Duncan and Levertov

I spent the weekend putting together material for my visit to Naropa in July. For one thing I've been asked to give a talk while I'm there during the fourth week. Typically, I don't lecture when I teach. I preside over small writing classes and so engage students with a kind of Socratic dialogue thing. So it's been good to put a more formal lecture together.

I'll be looking at the Vietnam-era argument between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov as both worked to articulate a public response in writing (and activism in Levertov's case) to the war. Duncan's Bending the Bow and Levertov's To Stay Alive are the main texts that I discuss in relation to their letters of the period. My goal isn't really to show that one approach is better than the other, though I do lean more toward Duncan's sense of imagination (“[t]he poet's role is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it”). He asks Levertov at one point in the correspondence, “Is it a disease of our generation that we offer symptoms and diagnoses of what we are in the place of imaginations and creations of what we are?” This sense of imagination can be useful in our own situations as we reconcile opposing tensions in American cultural and economic life. Levertov's sense of protest and opposition remains important, but Duncan's correct to acknowledge that it's hard to make poetry of that, depending, I suppose, on what he or we mean by "poetry." I like some of the recent ephemeral performances and poems used in public situations by PIPA (Poetry Is Public Art) and I like how Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetry Theater assumes a public presence and creates spaces of opposition in unusual and productive ways. The Duncan/Levertov correspondence will be useful I hope in coming to terms with the contradictions and difficulties of poetry and politics, private and public statements---discovering where privacy begins and publicity ends, etc....

*

Tom Clark has posted some terrific poems lately at his blog. I particularly like this one about Robert Duncan, and this about
Philip Whalen. I like to start the week by reading Tom's newest entries. The movement of text and image is instructive and generous with its recursive layering of thought and feeling.

"Henry Corbin & American Poetry"

Tom Cheetham recently wrote on Robert Duncan's interest in Persian scholar Henry Corbin. It's great to see a web space devoted to Corbin's work which, via Olson and Duncan, helped influence the projective aims of Black Mountain. I've always found Corbin's scholarship helpful in articulating how thought and perception can be precisely valued--and that the history of how we think and feel has roots in competing traditions of thought and bodies of spiritual feeling. It's been a while since I've read Corbin, but Cheetham links to an article I wrote several years ago that discusses how the New Americans applied some of Corbin's study to their own pursuits. Here's a snippet:

Persian scholar Henry Corbin wrote extensively on the active intelligence of Medieval Islamic philosophy and spiritual practice, particularly in Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. In Arabic it's 'aql fa''al, the Tenth Intelligence, uniting light and darkness, matter and language. In that sense it's part of a complex medieval angelology, a system of reading signs and their spiritual correspondences. For Duncan, Charles Olson and others it has to do with the activation of language in the self, a kind of self-actualization by the word. An active intelligence in poetry is one that quickly apprehends the relations of things, ideas and emotions without explaining or playing games with words. It's a unifying intelligence that does not rest, abiding by an intuitive curiosity. There are emotional and instinctive intelligences, physical ones too (like Newton's law of gravity!). But the active intelligence is engaged with the reading of images and the mediation between self and other through them. Related to it is ta'wil, a spiritual or esoteric exegesis that turns thought back on its origin in language and the world.

Rhetorical Drift

Recent conversations at Harriet on poetry and rhetoric have been provocative. It’s interesting to watch the different responses to the term “rhetoric,” and how age-old problems between it, poetry, and dialectic persist (see Plato’s Gorgias for the map). Now usually, on TV or in other popular media, rhetoric is used pejoratively: “the CEO spoke rhetorically” ie, lying to you or spinning some item to the speaker’s benefit. It seems almost as if rhetoric doesn’t exist until someone lies or tries to convince you of something.

But rhetoric is a vast art and impossible to summarize carefully—and no one agrees on what it is, either, which means it’s a rich and complex body of knowledge that provides some insight to writing and speaking. It is gnarled too by its institutional and cultural histories: the rhetoric of the Middle Ages was not that of the Classical period. Augustine, a trained rhetorician prior to becoming a Christian, introduced hermeneutical studies to rhetoric in specific ways, and reminds me that grammar and rhetoric together provided a great source of knowledge. Grammar laid out the morphological basis of the language whereas rhetoric dealt with the psychological dimension of it: how do we speak or write in certain situations.

