Primitive Information

A typical day this week: woke up sorta late, had breakfast and coffee, went running — my last laps on the track at the Texas State football stadium — came home and started packing.

Break for lunch, then more packing; a nap, more packing. The guys came to replace the back door — not because I broke it down in a Stanley Kowalski / Jack Nicholson kind of way, but warping from the heat finally made it impossible to lock.

Off to Dr. Cohen’s Blake class. We met in the library tonight so he could show us some stunning fine press, limited edition artist/poetry books that the library owns, most of them from Arion Press.

Late dinner and beer with a friend. Saying goodbye to the friend in the parking garage while a quartet of men practice singing in the garage. Making plans to see each other again hopefully soon, but not really knowing when.

Driving home…

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A Reaction to Eugenio Montale’s “The Poet in Our Time”

There is a tension between subject and object and that makes poetry. Tension between what I saw, heard, felt, remembered, imagined, and how that moves through me and filters onto the page, or onto the tongue, thus winding up again in the eye/ear of the hearer/reader. (And there is a further tension, then, one hopes, between poem and “behearer,” “energy transferred” etc.) Tension between the transparency/opaqueness of how it gets said, the control/freedom of the verse, distance/proximity of the speaker to what gets said, and probably many others that I’m omitting. I think of Pessoa. There is a tension there between what might be a mundane, everyday experience/observation, and the problem of the speaker, who is an imaginary “heteronym.” Thus if Pessoa says in a poem, a flower is just a flower, a stone is just a stone, nature is just nature and it has nothing to say to me other than that, the tension is created by the fact that the person who’s saying this doesn’t actually exist. Now this might seem like cheating, making the persona him- or herself the star of the poem so to speak, its “problematizing” element, but if so, it is a thoroughly modern tension (that of authenticity/identity) (which is not to say that it was never done before), and perhaps a necessary one, at that.

But for now I want to focus a little more closely on how a poem gets made, at least from my point of view. It seems to me that in reaching for the lofty and “important,” which is how most of us are taught poems are made, we miss the very things that oddly enough make the poem universal and useful to others, that is, our particular experience as individuals. “The subject of poetry which has been most important to me,” Montale writes, “is the human condition considered in itself, not this or that historical event.” (In parentheses he adds, “the subject, I think, of every possible form of poetry,” which seems a bit too broad a claim but underscores the urgency of this, for him.) To which I can only say, Amen, and then immediately step back and examine all the ways in which it both is and isn’t true.

First of all it needs to be pointed out what isn’t there when I decide to reach after something lofty and write an important poem. And I can only speak for myself here, because this was certainly my strategy for writing poems up until as recently as yesterday. I mean it’s a very recent and ongoing struggle, to get beyond the urge to say the profound and down to a faith in actual experience. Because that’s what’s missing in the former kind of poem. Faith – that what I see is important, is meaningful enough on its own, without the added gloss or heave to lift it into the universal. So the moment I try to connect the cardinal I see on the branch outside to the Passion of Spring, or Christ’s Ascension, or anything other than the robin or cardinal or bluejay I see in the tree, it ironically has the effect of isolating that vision from anyone who will read/hear it. The reason is, because I am pushing it away from myself into some transcendent plane (or am attempting to), which does not push it closer to others, who are down here on earth with me in their own everydayness, but away from them as well.

So it seals off what had been a living, breathing bird in a kind of “art package” with no air inside it.

To the medieval mind this would’ve been incomprehensible. There is no individual experience! The cardinal you see on the branch is not a particular cardinal, it is all cardinals, it points at the Archetype of the Cardinal, and you must make it as general and close to that type as you possibly can, so that everyone can appreciate and understand it. But it is precisely because we don’t think this way anymore that we must instead go the other way, it is the intensely personal that people accept and identify with. And you could go into a million reasons for this – we are so isolated that we need to see into the secret of someone else’s life to connect with them, God is Dead, there is no overriding plan, etc. But at the end of the day, I would largely agree with Montale, poetry is a “precise truth, not a general truth.”

There is a magic in this idea. Taken to its furthest extreme, it lifts the personal experience out of the mundane and infuses it with a numinous essence. If, as Montale writes, one can hear symphonies in one’s head while waiting in line at the post office, one can create them, there, too. Last week I wrote about the poignancy of a woman waving at a distant passenger train, the awkwardness of taking leave of someone at a bar. There is the miracle of how people speak, the spontaneous expression, the dance of gesture, the expressiveness of the glance. There is the quality of light on various surfaces and at different times of the day, the murmur of traffic and rivers, the strange feelings that come over one while merely sitting in rooms, looking out the window. When any or all of these things rise vividly to the surface of one’s “poet,” then writing poetry can seem a simple and joyful thing. But I remember the horror of freaking out on some mixture of drugs in San Francisco, when I could see down to the essence of every single person around me on the streets, a hard kernal of fear mingled with tenderness longing to escape. A valuable vision, but not one to endure every day.

