The Poet's Journey

Among his many epithets, including hodio, patron of travelers, the Greek god Hermes is also oneiropompous, conductor of dreams, and psychopompos, conveyer of souls. Hermes is guide physical and spiritual, the god of the Poet, guiding the poet through the "membrane" of the uncanny before Apollo descends with the lyre Hermes made for him. Hermes directs the poet to the steps of the Delphic Oracle, to an audience with the underworld Queen. Hermes arrives in daylight undisguised and impregnates first.


In 1929, a young man went to a crossroads in Mississippi and at midnight the devil taught the young man to play the blues. Robert Johnson had to travel to lose his soul for the sake of the blues.


The poet must explore, and be guided, in order to achieve blessing. This is Thoreau's saunter -- or sans terre, to be without land, or to be a pilgrim, a holy-lander, a Sainte Terrer. This exploration is either physical, psychological, or both. As often is the case in American poetics, Dickinson and Whitman mark the dividing line: when Dickinson starts early and takes her dog, the mental/spiritual/psychological processes of the world soon overpower her. It is the walk that begins it; for Whitman, it is not psychology but the physical environment that leads to the expression of deep sublimity. Whitman is not prone to keeping it inside, rather "sounds his barbaric yawp" upon the multitudes and democratic masses of his landscape. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is my favorite example of such a physical exploration. 


In the 21st century there seems to be two sites of exploration. The first is cybernetic, attached to the open window of the browser, the endless page on page that I believe is Joyelle McSweeney's real "necropastoral." It is the living dead-ness of cyberspace many of us sit down to day after day, aware a living world beyond our screen; but "disconnecting" is now a very strangely disconnecting experience. This cybernetic ground is a psychological space, and poetry invested in this space is more psychologically uncanny than other spaces, linking it to the darker realms of the Romantic and lyrical poetics, such as Coleridge or Prospero. In further posts I will explore examples of those poems.

Joshua Carey in a post from last year, questions the poetry that leans toward the uncanny, a poetics he sees as passing through Olsen's lineage and is (I would say) given more clout as the landscape of poetry moves from the book to cyberspace. Here things are even weirder. But Carey calls for moderation: "There has to be a role for the rational, even a humbled and supplemented rationality, in a poetics that is nonetheless not instrumental but re-open the foreclosed world."

To me, this is remembering what lives beyond the window of the screen, what is the world "out there." That is physical exploration, with its reaches into the uncanny and the real. But I must move even farther from what is popular today, and that is to say that even the urban landscape is a place deadened by the psychology of being urban. It dangerously treads through malaise, the morose and the cynical so its uncanniness is even more putrid and dangerous. It has no renewal, no love. It seeks out the pastoral to moderate its discomfort. Rather than allow the rural and pastoral to do so, I propose we begin to explore once more that state of being, more naturally the space of Whitman and Dickinson and Thoreau. This is western poetry, the poetry of landscapes where human beings play little part. I propose we bring the poetics of the pasture back into the American landscape. Robert Johnson had to go to the crossroads to sell his soul and learn his instrument. We too must take that journey.

Kicking Gravel Re-Boot

Why Kicking the Gravel?

1. Look to where the gravel goes once it's kicked: it is a sprayed action. Once the dust settles, there is little that has changed. To kick gravel is to make a mark that goes unnoticed. Each pebble is likely to make sense here as it is here. Little is changed when gravel is kicked, unless the gravel is thin and the foot's mark is noticeable. Symbolically the gravel represents poetry. If this blog makes a mark we'll know that poetry is exceptionally thin.

2. The gravel I kick may go entirely unnoticed, but for You, who may or may not have stumbled here to watch the splayed action of a kick, or perhaps kick a little yourself. The kicking motion immediately makes transient what wasn't before, but very quickly it goes unnoticed. Your eye tilts back upward to the web address, in search of something else. Generally you only kick gravel when by your self, or with someone so close as to kick gravel with you, also your self. This is such a place for me.

3. "Why do I feel no shame, kicking the loose gravel home?"
~ Richard Hugo, "White Center"

4. There are two ways to kick gravel: the first is incidental, the second is with purpose. The purposeful kick is often done on the walk that is to go no where, on the saunter, as it were, and the moment of kicking gravel is a moment to affect the physical world because one has nothing better to do. The other option of the purposeful kick is catharsis, and I guess on a blog that might happen too. Whatever emotion is pent up in the self is expressed by the scattering of pebbles forward, which clearly become invisible in the gravel they landed in so that whatever emotion might have been in them as they flew forward, whatever energy was expended at that time is no longer noticeable and the eye moves to the next page. I do not intend for this to be a place for that sort of catharsis.

