Many of Knut Hamsun’s books work from a similar premise: a self-isolate, such as a wanderer or a hermit-like figure, begins to integrate with local villagers while simultaneously living an intense inner life prevalent with unrestrained emotions and irreconcilable contradictions. The two qualities make for an ‘outside’ perspective to study the social mannerisms of the characters while also imbuing the stories with an operatic melodrama that is as seductively sentimental as it is humorously ironic. Naturally, conflict typically wrestles between the two. In Hamsun’s 1894 Pan, an earlier publication and one of his most well known, the story is told through a narrative memory authored by Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, a hunter who lived pastorally in the woods with his dog Aesop until he meets the ever side glancing Edvarda, daughter to a merchant in the nearby sea town.

On the surface, Pan is a love story, and a good one at that as Hamsun captures the subtle psychology that emerges within the cycle of love (physical longing, jealousy, desire, infatuation, indifference, ecstacy, spite, hope, despair-- sometimes all in the same day), and then emphasized through the erratic behaviors of his characters. With a broader read though, and after consideration to the mythological reference in the title of the book, Lt. Glahn can be seen to embody the natural aspects of love and sexuality while Envarda represents the social constructions which are placed upon love. Enter the Baron rowing onto shore. But it doesn’t have to stop there as Lt. Glahn could be seen as nothing more than a deranged lunatic who has a mumbling yarn to tell (again, the story is written from his perspective and maybe shouldn't be trusted), or an emblem for the dualistic life that must be lived by an artist, or maybe foreshadowing the existential crisis modern mankind was to face in the 20th century.

Ambiguities abound, but they are what allow the opening of possibilities, especially after reading the epilogue, “Glahn’s Death, a Document from 1861", which makes Pan an early example for post-modern structural techniques as well as a classic tale of spurned love. While the main portion is written as a memoir from Lt. Glahn, the last portion is from the perspective of an envious hunter who spent time with Lt. Glahn in the final days up before his death, a result of an accidental- or maybe not so accidental- hunt in India. The unexpected addition to the book provides a past history for yet further speculation by the reader as to who Lt. Glahn actually was and how a reader should feel about him, as with sympathy or pity, respect or annoyance.

Ahh Pan, the mythological god for fertility, including all of his mischievous uncertainty! How Hamsun constantly undermines any final understanding of his story! Which is exactly what keeps it fresh and alive, that flux necessary for constant creation within the reader's imagination.

It falls on the sweet-neck of poetry to keep the rain-pitted face of love from leaving us once and for all.

--C.D. Wright

[Synecdoche, New York; Charlie Kaufman, 2008]

"Now I have a title. The Obscure Moan Lighting an Obscure World."

"I think it might be too much."

"Probably."

"...we must first be ice. Be nails. Be teeth. Be lightning."

I admire poetry that confutes its own formal conditions-- poetry that due to the exigence of its own matter exceeds its own limits. Some of us do not read or write particularly for pleasure or instruction, but to be changed, healed, charged. Therefore, the poet's amplitude may take precedence over her strategies. When aiming for a language nearer one's own ideals and principles, a tongue where everything is at risk-- there are no certainties. This has been dubbed unimproved poetry. Untrammeled is W. S. Merwin's stately word for the poem's inalienable right to freedom. The French formalists... ...name it pejoratively shriek poetry or eructative poetry. Unfettered was Kurt Schwitter's turn-of-the-twentieth-century word. The punks could have called it thrash poetry. Oh yeah.

--C. D. Wright, from her book, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

gobble, gobble

If a body makes 1 centavo per chile picked or
5 cents for 50 chiles can Walmex get it down to 3 cents. Pass the savings on
........to US.
Will they open a Supercenter in Fallujah once it is pacified. Once the corpses
in the garden have decomposed. Once the wild dogs have finished off
........the bones.
Does the war never end. Is this the war of all against all.
Who will build the great wall between us, the illegals, the vigilantes, the
.........evangelicals
or the ones who came back from Fallujah with four limbs and
........attached head.
And the Supercenter in Teotihuacán. Is it not quietly being built at the skirt
of the pyramids. Will the great job of the future be the The Greeter.
Thus did Montezuma open his arms to Cortés.
In a gesture Prescott referred to as Montezuma's nonresistance to evil.
Thus did one terrible story begin to unfold. De costumbre.

