It is more important
that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
Begin again. In a new
spirit of
pragmatism, asking not
why I am interested in
vital materialism, in
modernist poetics, in the dialectic of
innocence and
experience, in the
phenomenological and ecological implications of taking language and the
imagination as things that obtain, that exist. Accepting that I am interested
in these things, that they are a matter of my temperament, its line or lines of
flight. Asking, instead, what this assemblage of interests can
do.
The idea has come to
me that I want to do now is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all
waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes.
In my own poetry this assemblage empowers a new practice, a
practical poetics to be lived with and explored. Such a poetics undermines the
impulse toward the made and returns one’s attention to making. To be always
beginning again, with the reader, asking what it is in the moment that poems
do.
Say that the moment is
a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea.
Poetry is a practice of magic, of incantation, “a matter of
disturbance, entrance and passion, rather than abracadabra.” A
speech in which the speaker is fully embedded, fully committed. A voice
committed to the moment, to creating and being created by the otherness of what
the poem includes.
Waste, deadness, come
from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling
narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is
false, unreal, merely conventional.
It is false, unreal, merely conventional: this business of
the realist: how some poetry and much scholarship encases and thwarts
experience. In their insistent proprieties they obscure our vision of the
actual, what William James called “pure experience.”
The actual may be a poem; it may be the western black rhino, declared extinct
last week; it may be my daughter; it may be a feeling or a lure for feeling. We
lose the actual when we lose the adventure of imagination.
The world of wonders
is limited at last to the parent’s will (for will prospers where imagination is
thwarted); intellectual appetites become no more than ambitions; curious minds
become consciences; love, hatred, affection, and cruelty cease to be responses
and become convictions. And the adventure of life becomes a self-improvement
course.
We can, in other words, know nothing in advance. The poem
lies before us. We are implicated if we write it, if we read it. We are willing
subjects in the wrong.
There is a stone chair
on a dais. Seeing it is the King’s chair or, even, in some dreamings of this
dream, finding myself a lonely king in that chair, there is no one rightly
there. A wave of fear seizes me. All things have gone wrong and I am in the
wrong. Great doors break from their bars and hinges, and, under pressure, a
wall of water floods the cavern.
I am interested in noir.
In a noir narrative the protagonist,
who is usually some sort of detective, plunges confidently into the heart of an
expanding darkness, only to discover that the darkness is inside himself—that
he may even be its origin. This is the story of Oedipus and the story of Chinatown. Noir reverses the dialectic of innocence and experience. The
experienced detective is undone by his adventure, confronted with his own
complicity in evil. He detects himself. A terrible innocence is born. This
terrible moment, the moment at the very end of the noir narrative, is ours.
I discover myself on
the verge of the usual mistake.
But we can bear in, imagining the darkness rather than
willing it.
Medicine can cure the
body. But soul, poetry, is capable of living in, longing for, choosing illness.
Only the most fanatic researcher upon cancer could share with the poet the
concept that cancer is a flower, an adventure, an intrigue with life.
“Ecological politics has a noir form,” Timothy Morton writes. “We start by thinking we can
‘save’ something called ‘the world’ ‘over there,’ but end up realizing that we
ourselves are implicated. This is the solution to beautiful soul syndrome:
reframing our field of activity as one for which we ourselves are formally
responsible, even guilty.”
We are or ought to be fanatic cancer researchers, and the cancer is in us. Is us. We are caught up in the
Anthropocene. We are caught up in an intrigue with life.
Why admit anything to
literature that is not poetry—by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge
against novelists? that they select nothing?
I have written a novel called Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy. It is a sentimental title for a
narrative that struggles to emerge on the other side of sentimentality, as the
protagonist, in her struggle with the past that composes her, tries to survive
her own innocence of that past. The phrase “beautiful soul” is Hegelian (schöne Seele): “The beautiful soul maintains
a split between self and world, an irresolvable chasm created by the call of
conscience.... [it] cannot see that the evil it condemns is intrinsic to its
existence—indeed, its very form as pure subjectivity is this evil.”
