From Bill Viola's I Do Knot Know What It Is I Am Like.

Need not end. Indeed, nothing. Step
out. Grist for wits. Shadow of your
shell. Stand there.

No other ground. No
other. And the world concerns you every-
where, but do not identify with it.

Let light onto us. Flowers through the
gate, flowers skimming
the wall. A carpet of petal.

Treasures below the earth. Neither in
this world nor another, guarding.
Nothing but fade and flourish.

--Keith Waldrop; No. 8, Part 1,
...'Shipwreck in Haven'; Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy

Pointless
--Keith Waldrop

Cannot be aroused. Into bright
light of day, where even no
tender shadow falls. Florid events.

Damp bench just under the ivy hanging
from the balustrade of the terrace. Dreamy
perplexity. Very few sensations appear.

Indescribably beautiful, with the colors
of springtime. Perceptions dim as
memories. Chilled and saddened.

Love, tenderness, triumph, ardor for war-- nearly
the same emotions, but weaker, less complex, felt
by birds. Suggesting, continually, physical movement.

Nothing can be remembered. Has she
forgotten him? Difficulties in
reflection and subsequent amnesia.

The act of thought no longer. Frightened
by recent rain, all psychic events
slowed down and much more difficult.

Things which we advance along steadily, things
to be followed from end to end. Just
now, as I dream it, all.

From the National Book Foundation interview with Keith Waldrop:

CMT: This is an unusual book—really three books in one, which you call a trilogy. Can you explain how you wrote them?

KW: It came about for a very specific reason. The problem was that I had to become the director of a program at Brown.... It was not a difficult job, but it was endless. I kept thinking after hours about what I should do tomorrow and what I didn’t do yesterday, and I found after some months that I was not writing any poetry, and I didn’t like that, so I decided midnight would be the hour when Brown would disappear for me and I’d work on my poems no matter what. I decided to do some collage work with my poems, and the mechanical part of it, just getting words from somewhere, I thought would be something I could do without thinking, so I got a batch of books and put them on the table—the plan was very simple, I put three books in front of me, all prose, a novel, then something psychological, then whatever I happened to have around. I would take phrases from these three books and make some stanzas, four, five six lines. Once I had that I’d make more stanzas of the same number of lines, and when that gave out, after a page or two, I’d say alright I have this poem now and I would take it to the typewriter and type it up and in doing so I would rearrange the stanzas alphabetically. I wasn’t worried about keeping the words exactly what they were—sometimes I changed words. I wasn’t trying to prove anything about collage, I was trying to write poems. Then I would put a title on it and put it aside. Then after a matter of weeks, I had something book length, when it wasn’t working anymore, I stopped. At that point I rearranged all the poems by title and that was the second part of the book. The first and third parts are mainly collage, a little less. I had different ways of working with it.

And from an interview with poet, Peter Gizzi, at Siglio Press:

PG: Would you say that this idea of revision or collage is an act of recuperation, a restructuring or rearranging of what would be linear time?

KW: I've sometimes been irritated by people "reading" my collages. "This looks like. . ." is not objectionable, but "This means . . ." makes little sense to me. It's hard to carry this across verbatim into the verbal collages, since I would hardly want to say, "Don't read my poems, just look at them." But something maybe like "Read what it says, not what it means" might be an analog. Or better: Vygotsky distinguished between 'meaning' and 'sense': the 'sense' of a word or text being everything a word or text does, all its effect whether intellectual or emotional or whatever. 'Meaning' being the central, more or less definite content -- what, in some cases, you'd go to a dictionary for. So that meaning is a part of sense, but only a part. Vygotsky says that our "inner speech" emphasizes sense at the expense of meaning. I once applied that idea to Gertrude Stein's writing, but I think it's a useful notion for art in general. A translation, for instance, that brings across only the meaning of a poem or novel is not adequate, is only a start. And to explicate or "figure out" a poem, without really listening to it, is to avoid the poem, to short-circuit it.

To get back to your question, collage is certainly rearranging things. And often, in my case, using elements that might otherwise be thrown away. Old posters or. . . whatever. Or memories that could be thrown away. What do you do with memories, that in many cases hardly seem worth writing down. But as an element of collage . . .