--from Rising, Falling, Hovering cont.; C. D. Wright

[William Christenberry; T.B. Hick's Store in Newbern, Ala, 1976]

..........If this were not a marked beginning, but an end or more severely, the end, and you were ready to make peace with you major failures and hidden contradictions, and you were about to start the countdown on your own long-lived-in-body (and so,


.......................a little flyover in remembrance),


..........you would seem alert enough to attend this imminent loss, sensing your own twirl in the void accelerating toward its outermost ring while your sputtering mind starts its rewind of the crud-and-gem-encrusted strata through which poetry has taken you as if some kook might jump out of the holly at any moment and extinguish you with one stroke;


..........hit pause before contact is made between your phantom assailant and your individual quote unquote soul and you are physically hied to a ramshackle building risen in full sun from uncut grass, the walls stripped of canned and dried goods and a single stick insect sticking to a tatter of color on a post struggling to support a torn roof


.......................(like something Christenberry pictured....



--from Like Something Christenberry Pictured; C. D. Wright

[Christenberry; Guinea Church, near Moundville, Alabama, 1964]

Originally from Arkansas, C. D. Wright's earlier poems are composed of regional details and could identify her as a ‘poet of place’. However, in the 1970's while living in the Bay area, she become loosely associated with the Language poets and brought an emphasis upon not what is being signified in the poetry, but the words themselves being and having the sole responsibility of defining the worlds which they inhabit.

Now, within her most mature work, physicality meets language theory. Wright assembles with qualities from both traditions to craft poems which remind me of the assemblage techniques used in film– with short, lyrical syntactical phrases, strategically compacted for precision and heightened awareness towards what is being brought into the text, Wright’s lines enter my mind like spliced segments of film, the language lifted from superfluous padding in order to place urgent and necessary emphasis upon what is being projected.

To compose her most recent collection, Rising, Falling Hovering, Wright drew upon a number of film reels to create a body of work that is both intimately personal while equally relevant to the social and historical conditions of the past ten years. The personal includes her relationship and history with her husband, trips taken to Mexico, her son as he begins entering the adult world, a friend who is battling cancer, her own ageing and the reliance upon poetry within her daily life. Combined with these are reels of broader socio-political issues: the struggles of illegal immigrants from Mexico, capitalist globalization and its overtones of imperialism, the unresolved aftermath of Katrina and the rising, and ultimately incalculable, death count of the Iraq War.

Wright objectively bears witness to all of these events (her unavoidable subjectivity included) and allows each aspect to enter with equal significance, as if someone were carefully placing objects upon a well lit table, and is what allows a suggestion for betterment without reducing her work to heavy handed didacticism. Ultimately, Wright is well aware of the inability of poetry to enter the political world, The temperature has already been adjusted/ by the state/ Our obsolescence built into the system (91). Instead, Wright’s poetry draws the reader’s attention to the interconnected relations of her material within the world, Not so many scientists subscribe to the Gaia hypothesis./ Nor are so many rushing to refute the thousand and one levels of interdependence. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, as the Gestalt theorists put it. Further emphasis results through elliptical techniques to thread the work into a whole. Two such examples (and neither at all pleasant) being the body count in Iraq, the number rising as the book progresses, and sopa de pollo, “chicken soup”– noted at the end of the book that pollo is sometimes used for undocumented emigrants from Mexico.

Rising, Falling, Hovering is a difficult book at first, and it took me a couple reads to feel like I had a decent relationship with the text. However, once the difficulty is removed, there is an entirely unique experience awaiting for attentive and patient readers, and unlike what can be found in more traditional poetic techniques, one that is entirely human and concerned for the world while also intellectually satisfying as to how to conceptualize the world's problems and one's place within it. Wright is in many respects a ‘poet of consciousness’, and while that is a description used pejoratively by dissenters of contemporary poetry, they would find themselves at a loss to even suggest that Wright’s work is not grounded 100% upon the significance of the real world and demonstrative of how the experiments in the poetic arts over the past 30 years have paid off, in spades.

[Hermes; Salvador Dali, 1981]

Chilean-born artist, Alfredo Jaar, on his piece "Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom".

And sometimes I dream that Mario arrives
With his black bike in the middle of a nightmare
And we take off bound for the north,
Bound for ghost towns where
Little lizards and flies live.
And while the dream takes me
From one continent to another
Through a shower of cold, painless stars,
I see the black bike, like a donkey from another planet,
Split the lands of Coahuila in two.
A donkey from another planet
That is the unrestrained longing of our ignorance,
But that is also our hope
And our courage.
An unnamable and useless courage, for sure,
But re-encountered in the margins
Of the most remote dream,
In the partitions of the final dream,
In the confusing and magnetic trail
of donkeys and poets.