The opposite danger seems to lie in what I would call the “Fuñes” syndrome, that famous character of Borges’ who had such a vivid, extraordinary memory that he couldn’t forget a single leaf on a single tree if he had once seen it. I was reminded of this by the last line of Montale’s essay, re. “memory’s most urgent task,” i.e. forgetting. The danger is that one dissolve so thoroughly into the significance of things that one loses all sense of perspective, the ability to give the poem that slight extra sheen, that knife-twist that makes it resonate and reverberate in the behearer. This is where the lesson of Pessoa, at least of persona, comes in, it seems to me. That is, you are you, you have your own rhythms and obsessions and perspectives and interest in the things, life, and speech around you. Use that. Trust it. If there is anything to you and if you are interested in growth and change, if you are at least brave enough to be a poet in the first place, your stance will change, the perspective will shift, not as much as Pessoa’s but at least enough to keep things interesting and fresh.

Tags: Form and Theory by dhadbawnik
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This week I began sitting in on a class on William Blake taught by the great Dr. Paul Cohen at Texas State. We kicked things off by looking at some selections from Songs of Innocence and Experience and listening to different versions of musical settings for them, followed by reading all of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

I have to admit that Blake was the one English Romantic I hadn’t read carefully up to now. It’s funny, but when I presented a paper on “Keats and Capitalism” a couple years ago at a conference, I made the kind of sweeping statement that one makes in such papers, along the lines of “Keats was the only Romantic to offer a legitimate critique of capitalism in his poetry.” Someone said, “What about Blake?” I mumbled an equivocating response and vowed to go read him, and of course never did.

Now that I’ve finally begun to look at the poems, I definitely should have made mention of Blake. He doesn’t share Keats’s concern — obsession? — with matters of economy, profit, etc., but he’s certainly an incisive social critic whose content overlaps with Keats in some ways. I would say that he’s more concerned with social justice and personal freedom, especially from the bonds of religion and morality, but this naturally leads him into the territory of exploitation and the horrors of the dawning Industrial Age.

Three poems from Innocence and Experience stand out in this regard: The two “Chimney Sweeper” poems, and “London.” The Innocence “Chimney Sweeper” is narrated by a boy who has been sold into the trade by his father after his mother died. He describes how he comforts “little Tom Dacre” after Tom’s nightmare, which depicts the nightmarish conditions of child chimney sweepers in a kind of reverse allegory:

“…thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black,

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open’d the coffins & set them all free.
Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run
And wash in a river and shine in the sun.”

While this evokes the daily grind of the sweepers — who are “locked up” in the coffins of chimneys all day, then set free to wash themselves off in a river (they would have worked in the nude, with shaved heads, to keep from dirtying clothes etc.) — the Angel turns the dream into a lesson on morality, telling Tom “if he’d be a good boy, / He’d have God for his father and never want joy.”

The narrator reinforces this interpretation, and naively closes with another platitude: “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.”

The Swiftian satire of this poem lies in the stark contrast between the boys’ bleak reality and the promise of a distant afterlife in Heaven if they just shut up and keep working. By placing the false words of comfort in the mouth of the very boy who is exploited and sold, Blake’s poem cuts against the Church that would make such promises and the ordinary folks who would either ignore or take advantage of such exploitation.

In case anyone misses the point, Blake provides the Experience version. Here the boy, after underlining the hypocrisy of his absent mother and father by reporting that they’ve “gone up to the church to pray,” asserts that he was sold into chimney sweeping “Because I was happy upon the heath” (emphasis mine). He later explains that his apparent happiness also allows his parents to “think they have done me no injury,” and dripping with bitterness, closes the poem by accusing “God & his Priest & King” of “mak[ing] up a heaven of our misery.”

Scathing stuff!

And Blake put his money where his mouth was, publishing both poems in an anthology meant to raise money and awareness to help end this slavery.