Years ago back in college, before the immediate availability of the internet, I wanted to learn what a stoic was. So I headed over to the library, picked out a random title or two from the database (there were at least computer terminals– I don’t go back so far when card catalogues were still in use), and I found myself in the Greek philosophy stacks. I thumbed through a few books for an hour or two to get a general idea about what they were about. Not much more. But one concept stuck with me. Lodged in pretty good.

According to stoic thought, when we are younger, the surface level of the world fills us with wonder and excitement. That’s what engages us. Its all new. Remains excitingly new for a number of years. But as a person ages, it’s the processes and interrelations beneath the surface that become more engaging. I was only about twenty at that time, so said to myself, “Hmmm. Interesting. We’ll see.” Seventeen years later and I’m finding this theory applicable.

A basic example: I enjoy a nice sunset, always will. But my enjoyment of a nice sunset is always connected to something else– memories, whether immediately acknowledged or not; a banal weather prediction; if I’m feeling theatrical or in the need for catharsis, drama; even if purely aesthetic, for color, shade and form only, that is still a decision that I’ve decided upon, valuing it for its own sake. In other words, the child in me still sees a wonderful sunset and becomes instantly enthralled, ga-ga. But the difference is that with this stage of life, I recognize sunset is an opening for something that is not seen and therefore, somewhat self created. Maybe later in life I’ll be able to go a little bit deeper than that, but that’s where I’m at now. Good enough.

Now for the hard part, connecting this to Keith Waldrop’s 2009 National Book Award winner, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. Stylistically, Waldrop constructs his poems with clipped phrases that make them vocally jagged, but with associative connections to keep the mental flow together. Abstract, yes. Hard to follow, no. And the vocabulary is largely no more advanced than a collegiate level, which I think Waldrop probably chooses in order to keep a simplicity in the language and conceptually contrast deeper meaning. And this is going to be my lead in to the above.

One of the great things about literature, poetry especially, is that you can bathe in paradox, more so than any other art form or philosophy. Waldrop often returns his poetry back to the simplistic void, nothingness, a white door, a wall, silence, an end. Plain language– the majority of the poems written after midnight. But in this blank state, something more is to be found. True, in Waldrop’s vision, the surface of the world is all there is. Thoroughly post-modern in that. But as there is no inherent depth beyond the materiality of the world, there is the free creation of significance available. Thoroughly Romantic in that. Waldrop simultaneously re-constructs and de-constructs while exploring the relation between the self and the world and with a quality that is, most importantly, a complex dynamic, even if but a dream. From the opening poem, which begins with two verses that speak in a stoic voice but concludes with two verses that exude romanticism:

Balancing. Austere. Life-
less. I have tried to keep
context from claiming you.

Without doors. And there are
windows. How far, how
far into the desert have we come?

Rude instruments, product
of my garden. Might also be
different, what I am thinking of.

So you see: it is
not symmetrical, dark
red out of the snow.

[Sunflowers; Emil Nolde]

Spoken word excerpt of the poem "BOMB" by Gregory Corso, animated by Shannon Larratt of Zentastic.com.

Aye, what happened to you, dear friend, compassionate
............friend, is what is happening to everyone and
............thing of planet the clamorous sadly desperate
............planet now one voice less...expendable as the
............wind...gone, and who'll now blow away the
............awful miasma of sick, sick and dying
............earthflesh-soul America

When you went on the road looking for America you found
............only what you put there and a man seeking gold
............finds the only America there is to find; and his
............investment and a poet's investment...the same
............when comes the crash, and it's crashing, yet
............the windows are tight, are not for jumping; from
............hell non e'er fell

--from 'Elegiac Feelings American' (for the dear memory of John Kerouac) ; Gregory Corso

While the majority of the poems in Elegiac Feelings American are relevant to social and cultural issues, Corso has some where the scope is limited to poetry only, and they are quite good. The following is from 'Mutation of the Spirit'. The first two lines, to me, pretty much define poetry. They also echo the title of the poem nicely:

Depression may relinquish all definitions
yet joy shall acquire prescise usage
Frenzy may leave terms phrases and evacuate basic form
yet soundness shall keep the senses specialized
Imperfection may discredit the odd the rare
yet shall perfection honor the typical
Blemishes humiliate the outlandish the unique the strange
yet excellence extols the orthodox the natural
Adornment seduces the odious
yet severity restores the loveable
Garnishment mayest ravish the vile.
Festooning mayest shanghai the accursed
may seize the nauseating the foul the beastly
may rape the unspeakable
Yet shall bareness liberate the estimable
Direction breakthrough meteorlogical panic
.....cloud-cover thermotemperature
I am prepared to believe that drama of sky
Give it clear I can hear.....