--from 'The Donkey'; Roberto Bolaño

The Outsider Ape
--Robert Bolaño

Remember the Triumph of Alexander the Great, by Gustav Moreau?
The beauty and terror, the crystal moment when
all breathing stops. But you wouldn't stand still under that dome
in dim shadows, under that dome lit by ferocious
rays of harmony. And it didn't take your breath away.
You walked like a tireless ape among gods,
For you knew-- or maybe not-- that the Triumph was unfurling
its weapons inside Plato's cavern: images,
shadows without substance, sovereignty of emptiness. You wanted
to reach the tree and the bird, the leftovers
from a humble backyard fiesta, the desert land
watered with blood, the scene of the crime where
statues of photographers and police are grazing, and the hostility of life
outdoors. Ah, the hostility of life outdoors!

[Prometheus; Gustave Moreau, 1868]

While there are many interesting literary and historical qualities in Bolaño’s books, what fascinates me most is how his writing reveals, what has been noted by Levi Stahl at The Front Table as, “Bolaño's increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes”. The aspects of his writing that can only be hinted and alluded to and making any sort of ultimate meaning from his books too elusive for clear definition, ultimately limited to the individual experience of the reader. Which is why they are so fascinating, what makes a Bolaño text exist as a world as fully as alive as our own- equally monstrous and angelic as our own.

To add to my thoughts from yesterday, Bolaño was fascinated by power, specifically, powerful individuals and whom he typically represented either in the form of military personnel or writers (sometimes both, as found in 2666 with Benno von Archimboldi– who early in his life fought for Germany in World War II and only later to be a contender for the Nobel). Like many other aspects of his books, Bolaño won’t be pinned down on what he makes of these ‘heroic’ characters, choosing complexity in order to blur the lines between glory and the horrific. Does too much glory lead inevitably to the horrific? Can the horrific be redeemed by glory? Is the only safe place to direct and contain great power within literature and art (glory)? Only, like the opening of Pandora’s box, will such power inevitably leak back into the world and continue its own morally ambiguous course (horrific)? Compelling. That is the best answer I can come up with.

[Pandora; Jules Joseph Lefebvre, 1882]

Distant Star is the fourth Roberto Bolaño I’ve read this year and is by far the most political. It begins in a poetry workshop just prior to the 1973 political coup that established the Pinochet regime as the ruling party over Chile. Attending the workshop include the book’s nameless narrator, several students with left wing affiliations and the anti-hero of the book, Carlos Wieder, a self-assured autodidact who is both elusively distant and confidently charismatic when necessary. As the Pinochet regime began enforcing its oppressive rule against political dissidence, whether real or imagined, Bolaño accounts the various disappearances, internments and ex-pat flights of the students. In particular, Carlos Wieder, who is eventually revealed as a rogue right wing extremist who conducts various ‘artistic’ acts to help propel Pinochet propaganda.

Being the fourth Bolaño book that I’ve read, I can now better appreciate his idiosyncratic techniques and how these contribute his literary vision. In particular, how tension is built (or not built) to lead up to violent acts. Rather than progressing events with incremental suspense, such as what you traditionally find in someone like Hitchcock (who, should be noted, referred to his viewers as the ‘idiot masses’), Bolaño instead places emphasis upon the mundane, preferring the seemingly inconsequential, the tediously boring, over anything too alarmingly indicative. Then when the violence does occur, the act becomes hellishly sublime because of it being placed within an, otherwise, placid environment; explosively aberrant while at the same time chilling, distant because of it being removed from a more containable logic of cause and effect, leaving a reader baffled in stunted cold shock rather than screaming in horror.

Another common technique, and tied to this, is when Bolaño strategically throws brief, cryptic moments into his long catalogued events, such as what can maybe found within a description of a scene or an offhand comment during a dialogue. A quick example:

We went through two metro stations, then emerged into the suburbs. Suddenly the sea appeared. A weak sun lit the beaches, which flashed past like the beads of a necklace suspended not from a neck but in empty space.

