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AN ESSAY ON POETIC
ORGANIZATION
To be whole is to be part. True voyage is return. -- Ursula Leguin, The Dispossessed Preface: Letter to a Neoformalist Poetry Journal Dear Editors, I write this in response to certain things I read in your last issue, to statements of a formalist poetics and a conservative politics. I hope you will allow my writing this in verse, which I adopt because it helps me see the contour of my thought, and gives me hope the reader, too, will see it. That verse can be, inter alia, a tool of thought is not without some bearing on the case. First of all, let’s start with formalism, since poetry I think is at the center of your review’s and also my concern. If I must choose between two monolithic establishments, holding respectively that formal and free verse alone can count, I’ll go with formalism, for the reasons you’ve mentioned; but I do not want that choice; nor do the fruits of the "new formalism," so far, persuade me that the outward forms alone will get us back to the tradition. Form in some recent poets is a hedge bordering a neat suburban lawn, the declaration of a territory on which the reader is not really welcome, only summoned to admire and envy the air and apparatus of success. Whereas in the tradition, form’s a shell that holds the voice of the abyss, a boat in which the poet, and the reader with him, put forth together on that face of that same abyss, and not without some risk. Nor is form always nameable in meter and rhyme. There is the work of Paul Celan -- here and there, scattered in the world, you’ll find readers who have the half of it by heart. And there is Stephen Crane, whose rhymeless poems are graven on my mind like numerals of an invisible clock-dial, which the hour-hand of my experience sweeps at intervals for which I have no calculus. In short, there is no formula for poetry. It is the unexpected. It occurs; to hail it you must step out of the frameworks in which you tried to make yourself secure. That’s frightening (except to the extent that one is suicidal) and perhaps not possible, unless we have beneath us some ultimate security, not formed by right opinions and alliances nor by deserving and accomplishment, but what was given to Frost’s dying tramp -- "something you somehow haven’t to deserve." Home. Mother. Human solidarity. Which brings me to the second item on the agenda of this letter. I must style myself a communist -- with a small c: I hold no brief for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, nor for the academics you deride (deacons of decon, parlor Marxists, builders of intellectual ghettoes -- take ‘em all). But nonetheless. I once began to read The Wealth of Nations. Hadn’t time to finish but felt I’d got the point, which thoroughly appalled and scared me, namely the belief that through the aggregate acts of selfishness the common good arises. That’s the premise of much that calls itself conservatism today; but I think it is not true. The common good arises from concern and through concerted action from concern. Concern has its temptations, this I know. They are painted large upon this century’s canvas. They all come down to the promptings of impatience, which grasps for means that undercut the ends. The wrongs that come in consequence are plain; but so are those that come from substitution of the appeal to selfishness for that to conscience, which is consciousness of other needs, besides one’s own immediate urge. "A world of made is not a world of born," Cummings said truly; and a culture bought and sold, is not a culture of true hearts. Come let us reason: have you ever known a salesman who attempted to instill wisdom, humility, a reverent wonder at the G-d-given world, a willingness to sacrifice, a sense that some things are quite irreplaceable? Such traits are not useful to the marketer, who must plant heedlessness, and unappeasable hunger for what can never satisfy, and arrogance, and envy of one’s neighbor, to sell more things, things, things, till we are drowning in things, and cannot see each other’s faces, and home is wrecked by ever-tickled itches and anger over what we cannot get, and the body politic gives up the ghost of wisdom. In this scheme of things there is no place for poets -- save the one they have at present, in the universities, where they are schooled to draw the teeth of sense, to play with silly ideologies that make a travesty of good intentions -- which travesty conservatives then duly defoliate with a certain brand of wit compounded well to kill the pangs of conscience and to expunge the trace of any truth the victim had ineptly represented. I don’t wish to be seen as "anti-business." The business of the world has to get done. Trade and manufacture have their place, and so has marketing -- the marketplace, not the home, the school, or any commons; they have their time -- the six days of the week -- days, and not nights; and not the Sabbath day. I’m only saying: They are too much with us. They have been suffered to encroach not only upon the space of council, where a common vision should have power to override the voices of self-interest on occasion, but on the love of friends, the inner life, upon the very memory of the sacred. Of course, it isn’t that the borderline of sacred and profane was ever fixed; but like the line between the land and sea upheaval, deposition and erosion incessantly redraw, that line has shifted from place to place, from time to time. It’s just that industry has lately tipped the balance, as Marx appears to have understood. Increase in the complexity of process calls for greater organization in pursuit of profit, at the expense of older, simpler structures that once held kin and friends together and made the individual feel secure enough for generosity and vision. We, the people, need somehow to gather the strength and vision to redraw the line, and I would like to think that poets could assume a leading role in such an effort (indeed, I do not see who else could lead it), if we could summon courage to dig in our heels, make a stand -- ORGANIZE, in short. If form’s our forte, it seems to me we ought to manage that, since form is just another name for organization. But enough for now. If you have heard me to this point and will hear further, in another letter I’ll speculate how we might go about it.
