Jeffers in the tidal pool room, in the day after having been at the annual Robinson Jeffers conference.






leafy sea dragon


leafy sea dragon




weedy sea dragon






brain coral

Robinson Jeffers & Tor House

Tor House


Hawk Tower

I was in Carmel-By-the-Sea in California in mid-February 2010 to give a presentation at the annual conference of the Robinson Jeffers Association, of which I am a member. (Giving this paper at this conference was my only fixed agenda on this recent roadtrip out to California and back; the rest of my time was devoted to being on vacation, making photographs, and visiting friends and family.) The theme of the conference was "Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of the West." I was part of a Sunday morning panel that discussed ecopoetics, fire- and water-ecosystem management and its poetics, and related matters. I gave a talk as an artist, then showed an original video. I thought my presentation went very well; and it was well-received, and received some very good comments. (I'll post a version of it here, when I get a chance.)



I approached my topic as an artist, rather than as a scholar, academic professor, critic, or literary analyst. There were at the conference the usual number of papers that looked into the details of poetic content, form, and analysis; but I'm proud to say that I quoted no poems in my paper, and did no analysis. This set me quite outside the norm, where I am usually more comfortable. I've been an academic scholar; I've presented lots of papers at academic conferences, although it's been at least 15 years since I did anything like this; and I decided to do something completely different. I even went so far as to read my paper from my laptop, rather than print it out beforehand. I actually read from notes rather than a finished paper; I'm not that fond of just reading a pre-written text out loud at these sorts of conferences; it can get a bit deadening to do only that.





The first evening of this annual conference, there was an informal social gathering and poetry reading at Tor House, overlooking the ocean at the edge of Carmel, the home that Jeffers built out of the local stone for himself, his wife Una, and their children. During this social get-together, we were allowed to wander the grounds, explore the house, climb Hawk Tower to look out over the ocean and the surrounding lands, and take as many photos for ourselves as we wished. All of which I avidly partook. It was a real challenge climbing up to the top of Hawk Tower—steep, steep risers, narrow, rain-wet stairs with no real handholds except the stones themselves—but I'm glad I did. Not only for the view, but to have stood where Jeffers stood, and seen the view of Point Lobos and the other spurs of land extending out into the Pacific Ocean.


the oceanside gate, and Hawk Tower


garden bench at the foot of Hawk Tower

Tor House is maintained and operated now by the private Tor House Foundation, which offers tours and sponsors events, including an annual poetry contest. This year they also provided a lot of the logistical support for the annual conference; wonderful people doing wonderful work, to preserve the house that Jeffers built, and to preserve and extend his legacy.


lilies, by the gate

After the conference, as we were all breaking up to go home, one of my co-panelists told me that he had very much appreciated that I had approached Jeffers as an artist, not just as a writer. I thanked him for understanding my message, if you will, on that very point.



Robinson Jeffers was an artist: in addition to being a poet, he was a stonemason, a designer, a builder, a carpenter, a garden designer, and more. He was visually aware: I argue that his poetry is almost cinematic at times, giving us a sequence of images that create a narrative, almost non-verbally, although made of words, because presented without interpretation or commentary. Although he is well-known for his long narrative poems, his essays giving us his still-controversial views on poetics and politics and social reality, in fact in many of his shorter lyrics the world is just presented as it is: Jeffers was a keen visual observer. His observations led him towards an understanding of coastal fire ecology decades before such was formulated; he was keenly aware of the life and death of the natural world around him, the rhythms of the ocean and climate, the meanings given by us to the stars overhead. He knew his place very well indeed.


Tor House, from the top of Hawk Tower

Robinson Jeffers' Last Poems

I recently discovered a first edition copy of the last published book of Robinson Jeffers' poems, The Beginning & the End, and other poems. This was a posthumous collection, although some of the poems had been organized and collected by Jeffers over the decade preceding his death.

It's a philosophical poetry collection, the last thoughts written of a thoughtful poet who had lived a dramatic life and written dramatically about life. These are final statements, some very powerful, some more general summations of life. I want to focus on some of the latter summations, as they appear in short poems that are more statements than images.

The conventional wisdom is that poetry should show, not tell: that is, describe and evoke, rather than tell us what to think or feel. Generally, I feel strongly that a poem needs to evoke an experience, or draw you into itself and recreate an experience in you: to make you feel something, rather than just tell you what you're supposed to be feeling. Generally, the "show, don't tell" rule is a good one to follow.

Yet there is also room, at times, for more philosophical poetry, which examines ideas, which examines life from a thoughtful and interpretative mode, rather than a purely descriptive, narrative, or evocative mode. Jeffers is in many ways best known for these other modes; many consider his greatest poems to be his long narratives, such as Cawdor, or The Double Axe. Some of his other, nature-inspired shorter poems, lyric in tone if original in structure, evoke the descriptive or imagistic mode. These are the types of poetry Jeffers is best known for, so I think his shorter philosophical poems often get overlooked.

I want to respond to some of these late, shorter, philosophical poems. My best response to Jeffers' poetry is artistic: his poems often evoke an image for me, or inspire a poem of my own, or words and image combined. I reproduce here one or two short excerpts, to respond to; and also as photos, to also show the beautiful design and typography of this last collection of poems.



It is only a little planet / But how beautiful it is. That sums up so much of Jeffers' poetic viewpoint, and his mark upon my own. The double vision of immensity combined with love for what little we can know of that immensity. We are so small, in that vastness of the Universe; and important perhaps only to ourselves, in our own minds; yet our little, fragile planet is so incredibly beautiful. Even in its most harsh and terrible aspects, it is astoundingly lovely. There is so much wonder that we can never exhaust it, with our short lives. It would take forever to run out of beauty. And even though we ourselves will run out, and fail, the beauty will still go on, still be there for those who come after us.



