David Antin: From “Words to the Wise” (2 poems, 2009)

RUSSIAN PROVERBS

the wave betrays the wind
thirst teaches you the value of water
if you have nothing you’ve got nothing to lose
the squash calls the melon a cucumber
a small hole can sink a big ship
the road from the peak can only lead to the valley
its easier for a lake to become a swamp than for a swamp to become a lake
you can soften steel but it takes a lot of heat
experience may be a good teacher but its not a governess
when the river overflows, the last raindrop thinks it caused the flood
the sea swallows the wise as well as the fool
hope has distinguished relatives
if you’re looking for a lasting peace try a cemetery
a man with bad luck can drown in a teaspoon of water
looking at a broken pot won’t put it together again
what good is a loaf of bread when thousands are starving
the great volga began as a little stream
don’t become a violin if you don’t want to be stroked
what you tell the volga today the volga will tell the caspian tomorrow
its not the net that counts, it’s the fish
its easier for a dog to learn to howl than for a wolf to learn to bark
most cavalry songs are sung by infantrymen
a wolf without teeth is still a wolf
anyone can die without special training


CHINESE PROVERBS

If the ground under your feet is wet, the sky is to blame.
before you buy shoes, make sure you measure your feet
if you doubt what you hear, you can’t believe what you see
it’s as difficult to recover the past as to pick up spilled water
every needle has a point
if there’s a car ahead of you in a fog, you can follow its lights, but not too closely
no matter how tall you are, your legs still touch the ground
if you’re always in a hurry, you’ll never arrive on time
a person who walks in a straight line and a person who walks in a curved line
will never arrive at the same place
you can tell it on the mountain, but whisper it in the valley
if the morning is sunny, the evening can still bring clouds
a festival for some people is a traffic problem for others
time is a hallway we never get out of, except at the end
a question may be an answer to a question as an answer maybe a question to
an answer
a system of values may be nothing more than an accountant’s dream
it’s hard to be a bystander in a storm
the country is where the food is, but the city is where the money is
the fool will not believe you because your story is too complicated,
the educated man will not believe you because your story is too simple
there is no fact as unlikely as a giraffe
when you’re caught in the rain you’ll remember you forgot your umbrella
don’t climb a tree to look for fish
when you’re climbing a mountain don’t step back
if you’re holding a tool in your hand, it’s also holding you by the hand
you can’t use paint to cover a hole in the wall
there are two sides to every wall
if you don’t drink, the price of wine doesn’t matter
if you stand on a mountain top nothing is likely to fall on your head
if you go underground you may not have enough light
until you get in the water you don’t know what it’s like to swim

September, 2009

[David Antin’s most recent book of talk-poems, i never knew what time it was, was published by the University of California Press & is still easily available. Other pieces by Antin on the present site were posted on June 19, 2008 and on May 28 and June 17, 2009. Radical Coherency, his major collection of essays, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010.]

Reconfiguring Romanticism (33) : from Novalis and Schlegel, two essays toward a language poetry

NOVALIS (FRIEDRICH VON HARDENBERG): MONOLOGUE (1798)

Matters concerning speech and writing are genuinely strange; proper conversation is a mere play of words. We can only marvel at the laughable error people make--believing that they speak about things. No one knows precisely what is peculiar to language, that it concerns itself merely with itself. For that reason, it is a wonderful and fertile mystery--that when someone speaks merely in order to speak, one precisely then expresses the most splendid and most original truths. Yet if one wishes to speak of something determinate, then temperamental language has them say the most laughable and perverse things. That is the reason too for the hatred that so many earnest people have toward language. They recognize their own willfulness, but do not observe that contemptible chatter is the infinitely earnest side of language. If only one could make people grasp that the case of language is similar to the case of mathematical formulae--they constitute a world for themselves-- they play with themselves alone, express nothing other than their wonderful nature, and precisely for that reason they are so expressive--precisely for that reason they mirror in themselves the curious play of relations in things. Only by way of freedom are they members of nature and only in their free movements does the world soul give utterance, making them a delicate standard of measure and blueprint for things. Thus it is with language too--whoever has a subtle sense of its application, its cadence, its musical spirit, whoever perceives in oneself the delicate effects of its inner nature, and moves one’s tongue and hand in accordance with it will be a prophet; in contrast, whoever knows it but does not have sufficient ear and sensibility for language, writes truths such as these, will be held hostage by language itself and will be mocked by human beings, as was Cassandra among the Trojans. If I believe I have hereby declared most precisely the essence and office of poesy, I know nonetheless that no human being can understand it, and that I have said something quite foolish, for the mere reason that I wanted to say it, so that no poesy comes to be. Yet what would happen if I had to talk? and if this linguistic drive to speak were the characteristic of inspiration of language, and of the efficacy of language in me? and if my will only willed precisely everything that I had to will--then in the end this could be without my knowledge or belief poesy and could make a mystery of language comprehensible? and thus I would be a writer by vocation, inasmuch as a writer is only an enthusiast of language?--

