attuned

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from my COLLECTED SONNETS 1970-2010 (which like all my other books can be downloaded free via the link atop the sidebar here):

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MARTIAL

Military sculpture is
to sculpture as
military food is to food,
if there are

any sculptors or chefs
left who have not
been conscripted, since
military verse

is to verse as
military noon is
to noon, the hands
straight up in rhyme.

And music—
music of course is war.

Note:
Anybody who reads poetry can see the ubiquitous self-doubts poets evince regarding the validity/value of their art. Compare that to the smug self-satisfied attitudes exhibited by the advocates and practitioners of music. They take it for granted that music is the highest art, the universal art, the only art that transcends all borders and biases. They never question that given assumption. The arrogance of composers and musicians is insufferable. They really believe Pater's dictum that all the other arts are inferior, that all the other arts "aspire towards the condition of music." But every military that ever marched out to murder rape and destroy was led by what art: were those armies fronted by poets extemporizing verse—by sculptors squeezing clay—by painters wielding brushes—actors posing soliloquies? No, the art that led those killers forth, the art whose urgent strident rhythms stirred and spurred their corresponding bloodlust, was the art to which they felt closest, the art that mirrored their evil egos. That's why they have always put music up there at the vanguard of their war-ranks, because not only is it the emblem, the fore-thrust insignia of their purpose, it is their purpose: it is the condition to which they aspire. But if music is what its hucksters continually sell it as, 'The Universal Language', what that means is that before the Babel Discontinuity there was no music. Music did not exist before Babel, and will cease to exist when a true universal language (and a true universal peace) returns in the form of digitaldata/pictovids exchanged instantaneously by androids cyborgs robots. Music will soon be as obsolete defunct extinct as humans are.

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After I wrote the above, I was intriqued by its ending, and this short poem came about as a result:


[UNTITLED]

Before the Babel Discontinuity
there was no music, only poetry—

when we return to that prior state
as androids cyborgs we shall hate

this falsity called "music"; solilovids
will provide our numbered heads

with much truer means of commune.
Attuned we'll be without a tune.

*

As I tweeted the other day:

Not until the last musician is strangled with the entrails of the last composer will we be free from Walter Pater.
*

But going back to Pater: think how very different our (contemporary) relation to music is from his, compared to his experience of it. How often would he have heard music?

I ask that literally: how often and under what conditions would he in his daily life have physically heard music, ie real music as opposed to any tune humming in his head?

I would guess to answer that question by saying : not very often: on special occasions, concerts, recitals, probably church bells more than anything else, a street musician perhaps, though it's hard to imagine Pater walking on streets where such creatures thrived . . .

Now compare that to our current experiencing of music, how it ubiquitously presses in on us relentlessly from every medium, you can't make a phonecall without being assailed by it, every store you go into blasts your ears with it, every street is boomboxed and car-stereoed to death with its intrusive noise. . . in many cities you can hardly find any public space not polluted by amplified "buskers"—

there is no escape from it.

It greases the gears of consumer capitalism as much as the oil our government is currently killing as many as it can to gain control of.

If Pater had to hearsuffer what the average USAer is deluged with on a daily basis, I doubt he would reverence music quite as highly as in his pre-massmedia'ed cloistered Oxford. . .

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Anyway, my poem above (with its note) is in the mode of hyperbole, and not meant to be taken entirely unsatirically.

But I can't be the only poet in the last hundred years who has chafed at Pater, and has resented the fact that poetry is not ranked first among the arts.

And yes, I would say it again, the complacency and arrogance of composers and musicians is insufferable. Poets are constantly questioning the value and the validity of poetry; do composers and conductors ever do that?

I have had no personal acquaintance with those in music—my view of their smug arrogant attitude is based on what I've read and heard them say in various media.

*another sonnet on the subject:
TRANSHENDECULOUS

Granted every poet "constantly aspires
towards the condition of music," that sphere
of perfection which Walter Pater declares
the other arts must humble themselves before:

so why shouldn't I kneel by the podium
and beg the conductor to leave her baton
propped upon my proselyte head like a sword
knighting me until I can hardly rise from

that ideal sill: one could have no grail beyond
that grace; could never long for that pated wand
to guide your own quest: its shadow bids us toward

the stead path still, sticking out over the brow
like some penile spitcurl: so why not die there
while maestro Mater makes his lowest bow?

Note:
"In music, then, rather than in poetry, is to be found the true type or measure of perfected art." —Pater.Title: Trans(from poetry to music/from Pater to Mater)hendec(-asyllabics)ulous(ridic- of no-brow me to adumbrate the Great Pate).

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repost from January 13, 2007

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Today's NYTimes reports a connection between the C.I.A. and The Paris Review. One of its founding editors has been revealed as a C.I.A. agent.

No word yet on how many of the other names which have appeared on its masthead over the years were also "undercover."

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How many other of our most prestigious litmags were founded and funded by the C.I.A.?

Do their editorial decisions and directions come direct from Langley?

(I think this explains the rise of Elliptical poetry, don't you?)

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Which literary journals are currently receiving support from the secret intelligence agencies of the the U.S. government?

I always suspected Rat Vomit Review had a hidden agenda.

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Makes me wonder about one of our local mags here in Boston. Maybe that's why they named it The Nixon-Agnew Review.

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If you've read anything at all about the U.S. Intelligence community, you know how heated their inter-agency rivalries have always been.

—So if the C.I.A. has its own private litmag, each of the others is going to want one too,

the NSA, the FBI, the DIA, the DEA et al,

and that's not even including Area 51.

They're all going to want a piece of the pie.

So who's running what? Any guesses?

Which acronymic clump of spies is behind that magazine that publishes all those "spiritual" poems?

Whose Black Budget is supporting that overspend journal of avantgarde non-absorptions?

Which evil group of faceless killers is sponsoring YOUR brilliant breakthrough verse?

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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 . . . ."

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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.

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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 . . . ."

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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 . . .

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please note

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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.

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