A late, final ars poetica, those poems poets write about their art, about themselves. There are lines that serve as ars poetica, throughout Jeffers' long writing career; phrases from the longer narratives, and entire shorter poems, that tell us what he thought of his own art, and how to accomplish it. But this to me seems to be the kernel of it: A poet is one who listens / To nature and his own heart; and to nature and our hearts we must always listen, is the implication. Which I respond to with wholehearted agreement. Many of the poets who have most strongly influenced me, as someone who occasionally makes poems, are poets such as Jeffers who listen to nature: Whitman, Dickinson, Gary Snyder, Basho, among others. Not all poetry, and not even the best poetry, is always human-centered. Sometimes great poems have no humanity in them. Of course, being made by humans, there is always a relationships involved, between poet and subject: a connection woven from word and image between what is human and what is nameless; so that all poems in one way human-centered, in that they are made by humans.

But human-centered is not necessarily human-centric. Jeffers was often at pains to state that poetry does not always have to be about humans and their desires and concerns; that poetry does not have to be focused upon human need, human action, and human idea. This was one of the ways in which he strongly influenced many poets who came after him (including Snyder). In some ways, when Jeffers says to leave the poet alone, I think he means that human action can be distracting rather than supportive, to the poet, to the artistic process.

My own experience has often been that I feel clearest of artistic purpose when away from people, when far out in the wilderness, when on a roadtrip or camping at an isolated state park where few are gathered. My mind is clearer for not being entangled with worries and drama brought on by other people. I need this, I realize: I need it, at least to some deep extent, I need it enough that I must make time for it, and thus make time for trips away from the routines, from the daily circuit of self-involvement that is people worrying about their own lives. I return recharged, even refreshed. And when out away from the whirl, I often am given good poems, and good photographs.



This is another short ars poetica, but more than that it's a summation of what Jeffers built there on the Carmel shore: his home, the tower next to the house, and the several hundred trees he planted. This late poem is prophetic: many of those trees are gone, and the desirable real estate of the peninsula has crowded around his once-isolated house with new house after house built close together and congested. It is still a beautiful place, for all the houses crowded in. One can still walk along the shoreline and look out at the limitless ocean. One can still stand at the foot of the tower and see nothing but sky, rock, and waves. And now Tor House and Hawk Tower are landmarks to be preserved, because of the granitic strength of the poet's words. So even though development of the peninsula and neighbors' houses have eaten up many of his trees, I believe the stones of his house will endure. I love the idea that "flower-soft verse" is sometimes harder than stone: that Jeffers' home is being preserved proves him to be again prophetic.

The other mode of poetry, not yet mentioned here, is the prophetic mode, or vatic mode: the sometimes didactic but necessary mode in which the poet speaks to the people as a prophet, speaks to future generations, promises to speak only truth no matter how painful truth is to hear, and risks rejection on the basis of that truthful speech. Many unpopular poets are truthful speakers; many poets famed and lauded during their own lifetimes are liars, in that they give us not truth, but what we want to hear. These are the famous and popular and best-selling poets, often enough, who play to the crowd, who pander and diminish their own visions as a means of becoming popular. A kind of prostitution, if you will. Jeffers was frequently harsh about this type of poet: harsh and uncompromising. He could afford to be. It is a prophet's necessity.

I find myself sometimes sharing that harsh, uncompromising viewpoint about the poems I write. But then, I'm not trying to make a living from poetry; nor am I trying to make a worldly reputation. I don't need to prostitute my poems because I have no ambition for them except for them to truthful speaking. I respond so strongly to the vatic mode in Jeffers' poems because it serves as a model for the necessity I feel to be truthful in my own. If only accidentally prophetic, if not deliberately vatic. I do write shamanic poetry, just as I make shamanic art, and music. But that's another mode of truthful speaking, not necessarily intended to be either prophetic or didactic. I don't like to lecture: to tell, rather than show.

Nonetheless, I think this vatic mode in Jeffers' poetry is both essential and necessary. So much of what he wrote was essentially prophetic, and much of that was deeply rooted in the ancient Greek classics. The epic mode can be found in his longer narrative poems, and his verse dramas such as Medea. But the epic mode, in Jeffers, often shares mental space with the prophetic mode. His narratives show us the violence of what will happen, as consequence, to the larger-than-life human failings and jealousies that set great dramas into motion. Each of the narrative poems contain passages of rhapsodic description, of beautiful fragments of nature-writing, buried in and around the human dramas. It is a mistake to believe that these are digressions. Rather, they're reflections and commentary on the human action of the narrative: such passages provide setting, but they are also mirror-reflections in nature's eye of where the people go wrong.

This brings us back around to Jeffers' sense of our proper place in nature: not at its center, but as small animals on a small planet in a very ordinary spiral galaxy. What a small planet it is, yet it is so very beautiful. If we remember nothing else from these last poems, we do well to remember this. So very small in the grand scheme of things, we are nonetheless enacted by and enact with that terrible beauty that is life in nature on our planet. And we are part of nature, not separate from it, and not lords over it. We are one with our small planet, and its beauty is our beauty.

Young & Old Writers

I've noticed—and it's been pointed out before by others—that a great deal of youthful writing is in grand sweeping general statements, while more mature writers tend to be more specific, personal, precise.

Last night, looking through old notebooks for something else, I found an old red three-ring binder of most of my oldest typed poems. I wrote these mostly sitting cross-legged on my bed in my mid- and late teens, the typewriter propped up on its case as a kind of desk; typing on the bed was quieter than on my desk, where the typewriter keystrokes tended to resonate through the wooden legs of the desk and into my room's wooden floorboards. I liked writing in privacy, so typing on the bed was quieter, perhaps more intimate.

Skimming through those oldest poems, most of which are crap, I saw so many generalities, so many grand sweeping statements. Perhaps younger writers put down these grand sweeping thoughts because they're incontrovertible—who could argue with them?—and young writers are insecure, still barely finding their way. As a young writer, I spouted off grand statements about life, the universe, and everything, trying to find myself within them. I was trying to find, or make, my own own identity, by working from the universal to the specific, from the philosophical to the story of my own life. So, most of these very early poems, many of which are fragments of unformed free-verse that might as well have been journal entries except they're broken into lines on the page, tell me nothing about myself, about what I was thinking at the time.