I. This started with the word "organization," an uneuphonious word, which many think ought to be farthest from a poet’s usage, pledged as we are to render faithfully the sightings of the individual eye, the motions of the individual mind, wary of any call to march in step or get involved in social machination. Yet what is organization if not form, and whose is form if not a poet’s business? Too, in this time the individual mind, and soul, are under pressure from two quarters: from the suggestions of commercialism which purposely degrades and undermines the will, and stuns the mind; and from the assault of mere fanaticism, which denies the mind, and equally perverts the will by deifying its own will-to-power -- and both put out the individual eye. Therefore I have undertaken to envision how poets might get organized to stand with more confederate minds, concerted voices for truth and beauty and the good, to sound a clearer note through a surrounding culture where chaos daily seems to gain on order.
II. As a foundation, let me first review in broadest outline the concrete devices in which the craft of poetry consists, lest I be classified with those who’d press the Muse into an alien servitude. Whereas that which I see before me is the Muse’s proper home, although truncated by the ignorance of an obscuring age. What’s left are the foundations -- barely those -- with here and there a scattered shattered block from fallen wall, obliterated lintel. Muse! fiction or projection of the mind that wants to make a whole of what it sees, Thee I invoke, as did the ancient bards whose skill and wisdom far exceeded mine. O stand me and the Reader in good stead: aid me in setting forth your deep design and aid the reader likewise to perceive it!
III. I will consider rhythmic pattern first, as grounded deepest in the human body, the substrate of all poetry except "free verse," that aberration of this time, that oxymoron, planted like a virus in poets’ brains by musephobic culture to make them self-destruct. For when a body lacks pulse and respiration, we declare it dead, and draw the sheet across its eyes. thus proves the rule I seek to reaffirm.Indeed the regular beat -- iamb or trochee, dactyl or anapaest -- appears to mime the pulse, as length of line the respiration, and thence comes that the poem seems to issue from the maker’s and the reader’s heart and soul. Rhythm! great principle, not of the body alone, but of the universe entire, periodicities of sun and moon, pulses of sound, of light, and those most subtle wavelets to which the deepest sight resolves all matter: who, except the modern poet, disputes your sway, which the maternal heartbeat to the fetus floating in the womb declared? A company of marching men approaching a bridge, fall out, to keep their tread from starting a tremor in the steel or stone increasing till like a catgut string the span could snap. With rhythmic soothing hypnotists can draw the subject down to trance, to live again through scenes long sunk from memory, or perhaps never enacted on the actual stage. Those images that rise in meditation when murmured mantrams first attune the mind are known to each apprentice in the spirit; and what is meditation but another remnant and fragment of lost bardic skill? On rhythm, then, the other elements of poetry are based, by it aligned. Rhyme comes to shadow respiration’s contour, alliteration underscores the pulse; these tempos passion and mimesis vary, inflect, as winds mildly or roughly sway the rooted tree, but leave it in its place; bow down the flame, but must not blow it out. Into the mind thus calmed and thus awakened to contemplation, epithet and name can summon images, and visions rise.
