Before The Inside: Michael Lee Rattigan’s ‘Liminal’

Michael Lee Rattigan is a poet of a clarity spent in the relative formedness of the mind-body’s attentions. The intense world of feeling he evokes in the poems of ‘Liminal’ feels, to me, like something of a refreshing change in English language poetry. Is this because he is obviously schooled in work from other languages? Spanish, particularly. Perhaps the question needs no answer. The word ‘Liminal’, in starting to read, throws off some interesting parallels where a critique of the book might be explicated. I re-read the poem ‘To Write’:

Life in words beyond
                      “…l’habitat de la solitude”,
desired            with fingertips
from nowhere, anywhere, everywhere:
“dragnet fishermen gone mad”
imagination, stalked and fled
an ever open valve
marginal things              wanting to live.

Emblematic, in some ways, of a number of probings contained in the book. Here, a kind of alchemic chemistry, the poetry as process-reflection. The theme of the motions of the mind also set up. And we see a kind of macrocosm folded back on itself in the ending. There’s a clearness here, both in expression and in the moment of being-expressed, a theme that’s also vital to this writer; motion, in relation to new conceptions of the temporal. Indeed, we see this in a poem of that name, ‘Temporal’:

Not divided
by static points
that never come
into being,

…an argument, or thesis, slowly unlodges itself from the book of the world through this book of poetry. Here, Rattigan concerned with notions of appearance and recognition, as in those thoughts on writing itself. A tension with the whole problem of dualistic modalities embedded precariously in the mind,

[...] a gulf
separating two worlds

An ambivalence of voice, between these two poems, that creates an interesting dissonance on re-reading. In both the abstract and the concrete he takes the overheard as well as the given (assumed?) voice of the poet as BOTH forming the voice of the poem, which, in turn, ushers in a great variety of narrative choices. Attitudes of dualisms played off against each other for creative purpose. Languages, too, are bound up in this unique freedom. And a music created there… a particular brand of complexity Rattigan seems expert at, words, in novelty, as toys, breaking over the reader in simplicity of statement (perhaps the word simplesse, from the French, is implicated here? The delicate balance between complexity and simplicity of utterance). The poems do not suffer meaning over music nor music over meaning, which is to say he worlds his objects as though they were phonemically and physiologically part of him (and they are part of him, if we wanted to stray into metaphysics).

There is a serenity, and a unity, in the way he moves from the general to the specific and back again… does this summon a project of disturbance underneath the lyric repose? A fabulous convergence of sight and sound provides pleasant dissonances. He is conducting away from Joyce’s drunkenness, the central concrete fact of imaginative leaps, in tune with the phonetic value of thoughts in motion, turning more toward the imagistic sobriety of an Octavio Paz or a George Oppen. In ‘Window Sketch’, where one expects to hear ‘Still motion / tanged with salt’ one actually gets the wonderful:

Still motion
tangled with salt

so that the movement of attention becomes a physical character in the fixed drama of adjectives.  And, amiably reduced to the vital disturbances of this lyrical mode, the didactic voice stands both before, and inside, things seen, as in ‘Incognito Fragments’

Annihilation’s limit

A match unstruck
in deep time
beyond heat and pulse
and all thought
benevolent or otherwise

…perhaps there is a debate of emphases here? Which reminds me of ‘The Good’ of Plotinus, or Eriugena’s ‘Nothingness’ (both notions perhaps unknowingly re-born, in different ways, into the 20^th Century through the philosophies of Whitehead, Heidegger and Sartre). The great speech of ‘the match’ moving in reduction (and the attendant association, meaning-wise, of the word ‘match’; what Stevens called ‘the danger of metaphor’).

This magnetic rumour I find, more and more, in my reading of a great problem inherent in notions of measure, continued here:

Yet no “final result” either,
as terms belong to dark vocabulary
time’s inevitable arrow -
furious measurability…

The poem finds Rattigan at his most abstract-instructive-best. ‘Thanatos’ unfortunately, finds me moved, more negatively, away from the assertion: ‘One day earth won’t be. / Water will have its way / and air will breathe through bones.’ What travel appears here? An overdose of entropic prophecy, on first reading, at least for this reader. But this is perhaps missing the point… the final two lines seeking a performance of the poem’s title, suggesting the poem as dramatic character in the drama of book and world.  It also sends me to Valéry’s Eupalinos, which, in similarly dramatic mode, employs the voice of Socrates:

Here I am, says the Constructor, I am the act. You are the matter, you are the force, you are the desire, but you are separate. An unknown industry has isolated and prepared you according to its means. The Demiurge was pursuing his own designs, which do not concern his creatures. The converse of this must come to pass.

I relate The Demiurge, in Valéry (and a key feature in certain gnostic writings) to the Entropy implied in Thanatos (it then morphs into Satan through Christian symbology and is left in its most modern formulation in Milton, with the most recent usages being simply intellectualized manipulates, broken up by cold corporations, as moral excuses for endless war in a kind of skewed post-modern Cabalese)… yet there is no total conclusion, in the poem (which, ironically, sets up part of its theme, the poem as endlessly re-defined character, or beginning) and I’m happy to defer to Valéry’s Socrates on the topic of the physics of entropic forces (which, in the ideal human realm, and in the absence of The Demiurge, seek balance over preference?)

One can always look upon a work that has failed as a step which brings us nearer to the most beautiful. Which, I’m sure Rattigan would approve of. Regardless, I often wonder if the most horrific thing, for men, is the notion that the world will not ever end, so desperate he sometimes seems to encircle character with absolutisms in an effort to afford despair’s surfeit of want. The notion of the ultimate, somehow, not where the field of focus should lie? Having said all this, these tensions are rewarded in the mirror of each poem’s constellations, the balance and poise of them… as we find, later, in Rattigan pre-empting these apocalyptic tensions through the precision of this line from ‘Autre’:

If only
you could pin it
down, as definite
as the face still there,
turned away

…re-painting the famous closing of Rilke’s eighth elegy from Duino.

Still, before the energetic assertions of both ‘Thanatos’ and ‘Autre’ I discover the ancient totem of the pomegranate through these lithe lines:

seeping
from tart pith
that severs
in clotted fullness
to offer the blood’s
cascading
bread.

Not often does a poet dare to celebrate the blood, so tainted by the associations of war and torture, as we have found via the word, re-convened and cornered by violence, in the 20^th Century. The blood, for me, is not a bodily offering. It is the soul’s infused being manifest in the corporeal world so as to give symbolic and energetic weight to God, the object, and projection, of its passion… the blood echoed in the formation of matter, particularly fire and air, as any good student of Pythagoras and the pre-Socratics might imagine. The poem, while not lost to these auto-didacticks, seems simply to intend a re-introduction to the poetic discourse of this sacred image and, as ever, succeeds in finding it amongst the pleasing flux of these lines.

I also notice, too, the almost total absence of an ‘I’ in the book… another example of the ‘Liminal’, in different hues, throwing off the image of bridge… rather than societal station. In this, Rattigan is more photographer than narrator (a fore-knowledge of the reader as ultimate narrator in a larger sphere of textual spheres?) with the ‘Liminal’ also being the communality implied in the bridge… as in a beautiful poem, written for the poet Paul Stubbs, ‘Hubble,’

10,000 galaxies bloom
to our unseeing sight
and all our knowledge a step
further into wonder

The  poet’s strengths eminently made visible here.

One of the greatnesses of Rattigan’s poetry is the immense respect he engenders in setting himself before the objectia of the world and, again, what gives him, often, the soul of the photographer, particularly in accessing the neo-Platonic awareness of Being, as opposed to the measured (though necessary) successes and failures of knowledge, existing as process.

And perhaps this is where I discover my final ‘Liminal’… between those two fields, as exemplified in the Heraclitean poem ‘Flow’:

All colours
inundate
unparched day,
open windows and doors
on dappled spaces

maybe this is the most keenly explicated presentation of a working philosophy for this poet; the eminence of flux:

All vision
undeceives awareness
by what separates
‘it’                from the world […]

dispersed
“en formas, colores, vibraciones”,
as rhythm-loving
rhyming action

Is there a final triplicate there? Or perhaps the bird has flown into an entirely Other arena? An offering to the poetry-book god at the end of the rainbow, a more-than-full verbal explosion?! The poem feels like an ambassador for the book as a whole; a kind of treasury, or bestiary, animal-like, dressed in its own lingual clothing… moving toward the between of its title.

Andrew O’Donnell, Oct ’12

Michael Lee Rattigan is a poet and translator, and regular contributor to The Fiend. His most recent work can be found in The Black Herald 3. ‘Liminal’ can be ordered here:

http://www.rufusbookspublishing.ca/

http://www.rufusbookspublishing.ca/authors/rattigan_michael_lee/index.html

On Microbes and Adders – Will Alexander

In response to utopian intellectual labour conservative rejoinder attempts to answer its energy according to portraits of constraint, according to honoured reputations in the canon. The latter, always holding up the inert, like the weight of hardened rum obstructing collective neurology.

So in order to de-solidify this rum one must begin to ignite a curious ether of scars across the rote of the canon. And we know that this rote befits conventional blinding as it trajects across the given. And this given, pervasively stratified, is always cauterized against transmixture. Living thought becomes penalized by citation, by rhetoric which ceases merging by contradiction. Never a burning hand or a spider which heats up the pores of glaciation. At another remove, by each utterance, one ignites by insidious remark, thus a wave of unseasonable motion is engendered, an untoward momentum, ceasing to be claimed by low custoidial procedure. One then rises above the critical foyer scattered as it is with old psychic tin.

For the creator, health in such circumstance means insolence, means unsullied perspective. For instance, as a practitioner of language, one spontaneously emits signs which confirms the state of the infidel. One is then accused of creating characters, or individual lines clouded by the power of misnomer. According to the afore- mentioned critics the text or book in question remains oceanic without contextual tremor. So those who comment by their skills through sanctioned stationary arcs, such texts are atrocities, posturings, created in principle by syllabic distortion.

Critics in this sense function as watchdogs of order, microbes if you will, filled with claims against a pantheon of adders. These adders being practitioners who reek of the ardour of Artaud, who smell of the seasoning of Cesaire, who have  abandoned the West to seek the ritual of biography ala Leiris, or embrace the Afrocentric angles found in Lamantia. To a diurnal mind these are examples which remained housed in a mysterious feral quarter bereft of procurable password.

So by prevailing in felonous code, the atmosphere shakes, the relevance of the Greco-Roman is abducted, then linear circumstance demurs. The classical survey then lists itself as non-example, as starch which oozes from a valueless pendant. It can be said in conclusion that new ferment claims and reclaims the ferocious, remains a trangressive adder, always breathing by insidious observation, by taint as mutative evolvement.

Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Visit his full bio, under the submission: ‘from Two Books of Aphorisms’

The Shaman of Subversion: Jerome Rothenberg’s Radical Deconstructions – Mark Wilson

Triptych (Poland/1931, Khurbn, The Burning Babe) 2007

There is much to celebrate in this recent collage-compendium of Jerome Rothenberg’s multi-various ‘Jewish’/'Poland’ poems. Triptych brings together perhaps his finest two works: the radically irreverent Poland/1931 and the brilliant holocaust memorial Khurbn. This ‘Polish’ trilogy is concluded by a fascinating recent work The Burning Babe. Poetry, therefore, from the 70s, the 80s and the new millennium respectively. A satisfying and ideal introductory compilation, in short, to one of the few innovative mavericks of contemporary American poetry.

For me, reading Triptych has been a radical and euphoric rediscovery of a poet I had read back in my university days during the 90s. Whilst I was supposed to be reading Forster, Woolf and Auden I was, in fact, also immersing myself in as much avant-garde Twentieth Century poetry I could find in the vast warren of the ULU library at Senate House. Anything published by James Laughlin’s New Directions was instantly appealing and Rothenberg’s dadaistic verse was definitely part of this subversive syllabus. Poland/1931 stood out most significantly then and, having gone out of print in the interim years, Triptych is certainly worth the price of admission for this 1974 classic alone being part of the package. To have Khurbn and The Burning Babe in addition is like being blessed with a second (and a third!) Bar Mitzvah. In assembling Triptych from these three quite different works and presenting them as a single, cohesive, multi-layered text one gets the impression that Rothenberg is, indeed, gifting the reading public with his magnum opus.