Except by inference, deduction, and their ability to help me remember what I was thinking and feeling around the time I wrote them. I am looking back into my own teens, right now, to reconstruct the unformed identity of who I was then, in the same way that these very early poems are unformed.

(My parents gave my sister and I identical Smith-Corona manual typewriters for Christmas one year, and I used that typewriter—my first typewriter—as my main writing and composing tool for well over a decade, all through high school and college. I took class notes by hand, in a tiny but accurate printed script, and all my papers were typed up on this typewriter. I can see where the ribbon needed replacing in the three-ring binder of old poems, where the poems began to be a little light on ink, then the next page is darker.)

It seems to me that a writer more mature in their craft tends to work from the opposite direction: from the personal to the universal. More mature poets don't start with grand sweeping philosophical statements, although they might end up there.

One of the virtues of mature poetry is that is brings the reader into the world the poet is making. Juvenile poetry tends to be so self-centered that the reader isn't brought in. The old writer's aphorism of "Show, don't tell," applies directly to the observation that younger poets often tell us what they're thinking, or tell us what to think, but they lack the craft to pull the reader into the experience for themselves.

A sweeping general statement might tell us what to think, or what the writer thinks, but the progression of moving from the personal to the universal invites to think for ourselves, while giving us the poet's embodied experience as a guide.

•

There may be an arc to a poet's career, as well: that, late in a poet's career, he or she might revert to sweeping generalities. This is not always the case, as some older poets continue to refine and extend their insights, become ever more supple and limpid in their great age. Yet some elder poets do seem to run out of steam, become exhausted, and revert to the grand philosophical statements typical of younger poets. Or they might have lost their way, due to failing health, failing clarity of mind, or the troubles of life, which can be exhausting and drown both inspiration and the ability to respond with one's full attention and craft.

Walt Whitman, even in his early editions of Leaves of Grass, written when the poet was in his 30s, was full of descriptions of experience, of lists of places and the kinds of people found there, which give weight to his underlying, philosophical arguments. Yet his late editions of his book contain many revisions, probably born of an increasing if forgivable reticence in response to a lifetime of artistic rejection, which make the poems less specific, more general. And some of his last poems are the grand sweeping philosophical statements of a young writer. Some remind me only too well of my own fumbling unformed poems in that red three-ring binder. What saves Whitman's poems in, for example, the Second Annex of the "death-bed" edition of 1891-1892, is that he has years of writing craft to use when writing his vague philosophical comments. For example,

Apparitions

A vague mist hanging 'round half the pages:
(Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul,
That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, concepts, non-realities.)

I recently found the last published book of Robinson Jeffers' poems, The Beginning & the End, and other poems. (A posthumous collection, although some of the poems had been organized and collected by Jeffers over the preceding decade.) Although this collection contains a few poems written at his full strength, such as the famous poem "Passenger Pigeons," much of this last book is afterthoughts and aphorisms. I am again reminded of how similar these essentially prose statements about grand sweeping philosophies, broken almost arbitrarily into lines on the page, are to the grand sweeping statements typical of youthful poets. These late poems remind me of juvenilia. For example, this bit of late-life spleen:

Unnatural Powers

For fifty thousand years man has been dreaming of powers
Unnatural to him: to fly like the eagles—this groundling!
   —to breathe under the seas, to voyage to the moon,
To launch like the sky-god intolerable thunder-bolts:
   now he has got them.
How little he looks, how desperately scared and excited,
   like a poisonous insect, and no God pities him.

Despite Jeffers' distinctive voice still coming through, his strong, granitic way of phrasing things, this is a general philosophical statement, barely hung on the frame of the natural world—that observation of natural rhythms and forces which was his natural poetic environment when he was at his best. Like Whitman, his many years of honed craft prevent these late poems from being actual juvenilia, yet there are many similarities in intent, if not exactly in execution.

•

To go back to my own juvenilia, I am astounded to notice that I numbered the typed pages in this binder, up to page 205 or so. Most pages contain more than one poem, or fragment of a poem. Most of it is crap, of course, but I can say that I was at least being diligent as a young writer, trying to learn my craft by doing, and doing more, and more. I was if nothing else very prolific in my process of learning to write poems. A few of the parody-poems, at least, are witty enough to make me smile; which I can do because I had entirely forgotten them, and so could approach them today as if written by someone else.

There are many crossings-out and revisions in the binder, a few hand-written replacement pages, some entire poems stroked out and rejected. I've never had a talent for rhymed meter, which is very evident here; one or two whimsical poems or parodies have some wit to their rhymes, but little else. I think I've thoroughly proved that I am unable to write an adequate sonnet.

I freely admit that I was a child of late 20th C. Modernist poetics, which tended to view rhymed meter as quaint—although I was an Ogden Nash fan as a boy, and my father had a lifelong passion for limericks—while more "serious" poetry was of the Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound lineage. So some of the best of these juvenile poems—and one or two of them have survived into my more mature work, albeit rewritten—are free verse, organic forms, open-ended structures. I can see, in the few adequate-if-not-great poems in here, the seeds of a later style and approach. There are a few very strange turns and metaphors, not quite surrealist but easily magic-realist, that would develop into something more, later on.

I can see the lineage of my own development here, if nothing else, and what I see is that my current way of looking at the world, my unique use of language to convey experience, was already in place. I may have acquired more craft in the intervening years, to better support and shape a poem's voice, yet I can already see, in these very early poems, some topics and worldviews that I continue to hold. I guess I always did. What made me a better writer, over time, was learning the skills and tools of poetic craft, but the visions were already there, already in place, already liminal with light from other worlds.

The Essentially Pagan Nature of Environmentalism

Last dream before waking: I am carrying a load of wood, long stripped pine logs, with others, from a forest patch to a trucking site down the road; our work group is two Native girls, a friend, and myself; we take turns carrying and maneuvering the load of wood, trying to get where we’re going; we get to talking about our motivations for why we have all become environmentalists; I talk about my birth and life in Michigan, how I felt directly connected to the land, how I still feel connected to the land when I settle some place; the older of the two Native girls, the one who talks, finds this a good thing, and close in kind to the values and feelings she herself has, and was raised to believe.

