Thin Waters

Yeats, the bardic lord, foretold the condition
of modern poetry when he said, "Things fall apart,
the center cannot hold." He was foretelling the breakdown
of the centers of civilization, but it was really
as always about poetry. I've read enough
Gertrude Stein now to realize that she was right
in her self-assessment that she was shallow actually.
Words glorious words about nothing much at all.
If you get under the surface of her plays, they're parlor
plays with little drama. Still, a good pun is a good pun.
A phrase well-turned, she is the darling of the language
that that nothing poetic to say except about itself.
There's a golden maple outside my window, blown
in bleak gusts, half its leaves on the ground
shed like words or worlds, its branches still
half-leaved. It's not that shallowness is bad, unless
there's no center to hold, but that these word players
glory in their inanity. They don't even want more meat.
Robert Duncan, whose word tangles were at least as
exotic never lost the center of his purpose, which
was bardic. Bards, skalds, tellers of the insistent news
of other lands, travelers between small kingdoms
more cultural than geographic, small minds in large halls
firelit with retellings of the oldest Anglo-Saxon epics,
lust and battle and pointless deaths albeit monstrous.
Put that in your meerschaum and scribe it. I wish,
as everyone probably does, that life had some kind of
meaning or purpose, even an invented tradition rife
with accumulated verbal fossils. These vintage lake beds
are very shallow, many layers but all very thin. Not enough
time to compress them to solidity. Word-play is no bad thing.
It's just that like Duncan meaning lurks below the scintillation
of the surface tension. To glory in one's tepid ordinary,
no mass, seems shale. I keep looking for the dark matter
hidden behind the facade of words, but telescope not
wit nor jot. A list-poem of fashionable name-checks even Whitman
would reject. I ramble incoherent, here myself at play with words.
More leaves fall like words in the wind. Apples and maples all fall.
I find I cannot go along with embracing pointlessness as being
the point. Some part of me yearns for dragon's teeth in the warp
and weft, handspun yarn uneven and clumped, not perfect
but dangling with threads of connection. Go to, young language.
You can be small-scale, explore domestic mysteries, or overblown,
making a life mythic because resonant with archetypes. What else
is "Beowulf" but a cautionary tale of hubris and self-deceit?
If I name-check other poets it's to weave them not deceive them.
My own word-hoard is darker than you think.

Adrienne Rich as Bard

This past week and more I have been reading through what I have of Adrienne Rich's poems and essays, reading some things again, reading some things for the first time. At one point I was talked into getting rid of all my Rich books, and convinced that as a political poet she wasn’t any good. That was wrong, and I’ve changed my mind. I now value her poetry highly, and some of her prose essays are fundamental to 20th C. thought about LGBT issues, about poetry, about how to live in a war-torn century and refuse to be complicit with its compromises and losses in public life.

In fact, I like Rich’s anger now more than ever, her rock-hard determination, her use of language to get at the roots of life, partly because they reflect my own, but also because they have come to seem necessary. Too much ground has been given in to the bullies, and that must stop. Her refusal to give in to those who would destroy her, and me, is more essential than ever.

The freedom of the wholly mad
to smear & play with her madness
write with her fingers dipped in it
the length of a room

which is not, of course, the freedom
you have, walking on Broadway
to stop & turn back or go on
10 blocks; 20 blocks

but feels enviable maybe
to the compromised

. . .

Madness.       Suicide.       Murder.
Is there no way out but these?
The enemy, always just out of sight
snowshoeing the next forest, shrouded

In a snowy blur, abominable snowman
—at once the most destructive
and the most elusive being
gunning down the babies at My Lai
vanishing in the face of confrontation

The prince of air and darkness
computing body counts, masturbating
in the factory
of facts.
—Adrienne Rich, from “The Phenomenology of Anger”

What other poet uses such a vocabulary lately? So many are content to speak only of lovers' dramas set in urban living rooms, or play with words till nothing means anything any more. What other poet tells such stories of the world’s tragedies, and our individual ones? They’re the same, of course.

