Message in a Battle
MESSAGE IN A BATTLE
Spring begins today. The seasonal gate swings open on its equinox hinge. And I’m also in-between things : the end of a years-long writing project, on one hand, and a new and unexpected set of social responsibilities, on the other.
So this is just a diary note, a fugitive transition report. Stray thoughts.
When you are absorbed and propelled by the magnetic field of an extended poetry project, you are really in that world. Wearing thick horse-blinders donated by Pegasus. So when you emerge, everything looks slightly changed.
And what have I sought for, all these years, eyes fixed on poetry? Yet maybe this is the wrong way to put it. The ideal, the model, of poetry is out there, in the world; yet the quiddity of poet-qua-poet is constituted by an ongoing relationship, with an emerging process – that is, between the poet and poems themselves. And over time, sometimes, this relation becomes more symbiotic, more “second nature” : “Time silvers the plow, and the poet’s voice” (per Osip Mandelstam).
When Mandelstam was asked by one of his Soviet media handlers to define “Acmeism”, the literary movement which he helped bring to birth, he replied : “Nostalgia for world culture.” His remark encapsulates one of the evergreen, effervescent aspects of the poet’s métier : a sense not only of tradition, but also solidarity with fellow workers in the verse-furrows – all over the world, all through both time and space. It can make you giddy just to think of it.
But when I step back a little, step out of my furrow slightly, as I’m doing – now, this spring – I sense some difficulties – those steep, rocky slopes the poet’s plow must navigate (even over the lower reaches of Parnassus).
Our contemporary logos-ecosystem (so to awkwardly speak), and our global collection of readerly and writerly circles and scenes, often seem shaded and defined not by poets themselves, but by commentators of various species : reporters, observers, influencers, promoters, gamblers, professors, doctors of Religion, marketers, accountants, budget analysts, trend analysts, prognosticators, pontificators, and doctrinaire axe-grinders of many quasi-literary guilds. Those who are intent on advancing various theoretical potpourris of Old or New, the Great or the Transgressive, and so on.
Speaking as poet, I feel an idealistic affinity for indelibly graceful makings of remote, exotic times and places. I want to read the translations. and listen to the music of the originals (rich and strange as can be). I want to connect somehow, to those clearly beautiful works way out there, up there – and to other contemporary poets who may exhibit similar motivations. I want to hear the contemporary : rough and inchoate as it may seem, or half-blind as my own inklings and apperceptions may be.
But such cultural connectivities – I would suppose, anyway – can only emerge directly from poets themselves. I’m not so much interested in the ponderously Old, or the pretentiously New, as I am in the real, the natural NEW : that is, the truly contemporary. That which might provide a lambent, accurate, and edifying “form and pressure of the times”.
Poets have to do this themselves. No further comment.