People need to always remember, the Earth will endure, even if we destroy ourselves. We could destroy ourselves, still, and the habitats we rely on for survival. But “save the planet” needs to be rephrased as “save ourselves.” We are the ones in danger. The planet itself is enduring, and will still be here even after we, as a species, have either died out, or evolved on to some other state, possibly a space-borne one, either technologically or inherently, or something wildly beyond imagining.

The dream, and the thoughts it springs forward upon waking, that I’ve written here, remind me of the essentially pagan nature of the thoughts and feelings behind the environmental movement(s). Pagan, in the original Latin, meant the people of the countryside, the pagani, as opposed to those who dwelled in the center of culture in the Big City. Pagan also meant the country people's little religions, the thousand little gods, the statues of Priapus in the village greens, and other fertility symbols, the old Dionysian/Bacchan rites, the gods and festivals that were tied to and marked the agricultural annual cycle. Pagan, once Rome became Christian, the Holy Roman Empire, who consolidated their power in the One True Church, as some have called it, also came to mean all the little pre-Christian, non-Christian belief-systems and local religions that institutional Christianity strove to supplant throughout Europe. Thus do the conquering monoliths of organized faiths label those they have supplanted, murdered, and exterminated: heretics, heathens, witches (which meant, originally, wise ones), pagans. During the Inquisition, which some scholars insist has never ended, women and men alike were burned as witches because their local wisdom was based on the local herbs and beliefs, not the One True Church. The shift in meaning of the word pagan to mean non-Christian was part of a method of centralized political control, of the consolidation of temporal power as well as religious domination. In which case, being the fundamentally anti-authoritarian beast that I am, it pleases me to be labeled, pagan, witch, heretic, faggot. I own all those labels proudly, in defiance of Church authorities. And my dreams, ever archetypal and resonant, continue to remind me of my own essentially pagan nature: my feel for the land, for the forces of nature, weather, time, erosion, wabi-sabi, the agricultural annual cycle, and the non-human beings that travel alongside us on this turning globe. There’s a squirrel bounding across the snow in the yard out back: gather ye nuts and berries while ye may.

I am not anti-human in the slightest, although I don’t think we’re the center of the universe, the measure of all things, or the end product of evolution. Evolution continues, and will do so when we're gone. If the theory of evolution is correct, our species like many other species has a lifespan of probably a few million years, at most. After that, we would not even recognize ourselves, if we are still here; we'll either have evolved or become extinct. The globe will circle our Sun for much longer than that. The earth does care about us, her wayward children, of this I have no doubt. Meister Eckhart’s comment about how we feel separated from the Divine, be it God or Gaea, is relevant here: God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk. In all of this I agree with Robinson Jeffers, in his oft-misunderstood philosophy of Inhumanism, which is not misanthropic but rather reaffirms that all things human are rather small, and not the center of the universe. I am not anti-human, but I am opposed to the excesses of some of the humanist philosophy, which at times approaches narcissistic self-regard at the level of solipsism. What I am for is including everybody else in our self-regard, not forgetting that we are all One, and that a good guest in a home doesn’t mess up the furniture or leave dirty dishes in the sink.

But perhaps selfishness is the only motivation that many people will hitch their wagons to. If you point out that the real truth of the environmental movement is not “save the planet” but “save ourselves,” maybe people will actually begin to pay attention, and wake up to the truth that it’s not healthy to shit where you sleep. The planet will endure, whether or not we do. If an appeal to enlightened self-interest is what it takes us to clean up our acts, literally, then I’m all for it.

Tor House & Hawk Tower

The Beauty of Things

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars—
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality—
For man's half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant—to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest's diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

—Robinson Jeffers



Once again, passing through Carmel, CA, I drove by and paid my respects to Hawk Tower and Tor House, built by poet Robinson Jeffers. This Monterey and Big Sur landscape, his adopted home and source and wellspring inspiration, root of much of his nature-based imagery and observation, remains a soulful point along a beautiful coastline. Now maintained by the Tor House Foundation, the buildings are both a memorial and a continuing inspiration; if you're ever driving by, and feel like undertaking a poetic pilgrimage into the world of a difficult, brilliant poet, I highly recommend a visit.



Tor House

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River-valley, these four will remain
In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind
Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from
Before the poles changed; and Orion in December
Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.
Come in the morning you will see white gulls
Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon
Their dance-companion, a ghost walking
By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.
My ghost you needn't look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
With the mad wings and the day moon.

—Robinson Jeffers

Notes towards an egoless poetry 13: Something Other

Crystallizing in me as I sit in early morning sunlight, for once having risen with the sun, and looking out the large windows over a vista frosted with yesterday's brief, wet, late-winter snow, is an awareness of the limitations of all human self-definition. There is something else, something larger, in the Universe, then the things we care about as humans. When I get mired in my own small concerns, which can seem large at the time, I step back to realize they're very small. That red fox who has denned across the river will go on living, if I moved away today. The tallest trees here, all between 75 and 100 years old, have risen and fallen with no need of human stewardship.

This perspective keeps us sane, keeps us in balance, keeps us aware that all those things of the topical and political moment that get so much energy and attention are really very small things. Not much more than the drops of snow falling off the frosted tree branches outsides.

There is something Other in the world, something important to recognize.

All too often our ideas of stewardship and rightness cling to the walls of our conceptual prisons, and never venture beyond. The beginnings of the environmentalism movement, some few decades ago, were the first general awareness in Western culture that we do not live alone on this planet, and that we are responsible for its care. Having been around the globe a couple of times in childhood and youth, I carry memories of places most people in my root culture have never seen except virtually, and have no feel for. I always like to go to a place to get a feel for it myself. The environmental movement was and is in part an aesthetic movement: it seeks to preserve that which we find beautiful that is Other than ourselves. This Other is not fashion, or fashionable; it does not depend on its for its creation, only for its continued preservation; it does not care if we come or go, except as we interfere with it.