Broadly in the American Modernist/Avant-Garde tradition spanning from Whitman, Pound, Stein and Williams through Olson, Duncan and the Objectivists to the Beats, Jerome Rothenberg burst on to the literary scene in the late 50s with his poetry of the ‘Deep Image’ which, with its Symbolist leanings, tapped into Lorca’s duende and ‘Deep Song’ poetics. Robert Kelly and Clayton Eshleman were fellow travellers in this poetic enterprise. Rothenberg also impressed with his City Lights translations of young German poets introducing the likes of Paul Celan and Gunter Grass to an English reading public for the first time. This passion for a universalist world poetics would later spawn organically into the Ethnopoetics movement which is perhaps Rothenberg’s finest, and most enduring, poetic legacy. Ethnopoetics was, and still is, a very impressive attempt to collate and translate the oral poetries of ethnic and tribal peoples not in the accepted Western literary traditions. With poets Gary Snyder, Nathaniel Tarn and various anthropologists (Dennis Tedlock, Dell Hymes) Rothenberg has exploded preconceived and colonial notions of what poetry could and should be. He has founded a literary magazine (Alcheringa) and published a handful of groundbreaking anthologies (Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin etc.) to showcase his new discoveries and latest findings in the fertile, simmering, grass-roots savannah of Ethnopoetics. His blog Poems and Poetics, started in 2008, positively bristles with mini-anthologies in constant flux as well as retrievals from his own back catalogue and compendiums of other poets that he admires. Rothenberg’s keen interest in the experimental Dada poets Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters has allowed him to nurture, over a period of fifty years or so, a poetics of gleeful deconstruction and playful reconstruction. The primitive phonetics and gestures of the Dadaists, and other Modernist artists (Picasso, Picabia), chime convincingly with the primitive oral pursuits of the Ethnopoetics movement allowing Rothenberg to mystically marry his passion for the Early Modernists with his primal and ethnic explorations.

In the late 60s Rothenberg decided to create his very own customised ‘ethnopoetics’ by plummeting his ancestral roots in the Jewish Poland of 1931. Although Rothenberg was himself born in New York in 1931 he vividly imagined the world of his Polish ancestors and, perhaps, his doppelgänger-twin in what he later described as “a world of Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen”. The result is the riotous literary pyrotechnics of Poland/1931 which is definitely his career-breakthrough volume and the clear foundation for all his later work. Poland/1931 is as linguistically pleasurable as Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric, the Circe episode in Joyce’s Ulysses or the quotidian, narrative sections of Pound’s Cantos. The rhythmic, somatic lines of Poland/1931 sashay dangerously with a very real intention to subvert. Its wild dance smashes to pieces rigid Jewish taboos and, simultaneously, splinters many musty Polish ancestral codes in its wake. What had been long suppressed in a patriarchal religion or traditional culture is finally released in the pages of Poland/1931 in an orgasmic sublimation of language. The opening title-poem introduces this subversive theme with a wild and headlong cantillation:

my mind is stuffed with tablecloths
& with rings but my mind
is dreaming of poland stuffed with poland
brought in the imagination
to a black wedding
a naked bridegroom hovering above
his naked bride            mad poland
how terrible thy jews at weddings
thy synagogues with camphor smells & almonds
thy thermos bottles thy electric fogs
thy braided armpits
thy underwear alive with roots o poland
poland poland poland poland poland

Eschewing punctuation in an experimental, phonetic chant the poet charges language with a pulsing, earthy ground-bass which is extremely appropriate to his subject matter. The satirical humour of Rothenberg’s ambivalent relationship to his Jewishness is also fitting. With its raw ironic bite and unbridled ambition it achieves a huge literary mileage. From the start of Triptych the poet is keen to stress the oral bent of his poetics. The shamanistic aspects of verse have always fascinated Rothenberg. One only has to think of his many translations from indigenous North American poets such as the Navajo Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell. What he conjures here at the onset is something which is both a searing critique and a raucous celebration of his forebears. In another poem, Soap (II), Rothenberg ironically sends up the ritual washings associated with Judaism:

Will the man who gets clean love his neighbour?
Yes the facts are apparent yes the facts
live on in the mind if the mind lives on

This playful deconstruction reaches its pitch in the first section of Poland/1931 with poems dealing with all members of the Polish Jewish family including poems entitled The Mothers, The Grandmothers, The Fathers and The Brothers where the poet, almost irreverently, presents his forebears in all their naked reality. This is quite deliberate to avoid any potential romantic nostalgia and, therefore, literary slush. In true ethnopoetical style we have the whole truth of the tribal clan brought complete to the festal board.

The deconstruction of one’s own ancestral religion in literature is, of course, not new. Most famously there is Joyce’s 1914-15 bildungsroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where protagonist Stephen Dedalus finally flies free from the repressive nets of Irish Catholicism to “forge in the smithy of (his) soul the uncreated conscience of (his) race”. Earlier still in 1907 there had been Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son where a young man escapes the cloying straitjacket of his early years in the Plymouth Brethren to embrace Darwinism and a literary life. More specifically Jewish American, and far more contemporary to Rothenberg, is Chaim Potok’s 1972 novel My Name is Asher Lev, heavily influenced by Joyce’s Portrait, which records a young Jewish painter’s struggles and ultimate ostracism after depicting nudes and crucifixions which are anathema to the New York Lubavitcher group which he is a member of. Nevertheless, these are all novels. The new semantic territory that Rothenberg is perhaps breaking in to with Poland/1931 is writing an entire book of poetry (i.e. one long 150-page sequence) which takes this as the main leitmotif and using subversive phonetic techniques to achieve his ultimate aim. Rothenberg confesses that some of the most extreme poems in the Testimony section were indeed ‘experiments in blasphemy’. Challenges to traditional patriarchal Judaism include the re-discovery of the feminine side of God in the Shekinah poems. This includes the stunningly beautiful, yet deceptively simple, She:

She Shekinah
She Kingship
She Dwelling

She Daughter
She Lady
She Pearl

She Precious
She Cornerstone
She Female

She Floweth
She Male
She Garden

She Garment
She Earth
She Ocean

She Omen
She Lady of Light
She Sarah

She Slave
She Sucketh the Gods
She Rebekkah

She Rachel
She Leah
She Moon with the Hair

She the Hoverer

This is certainly reminiscent of the troubadour cortesia tradition revived  in Modernist poetry by Pound, Duncan and Blackburn (all poets Rothenberg admires of course), but the deliberately Jewish and ethnopoetical tinctures are arguably something new in American verse. In Poland/1931 there are also mystical re-interpretations of the kabbalistic Gematria in the Numbers sequence which recall Blake and Duncan as well as Ezekiel and Daniel:

Then did the Master read the text: All sevens are beloved.

And Again:
4 lamps
4 ladders
4 children of the flowers of the priesthood
shook 4 willow branches
toward the 4 directions

One realises, when reaching this point in the book, that Rothenberg’s extroverted mysticism and avant-garde deconstructions are indeed sacral acts of the shamanistic poet. What had, at first, seemed nonsensical and puerile now attunes more to Rothenberg’s enduring and unforgettable phrase for the tribal poet: ‘a technician of the sacred’. The poems have started to exude both a positive spirituality and a healthy humanisation. New rituals and liturgies are reconfigured from ancient sources and reborn in the poetic imagination. The narrow legalism of traditional Judaism has been exploded quite laterally here into something far more universal. Messianic undertones are not accidental of course.

Meanwhile, Poland/1931 rolls insanely on and we are introduced to a surrogate mother figure in the beautiful Esther K who seems to be the immanent incarnation of Shekinah and who, in this life on earth, is a local sibyl or fortune-teller. The Jewish vaudevillian quality of all this is quite brilliantly done. This is especially the case when we are introduced to a surrogate father figure: Lou Levy, hapless and glass-eyed. The reader is indulged in small tableaus of the couple’s strange relationship before Esther K eventually embarks to America. Her name and voyage carry Kafkaesque allusions which reinforce the absurdist and parabolic qualities of this book. Poland/1931 finally climaxes in the two Cokboy poems, where Rothenberg’s doppelgänger-twin has finally laid possession to America by embracing the mind- and spirit-space of the North American Indians

saddlesore I came
a jew among
the indians
vot em I doink in dis strange place
mit deez pipple mit strange eyes
could be it’s trouble
could be              could be

Here we are in the realm of postmodernist multi-persona and trickster-heroes. Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger or Gary Snyder’s re-workings of the North American Coyote myths come to mind as obvious precursors. The incarnation of Cokboy is wonderfully irreverent, but equally captivating and heartwarming as well. At any rate, an agreeable alternative to trenchant capitalism and gloss-slick urban utopianisms. In some senses a caricature, with Rothenberg sending himself up as a poet-searcher-pioneer (with all his many personas to boot: poet, translator, anthologist, essayist, performer, activist). It is certainly the perfect foil to what will come next in Triptych.

Poland/1931 takes up two-thirds of Triptych. The second part is the forty-page holocaust-memorial Khurbn written in 1988. A change in register could not be more pronounced. The Polish-Jewish holocaust was but a subtext in Poland/1931 whereas in Khurbn it is the central, and really the only, thrust for the sequence. Khurbn is excerpted from its original context in Khurbn and Other Poems (1989) and placed in its truer context as the progenital sequel to Poland/1931.

Rothenberg visited Poland for the first time in 1987 and was able to see his ancestral town, Ostrow-Mazowiecka. Here he discovered that the town was only fifteen miles from Treblinka. During the war those in his family had died without a trace and an uncle committed suicide on hearing the news of the death of his wife and children at Treblinka. In his ‘pre-face’ to Khurbn Rothenberg explains that the word holocaust had always seemed to him ‘too Christian, too beautiful, too much smacking of a “sacrifice”’ and he was therefore uncomfortable in using it. The word “sacrifice” suggests that there was a point to the suffering or, at least, some sort of ‘purpose’ or underlying ‘meaning’. Instead (Rothenberg writes) ‘the word with which we spoke of it was the Yiddish-Hebrew word, khurbn‘. This word meaning “destruction”, and the poet’s preference for it, acts as a subtly subversive critique of most European/North American presentations of the holocaust. It also flies in the face of Theodor Adorno’s dictum that after Auschwitz there should be no poetry only silence. As Charles Bernstein points out in the preface to Triptych there is definitely a ‘negative dialectics’ at work in Khurbn. Whereas Poland/1931 was peopled with dynamic, bristling, headlong life which the poet presented with a gleeful chutzpah, Khurbn is the flipside of the shekel: a dark Sheol filled with ghosts, spirits and dibbiks:

IN THE DARK WORD KHURBN
all their lights went ou

their words were silences,
memories
drifting along the horse roads
onto malkiner street

a disaster in the mother’s tongue
her words emptied
by speaking

Here we have an ultimate ‘emptying’. The poet’s tone has transmuted into a voice of  witness. The poems have become a whispered  testimonial as opposed to the loud and percussive ‘ethnopoetics’ of Poland/1931. In that book the people had been full of somatic, gargantuan life. In Khurbn people are lonely wraiths who are positively spectral, existing in a shadow-land between life and death:

he picks a coin up
from the ground-bass

it burns his hand
like ashes it is rediscovers

& marks him as it marks
the others            hidden

he is hidden in the forest
in a world of nails
his dibbik fails him

Rothenberg explains that within the poems of Khurbn he was ‘allowing (his) uncle’s khurbn to speak through (him)’. So here we have, perhaps, a radically new approach to Holocaust verse-writing. If one quickly scans the most successful Holocaust poetry that has come down down to us over the past seventy years there seems to be one of two ways. One can either do as Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs did, which is create a totally new hermetic or symbolist language which deals with the horrors of the extermination camps in an indirect and implied fashion, at the edge of language and of what can be spoken or written. Celan, of course, took this to its furthest extreme by fracturing the substructure of poetic language itself. The other approach is that of Charles Reznikoff’s in his book-length poem Holocaust. That is the presentation of the Shoah in a clinical, documentary fashion. A totally ‘objectivist’ method stripped of adjectives and adverbs and offered with no commentary or gloss, but equally as powerful as the hermetic approach outlined above. Rothenberg’s ‘ventriloquist-of-the-dead’ approach in Khurbn seems to combine aspects of both, but is perhaps more in debt to Robert Duncan’s Passages sequence when it is dealing with the horrors of the Vietnam War. This is quite credible when one considers that the likely source for The Burning Babe title not only alludes to Robert Southwell’s Metaphysical poem in the first instance but to Duncan’s redeployment of the phrase in Groundwork to describe the naked Vietnamese girl-child who has just been napalmed. Likewise, Rothenberg’s poetry of the Shoah portrays this same meaningless carnage accompanied by its utter dehumanisation. This reaches a horrifying pitch in the litany-poem The Maledictions.

Let the holes in his body drop open let his excretions pour out across the room
Let it flood the bottoms of the women’s cages let it drip through the cracks into the faces of the women down below
Let him scream in a language you cannot understand let the word “khurbn” come at the end of every phrase
Let a picture begin to form every scream
Let the screams tell you that the world was formed in darkness that it ends in darkness

Even here Rothenberg has subverted the so-called ‘curse’ passages of the Hebrew Pentateuch in order to create something new for another time, another apocalyptic dispensation. In his ‘pre-face’ to Khurbn the poet declares unequivocally that ‘the poems that I first began to hear at Treblinka are the clearest message I have ever gotten about why I write poetry’. Almost twenty years after the subversive ‘dada’ of Poland/1931 we read a poet whose voice has fully matured with a far subtler form of shamanic subversion.

