judas

inviolate

Mallarme's Commandment:
"Everything that wishes to remain sacred must surround itself with mystery."
Poets must surround their work with an aura of obscurity.
A moat of mist.
Like the mouth of Avernus they must exude a miasma.
They must remain unapproachable, hidden amid the cloud of their strange verbiage.
Skulking there behind their verbal herb-hedge.
/
Here's how D. H. Lawrence describes the nameless Christ-figure in The Man Who Died:
"So he went his way, and was alone. But the way of the world was past belief, as he saw the strange entanglement of passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion. It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men mad. So always he must move on, for if he stayed, his neighbours wound the strangling of their fear and bullying around him. There was nothing he could touch, for all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him, and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion on a man, upon all men. For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness. And he thought of his own mission, how he had tried to lay the compulsion of love on all men. And the old nausea came back on him. For there was no contact without a subtle attempt to inflict a compulsion. And already he had been compelled into death. The nausea of the old wound broke out afresh, and he looked again on the world with repulsion, dreading its mean contacts."

/
Given the world of "mean contacts,"
the mania of societies and hosts to compel a mass mindless allegiance,
is it any wonder poets recoil in self-isolation from that "mad assertion"?
Better the dreamstate of our semi-somnolent rhymes,
our hallucinatory lulls of glossolalia,
our REMpoems,
than that "dread insomnia" . . . .

/
Noli me tangere, unless you're a disciple:
didn't Mallarme say somewhere he would be content with a readership of 12?
(Every poet gets to be his own Judas, of course.)
///

brilliant enders

*

Jonathan Mayhew is currently trashing Charles Simic in a flashback rehash of the whole Simic/Creeley question.

I thought then and still think Simic has a good point about how much/how little, what quantity, of a poet's work will finally be distilled down to, his figure of 80 pages is close to the 90 I suggested was feasible in an earlier post here.

But don't take Simic's word for it, or mine (or Mayhew's)— take RJ's:

Randall Jarrell, in "The Third Book of Criticism," page 65:

"Stevens's poetry makes one understand how valuable it can be for a poet to write a great deal. Not too much of that great deal, ever, is good poetry; but out of quantity can come practice, naturalness, accustomed mastery, adaptations and elaborations and reversals of old ways, new ways, even—so that the poet can put into the poems, at the end of a lifetime, what the end of a lifetime brings him."

(Creeley to me has always seemed a very readable poet, comparatively easy to read. When I say a poet is readable I mean it as a compliment, as an admirable virtue—)

Speaking of writing a great deal: in this same book, Jarrell devotes 18 pages to The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens—

and an equal number of pages to the The Collected Poems of Robert Graves.

Is Jarrell right (and can one apply this to Creeley and every poet):

"Not too much of that great deal, ever, is good poetry . . . ."

*

One of my observations in that earlier post was that by restricting her output Bishop was closer to Larkin than to Lowell . . .

add the pages of their Collected Poems and get a total hundreds less than the latter's Collected . . .

Count the pages. But who's counting, and what counts—

Not too much of Lowell's Collected is good poetry: according to Jarrell, that is.

*

Speaking of Larkin, I came across this recently in Peter Levi's biog of Tennyson:

"Tennyson (like Auden) is one of the most brilliant beginners of poems, as Larkin is one of the most brilliant enders . . . ."

///

any suggestions for my demise?

I promise to try to make a splash when I die,

to help increase the value of your knottart—

I'll jump off the Weldon Kees Memorial Bridge, or something . . .

///

please note

///

*
If anyone reading this has followed my posts on respectively my poetry blog and my art blog,

they may have noticed a decrease in the former and an increase in the latter.

I currently devote almost no time to poetry, and the meager creative energies I still have, sapped as they are with age, are spent on my sputtering artwork . . .

As I've pointed out many times on this blog and perhaps elsewhere, it has become more and more clear to me that my poetry is and has for the most part always been a failure—

I wish it were otherwise. I wish my poems were in the anthologies, but they aren't. Go look at the walls of Contemporary American Poetry anthologies—there have been hundreds of them published during the 40 or so years of my active career as a poet, and while I was fortunate to appear in a few anthols in the late 1960s/early 1970s, as time has passed my time has passed—you won't find my work in hardly any of the thousand relevant anthologies.

Maybe "thousand" is hyberbole. But hundreds isn't. It would be interesting to see a complete bibliography of anthologies published in the past half-century which include poetry by contemporaneous USA poets.