This natural Other is entirely uncaring about us. It doesn't even know if we live or die. Hawks will continue to nest there, as will ground squirrels, long after we pass on. There is an eternity there that has nothing to do with us.

And so I am drawn into a deeper understanding of what those few poets who don't think humans were the most important subject to write about, or the most important subject to think about, have represented in their poetry: something Other than human. This has always been a minority stance in poetry, which, as a human artform, tends to be as recursive and self-regarding as any other artform. Confessional poetry, and its ongoing dominance in mainstream poetry with the rise of the confessional lyric, was perhaps an inevitable culmination of the tendency towards self-regard that the species carries along; perhaps unflinching self-regard is the inevitable curse of self-awareness, of sentience itself. Poetry that is about something Other than the human has never been dominant in literature, and probably never will be. We mostly like to write about ourselves. Yet it is a necessary thread: a reminder of that Other that is larger than all of us combined. In poetry, this can be expressed in religious language, of course, but it is wise to be clear that an homage to an intellectually-conceived divine is both unnecessary and irrelevant; the Other we discuss here requires from us neither worship nor submission, but only coexistence. It is indifferent to us, for the most part.

This Other is nature itself. The world beyond. The Universe of the astrophysicists, and the geological actuality of the planet we ride on. We ourselves are not separate from nature, although we have tried very hard to believe that we have been separated from nature, in order to justify our childish ideas of dominion and conquest. We prefer to rule rather than coexist. One might delve into the infantile aspects worldview that underlies such will to dominate and control. Suffice to say that, as a species, we have not yet grown up into adult wisdom, but remain in our turbulent adolescence, reverting at whim to childish self-inflations. Nothing is more egocentric than a baby.

There has been growing in me, this past year in which many parts of my old life have died or otherwise fallen away, an awareness of the scale of the world, of its vastness, and its vast indifference to me and mine. Rather than arouse fear in me—fear of annihilation—this inspires relief, even a kind of solace. An awareness that nothing of the everyday matters; it could all fall apart tomorrow, and the world would still go on. I take solace in the world's indifference. I spend my mornings, before engaging in the everyday necessities, with the trees and the river here, and the animals and birds and fungi that populate them. We interact, we coexist, we live together; none of them care about what I must get done today. So why must I?

So I return to poets like Robinson Jeffers, with his poetic philosophy of Inhumanism, which expresses something very similar to this indifference of the Other to us. I return to poets of naturalism, poets of observation, who report without prejudice what they see. Trained observers of the world as it is, who interact with the Other without trying ipose their will onto it.

Jeffers famously, or infamously, wrote in his Preface to The Double Axe about his poetic attitude of Inhumanism. This attitude, as well as the book, was roundly attacked and condemned during his lifetime, but in recent years has been reconsidered; his ideas are currently undergoing reassessment, and there is fruit there for the new trees we are trying to plant here.

Jeffers wrote of his book's long title poem in that same Preface: Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a certain philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty. There is so much here that speaks directly to what I keep finding myself trying to do, as a poet, that my breath catches, and I can only point towards Jeffers' own words as signposts for my own: the rejection of human solipsism . . . the recognition of the transhuman magnificence . . . a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man. . . . Poems that speak through the poet not with a human voice, but the collective voice of a colony of fire ants; poems that are the wet walls of the Oregon coastal mountains speaking to a fox passing through; poems that have no human voice at all, and can barely fit into words.

Loren Eiseley, paleontologist, literary science writer, poet and naturalist, and one of my favorite writers, had many pithy things to say about our place in the grand scheme of things. About our fundamental need to part of nature, he wrote: Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war. About our desire to separate ourselves from nature, which is really the desire to be special and superior, Eiseley wrote: From the solitude of the wood, [Man] has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart. And: If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure. It takes a geologic sense of time, as Eiseley had, to remind ourselves that even species have limited lifetimes; we might act as if we will be here forever; but most mammalian species have had lifetimes measured in mere millions of years. Our species, like others, is in fact, very fragile, and not enduring. In the far future, will we still be here? Eiseley believed, as I do, that Life may exist in yonder dark, but it will not wear the shape of man.

Yet Eiseley was also aware of both the artist's transformative role in society, here and now, and the price that often must be paid: It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. Visionary scientist Freeman Dyson titled one of his books, Disturbing the Universe, to express a very similar thought.

British poet Basil Bunting once said in an interview: There is a possibility of a kind of reverence for the whole of creation which I feel we all ought to have in our bones, a kind of pantheism. If the word `God’ is to have any use it must include everything. The only way to know anything is to consider yourself a student of histology, finding out as much as carefully controlled common sense can find out about the world. In so doing, you will be contributing to the histology of God. At another time, he wrote: Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation. This is harsh, as harsh as the old rock exposed along the peaks of old island's backbones; but it is the perspective of the Other to be indifferent, which only seems harsh when you yourself are the target of such indifference. As many theologians and other poets echo Bunting: If the word `God’ is to have any use it must include everything. Everything. If you exclude the Other, there is no God in your excluding; no Godhead, no act of divine definition. It's an all or nothing proposition.

John Alec Baker published in 1967 a book called The Peregrine, which is a record of close observation of the falcon in its natural setting. There is almost no authorial self in the book, although the style of language is strong and occasionally dazzling. Baker begins the book with this paragraph: East of my home, the long ridge lies across the skyline like the low hull of a submarine. Above it, the eastern sky is bright with reflections of distant water, and there is a feeling of sails beyond land. Hill trees mass together in a dark–spired forest, but when I move toward them they slowly fan apart, the sky descends between, and they are solitary oaks and elms, each with its own wide territory of winter shadow. The calmness, the solitude of horizons lures me toward them, through them, and on to others. They layer the memory like strata.