III. But here the rhythmic principle’s domain is tangent to another, equally as great, likewise ubiquitous: I mean Association, which at every point (most at the points of rhyme, when it is used) the waves of rhythm touch, the way the sea touches the sky, as long as song is made with words. For while each word discretely names some thing or act, quality or relation, the named rises in memory, not alone, but with what was contiguous and akin: context, resemblance, origin. So that with every word we take upon our tongues a token of the language as a whole, of all that world to which the tongue refers. And as things are related in the world in different ways (as bird and tree, as bird and egg, as bird and reptile, bird and oboe), so names too have their different relations through derivation and coincidence: dead metaphor, analogous formation, remnant of ancient customary link, sheer puns, that link the discontinuous as pranksters knock unwary heads together. We speak of metaphor and simile, metonymy and symbol, but in truth there is no speech that is not figurative. True that in all this there appears no system, no Law the names invariably obey, but local regularities alone: grammars one language follows -- usually, paths that association often takes, trends of phonetic change that mostly hold; and -osophies and -ologies and -isms that keep the world in order for a few, some, a majority -- but never all. There’s no commutability of tongues, nor necessary link of word and thing, only the jumbled works of time and change -- in short, confusion, chaos, nothing like the lucid stringencies of mathematics, those scientific laws whose demonstration is true and certain and controllable, implying if not altogether showing an order indescribably complex but yet in principle predictable, because it is consistent and persistent, everywhere the same and for all time; that must somewhere account for everything that words can name, including words themselves, in which that order never could be summed. -- So think at least those Scientists whose virtue is that they stand before the Universe stripped of all will except the will to know the Object: seeking merely to determine what It is in itself, without regard for those concerns that form our words, our things -- only to learn that mind can’t comprehend said whole, for it exceeds our cogitation, but just some parts, that yield a partial knowledge useful to those who hold the power to use it, though keeping, like the fabled Monkey’s Paw, an after-kick of disutility for others, and for that configuration of nature within which the human species took shape, against which it has taken arms. Perhaps one day computers will know all when, instrumental to our instruments, we humans beings have vanished like the fairies or the proletarian dictatorship (although, since knowing is a human thing, the computers will not know but only mirror, without the gaze which must complete reflection). But Poets, though they cannot choose but hear what science may relate, must first and last measure the universe with human stature. Their units are not meters, centimeters (unhandy cuts the carpenter still gripes at) nor light-years, microns, but the ell, the cubit, the span, the inch, the hairbreadth and the mile -- or, literally, the foot, the step-and-pulse, the measure given by the organism, by this one life-form seeking to maintain its life against a universe where all falls to indifference. Against it -- yet concomitantly, by its leave and favor. The poet’s mind, conscious of self and world, goes gathering and ordering the names of things that make the world that holds the poet, setting them so that they are held in place by the force we moderns call Association; others, at other times, have called it Love. Love -- that is, not just the poet’s love for some particular thing, but the perception that in the world among affinities a current of attraction and delight circulates, which by the Muse’s grace poets are sometimes privileged to feel; and it is just this touch of grace that makes poetry, that mysterious thing so many try otherwise to capture and define.
IV. The vision which a Poet puts together is, of course, always individual: the gatherings of a given set of senses arranged in patterns by one heart’s desire. And yet it is not and could never be the expression of the person as a monad to whom the Other is a volume sealed. For words are common, and there is no poet who is not an ear for other poets’ tongues. Whatever sense a poet makes is made of meanings that were made by predecessors, as well as by today’s need and invention. There may be sibling rivalry -- each one would like to be the Muse’s only child -- but there is also kindred love, the seeing of self in other, and the sheer delight of point and counterpoint in their resemblings. Likewise "anxiety of influence" (the need to find one’s own self-definition) is balanced by the piety and awe the poet feels (the best have felt it most) when contemplating their own origins -- original enough, if they keep faith and render faithful answers to the questions which time and place so changefully propound. Moreover: though each poem is a world rounded in itself, a separate planet, there is a world beyond them which they show, though no one poem shows it forth completely. This is, on the one hand, the world "as is," as it affects or, as we nowadays say, "impacts" the poet. At the same time, on the As-is there falls the light and shadow of a world that must at some time have existed to have shaped the bardic brain. Nothing evolves, we’re told, unless there is a function for it; so our existence proves a former world, a phantom world, known through our missing of it, where words were heeded more than they are now. That also was a world where nature’s books still balanced, and its body had not yet given itself the grievous wound and discord it got through and in us, the human creature. The poet’s brain, which had that world as template, is now the template of its reprojection into the poem’s form, the reader’s mind.