The incidental kick is whatever one does on a walk -- we are consistently, as moving objects in the world, affecting the world in which we live. A stumble, a shuffle, a leg moving forward can easily kick without intent. Just as any word placed onto the world wide web has its own place, incidentally, it can be pointed to for meaning, although lost in its surroundings.

5. The gravel road is a road that straddles the city and country. It straddles the natural and the artifice. It is itself a hybrid of what is natural and artificial. Unlike concrete, gravel gives the peripatetic a feeling closer to the Earth; unlike earth, gravel is a man-made process, however close it might be to what a river can do. Poetry also balances between its artifice and what it represents. Entirely man-made, it seeks to be as close to what artifice it is rather than be wholly (concretely) with man.

Not every poem is really that way. Some poets have made poems that are closer to concrete than to earth. That will be a subject of a later post.

More to Say McSweeney

I suppose engagement with the necropastoral is something chronic: like hours of playing Snood the connections, implausible, become sustained even when you close your eyes.

Link to Joyelle McSweeney's latest, wonderful, post on bug-life and the poet. What I got most out of this was that our poetry is like the generations of bugs: die 150 plus times a year. Echos of Hugo: "we build our prison and earn parole each poem." In a hyperextended world (link : everything) our corpses may be everywhere, and with each new reading we are in a way animated only to die again. Who are you who got to this question mark -- ?

So why not write everywhere. Walls are for graffiti, threads can be tied onto thread. What it is is zombie-ness, but I think there's more optimism than just that. Not the world as dead and rotting (it is) but the world in language dead and reborn (it is).

Put economically, language of communication -- dead already. Language simply to communicate dies at the moment it communicates: self-destructing messages Chief Quimby can never get out of his coat in time. This kind of language eventually burns. Cynics say the new-speak begins and language rots. The poet plants eggs on the rot and is reborn a thousand times. The poet says new-speak and thinks up twenty nouns that are now verbs. (I'm roading it, I tonicked by gin, I Ricola'd my throat.)

Joyelle:

"I reject the so-called economy of corporate time, capitalist time, so called ‘linear’ time, triumphalist time, which is a golden lie anyway, and instead I recognize this tide of shit and waste, I recognize that that is where I live, if I live, on bug time, on bug time; in Indiana, in the necropastoral; I have no interest in myths of posterity, in a secured future, in the supposed future of literature or humans or anything else; the way I’m writing now is disposable; in disposible media and unsturdy genres; but it’s the most important thing in my milisecond life; that’s why I want to be wear my grave clothes now, ceremental, distressed, and yes, bug-eaten, moths in my hair, Miss Death-in-life, like PJ Harvey in her Mercury clothes, mercury poisoned, one part Miss Havisham, one part Gregor Samsa, with chitinous extensions shoving out from her brain through her cranium, her dura mater (tough mother), her pia mater (her little mother), her arachnoid mater (spider mother). Stabat, mater, my black pincers stabbed you in the eye, and now I’ll plant my eggs there, time flowing backwards, you carry the eggs again for me."

Take a text message, say "lets meet @4 Egan's."

Take a text message, say "sidled, slid, billiard boys I'm wasting my life."

Language slips back into the pocket of the reader, one way or the other. What happens in the world outside the language has always been anybody's guess but well known it is that you got to the end of this sentence and may turn around and read it again. Or hyperlink.

But that is urban. Go out to the pastoral and bring your urbanity with you, yes. Speak your new verbs to the plains, or hills. Or mountains. The only thing dead is the sound you just let carry. Nature isn't in a caring mood. Hyperlinks are not in place. Mountain time has no concept of linear, it is metamorphic or basalt. We know our searches inform the advertisements on the margins of our screen, we have been profiled by corporations and are a profile with a picture. This isn't about consuming, it is about producing on the consumption, and when we die of consumption (pun is there and I keep it there) we are born out of it again.

Joanna Klink and the Necropastoral

To my friends I give many books, usually what I would consider good reads. It is usual, however, that when I pass on the poetry of Joanna Klink the receiver, upon reading, is usually left cold.

"It's just too lyrical," they say, which I suppose is fair. Klink is deeply rooted in the lyric pastoral, a pastoral that may be dated for the millennium.

