saturday critical notes

Poetry and the metaphor of search.

(OK this is one of my attempts at an "assay" -- a term I
got from Jane Hirshfield (see her assay on Poe) which
seeks to combine prose and somewhat poetic style,
within the critical prose-text -- sometimes these
experiments work out, sometimes they flop . . .)



The Master has no mind of her own.
She understands the mind of the people.

To those who are good she treats as good.
To those who aren't good she also treats as good.
This is how she attains true goodness.

She trusts people who are trustworthy.
She also trusts people who aren't trustworthy.
This is how she gains true trust.

The Master's mind is shut off from the world.
Only for the sake of the people does she muddle her mind.
They look to her in anticipation.
Yet she treats them all as her children.

(Tao te Ching). The winding, cursive script of inner Taoism entrances us. It has an earnestly mystical quality, it seems to arrive from a zone of an otherworldly calm. And yet their lives were not always easy:

Gesshu Soko, died January 10, 1696, at age 79:

Inhale, exhale
Forward, back
Living, dying:
Arrows, let flown each to each
Meet midway and slice
The void in aimless flight --
Thus I return to the source.

To me, at times, there is something profoundly hopeful about these poems. Because profoundly interesting. The messages do not all convey horror. The messages do not all convey inexpressible sadness. There is spryness, resiliency: health into death. Goku Kyonen, died October 8, 1272, at age 56:

The truth embodied in the Buddhas
Of the future, present, past;
The teaching we received from the
Fathers of our faith
Can be found at the tip of my stick.


The tradition of the asian death poem can be a very hard one to take. It is a fearsome insight. To jot down at the edge of death. I remember, my ex wouldn’t let me buy this book. To her it was too morbid. She may have been right. The commentaries are also enthralling, they frame and bracket the terse/relaxed messages, like stones around a creek:


When Goku felt his death was near, he ordered all his monk-disciples to gather around him. He sat at the pulpit, raised his stick, gave the floor a single tap with it, and said the poem above. When he finished, he raised the stick again, tapped the floor once more, and cried, "See! See!" Then, sitting upright, he died.

Each one is marked by the peculiarities of the personality of the person who wrote it, each one different, like a snowflake, or a fingerprint. Each one, beautiful, in its own way. In such a unique context, (again, only at times) each is imperishably beautiful. Eternity happens in words. Occurs. Disperses? Whom to ask? Hosshin, 13th century:


Coming, all is clear, no doubt about it. Going, all is clear, without a doubt.
What, then, is all?


Hosshin's last word was "Katsu!" (a word signifying the attainment of enlightenment.)

Shoro, died April 1894, at age 80:


Pampas grass, now dry,
once bent this way
and that.

Kozan Ichikyo, died February 12, 1360, at 77:


Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going --
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.


A few days before his death, Kozan called his pupils together, ordered them to bury him without ceremony, and forbade them to hold services in his memory. He wrote this poem on the morning of his death, laid down his brush and died sitting upright.

Senryu, died June 2, 1827:


Like dew drops
on a lotus leaf
I vanish.

Shinsui, died September 9, 1769, at 49:


O


Often, when it comes to poetry, people will speak in terms of metaphors of a search, a quest, a path, an exploration. A path connotes something at least ostensibly linear, progressive -- forward-moving. Similarly, in a poem, in general we agree to abide by certain linguistic formalities which are inherently linear. We read from left to right; then, drop down one line; and scan again, left to right. . . Our very eye is, in a sense, proceeding along a path, as we read. Now, Wallace Stevens said of the poem, that it must bring pleasure. (We know that any “rule” for poetry is infinitely reversible, and that for example, we see nearly total reversibility of concepts of pleasure and pain in the corpus of Bataille. Nonetheless, after Stevens and Barthes, I will indulge an intuition of a pleasure-poetry linkage.).

Along the pathway of a line, we have punctuation. The period, most drastically. The wave-like pause and surge of a comma, the odd formal fussy half-stop of a semicolon; the full yet oddly thrusting stop: of a colon (which Ammons used so well).