As to what to make of these interjections, that ulitmately is left to the individual reader. But to me, they represent a metaphysical ‘other’ (a 'chaos'; a 'nothing') and bring an undermining vapidness to the stories, implying both transcendent capability, but also extreme vulnerability, the fabric of the character’s lives being tissue paper thin, and therefore all the more subject to the intangibility of our dreams and nightmares.

The pleasures of reading such a style of writing are many, but two in particular compliment each other well and get at the heart of Bolaño's intent to both exalt the individual power of art and literature, but also provide warnings for when art and literature is manipulated for social power or used to escape from the social realities of the world. On the one hand, Bolaño draws attention to consciousness, how our interaction with the world is largely an imaginative act that is built upon the details we choose to recognize and make significant (create) or simply ignore. What a writer has to do when they decide to write, what we all do in our day to day lives. And this then tied to social awareness, which, when absent, allows susceptibility to social movements and widespread beliefs that exist either in their own momentum or as a result of the wills and dreams of powerful people (the most dangerous). Militant dictatorships being perfect examples. A stiff paradox: awareness allows us to create our dreams but its these very dreams, either when in the hands of power, or when such dreams remove us from the social realities of the world, that can also result in nightmares.

Life is earth, and living it is mud.
Everything is style, difference or manner.
In all that you do be only you.
In all that you do be the whole of you.

--Fernando Pessoa

Art by Maggie Taylor, music, 'Pan's Labyrinth Lullaby', by Javier Navarrete. [via The Perpetual Bird]

Probably my favorite story in The Grass Harp & Other Stories was 'The Headless Hawk', about a 36 year old man who lives in a basement apartment and works in the Garland Gallery. His life hasn’t taken the path he thought it would, which becomes fully acknowledged after a depthless woman enters, bringing along a surrealistic painting that includes a severed head from a reclining, robed, woman and a headless hawk flying in the background. "It was there, all of it, in the painting, everything disconnected and cockeyed..." Shamanistic or psychotic? Here are some select sentences to give you a feel for the writing:

This is my neighborhood, my street, the house with the gateway is where I live. To remind himself of this was necessary, inasmuch as he’d substituted for a sense of reality a knowledge of time, and place.

And it was true that about those whom he’d loved there was always a little something wrong, broken.

Vincent reacted as he did when occasionally a phrase of music surprised a note of inward recognition, or a cluster of words in a poem revealed to him a secret concerning himself: he felt a powerful chill of pleasure run down his spine.

It was as if her face were imposed upon his mind; he could no more dispossess it than could, for example, a dead man rid his legendary eyes of the last image seen.

“I am heavier that I look,” says the child, and the terrible voice retorts, “But I am heaviest of all.”

He notices then that many are also saddled with malevolent semblances of themselves, outward embodiments of inner decay.

A knot of pain was set like a malignant jewel in the core of his head; each aching motion made jeweled pinpoints of color flare out.

Chilling, prophetic words from the then, still young Truman Capote.

"Is it true, Charlie?" Dolly asked, as a child might ask where do falling stars fall? and: "Have we had our lives?"

"We're not dead," he told her; but it was as if, to the questioning child, he'd said stars fall into space: an irrefutable, still unsatisfactory answer. Dolly could not accept it: "You don't have to be dead. At home, in the kitchen, there is a geranium that blooms over and over. Some plants, though, they bloom just the once, if at all, and nothing more happens to them. They live, but they've had their life."

"Not you," he said, and brought his face nearer hers, as though he meant their lips to touch, yet wavered, not daring it. Rain had tunneled through the branches, it fell full weight; rivulets of it streamed off Dolly's hat, the veiling clung to her cheeks; with a flutter the candle failed. "Not me."

--from The Grass Harp; Truman Capote

I decided to pick up a Truman Capote book after watching the film Capote a few weekends ago. It was the perfect mood film for a dreary Saturday afternoon, but I got a lot more out of the film than I had anticipated, with the crux of the film weighted upon the internal conflict which developed within Truman Capote after he began interviewing Perry Smith, the one of the two prisoners that was willing to tell Capote about his life so that he could write In Cold Blood.

At first, Capote cascaded himself into his project with all of the inquiring ambition one might expect from a New York socialite. However, after becoming acquainted with Perry Smith, learning how he too was of an artistic mind set, possibly homosexual, and, most importantly, also abandoned as a young child by his mother, Capote became emotionally involved with Perry-- as if he were a brother when realizing that their roles in life could easily have been reversed. Only, the other side of Capote desperately, even ruthlessly, required as detailed information as possible from Perry so that he could write his book, including an accurate account of the night of the murders. So while Capote was developing an empathetic relationship with Perry, he was at the same time both exploiting and manipulating Perry for his own personal gain. But the conflict then even went a step further: Capote required Perry Smith dead in order to complete his book.