This is bardic, in the old tradition of the poet at the king’s fire, telling the news. This is the voice of the lineage of ancient Jewish prophets, telling the truths no one wants to hear. Contemporary Jewish mystic Rabbi Abraham Heschel once wrote, A prophet is one who interferes with injustice, and that is what we have in Rich’s writing. Can a poem change the world? Perhaps not. But it does have the power to make a reader think about starting to change the world, even if only in their own backyard. Poetry does have the power to inspire. It's only when we treat poetry as a pretty decoration, like a doily on a sewing table, that it does not. If we resist letting poetry become purely decorative, than there are things we can still say with it.

Even more than the poems themselves, I keep returning to Rich’s ideas about poetry. The poems are thick and muscular, pared down to the limits of language, forceful commentaries on life, what wounds us, on engagement with the world, personally, politically, socially, spiritually. What she wrote about the act of making poetry, the art of the vatic word, is just as muscular.

I keep coming back to what Rich said that poems are meant to be:

Today, I have to say that what I know I know through making poems. Like the novelist who finds that his characters begin to have a life of their own and to demand certain experiences, I find that I can no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express those materials acrrording to a prior plan: the poem itself engenders new sensations, new awareness in me as it progresses. Without for one moment turning my back on conscious choice and selection, I have been increasingly willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than the one voice of a single idea. Perhaps a simple way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it.

Rather than being about an experience, a poem should be an experience. I wholeheartedly agree. I find myself, every time I make a poem, wanting to make it an experience for the reader. I want the poem to recreate for the reader the experience that the poet had that led to the making of the poem. I don’t want to tell about what I experienced, I want to make you share the experience.

Sometimes the closest I can get to that is haiku. I keep making the attempt, even if it often fails. I feel like some of my more experimental poetry, like the Theokritikos series of poems, approaches what we want to do. Having a conversation in a normal tone, but with the heightened language of poetry, that’s what I try to do in the Letters poem series. Other bodies of work have different styles and forms. I’ve talked about cinematic poetry, a poetry that builds a narrative not through conventional grammar and storytelling but through sequencing images in strings that ignite into images in the mind. I think sometimes of Chris Marker’s beautiful and terrifying film, La Jeté, which is a film made up of B&W still photographs, that tell a huge and complex story using very simple means. Poems can be like that, if we allow them the grace to make the attempt, if we let go of our clinging to the words themselves and aim for what lies beyond and behind words.

And how we represent our lives as metaphor. I’ve had the experience of being in the desert just as described by Rich:

Every drought-resistant plant has its own story
each had to learn to live
with less and less water, each would have loved

to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip
after the thunderstorm
each could do without deprivation

but where drought is the epic then there must be some
who persist, not by species-betrayal
but by changing themselves

minutely, by a constant study
of the price of continuity
a steady bargain with the way things are
—Adrienne Rich, from the poem “The Desert as Garden of Paradise”

•

Other recent articles on Rich:

Poems Good Enough to Eat

Adrienne Rich: Moral Compass

And disabled writer Kenny Fries reflects on how important Rich was to the disabled community:

How Adrienne Rich Taught Me to Drive

Visionary Poetry 5: the Bardic tradition

A poet-critic states: "All the other art forms draw on poetry for the visionary." This comes back to the argument that poetry is the highest artform, which I have already stated my opinion on.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting idea: the shaman-poet, the bard, the teller of tales, the skald, inspiring the other arts.

I think it probably does happen, but no more than any of the other arts inspire poetry back, on this visionary, shamanic level. I'm thinking of some great ekphrastic poems over the centuries. The track of visionary poetry, music, and artwork through the centuries has several threads, which sometimes separate for awhile, before weaving together again. There are threads that go back to the Paleolithic era.

I think you might make a case for some of these inspiring, visionary shaman-poets of the past being Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Coleridge, Longfellow, possibly Browning. Each of these has inspired other artists. it's a short list, though.

In the modern era, I think the direction of influence is harder to support. Pollack, brilliant as he was as a painter who innovated, was pretty much an illiterate lout. van Gogh wasn't much better, and despite the record of his letters, he was remarkably inarticulate at times. Gaugain you might be able to make a case for; he was a reader of literature, and a writer, too; his diaries of Tahiti are interesting reading. I'm a big fan of Andy Goldsworthy, he's influenced my own art directly, but in all the books of his I've read, seen, or interviews and videos I've seen of him working, poetry doesn't seem to be in there anywhere, except for when Goldsworthy puts in his own pithy aphorisms.

