Mind-degradable Manifesto
I’ve always
wondered what it would feel like to issue a manifesto like in the good old
days, but any such assertion nowadays always seems to splinter into its
ambiguities, leaving the motivating impulse unmanifest. The burden of
poetic process is how easily it spoils even the finest dogma. However, if one
located a principle that exists outside as well as inside art, stating it would
not be a manifesto but a poignant observation.
Heroes of Mind-degradability
We’ve lost so many
of the greatest (re)thinkers of poetic possibility in recent years that it’s
important to keep reading out from their gifts and to rethink our own work in
relation to them. Powerful among these are certain poets whose work literary
critics and historians once doubted was poetry at all (deniers remain)—a
distinction not in itself limiting, as there are ample instances past and
present: Blake’s Milton
and Jerusalem had virtually no readers in his time. David
Antin and Jackson
Mac Low are especially on my mind here, along with Franz Kamin,
the latter by far the least known of the three. Their work was not based on
literary models but an exploration of principles that required a radical
revisioning of language. Some of these principles are hardly limited to
language art, narrowly defined.
It’s a curious
moment to be thinking about these matters as we awake daily to find out what
major mischief our country is falling into now. It takes a special effort of
mind to keep a focus—a double vision really—that both recognizes a terrifying
process underway and nevertheless stays tuned to an other vision of possible
being. Yet we return to this and related sites for what goes by the vexed name poetry—a
name in dispute from many sides and within itself, ranging from accusation to
Mental Warfare, Blake’s term for the crucial alternative to Corporeal Warfare.
Which of these represents the recurrent and newly resurgent Poetry Wars?
Poetry has always
excited antithetical passions, which pretty clearly attests to its fundamental
power, however little it figures in the consciousness of our society at large.
There’s the ever present question, which heats up at times like this, of how poetry
can have an effective social role or “be relevant,” and the discussion
reflected recently in social media shows that many think the issue can be
resolved by leaving behind one kind of poetry, say, Conceptual writing, and
embracing another, like a species of socially engaged writing. Often poets
still seem to believe in these abstract distinctions as what matters, that a
particular group or movement will make the difference, or that one approach or
theory will win the debate. There’s no escaping ideology and there’s no denying
the charge it carries. Yet when we look at powerful work it’s not so easy to
characterize its genre or social position; it might have taken the charged
issues into its language body and done something outside the categories we use
in order to think.
I’ve written about
Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) on
this site before in conjunction with John Cage, but I want to think of him now in the context of
a poetry of principle. We call him not only poet but composer,
performance artist, playwright, and in addition to the usual string of
identifiers we could add political activist, anarchist, experimentalist,
artist, and more. It’s hard not to use these abstract framing terms in our zeal
to represent intricate identity in so radical and influential a practitioner,
but he deserves better: we need to read him beyond what we already know. His
work is hard to encompass in categorial description because he was always
working on the outside of definition, even his own. Despite what some may think
encountering his work, or the poet’s often elaborate notational commentary, it
was not the product of concepts, rules and theory as such; he used strict
procedures to work through and test out theories and concepts connected to
philosophical issues that excited, preoccupied and perplexed him, and he
oriented them toward opportunities for unrepeatable solo and group performance,
which emphasized refined listening. His body of work is huge and, true to the
person, full of contradictory extremes with contrasting dynamics—e.g., the
systematic chance operations of Stanzas to Iris Lezak vis-à-vis what at
the time was an almost alarming intimacy in Odes to Iris; performance
“vocabularies” and processual thinking in the Light Poems, etc. At the
center of all this was a writing practice serving as full-scale pervasive life
practice. It was driven by a commitment akin to religious devotion yet without
dogma or even belief; in fact, it was simultaneously meditative, mantric,
proto-Buddhist, fiercely skeptical, politically activist, philosophical at
root, and intimately personal. He’s viewed as a forerunner of/influence on
Language poetry (a term he respectfully argued with) as well as Conceptual
writing, included in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing,
an invaluable and historically revisionist collection edited by Craig
Dworkin & Kenneth
Goldsmith (2011). You could say Mac Low contained multitudes including the
poetry wars in his own body electric, although he was too modest and thoughtful
to say a thing like that about himself. In my experience with him, he was
uncontentiously responsive to the work of others beyond genre or fashion.
Other frames
At 22 in NYC I met
Jackson at the same time as David Antin (along with Jerome
Rothenberg, Paul
Blackburn, Diane
di Prima, Diane
Wakoski, Armand
Schwerner, Allen
Ginsberg, Ed
Sanders, et al.) at Café Le Métro on 2nd Ave. where as a senior at
NYU editing the student magazine Apprentice (begun by Blackburn years
before) I would go most weeks to the readings. They fascinated and tormented
me. At 14 in Miami, Florida I had suddenly realized I was a poet the moment I
heard the mysterious and to me incomprehensible words, read aloud by a friend
late one night, “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time
future/And time future contained in time past…,” and years later I was still
carrying The Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens in my back pocket; so I
kept returning to Le Métro to find out why this also was poetry. It hit home
one day that its not seeming to be poetry was one of its actual powers.