In this poem below, there is a leap specific to poetry occurring, after every mark of punctuation. There is a little semi-langpo skip after each period. For example look at the sequence in line 3 below:

Yard sales and trees. The blue-black tire swing.
The apple? apple tree. Merry
old broken television. Chipped tooth. Chipped cup. Chipped
sacristy of the bath. For Jesus. For silver. Tin

hey the crappy owl in the yard (the bird bath
thank you) must’ve once been some kind of
flamingo some kind of a
faucet -Styrofoam- personal stuff

(David). Listening again: “old broken television. Chipped tooth. Chipped cup. Chipped
sacristy of the bath. For Jesus. For silver. Tin” -- I seem to detect
An echo, a desire, for life to leap across the sad barrier
Between each segment. From the hard oh in old (oh-lde) to the broken-by-a-k sound in broken, from the broken to natural correspondence chipped; from chipped to tooth because make the chips intimate; from chipped to cup to shorten, suck out the uh. After each period, a leap: from “Chipped tooth.” over to “Chipped cup.” -- what changed from tooth to cup? Why this change? A change is a demarcation. This is how he sculpts. Do you like his sculptures? Do you not like his sculptures? -- these questions themselves are “Chipped” against the “sacristy of the bath. For Jesus.” The skip there is religious, immanent. Then monetary, alloyed: “For silver. Tin” -- following there with a weakening of the cliché richness of silver into the cliché richness of tin -- as in the movie “Tin Men” -- or in the tin robot located on The Yellow Brick Road.

Country gurl with a “Chipped tooth.” The gaps between the phrases make spaces where you can either lose interest, or fill with meaning -- I think this magic works. Think of the mixture, the precise ratio, of chaos to intentionality of the skip to this: “Chipped cup. Chipped
sacristy of the bath. For Jesus. For silver. Tin” -- he inserts a slightly random skip between each sentence. A period mixed with a rupture. So, unprosaic. Impractical to use as military arsenal launch-code or even the seasons greetings found downtown, in a hometown Christmas city . . . Do you see how the skips within his text mutate and aureole my own? If I let it get too far. SO we push it back. With equal measures incoherence, and tragedy, he drifts from word to word, from sentence to sentence:

he sits down in a field
and waits for the beasts to talk.

This is a traditional religious image. The saint, or the goddess, is able to sit with the animals and speak with them. For example, Apollo may speak with hawks to understand why their bellies are a veiled mealy yellow. For the beasts to talk: that is, for incoherence to become made sensible. For a translation program of sorts to descend, deus ex machina style, out from the sky, a bureau drawer opening,
A scaffold . . . “like,” “like,” “so full” “alike” -- this specific distortion was employed by Alice Notley in her book-length epic poem, “The Descent of Alette.” Each phrase is presented inside quotation marks, as if the author is quoting somebody else.

Critic Susan Rosenbaum noted that these marks "imply that the separation of self and text is inevitable, the act of writing marking the entrance of her language into the public (quotable) domain."

Notley herself has remarked that there is a way in which a female poet
is always struggling to find a voice. Because epics, narrative poetry,
and the voices that one grows up hearing were created by men,
Notley says, female poets have suppressed what the female mind
must have been like before the existence of the forms invented by men.

In the prose poem "Homer’s Art," she writes, "there might be recovered
some sense of what the mind was like before Homer, before the world
went haywire & women were denied participation in the design &
making of it.”

Is it not found in male voice. It comes from edges, “verges” so they say, the fatalities, fractellites, aha, the 2nd time
Spellchek went off


Baa baa baa

is what he hears, what’s behind door number 3
and when he says I’ll take it, I’ll take it, there is no kidding, no fooling in this one.

In the autobiographical book of poetry "The Mysteries of Small Houses," Notley writes:


What is a poem this
What is a poem it’s like a
Collage shapes in conjunction of world and bright color

Likewise, in Jenni’s poems, we are stopped breathless before a roaring wall of what may be thunder, what may be distant thunder, or is it only silent strikes of heat lightning? --


Or how about in this one, where a little variant of the Yiddish golem theme is dreamt up in a nasty-minded, yet funny way, a genuine health like a rat tail terrier, the figure of “juan” here:

juan, little bad juan,
self appointed potter
at the Greenstreet Home
for Way
ward boys, sings
while he secretly forms
the perfect clay
rear
end

(Pris). That in itself is lifted free of merely sentimental potentiality via the sprinkling of moderately wild-eyed sensations, sense-data; things like the small “j” on “juan,” the very ethnic use of “juan” at all instead of the expected british/anglo/caucasian/black name;
(my "little bad girl"'s having a hard
time tonight . . . I'm writing a lot
at least half out of nervousness . . .) {deletion in[of] hypen// deconnective}
The split after “Way” without the hypen { - } signifies a potential local place where internet discourse no longer needs the hyphen, perhaps we are onto new language, stumbling into, no hyphen anymore -- could it be possible? Then the golem mud-modeling image of from “perfect” to “rear end” -- with its gay/child connotations -- that may be nothing -- I.e. the poem still preserves a surviving innocence, that has that airy, quicksilver quality of innocence, which is, that it may still be there in the most distant, rare, faded of places . . .