As is generally known, Truman Capote never completed a novel after In Cold Blood and suffered a slow decline with alcoholism. Previously I thought Capote’s story was the standard, ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale. But after watching Capote, I saw how his story is much more tragic than that, in a classic sense, as Capote was blind to his Shakespearean fault of self-centered ambition and then powerless to the inevitable fate that followed. The ‘Dolly’ side of Capote died when Perry died, leaving only a shell of a man to continue his remaining years. After Perry Smith’s hanging Capote confided to Harper Lee that he felt helpless towards not being able to do anything to stop Perry’s death. Lee’s response then the last line of the film, "Maybe not; the fact is you didn't want to."

What is most immediately noteable about Truman Capote's The Grass Harp is that it was published when Capote was only 26, although the autobiographical components I’m sure helped to move the writing along. Like Capote, the story involves an orphaned boy who moves in with two eccentric old aunts after losing his mother and father. One aunt, Dolly, is a nurturing, open minded woman while the other, Verena, is a self-centered, ambitious business woman who is without qualm to use others for her own advancement. And it is important to recognize that both of these personalities were prevalent within Capote as well– the friction between the two becoming destructively apparent after he began working on In Cold Blood.

One could say that In Cold Blood was written from the Verena side of Capote’s personality and The Grass Harp written from the Dolly side. In The Grass Harp, the diametrical differences between Vera and Dolly eventually reaches a crisis when Dolly, having enough of the overbearing Verena, ventures out into the world with the boy and the house servant, Catherine Creek, in order to begin a new life. Not having anyplace to really go to, they take residence in a tree house up in a China berry tree located only just outside of the town. After some encounters with various endearing characters, word gets back to Verena where they are staying and she uses her political clout to form a search party, composed of various figures of power within the town, and retrieve Dolly, the boy and Catherine. From the various confrontations between the two groups, personalities open, honest communications begin and new understandings erode the ingrained divisions of the past.

In essence, The Grass Harp is a story about love and community. The ‘grass harp’ of the title referring to the blowing wind through the fields, forming a "grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story." How nice it would have been if Capote was able to find such balanced unity within the his own multiplicities..... But that was not his story to be known....

I didn’t get into The Grass Harp quite as much as I thought I would, probably because I basically knew beforehand what the book was about. But I did find it very interesting for what it revealed about Capote's psychology. And the same thing could be said with respect to the short stories included with the current edition of the The Grass Harp. While there are two exceptions (which could have been omitted), these stories relied upon magical realism to augment what are, for the most part, dramatic character studies. Capote used magical realism by bringing to the narratives characters which shadowed the more extreme aspects of the internal lives of the main characters. More half-formed specters than doppelgängers, emphasizing incompleteness there, and only known within the privacy of the main characters.

As to why Capote wrote a series of stories that work from this premise, an obvious answer could be because of his growing up isolated from family and a steady community (he never graduated from High School), so therefore only having his own ghosts to keep company and contend with (these short stories were also written when he was in his early twenties, if not before). But maybe another reason could be found in the again displayed divisions of Capote’s personality, or at least its early formations. Not as clearly defined as what resulted when and after he wrote In Cold Blood, the eventual surfacing of the Dolly vs Verena split, the compassionate Humanist vs the ambitious Artist, but definitely foreshadowing the complexities which would later consume Capote’s own internal life. More on this throughout the week.

[Death and the Woodcutter; Jean-François Millet]

Where we were walking in the day's light, seeing
the flight of bones to the stars, the voyage of dead men,
those who go forth like dead leaves on the air
in the long journey, those who are swept
on the last current, the cold and shoreless ones,
who do not speak, do not answer, have no names,
nor are assembled again by any thought, but voyage
in the wide circle, the great circle

where we were talking, in the day's light, watching...

--from Time in the Rock; Conrad Aiken

Whisper it, how among whispering ashes
Her pale bright beauty comes, the moon's dark daughter,
Lighting those ruins with her radiant madness...