[Translation by Ferit Güven, from Novalis, The Philosophical and Theoretical Works]


FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL, “ON INCOMPREHENSIBILITY” [Über die Unverständlichkeit] (1800)

[…] Of all things that have to do with communicating ideas, what ould be more fascinating than the question of whether such communication is actually possible? […]

Common sense […] probably did not have a difficult time in arriving at the conclusion that the basis of the incomprehensible is to be found in incomprehension. Now, it is a peculiarity of mine that I absolutely detest incomprehension, not only the incomprehension of the uncomprehending but even more the incomprehension of the comprehending. For this reason, I made a resolution quite some time ago to have a talk about this matter with my reader […]. I wanted for once to be really thorough and go through the whole series of my essays, admit their frequent lack of success with complete frankness, and so gradually lead the reader to being similarly frank and straightforward with himself. I wanted to show that all incomprehension is relative […]. I wanted to demonstrate that words often understand themselves better than do those who use them […]. I wanted to show that the purest and most genuine incomprehension emanates precisely from science and the arts—which by their very nature aim at comprehension and at making comprehensible—and from philosophy and philology; and so that the whole business shouldn’t turn around in too palpable a circle I had made a firm resolve really to be comprehensible, at least this time. […]

A great part of the incomprehensibility of the Athenaeum [Schlegel’s magazine, 1798-1800] is unquestionably due to the irony that to a greater or lesser extent is to be found everywhere in it. […] In order to facilitate a survey of the whole system of irony, we would like to mention here a few of the choicest kinds. The first and most distinguished of all is coarse irony. It is to be found in the real nature of things and is one of the most widespread of substances […]. Next there is fine or delicate irony; then extra-fine. Scaramouche employs the last type when he seems to be talking amicably and earnestly with someone when really he is only waiting for the chance to give him—while preserving the social amenities—a kick in the behind. This kind of irony is also to be found in poets, as well as straightforward irony, a type that flourishes most purely and originally in old gardens where wonderfully lovely grottoes lure the sensitive friend of nature into their cool wombs only to be-splash him plentifully from all sides with water and thereby wipe him clean of delicacy. Further, dramatic irony; that is, when an author has written three acts, then unexpectedly turns into another man and now has to write the last two acts. Double irony, when two lines of irony run parallel side-by-side without disturbing each other: one for the gallery, another for the boxes, though a few little sparks may also manage to get behind the scenes. Finally, there is the irony of irony. Generally speaking, the most fundamental irony of irony probably is that even it becomes tiresome if we are always being confronted with it. But what we want this irony to mean in the first place is something that happens in more ways than one. For example, if one speaks of irony without using it, as I have just done; if one speaks of irony ironically without in the process being aware of having fallen into a far more noticeable irony; if one can’t disentangle oneself from irony anymore, as seems to be happening in this essay on incomprehensibility; if irony turns into a mannerism and becomes, as it were, ironical about the author; […] and if irony runs wild and can’t be controlled any longer.

What gods will rescue us from all these ironies? The only solution is to find an irony that might be able to swallow up all these big and little ironies and leave no trace of them at all. I must confess that at precisely this moment I feel that mine has a real urge to do just that. But even this would only be a short-term solution. I fear that if I understand correctly what destiny seems to be hinting at, then soon there will arise a new generation of little ironies: for truly the stars augur the fantastic. And even if it should happen that everything were to be peaceful for a long period of time, one still would not be able to put any faith in this seeming calm. Irony is something one simply cannot play games with. It can have incredibly long-lasting effects. I have a suspicion that some of the most conscious artists of earlier times are still carrying on ironically, hundreds of years after their deaths, with their most faithful followers and admirers. […]
I’ve already been forced to admit indirectly that the Athenaeum is incomprehensible, and because it happened in the heat of irony, I can hardly take it back without in the process doing violence to that irony.

But is incomprehensibility really something so unmitigatedly contemptible and evil? Methinks the salvation of families and nations rests upon it. […] Yes, even man’s most precious possession, his own inner happiness, depends in the last analysis, as anybody can easily verify, on some such point of strength that must be left in the dark, but that nonetheless shores up and supports the whole burden and would crumble the moment one subjected it to rational analysis. Verily, it would fare badly with you if, as you demand, the whole world were ever to become wholly comprehensible in earnest. And isn’t this entire, unending world constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos? […]

[Translation by Peter Firchow, from Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, University of Minnesota Press, 1971]


ADDENDUM: FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL, ATHENEUM FRAGMENT 116

Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn't merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical; poeticize wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humor. It embraces everything that is purely poetic, from the greatest systems of art, containing within themselves still further systems, to the sigh, the kiss that the poetizing child breathes forth in artless song. It can so lose itself in what it describes that one might believe it exists only to characterize poetical individuals of all sorts; and yet there still is no form so fit for expressing the entire spirit of an author: so that many artists who started out to write only a novel ended up by providing us with a portrait of themselves. It alone can become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole circumambient world, an image of the age. And it can also – more than any other form – hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on tbe wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors. It is capable of the highest and most variegated refinement, not only from within outwards, but also from without inwards; capable in that it organizes – for everything that seeks a wholeness in its effects – the parts along similar lines, so that it opens up a perspective upon an infinitely increasing classicism. Romantic poetry is in the arts what wit is in philosophy, and what society and sociability, friendship and love are in life. Other kinds of poetry are finished and are now capable of being fully analyzed. The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself. The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that it is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.