* * *

London

I wander thro’ each charter’d street
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

The poem is so deceptively simple as to mask the intense social critique it contains, compressed almost to the point of bursting. What resonates with me from the start is the vision of weakness and woe on the faces of passersby, something I experienced quite vividly one night in San Francisco (never mind that I was on at least two illicit pharmaceuticals at the time). The “mind-forg’d manacles” neatly captures the sense of fear and isolation one feels in an urban setting, which often manifests itself as an unwillingness to look too long or carefully into another’s eyes or face.

Later, each category of oppressed persons is compactly tied to its contrary, in some cases the very entity (Church, Palace) that bears some responsibility for its oppression. The last stanza basically does in four lines the work of both “Chimney Sweeper” poems together, pointing out the hypocrisy of moral condemnation and the impossibility of truly enjoying life while others suffer. It’s a wonderful poem.

The experience of reading this and other Songs was heightened by listening to some musical settings. The best of these, I thought, were by Mike Westbrook, a jazz musician working in the UK.

* * *

More on Blake later, perhaps; we’ve since read America, a Prophecy, Europe, a Prophecy, and The First Book of Urizen, and will look at Milton and Jerusalem. In conversation last weekend, Phillip Trussell called Blake “the first American poet.” It’s an intriguing idea, especially in light of Blake’s willingness to break with traditional meter and rhyme (anticipating Whitman) and political leanings (he probably would have been hanged for sedition if more people had read his books). Given his highly symbolic / allegorical images, seemingly pulled straight from the subconscious, Phillip also feels that Blake anticipates Jung. He is perhaps the poet and artist that Jung might have been if had decided to be an artist instead of a therapist.

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—that’s the first line of a song by my friend Sonny Smith that came on via my i-tunes at the exact moment I finished reading a long, harrowing post on the blog of poet Reginald Shepherd. Definitely puts things in perspective.

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I have here a postcard of an image from a Bill Viola piece. It shows an enormous white owl looming up, wings spread, behind an ordinary office desk. On the desk one sees the dark outline of a lamp, a laptop, and a digital clock against the bird’s white feathers. Off to the side is the vague outline of a vase of flowers. The piece consists of a video of the owl, enlarged to monstrous size, projected on a white wall behind the actual desk.

Naturally the joke is that here is this giant owl inserted into a human workspace. The name of the piece is “The Sleep of Reason,” and it is described as a video and sound installation, the sound consisting of an amplified recording of the bird’s wings beating as it takes flight. One is led to surmise that the “studious” nature of the owl, as it has anthropomorphically and metaphorically come down to us, suggested this juxtaposition; indeed, there is a sort of serious, “getting down to business” look in the owl’s black eyes, set back bead-like in its great oval face, if one chooses to see it that way.

Recently, for the first time, I watched Out of Africa, the film that tells the story of Danish author Isak Dineson’s time in Africa. There is a telling scene when Robert Redford’s character, an ivory hunter who is depicted as having a “native” relationship to the country and its animals, is asked how it will be different once the hunting format shifts to that of the safari, the hunt for sport rather than commerce. “It won’t be any different for the animals,” he says, and then, reflectively, almost as an afterthought: “Maybe it will be different for the animals.”

Elsewhere in the film, reference is made to a certain native tribe, who are described as having a special, almost primeval relationship to the land. Their undoing, asserts the same character, will be that they have no regard for the white man; they literally can’t see him. This is made clear in a scene when a group of them are shown running in formation across a plain towards a group of travelers. At first there is tension, reaching for guns, but the tribe simply runs right by them without pausing.

Now if one were to write a history of animals during the age of humankind, one is immediately led to this question: which species were able to see man, in order to avoid or adapt to his presence, which were able to keep from being seen, which were eradicated, which prospered, and what was the function of adaptation/proximity in their fate. It’s natural, for example, to consider human proximity lethal to animals’ existence, as in the case of American bison and certain birds. But think of the rat. Through cunning, adaptation, and an almost symbiotic relationship with the urban human population, rats have prospered to the point where they are estimated to outnumber humans by several billions.

And there is an added poignancy, I think, to that Viola piece, if one gets beyond the obvious joke to register it as a statement on animal presence/proximity to man. As not only the metaphor of the “night owl,” chipping dutifully away at work while everyone sleeps, but as reverse metaphor – the owl’s “office” being its presence on the margins of the human, late at night, in trees, hooting, hunting, keeping watch.