From Gavin Selerie, "The Interview," in The Riverside Interviews: 3 Gregory Corso. Gavin Selerie, ed., Ladbroke Grove: Binnacle Press, 1982:

GS: Appetite, violence?

GC: No, to be smart. I used to go to the library all of the time and read the books as best I could–books on rhetoric, for instance. How do you get smart, Gregory? You see, I went to the sixth grade and that was the highest I ever went. How do you get smart?–you got to read books, but what books? I had no friends or anything to tell me this shit; I had to check it out myself. Rhetoric–I don't know where the fuck I heard that word but I thought that's what made you smart. Do you know how many books they have on rhetoric that were done about 1895 or the late nineteenth century? Thousands!–of this fucker on rhetoric. Then I thought, "What do I need with rhetoric?"..... I met this kid in the library when the war was over, and he had this great idea. He said, "Hey, you know these Army–Navy stores that are selling walkie–talkies? If we buy four of these things we can get a lot of money." I said, He said, "We gotta get two more guys; one drives a car and speaks through the walkie–talkie to the guy on the stairway, who relays to the guys breaking the safe that no cops are coming." That's putting crime on a scientific basis and that I ate up. I said, "Great, about time. Now if I'm going to that fucking jail again with all that horror, at least it's for something–not that shit of going up because I fell asleep or needed something to eat." This is a big one.... The judge said I was a menace to society because I had put crime on a scientific basis. I did three years there–from the beginning of seventeen years old to the end of nineteen; that's 1947–1950. I am so happy I never knew that guy's name cause once you mention the name of a partner in crime, mister your life is over. If you squeal you blow it I was lucky. I never got the fuckers who squealed on me but I didn't care; they were just kids anyway. So the first thing I learned was: "Never give your name to strangers while you're doing a crime." I took the lickings, went to prison, and that's where I learned, I think, the rest of that smell. Three shots were laid on me in prison. First of all: "Don't take your shoes off"–which meant you're walking right out. Because three years was a cinch compared to the thirty–six years or a lifetime given to others. People go to the electric chair but I'd been given a different path. The next thing they said was: "Don't you serve time; let time serve you." That's when I got off rhetoric and ate up all the books. That's when I got into Stendhal, into Hugo, into Shelley, into all the goody-gum–drops. I ate up the 1905 Standard Dictionary, every word; it was about this thick [gestures] . All the archaic and obsolete words–ate it up. So I didn't serve time, I let time serve me. I was fed well and because I was young I had a kind of mascot status. The last shot was given to me as I'm walking out of the prison. Big Mafioso man, who never spoke to me, gives me this hit: "When you're talking to two people when you're out there, make sure you see three." I thought, "What does this mean?" and I said, "oh yeah, of course, dig yourself." That's where you get the control. If I'm talking to two people, make sure that I'm there too, and then everything's gonna be in harmony and fine. But if you're talking to two people and you don't know that you're there, you're out of control, man. It's a dangerous game in life. So the only thing I'm left with on that one was what about participation? What about getting happy–drunk sometimes and just let things abandon for a while. Well, that's happened to me in life and I've been in good fortune; I never got hurt when I was in abandon. I'm in my weakest moment when I'm in that state. Any fuckers want to get me, they can get me then, but you see I'm a very smart man, a happy one. I don't hurt nobody–nothing like that. When I let myself go in abandon, well yeah, if they want to get my arse they can do it.

Gregory Corso was the youngest member of the Beat movement and found a devotion to poetry for social and cultural change, even if he was more often than not banging on silent doors. His youth involved living in various orphanages and foster homes, eventually leading to a three year prison term for theft and an attempt to take over NYC with the aid of two friends and a set of walkie-talkies. While incarcerated, thanks to a library built up by a local mob boss, he educated himself with the classics, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Chatterton, and Christopher Marlowe. After his release, he became friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and published his first book in 1955.