This early mention of the author's homestead is almost the only mention of humanity in the book, which moves gradually away from the human, to become fully enmeshed in the lives of the non-human. (I think Jeffers would have liked this progression throughout the course of Baker's book.) The reader feels completely drawn into the world of the falcon, and outside of myself. Baker followed the peregrines near his home for almost a decade, gradually feeling more and more like them. This is how Baker describes learning to track the peregrine: Approach him across open ground with a steady unfaltering movement. Let your shape grow in size but do not alter its outline. Never hide yourself unless concealment is complete. Be alone. Shun the furtive oddity of man, cringe from the hostile eyes of farms. Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must become the thing he hunts. This is the pure poetry of that something Other than ourselves. Another moment from The Peregrine that beholds the world's dramatic beauty: A falcon peregrine, sable on a white shield of sky, circled over from the sea. She slowed, and drifted aimlessly, as though the air above the land was thick and heavy. She dropped. The beaches flared and roared with salvoes of white wings. The sky shredded up, was torn by whirling birds. The falcon rose and fell, like a black billhook in splinters of white wood.

Poets are these who do not define themselves by their place in society, or their success in the marketplace of societal self-regard. Contemplatives are these without an investment in the usual dominance of self-regard. Solace-takers in the eternal present.

A poetry of the non-human, the inhuman, the something Other that is the rest of existence, in which we play only a part, and of which we are neither the masters nor of whose fate are we the sole determining force.

Outside, the snow melts away under early spring sunlight, leaving the lawn half-white, half-green. A hawk flies along the river. Red male cardinals pipe in the trees.

Post-humanism

Humanism, in the literary arts, is the idea that "man is the measure of all things." This is a viewpoint that has been in the philosophical ascendant for centuries now, to the point where most people simply take it for granted as natural law. In fact, it's an illusion, a solipsistic illusion, and a particularly self-absorbed, culturally-egotistic one. The arrogance comes in primarily when human writing is framed as natural writing: the only natural text worth discussing.

This is worth examining in detail. Gary Snyder writes about humanism and posthumanism is his long essay Tawny Grammar, collected in his book of essays, The Practice of the Wild, published by North Point Press. Snyder is worth quoting from at length:

One of the formal criteria of humanist scholarship is that it be concerned with the scrutiny of texts. A text is information stored through time. The stratigraphy of rocks, layers of pollen in swamps, the outward expanding circles in the truck of a tree, can be seen as texts. The calligraphy of rivers winding back and forth over the land, leaving layer upon layer of traces of previous riverbeds is text. The layers of history in language become a text of language itself. . . .

Euro-American humanism has been a story of writers and scholars who were deeply moved and transformed by their immersion in earlier histories and literatures. Their writings have provided useful cultural—rather than theological or biological—perspectives on the human situation. The Periclean Greeks digested the Homeric lore, which went back to the Bronze Age and before. The Romans enlarged themselves by their study of Greece. Renaissance seekers nourished themselves on Greece and Rome. Today a new breed of posthumanists is investigating and experiencing the diverse little nations of the planet, coming to appreciate the "primitive," and finding prehistory to be an ever-expanding field of richness. We get a glimmering of the depth of our ultimately single human root. Wild nature is inextricably in the weave of self and culture. The "post" in the term posthumanism is on account of the word human. The dialogue to open next would be among all beings, toward a rhetoric of ecological relationships. This is not to put down the human: the "proper study of mankind" is what it means to be human. It's enough to be shown in school that we're kin to all the rest: we have to feel it all the way through. Then we can also be uniquely "human" with no sense of special privilege. . . .

When humans know themselves, the rest of nature is right there. (pp. 66–68)

I find this to be remarkably similar to what Robinson Jeffers said about his ideas of Inhumanism. The parallels are striking, although the language is very different. Jeffers wrote, in his preface to The Double Axe (1948):

The first part of The Double Axe was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a certain philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.

Snyder speaks in a gentle, Buddhist-inflected voice, while Jeffers speaks more harshly, more directly, in his Calvinist-raised voice. Yet I believe they are essentially saying the same thing; and they are statements that I agree with strongly, both as a poet and as a human. Having visited or lived among many of the landscapes that Jeffers and Snyder have inhabited and written about, I find myself caring deeply about preserving the natural beauty of those places.

In retrospect, it is ironic that Jeffers was often misunderstood to be misanthropic or bitterly anti-human. In fact, both Snyder and Jeffers explicitly state that their philosophies are not anti-human, misanthropic, or pessimistic. That they have been perceived to be just that, is an indictment of the self-same human-centered solipsism that they are presenting an alternative to, to bring humanism into balance with those natural forces that are part of us, and also much larger than us.

In Western thought, we seem to need to continually be reminded of these ideas; they keep getting lost in recurrent waves of theoretical navel-gazing. But it is instructive to remember how many great Western thinkers have written attempts to redress the imbalance. Man's proper place in nature, as part of nature, was what Henry David Thoreau wrote about in much of his work, notably in Walden. I also am reminded of part of W.H. Auden's argument in his essay book on poetics, The Enchaféd Flood, wherein Auden reminds us that we are part of nature: nature is all around us, and in us, and the division between "City" and "Wilderness," as represented by desert and ocean, is a purely mental division, not an actual one. As Snyder writes, Wild nature is inextricably in the weave of self and culture. I read an article recently about how wild species have made comfortable homes for themselves within our major cities: peregrine falcons nest on our skyscrapers; bald eagles fly along the Mississippi River through downtown Minneapolis; there are thriving packs of coyotes living in Chicago and Boston and Denver.

Recently, I have been noting a new rise of environmentalist rhetoric, this time emerging from within the Biblical fundamentalist community (not a group I've ever considered very rigorous or logical in their theology, which often has little to do with actual Biblical scholarship). It's amazing to find allies about environmental issues coming forward from many surprising directions; regardless of any other differences, it is a hopeful sign, since the Christian evangelical community has traditionally been hostile to environmental issues.