What has also proved lethal to animals, as Berger points out, is their seeming inability to speak to us. To say, no, stop, I like this, I don’t like that. Perhaps just as deadly, however, is the tendency to “put words in their mouths,” to imagine, even with the best of intentions, what it is that an animal would say if it could speak. There seems to me a double danger in this. First, it puts animals on a sort of psychological “hit list,” where they begin to exist in the imagination, thus lessening the reality of their actual presence. Berger notes Disney cartoons, toys, stuffed animals in this connection. In extreme cases, it can even be used as a tool to posit animals’ participation in their own demise. I remember a series of commercials in California, which purported to be sort of jokey conversations between cows out in a pasture. The point was that they were very lucky to have all this room to graze and sun and whatnot and looked forward to being milked. Happy cows make for good milk/cheese/meat, was the gist of the human-voiced tag at the end.

The second danger, as noted in part I of this essay and hinted at above, is that when animals do speak to us the only way they can, through their instincts and actions, we feel betrayed, as if they were breaking a prior agreement that exists only in our imagination. When the shark attacks a surfer, when the lion turns on its tamer, when a dog turns on its owner, we are confused, partially because in our minds we have been conversing with these creatures. They have seemed to give their assent (less so with the shark, to be sure), if not to a partnership, then at least to a mutual tolerance with mankind.

But what would it mean to try to meet the animal without recourse to language. How many messages are we missing before we get to the bite, the attack, the extinction?

A project I had undertaken several years ago was meant to explore the relationship between humans and dogs. At the time I was living in San Francisco with a couple who owned a dog that seemed a vibrant and playful personality, hungry for attention and contact, but also at times afraid, sad almost to the point of despair. I befriended it and took it for frequent walks and runs, noting the strange relationship it had in the household to each of us, how it was used as a sort of emotional medium, how it took on this role or had it thrust upon it to varying degrees. In the writing I immediately ran into the problem outlined above, that is, I had to resort either to speculative description or a “putting of words into its mouth” that felt forced and false. Writing and research only seemed to exponentially multiply the questions and confusion of the project.

I took a step back from the project, moved out of that house, lost touch with the dog. But it led me to take my job as a dog-walker, and to get a dog once I arrived here in San Marcos. My desire to understand “dogness” in my day-to-day life was a new and intense interest, one that seemed to go hand-in-hand with the introspection of therapy, the decision to go back to school, a further step in personal growth and “individuation.” Perhaps this is all the dog was trying to communicate to me, across the millenia, from the depths of the subconscious, across the simple, silent space of a room in a house.

The Coronation of the Queen

Now the dog appears in my work more as a motif, a recurring image, a flash of something glimpsed in peripheral vision, as, I have always thought, it appears and disappears in the paintings of Rubens (see above). That is my current relationship to it, and it does feel more natural. But I imagine it will continue to evolve and change, if I remain patient and listen.

Tags: Form and Theory by dhadbawnik
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I had to fly back to Buffalo this week to look for a house for Tina and me and the animals. My flight was Monday evening, the same night the Red Wings were trying to clinch the Stanley Cup against the Penguins. Here’s a summary of the trip and the Cup and the whole weird odyssey of finding a place.

During my layover in Chicago (it was supposed to be Washington, but that’s a different story), I rush to a sports bar to check the score and discover the Wings are already down 2-0 in the first period. Stunned, I sit down over a beer beside a guy from Michigan and some assorted jackasses who seem to take more delight in our (my?) reactions to the game than the game itself.

This, by the way, is why I hate going out to watch sports in “hostile” cities — never mind wearing team gear in public, which I long ago stopped doing at anything resembling a crucial moment for my teams. Granted, there’s a certain superstition about it as well, but I’ve found the odds of someone caustically sneering “They really choked last night, eh?” far outweigh the likelihood of bumping into a fellow fan.

Flash forward to Buffalo. The plane touches down and within minutes I’m on the phone to Tina, without much hope given the score when I left Chi. At almost the same moment I reach her, I notice a small group of guys hovering around a TV in a darkened sports bar. Most of them wear the uniforms of airline employees, and as our plane and another one empties more and more folks gather to watch. The game’s gone into overtime — actually, this is the second OT. So all right, I’m willing to put up with a bit of ribbing in a town where fans can commandeer a TV after closing time.

Everyone’s wondering what happened and I’m able to tell them, thanks to T., that the Wings actually managed to take the lead and the Pens struck back with about 30 seconds left in the 3rd to force sudden death. I stand there transfixed for five minutes, ten, knowing that poor Rich has driven out close to midnight and is waiting to pick me up. But I rationalize my lingering by the fact that I have no bags to retrieve.