The Burning Babe, written between 2001 and 2006,is only twenty five pages long and acts as a coda or postscript to Triptych. Here we have the poet’s doppelgänger-twin re-imagined once more as he rises up out of the flames of the Shoah: an exultant Christ-child just as he is presented in much Western art. The sudden integration of Christian imagery and iconography might be surprising here until we realise that Rothenberg is once again subverting the preconceived colonial and elitist mythologies and transforming them into something far more interesting and applicable. In short unadorned lines we have a strange babe, glimpsed in churches, galleries and museums, presented in all his ambivalence:

the groom
a babe
in bright green shirt
& red cape
with a red sun overhead
& dark blue moon
when they have come together
nightly in the dark
& staring at herself inside the mirror
of his god eyes
what will she do to please him
how will the pressures of her body
rest on him
her breathing filling up the nursery
the crib in which he stands
or will a babe
hands cupped     go mad
with pleasure

The Marriage of Saint Catherine is typical of this short book. The shamanic eye is able to deconstruct a millennium of religious culture and create a new mythology for the 21^st Century. The babe is as much a mischevious imp as he is a fledgling prince of heaven. Absurdity and irony is part of the literary cocktail that Rothenberg shakes here. The Burning Babe climaxes with a lengthy meditation on Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau house (a large piece of installation art) which brings together and sublimates the multi-various strands of all three books. The poet’s disregard here for conventional punctuation once more emphasising the strange, reconfigured age following in the wake of holocaust destruction:

from hannover to oslo columns rising up
in each a babe’s head reaching to the room
in which we sit we are the witnesses
ourselves from dresden to new york
from ambleside to hiroshima
guernica to auschwitz
where they grind their poems into the dirt
a passage from their time to ours
khurbn shoah holocaust

Jerome Rothenberg’s Triptych gathers together over thirty years worth of poetic experience and imaginative contemplation. As an exploration, confrontation and ultimate transformation of a poet’s ancestral and religious roots it is unrivalled. It is certainly this pivotal American poet’s major opus. The reading public must count itself blessed that Rothenberg, with the benefit of hindsight and retrospection, has finally collated and collaged this masterpiece of contemporary verse.

Mark Wilson’s first poetry collection ‘Quartet For the End of Time’ (Editions du Zaporogue) was published in August, 2011 (it is available to buy or download at http://www.lulu.com). His poems and articles have appeared in The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, The Fiend and  Le Zaporogue. Mark is currently working on a second collection.)

from Two Books of Aphorisms – Will Alexander

from ‘ACROSS THE VAPOUR GULF’

“Nothing dessicates a mind so much as its repugnance to conceive obscure ideas.”

- E.M. Cioran

“…something subversive, something perilous…about the aphorism…”

- Richard Howard

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Perfection. And by perfection I think of the Argentinean Macedonio Fernandez who maintained that there are moments of perfection in this life.

*

What is this perfection of which I speak? I want to call it perpendicular rotation, or a power of cleansing transparency, flying above misty realms of soil. Dialectically, it possesses the root vibration, the colloquy of nerves, like arachnoidal webs connected to the Earth. Which channels pure light seemingly hovering as immobility. The body then exists as one connective, as a seminal light source in being.

*

And here, I always align myself with sigils, with the evil beauty of metaphor. In spite of all appearance nothing can be concluded from episodes within phenomena. There always remains the exclusivity of insight, the sensitive spiral arms in the heavens, the breath which flows from galactic urns. And at the moment of extinguished lunar imperatives, I am always alive with subterranean wanderings, with organic voudoun from extinguished alligator hills, always uncovering forceful feral implosions, bringing to life, striking dead, strategically evading forts with acidic rivulets, with ferociously perched vultures, the latter, always snapping at the spines of those who suggest a poisoned moral authority.

*

Even while prone to attacks by surrounding vapour, I am always finding angles inside poetic water, always surviving pointed electrical assailment, moving freely, avoiding assault from swarming stingray engulfment.

*

An etymology of blizzards going back to the scorching circumstantials of primal rotational impregnation.

*

from ‘GENERAL SCATTERINGS AND COMMENT’

“We say that inseparable quantum of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.”

- David Bohm

“It is through its own force…, its own energy, its own movement, that the Existing comes to Existence.”

- Theophile Obenga

*

As poet, I listen to flaws speak. I listen to culpability, I listen to entanglement converse. Then this or that fragment awakens, and builds upon itself by pressure from nervous display. This process remaining operant as spontaneous lingual emotion, as colour unspent by pervasive electrical exhaustion.

*

So how does one cleanse hesitation? How is the breathing through fresh and ulterior dazzling? I surmise it is to scrape from one’s scales dire and unbreatheable habit, so that other shadows are developed ceasing approbation of prior combinatory ruin.

*

At the depth of my own improvisatory core, I sometimes ignite from listless suggestion, from energy spawned from seeming detritus, self-sparked by its own meandering ray. A blossomed streak on a Miro blue field, not as an in-serviceable suggestion, but as a living laterality, which in turn engenders in me experience on both the vertical and horizontal levels. Thus, I become kinetic on a combinational plane, knowing the blue streak as both terrestrial sky and interstellar hydroxyl. Whatever breech may exist in terms of intellectual assessment, dissolves, and becomes the instrument of untold irradiation.

*

As of now I’m trying to find out how old fuel is read. Of course, not combustion on the mechanical level, but combustion as it eternally explores itself throughout different levels and ferments. I’m speaking of the state prior to the invisible as it comingles with cusps of hydrogen, prior to the fire of its kinetic arrows, prior to its substanceless sound.

*

As to meteors, as to regression of novae, I am now engaged at the understanding of prior electrical kinetics, prior to universal enactment. And I can truly say that I swarm and commingle on the plane of pure electrical strata.

*

History has revealed itself according to its decimated offspring. And these offspring consist of piles and piles of aggravated bodies, inscripted by lesionous infernoes.

*

I’m witnessing a useless old figure in blinding nitrogen socks, having now forgotten the names he once inadequately read. To him, memory no longer functions as diachronic nesting ground. So to him fatigue is heritage, is his basic lair of acceptance. Although his thought now lingers near the diachronic, he can suggest no other example to himself, knowing now that his energy suggests confusion, and can no longer wander into lateral fields as escape.

*

Through the powers of telepathy and pulchritude, I am healing broken doves with my fingers. Because these are psychic doves, by my very attempt nutation is occuring. I am much in the spirit of a vertical lama, cleansing his cells in order to keep the solar form in balance. According to perpendicular maturation the body is less morbific and less challenged, thereby obtaining the power to open to pure celestial finding.

*

There are moments aligned to a dark and clandestine quiet, hovering like an insular jurisdiction. When inhabiting such a state, one remains magnetic, isolate, on an unending plane floating through outer darkness. The Sun remains formless with haze, and flotation ignites with the answerless. In this magnetic phase, deafness occurs and calls upon itself to float through eliminated circles. At such arcane remove the anthropomorfic can never reply, or call on sudden divinities to geographically state regions.

*

Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and visual artist who lives in Los Angeles, the city where he was born in 1948. His many honors include a PEN Oakland Award, a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry, and a California Arts Council Fellowship. He has worked several less rewarding jobs over the years, and has taught at various institutions, including the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts / Youth First that serves neglected, at-risk youth.

His most recent publications include ‘The Brimstone Boat’ (Reve a Deux 2012), ‘Compression and Purity’ (City Lights 2011), ‘Mirach Speaks to His Grammatical Transparents’ (Oyster Moon Press 2011), ‘Diary as Sin’ (Skylight Press 2011) and ‘The Sri Lankan Loxodrome’ (New Directions 2009).

1 Poem, from a sequence – Felino A. Soriano

from Circumference this ornate certainty

Encompass

Fractions faith
multiple identities.

Of earth of soil’s relevance:

solidified struggle
growth among death cyclic invention s

circling achromatic hours’
elongated factions of designed attributions—

Felino A. Soriano is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities.  Recent poetry collections include Intentions of Aligned Demarcations (Desperanto, 2011), Pathos etched, recalled: (white sky books, 2011), and Divaricated, Spatial Aggregates (limit cycle press, 2011).  He edits and publishes the online journal, Counterexample Poetics.  For information regarding his published works, editorships, and interviews, please visit: www.felinoasoriano.info.

Towards an Interdimensional Poetics (Part Two)

Premonition of this Philosophy, this Poetics… Staffs 1996

We must have been studying Descartes’ Meditations… and I was still in the first full-blown emanations of ‘finding philosophy’ so I probably adhered to what Descartes’ thesis was attempting to teach us, to begin with. Or was it that I didn’t think this in any relation to Descartes’ at all? But that a spark had gone off?

One day, I remember going into the Student Union with the feeling that there was something unfailingly magnificent about the human condition, an overwhelming certainty that the entire intellectual establishment was irrefutably unaware, so ensconced in the worst kind of Heideggerisms and neo-liberal cultural-narratives that tended to dominate philosophy and literature courses of that time. With this wave of positivity came this feeling that, in my locality, and in all the prevailing media, was entirely ignorant of (England NEVER gets anywhere near the true trading of ideas in any organic and progressive sense; the nearest it gets is Radio 4’s “In Our Time” which is still often way off, given that it depends almost entirely on university sponsored opinion).

When I consider this now, that wave of feeling I experience seemed in contradistinction to almost everything I was studying at the time… the literature courses, bar a course in Russian Literature, were either poorly taught or were telling me things I already knew. Philosophy, however, was still new to me and a couple of courses kept my interest, anything that Robin Durie was lecturing in, and Peter Shott’s Schopenhauer… these, still, both suffered, though, from the usual laziness of those people gifted in a milieu of absence of enquiry. They tend to edutain themselves over taking their work to the next level; i.e, they don’t become their own intellectual measure, being in a circumstance of teaching introductory level philosophy, for that time, and not coming across any ‘free spirits’ in a Nietzschean sense. But, having said that, they may have been into a lot more than they were teaching, such is the self-censorship of the academy. In fact, Staffs was probably a lot more interesting, being an ex-Polytechnic at the time, and not having any posh friends it had to shake hands with on a regular basis.

Durie was obviously the brightest spark in the group but, unfortunately, knew it too much to receive much warmth from students, so desperate were we, in England, to encourage in each other unique lows in oh-so-democratic neo-liberal mediocrity (and Shott was too much a Darwinian for me ever to find much common ground with, despite doing an excellent job of drawing me into Schopenhauer’s unique net of genius. My dissertation title was: Genius and Madness in the Aesthetics of Arthur Schopenhauer… and, I remember, had a quote from Baudelaire’s The Albatross, at the front of it… and was the only piece of work I handed in early, in all my time at university… I’m not sure if Shott really knew what I was going on about; it was basically a comparison between psychologies of madness and badly written sub-par-neoplatonism through Schopenhauer).

There was one other course in European drama that, without much direction or intrigue, still brought me into contact with Artaud for the first time (I had read all the novels of Genet by that time, so this stood me in good stead… none of the students on that course had any kind of a handle on Genet OR Artaud, despite my presentation of a rather long and impassioned presentation on a Shakespeare/Artaudian Le Theatre et Son Double parabola I was nursing at the time, either badly-argued and abstruse-seeming as it may have seemed to all of us at the time, regardless, the magnetism of Artaud manifested there).

But that wave; what was it?? I realize that I wasn’t really responding to Descartes’ text in any cognitive sense. I was entirely re-envisioning him for my own reasons, or the reasons that this wave of feeling somehow engendered in me? And, I’m sure, it wouldn’t have been felt in my university work on The Meditations at the time, in essays or whatever… it felt entirely of an orbit that was intensely more subtle thn anything I was being taught (kind of like reading a page of Finnegans Wake, it hits you on a level that is absolutely Other to cognition, or academic training, if I’d have framed it on any level, then, I was saying that it didn’t conform to the impersonality of general western philosophizing etc, the anchor being mostly Germanic, individually focussed, and abstract; the great failure of our philosophy being that it doesn’t embrace myth, parable, and the anecdotal, as Eastern philosophy does, eventually; and for this to be Encouraged with a kind of syncretic gnosis as the real aim for any real future for philosophy).

Later I wrote a letter to my friend Mark Swannell, explaining this wave of positivity that had been thrown over me that afternoon. In retrospect I related it to Descartes but, as I say, this reading of The Meditations was simply both a connected, and unconnected, prelude to that wave of feeling. I say this while also considering McKenna’s thesis that Descartes’ project for philosophy was spurred on by a dream experience where McKenna claims a ‘spirit’, of some order, spoke to him, and revealed to him that the future of philosophy would come from an emphasis on number, and on mathematics (notice, in an oppositional sense, how both Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell come out of mathematics as the cultural narrative of the 19^th century is thrown into the bloodiness of the 20^th, with only Wittgenstein being vomited up and considered within anything that could be construed as mainstream philosophy.