There have been some new theorizing on the pastoral, mostly from the blog Montevidayo featuring Joyelle McSweeney and her concept of the Necropastoral. From what I can understand (and correct me if I'm wrong), the idea is something like this:

The pastoral has always been synonymous with a kind of wilderness that is itself an anachronism of city life. That is, the pastoral is the reflection of the city cast out into a space that is occult, a fable, a fantasy. It has been appreciated and celebrated for its "other-ness" but it merely reflects the city's own decay in a larger space, since it "contaminates" itself with a kind of past glory in the present tense. It is a death of itself in the making, always.

As readers of poetry, we've come to expect this in lyric pastoral; in fact, it is what we are anchored to. A.R. Ammons "Visit," in which the poet, inviting you the reader to his place in the woods, advises the reader to "treat yourself gently: the ascent thins both / mind and blood and you must / keep still a dense reserve / of silence we can poise against / conversation: there is little news . . ."

The celebration of an anachronism. The desire in present to be in a dead past.

Joanna Klink, however, is one of the few poets who still believes in the pastoral as pure and devoid of the city and its pushy homages. I don't think she repudiates the necropastoral, but she certainly complicates it. It is not nostalgia we find in her landscape, but ardor. A yearning that must reject itself and the city. If that's the case her poetry finds itself nowhere, it is a negative of a positive of a negative. Here is the poem that begins her latest book, Raptus (Penguin, 2010):

Some Feel Rain

Some feel rain. Some reel the beetle startle

in its ghost-part when the bark

slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against

each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.

When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air

drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of

snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,

a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer

you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl

it carries. Some feel sunlight

well up in blood-vessels below the skin

and wish there had been less to lose.

Knowing how it could have been, pale maples

drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments.

do I imagine there is any place so safe it can't be

snapped? Some feel the rivers shirt,

blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long

dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws

skim the ground in snow and showers.

The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until

the second they are plucked. You can wait

to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury

the early star underdraws the night and its blackest

districts. And wonder. Why others feel

through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet

star. Why sparring and pins are all you have.

Why the earth cannot make its way toward you.

Dream-state, death-state, beautiful annihilation. We are discouraged by her style because she will never offer us what we really desire, to die in a wilderness and awake inside our urban walls. If we die the door will open in a wilderness, but what we walk into is the unknown.

Poem as Prayer

from Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo, 2004) by Ilya Kaminsky:

Author's Prayer

If I speak for the dead, I must leave

this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,

for an empty page is the white flag of surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge

of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without

touching furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year is it?"

I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.

Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and

in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music

in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest

days must I praise.

Another way in which the poet engages the reader is through the act of "prayer," usually on the outset of a book. Kaminsky's prayer is a steadfast and painful one, as a survivor who must now "speak" on behalf of those that cannot. The poet's address is one to a higher sort of being, or a statement of purpose. Not only can it be construed as the guiding light of the text (the rest of the book), but it may also set the tone.

Here is another sort of prayer, this time from Dan Beachy-Quick, from his book Spell (Ahsahta, 2004). This is from the prologue of the book, and is untitled:

Editor,

Here are the lines my mind fathomed.

They are tar-dark. I wrote them on pages

Breathless and blank, as beneath water

Men's minds are blank but for needing

A next breath. Sir, turn

This page and the thick door opens

By growing thinner, ever thinner,

Until the last page turns and is turned

Into air. Don't knock. The ocean knocks

Ceaseless on my little craft, and I am

Asking you, Will my craft hold? I send me

To you on a paper-thin hull. Don't knock.

I'm in there. I breathe on one lunch

for both lungs' air; my hand is wet

With knocking my knuckle to wave, and

Though the wave opens, I am never

Let in. I promised you the deep wave

's inner chamber. I'm sorry.

Do you see, Sir--

How the creast of a book builds at the binding

And finally spills over on to no shore?

Don't knock. I will ask the water to open for you

If you'll stop. Don't knock, don't knock, Sir--

Oh, it is not you. My wife's at my study door

And knows the wood won't open from wanting

Wood to. I must seal this craft's las plank

In place, and voyage it over ocean to you.

"Come in." She's knocking. "Come in."

Her hand's on my wooden shore, door--

I go. Send word, send word. If you don't, I'll know.

This is the beginning of a very impressive book of poems that adapts the megalomaniac obsessions of Moby Dick. Unlike the Kaminsky prayer, which has the air of optimism in the face of the cynic (". . . whatever I say // is a kind of petition, and the darkest / days must I praise"), Beachy-Quick's speaker is in a dark obsessive place, deep within the human psyche so that he feels entirely at sea or under sea. The door to his study is his "wooden shore," whereupon his study must be the sea. The "tar-dark" lines "my mind fathomed" are what we, as readers, shall find in this book, but the initial poem is a supplication (to his editor and us) of the poet's self-consciousness in the face of what he's written. Ultimately, the speaker-poet's a desperate man: "I send me / To you on a paper-thin hull."