Jackson had set up
a reading in which there was no apparent reader, as readers were spread out
through the ample audience and uttering fragmentary phrases in no discernable
pattern; it was eerie to me as I’d never conceived of such a thing. But not
only to me. A cop came in to inspect the place under orders from “City Hall” to
crack down on cafés as violators of the cabaret law, which required an
expensive license (out of range to coffee-serving establishments patronized by
indigent poets, some even sneaking in whiskey). I was standing in the back, all
seats already occupied, and happened to see the cop, obviously confused and
nervous amidst sourceless voices in unaccountably reverent quiet, go up to Moe,
the proprietor, and say, “I’m issuing you a citation!” “For what?” countered
Moe. “I don’t know but it ain’t right!”
Jackson wasn’t the
only enigma; David and others read texts that I found perplexing as well. After
all, I was spending the rest of my week reading the Metaphysical poets,
Chaucer, Beowulf, and the like. The turn came one day as I was walking
along Waverly Place and it suddenly hit me with startling force that I could no
longer deny that Jackson Mac Low and David Antin et. al. had changed everything
for me. Like that day in Le Métro, the chair where the poet sits was empty but
new sounds were everywhere. I was at a loss to say what it all meant but it no
longer mattered.
My story is not
particularly remarkable except as an instance of the way poetry can be powerful
in a certain frame, which is to say not only in the grand categories of
understanding and influence but in discretely important ways to oneself at a
given time and place. Beyond the “personal” but not beyond the experiential.
Poetry at different points has reoriented my sense of myself and what it means
to have a life work centered in questionable language. Poetry may be a life
accident waiting to happen and poets are probably born and made, trapped
and liberated by the prison-house/stormed-Bastille of language, and subject to
unanalyzed psychonautic insight. Whatever its possible social function it could
never not be the site where being sees what it is, or as Stevens wrote,
“The poem
of the mind in the act of finding/What will suffice….”
What sort of mind-action is the poem and what are the
implications?
The strong devotion
many of us still feel to Jackson Mac Low is due in part to an experience of his
readings and performances, which bespoke a path in poetry but also a way of
being grounded in listening. After performing with him or being present in a
performance we heard language differently, as materially different as going
from New York’s air to the Yucatan’s where you breathe the ocean at one moment
and a Mayan ruin at another. To listen was to be instructed. Jackson’s reading
did not strive for stylistic effect or attempt to persuade or impress but to
realize actual qualities of voiced language that require “the body itself—one’s
own ‘corpus’,” as Charles
Olson said in Proprioception, “the cavity of the body.” The
principle that drives this level of realization is hard to characterize but it
has to do with an actual power of the poetic that recreates the
reader/listener—creates not by way of a literary persona but an impersona,
a new and possible receptive intelligence inside one’s own body and mind. You
could describe it as momentarily getting free of one’s own identity just by
being fully present there in the performative language sounding in space.
Early on Mac Low
had the issue of getting beyond ego or the limitations of self, which had a
Buddhist and anarchist resonance, and it motivated the procedural work with
systematic chance operations. But he noticed that the self did not change much,
let alone disappear. In my view he accomplished what is most important in that
concern, namely, that by realizing an intention of the work to be itself
transformatively, the issue of self faded away or, rather, woke to a
species of non-duality by which self and non-self, poem and world, language and
mind are experienced as inseparable. His performance work as well as his
textual realizations took the powerful lessons of the procedural work into his
greatest reinvention of writing. I first became aware of this development in Bloomsday,
which we published at Station Hill Press in 1984, but it continued in a number
of works after that and found its fullest realization in Forties,
which Franz Kamin alerted me to as the “greatest Mac Low”; the first book was 20
Forties (Zasterle, 1999) and the final magnificent full edition edited by Anne
Tardos, 154 Forties (Copunterpath, 2012). What was so
startling and for me re-orienting was that the procedural work had transmuted
into an unheard of species of processual, intuitive, spontaneous textual
performativity. Jackson’s “language mind” now fully embodied the long-evolving
experience of his work. This helped me conceive what I was understanding as
principle—especially an axial principle of radical centering within language
and the voice. It’s self-organizing with a free-moving zero point, and “self”
discovers self-variance in response to the surround.
[Reposted from the full essay, which can be found at the Harriet
web site: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/04/poetry-in-principle/.]
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