All of these writers and poets, and their ideas about our proper place in the natural world, are converging on a point that the "primitive" (pre-Euro-American climax civilization) cultures knew quite well: we are not the lords of creation, we are part of the created. We seem to be living at last, now, in a posthumanist era, where we are being continually brought up against reminders that we're not separate from nature, or from each other, and also that we are not "in dominion over nature," one of the most grievous interpretations of Biblical theology, but rather that we must exist in partnership with nature, or die.

So, in our poetry, it is perhaps time to seek out a posthumanist poetry: a genuine antidote to the current dominance of the navel-gazing confessional lyric, and furthermore an antidote to the solipsistic self-referential hermeticism of the New York School and Language Poetry. A posthumanist poetry that does not exclude humanity, but also does not put humanity into high relief in opposition to nature, but in balanced, reverential, embodied partnership with nature.

Wayfaring

Here's another older poem about nomadics, from 1986, slightly revised; again, maybe not the best poem I've ever written, but since I'm traveling right now, I'm in the mood to review some of my older writings about nomadics, travel, and pilgrimage.



Earlier this week, I visited Robinson Jeffers home in Carmel, CA, Tor House and Hawk Tower. They only do tours on weekends, and I was there on a Thursday; nonetheless, the quiet and beauty of the place, under its canopy of tall trees, with its view of the ocean at its feet, and the quiet, inhabited beauty of the buildings themselves, was enriching. I just stood there for awhile, taking in the silence and the beauty of the place, and I felt reverence enter my heart. A place of enchantment.

•

wayfaring

you start from a place
you never left behind,
crossing endless paths, never staying,
though you have smelled meadow wildflowers
and once, at a summerland place, you rested;
but never long. the road always calls
you into being in motion;
you walk into twilight.
you have slept in fields
beneath terrifying stars,
in barns, in houses, in caves, in snow,
in leaves, in beds, in ruins;
you never cared enough for shelter.

now you have no voice,
no reason to speak as you walk.
nighthawks circle in the twilight;
their calls are music enough, their speech
is full of your own words,
the same speaking, same tongues;
now you become elemental,
outside the unknown,
last time you tried to speak
it came out a waterfall,
a desert sandwind.

Jeffers Pilgrimage

I arrived yesterday in the San Francisco area, where I will be staying about a week. Then, I will be driving down Highway One on the California coast. I plan to stop in at the Robinson Jeffers home, Tor House, now a foundation and historical site, at Carmel-by-the-sea, near Big Sur.

It's time for a quote or two from Jeffers, to prepare the way:

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars,
  life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye
  that watched before there was an ocean.
—from Continent's End

                                Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could I help but
    recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared,
    and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into inter-
    dependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free
    survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent.
    The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in.
—from The Purse-Seine

Protest & Political Poetry

Politically motivated? Pissed off at the bad conditions of the world? Empathy for the sufferers, for the mothers of the disappeared? Concerned about social justice? Worried about those worse off than yourself?

Write a poem about it!

But wait: what happened to the tradition of protest music, protest song, political singer-songwriters? that whole generation from Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, to the present? (Topic for another time: Industrial music is the new protest music: it addresses the same concerns and issues, while most of the singer/songwriters these day seem to be less political, more self-concerned; the same way the personal confessional lyric has come to dominate poetry.)

Still: write a poem, and speak your mind!

But wait: protest poetry isn't dead, not really. It never was. You could check out Poets Against the War online (I even had a poem on their website, when they first started out) You could check out the entire history of Arabic poetry, which is full of such poetry. War and death and suffering in the desert lands are nothing new.

The chief problem with political poems is that they are ephemeral, and topical: they rarely outlast the events which they are talking about, and they rarely rise above the fray to endure past those times in which they are written. They might still be read in later centuries, but usually only as an artistic footnote reflecting upon the historical chapter. A commentary on social justice by a dead protester.

Sometimes the most political poetry that you can write is something that endures beyond the news of the hour, and lasts for a good long time. Walt Whitman, for example, comes to mind, with his Lincoln poems, his Civil War poems. When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd endures because it is not a short-term angry protest-poem, but because it is a poem of universal mourning, a meditation on death, and an evocation of eternity. Most political poems, especially protest-poems, fall far short of that mark, because they are written out of short-term outrage rather than deep, lasting, human experience.

Sometimes the most political poetry you can write is poetry that points out how the earth endures, despite everything horrible that humans do to it, and to each other.

Even otherwise excellent poets will often write crap, when they turn to political/protest (outrage) poetry. It's not the poets that are at fault, usually, rather the subject matter itself tends to make the poems topical and ephemeral. Even some of the more political poems by Browning, Whitman, Hopkins, Sandburg and Frost, just don't stand the test of time. Protest is a subject matter that inherently tends to be difficult to pull off as a good, enduring poem. It's as if many poets and readers think, given the subject of the poem, the craft of the poem ought to be given a free pass. This is very parallel to poets and readers thinking that therapy-poems ought to be given a free pass, as if a poet who writes about abuse or rape or torture should be soothed rather than critiqued.

It's almost as if the critical faculty goes out the window, when the subject matter is political. At the worst extreme, political correctness gone wrong tells us that we dare not offer critique of the Other's artistic product; although some of the reasons behind that viewpoint may be sound (acceptance of diversity, the innate fairness of wanting to meet the Other in an arena of understanding, whether the arena be one of gender, culture, sexuality, race, whatever), taken to its silliest extreme, that otherwise wise stance or equality and fairness denies any possibility of criticism on purely literary grounds.

It seems to me that many political poems seem to be written with ambition: that they will noticed, that their voices will be heard, that they will survive the judgment of history. Think about it: it takes a certain amount of necessary ego, even necessary hubris, to imagine that anything one writes as a personal protest poem will survive the test of time. Ego is not inherently bad in itself, but neither is ego-inflation the same as self-confidence. There's a difference between mature self-confidence and raw ambition.

The irony is that most political poems don't survive the judgment of history. Of course one is perfectly free to write whatever one wants to write, for whatever reason, whenever, however, whoever, whatever. One is also free to believe that one is in fact contributing to the course of history by using one's art to make comments about that historical course. One might be right, and one might be wrong. I don't think one can know, in advance.