Todo lo que pido de ti
Es que siempre Me recuerdes *

-- this switches admirably, especially with the asterisk which is pitch-perfect internet funniness. A pseudo-footnote: like the poem was a pseudo-exegesis of itself. What does the phrase mean? We look down, it interests us -- this is the key, it interests -- with this,
That path opens wide . . .






through the crisp
bedroom wall

he hides it under his bed, along
with two pairs of soiled jockeys,
one grey sock and one blue striped
shirt he stole last week on an outing
to Joyner's Thrift Shop

-- “crisp” is tartly and well-placed. Like a painting hung neatly in the middle of a hotel stucco wall. Compare this part of a poem by Jenni:

A woman and her two girls pass
my window carrying black flippers,
goggles and a yellow inner tube.

Wet footprints paint the tar
and the sun’s heat peels off their prints
soon as the next step’s taken.

A carpenter bee lands on the window,
drags its stinger across the screen,
a little hiss that toggles the pinholes.

I don’t have the heart to kill small things,
to hurt what can easily be conquered.


(Jenni). The first stanza uses white space to frame the image, like a painting hung on the wall of the reader’s mind. Themes of insight, hedonism, risk, annul, coincide. Or the “penis” reference in Treeza’s recent poem on her blog: excellent edginess, which might be wholly organic growth. Poetry is a beautiful game, using the bones of thoughts for a game, selling beauty, being sold on insight. Treeza’s power as a woman poet has always scared me. This has been like Jenni. This is now like Pris. So it is like being in a room of smart, talking women -- the guy wonders, “can I keep up?”

Pleasure is natural. Therefore Stevens: "A poem need not have a meaning and, like most things in nature, often does not have." (from Opus Posthumous, "Adagia" (1959)).

It is amazing to me what I don’t know. For example, you know Stevens’ poem, “The Emperor of Ice Cream”? Here, I will run it as a prose poem to display its meaning as discerned by the critics:

Call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one, and bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress as they are used to wear, and let the boys bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal, lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet on which she embroidered fantails once and spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come to show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The poem is said to describe a funeral scene. The dead woman and her mourners are from a low social status. They are ghetto. Stevens writes, "Let the wenches dawdle in such dress/ As they are used to wear, and let the boys/ Bring flowers in last month's newspapers." So he is apparently insinuating that the girls are either heathen, or horny? I never got that line. Still don’t really. But, the critics say (quite possibly correctly) that everyday dresses and the boys' flowers wrapped in old newspapers are testaments to plainness as well as poverty.

Plainness, in a neutral or “homely“ sense?

Stevens adds that the decedent has a "dresser of deal,/ Lacking the three glass knobs." This is a clothing bureau that is missing some of its drawer knobs. Imagine crystal doorknobs fastened to dark polished wood. Her piece of furniture is sad and cheap, not at all, one might say, like the clothes drawers of a wealthy corporate lawyer up in Hartford. The thin chill of winter drifts in his bones -- or does it? Is Stevens misogynist, or ironic? It may be that her cheap dresser missing three of its knobs shows the poverty (the worst fear of a banker, next to Otherness) and simplicity (a false view of animals) of the woman and her mourners. One might say that in this poem, Stephen's characters are simple and normal people. The essay I cribbed from a googled blog to get the samples I wove in above in my closing Stevens part was pretty interesting too: can words afford this lack of ownership? Stevens had money. Did he ever start to become money? Did he ever sense a smoothness and a chill tingle into his fingers, like a leg that went to sleep, like bottled lightning?



In these potential ways, each of these poems searches.


Sunao, died in 1926 at 39:


Spitting blood
clears up reality
and dream alike.

Senryu, died September 23, 1790, at 73:


Bitter winds of winter --
but later, river willow,
open up your buds.