In the Renaissance rhetoric became a powerful tool of state as humanist scholarship introduced the civic discourse of the ancient world. Printing also complicated rhetoric at this time, creating what Wayne Rebhorn, in The Emperor of Men’s Minds (Cornell, 1995), calls “an imbalance of power between […] readers and legitimate rulers” that “put […] a weapon in the hands of the former by means of which they could criticize, resist, and possibly even subvert the rule of the latter” (103). For the Renaissance Prince, deliberative rhetoric, however, was less important than the epideictic mode, used “to celebrate rulers for their good qualities while denouncing others for their bad” (107). Rhetoric gave tools to those who would increase their power and influence over others. The epideictic mode is complicated, more artful and capable of symbolic acts than deliberative or forensic investigations. Machiavelli’s “princes are creators of shows, of spettacoli, a procedure based on the deeply rhetorical assumptions that the world is a place of appearances, that all truths are provisional and contingent, and that one can impose one’s will on others by manipulating the image one projects” (54). Rhetoric’s associations with magic and witchcraft are common. In the symbolic realm this projection of Ethos correlates with poiesis, too.

What I’ve found useful about the study of rhetoric is that it has introduced me to the practical values of language in a cultural and historic context that helps me better understand contemporary usage. As a rhetorician, when I write about poetry I am expected not to show what a text is by identifying all the references, etc, but to show what it does in its various contexts for diverse readers. As a poet I’ve tried to use Slow Poetry as a way to begin a discussion about poetry that is informed by a more rhetorical perspective than a literary one.

There is of course resistance to rhetoric. Poetry and art are objectively beautiful: they are not rhetorically constructed. Some claim. Poems don’t communicate, they exist, tree-like, in the forest until someone is capable of approaching the poem’s majesty. (W. S. Merwin at a reading I attended recently made this claim—poems don’t communicate—even as he spoke from a podium to an audience of several hundred.) Within the large field of interdisciplinary pursuits known as English Studies also, few agree on what literature is. Professors of literature focus on the hermeneutical aspect: interpretation is their bread-and-butter. Compositionists often refuse to allow literature in the classroom because their job is to have students produce texts, not interpret the work of others. Creative Writing pedagogy, by contrast, identifies particular models that are used to instruct students on a variety of contemporary assumptions re: literature based in part on the perspective of the instructor and on the particular relationship of the MFA program to larger market forces.

I tend to see poetry as performative—or dramatistic—an art of contingencies wherein beauty results from symbolic actions derived for particular situations. I like the projected images and the sound and feel of the space of the poem. I like the physical fact of the words in my mouth and in my ear. I like to be delighted and encouraged by a poem and I like to feel at times overwhelmed by its graces. I like to talk back to a poem or to challenge its claims to authority. I like to follow its trails and traces, learning what I can of the world.

Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” is one of those poems for me that oozes in a state of delicate, trembling uncertainty. It’s nothing more than a poem about a young man trying to hush his crying babe in the moonlight. Perhaps my identification with this basic human feeling makes me susceptible to the particular arrangement of language. And yet, the situation the poem speaks to is common to many, and in that commonality we share much. There’s a density of symbolic energy in the poem: fear, hope, desire, etc. The situation in Coleridge’s life influences how I see the poem, too. He’s not yet dumped the family entirely for dope. He’s between places, negotiating his life in a poem that on the surface offers little but a note of love for a child. But that love is embedded in a density of life and a tightly wound unification of image and prosody, sympathetic inquiry and earnest quest, that detonate some greater form of awareness in him. A square rhetorician might ask, "Well, then, what does this poem do" while the professor of Literature might inquire, “Tell me, what does it mean". To me, the poem doesn’t remain beautiful and useful because of some innate aesthetic virtue, but because it makes me think for a moment about what it is to be here, alive to the forces of the world. Like Coleridge, who at the time wanted to be a better man, the poem challenges me to do the same. It asks that we slow down and listen in the stillness for a moment before the next rush of things interferes and destroys that reflection. The Ethos—Coleridge’s projected values—are compelling to me for these reasons.