V. If all of this be so, there is yet a form to find or make. As words build to a line, lines to a stanza, stanzas to a poem, the poem too is part as well as whole: part of a great continuum of song, of a millennial colloquy among those best gifted to perceive and to express in great and small things, in detail and outline, the fate of humankind and of the planet. Without a time, without a meeting-place, the makers are perpetually assembled in the hearing of the understanding heart, the Ideal Reader, say, of all the poets. What is to fashion is the form, the vessel in which that Understanding can appear, loom up, amid the whirlwinds of the present, as a Presence, if not palpable still sensed and capable of magnetizing thoughts, aligning them so that they can be read as a topography informed by one projection, where "the roads that go from poem to poem" (Bloom’s word) are clear; -- in short, behaving in the space between the works, as individual mind within the compass of its own creation: assorting and arranging like with like, setting each opposition in just light, and giving to the whole, at last, a heartbeat, a breath, of larger Being than the atoms of humankind when scattered can believe -- "the life of all our lives," as Black Elk said. This is a fiction; yet a fiction can be dramatized, be given space to be. How then is such a space to be constructed? -- Go call the movers of the earth to level a plot of ground close to the city’s heart, engage the pourers of cement, the masons, the carpenters, to build a stately house, with many rooms, where poets of each ward meet every second Sabbath, let us say, to tell in measure what they’ve seen and learned in whatsoever circles they may move, and one great hall, where all convene at seasons -- say full and new moon, equinox and solstice -- to hear the summary of all their numbers recited by the skillfullest among them. Let in this place the works of every bard who joins that company, be treasured up, and let it be each day from dawn to curfew a place for study and for conversation. Each city should have such -- call it a public utility, the same as light and power, as needful as the courts and the police force, if ever we hope to counter the momentum of social forces making for decline, and live in fairness, amity, and wisdom. All we must do is get folks to believe it, and that may well be possible if poets can will this thing and work toward it together. To have and hold in thought this citadel of heart and mind, this Homely House, as goal and grail, as central symbol of our hope, would give that hope a substance, though a long road may wind between us and that goal, strewn with obstacles and cleft across by chasms with no bridge or ground to walk. (For instance, who can speak of meeting-times in a society that keeps no Sabbath?) But the House of Possibility requires no probable foundation, after all; the New Age folks do say that imaging one’s wish can be a step toward getting it; and once again, we are supposedly the experts on imagination.
VII. Holding this hope for poets, and for all, we also can envision a poetics consistent with this hope, eloquent of it. One premise is already grounded here -- a preference for those traditional measures, in which our physical and mental being mirrors itself most constantly and truly, and which (we see now) also have the advantage of aiding bards to synchronize their breathing -- con-spiracy: the rebels of the ‘60's found the pun, but not its application -- and see each other’s visions. To the same end, we ought to labor to restore, as among poets, that which makes words mean, by virtue of which words are sometimes things: to wit, good faith and trust. For Relaxation, the bringer of good visions, cannot enter where folk feel insecure and on their guard, when they’re afraid of blows, or sneers. They tense themselves, and if they dream, their dreams are bad. Let us be courteous to one another as the attentive reader each desires, grateful for any drop of the true nectar, fain to deserve the gift of understanding and slow to look the poem in the mouth; treating with reverence the marks of sorrow, the seals of honest intellectual labor; each eager to shine with and through the other, rather than at the other bard’s expense. There should be (come to think of it) a rule that any criticism of a poem has to be framed in verse, that all may see whether it rise from comparable depth. In short, the bardic discipline includes just the same exercise of charity, the same attention to each word of Nature, the same commitment to examination of one’s own motives toward a fellow-being, which spiritual teachers everywhere have urged on those who seek enlightenment. This is not new; it is only long forgotten. Consider these four lines from the Rig-Veda: "He who deserts a companion in knowledge Has no way left of sharing the Word. Indeed, whatever he hears he hears in vain. He is not disposed to be magnanimous." See what a shiny world of faith is mirrored on this stray bubble from a vanished stream! (Perhaps a few conjunctions we have heard of -- the Acmeists, and those who roamed the Lakes -- still help us guess the strength of those so bound.) I do not know the original, but guess the word "magnanimous" is meant exactly, as the great breath of a life more than mine which the true poets of the past still felt, which is not felt in the low-ceilinged cells to which we have somehow become committed. But if we summon up the resolution -- breathe deeply, Reader -- we shall overcome. All causes that depend upon compassion and upon wisdom, are bound up in ours, and we shall find the words to drive it home.
VII. Is this concrete enough? If not, well then, I think that we should sign a Manifesto -- take this, dear Poet-Reader, as a draft. Signed, it will be the first fruit of our purpose, opening chord of a symphony whose themes our voices will then severally develop in various situations, reconverging to share the Muse’s gifts and to report (always in measured speech, that’s understood) upon our efforts and our observations. Let us accept the helps technology can tender us: computers that will store our volumes on the compass of a leaf; the Internet, that working metaphor (Muse, may we have the wisdom so to use it) of the No-Place, the imaginary locus where we have heard that parallels converge and the couriers "see each other in the Word." So, dear Reader -- fellow-Poet -- Comrade! What do you say now? shall this be a Work? My solo’s ended, and I listen for your voice, your entrance, hopefully restating that it would be great fun, whatever the odds, amid whatever breakings, to pursue the making of our once and future world. -- Esther Cameron |
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