The poets succeeding
by simplifying: practically everything is left out.
Poems are not mimetic; they do not represent; they show
nothing of states of affairs or states of mind. Poetry is the by-product of
what Karen Barad calls “intra-action,” “the
mutual constitution of entangled agencies… the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do
not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action.”
The poet is one agent entangled with innumerable other agents: black rhinos,
Congressional Republicans, tornadoes, John Keats, hay fever, words. The
particular moment of entanglement is the poet’s experience. The record of that
experience is the poem; liable, as Ezra Pound said of The Cantos, to carry “the defects inherent in a record of
struggle.”
The poet’s role is not
to oppose evil, but to imagine it: what if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or
Dostoyevsky opposed Raskolnikov—the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskolnikov.
The poem itself is not mimetic but the struggle to produce
it is microcosmic; as Whitehead says, “Each task of creation is a social
effort, employing the whole universe.” The defects of the poem mark its
suffering of incompatible facts. “Insistence on birth at the wrong season is
the trick of evil.” Whitehead follows this claim with a gimcrack theodicy,
assuring us that “in the advance of the world, particular evil facts are
finally transcended.”
One can accept this only in the spirit of Kafka’s mordant remark that there is
plenty of hope for God, but not for us. Yet what Keats calls “the poetical
Character” must participate this hope if is not to be overwhelmed, or to
retreat to the guilty noncommitment of the beautiful soul.
...it is not itself—it
has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys life
and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor,
mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.
Poetic practice is a pragmatism of impure subjectivity. The poem’s I
is embedded in, produces, and is produced by what it sees. “Environment” does
not exist. There is a vibration and an overlapping and a revision. The poem
ends, but the adventure does not. If the adventurer encounters evil, he tarries
with it and becomes it for a while. “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge
mine.”
That is his obedience to the struggle.
A Poet is the most
unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is
continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and
Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an
unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most
unpoetical of all God’s Creatures.
Keats is wrong about the unchangeable attributes of things,
since all things are themselves entangled and intra-acting agents. He is right
that a poet is willing to enter consciously and of his own free will into the
contract of intra-action that binds the rest of us all unwilling, since we are
blind to it. That blindness is what makes us poetical creatures of impulse. The
poet’s vision makes blindness palpable. What Duncan called, “a little
endarkenment.”
I want to put
practically everything in: yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in “The
Moths.” It must include nonsense fact, sordidity: but made transparent.
Moths are nocturnal insects, except when they are not. There
is nothing so strange nor seemingly nonsensical as the luna moth, which molts
five times in caterpillar form, eating the leaves of black walnut trees, until
finally cocooning and emerging with a wingspan of four and a half inches. The
luna moth has no mouth; its career as a gourmand is done. It lives for about a
week, flying only by night (unlike the diurnal sphinx moth, the infant moth,
the Panamanian tiger moth), the females releasing a chemical that attracts the
males to mate with them. Then they lay several hundred eggs, and then they die.
Moths are very common, except when they are not. Luna moths are endangered in
many areas due to pollution from herbicides and insectisides, as well as
habitat loss. Is this saturated? Is this transparent? Is the luna moth,
selected for the purposes of this essay very nearly at random, something with
which I am entangled in 2013, on the November night after a day of unseasonable
warmth and torrential rain, during which at least seventy-seven tornadoes
caused five reported deaths and untold property damage in the state of Illinois
where I live? The lives of moths are fantastically brief. Does this writing
bear the defects of a record of my struggle to imagine an order that is not an
illusion or bad faith but the order of intra-action, of noir, of innocence?
For she stood upon the
threshold of an art where she was to take her place with Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams in the adventure of the higher imagination, in the full risk of
the poem in which divine, human, and animal orders must be revealed.
The lives of moths are fantastically brief.
Watching him, it
seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world
had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body.
Innocence survives experience, through experience. The
innocence of the moth in its mouthless struggle for life. Of the poem.
Again, somehow, one
saw life, a pure bead.
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