*

Of parallel interest, Don Share shares this from Robin Blaser.

Cosmologic: Blaser (1925-2009)

From an interview:

(Paul Nelson) – And how would you describe the basic cosmology? What are the components of that worldview?

(Robin Blaser) – The main components are, first, that there isn’t one. That was what you felt and this was what the 20th century tried to do to us. It took us away and Marxism didn’t help at all unfortunately with that problem. Marxism is quite a different thing, but that’s when we’re already social and know how to move and then Marxism can speak to you. Otherwise, you’re fucked. You’ve not got a cosmos with which: Where’s God? We’ll you’re sure not going to…even an old Catholic like me isn’t going to turn into THAT. And Spicer, I mean, Spicer’s view of the Catholic Church (laughing heartily) IS ONE KICK IN THE ASS AFTER ANOTHER! HA! and I just loved it. And Duncan, ooooh Duncan. He was an occultist in some part and the occult tradition was a fascinating one. We all came to know of it. But the occult was a counter Christian, counter religious tradition that was also a religious tradition, whatever a religion means, essentially to be tied to a world at large. So all of us were busy working around it, sometimes at quite a loss. Spicer is utterly fascinating for the size of the world in his work. First I think it’s by experimenting with language. Spicer was so marvelous since (because of) the fact that language wasn’t working. It didn’t give him a world. It didn’t give any of the rest of us a world. It just jabbered on & on & on. And lectures could just be insolent jabbering, so you were sitting there and you’d try to get some Shelley in all this jabberwocky. I’m not going to mention any of the professors. They’re dead now. I’m glad I’m not. But it was simply a matter of finding language as the way with which you could walk on a piece of earth…

Sonny Rollins to David Meltzer

At times last night I was surprised to find myself in the middle of a large university auditorium, because the music felt much more intimate—like it came from the floor of a Midwest ball room. Sonny Rollins’ alto sax and Bobby Broom’s hollow body guitar complimented the other with a rich, velvety timbre. Clifton Anderson’s trombone textured the sound with more mid-range color. Victor See Yuen and Kobie Watkins kept beat and Bob Cranshaw handled bass.

Rollins’ command of the stage was marvelous as he transported attention to new places. The spirit of the sound coming from his instrument grew through the evening. Nearly 80, Rollins is a master of form and limit. What I tried to reconcile during the show was how within set boundaries so many possibilities present themselves. That tension between melody and disintegration, between pulse and erasure, was the most instructive thing I’ve encountered in a long time. Rollins possesses the same spiritual flexibility as someone like Luis Bunuel: the range of emotions shift, collapse, return. The thought or knowledge of the spatial environment repeats and renews other orders of possibility.

In many ways (in most) the New American poetry can only really be understood in relation to bebop. Dorn and Creeley particularly in the 1950s worked within similar notions of spatial and temporal development: established limits were resisted, transformed, restated. Timbre registers as vowel (Dorn: “I was thinking in that moment / Newman Illinois / the Saturday night dance”). The warm, Midwest range of Coleman Hawkins swings behind these New American Rhythms.

I'm reminded too of David Meltzer and the sense of the music in his lines. What comes to a poem, like what comes through a sax, is all that one remains open to: the terms of experience arrive and vanish, only to resurface, changed--invoked by the presence of new forms. Textuality eventually gets fleshed out unless some pure machine sequence erases the body completely. Rollins, Meltzer, and others of their generation pushed the limits of knowledge to include what they could not possibly know until the conditions of the form required it. It comes as method of complete surrender in a moment after hours and hours of quickenings and turnings of thought through the compost. Meltzer says it so well:

Organizing these myths these trends these
traditions these rituals
this history this pattern
this secret this hope

Organizing these stars into one bright dot of hot
white light

As simple as that

MAYDAY

The first issue of Mayday Magazine hosts a roundtable on the current state of poetry book reviewing in response to Jason Guriel and Kent Johnson's recent commentary on same. I let Dada drummer Richard Huelsenbeck talk for me.