But the psychological emphasis of Descartes’ ‘spirit visitation’ also has parallels in the rise of mesmerism, on into hypnosis and psycho-analysis. Was Descarte’s whole philosophical project a kind of pre-empting force for the psychic experience that occurs later on in history? This is what I’m beginning to call the Flaming Pie Syndrome (there are different hues to it but John Lennon’s dream-command of the man who visited him in a dream, with the message: ‘You will be called “Beetles” with an A’ seems totemic enough, as with Descartes’ visitation, to suggest that, mildly after Lawrence, we can conceive of a sub-historical psychological narrative dependent entirely on the unconscious; a historico-anthropology of Unconsciousness, if you will… a realm of being that entirely surrounds the politics of calendar time).

Joint Honours, Literature & Philosophy, Philosophy & Literature

Nietzsche falls away… Schopenhauer returns. Jazz… Classical. Chaos… Order. Free verse… Rhyme. Heraclitus… Parmenides.

An Experiment

Something just out of frame, not given due attention. The rooster crowing in someone else’s morning. But this time: drenched in ‘I…’

which seems very amusing. Like walking round a corner you’ve walked round every day of your life… and, yet, if someone were to ask you directions right now you wouldn’t be able to tell them where either of you are.

This is how ‘the arm’ is seen. It is very funny that the arm belongs to me. The dose taken brings on only subtle (and very pleasant) forms of disassociation, but enough to prove that I am not who I think I am. I am not ME… and just to make sure (absolutely sure!) I’ll need to rifle through enough books to pretty much  prove to myself, over the following years, that, for the most part, metaphysics has been pretty much dead (bar the odd Spinoza, Blake or Schopenhauer) since John Scottus Eriugena passed over, in the late ninth century.

(Walking in the woods with Sam, age 6, he plays uncle to my nephew… is under the impression that that he has eyes ringing round the entire circumference of his head which no one else can see. And I believe him.

Life is the wrong shape. And our education system hasn’t figured it out yet. Under the auspices of the matrix we should really apply a certain pressure on each other so that the very young and the very old are the ones that teach and run the institutions, while those reaching into the desert-like impasse of middle age and adult politesse should be treated with the same condescension as the young and old are now. All the people who ‘know things’, ‘who want to apply policies’ etc. These people shouldn’t be able to get work anywhere. Their entire social existence should be governed by the need to be a combination of excessive child-like-ness or totally wise, reflective and curmudgeonly.

But that’s me being an adult again. Suffice to say I feel sad that his whole being has had to be crammed into corporea like a giant cumulonimbus cloud bathed in sunlight, packed into a hotdog container… which isn’t to demean the true reality of the body, but to symbolically show how little attention we’ve given the body in our institutions, as an outgrowth of earth and frequency).

But, to return to The Experiment… it is safe (or unsafe?) to infer that, if I am not me, then everyone else is not them Selves either. Which makes me want to laugh even louder. Then who is writing this??? Roland Barthes? And who is Roland Barthes anyway?

There are a multitude of other worlds hiding behind every familiar corner. There is a world in which I know who Roland Barthes is. And yet another, where myself and Roland Barthes are enjoying a short hiking holiday in Hokkaido.

Elvis is with us, of course, but he is slowing us down with his interminable forays into every nearest pharmacy, stammering broken katakana, and waving a Japanese phrase book around.

Absence of Time = Instant Prophecy = Random Planning

The god Kronos is spluttering to death in the corner of your dimly lit hotel room. All my selves have come out to play, and are dancing round a street-lamp thick with dense clouds of cheerful cherubim. Every angel is not necessarily terrifying, in this other world? A certain amount of careful discernment, if you please, in this roaming-round the realms of seraphic overlords and swarms of beatific light beings.

Science has proof. We have vision. Vision will out, and created science from the very start… while science (in its rogue druidic arrogance) imagines the historical steering wheel as having come about in exactly the opposite manner. A case of the children who refuse to admit their progenic sustenance… or that their parents exist, or that they ever had any. A godlessness entirely other to our experience of history, and of time.

But vision takes responsibility, which is why (after Mr. Yeats) it initially seems to come clothed as Fascism… it’s like riding a bike… the first few times are tricky. And if you want to bring Satan with you, and the whole crashing, bugling apocalyptic world… then know that I’ll have chosen to be elsewhere.

“Everything is entertainment,” Mr. Dylan wryly observed,

Oh… but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now / History,
Stephen said, is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.

Vision takes responsibility. One day you mentally will a friend over onto the wrong side of the tracks with a wallet full of hundred dollar bills, another day you’re an urban monk with connectivity frothing round your head and all the clouds descending towards you, as if in some form of extra-sacerdotal mystical observance.

But that day in Swansea? At the Dylan Thomas museum off The Mumbles, reading the account of Thomas’s death, in that hospital in New York (the same place Charles Olson died? Consult the internet oracle, Robin!)… the manuscript papers under glass.

Denise Levertov to Robert Duncan, “John Berryman is an evil man” paraphrased. Did Berryman kill Dylan Thomas?

Much of the New Criticism was funded by the CIA, The Kenyon Review, for sure? I must pick up that book.

“Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”

How many bullets in Lennon’s back? I forget. Yoko Ono, in an interview:

“They killed him…” (They?
They??… You mean, HE,
Yoko, HE? Surely? Surely??)

We do not know yet? Or do we? Poor us! Waiting to know. Lucky us! Waiting to know. Wanting to know. One man’s investigating is another man’s waiting? Never rub another man’s rhubard.

“A label persisted. The past tense
implies it took place. The redness
in which the the implies there was some other
did not persist. He was not waiting long.”

[Jackson Mac Low, in a thing named 1983… divined, 1:45am 6^th March 2012, Eternity]

What is true AND unnacceptable always arrives in the form of fiction.

Ezra Pound, to Eustace Mullins, regarding his thesis on the Federal Reserve: “You must write it like a detective novel”. William Paterson, the Medicis, Rome, Babylon… the whole financial shit storm; capstone of our emotional investment in the presiding mythos.

We allowed the Bank of England to be dreamed into existence, and it has been shafting us since 1694 (with Rome as its inspiration, as if a kind of skewed Shelley’s Prometheus). The shamanic ritual of the Tarahumaras and the rogue druidism of the stock market converge at the arse end of 2009 for your delectation. Some of us loathe Caliban, some loathe Margaret Thatcher (and Thatcher as Caliban to the techno-cultured Sioux, with his ipad oracle of his ancestor’s dream-time). Prospero’s magic books; giggling in the corner.

So?

Just keep your hands on the wheel. Pay attention. Know that those are hands. That that is the wheel. That you’re sitting in a car. That it’s all going rather fast. That we are all in each other’s dreams. That we’d prefer not to kill each other. That love exists.

In all realms, polar… do both dissociation and association constitute the dimming of the authority of time. Happy sperm, wriggling into egg… compares with:

this short youtube clip of a veritable thicket of UFOs bobbing around in earth’s orbit. The NASA assistant is trying to find the Russian space station: Meer.

Needle to
Hay-stack:
[A certain politesse]
Are you read-
ing me? Over…
Or Find me, find me,
find me.    &
nothing more

Fragments, & Inserts, from the Introduction to ‘Towards an Interdimensional Poetics’

…so I’m essentially uncomfortable with labels like “modernism” and “post-modernism”… in some way they represent an unnecessary ‘clinging’ of some order, an unnecessary faith; they are so very ‘cultural-narrative’ (that part of Emerson I dislike; the sudden elevation of Culture thrown into the 19^th Century soup), and VERY analogous to Antonin Artaud, at another level, speaking of the symbolism of the cross in his notes on Pour en Finir Avec le Jugement de Dieu:

“La croix est le signe qu’il faut faire tomber.
Voilà 757 siècles que le mal s’y suspend et s’y accroche,
voilà 2 mille ans qu’il s’est servi de son coup d’arrêt pour l’homme et l’empêcher
désormais d’avancer,
voilà l’éternité elle-même qu’il bute les choses et qu’il les choses et qu’il les croise
pour les empêcher de circuler.”

Roughly: ”The cross is a sign that we must break down. / Here, these 757 centuries… and it hangs on and hangs on. / These 2000 years hooked on, to halt and prevent man from going forward, / Here is the eternity itself that is encountered in things, what passes to obstruct movement.”

(–Dossier de Pour en Finir Avec le Jugement de Dieu (1948), Œuvres Complètes, Tome XIII, Antonin Artaud)

“Every human being has an archetype that emanates from the pineal gland that projects into his/her personal energetic web, or “aura”. This archetype, called a “T-bar” is a function of genetics, working to balance the left and right hemispheres of the brain. [It] can look like a “T”, a cross, or an ankh”

–The Hyperspace Helper (2004), Stewart A. Swerdlow and Janet D. Swerdlow

I haven’t concluded (do I even need to?) on whether the ‘T-Bar’, ‘cross’ or ‘ankh’ from Stewart and Janet Swerdlow’s books is a psychic corollary of the more religious iconography Artaud is refering to. Regardless of detailed conclusions it should not come as any surprise that the cross of modern religions is an emanation, or variation on, a more psychological phenomenon. Could the cross of religious iconography represent a usurping of something that naturally occurs in the brain, as an emanation of the pineal gland? It’s entirely possible:

…from this perspective we see a subtle battle against consciousness (would we term this the totality-of-field of the true body, beyond corporeality?) running through all human history, a mental imprisonment that spans across the ages, at the sociological and religious levels, all the way up to higher forms of imagining (with imagination, then, pushing hard against the walls of the communal and corporeal Known, to, ultimately be transcended, also?) This is important in reference to symbology and shamanism. We shall come to see that symbol and image are part of a consistent suppression of human potentiality (one need only look into the internet presentations Michael Tsarion has given on occult symbology) which can be, and have been, used in many different ways… this is not to say that these things have not been, and cannot be, used in a more nurturing manner, also).

(and is this what I intend, in my own haphazard way, to unravel in this text? and what I have generally termed ‘lockdowns’? The lockdowns, themselves, though, adhere to cultural narrative in that they deconstruct it… is this where The Cantos leave off and The Wake enters? The Cantos, as Blakean ‘horses of instruction’, subvert cultural narrative to their own ends (and, obviously, explore new areas of knowledge, as far as the western milieu is concerned… and yet are not the rules originating there? The template? With the L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E poetry-spillage, and de-constructionism, as end-result?) Sometimes I think deconstructionism is just badly interpreted late Artaud (without mistakenly dismissing all of it, as, say, a Harold Bloom does).

And Artaud, then? Andrew? Essentially Greek? Possibly… Nalpas. Hmm. A Greek reincarnated-injection into the 20^th-Century-Mode so as to put a ragged face on the politesse of a Wallace Stevens? There will have to be a chapter on reincarnational identities for the reader to see this properly teased out, and it must answer the question: What is reincarnation given that time and space are irreal, and a construct of the mind.

Crane Parabolas, Bloomian Originations, Cosmological Energies…

The letters of Hart Crane fascinate me. They veer between incredibly insightful slices of poetry-vision and rather mundane everyday observances (still exciting, in a way, due to the tensions between his father, mother and himself, and how the poetry functions in relation to it). But try this out:

“…there are certain basically mythical factors in our Western world which literally cry for embodiment. Oddly, as I see it, they cannot be presented completely (any one of them) in isolated order, but in order to appear in their true, luminous reality must be presented in chronological and organic order, out of which you get a kind of bridge, the quest of which bridge is— nothing less ambitious than the annihilation of time and space, the prime myth of the modern world.”

-Letter to Yvor Winters, Nov 15th, 1926

Modern criticism has never really put together Crane’s poetics under any kind of passionate banner for metaphysics. That’s essentially how I see it. Yet, from this distance, I find the poems themselves more appealing invitations into that field than anything Crane was conscious of, and could explain coherently in the letters (the quote above is one of his more searing attempts).

Crane, at the conscious level, seems to inherit Whitman, as is probably well-established. But, another letter of Crane’s, to Yvor Winters again… before we get to Walt:

“The “New Metaphysics” that Whitman proclaimed in Democratic Vistas here and there in America today. I feel it in your work and I think I can sense it in some of my own work. (Probably Whitman wouldn’t recognize it in either of us, but no matter)”

An acceptance, here, of Harold Bloom’s misreadings theory, at the end there? (to be found in Bloom’s well known book The Anxiety of Influence). In this way we have:

Succession / Cessation

Son   sez to father:
“How is it done?”
“Like this… y’see?”
replies father. (& yet,

displeased?   is he?…
that the son’s
done   can never be
the father’s done.

Each   perfecting a
different achievement
in the same object).

This b metaphor as
law of universe,   brute
generic thingly-ness

(& talent being proximity in sensible appearance… the place from which all appearance comes – and which is the mark of origination, of misreading – is the birth place of poetic vision, and poetic vision; not dependant whatsoever on experience… and yet we still have a translation problem here: vision, in English, still implies cornea, cortex, visua etc. And, yes, Of-This IS its being, in language… but not coming-from until now, why Joyce re-makes grammar and language so as to to sit closer to vision’s hearth? When Eliot, in The Waste Land, says “that is not it at all” we see the essential misreading at work, and belong to, for at least an instant, something other than the stranglehold of space and time). But, let’s turn to Democratic Vistas, and see where Crane was at:

“We see that almost everything that has been written, sung, or stated, of old, with reference to humanity under the feudal and oriental institutes, religions, and for other lands, needs to be re-written, re-sung, re-stated, in terms consistent with the institution of these States, and to come in range and obedient uniformity with them.