Corso’s writing style is with a more plain spoken approach rather than fractured forms of post-modern poetry. Corso’s emphasis is instead upon the visceral beat and forward movement of his lines. Jazz being a major influence with that. In fact, this is the type of poetry where its actually helpful to have music on in the back ground, fueling the momentum of the lines in a way that’s similar to rap. But unlike rap, there is not the predominant emphasis to have every line rhyme. Corso does utilize rhyme, but more subtly and as accent within the poetry. In that, it avoids the repetition too often found in rap, but is poetry that could fit quite well with various styles of hip-hop and electronica, in the same way Gil Scott-Heron fused his poetry with funk and soul.

For the collection Elegiac Feelings American, this is largely an homage to Jack Kerouac and what he represented. The opening poem is a dedication to him and focuses upon all the areas of American culture that have gone wrong in a country that fancies itself ‘land of the free’. The poems then proceed with an examination of what America is supposed to be and how far off the mark it has found itself. His poem, The American Way, is an excellent example. First, how the America Way subverts Christianity to create fear and control:

They are frankensteining Christ in America
.........in their Sunday campaigns
They are putting the fear of Christ in America
........ under their tents in their Sunday campaigns
They are driving old ladies mad with Christ in America

How the American Way uses the education system as a factory:

The duty of these educators is no different
........ than the duty of a factory foreman
Replica production...make all the young think alike
........ dress alike...believe alike...do alike
Togetherness...this is the American Way

How the greatest threat to America is the American Way itself, not any sort of external threat:

The Aztecs did it by yanking out young hearts
........ at the height of their power
The Americans are doing it by feeding their young to the
........ Way
For it was not the Spaniard who killed the Aztec
........ but the Aztec who killed the Aztec
Rome is proof...Greece is proof...all history is proof
Victory does not allow degeneracy
It will not be the Communists will kill America
........ no...but America itself—

How the American Way subsumes its dissenters:

And those who seek to get out of the Way
........ can not
The Beats are good example of this
They forsake the Way’s habits
........ and acquire for themselves their own habits
And they become as distinct and regimented and lost
........as the main flow
........because the Way has many outlets
........like a snake of many tentacles—

While I tend to not enjoy art that has social change as its aim, I enjoyed this collection because the tone is more of confused bafflement rather than anger or, worse yet, overtly aggressive in its criticism, like one dictator replacing another. Nor does Corso ever believe he has answers. Instead, he provides a plea for something different, a more fundamental change in how we understand our lives rather than what we do with our lives.

Maybe to shed some light on what that change might be, a good place to start is to understand what exactly inalienable rights are– life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not given or granted to us through any sort of declaration, nor are they ever protected (that’s Orwellian doublespeak). Instead, by definition, they are the very qualities of life itself from the moment of birth on; natural and inherent. And if the concept is thought through, one can realize that, while a great thing, this also places a burden upon each of us to be responsible for his/her own self, rather then relying upon a government, a church, a career, a group/institution, etc. While some of these are inevitable for mankind to interact socially, its always all on you. Gregory Corso:

"They, that unnamed "they," they've knocked me down but I got up. I always get up-and I swear when I went down quite often I took the fall; nothing moves a mountain but itself. They, I've long ago named them me."

[A Hilly Scene; Samuel Palmer, 1826-8]

Sleep
--Walter de la Mare

Men all, and birds, and creeping beasts,
When the dark of night is deep,
From the moving wonder of their lives
Commit themselves to sleep.

Without a thought, or fear, they shut
The narrow gates of sense;
Heedless and quiet, in slumber turn
Their strength to impotence.

The transient strangeness of the earth
Their spirits no more see:
Within a silent gloom withdrawn,
They slumber in secrecy.

Two worlds they have--a globe forgot,
Wheeling from dark to light;
And all the enchanted realm of dream
That burgeons out of night.

The Quiet Enemy
--Walter de la Mare

Hearken! now the hermit bee
Drones a quiet threnody;
Greening on the stagnant pool
The criss-cross light is beautiful;
In the venomed yew tree wings
Preen and flit. The linnet sings.

Gradually the brave sun
Sinks to a day's journey done;
In the marshy flats abide
Mists to muffle midnight-tide.
Puffed within the belfry tower
Hungry owls drowse out their hour.