[Translation by Peter Firchow, from Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, University of Minnesota Press, 1971]

Outsider Poems, a Mini-Anthology in Progress (11): A Christmas Play, Performed by the Derbyshire Mummers, 1849

DRAMATIS PERSONAE: ST. GAY, KING GEORGE, SOLDIER, BLACK PRINCE, DOCTOR, and BEELZEBUB

Prologue
I open the door as I came in,
A pinion favour for to win;
Whether I rise, stand, or fall,
I'll do my duty to please you all.
Room, room, brave gallants;
Room, room, I intend to shew,
See how these pretty actors go,
Acting well, or acting pale.
And if you can't believe me what I say,
Step in, St. Gay, and clear a way.


[Enter ST. GAY.]

St. Gay
Here am I, St. Gay;
St. Gay it is my name;
From England's ground I sprung and came;
I'll search the nations round and round,
If I can but find King George
I'll give thousand pound.

Prol.
King George is here,
He's ready at hand.
I'll fetch him in at thy command;
And if you can't believe me what I say,
Step in, King George, and clear a way.

{Enter KING GEORGE.}

King George.
The dew drops from yonder mountains high!
I've been in search of my enemy,
And, now I've found him, my sword shall end his life!

St. Gay.
I'm afraid l am a stranger,
Exposed all in danger,
Two balls from yonder mountain have laid me quite low.
Enter in that noble soldier bold,
Before King George does strike me cold.

{Enter SOLDIER.}

Soldier.
Forbear, King George, a few minutes!
Look down with pity on him;
Thou shalt not wrong him!

King George.
Who art thou?

Soldier.
A noble soldier bold,
And Slasher is my name!
With a sword and buckler by my side
I hope to win this game;
And if this game should do me good,
I'll draw my sword and draw thy blood.

King George.
O thou hasher, thou slasher,
How canst thou talk so hot?
When there's one in this room
Thou little think'st thou hast got,
Who will hash thee and slash thee,
As I told thee once before.

Soldier.
O thou hasher, thou slasher,
How canst thou talk so hot?
My hands are made of iron,
My body's made of steel,
My head is made of beaten-brass;
No man can make me feel.

King George.
Here stands King George,
One of the noble deeds of valour;
In a close escape have I been kept,
And out of that into a prison leapt;
Many a giant I did subdue,
When I run the fiery dragon through.
'Twas me who slew the dragon,
And brought him to the slaughter,
And won the King of Egypt's daughter.

Prol.
Get on, King George, it shall be so,
The warmest battle that ever was know!

{King George and Soldier fight; Soldier tumbles down and dies.}

{Enter DOCTOR.}

Doctor.
Rut-a-tut-tut,
Here am I, doctor so good,
And with my hand I clear his blood;
I carry him some pill
To cure all diseases,
Take my word just as it pleases.

St. Gay.
How far bast thou travelled, noble doctor?

Doctor.
The pie place, the bread and cheese cupboard.

St. Gay.

Any further?

Doctor.
O, yes; through Italy, Pittaly,
And all the towns that you can name,
Now returned to old England again,
To heal this man that here lies lame.
O I have got a little bottle in my waistcoat pocket,
Called hokum smokum clicampane,
Fetch any dead man to life again!
Here, Jack, take a bit of my nip-nap,
Ram it down, hey tip-tap:
Rise up, Jack, and fight again.

Soldier.
O how horrible, cut horrible,
The like was never seen,
A man frighten'd out of seven senses into seventeen,
And out of seventeen into seven score!
The like was never seen, and never done before;
And if you can't believe me what I say,
Step in, Black Prince, and clear away.

{Enter Black Prince.}

Bl. Prince
Here am I, Black Prince,
-Black Prince of Paradise, black Morocco king;
Through all those woods and graves I range through,
I make the earth to ring!
It was me who slew those seven Turks.
Although King George I do not fear,
But from his body to his heart
I'll run my dreadful spear!
I'll jam his giblets full of holes,
And in those holes put pebble stones!

King George.
Thou jam my giblets full of holes,
And in those holes put pebble stones!
Although thou art a champion's squire,I
t does not lie in thy power!

Bl. Prince.
Let me be a champion's squire, or what I will,
I'll do my best thou for to kill!

Doctor.
Get on, Black Prince, it shall be so,
The sorest battle that ever was know;
The clock struck one,
And the hour is gone,
And this sorest battle must go on!

Prol.
Put up those swords, and be at rest,
Peace and quietness is the best!
And if you can't believe me what I say,
Enter in, owld Beelzebub, and clear a way.

