Dead Poets Society

The famous poets were all disreputable in life, and died in obscurity.  Let’s say that again: the famous poets were all disreputable in life, and died in obscurity.  Sounds hyperbolic, not to mention paradoxical.  Yes, there was Pope, and Longfellow – but for every Alexander Pope there were at least two John Clares.  And for every Longfellow there were at least three shorter fellows, such as Melville, Dickinson or Sidney Lanier.

And what, really, do we know about Homer, the person?  Approximately enough factual data to fit within the orbit of a single atom of helium.  And Dante?  Dante died in exile, buried quietly in the backwater town of Ravenna.  And Shakespeare?  Sweet Will, the historical individual, on the 400th anniversary of his passing?  (Let’s not even go there.)

The famous poets struggled in life and died in obscurity: let us contemplate, if ever so briefly, this conundrum.  But for contrast, let’s begin with a detour.

Picture the poetry section in a bookstore.  Any bookstore: a bland outlet in a suburban mall, a university shop in a fancy college town... you’ve been there, as I have, mon semblable, mon frère, ma soeur.  There is a particular, peculiar bookstore feeling.  It suffuses, ineluctably, every would-be poet – every unknown, unsuccessful, or even half-successful versifier.  A toxic blend of melancholy, nausea, vertigo, anxiety, envy, skepticism and self-consciousness (with maybe a dab of paranoia) – catalyzed by the proximity of these cliff-like wooden aisles, packed neatly with clean bright poetry volumes, pinned on the chest with gold-leaf medals, on the rear with probing squeals of approval.  These are the immense high fortress walls of official recognition – which you, nondescript interloper, typical nonentity, will neither scale nor penetrate.

Some talented writer could devote an entire essay to this sad etching of darkness at noon, this invisible eclipse.

A few years ago there arose from the swamp of literary journals a good deal of complaint about the poetry “glut”.  The avalanche of bad or mediocre poems fomented and sent into circulation was drowning out the good, and this phenomenon marked a decline or morbidity in cultural values and aesthetic taste.  But such jeremiads failed to convince.  The writerly schools coalesced, instead, in the opposite direction: the U.S. was undergoing a veritable poetry renaissance, an unprecedented, explosive convergence of interest, talent, energy and relevance.  It was the dawn of a new, uncharted, and vital era for poetry.

Where does this leave that glum, marginal character loitering by the “Poetry & Criticism” shelves?  Don’t pay any mind.  She’s a loser.

Yet something uncanny happens there, under the mall’s desolate fluorescent lighting.  That abject nobody-poet shares one minor feature – infinitely insubstantial as it may be – with the splendid canonical poets of our glorious tradition: that is, she struggles in life and dies in obscurity.  

And in a flash, we recognize a kinship between these rows of gleaming, nauseous, fiberboard bookshelves, and the archaic labyrinth-tombs of Knossos and Thebes.  What then is the skeleton key to this riddle?  Where is Ariadne’s thread?

The great anthropologist A.M. Hocart, characterizing our prehistoric ancestors, put it in a gnomic nutshell : “the first king was a dead king.”  Not for nothing was Eliot’s signature volume of criticism titled The Sacred Wood.  This was borrowed from Sir James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough – a study of the roots of cultural mythology in sacrificial kingship.  Our so-called canon – the authorized diachronic transmission of literary authority (a particularly Eliotic obsession) – is intertwined with the legacy of prehistoric tribal succession rites.

The king must die.  Le Roi est mort – vive le Roi!  Anthropology has hovered for generations around the problem of vicarious sacrifice.  Its most radical theorist was the late René Girard, who proposed that mob violence and the scapegoat mechanism are actually constitutive of human culture, a subconscious stratum which configures human social experience in toto.  The king must die so that we may continue to have abundance of life, blessings of the gods. The death of the scapegoat brings peace to rivalrous tribes, does away with sin and all uncleanness.

In Western culture, our poets must suffer in life and die in obscurity before mounting to the heaven of the pantheon.  Art’s aesthetic pleasure is inextricably woven with the remoteness and otherness, the difference, the finish, of its maker’s ends.  As Mandelstam, himself an exemplary literary scapegoat, put it (in my rough paraphrase): “the poet’s meaning is fulfilled by his death.”  Or, in Wallace Stevens’ terms : “Death is the mother of beauty.”  