We see, as in the universes of the material kosmos, after meteorological, vegetable, and animal cycles, man at last arises, born through them, to prove them, concentrate them, to turn upon them with wonder and love — to command them, adorn them, and carry them upward into superior realms —so, out of the series of the preceding social and and political universes, now arise these States. We see that while many were supposing things established and completed, really my grandest things always remain; and discover that the work of the New World is not ended, but only fairly begun.”

-Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

The emphasis, then, is on the metaphysical and the cosmological. From Whitman all the way through Ginsberg we have the reiteration of these States (and by Ginsberg’s time its lost much of its sociological currency… I’m drawn to it more in an energetic sense; ‘states of wonder’, ‘states of being’ etc).

It seems almost as if the ideology Whitman urged on America in his time, transcended its own definition as we look back (or through?) the 20^th century and all the blood shed in the name of democracy, or ideology more generally. All births are intended to transcend their own language game, their own sphere of reference (as Manly P. Hall mentioned many moons ago).

Crane intuited this, though, and attempted to follow Whitman, at least on a metaphysical and cosmological level (and I’ve pontificated a little on the results in a previous section of the book). The dark end of this methodology comes in the more Emersonian characterisations of culture, as transcendant. Again, a term that has slithered past the usefulness of its achievements.  The idea of being in service to culture is incredibly odious to me, particularly as we conceive of any function for the arts. This is why genius in the arts is hardly ever rewarded (why would you pay someone to not do any Thing for you, and that is exactly what the true artist does, fixedly lost in his or her abject creationism rather than being the goal of an individual or communal conception, true art being the total absence of the utilitarian). But Crane, in many ways, instead of naming or re-naming that Whitmanian cosmology in any ideological sense (if only Ginsberg had deigned to do the same!) he, perhaps in spite of himself, danced around the mystery and so brought the entire project forward (in a way that Eliot, slave of the cultural paradigm…  and, as a foreigner in service to a kind of Old World historicism, didn’t).  Joyce (in silence, exile and cunning) escaped this entirely. Pound, only partially. (His escape was the ideological Other, and so; an insincere escape).

Wasn’t the problem of Whitman’s democratic cosmology essentially one of self-orientation, while still having a certain veracity and usefulness for the nationhood of his own time?

Yet, once the ideological goal is asserted human thinking fails to get there; this is the snag of fallen man, is it not? Repetitious egoism disguised as progress. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, not as cosmic warning but actual statement, to be taken literally, regarding the repetitious nature of history. Would it help to revise that ‘in back of’ of Duncan in this context? Communal goal, conceived of in the individual, then projected outwards, tends to proceed outward as ‘instruction’, and cannot ever be fulfilled given simply the variousness of each individuated human soul… it is the goal that hinders. Communal ‘agreement’ (or more acutely; the similarity found in variousness when immediate experience is valued over the filter of ‘people’ as seen through the immediate experience)   is discovered, or comes about, exactly when it is not searched-for. Any amendation to the world conceived of, as goal, can only successfully effected in the individual. This is why the political realm exists in a kind of self-perpetuating trauma… it is obsessed with remedy, just as fundamentalism is. True engagement involves itself with immediacy of interest, and is negligent of mass viewpoint or argument. This is a horrific notion to fallen man (I’m beginning to like this term better than ‘inauthentic man’ since it has the necessary shades of Julian Jaynes and Milton that I believe are necessary; that Nietzsche’s ‘Ubermensch’ and Whitehead’s ‘superject’ are forms of intuiting the incredible power of the human before The Fall etc).

We need to understand that chaos, the thing that scares fallen ‘historical’ man most, exists as another’s order, and vice versa… this is what might be termed as a brand of connectivizing perspectivism, not to be mistaken with logical positivism because it is aware of the illusion of common sense as well as (in the same moment) the necessity of communal poles of opinion (Blakean corollaries), in one form or another, of psychological acceptance, on behalf of any given community. Chaos is simply something that exists beyond the boundaries of ANY given order (at their poles they actually absorb each other in meaning, in the periphera of the cultural gaze).

In the same way, then, understand that Whitman’s democracy is not the form of government or self-government trumpeted through the 20^th Century? The only straggling point left here would be to throw Freud at the leftovers of Whitman (Crane’s poetic vision, the focus for me here) and see what sticks. Is there any form of psychological  democracy, an inner democracy worth pursing? Something closer to the dao than the sham of party politics? Or those terms, themselves, as central ‘back-ofs’ from which, also, to leap. I’ll leave a larger discussion of this… for another chapter, while finding resonance in the specific examples of

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, Time & Gnosticism, Vortex & Word, God & Matrix…

Any particular cosmology that advances newness must have to have the idea of how we experience time as its eminent badge of ultimate investigation. This would be something required in any poetics wishing to further the Whitman – Crane line (with Blake as godfather presence?)

With regard to Time, and in McKenna’s words the simple command ‘read À la recherche du temps perdu’ by Proust is offered. A particularly appealing comparison then (to move on a little) occurs, in attempting a re-envisioning of Whitman’s cosmology through Crane, when reading The Exegesis of Philip K.Dick (and both Ubermensch and superject, as mentioned before, could form useful parallels when reading Dick’s intriguing brand of Gnostic metaphysics).

The Beast of my earlier pieces becomes confirmed in what Dick is writing about through the mid-seventies and early eighties. Specifically, it seems parallel to what he calls the Black Iron Prison (the metaphysical matrix which has forged and shaped our reality, and given birth to the arch-totalitarianism we know today, as manifested under different monikers in the conspiracy field, namely things like The Illuminati, Secret Government, and all those related to the cabal related to the Federal Reserve and the Banks of Europe). However, this isn’t, pertinently, my interest (insofar as there is a lot of information already out on the internet now, that pertains to this) but seems also of a piece with a statement McKenna makes on the notion that a time matrix came into play that was closely connected to Rome of between 100-300 A.D, a kind of overlay onto our current reality. Where they diverge is in their specific placements within the 20^th Century (McKenna has them overlaid in the 1910s and Dick holds to their convergence with his ‘spiritual awakening’ of early 1974). The origin of that matrix, insofar as it relates to global politics, tugs at me a little more…

What interests me most, however, is not the Black Iron Prison but its opposing force… which seems much more sophisticated and subtle. Dick names it ‘Zebra’ and it very much adheres to the sum of all immediate experience on earth, Jungian synchronicities, other-world experiences etc, and dream visitation. There is also an air of true-science formality in it that recalls the philosophy of Alan Watts, particularly in Dick’s reflection on the universe as functioning like a gigantic brain, but here, with a definite gnostic twist:

“[…] what it is is that a brain exists, feeding us a spurious reality which it grows and develops, and we’re cells in it subliminally governed and integrated into it. The spurious reality is to keep us from going nuts from sense-deprivation, and is a 3-D hologram matrix through which info passes; its thoughts, instructions and info.

It’s all certainly for a benign purpose: the brain is negentropic, the life of the universe, “the final bulwark against non being,” […] As cells, we are born, function, live, age, die. and are replaced; the brain is immortal. What we accomplish in our lifetimes is made eternal as bits of the brain’s evolving structure, especially if it deals with info, the very substance of the brain.”

Words and language, in Dick’s conception, as units of sound, are organic structures of all ultimate creation, but not representative of materiality in any conventional sense. Language, inherantly contains its own Orphism, as in Charles Olson’s well known claim:

“To build out of sound the walls of the city
And display in one flower the wunderworld so that
By such means the unique stand forth
Clear itself shall be made known.”

…now, we’ll get back to this, particularly in relation to ancient Greece, mythological archetypes, and the beginnings of a true science (that relates to Eriugena and the ancient Irish symbol of the triskellion) that exists as an exploitation of the creation of world by vocality, as a form of energy, in the Blakean sense.

And this is where, closest to us in timely terms, Pound’s vorticism, Blake, and Olson all merge, with Dick’s musings, here, following on from this excerpt from Pound’s statements on vorticism:

“Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this image, to poetry; form, to design; colour in position, to painting; form or design in three planes, to sculpture; movement, to the dance or to the rhythm of music or verses.”

-Ezra Pound, Blast #1 (June 1914)

“Words, bursting through the material world, are in fact ‘real’ universe (noös) penetrating a (mere) holographic projection […] God ‘says’ “Let there be light,” there is light; he creates by ‘saying’ (thinking) (cf. Bishop Berkeley) […]

The “other universe” is an intelligent, thinking mind, and so when it impinges on our material universe, these “impregnations” take the form of written or audible information (words) […] The term for this impinging information is “word” or Logos!”

-Philip K.Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K.Dick

If that word-hoard, as creator, or creative energy, imagined in human orality (with breath as origin? If we give credence to anything written in The Upanishads), infects Dick’s Black Iron Prison then, for Artaud, we see, in materiality, an opposed evil force, or matrix, in a similar sense (veiled in Artaud’s characteristic vatic anger)… an announcement that compares to Dick’s injected Gnosticism:

“On voit Dieu quand on le veut bien, et voir Dieu c’est ne pas être satisfait de la petite enclave des sensations terrestres qui n’ont jamais fait que d’un peu plus ouvrir la faim d’un moi et d’une conscience entière, que ce monde ne cesse pas d’assassiner et de tromper.”

(“One sees God when one really wants to, and to see God is to be dissatisfied with the little enclave of terrestrial  sensations which have never done anything but slightly increase the hunger for a self and for a consciousness which the world does not cease to murder and betray”)

-Antonin Artaud, Supplément au Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras [trans. Helen Weaver]

God, then, is realm-ified (or field-ified, in the terminology of Robert Duncan) with the goal of the church being to nail it into material inertia so as to be worshipped en masse (in mass?) rather than by a connection to the divinity of the muse’s permissions. How, then, to access that energy of the muse through material means? Is this not the impossible tension also witnessed in Dante’s Convivio, this time with the drama being symbolised by the visioning of the immortal soul in relation to empirical world…

“…the soul united with the body is in truth its effect; for the soul which is parted endureth perpetually in a nature more than human. And so is the problem solved […] But inasmuch as the immortality of the soul has here been touched upon […] for, if we turn over all the scriptures both of the philosophers and of the other sage writers, all agree  in this that within us there is a certain part that endures. […] Further we witness unbroken experience of our immortality in the divinations of our dreams, which might not be if there were not some immortal part of us; inasmuch as the revealer, whether corporeal or incorporeal, must needs be immortal if we think it out subtly”

Alighieri, popped up into twentieth century, and dressed as Sigmund Freud, while reciting John Scottus Eriugena through a man named Augustine, kneeling in front of the emanation of Jesus Christ, who was a man named Jmannuel , buried in the Himalayas, under the symbol of the sacred heart of Shiva, and the breasts of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s mother, read into, and to, the words of a poem of Rome; the church of Saturn…

“A spegnere col giorno la vacanza
sono dei colpi invasati e nudi,
l’angelus del quartiere consumato,
col giorno da peccati d’ignoranza
puerile e incallita in cuori sordid
alla campanella che scandisce
a colpi ciechi il senso della notte”

(with the extinguished day emptied, / faults are potted and bare, / The Angelus of the neighbourhood exhausted, / the day of sins, of ignorance, of / what’s puerile and callous within sordid hearts… / there, at the bell that sounds out / at blind error, into the meaning of the night.)

-Pier Paolo Pasolini, from Dal Diario 1943-1953,

the cold war coming (the tangles of its illusory germination…) and the invisible war now, then?

-Andrew O’Donnell, March 2012 (draft version)

NOTE: For a more in-depth look at Harold Bloom’s criticism this celebrated essay, from Sulphur magazine, acts as a good introduction:

http://www.webdelsol.com/Sulfur/Rothenberg_text1.htm

*For more information on the author please see the bio entry at the bottom of the first part of ‘Towards an Interdimensional Poetics’ or the ‘About’ page of this site.

Madness in Art – Prose by César Vallejo

A few abstract theodolites. The Mad Salon. A Chronicle of favourite pastimes. Art among the mad, or the mad in art. The opinions of two great French Psychiatrists. Thoughts written in the margin of insane pictures. The fatal breakdown of vocation. The restless creativity of an Indo-American. Madness, secret of human destiny.

The Countess of Noailles’s favourite pastime is to paint. Max Jacob and Francis Picabia have theirs also in painting. Charlie Chaplin has his in musical composition. Lindbergh has his in song. The French senators favourite pastime is the Basque Ball, and the members, in drawing. Marritte de Rauwera’s favourite pastime is classical dance. The deaf have theirs in sculpture, and the mad in painting. The favourite pastime is a current phenomena, because man never devotes both arms to a single vocation, but always reserves the left for what, just for an instant, may have been.