This past Monday night I had to pull off the side of the road to take in the full moon sitting above a low field. It was the first full moon for November, the first after the change of daylight savings, and with a semblance to the upcoming winter season. Beneath her radiance, an ash-silver cloud bank moved across the sky, as though carried within the gravity of cold northern tide waters. But once entering closer into her argent sphere, a current slung curved away back outward into the closed sky of night. Radka Toneff was a Norwegian jazz singer who committed suicide in 1982 at the age of 30, and with her the world lost one of the most beautifully haunting voices it has known.

Go out in fog go out in snow go out in hoarfrost
break down the autumnal web that bars your path
gather your leaves and berries seeds and torments
your hours and minutes and all you save therefrom
assemble in all weathers the world's wonder
that tapestry of consciousness and stars
which grows from cabbage roots and sines and cosines
sing as you walk sing as you gather nonsense
sing as you make your meaning out of nonsense

and bring them home to us and spread them out,
your treasures, and assure us out of the pattern
in which they fall-- it must be thus and thus
only and always in such shape as this
this is the curve that sought them this wild curve
bending the waves of water or of light
shaping the alpha to the shape of the world
the shape of the world

.............................and thence your meaning
pitiful child pitiful crystal.....

--from Time in the Rock; Conrad Aiken

After getting about a dozen lines into this poem, I had no choice but to start reading it aloud. Not because the language was more eloquent than other Aiken poems, but because of the shifting dramatic inquiries and the emphatic challenge that was kicking to get out, needing to be heard in order to be considered. This is especially true as you get to the end of the poem. It starts as a deceptively playful pastoral but takes a sudden about-face against the reader, and with an imploring, even threatening seriousness. The progression very much reminds me of Tilda Swinton reading from The Raw Shark Texts (still one of my favorite youtube videos posted on this blog). If you don't want to read it out loud yourself, then imagine hearing the white fire of Swinton's dramatic voice infusing the poetry for you.

Shall we call it, then, the walk in the garden?
the morning walk in the simple garden? But only if by this we mean
everything! The vast daybreak ascends the stairs of pale silver
above a murmur of acacias, the white crowns
shake dark and bright against that swift escalation of light,
and then, in intricate succession, the unfolding minutes and hours
are marked off by the slow and secret transactions
of ant and grassblade, mole and tree-root,
the shivering cascade of the cicada's downward cry, the visitations
(when the brazen noon invites) of that lightened prism
the hummingbird, or the motionless hawkmoth.
Listen! The waterclock of sap in bough and bole,
in bud and twig, even in the dying
branch of the ancient plum-tree, this you hear, and clearly,
at eleven, or three, as the rusted rose-petal
drops softly, being bidden to do so, at the foot of the stem,
past the toad's unwinking eye! Call it
the voyage in the garden, too, for so it is:
the long voyage home, past cape and headland
of the forgotten or remembered: the mystic signal
is barely guessed in the spiderwort's golden eye, recognized
tardily, obscurely, in the quick bronze flash
from the little raindrop left to wither
in the hollow of a dead leaf, or a green fork
of celandine. For in this walk, this voyage,
it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self',
that now as always you encounter. At eleven or three
it was past these folded capes and headlands, these decisions or refusals,
these little loves, or great,
that you once came. Did you love? did you hate?
did you murder, or refrain from murder, on an afternoon
of innocent cirrus in April? It is all recorded
(and with man's history also)
in the garden syllables of dust and dew:
the crucifixions and betrayals,
the lying affirmations and conniving details,
the cowardly assumptions, when you dared not face yourself,
the little deaths, and the great. Today
among these voluntary resumptions you walk a little way
toward tomorrow. What, then, will you choose to love or hate?
These leaves, these ants, these dews, these steadfast trifles, dictate
whether that further walk be little or great.
These waiting histories will have their say.

--from The Walk in the Garden; Conrad Aiken

When reading Aiken, Wallace Stevens was the first to come to mind for a poet of similar style. A difference could be that where Aiken wrote poetry more for the act of speech, Stevens wrote poetry to emphasize the act of the imagination. A subtle difference, but still there. An analogy could be that Aiken’s poetry sings to the angels while Stevens’ sings with the angels. Stevens delves into abstraction and opens the poem beyond itself. Aiken more often remains linear, for the poetry to follow the thought’s progression. I personally prefer Stevens, where the thought follows the poetry, but a reviewer of Aiken’s Selected Poems at Amazon takes a different opinion:

Harold Bloom, in his very good introductory essay, tells why Aiken matters. But I must disagree with him on the subject of Aiken's eloquence, which he considers to be the fatal flaw separating Aiken from greater poets like Stevens and Crane. To me this eloquence is precisely Aiken's strength. If more modern poets had been less interested in modelling consciousness than in analyzing it and extracting its elusive essences--yes, even sometimes extracting the ore of eloquence from the dross of momentary chaos--poetry might still have an audience.