When I look at the art and poems that have survived the test of time, whether or not their creators ever intended them to is almost irrelevant. You never know, and you can't. I'm not saying that poets should write with the test of time in mind. I'm not saying that at all. Poets shouldn't think about the judgment of history, when they are writing, because they can't do anything about it. Not only that, worrying about the verdict of history can skew up what one does write: it can lead to self-censorship, but it can also lead towards personal ego-fulfillment, rather than about serving one's muse.

I'm all for artists using their creative voices to persuade, cajole, entice, subvert, teach, learn, practice, invoke, etc. I am less sanguine about artists using their creative voices to castigate, lecture, vilify, control, harangue, etc.

Most political poetry, by its very nature, is pedantic, polemic, and lecturing. That is another good reason it tends to have a short shelf-life.

But if you wrote a poem about the redwoods that makes people think about them, love them, and want to conserve their habitat, that might become an enduring political/social poem. Perhaps more enduring than a topical political poem, because the environment is a bigger, more enduring issue itself. There can be a ripple effect: if you photographed or painted them in all kinds of light and weather, your artwork might touch a few who are new to wanting to save them; the same could happen with a poetry of natural existence, such as Robinson Jeffers'.

I think that's how real, enduring change happens. I don't think real political change happens from the top down, but from the bottom up. It can be slow, and apparently indirect, but when you change someone's ideas about their place in the universe, you have changed their lives, and their zeitgeist, and their politics. I think that's far more enduring than who's President right now, or who's in Congress. It's the Native American idea of stewarding the earth so that it will still be there to be lovingly inhabited by the seventh generation. I think art can make a difference in this particular arena of political action, in a way that the topically-political cannot. Rather, the topical, Washington D.C. Beltway-level of the political status quo is what I think poetry can have no impact on, because those people in D.C. don't read poetry anyway, or really care about the arts, or think they mean anything.

The philosophy of change and action at the grass-roots level is something the D.C. insiders always discount, and underestimate. (It's one reason I can never take them very seriously.) Grass-roots action is the philosophy behind eco-friendly publishers such as Sierra Club Books; to be honest, those earlier books, especially under David Brower's editorship, really did make a difference to a lot of people, and helped ignite the conservation movement, influencing such legislation as the Clean Air Act. (Which Nixon signed into law, one might recall.) I collect old Sierra Club editions, and treasure them. I have several books of photos by Elliott Porter, a great nature photographer; I also have been reading Not Man Apart, which is a book of photos accompanying the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. It's an excellent edition, and in some ways a better introduction to his occasionally challenging poetry, than are his own purely poetry books.

Art about conservation is inherently more enduring than art about war or politics, because the earth is more enduring than nations. Stewardship of the earth is an ethical value I think worth promoting, and is more likely to effect long-term political change, from the grass-roots, than the growing body poems about the current war—and there have always been poems about the current war, because there has always been a current war.

I should point out at this juncture that there is often a conflation between "war poetry" and "political poetry," which is ultimately misleading. War poetry is poetry about war, or against war, or about the horror of war. One keeps returning to Wilfred Owen's famous statement, My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. His poems are about individual, specific moments, with specific characters and specific moments. They are true to human experience, specific rather than general, reportorial rather than ideological. That's why they're memorable poems. They're not vague philosophical generalities, they're not abstract, they're specific. Strange Meeting, one of his masterpieces, is all about how the universal emerges from the specific:

. . . 'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. . . .

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . .'

Generalities are not what make a poem universal and enduring. Many poets will likely agree that what makes poems endure is the way they evoke the personal and the specific in the reader, almost somatically or empathically, if you will. The main problem with political poetry, again, is the tendency to make Grand Philosophical Statements—most of which tend to be familiar to the point of being clichés, abstract to the point of being disembodied, ideological rather than ethical, ineffective simply because they are clichés. Politicians use soundbytes to distill their messages—poets can do much more than that, and probably ought to at least make an attempt.

War poetry is as Owen indicates: it's reportorial, it's about pity, and it's often a response to the experience, and the horror. (Keith Douglas, Steve Murphy, Michael Casey, other "war poets," most of them vets exemplify this. Some of them even survived.)

Political protest poetry, I have noticed over many years, is not often written by veterans; it is often written by those on the home front. (There's no judgment here, just an observation.) Political protest poetry, which is what most think of as "political poetry," is often about disagreeing with those in political power at the moment: but it often reads as a screed, a diatribe, a broadsheet, a polemic, a sermon, a heckling, and not much as poetry. That's fine, that's its purpose. (If you assume that I'm saying that all political protest anti-war poetry is a priori bad and wrong, go back and read what I said again: I said, it's often not very good, and it often fails to endure past the topical moment.) The purpose of screed, diatribe, protest, polemic, and propaganda is to change peoples' minds, change their opinions so that they agree with your own. Convince them of the truth of your own viewpoint. Yelling at them only makes them clamp down and ossify their opinions. If you really want to change someone's mind, cajole them, entice them, get them to walk a mile in someone else's shoes—get them to think of something outside their usual circle of awareness, get them to appreciate the viewpoints held by the Other. One of the best ways to do this is through a poetry of embodiment—rather than a poetry of ideas.

Again, I refer the reader to Robinson Jeffers; he embodies both aspects of this issue, in different poems. His best poems succeed because they are specific, evocative, full of fresh imagery; they convince one to love and care for the earth simply by making us fall in love with it all over again. His worst poems, among them his most overtly political poems, and his most screed-like, tend to be built on ideas rather than images, abstractions rather than story, satiric devices (his much-maligned and often-misunderstood ideas about "Inhumanism," for example) rather than personal contact with the reader, and so forth. His work is an interesting case study of the best and the worst aspects of political/polemic poetry. Jeffers was a WWI veteran, and his experiences in that war colored the rest of his life and work.

Good poetry must be true to the experience it communicates. It needs to come from the heart, yes, but it needs to include the head and the hands in the mix: intellect, empathy, and artifice combined.