The principal vocation of the mad is madness. Such is their art, its fundamental motive in life. But the mad also make concessions to the remaining numbers of a problem. The mad seek to bite off  the whole right arm, but meanwhile carry out with their left eye, so as not to bore themselves, a criticism of pure reason or surprise a new dimension of the plastic arts. Similarly dividing their concern, the mad do it almost half and half, that’s to say, are almost equally enthused by both activities. This is one of the most important differences that distinguish the sane from the mad. In the sane man, the right differs enormously from the left and this marks out the irreproachable citizen, who never puts a foot wrong, or a serious child, who doesn’t play. By contrast, in the mad the right foot is hardly distinguishable from the left. If you ask a mad person of great precision what the difference is between day and night, or between the past and future, they’ll respond with wonders, distinguished stupidity. The mad then, contrary to what one might think, don’t give themselves over to complete madness, but divide their sensitivity almost equally between their predominant life vocation and some other sphere of life. The mad don’t put much east in this, nor too much west in that. We’re almost tempted to attribute to them a meridian position, the terrible metaphysical golden mean.

When the mad, apart from being mad, give themselves up to painting, they aren’t left-handed because, following what’s been said, they almost paint with both hands, or at least they ignore, in the act of painting, which is their left and which is their right hand, which is light and which is shadow, which is just a point and which a line. And their pictures, as a result, are magnificent, disastrous.

In an intrepid gallery on Vavin street, a few mad people from various countries offer, for communal sanity, a copious exposition of drawing, painting and sculpture. While rational decorative architects prepare us for Christmas with harmonious illuminations in shop facades and on The Eiffel Tower, the favourite pastime of the mad vibrates strangely; but the purity and clarity of their sad melodies surpass, in their creative surge, even the music of the celebrated Theremin. Without doubt, the mad are admirable people.

Some critics dare to believe that this exposition could actually support a fundamentally creative aesthetic. “Picasso already desires- ventures a critic in L’Art Vivant- to possess the mad Juny’s amazing resources, one of those exponents who’s written slogans and thoughts like this in the corner of their drawings: ‘And the bells of Meudón go ding dang dong!…Or that of: ‘These same walls, sir, have eagle eyes’.”

“The art of the alienated- says another critic of Crapuillot- has a guiding significance as great as that held by black art twenty years ago”. Called on to rule in this matter, the celebrated psychiatrists Marié and Vonchon, agree in affirming that “modern art seems to connect at a certain point with insane art, because both take their inspiration from the domain of the unconscious and express it, more or less, directly. It should be noted, as well- following these wise figures- that when an artist suffers mental disturbance, their spirit generally returns to primitive ideas of art and a similar tendency can be seen to manifest itself in our modern schools, just as it manifested itself in the past in the case of ancient artists, such as El Greco, for example?

What would older people back home say to all this? Recently, no less, on the occasion of an exposition of the work of the Peruvian artist Juan Devéscovi in Paris, people from overseas found themselves before that same direct expression, of the kind spoken about by Maré and Vinchon and which characterises the painting of this brave Indo-American artist.  These people do not want to be convinced that what man lacks in order to be completely happy is, precisely, more than a few mad comrades.

-Paris, December 1927. Translated by Michael Lee Rattigan 2011.

Michael Lee Rattigan is a poet and translator based in Surrey, England. His collection ‘Nature Notes’, and translations of Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Complete Poems of Alberto Caeiro’ were published with Rufus Books. Recent poems can be found in Black Herald 2, and at: gobbetmag.wordpress.com   

1 Poem – Gary J. Shipley

RAT CODE

There are new seasons by courtesy of neglect
And the holes in our skin do not tell the time.

I visited a site of recent failure.
The only thing I saw were people that were dead.
I came back embalmed in their love
and this is an exaggeration made of nothing but words
and people often quote me in their dreams.

When you get back we’ll feed the tarmac into our brains,
persuade the ground that we can swim.
Is it capable of listening?
Can it tell she has bad teeth and hasn’t hatched in a week?

In the impurities of god we parasite our story.
We use Cold War jargon because no worm survived.

We find a pleasing economy in the language of killers.
Don’t listen to the industry danger these returns.

Our evacuation fills a jungle of machines.
The hardest thing is the wood in our necks.

Avoid the chemistry of singing.
Accent the critical flowers.
Breathe the buried dog.
Make the accident berserk with nails.

The prospect of outside gets submerged.
It seems this gouged meat holds air.

This virility is a facsimile of sewage.
Perhaps I can populate a panic-stricken mother
running at the door with her factory,
snot like wool from her nose.
Perhaps I can populate her shreds.
Perhaps I can populate Fontaine
and feed from the door with a spoon.

The people make fences or the fences make people.
That’s my transaction of indifference.

I chew at my circuits for function.
The drama of place is a melted proof.

We inherit ourselves yellowing in cartoonish sweat,
our bodies poor furniture for reluctant strumming.

Gary J. Shipley is the author of Theoretical Animals, and co-author of Necrology. He has work that has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The Black Herald, New Dead Families, le Zaporogue, Gargoyle, nthposition, elimae, la Granada, and others. He is on the editorial board of the arts journal SCRIPT. More details can be found here.

4 Poem Sequence – Heller Levinson

The Fecundating Query Rotational Cluster

querying in pulsative trunk

emperors did it puissantly

forumlative ://: disintegrative

avenging ://: senescent          prior

to the maturation of repudiation

when zoning was honest & the

councils were aboveboard the

galleys wet unkempt grunge latrining

men’s minds interlocutors fumble resolution the causeway to

unclog whinny when all was clearly

zero persuing reduction

tremulous       perfervid

unwieldy

the

algae

query like collapsible fruit

meltdown                    bunchings

                      seed

serrying nonplussed pagodas pulsative trunk options expire timelines skewer consideration mycelium directional monastically alert

seedfall                        collapse enabling abandon

abandon creating collapse

dissolution merriment

query in deliberative domain

 

speculation trumped the roundup flareful ardour pump

press evedentiary

triste elopement

tertiary meld blend the velocities produce a sustainable sleep for stone

an undulant sea for piracy

what wild animal can canker the eye

in the sleep of stone

 

bedding                       pause

pause drowse dripping

pacing dromedaries

silicates

looting the louche galleries

lurk      dare

burn /   intercourse(s)    /   interstitials

analogous service stations fulfilling

the caliber of tones inebriate with congregation

 

Heller Levinson lives in NYC where he studies animal behavior.  He has published in over a hundred journals and magazines including Sulfur, Jacket, Hunger, Talisman, First Intensity, Laurel Review, Omega, The Wandering Hermit, Fire (U.K), Tears in the Fence (U.K.), Alligatorzine, Counterexample Poetics, The Jivin’ Ladybug, Moria, Woodcoin, Mad Hatter Review, etc.  His publication, Smelling Mary (Howling Dog Press, 2008), was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Prize.  Black Widow Press will be publishing his from stone this running in 2011.  Additionally, he is the originator of Hinge Theory.  Please visit http://www.hellerlevinson.com for more information.

Towards an Interdimensional Poetics (Part One)

Being a Response to ‘The H.D Book’ of Robert Duncan, Amongst Other Things

“Matter?? Where’s it coming from?”

-Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson

“La science, la nouvelle noblesse! Le progrès. Le monde marche! Pourquoi tournerait-il pas?

C’est la vision des nombres. Nous allons à l’Esprit. C’est très certain, c’est oracle, ce que je dis. Je comprends, et ne sachant m’expliquer sans paroles païennes, je voudrais me taire”.

- Une Saison en Enfer, Arthur Rimbaud 1873

 1.      Gulls

This variation on a dream-vision of 1999 I had in Kenchomae, Kobe, Japan replaces the toads hatching from some heavily viscous shells underground… with what, at first, strikes me as giant scissors and their steel-on-steel scything being ground out (squealing?) through the audio-fabric of the dream. These giant pairs of scissors are somewhere between two and three feet in length.But why begin an essay with a totem from personal mythology? Well, to emphasize simply the latent power of personal, and therefore communal mythology. This is essentially dream-like and illusory, in either manifestation. Which is exactly what reality is.

The form of the essay is always curiously dependant on some form of group consensus… language, in its past interpretations, depends on the place this build up of words is leading you. Language as sending the reader/hearer towards something. But, to continue with that totem…

As it develops, and the visual blurring irons itself out, the scissor-points become the giant beaks of oversized gulls writhing in white birth-sacs of some kind. Gulls clapping their beaks together. Heavy bodies in waggling fluid, wrestling with their stubborn and impertinent births.

These are simply a collection of images buzzing around a central language-less atmosphere. And yet all of human life emanates from it. The control and ‘psychic travel’ of memory informs everything that we naturally derive as ‘experience’.

These gulls represent, for me, something of a space… meaning; they bring with them a space in which ‘origin’ is born. In this case, Blackpool promenade… the death of my grandfather and our subsequent drive, almost immediately, it seems, to the coast from the hospice. Our conditioned aversion to the process of death, the finality of it… let loose once more into the solace of the images of the world. In this case; gulls. Gulls produced by the human mind. The need for the procession of life and our being in the midst of it despite the gnosis of death. And then the converse notion that death, and the person dying, is so insignificant in the face of endless process. Mandalas being slowly built… and then whisked away with one breath. Seconds. Cities. Universes. The strange attraction, in us, toward fire; its latent fragility and law.

In the film Nostalgia Tarkovsky has his actor walk three times across a long dried-out bathing area carrying a candle and sheltering its flame from the wind. Each time he must walk back to re-light the candle after its flame has been blown out by the wind, a wind that we believe to be Godless and variable… a secular wind, from our late 20^th century perspective. Yet, when it is over, and the actor has finally lit his candle at the end of the long walk we feel that somehow this was inevitable, and that the camera has unlocked something innately sacred about all acts within human experience.

 2.      Numerology, Meaning and Seeing

In language we say that good or bad things happen in threes. The philosopher and cultural commentator Terence McKenna would weave the importance of mathematics throughout most of his enigmatic and highly adept mental meanderings; the speeches he gave to small numbers of students. To be clear; it is the trinity of ‘3’, here, that plagues me.

C’est la vision des nombres. In Spanish, though, nombres means names, and not numbers (although the first 3 letters of that word, in the French, indicate “name” in that language!) Which leads me to César Vallejo’s Trilce, a collection obsessed with number and numerology… and the last line of poem II;  the chanting of “nombre   nombre   nombre   nombrE”

…and the fact that his translator, Clayton Eshleman, has it that when Vallejo writes make way for the new odd number his made-up collection title Trilce is implied, its first three letters implying the trinity in Greek.

(It’s perhaps important to note that when I picked up the book to look for where this sentence occurs in this collection my eyes found the line: Mas sufro. Allende sufro. Aquende sufro… from poem XX, “But I suffer. Hither I suffer. Thither I suffer”… and I found myself focussing on the name of the Chilean president Salvador Allende, killed in a coup in 1973 (supposedly performed by Pinochet but, more probably with the planning and backing of the CIA) and the death of Pablo Neruda shortly afterwards… the word Allende, translated as ‘Hither’, this word itself; one letter away from ‘Hitler’. The bibliomantic cause celebre seemingly stays with me).

McKenna also emphasized, in his Time Wave Zero thesis, that civilization in general was about due for an modern update on “language” from the novel onward… he analyzes when he believes language to have occurred in human history, tracks civilization up to the recent past, and concludes that the new pictorial modes in which we have used to imply language; photography, the moving image, and now the internet… all these point us to a new language of symbols that he believes will make the statement ‘I see what you mean’ (hitherto a metaphorical assumption in our communications) a de facto literal reality. You could argue that social networking sites like facebook are actually the beginnings of this, as well as the abundance of sites whereby identity has been fragmented by the idea of a multitude of online identities.

 3.      Process

Each time I begin to write this piece it is as if a digressionary instinct has taken over, and, again, the essay format frustrates me. All communication implies goals and not journey… a ‘point’ implies a build-up of sensory meaningful datum coalesced and collected in a psychological bucket marked meaning. If this is an essay I want it to be a geometrical digression on itself (perhaps the title should come at the end? Or at some in-betweened ‘centre’).

I think of Duncan’s continually returned-to expression ‘Back of…’ or ‘In back of…’ to mean beginning from, emphasizing a jumping off point rather than gathered-up goal-datum? When we say ‘behind’ we assert, in this, some concrete surface of appearance (let us be clear that this surface is not simply apprehended empirical world but is psychological and linguistic). In doing so we assert goal around which language dances. Duncan seems to shoot for something more integrated and original.

 4.      Gulls

But to return to Blackpool…

In this case, however, the gulls of that particular visit do NOT bring much into focus… they seem to only be a playing field on which the destiny of number and association ferment.

I will not dig too hard here, except to say that the body means so very little that it is almost embarrassing to want to point out. It is imperative to understand that all life is manifestation of soul… the word ‘promenade’, here, seems, also, imperative. Play and shadow play. When we come to the subject of modern mind control we can see how imperative it is to get these images, and their associations, nailed down and sealed up from the off.