{Enter BEELZEBUB; bell rings all through this part.}

Beelz.
In comes one that never came yet,
A big head and little wit;
Althoagh my wit it is so small,
I've got enough to serve you all.
Ah! ah! funny,
All these fine things and no money.
My name is called owld Beelzebub,
And over my left shoulder I carry a club,
And in my right hand a small dripping-pan,
So I think myself a jolly old man!
A duck-skin hairy budget
Tied fast upon my back;
A snuff-box in my pocket,
As large as you may suppose,
As large as any owld turnip,
All for to view my own nose;
With a rink a tink,
And a sup more drink,
And I'll make your old kettle cry sound!

FINIS.

[Extract from Halliwell's nineteenth-century Preface: "The present piece is a copy of a Christmas play performed by the mummers of Derbyshire, obtained from oral tradition in that county. Numerous versions of this rural drama are used in the north of England, and it were to be wished that they were all collected and published. The present one, although curious, is replete with strange corruptions, King George occupying the place of the Saint, and Guy being introduced as 8t. Gay, an addition to the calendar not noticed elsewhere. Beelzebub is here a genuine descendant of the ancient Vice, and there can be but little doubt that the whole performance, though it has doubtlessly undergone great alteration, is a traditional version of an early mystery."]

Jess (Collins): Images from "Tricky Cad" with an anecdote, in memory

When I first came across Tricky Cad, Jess's ferocious cut-up/collage from the old & very popular Dick Tracy comic strip, I spoke to him about making it a part of of a small (16 page) book that we intended to publish by the cheapest means then available. He called the book O! & filled it with it with mostly Victorian & photo-inspired collages, plus his own handwritten & handtyped poems in the manner, I thought, of Christian Morgenstern, whom he was also then translating. The deconstructed comic strips brought the book into the proto-pop world, of which we were still hardly aware, & served I thought as a perfect centerfold (albeit in black & white) for the book we were planning. When O! was nearly done & ready to pass along to the offset printer, Jess raised the sometimes dicey question of permissions. His secret wish, he said, was to make contact with Dick Tracy's creator Chester Gould, who was one of his longtime heroes, & this would give him a chance to do so. I gave him the go-ahead, only to hear a few weeks later that Gould had not only denied permission but had threatened to sue all of us, if I remember it correctly, for every cent we had. There was a lesson in all of that, but in the face of Gould’s threats, which he could afford better than we could, the only choice we had was to retreat. Jess therefore constructed a marvelous comic-style centerfold, “That Sly Old Gobbler or the Orange,” carrying forward the Victorian imagery, and it took a legal/judicial change in the status of parody & appropriation before Tricky Cad was finally – & safely – published. For myself the present posting presents my first chance to join in celebrating Jess’s masterwork, though a full reproduction of O! (in the non-Tricky Cad version) appears in A Book of the Book, edited a few years ago with Steven Clay. (J.R.)

Kenneth Rexroth: American Indian Songs, from Densmore & Others

[This groundbreaking & highly influential essay (including an accompanying selection of poem-songs) was first published in Perspectives USA (1956). It was reprinted in Assays (New Directions, 1961) & again in Ken Knabb’s Bureau of Public Secrets. Rexroth’s selection of Dennsmore’s translations will appear in two subsequent postings. (Copyright © 1961 by Kenneth Rexroth, used courtesy of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.) I reprint it here as a homage both to Rexroth & to Densmore. - J.R.]

In all the public and academic libraries in America and in most of the principal libraries of the world, off in a corner somewhere or in a seldom entered room, you can find a good many square feet of bookshelves lined with the olive-green publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, a department of the Smithsonian Institution. There are forty-seven annual reports, from 1881 to 1932, royal octavo volumes lavishly illustrated, averaging around eight hundred pages each. After the forty-seventh report, the ethnological and anthropological material has been published separately. There are about one hundred and fifty bulletins in octavo; these run from thirty-two to one thousand pages, and include the annual anthropological papers — about ten articles to each volume — published each year since the forty-seventh annual report. Besides this there have been a couple of hundred other miscellaneous publications.

This is the largest body of anthropological literature ever published by one institution, private or public. Although it is readily available to every American citizen in his nearby library and at least to every inhabitant of a national capital elsewhere, it is little known and less read — even by anthropologists. This is not due to the quality of its scientific writing. Many of America’s major anthropologists are included, often with their greatest works.

Every aspect of American Indian life and much major archaeological-exploration data can he found somewhere in the publications. Many of the monographs in the annual reports are larger than most books. Many of them treat aspects of Indian life now perished past recall. There are classic treatments of the life and culture of a whole tribe, like Paul Radin’s Winnebago, which takes up all the thirty-seventh annual report, and short essays on Indian crafts and ceremonies and detailed, comprehensively illustrated reports of archeological excavations. For instance, over the years an accumulation of papers on the ethnobotany of various tribes has covered the entire useful native flora of North America. Again, the twenty-first annual report contains sixty-three color plates of Hopi Katchinas, the dance masks and costumes which represent the demigods of Pueblo religion. These were all drawn by native artists just at the end of the nineteenth century. They are the first examples of Pueblo Indian painting and are still the best. Inspired by this first assignment, a whole school of Pueblo Indian painting has grown up and is today very popular in America and is shown periodically in the major art galleries of the country. The modern painting is more sophisticated and superficially more decorative, but none of it compares with the freshness and immediacy of these first examples.