Walk in beauty. Vaunt thy rose.
Flaunt thy poisonous loveliness!
Pace for pace with thee there goes
A shape that hath not come to bless.
I, thine enemy? . . . Nay, nay!
I can only watch, and wait
Patient treacherous time away,
Hold ajar the wicket gate.

I'm pulling this straight from Walter de la Mare's wikipedia page, a section entitled Imagination:

De la Mare described two distinct "types" of imagination — although "aspects" might be a better term: the childlike and the boylike. It was at the border between the two that Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest of the great poets lay.

De la Mare claimed that all children fall into the category of having a childlike imagination at first, which is usually replaced at some point in their lives. In his lecture, "Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination," he argued that children ". . . are not so closely confined and bound in by their groping senses. Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons . . . They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision." Doris Ross McCrosson summarizes this passage, "Children are, in short, visionaries." This visionary view of life can be seen as either vital creativity and ingenuity, or fatal disconnection from reality (or, in a limited sense, both).

The increasing intrusions of the external world upon the mind, however, frighten the childlike imagination, which "retires like a shocked snail into its shell." From then onward the boyish imagination flourishes, the "intellectual, analytical type."

By adulthood (de la Mare proposed), the childlike imagination has either retreated for ever or grown bold enough to face the real world. Thus emerge the two extremes of the spectrum of adult minds: the mind molded by the boylike is "logical" and "deductive". That shaped by the childlike becomes "intuitive, inductive." De la Mare's summary of this distinction is, "The one knows that beauty is truth, the other reveals that truth is beauty." Another way he puts it is that the visionary's source of poetry is within, while the intellectual's sources are without — external — in "action, knowledge of things, and experience," as McCrosson puts it. De la Mare hastens to add that this does not make the intellectual's poetry any less good, but it is clear where his own preference lies.

A note to avoid confusion: The term "imagination" in the lecture "Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination" is used to refer to both the intellectual and the visionary. To simplify and clarify his language, de la Mare generally used the more conventional "reason" and "imagination" when discussing the same idea elsewhere.

Writer Joan Aiken cites some of his short stories such as Almond Trees and Snow Mountains for their sometimes unexplained quality, which she also employs in her own work.

There's nothing in there that I wouldn't agree with, and now I'm in the mood for watching a Miyazaki film.

I love poetry but generally I only read poems based in traditional form and meter. However, a week or two ago, after reading a Walter de La Mare poem featured at poetry foundation.org as the ‘poem of the day’, I knew I had to look more in de la Mare’s works. The poem was The Listeners and I found a dark, fairytale-like tone to the verse that evoked an unsettling darkness that isn’t easily pinpointed, a darkness that’s only suggested but then all the more capable of shedding light on the behaviors being displayed in the poem. The poem contained qualities that are quite similar to what I look for in some of my favorite fiction writers, such as Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami and Roberto Bolano.

So after reading the poem, I went to the library and only books that he wrote for children in mind were available in the stacks. The collection of Selected Poems for adults was in special storage and dates back to 1927, which sort of added to the intrigue as I began reading poems that are filled with moonlight, tolling bells, death, non-existence, loss, sorrow, age, dreams, lamps, altered states of mind and the occasional strength to transcend. Subject matter that many think should be kept locked in crate box in the back of a basement somewhere. And maybe it should. While the book is by no means a relic, not even being a hundred years old, de la Mare is accessing through his verse aspects of the primal imagination that course through the entire history of mankind; "Strange to me: strange...."

As to the formality of the verse, no doubt there are more skilled technicians available to readers, such as Hardy and Yeats. The language doesn’t shine through like with these other masters. However, the open dream-like state is where his poetry is enjoyed the most. And de la Mare does not look for closure in his visions, and certainly not a philosophical or spiritual resolution. Which I why I, as someone who views all art as being inherently anarchistic, the purpose being solely to delve into and appreciate the great mysteries of life, enjoyed reading him so much.

[I'll be back up next Monday]

Perplexing Ways
--John Ashbery

Comb it wet through these otherwise days.
"Difficult" scenes emerge. What was so bad about perjury?
Think back to how it teased us.
We were raised alive for the behest of others.
Children unwind us, grown-ups cobble us
into their frescoes. Night is seen as becoming.
We love you! This from the heralds.

Alas it isn't easy once again.
The old bike just lies there.
I shall have to do something...
In the meantime living resolves itself
into a dance. A cinema. More light.