After greeting Rich in the lobby and catching up I call Tina to find out if the game has gone to a third overtime, and discovering that it has I talk Rich into heading out to watch even though he could care less about it. We wind up at The Pink, perhaps the sleaziest dive in Allentown, Buffalo’s less-annoying version of Austin’s 6th St.

I can tell Rich is eager to grab some beers and keep talking, and is a bit taken aback by how hypnotized I am by the game, as we stand watching it on a wall-mounted TV with more random dudes of mixed (but mostly Pittsburgh-oriented) allegiance. That’s the thing — you either go in for sports or you don’t. I’m embarrassed at times by how emotionally invested I become — especially during intense finals series — but try though I might to wean myself off of sports I simply haven’t been able to do it. It’s part of me, like my inner mullet and boyish good looks.

The Wings are dominating the OT but an accidental stick to the face gives the Pens a 4-minute power play and it doesn’t take long for them to score. Game over. Most of the folks watching cackle and high-five each other in a way that seems especially cruel to me, given this is Buffalo and not Pittsburgh. Deflated but trying not to show it, I sit down at the bar with Rich and proceed to plow through way too many whiskeys and beers as we talk about music and poetry.

* * *

The next two days are a blur of scrolling through craigslist, calling landlords, mostly being told “No way” when they find out we have a dog, and driving around town to look at houses. It’s odd because Buffalo is full of dogs. And I never once saw one roaming around loose pissing and shitting and running into the street like you’ll see in San Marcos. But since houses are so cheap, I gather most dog owners must also own their homes.

The weird despair of driving around a strange town looking for a place, combined with my natural angst over moving at all and the nightmare prospect of the Wings blowing a 3-1 series lead, nearly causes me to lose it. I find it tough to sleep and only the necessity of moving forward with the housing search keeps me going. Rich and Kara are sweethearts to put up with me, busy as they are with their own work and lives.

Despite these challenges, I basically wind up with three solid offers for flats that I think we could live in. One’s on Parkside overlooking the Buffalo Zoo and the wonderful Delaware Park beyond it. Another’s in North Buffalo near Hertel Ave., which rivals Elmwood as one of the most happening neighborhoods to live in. The third is a house in Elmwood (technically Westside), around the corner from Rich, which I’d been chasing before even getting up here, having made contact with the landlord several weeks ago.

During a long run I decide on the third option, and upon getting home I call the landlord and we work out the details. Tina’s already posted a photo of the house. It feels good — cathartic almost — to get that settled. In the end I pick it because I like the neighborhood and the landlords, as well as its proximity to others in the program and the Elmwood strip, which is really quite lovely and full of cafes and neighborhood stores and generally the type of stuff we said we wanted to live near when we moved.

* * *

That evening I arrange to catch game 6 with Mike, a poet from Michigan I met my last time in town.

Mike had predicted even before the last game that the series would go 6, and his casual confidence that the Wings will now close it out is both reassuring and maddening. We’re supposed to meet another poet at Fat Bob’s, a barbecue joint in Allentown, but not being able to find it we once again wind up at The Pink.

This seems like a bad omen to me, but unlike the previous game the bar’s deserted and the barkeep turns up the volume and even switches to the CBC broadcast, which has way better announcers and the patented but apparently endangered Hockey Night in Canada theme song. Things look up when the Wings score first. We’re having beers and Aaron shows up between periods. He’s wearing a Sabres jersey and rooting for the Pens in a desultory, “I wanna see a good series” sort of way, which I guess is all right — at any rate the Wings score again and folks slowly trickle into the bar and it’s fun and for the first time on the trip I feel like I can really breathe. Sad, right?

Of course things get tight at the end but the Wings pull it out and bring home the Cup. There’s more I could write about, such as the drunk at the bar who claimed to have shined Jack Kerouac’s shoes and done something I’d rather not repeat with his niece, and my yelling into the phone when Tina called and inexplicably passing the phone off to Mike and Mike’s telling her I’m his new best friend, and both of us arguing with the guy outside who claimed to be a sports writer and kept comparing the Wings to the Atlanta Braves… but in the end it’s just such a relief to have it over with and know that they didn’t blow it and we have a place to live and life can go on.

I’m still apprehensive about the move and the weather and the prospect of having to start over again in another new city.

But I’m also excited about the program, even moreso after locating Fat Bob’s the next evening with Rich and Andrew and downing pretty decent bbq and several pints of Murphy’s, and hearing what they had to say about SUNY and the types of things they’ve been able to do there as poets, editors, and organizers of events. So I’m trying hard just to relax with that feeling and look forward to getting up there.

Tags: Sports, Travel by dhadbawnik
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