Just like the opening lines of a novel or the prologue of a non-fiction piece, the first poem in a poetry collection is usually meant as a signal to what the collection will be. Very conscientious poets -- such as Kaminksy and Beachy-Quick -- are sure to do this, usually in the form of prayer or supplication.

Connotations

Here is a poem by Theodore Roethke, one of his most anthologized poems:

"My Papa's Waltz"

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I clung on like death:

Such waltzing is not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother's countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hands that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

"My Papa's Waltz" is an easy poem for any reader to understand, and its double meaning - that of a drunken waltz with the speaker's father, and that of the father beating the child - is easily seen. Violent language pervades: "hung on like death," "unfrown itself," "battered," "scraped," "beat." Yet inside it is a sentimental tendency allowed through the use of the past tense. This is not occurring at present, but in some sort of past, and the speaker is no doubt grown by now. The emotions are therefore convoluted: there is a love of the father beating time on the speaker's head "with a palm caked hard by dirt," which empathizes with the father, a sense of a harder life for the father; "then waltzed me off to bed" is lovely in its own love, an endearment, even while "clinging to your shirt" contains the violence of child abuse.

I have heard argument that Roethke was not careful enough with the language, and the double meaning should not be there: it is either one or the other, not both. I see no reason to believe this. Poetry must, in all cases, pay close attention to a word's connotation. A word can give a feeling that the poet must be careful toward, and a group of words creates an image that must be viewed from all sides. Interpretation is usually what people say when they, as readers, attend to a poem. Sometimes an interpretation can be made the poet was in no way expecting, and plenty of interviews confirm this (there are others, such as interviews with Bob Dylan, in which Dylan is quite perplexed at some of the interpretations his interviewer comes up with). But what should be understood, and what I try to continually express in these posts, is that the poet is also being careful to interpret and examine, and usually wants to be in control of the connotations. A reader, therefore, should allow themselves the opportunity to feel the connotations - how they react emotionally to the poem. This again, is an argument for breaking down the wall between poet and reader: inviting the reader to engage in the poem from the level of connotations. Once the reader feels free and courageous enough to react to their emotions, the reader is engaging at the level of the poet. If the poet is strong, the emotions will follow course.

Here is another poem in which the poet is careful to construe connotations on an emotional level, but in a more playful manner:

"I Knew I'd Sing" -- Heather McHugh

A few sashay, a few finangle,

Some make whoopee, some

make good. But most make

diddly-squat. I tell you this

is what I love about

America - the words it puts

in my mouth, the mouth where once

my mother rubbed

a word away with soap. The word

was cunt. She stuck that bar

of family-size in there

until there was no hole to speak of,

so she hoped. But still

I'm full of it -- the cunt,

the prick, short u, short i,

the words that stood

for her and him. I loved the thing

they must have done, the love they must

have made, to make

an example of me. After my lunch of Ivory I said

vagina for a day or two, but knew

from that day forth which word

struck home like sex itself. I knew

when I was big I'd sing

a song in praise of cunt -- I'd want

to keep my word, the one with teeth in it.

Forevermore (and even after I was raised) I swore

nothing -- but nothing -- would be beneath me.

The emotion that is driven home is comedy, a chance for us to laugh at the play of language and the situation. This is a very easy example of how connotation is chosen, how images are allowed for the sake of pun. This is at play in many poems, and is always a good starting point: allowing your own emotions to fall in or out of line with the poem's.

55 Versus 95

In his essay "Statements of Faith," Richard Hugo muses on the qualities of self-reflection inherent within a poet, and how a poet harnesses that self reflection:

"Poets who fail (and by fail I mean fail themselves and never write a poem as good as they know they are capable of) are often poets who fail to accept feelings of personal worthlessness. They lack the self-criticism necessary to perfect the poem. They resist the role of a wrong thing in a right world and proclaim themselves the right thing in a wrong world . . ." (p. 70, my emphasis)

I find it continually useful to look to the poem and the poet through this eye of self-criticism. Some of the best American poetry in the 20th century comes out of this idea of wrong in a right world (Lowell: "my mind's not right" [Skunk Hour], Eliot: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / scuttling the floors of silent seas." [The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock]), but for this post I wanted to look specifically at John Berryman.