Among the bulletins there are a number of handbooks — American Indians North of Mexico, edited by Frederick Webb Hodge; succeeded by Indian Tribes of North America, edited by J.R. Swanton; American Indian Languages, by Franz Boas; California Indians, by A.L. Kroeber; and now, completed only recently, the monumental Handbook of South American Indians, in six fat volumes, edited by Julian H. Steward. In addition to all this there are a large number of texts and translations of Indian oral literature — myths, legends, lengthy ceremonies and songs.
Most of the songs, both text and music, have been recorded by Frances Densmore, who has been working in this field for forty-five years, and whose collections of Indian music number more than fifteen volumes (three of which have been published elsewhere), each of the fifteen devoted to a different tribe. Besides the printed text and music, she has usually taken phonograph records as well, and these are part of the immense collection of Indian songs, folk songs, folk tales, and other oral literature held by the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress.
To the best of my knowledge, there does not exist any comparable collection of primitive lyric and music made by one person. I am well aware of the criticisms that have been made of Miss Densmore’s work by musicologists. It is of course true that primitive music can only be approximated by our Western notation, but at least she has approximated it, and in most cases with surprising accuracy. Any comparison of her notation with the phonograph records which I have ever made has never shown any serious error, once the validity of using our system of notation is granted. One can make a closer approximation by using special notation, but this too of course is still only approximation.

Over and above its musical interest, Miss Densmore’s work is also possibly the largest body of primitive lyric poetry in the original language and in translation in existence. As such, it is of tremendous importance to the student of literary origins, to the aesthetician or critic, and especially to the practicing poet. In spite of this her work is almost completely unknown among literary people, and only one American poet of any importance — Yvor Winters — has ever mentioned her in print or shown any sign of her work’s influence.

Although any work done with American Indians in the twentieth century can hardly be called early, Miss Densmore was not too late to catch many primitive customs before they became corrupted or forgotten. For instance, a substantial number of the songs in her first book, Chippewa Music (1910), are chants in the ritual of the Mide-wiwin Society (the Great Medicine Lodge) — what in our own civilized world would be called a religious and fraternal organization somewhat resembling Freemasonry, possibly originally the organization of the tribe’s medicine men. Societies of this sort are now dying out, and in much of the North American Indian world being replaced by the peyote cult. At one time they flourished; many were intertribal, sometimes over a wide area. Less disturbing than the apocalyptic movements like the Ghost Dance religion, they served the same purpose without getting the Indian into so much trouble. That is, they provided cohesion and consolation, and protected and sustained the Indian in his struggle to adjust to the gradually all-enveloping white civilization. Since Miss Densmore always roots each song in its social context, much of the Chippewa study is also one of the best studies of a nonaggressive intratribal cult society.

In 1915, when she visited the Teton Sioux, the Plains Indians, although defeated and broken, still kept much of their culture intact. There were still plenty of men who remembered the days of the buffalo hunt, and many of the great war chiefs were still alive. The memory of the bitter resistance to the white conquest of the Plains was a living thing to every member of the tribe. Furthermore, the Sun Dance religion, an intertribal movement which the Indian Bureau was attempting, unsuccessfully, to suppress, was still flourishing. It is extraordinary that Miss Densmore, a white woman visiting the tribe under the auspices of the government, was able to collect so much material. Not only was she able to gather some thirty-two Sun Dance songs, but she presents them in a context which is still one of the best studies of the Sun Dance religion. She also gives many songs of the dream societies, of the Sacred Bundles, of personal dreams, which, taken together — song and context — probably give more of the significance of these aspects of Plains Indian culture than anything else ever written on the subject.

Not all of her studies are of still flourishing tribes. She has also sought out tribes represented by two or three families of aged people who still treasured a few fragments of melody which they no longer understood.

Musical form can weather amazingly well the social vicissitudes to which it may be exposed and may survive relatively intact in a fundamentally different cultural setting, or from a bygone age, charged with new life and meaning. Music is one of the most persistent culture elements to be found in primitive societies and the most resistant to change. By and large, Western European music shows far more influence stemming from the American Indian (slight in bulk as that actually is) than his music has accepted from us. Not only is music, song — and with it of course, but sometimes to a lesser degree, the words of the lyric, the poetry — unusually persistent and resistant, but of all cultural intangibles it lends itself most to fairly exact record and quantitative analysis and comparison. However fragmentary, nothing else can give us comparable insight into alien and past modes of life. For instance, nothing gives a sense of historical presence like the words and music, surviving from over half a millennium in the Appalachian Mountain communities, of the ballads of their medieval Scottish ancestors.