If anything, Rilke was more influenced by artists, such as Cezanne and Rodin, and the Picasso of the "Saltimbanques" era, for the Fifth Duino Elegy, then he ever influenced visual artists in return.

I think one might be able to make a case for the visionary modern lyric to be present in pop music writing, which has been suggested; but even there, I think it's a limited case. I do not place Bob Dylan in as high esteem as many others do; nor do I think he's a visionary poet, in any realm other than the political/social. Granted, there's a bardic/skaldic thing going on with Dylan, and some real smarts, which he often seems to want to hide, but visionary poetry is only rarely social or political. (Neruda is occasionally visionary; but mostly late in life, and not so much in the political poems.) Except that they are both engaged with social justice, Dylan and Eckhart and Merton are all very, very far apart, poetically. Neither do I place Leonard Cohen in this category. I can see putting in Joni Mitchell there, and Bruce Cockburn. I might nominate Johnny Cash, for fulfilling a bardic function in society. But this might all be personal taste, on everyone's parts.

As for rock & roll, there's ekstasis and eros there aplenty, but a lot of it never rises above the level of the crotch, and a lot never achieves the sublime level that includes the crotch and more than the crotch. R&R is usually content to "be bad," to act out, and rebel, and very little of it ever achieves genuine emotional depth and maturity. Like atheism, rebelling against something only affirms the thing one is rebelling against, and rather than tearing it down, it serves to entrench it deeper. The rock artists who do get there, on occasion, all seem to come from the singer/songwriter direction, such as Cockburn or Paul Simon, or Robbie Robertson. Within "pure" rock, if there is such a thing, I might nominate Jimi Hendrix.

Frankly, I think there's a much stronger bardic/skaldic thread running through contemporary folk music, now and 50 years ago, then there ever was running through crotch-oriented R&R. But again, all that folkie protest music is mostly limited, and by its own choice, to the social justice arena. The genuinely visionary needs to be about more than social justice, although it includes it. It also needs to include the via negativa, the dark night of the soul, and the via positiva, the exaltation of all Creation, what Rilke means when he says that "A poet muct praise."

I know of a folk musician who's a genuine visionary: Gordon Bok. His "tellings" are directly in the bardic lineage, and each and every one of them is compelling, mysterious, visionary, even downright otherworldly.  

Now, some people say they remember the songs of their rebellious youths as the anthems of their lives. I do remember the music of my youth. But, because I am who I am, I admit it's usually the tune I can recall, not the lyrics. Perhaps that's why I remain a musician first, and poet third.  Actually, that's not accurate. More accurate to say would be that a song is music-and-lyrics; in a great song, you can't divorce the two into separate arenas. (Many a great song lyric doesn't hold up as a poem on the page, and is not as alive in that presentation as it is sung.) When pop or folk songs appear in my memory, they indelibly appear as words-and-music combined.

i think you might make a case for all the other arts being influenced by poetry, with poetry as the paramount visionary art, but it's a case that's limited to the far distant past. If you're talking the Paleolithic dawn of civilization, or even ancient Egypt and Greece, I think a case can be made for it; even more so for pre-Christian Europe, the Celtic shamanic ancestry which became subsumed into, for example, Irish religious practices, as Christianity spread across Europe after the 4th century A.D. But even in those ancient cultures, poetry was never divorced from music: lyrics were sung, songs were chanted, poetry was a living vehicle of expression, not words on a page. Even some of the Pharoahs were themselves illiterate; after all, they had as many scribes as they needed.

I don't think you can limit intuition to just the poets. Intuition is a universal, human birthright. It's a trainable skill; this is a pragmatic truth that has become quite evident in the past few decades, with the release of formerly-hidden threads of mysticism into the wider mainstream, a process which began in the 1950s. There are plenty of artists and musicians whose intuition is directly tied to the source, so to speak, without the mediation of poetry.

So, it's a very interesting idea, but I think it has many limits in application. I'm more likely to subscribe to a multi-valent, multi-dimensional schema, in which everybody influences everybody, everyone is influenced and influences in return. Both/and rather than either/or, as has been said, is a key paradigm for mysticism, visioary work, and shamanism.