But are we on the right track here?  Is there even a track?  Ariadne’s thread seems to be leading us into ghastly, spectral regions, the haunts of a Poe.  Can we really credit Girard’s claim about a universal scapegoat reciprocity-mechanism, a version of Original Sin?  Must poets die in order to dwell in the canonical Elysium of our hearts?

For the sake of our thread, let’s continue down this trail.  Ezra Pound wrote somewhere that “literature is hero worship”.  He may have been speaking with reference mostly to himself, but the statement has some relevance to the general phenomenon of poetic filiation, affinity, attraction.  We adore what is far-off; we honor what is complete, finished, accomplished, whole.  “The achieve of, the mastery of, the thing” (Olson).  This tendency works somewhat against the grain of that normative American shibboleth – progress, change, growth (the Future, the Open Road).  Rather, Past and Future balance one another; each radiates its distinct values and excellence.

But what of our lonesome traveler, that no-count figure in the bookstore aisles, looked down upon, mocked by the tall cemented guile of prestigious literary marketing?  For him, for her, the maze only gets darker, the spiderweb thickens.  

Then, unaccountably, she reaches the center... and instead of a Minotaur, she discovers, on the dirt floor, a single copper coin (maybe a penny).  She flips it over (it’s a two-faced image).  Beauty and Death, Poetry and Life...  Wallace Stevens’ wife Elsie, on the Liberty dime...

This place is haunted.  Do I wake or sleep?

All-a-Mistakeo !

 

In the befuddlement of yesterday's late-night blog post, I mis-spoke.  I mentioned two books by Marcel Detienne, and described Detienne's passage (in his Masters of Truth) on the origins of secular, philosophical thought in the political culture of early Greek cities.  And Detienne does indeed cite another author, Jean-Pierre Vernant, on this question.  But it was Vernant's own argument – in his excellent study, The Origins of Greek Thought – that I meant to cite last night.  My apologies! [This is authentic blogging at its best.]

The Writing of Orpheus

 

I'm reading this book by Marcel Detienne, which I picked up from the library after finishing his earlier book about pre-Socratic philosophy : The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. Which book I found very helpful. His argument was that the revolutionary appearance of non-mythical, pragmatic, scientific and philosophical thought was connected with the early communal, quasi-egalitarian, political character of Greek city-states – the polis.

The Writing of Orpheus has got me reflecting tonight, in a vague scattershot way, about my own writing track over the last 40 years.  There are all these quite long, book-length poems and sequences (In RI, Island Road, Forth of July, Lanthanum, Ravenna Diagram... & forthcoming, The Green Radius).  There's a prose memoir (Holy Fool) and its companion, a semi-autobiographical novella (Chapel Hill). There's a selected shorter poems (1968-2020), Continental Shelf.  All these compositions are out there, for the most part – available, though scarce. They are almost completely unknown to the reading public.  They are mostly dismissed or ignored by the established literary cognoscenti.

What I'm thinking is, that with its grand (or grandiose) obsessive scale, I've produced a kind of American poetry counter-world – submerged, underground.  And the reason I'm harping on it, in this context, is that you might be able to discern an Orphic shape to my interlocking scribbularium.

F.M. Cornford, in an earlier study of Detienne's subject (Principium Sapientiae), asserts that, even after the intellectual revolution of pre-Socratic philosophy, these new worldviews of rational thought still retained underlying forms of archaic myth.  The original undifferentiated One of Parmenides, Empedocles et al., after dividing into binary forces and the "limits", was organized, coalesced, in mythical, ritual processes, by the prior, very archaic cultures – in their own ways (sacral kingship, rites of hieros gamos, etc.).

Myth and poetry have always been closely intertwined.  If by some miracle someone bothers someday to examine my poetry, they will find a clear if tenuous thread or pattern.  There is presented a wild panoramic historical vision of continental America; and it is held together by a kind of "spiritualized" hieros gamos.  The narrative pattern is roughly Orphic.  Poet & Muse = Orpheus & Eurydice = Osiris & Isis = Henry & Juliet/Bluejay/Jonah/"Dove"/"J".  It's as if I've been semi-consciously trying (sleepwalking) to return to that original cosmic Unity, Parmenides' arché – through a quasi-archaic, ritualized "sacred marriage".  A United State, so to speak.

It Must Have Been Abstract

Apparently it's pleasant to me, for me, to ramble on (sometimes at great length) about the character of poetry in general, poetry in the abstract.  I've been doing it for many years on various blogs.  Maybe the pleasure is due in part to the lack of pressure.  There's no specific artistic object or product involved; no magazine editor out there to say, "Sorry, this does not fit our current needs"; no critic or professor ready with a reprimand or a call to order.  The process is a kind of discursive daydreaming.