The important thing about this half century of careful field work is that Miss Densmore has revealed as clearly as anyone ever has the sources of song in the religious and secular experience of primitive society. A great deal of theory has been written on this subject, but outside of work done by or under the inspiration of Erich Maria von Hornbostel in Germany, too little has been done in the field. No one has accumulated so much living data — the actual substance of song itself — from which it is possible to draw theoretical conclusions and also watch many practical conclusions draw themselves. I should add that Miss Densmore’s work is incomparably better than the collections of Natalie Curtis Burlin, Theodore Baker, and others which greatly influenced composers like Busoni and MacDowell in the early years of this century.

I think the easiest way to sum up Miss Densmore’s conclusions is to say that songs, like other things which we call works of art, occupy in American Indian society a position somewhat like the sacraments and sacramentals of the so-called higher religions. That is, the Indian poet is not only a prophet. Poetry or song does not only play a vatic role in the society, but is itself a numinous thing. The work of art is holy, in Rudolf Otto’s sense — an object of supernatural awe, and as such an important instrument in the control of reality on the highest plane. This, of course, is not an uncommon aesthetic theory, but it is something else again to see it concretely demonstrated by an immense mass of evidence gathered in the field.

Of course, there are those who would not choose, on aprioristic or temperamental grounds, to accept such an extreme conclusion from the evidence. Even so, the crucial importance of song, and hence of the work of art, as the very link of significant life itself, of the individual to his society, of the individual to his human and nonhuman environment, is certainly patent.
It is very significant that the texts of almost all these songs are not only extremely simple, but that most of them are pure poems of sensibility resembling nothing so much as classical Japanese poetry or Mallarmé and certain other modern French and American poets, notably some of the Imagists at their best. It is possible, of course, to say that Miss Densmore greatly simplifies the poem by cutting out repetitions and nonsense vocables. But the Japanese poetry which we think of as so extremely compact on the printed page is similarly sung in extended fashion. Certainly the Indian singer does not feel that he is dulling the poignancy of the transcendental awareness of reality which he is communicating by musical elaboration, but rather the reverse. And, if the song is sung, or the record is available, it is immediately apparent that this elaboration is insistence, not diffusion.

The resemblance to Japanese poetry is indeed startling, particularly in the Chippewa songs. This is not due to the influence of Amy Lowell and other free-verse translators on Miss Densmore. On the contrary, she worked with the Chippewa many years before such Japanese translations and their imitations in modern American verse came into existence. As the years have gone by she has moved on to tribes which do not show the same kind of resemblances either in music or in lyric, for instance the Papago, and this is made sufficiently obvious in the translations. Still, certain things remain. She has analyzed exhaustively the musical constants and variants of Indian song. Each new work in an appendix sums up and compares all past collections with the one at hand.

Are there similar constants in the lyric? I think there are. Western European man characteristically regards himself not only as an independent entity in a fundamentally hostile environment but as the relatively permanent factor in a perishing world and the sole source in it of value. Most Western European poetry is, even in its erotic lyric — “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” — concerned with the tragedy of the waste of value in a world of fact. There is nothing of this in American Indian poetry. The intense aesthetic realization which precedes the poem is a realization of identity with a beneficent environment. Often this is focused in a dream or vision, waking or sleeping, after long lonely fast and vigil in the forest or desert. An aspect of the environment, an animal or a natural object or force, appears to the Indian, waiting in a trance state, and gives him the song, which remains his most precious possession and the pivot of his life forever after. As such, however simple, these songs always express mutual acceptance and approval of the self and the other, focused but also generalized, amounting to identification. In other words, the holy is not the Judeo-Protestant “utterly other” — a term of Otto’s — but the utterly same. They also express the accompanying emotional state — a feeling of extraordinarily intense hyperesthesia, concentration of all faculties in one realization, and the emotional tone of the realization itself — what we call transfiguration and transcendence — the kind of general sacramentalism we identify with St. Francis’s Canticles and certain poems of Wordsworth or Francis Jammes.

It is apparent that the creation of song or poetry, “the creative act,” as we say today, occupies a place in American Indian culture similar to what may be called, roughly, yogi practices of concentration and nervous-system gymnastics in the cultures of India and the Far East. This is the identifying link. The brief poems of Hitomaro or Basho, or the lengthy reveries of Su Tung P’o, as a matter of fact, share the same attitude toward the creative process and produce a product essentially similar.

It is possible to hold that this is a saner and more civilized approach to life than that commonly exercised by Western man. At least, American Indian song operates, at its best, on the highest possible cultural level: it “enhances life values” at least to the degree attempted by our own most ambitious works of art. In a period when life values of all sorts are seriously threatened, it is not profitable to ignore it.