(There is a small outdoor theatre space in the neighbourhood of Kitsilano, Vancouver… last neighbourhood of poet Robin Blaser, where, with some friends a few years ago, I found myself. The stage was quiet and deserted and my friends encouraged me to ‘act’, as they performed ad-hoc routines to an imaginary audience… I had both something to say and nothing to say, there being only an imaginary audience in the mind, and no audience in the dark reality of those moments. I will return to this in a discussion of Duncan’s thesis of play/shadow-play).

The extreme lack of import of ‘a life’, combined with its totally serene substantiality, is inherant in the form and shape of the gulls on the promenade somewhere around the turn of the century in a northern coastal town. Which is not to be confused with the statement that this person, my grandfather, wasn’t ‘important’… his death immediately juxtaposed with the idea of the procession of life in continuum gives one a sense of release from these lives lived in a bodily, ‘formal’, fashion, just as the conversation turned to the subject of children immediately after his passing.

The toads of Kenchomae, dreamed perhaps a year or more before… begin to expand an imaginal narrative, becoming gulls… and then becoming something else? In the ayahuasca visions of the Amazonion shamans fluidity is a main operating modus. One image becomes another image. Duncan’s alternate and illuminating thesis on the central motivating and unconscious factors in imagism, as a movement, was this apprehension of a language formed in its absence: pictorial symbolism.

In life change manifests itself much more slowly, in our conception of time, and with a sharpness (I refute the word ‘clear’, for some reason) of delinearity. In life there is a sharpness, a ‘corner-liness’… edges manifest themselves… clarity is simply what we have agreed upon via language. As Nietzsche said: language hides as much as it reveals.

And, so far, language inherits the three dimensional and vaguely (or consensually?) convenient semblance of Locke’s forging of empiricism, Newton and Descarte’s weaving into that three dimensionality the tenets of modern rationalism, modern science.

In our modern mindset we find it almost impossible to understand that rationalism, and it’s naive opposite: madness (whatever this might mean?) are simply ideas cleaved into the historical narrative rather than the prisonous horizons of all that we deem this socially constructed world consists of. Every thought represents a degree by which the furtherance of our imprisonment completes itself, or a step on the road to further imaginings… the difference between two prepositional emphases: “from” or “to”, with the mechanism of thought implying too much “to” (or “toward”) and not enough “from” (or “back of”)…

Let us simply begin with the form then, the gulls…

They are Beings.

Beings… busy being born. Births? Deaths? Convergences. The Female Oracle of a Rimbaud, or of Eleusinian ceremony (for many, the temporal crux for the birth of all our human secret societies) brought together with The Beast of a terminally pathological western civilization. The Goddess and Big Brother. Nous allons à l’Esprit. C’est très certain. Rimbaud at his most prophetic. A convergence of forces implied over a century before the most obvious forms if their happening in our manifestly dreamed, but real, world; the world we dream into being, at every turn.

 5.      Context

137 years after Rimbaud’s ecstatic pronouncements against the modern God of science, and the appraisal of the living traditions of paganism (a hangover from Romanticism?) we look back on the fantasy of poetic innovation in the twentieth century… fantasy; not because of the lack of human endeavour of some sort and/or achievement in poetry… but the almost outright success modern behavioural conditioning toward mediocrity and short term nonsense in education has extinguished the poetic spirit in modern man, and policed and censored (self-censored?) any movement of worthy potential in this field. (It does not seem to be by chance that both Robert Duncan and P.B Shelley had to, in differing degrees, carve out a Poetics before firing up their separate, and unique, voices; the dead man needs/needed a slap around the face in order to be at all conscious of the presence of the muse.)

 6.      The Lockdown

Over half a century after Rimbaud, Henry Miller wryly observes:

We enter a new climate, not a better one necessarily, but one in which the artist becomes more callous, more indifferent. Whoever now experiences anything approaching that sort of agony, and registers it, is branded as “an incurable romantic.” One is not expected to feel that way any longer […] the poets of today are withdrawing, embalming themselves in a cryptic language which grows ever more and more unintelligible. And as they black out one by one, the countries which gave them birth plunge resolutely toward their doom

–The Time of the Assassins, Henry Miller

Auden’s vision of the poet as ‘upholding’ languages (surely a throwback to Shelley?) looks, within establishment verse, ever more facile and irresolute, in its time (given that Pound’s Cantos and its historicity had made language so much more slippery and 21^st Century, perhaps unbeknownst to the author of them) as we observe the current political aspects of our societal climate and the history of manufactured economic meltdowns and the correlating world conflicts that were created by them. All of these can be seen through the lense of poetry and poetry criticism, and the lineage of its inspirations and methodologies up to the present.

As Duncan confirms, in The H.D Book:

This is an age of criticism, so the critics tell us. An age that has sought to denature and exhaust its time of crisis in bringing philosophy, the arts, human psyche, historical spirit, and the inspiration of the divine world into the terms acceptable to academic aspirations. To undertake this study I must go against the grain of values and rationalities established in my lifetime by a new official literary world. Finding their livelihood in American universities, a new class of schoolteachers has arisen, setting up critical standards and grading responses to fit the anxieties and self-satisfactions of their professional roles and writing verses to exemplify these ideals. In Hound and Horn they begin to appear. In the Southern Review, Partisan Review, and Kenyon Review they take over. An age of criticism does not mean Pound’s Cavalcanti essay, Cocteau’s “Call to Order,” Dame Edith Sitwell’s notebooks or H.D’s “The Guest,” Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” or Louis Zukofsky’s “Bottom: On Shakespeare”, for these are concerned with the inner nature and process of poetry itself […] What they seek is not the course of some passionate intuition that men have called inspiration or divine fire or the inner melody of things; these very words are signals for critical contempt. We may recognize or feel what men call the divine fire but we cannot grade or weigh it. We cannot make it count or assign it its place in literary affairs.

Again, that imprisoning assumption of ‘goal’ with its cantankorous siblings; grading, formulating. Ask a singer why he sings and he will tell you that this is what he/she likes to do. Why Blake thought morality so stifling. Man is bent on his own spiritual advancement, throughout infinite lifetimes. This cannot be stifled. It is the nature of human consciousness. Morality is the attempt to knock back that enlightenment by asserting this-world temporality and judgement.

Words, also, are not the issue here… it is the assumptions that collect around them. In all my miscommunications with people in Korea, not the language… but the assumptions and expectations that brought that language into being.

 7.      Stirrings?

As he reached an awkward maturity, it was Italian poet Pier Paolo Pasolini who, with a certain amount of resignation, self-challenge or self-strategy, made the statement that there were really no poets after Rimbaud. (What is this notion we keep, about seeing poets, in history, as ‘beginnings’ or ‘endings’?

…and even before Pasolini, I see the ravaged, isolated figure of Antonin Artaud shocked into mechanical numbness at the hospital at Rodez, or tramping Mexico or Ireland in search of the dismembered Goddess or Muse, the projection of Nietzsche’s madman figure; embodiment of the most visceral form of the immediacy of that muse. I wonder what would have happened had Pasolini truly absorbed Artaud, or understood the ramifications of Crane’s symbolic Atlantis or Pound’s economics. Ah, poets! Like all men and women. Universally awesome yet separated by reasonable exhaustions, poverty and different languages…)

But, yes, Rimbaud’s apprehensions really cannot be gotten over easily. These same apprehensions killed Dylan Thomas who, unlike Rimbaud, did not quit poetry. But, still, in this way, the office of poet in the twentieth century was, as ever, unique to his/her time… and, in the main the popular mode was either to make the prospective poet entirely unaware of the challenge of conquering The Beast of industrialization and man, as seen through the mass, by making a world, or to function within a consistent pretence of Rimbaud’s challenge as not existing.

The question of how to proceed beyond Rimbaud’s newest energetic importation (without wanting to accede very much to the linearity of illusory calendar time) is paramount here, and in relation to Pound also…

I have been in many shapes,
Before I attained a congenial form.
I have been a narrow blade of a sword.
(I will believe it when it appears.)
I have been a drop in the air.
I have been a shining star.
I have been a word in a book
I have been a book originally.

Câd Goddeu, via The White Goddess, Robert Graves

Fast forward to the present (before or beyond the transfiguring alchemy of the ancient ‘Battle of the Trees’) and we find ourselves watching something die, seeing an entire school of poetry and it’s corresponding critical imperatives fall.

Where Rimbaud’s ‘I is other’ apprehends the conflict, the voice of the Câd Goddeu has rejoined the godhead, leading us to believe that an interim of fragmentation is necessary (Poundian fragmentation?)

Where much of Rimbaud’s work somehow exemplifies the struggle of the 20^th century to re-attain its connection with earth, the voice of the Câd Goddeu is proof that there is a smooth transformation applicable to the poetics of voice across the ancient and modern worlds, whereby the poet must join/re-join appearance as it is apprehended, meaning; the marriage of self and world.

 8.      Enjoinment / Rejoinment

We are returning to a time of divinely/cosmically inspired access to the true godhead of human spiritual evolution; infinite consciousness, a time of, what Julian Jayne’s called ‘the Bicameral Mind’. And, in this, we can take part in this suicide with a heavy dose of laughter and compassion, while the egos and paycheques that this system supported flap uselessly in greed’s wind. In order to be responsible for ourselves it is imperative that we begin to realise the illusory separation between self and other, self and world, and self and universe/multiverse etc.

So this is cultural ‘Death by universal love and divine fire’, so to speak… while at the same time we ruefully observe that, as far as the century that brought us modernism goes, we are searching amongst the rubble as would-be-poets and would-be readers of poetry… looking for the shadowy spat-upon figures that even vaguely have a sense of where and who they are, or were… just as we are consistently less sure and more sure of who we are, or were.

 9.      Pound, ‘The Ego Abroad’, and Pound’s Ego

In this way I see Ezra Pound’s Cantos standing wearily at mid-twentieth-century; some vague talisman of reclamation, a feisty attempt at re-constituting the years of the spirit stolen from humanity with the onset of industrialisation, the post-Whitman American desert. A desert because humanity has been struggling against this progression towards oneness, and the historical revisionism in Pound’s Cantos is an effort to retrieve that past in order to propel man forward spiritually… but that this, however, was a deeply unconscious act, given his own sympathy for politics and rhetoric. Again, like Rimbaud, he somehow exemplifies the struggle; the wrestling with the modern angel.

In this, I see the corpse of the Goddess sleeping, drugged, under Britain, or, as may have appeared to Pound from the vantage point of Paris and Rapallo. I consider Pound’s child-ish adoption of fascism as folksy alternative to The Beast of ultimate western materialism, and male egoistic attempt to ingratiate oneself with the locals and/or establish, to self, the other country as better country… a struggle many expats are somewhat needlessly prone to. To explain the problem here’s something called:

The Ego Abroad

…it has now fled and must justify it’s fleeing.
Why? Well because it believes itself to have a home,
that is the name of a place
and not the whole of the earth, and then some
of the universe too.
It also demands that this home
has some form of piercing locational reality, of
physical momentum private to its being;
so it mocks its (illusory) home
in order to justify its fleeing (also inherantly illusory).
It is its own emotional cartographer…
location is an outcome
of the struggle between these poles.

Next, ideology arrives… waving its wand,
raving! The ego can sup at ideology,
& it will help it justify
its fleeing… its separation from mother
or Mother Country. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel…
but so is ideology in the form of adopted groupism
(more virulent?) in that fled-to place. For the westerner;
even greater problems because
The West really is The Playground for these
control mechanisms (birthplace
of the modern bank?)
Patriotism; most often much greater
in those of the minority, numbers
also similar for those willing to die
defending their ideology
from other ideologies, not their own (I talked to those
teenagers living in the mountains of Nepal…
who dreamed of being ghurkas and killing for
the British Army (lucrative pay
involved in someone else’s battle, they:
symptom of western
cause). To defend ‘something’… of which no one’s
really sure.

Because of the weakness of conditioned man
we must withstand all forms of boring accusations
about racism and prejudice
just because people of majority or minority are too blinkered
and refuse to look at themselves
in the mirror/   refuse to suss what it is…
this Mass
that thay’re actually joining
(that it be not a matter of Joining or Not Joining, even hmm?
I watch it here, I watch it there…
of every stripe, creed, colour…white, black?…
no… of every stripe, creed, colour)

So Pound’s partially justified
in slagging the banks but, as shaman’s apprentice,
in the field of ideological alternatives
the problem is the inherant up-take of the form
of the ideology one flees from/adopts, and not the content
(the real self-harm inherent in ingratiation?)

Content is obvious. And similar. Democracy (majority psychosis, & no empowered individual). Communism (let’s all be the same, under whatever lunatic the manipulated mind can muster). Fascism (the right of might, if weakness is perceived to exist).

Each one; made to look exotic given the right
location & mediac spotlight.