Briefly, Berryman published some minor poetry while he saw most of his peers (Bishop, Plath, Lowell, Schwartz) recognized and honored. An ambitious poet, he suffered from personal turmoil and the desire to be recognized by the literary community. He became a intense alcoholic. For eleven years he worked on a sequence of poems, 77 Dream Songs, which, when published, was awarded the Pulitzer in 1965. The poems are from the point of view of Henry, a character loosely (or not so loosely) based on Berryman himself; and another voice that sometimes breaks into Henry's thoughts in a black vernacular, referring to Henry as Mr. Bones, or Sir Bones. In total, Berryman, after the first 77, continued writing the Dream Song seequence, producing 385 Dream Songs in all.

The first 77 songs are meditations on self-loathing. The first line to the first poem is "Huffy Henry hid the day." Continually Henry finds himself in situations where he can only conclude that he is wrong in a right world, that "there ought to be a law against Henry." However, by the beginning of the other Dream Songs, we see a shift in Henry's perspective, a sense that Henry has more authority with his readers, and less personal hatred. I wonder how this shifts the poems, how do the quality of the poems morph?

Here are two dream songs, the 55th and the 95th - one in the first 77, and the other after. Note the similarities in personalities and action:

55

Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks.

The architecture is far from reassuring.

I feel uneasy.

A pity, -the interview began so well:

I mentioned fiendish things, he waved them away

and sloshed out a martini

strangely needed. We spoke of indifferent matters--

God's health, the vague hell of the Congo,

John's energy,

anti-matter matter. I felt fine.

Then a change came backward. A chill fell.

Talk slackened,

died, and he began to give me sideways looks.

'Christ,' I thought, 'what now?' and would have askt for another

but didn't dare.

I feel my application failing. It's growing dark,

some other sound is overcoming. His last words are:

'We betrayed me.'

95

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep

insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.

I'd asked him in my robe

& hospital gown in the elevator politely

why someone saw so many police around,

and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep

across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.

I saw the point of Loeb

at last, to give oneself over to crime wholly,

baffle, torment, roar laughter, or without sound

attend while he is cooked

until with trembling hands hoist I my true

& legal ax, to get at the brains. I never liked brains--

it's the texture & the thought--

but I will like them now, spooning at you,

my guardian, slowly, until at length the rains

lose heart and the sun flames out.

In "55," we have Henry appealing to a person of authority, the one that can slosh out martinis. There is an "application" which fails. In 95 the authority figure is certainly more vague, but also its actions are to look at Henry (similar to Peter's action of the "sideways look"). The sense of worthlessness that Henry feels in 55 comes in gulps of straightforward language, a lack of ability to seek out metaphor or symbol because of the overwhelming sense of worthlessness. There is something concrete in Henry's summing up of the interview.

In 95, Henry is not in the least bit curious to explore his own feelings of self-worth. He sees himself as an "insect" in the eyes of the cop, however this is only the insult Henry believes the cop is capable of. Henry's duty to this authority figure denies any self-reflection, because it is a not a particular - like Peter - but a figure of a whole, a bureaucratic symbol. Easier to attack. The language here, instead of being subdued like in 55, is expansive, climaxing at the best of the poetry here: "until with trembling hands hoist I my true / & legal ax," the point of the execution of the cop, and Henry imagines spooning out the cop's brains. What? Are we, as readers, supposed to follow this fancy with Henry? Why is Henry in a hospital gown in the first place? What happened to his "nervous system some time ago wrecked?"

Not only is Henry a manic self-loather, he takes aim at people he can claim superiority to. The cop has nothing on Peter - Peter is allowed the enigmatic final words of Dream Song 55, whereas the cop is not allowed a voice, even as Henry dances around him delighting in the idea of spooning out his brains. The poems are much different stylistically, but that difference seems to draw itself out of the situation: in 55 the line is paralyzed into the situation and Henry doesn't have the confidence to move into an imaginative space, while 95 prances in degradation and psychotic language. The key to the difference comes out of Henry's attitude toward himself: when is the time to be wrong/right in a right/wrong world?

The level of language, in all of poetry, must come from the consciousness of the poet. Sure, a poet can manipulate feeling and sensibility in the reader, but inherent in all poetry is an attempt to make an ally of the reader. Can we align ourselves with the Henry of 95? Does Berryman understand our failing to do so? Does he expect it? Berryman, by the time he had won the Pulitzer, could act as courier from a position of poetic authority to us the reader. What was sacrificed in that shift? Would we ever have the same Henry who hid the day? Answer this question yourself: read the Dream Songs.