Uncollected Poems (11): Airplane Poems 1980-1992

(first set)

1
circles on the earth
– somewhere in Kansas –
what do they mean?
I take the circular form to mark
the coming of Messiah
day by day

– but not in Kansas

2
I am so crazy for you
Captain Star
your talk is like my radio
you listen
badly
We walk under the lightning
Captain
& strike it
rich & crazy
This song will bring you to the top

3
he struggles with a song
he can’t dislodge
– or can he? –
“I was alive & stupid
“like your eyes
“sweet angel
“rock my boat
“this is the long road to
“satisfaction

4
the earth of Kansas
is America’s
enduring work of art


(2nd set)

1 A HASID FROM BELZ

with whom I speak
high in the DC-10
& waiting at the door of
Men’s Room
– you from Brooklyn
– yeah
– how many Jews in San Diego
I dunno
can’t count them
lots of Jews

2
he pulls the words from me
my grandfather
a hasid at the court in Radzymin
not Rizhyn
& he knows
the smile acknowledges the fact
– the fact is senseless –
o Belz of Kafka
Belz of Jiri Langer
golden nights

3
now the plane is over Iowa
it blurs
the oranges of California
like the stars in Belz


(3rd set)

ACROSS THE AISLE
Airplane Voices

1
they stopped us
irridem
in spanish
“we’re not tourists
“we’re not here to get drunk”
we stayed in mexico
things happened
it was mexican territory
yours or mine

2
they speak more german than us
they speak german with everybody
he doesn’t speak at all
he mixes all languages
he speaks german with the kids
so many languages
be careful!


(4th set)

1
collar into knot
knot into back of throat
& up through eye

by which to tie you into portions
killing what was left
& what was left of you

ATTENTION do not move the zone
from here to there!

2
each time we strike the cloud
the cloud strikes back

we do the tumble down
& feel our stomachs sliding

softly, into our throats


3 O'HARE FIELD/CHICAGO
The Return

trucks move past planes
& planes past trucks
men stand in orange jackets
stare off into space

inside the cabin
rows of sailor hats & coats

another journey home
to san diego

[These poems were recovered, along with numerous others, for a volume of Uncollected Poems to be published by Mark Weiss and Junction Press.]

Pierre Joris: From Notes Towards a Nomadics Manifesto (Part One)

[The following is an earlier version of a manifesto that can be found in extended form in Joris’s groundbreaking collection, A Nomad Poetics: Essays, published by & still readily available from Wesleyan University Press. Its relevance to our ongoing project on “outsider poetry” should be apparent.]

"nomads-by-choice in the welfare of settled rings"
Allen Fisher, Dispossession & Cure

The days of anything static - form, content, state - are over. The past century has shown that anything not involved in continuous transformation hardens and dies. All revolutions have done just that: those that tried to deal with the state as much as those that tried to deal with the state of poetry.
. A nomadic poetics is a war machine, always on the move, always changing, morphing,moving through languages, cultures, terrains, times without stopping. Refuelling halts are called poases, they last a night or a day, the time of a poem, & then move on. The sufi poets spoke of mawqif - we will come back to this.
. A nomadic poetics needs mindfulness. In & of the drift (dérive) there is no at-home-ness here but only an ever more displaced drifting. The fallacy would be to think of language as at-home-ness while "all else" drifts, because for language to be accurate to the condition of nomadicty, it too has to be drifting, to be "on the way" as Celan puts it.

[Think through Heidegger's Abgeschiedenheit, apartness as the free domain or land where such nomadic drifting takes place. But that domain is always here & not somewhere else. It is the smooth space in D&G that deterritorializes all striated spaces.]

nomadics: the poet as comet. See Hölderlin's "In lovely blue" & thus to escape the metaphor of sun, center, etc.

10/25/94 If the mind is only the body's invisibility (Merleau-Ponty) then the poem is merely the unreadability, the non-transparency, the opaqueness of that mind. An opacity grounded in the materiality of language as much / if not more than in the viscosity of psyche. A turbulent opacity -not a monumental, laminary , marble-or-granite opaqueness.

Robin Blaser: "The muse requires a politics
where the tongue meets
In the thick of it
the sour sweat." [Cups, 1960]

If Empedoklean terms or reveries may be taken as valid, then the two major modes of poesis would also involve love (eros) & strife (nike). To see the poetics of the century thus would divide them between, say, Pound/nike and Duncan/eros. But somewhere else - here, now, later & beyond this fin-de-siècle identikit - eros & nike are both less & more than self-sufficient modes, are both simply that tiny deviation from equilibrium, stasis that makes movement, i.e. life, i.e. poetry, possible: they are the clinamen, thus in a poem from the early eighties:

One moment earlier
something had deviated
moving
______obliquely.
This is local fortuity
the clinamen exactly
& more exactly
deviation from equilibrium
the incline
______the streak of lightning
bars the clouds
immediately a shape happens
roughly (&) circular no need for more
a little hole around which people gather like bees
a dead body at center
a world where accident is rule

& now these five points:

1) that language has always to do with the other, in fact, for the writer (l'écrivant) is the other.

2) that there is no single other, there are only a multitude of them - plurality; even multitudes of different multitudes - hetero-pluralities.

3) language others itself always again -> nomadic writing is always "the practice of outside"; writing as nomadic practice -on the move from one other to another other.