There was something in my run-through of those older posts here, from 14 years ago, that stuck with me tonight.  

First of all, the suggestion that poetry in every case depends on, dangles there glittering from, beauty – some experience or intuition of same.

And following from that, the idea that you can't really grasp the character of poetry without seeing that it is a multidimensional – maybe tripartite? – phenomenon.  I mentioned three facets or aspects that interact :

1) the maker of the poem, who undergoes or "suffers" the sensibility or experience of an encounter with the beautiful – with beauty, in some form, some dimension.

2) the poem itself, which is a kind of response to this encounter : a reenactment, a memorialization, a mimesis, a dramatization of the passion – the passio, the suffering – of this event.

3) the reception of the poem in the life-experience, the sensibility, of the reader … all the concrete richness, complexity, and unknowable mystery of a person's ordinary life into which the poem, the work of art, makes itself felt.

Of course all this kind of abstract discursive explanatory prose is instantly boring... "murder to dissect" and all that.  But I mentioned some other things in in relation to this abstract pattern, that might bear further thought : I mean in regard to Orpheus as the "figure of the poet" – of poetry itself coming to reflective or self-reflexive consciousness in this mythical person.  And how the mythical cruxes of the story – the singing that brings healing and joy to Nature itself, the quest to rescue Eurydice from Hades, the later murder/sacrifice by the Maenads – amount to a ritual dramatization of this idea of Beauty suffered in experience : an exaltation for which the poem is a kind of evidence or testimony.

Aside : I'm looking for an experience of poetry beyond the glare of the obvious, or the fashionable trumpeting of self-expression, or the manufactured virtue of opinion.  I'm looking for something oblique and hard to find (but beautiful).

Orpheus Resurfacing

I began this blog – an offshoot of my longstanding mega-blog HG Poetics – in August of 2010, almost 14 years ago. It lasted a little over a month. Now, much later, much older, and under changed circumstances (retired from library work, living in Minneapolis) I've decided to revive it. 

My thinking (and feeling) since then have also changed, perhaps more than I realize. But rather than pursue a critique of my previous effusions, I will try to start over, somewhat. 

Rereading earlier posts here, I can see I was referring, indirectly, to my own poems and long poems. That's probably inevitable. But at least I'm going to try a slightly different approach, more in keeping with my current state of mind and interests. 

As mentioned, I'm retired; 72 years old; living back in my old home town, the very Minneapolis blocks where I was born, and where 3 or more generations of my family have lived. Here, and now, I feel all kinds of isolation (physical, psychological, political, literary-critical) from the larger world, the writerly world, and my fellow poets. So this blog is just another way for me to send sonar signals to that larger world – way off there, on shore.

The Word is Psyche

If it were possible to graph the trajectory of the emergence of new poetry - which is, actually, an impossible abstraction, but if it were possible - it would look less like a straight line or rising curve, and more like a sort of back-&-forth : an alternating current, a dance. A give-&-take between younger generations - Stevens' "ephebes" - & the classics, the achieved works of older generations, the past.

This is not just a matter of nostalgia or conservatism. The older poetry of past times & foreign places has gone through a certain cycle, which for the new, is ahead - still inchoate, still not yet. This cycle actually reveals itself only after the present has become the past : it's an effect of history, you might say. What I'm thinking of is a kind of "naturalization", of acculturation : the process by which a work of art, of poetry - produced by the artist in a state of great stress & anticipation - is finally received, absorbed, accepted, responded-to, and to some extent comprehended by the culture which called it forth in the first place & for which it was made. Until such a work is taken in this way, becomes a part of its surrounding culture, it remains somehow incomplete - it's an orphan, like a plaintive cricket calling out for its cricket family.

& what I'm thinking of (when I say poetic emergence is a kind of alternating back-&-forth, a dialectical dance) is the visceral, quickening (Eliot's term) impact that these "classics" - these fully-absorbed works from past & foreign places - have upon adolescent readers & young poets. The blissful shock these ephebes are registering is the full effect, the double impact, both of the work itself and of its naturalization - the way it shines through the adorable paper & binding & sweet-scented glue of the cherished paperback - which the young reader, much like a chipmunk, immediately runs off with - retreating to some private hideout, worthy of the poems' warm & secret inner glow.