First, a portion from Aiken's long poem, Preludes for Memnon:

Or say that in the middle comes a music
Suddenly out of silence, and delight
Brings all that chaos to one mood of wonder;
A seed of fire, fallen in a tinder world;
And instantly the whirling darkness fills
With conflagration; upspoutings of delirium;
Cracklings and seethings; the melting rocks, the bursts
Of flame smoke-stifled, twisting, smoke-inwreathed;
Magnificence; the whole dark filled with light;
And then a silence, as the world falls back
Consumed, devoured, its giant corolla shrivelled;
And in the waning light, the pistil glowing,
Glowing and fading; and on that shrinking stage--

Whisper it, how among whispering ashes
Her pale bright beauty comes, the moon's dark daughter,
Lighting those ruins with her radiant madness...


And now a section from Stevens' Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction:

IX
Whistle aloud, too weedy wren. I can
Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them,
Like men besides, like men in light secluded,

Enjoying angels. Whistle, forced bugler,
That bugles for the mate, nearby the nest,
Cock bugler, whistle and bugle and stop just short,

Red robin, stop in your preludes, practicing
Mere repetitions. These things at least compromise
An occupation, an exercise, a work,

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round

And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round in a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf
Above the table spins its constant spin,
So that we look at it with pleasure, look

At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

Conrad Aiken was a contemporary to the early American modernists, such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Willimas. Born 1889 in Savannah, Georgia and at the age of 11, he was the first to discover the dead bodies of his parents, both killed at the hands of his father, then later raised by a great-great aunt in Massachusetts. While such horrific trauma is rarely alluded to in his poetry (I wasn’t aware of it or would have guessed it when first reading Aiken’s work), there is a notable undercurrent of psychoanalysis-- with Freud even acknowledging some of his works as splendid examples of introspection-- as well as a quest to repeatedly reclaim personal empowerment and voice within his work, likely a result of needing to upkeep a life long battle against depression.

In one respect, I find Aiken an absolute joy to read. And quite often aloud, especially when he slips the tone into inquiring rhetoric. His poetic training was based in traditional English forms and verse and as a result, a strong internal music courses through Aiken’s lines. While he was ambitious in his ideas, the majority read Aiken for the sound that embodies his poetry rather than the loftier psychological inquiries, and it is in the faithful momentum of this music that brings unification to his poetry, rather than the intellectual conceits. Appropriately, Aiken created a prodigious body of work and could be seen as an early example of the writing of poetry as a process oriented activity.

On the other hand, reading Aiken for an extended period of time can become tedious. Often there is use of repetitive accumulation to progress the poems and while this can lead to introspection, because of its meditative effect (monotony), it can also diffuse the energy of the poetry to such an extent that there isn’t enough concentrated power capable of holding the reader to the page. It needs more tension, a problem which the New York Poets, who were influenced by Aiken’s sound based approach, resolved through the post-modernist techniques of kinetic interjection, associative leaps, disruption, torque, etc., the effects of these constantly engaging a nimble reader by bringing him/her to unexpected places and requiring an active reading.

Generally, Aiken could be considered a B-list poet for his time. While he was as erudite as any amongst his contemporaries, T. S. Eilot and Ezra Pound were capable of more valiant displays in their poetic methods. And with respect to innovative technique, modernists like E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams were busily opening doors while Aiken was largely relying upon past traditions. Still, Aiken’s dedicated belief in the compelling powers of poetry are capable of ringing his words true from time to time, becoming testament to the strength that can be derived from oration. He Collected Poems is out of print (the cheapest copy on Amazon running about $80.00), but a Selected Poems is widely available. Perfect.

Further Advantages of Learning
--Kenneth Rexroth

One day in the Library,
Puzzled and distracted,
Leafing through a dull book,
I came on a picture
Of the vase containing
Buddha's relics. A chill
Passed over me. I was
Haunted by the touch of
A calm I cannot know,
The opening into that
Busy place of a better world.