[3a: the critic/theorist: the dog that barks as the caravan passes]

4) poetry is always, then, "on the way" -- yes, on the road, as Kerouac has it here in these States where, as Sun Ra has it, "space is the place." It is also unterwegs, (underway) as Celan writes, where I hear the unter also as under the Weg, the way. (& pace, the Schwarzwalder's Holzwege!),

underway

+

under the way

a between-ness as essential nomadic condition, thus always a moving forward, a reaching, a tending. (I hear the need for both tension & tenderness). & an absence of rest, always a becoming, a line-of-flight [as against Being, which is always a veing-toward-death, stillness].

[4a: insert here a critique of Buddhism, of any spiritualism as quietism -- certainly Euro-Am adaptations of Buddhism are transcendental -- while only a truly immanent spirituality is viable. cf Janus]

5: Celan: "Reality is not. It has to be searched for and won." Replace "reality" with "poetry" or "millennium."

That is the fin mot, last words, toward the fin-de-siècle, or a poetics thereof. (Celan's phrase is the quest, as it includes the critique of the "society of the spectacle" -- & of the whole specular natures of our mis-takes on the real.)

We can still use notions such as Burroughs "astronaut of inner space," or Dorn's "inside real and outsidereal," though we must be aware that for the nomad-poet, the NOET, even those distinctions have to be abolished. There is no difference between inside & outside at the poem's warp speed. We can still use Olson's statement that the need is to move, instanter, on -- but no Interzone for us, no Idaho, in or out, no Gloucester hankering for a more perfect past.

NOET: NO stands for play, for no-saying & guerrilla war techniques, for gNOsis & NOetics. ET stands for etcetera, the always ongoing process, the no closure: it stands for ExtraTerritorial, for the continuous state of being outside (not a margin that would be always definable as the margin of something called the real (territory). ET stands for Electronic Terrain, where the poem composes, recomposes, decomposes before your eyes, de- & re-territorializing at will or chance -- without there being the ability to tell which of those two determinants it is.

(The WE here is not-I, or if you prefer, the Wild East)

As far as moral or social values are concerned, total miscegenation is the only goal we believe in. Purity is the root of all evil.

We will make good use use Nate Mackey's sense of a DISCREPANT ENGAGEMENT.

From Pound we will retain that a poem has to include history. And we will add that a poem and its poet are included in history, which he forgot.

We will keep all of Valère Novarina's theatre for its ludic nomadology of names that dissolves character into a fluidity...

We will keep Robert Kelly's notion of "ta'wil of the first line," the poem as nomadic/ rhizomatic extension of some given or found beginning, but a ta'wil reduced to immanence, to a "writing through." As he tells it otherwise in A MY NAME (RA 185) "This chant was my first news of the Great Trade Route along which scarce and isolate merchant-poet-nomads carried goods from tribe to tribe, over the mountains and under the sun, bringing the only news."

We will reread Melvin Tolson's The Harlem Gallery & ponder it's "bifacial" multiphasic poet Hideho Heights & ponder Tolson's statement on the poet's place, a statement which still startles: "The most violent revolution in the world is taking place -- not in Russia, not in China, but in American poetry."

We will remain breathless before Gertrude Stein’s nomadic syntax, an endless trace multistepping through this century’s desert geography of anybody.
We will meditate on Henri Michaux's drawing-poems, scribe of the post- semantic nomadic condition which is ours.

We will meditate on Henri Michaux's drawing-poems, scribe of the post-semantic nomadic condition, which is ours.

We will always again read & learn from Kateb Yacine’s multiple life-long text Nedjma, his Nedjma metamorphosed into poems proses plays, and meditate on that major Maghrebian figure Kateb brought back into the people’s consciousness — La Kahina, the Berber nomad warrior queen who fought the first post-Roman wave of imperialist invaders, the Islamic armies of Sidi Oqba.

Of Rothenberg's work we will keep everything, because his immigrant/emigrant nomadology of translation, poetry-making, anthologizing is an exemplary process at this end of the century.

We will attend to Don Byrd's Nomad Encyclopedia, he'll lead us through what he calls the "mesocosm -- the dense locale of the common, that is absorbed by the exaggeration of symbolism, on the one hand, and by mere biology, on the other."

We will reread Maurice Blanchot again and again & think through, among other things, the following of his reflections on the idea of exile and exodus as a legitimate movement: "If Judaism is destined to take on meaning for us, it is indeed by showing that, at whatever time, one must be ready to set out, because to go out (to step outside) is the exigency from which one cannot escape if one wants to maintain the possibility of a just relation. The exigency of uprooting; the affirmation of nomadic truth. In this Judaism stands in contrast to paganism (all paganism.) To be pagan is to be fixed, to plant oneself in the earth, as it were, to establish oneself through a pact with the permanence that authorizes sojourn and is certified by certainty in the land. Nomadism answers to a relation that possession cannot satisfy."

Right here 78 pages of commentaries on the century have been deleted to be summed up now:

From the 20C we will retain everything -- in memory. We will forget nothing and we will forgive nothing.

We will also remember that the twentieth century was the tail wagged by the nineteenth century dog.

[to be continued]