The wrong question:
NOT what you pick but why you need… because
The Other (who is you, by the way) is
judged as lacking (yes, that
quiet lack siphoned into reality; the trough for it all;
cyclic perceptual turbulance)

So this, also, is the lonely modus
of many a western exile (and
ultimate self-imposed, negative mind control).
Wherever I go, I’m always there. Belief-hungry,
position-starved…

that some form of ideology must be furthered!

Conditioned man, in all of his insecurities,
must have position in society. He must be on the scene.
Must be seen. He must be (which, for him, is
being seen to be).

The majority, in any country, peddles
its usual pseudo-liberal,
pseudo-conservative
clap-trap
and will always fold into its being
a generous wad from those outside its majority tribe,
(is there actually some statistical certainty
for this? Or can humans actually lead themselves
responsibly?)

Because the minority, generally speaking,
is more keen to fit in,
to be seen… (they justify this
by saying to themselves
that one should do these things simply to survive,
or to do good, to bring riches back to one’s minority tribe etc…
trickle-down; top to bottom,

and, thus, I write my poem, I write my poem).

And so, in The West, majority fear begets
minority Superfear (and all kind of stupidities
performed in order to feel like we ‘fit in’)
and in The East; exactly the same.

North? South? East? West?
Illusory compass born in separations, born
into the world by the mind, in its inability to control itself… exteriorizing, visioning off government
to do the job for it (then we complain about taxes).

Hmmm… what evil
the mind can conjure. Occurring! Physiquement!
Informativo! Self
giving birth to itself
with every psycho-physiological notion;
motion.

White, black, brown, pink, yellow, blue…
of no consequence.
Inauthentic man is desperate to fit in. The majority culture
prefers you to behave and speak like they do,
so the censor, and the self-censor, is born…
opinions/thoughts go
unexpressed, fending off, and feeding off, pseudo-junk
DNA. La-dat-dah. La-dat-dah. (Depends
on the individual; or whatever things
they particularly
do/don’t like talking about in that specific place).

From inside the liberalism/conservatism
of a majority new ideas are expressed
(that 9/11 was a hoax, that
the London bombings were an inside job etc)
generally speaking, the minority member
of that group rarely finds these ideas…
or wants to find these ideas
as they are still getting to grips with,
and pandering to,
the officially sanctioned. Thus;
the trickle-down.

And how to recognize this sanctioned man
at the moment he resolutely ‘opts in…’ by accepting
the specific terms of a debate, the specific needs
of his perceived majority?

Opting out, opting
in. The Blakean corollaries, let loose on surface consciousness,
tunnel into the unconscious…
achieving modus. Oppositions, lusted after;
lethargic manufactured objects
of sex
born of chakric disturbance. Energy-less…

What exactly you learn from exile, after years of meditation on it. Regarding Pound… unfortunately even geniuses fall foul of ego, and ‘oneness’ or ‘totality’ can be steered into difficult waters (the essay ‘The Recovery of the Public World’ by Robin Blaser assists here, and will be picked up later on) I see Pound’s confused but genuine apprehension of the European banking monsters (oh-so-excised, blanketed over or generalised upon by Pound scholarship). I mull over the imagined awkward silences and ill-fitting questions between visiting poets at St. Elizabeths where he was imprisoned for daring to confront these same international bankers under the cover of ideological treason (often in his own confused, immature, blanket term manner. The man or woman struggling with The New brings his/her own prejudices, modus of all, with him/her, and yet: to exist in that zone of sincere discovery is the duty of the artist, of the Vision apprehended)…

I conjure up in my mind the misunderstandings, the confused kindnesses rendered by his visitors, most of whom were probably unaware, in their time, of the level of spin and propoganda their minds were daily subject to. I consider the fifties as the arch decade for the beginning of mind control experiments in the U.S and elsewhere in the west, its influence on literature not even vaguely touched upon as of yet.

I verify nothing about both Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan volunteering for experiments in LSD as fifties turn to sixties… but AM intrigued by what interactions there have been between poets and government in the sixties, the decade when William Blake arrived in overdrive, ploughing his way into the public mind just as the intelligence service structure of the west went from playgroup to fortress, hemorrhaging assassins and patsies.

10.  Inauthentic Man at Mid-Century

But, on global finance, my motto of advice for nearly every analyst of late Pound, and Pound on economics, be: “You cannot arrive at where you are too culturally conditioned to not want to go” echoing, and finding similarities in, both Wilhelm Reich describing character armour and Churchill describing, in a veiled manner, the then-hidden banking aristocracy:

In the beginning, the patient senses the analyst’s attack on the character armor as a threat to the self […] Intellectually and, insofar as the patient consciously desires to establish orgastic potency the patient wants the imminent attack to succeed, […] He urgently desires, then, something which, at the same time, he is mortally afraid of.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

What Reich’s patient is ‘mortally afraid of’, I’d venture, is the judgement of others, particularly when all are subject to sophisticated social engineering… in the same instant, also, this same patient, here; the emblem of the civilized western individual, intuitively apprehends, what he unconsciously recognises as his own freedom.

With the veil of the accusation of anti-semitism thrown over the would-be investigator of the Federal Reserve the problem lies dormant, apart from a handful of brave writers, for over a half century.

So how could man (or the poets of Duncan’s time?) truly inherit an Ezra Pound, a H.D, or a Hart Crane if they refused to perceive the twin-death-palls of 1694 (the creation of the Bank of England, historical lock on the reformation) and 1913 (the creation of the Federal Reserve)? Duncan writes:

the means and ends of the war become the ultimate reality […] (as in the interim between wars, which we call “Peace,” to face reality means to accept and work with the terms of the dominant mercantile capitalistic and usurious system)

…when we are expecting, and ultimately finding reasons for war (or being fed them) then we are doomed to spiritual stasis. War being our own terrible group mental projection. By the time we get to ‘reasons’ the psychological mind-fight is already over.

And so in how many classrooms, across the media clamour of the post-war years, up to the present, have we heard the booming voice of Pound, reciting his Usura canto? And could Miller’s ‘toward their doom’ actually be reconfigured as ‘toward their renaissance’? Could it be a doom that has the seed of eternity writhing in its belly?

So to thine Everpresence, beyond time.
Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star
That bleeds infinity – the orphic strings,
Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge […]

–The Bridge [Atlantis Section], Hart Crane

Then ‘He’ is range.   And from this   household ours
Heaven is range.   In the grand Assemblage of Lives,
The Great Assembly-House,
this Identity, this Ever-Presence,   arranged
rank for rank,   person for person, each from its own
sent out from what we were   to another place
now in the constant exchange
renderd true

–Circulations of the Song, Robert Duncan

11.  The Everpresence, Eternal Realities & the Death of Time

The ‘Everpresence’ in Crane’s Atlantis is the this-dimension psychic re-assertion of the Goddess of Taliesin, and the oracle and l’Esprit of Une Saison en Enfer returning… as it will return in H.D’s Helen via Duncan’s book. When Rimbaud states, in the opening of that same book:

Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. – Et je l’ai trouvée amère. – Et je l’ai injuriée.

(One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. – And I found her bitter. – And I cursed her,  trans: Varese)

…we might well ask, is that voice subject-to or projecting-out its own horrific conclusion? Or simply creating, in some form of alchemical code, a signification for the new ideological playground of the 20^th century. Is this abandonment of Beauty simply an escalation into a Beauty beyond the confines of what can be communicated within the boundaries of language as it was conceived in Rimbaud’s time. In short; an end, or a beginning? Again, that insufferable bind. I’d tenuously offer that this is an indication of total shamanic ideological battle. At his most exploratory the shaman is also open to the most malevolent spirits, and so, within the medium of poetry, we can see this same struggle play itself out.

As the seer travels into the domain of revelation he is also constantly under attack by souls bent on his psychic destruction. This is why Une Saison en Enfer is such a contradictory and difficult book. How far do we trust Rimbaud’s I here? (Albeit the I that speaks through the pen?) The price of revelation is the possibility of expressing something that will cancel that spiritual revelation out… the assertion of a state of affairs that, psychologically speaking, can go ‘viral’. It is worth thinking on Duncan’s idea of fictive certainties here. The poet-seer brings certain realities into fruition (at it’s height this kind of fruition is not simply linguistic, it is magical… which I will get to later). These realities then, like the shaman, have the possibility of damaging or healing the tribe, depending on his own self-control, and his own psychic sense of direction. Duncan asserts that all psychological conjurements (anything brought into a realm of being, language-wise or otherwise) have both a reality which can be accessed, but a reality, after Karl Popper, that can be refuted. I’d add to this that the methodology of the seer is also the magickal methodology behind science as it has been through the ages (and not the fake science that has replaced it in recent centuries).

12.  Spheres of Oppositions, Poetry and Image, Crane’s Everpresence

It is no mistake that both Blake and Nietzsche, over the century previous, both, in diverging ways, had sought to undermine the standard rational morality of the civilizational beast. One need only look over titles like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Beyond Good and Evil to come across these assertions of a higher dimensionality,  mouthpieced into this dimension; a forceful dissension regarding the corollary realms of opposites (good and evil) hacked into the public mind by Hollywood, in place of the higher mythic signifiers that correspond with higher spiritual dimensions (proton-electron, male-female).

Into this heady brew we must re-imagine Crane’s Atlantis not only as re-configuration of Rimbaud’s l’Esprit (and oracle) but the undermining of the temporal signifiers that apply to this dimension, meaning the ending of a time matrix that corresponds to a this-world experience. The shamanic godhead, in this, works in tandem with the already in place psychological hearth of deja vu, intuition, imagination/telepathy and shamanic practices partially beaten into submission by western materialism and the secular faith of rationalism.

(Under this conception might we also complete the fulfillment of Crane’s lingistic wildness in the form of the Atlantis sequence by envisioning The Bridge as, not only a physical place rooted in a political landscape, but a symbol of the fluidity of a cross-dimensional visionary practice, a bridge to surrounding dimensions of reality?)

It is like a dream but not a dream, this going out into the world of the poem, inspired by the directions of an other self. It has a kinship too with the séance of the shaman, and in this light we recognize the country of the poem as being like the shaman’s land of the dead or the theosophical medium’s astral plane. In the story of Orpheus there is a hint of how close the shaman and the poet may be, the singer and the seer.

The shaman accesses the ‘Everpresence’ exactly as Rimbaud and Blake delineate. Can we also begin to imagine that, in this context, and along with Tarkovsky, there really is no such thing as death… at most; only the sound of spokes clacking against infinite wheels/cycles, the land of the dead as bardo, or celtic cauldron where the Goddess lives?

Firstly I was formed in the shape of a handsome man,
in the hall of Ceridwen in order to be refined.
Although small and modest in my behaviour,
I was great in her lofty sanctuary.

While I was held prisoner, sweet inspiration educated me
and laws were imparted me in a speech which had no words;
but I had to flee from the angry, terrible hag
whose outcry was terrifying.

Since then I have fled in the shape of a crow,
since then I have fled as a speedy frog,
since then I have fled with rage in my chains,
a roe-buck in a dense thicket

–Taliesin’s Song of his Origins (trans. John Matthews)

Through the 6^th century ‘last bard’ of the assassinated druidic world we come across the spirit of the bardic schools singing through a possibly-infinite series of reincarnated cycles; a concept that echoes through both ancient Indian vedic traditions and the more recent schools of Mahayana Buddhism. Irish mysticism alone is stuffed full of this mythology and symbolism.

Through Taliesin, Shelley, Blake, Whitman, Rimbaud, Pound and Dylan Thomas the rage and the pride of that spirit is nameless but abundant… can we picture the function of a shamanic poetry as a deathless art that functions under circumstances of reincarnation and fierce intuitive passion? And how to reconcile 1/the beleaguered medium of the proto-shamanic western poet of modern times in constant struggle with materialist civilization (I’m thinking, here, of the Yeats of A Vision or “The Martians” of Jack Spicer’s Vancouver Lectures, and of the ravaged figure of Artaud persecuted by Rodez doctors), 2/modes of the eternal feminine and the active and historical suppression of the female voice in literature, 3/certain practices of tribal healers and shaman throughout the world 4/vastly revisionist notions of a philosophy of time that contravenes Aristotle and asserts an eternal present, in constant motion/flux (Scotus Erigena through the metaphysics of Bishop Berkeley, then on to Bergson and Gertrude Stein’s concept of a rolling infinite present throwing off its expectations in the form of ‘the future’ and its ‘the past’ in the form of history, which is not to say these are not vital to that present, just as it is vital that a car stay on the road).

Andrew O’Donnell, May edit 2011.

*

Robert Duncan was an American poet, and the leading figure in the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. His major mature books of poetry are: The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), Bending the Bow (1968), Ground Work: Before  the War (1984) and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987). The H.D Book, Duncan’s major statement on poetics, was released this year on University of California Press.

Andrew O’Donnell is a poet, painter, translator and publisher based in Korea. His MMV (2008) was published by Open Season Press. Parts of his more recent To Insanity poem sequence (2009) were published in The Black Herald (Paris) this year. This essay is part of an ongoing sequence taken from a book on 21st Century poetics.