Again, I would argue that this whole process can't be reduced to some sort of sentimental regression, nostalgia, or "classicism" for its own sake. As Mandelstam puts it, "the Word is Psyche." We might say the process of poetic reception is actually tripartite : there is (1) the poem itself; there are (2) the delicate reverberations of its cultural naturalization, as we have described; & finally there is (3) the psychological dimension, the readers' own ground of feeling. The harmony, the music, we respond to in "ancient" (say, 19th-cent., for just one example) poetry, is, ultimately, not an anachronistic property belonging to those old writers of another, better time. Rather, the poets themselves caught some elusive "affluence" (Stevens' term) - penetrating, permeating & transcending their own time & place - of natural harmony, beauty in general. Pushkin's glory for Russians, for example, has to do with the fact that he drew something out of the harmony that exists as a kind of promise everywhere, giving it a "local habitation and a name." So that poetry feeds on, & actually stems from, this future-oriented promise of joy & harmony - the potential of goodness - which we tend to think only visits us in childhood, briefly, not to return. On the contrary, what we experienced in childhood was a stronger "feeling-perception" or intuition of that same promise of a yet-unknown but overwhelming happiness. Childhood & adolescence are absorbed in this sense - this longing for the future. & the indirections of poetry - its "resistance to the intelligence" (Stevens), its elusive basis in feeling & emotion - its "telling it slant" (Dickinson) - are all involved with evoking this irrational life of feeling, flowing gradually beneath the turbid commotions we experience "on the surface" of clock-time & the day-to-day.

Beauty will save the world

There's a dialogue between Ange Mlinko & author Iain McGilchrist in the October 2010 issue of Poetry. McGilchrist, a sort of cross-disciplinary brain-scientist/literary scholar, published The Master and his Emissary, a new meditation on right/left brain differences (shorthand : right brain = holism/synthesis/emotion; left brain = definition/analysis/abstraction). Mlinko & McGilchrist explore some of the implications for poetry of McGilchrist's work.

This dialogue appears around the same time as Elif Batuman's lengthy review of Mark McGurl's book The Program Era, on the impact of creative writing programs on British & American fiction-writing (which I haven't read). Both Batuman and McGurl address the academic divide between MFA programs and the other intellectual disciplines (humanities & sciences) - the split, generally, between "knowledge" and "creativity."

All of which makes me consider the possible connection between the two. Is the MFA/humanities divide a symptom of a deeper distinction between two dimensions or functions of the mind?

I wonder if this old conflict between knowledge & creativity, or what used to be called science & art, has something to do with an absence in our civilization of a philosophical ground in aesthetics - of a viable ontology of Beauty. The ancient Greeks (Plato, Aristotle) had a notion of beauty as musical harmony, rooted in natural proportions, which they were able to synthesize with ethics and metaphysics - natural beauty had its analogue in moral rectitude. The Middle Ages, in turn, synthesized the knowledge of nature with the metaphysics of divine creation, so that all intellectual investigation & knowledge was believed to have its origin in God, and its end in wonder & mystical contemplation. But the disenchanted naturalism of the Modern era was rooted in a scepticism about the metaphysical grounds of knowledge. Scientific truth was opposed to the superficial ("accidental") illusions of beauty. Thus the ground for aesthetics no longer existed.

Postmodernism & deconstruction, stemming from Nietzsche & Heidegger, attempted to dismantle the hegemony of scientific positivism by means of a sort of language-oriented but anti-rational vitalism, centered in a notion of poetry & art as displacing scientific reason. Hence postmodern literary Theory pushed a sort of intellectual wedge between American MFA programs, on the one hand, with their "naive" devotion to self-expressive creativity, and traditional academic disciplines, with their "naive" roots in "logocentric" rationalism. Yet postmodern Theory's anti-rational propositions were destined to fall by the weight of their own self-contradictions - and thus the contemporary scene seems to have returned to a strange state of intellectual dispossession, with echoes of 19th-century naturalism & scientific positivism emerging in the contemporary devotion to brain science and reductive biological determinisms.

"Beauty will save the world," famously reported Dostoevsky. Perhaps a new metaphysics, able to discern purpose & meaning in the mysterious phenomena of art and beauty, will tend somehow toward the fulfillment of that prophecy. & I suppose at the center of the chessboard will have to be a new challenge to the deeply-rooted modern-positivist doctrine - that beauty is a surface illusion, floating over a structure of what are simply forces : of non-human, abstract, cosmic physics, and of amoral, remorseless biological nature. Keats's taciturn (but stubborn) urn long ago set all the pieces into play :

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."


- Grace Ravlin (Venice, 1908)