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.