In any case, I don't think I will write any more poems. The law of diminishing returns, old age, the loss of any valid hope, the failures that pile up and crush the soul— I can't go on trying to write poetry which no one wants, which no one (with the exception of a few scattered delusionals) respects.

And as for my "artworks", their success rate is bound to be even less than that of my verse. But since I'm not trying to sell them, because I give them away free, their acceptance/rejection will hopefully never become the inhibiting and hurtful issue it was for me in poetry.

///

open

*
Thanks to Kyle Minor for hosting a "Bill Knott week" last week on HMTL Giant blog—

and thanks to the contributors who took the time to write something for it—

I wish they had concentrated more on the poetry itself and less on the ways I have packaged and presented it to the public over the years,

but I'm grateful for any notice of my self-publications,

and hopeful that the attention drawn to those books will encourage a few more readers to give them a look.

*
And while I'm considering myself, let me boast a bit about my work:

Whatever their merit may ultimately be reckoned at, the 400-plus pages of my COLLECTED SONNETS 1970-2010 show an sustained engagement with and serious commitment to this form which is (I think) unique among contemporary USA poets.

I think I am (correct me if I'm wrong) the only living USA poet to have published a separate volume of their own political verse: SELECTED POLITICAL POEMS 1965-2010.

My collection of short poems—ALL MY THOUGHTS ARE THE SAME: COLLECTED SHORT POEMS 1960-2010—: I ask you, has any living USA poet published a similar volume? The most recent one before mine which I'm aware of is The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons (1990)—but other than that?

Has any poet other than myself put out a selection of their seasonal poems? A SALT OF SEASONS: WINTER SPRING SUMMER FALL POEMS. Which like all my books of poetry can be downloaded free via a link atop the sidebar of this and my other two blogs—

My POEMS FOR DEATH—have any of my contemporaries published a selection of their poems about death? Not to my knowledge. Again, my book is unique.

And: my SELECTED SYLLABIC VERSE— where are the similar volumes by other living USA poets? How many of them have published a selection of their syllabic verse?

How many poets have put together a selection like my POEMS FROM CHILDHOOD?

What about my (ACTING) POEMS: "Poems about acting—about performers of whatever sort—movies, TV, theater, et al. Poems in which an act of public (or private) performance (real or imagined) is central."

And my SURREALIST VERSE—?

And my book of HOMAGES—?


?

*
I think my pride of book publications (see the complete list via the link atop sidebar)

is unique and unparalleled in contemporary USA poetry.

No other poet is putting out volumes comparable to mine.

Whatever their quality, whatever their provenance, whatever the defects of their packaging and presentation, whatever their shortcomings,

they are distinctive.

AND they are downloadable free through every modem in the world,

available at no cost to any reader who wants to have them:

help yourself.

With my thanks and best wishes.

///

revealed truths versus involved terms

*
from The Aeneid, Book 6, lines (approx) 100-106:

Robert Fitzgerald's trans:

............. These were the sentences
In which the Sibyl of Cumae from her shrine
Sang out her riddles, echoing in the cave,
Dark sayings muffling truths, the way Apollo
Pulled her up raging, or else whipped her on,
Digging the spurs beneath her breast. . . .

John Dryden's version:

Thus, from the dark recess, the Sibyl spoke,
And the resisting air the thunder broke;
The cave rebellow'd, and the temple shook.
Th'ambiguous god, who rul'd her lab'ring breast,
In these mysterious words his mind express'd;
Some truths reveal'd, in terms involv'd the rest.

*

Apollo presumedly expresses his mind as he wishes,
being a god. When he wants to speak truths, he does,
and when he wants to speak what,—mysteries? dark sayings?
ambiguities?—when he wants to speak the latter, he
does that too: presumably he knows the difference between
"truths" and "terms" and when he speaks he is consciously
choosing to use one or the either, given his olympian
powers. . .

Ein Gott vermaggs. Wie aber, sag mir, soll
ein Mann ihm folgen durch die schmale Leier? (Rilke)

A god can do it. But how, tell me, shall
a man follow him through the stringent lyre?

/
Involved in terms, wrung in the contorted serpent
ingenuities of his own terms, how can the poet speak
truths when truths and terms seem so irreconcilable,
and how would he even know when and where and with
what power his lab'ring breast was ruled, if his terms
could express truths, assuming he even wanted them to. . . .

///