Monads

This is how I use (waste) my time on the bus when I am not sleeping: I was reading the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the German philosopher Leibniz, a book called The Fold Leibniz and the Baroque. It is a difficult book, and my mind wandered to what I remembered of Leibniz' Monadology, where, famously, "monads have no windows--" a cryptic remark about the absolute isolation of each thing from every other thing. So, thinking about these things, I composed in my head a short, rather Celanesque poem:

Monad
what is
sole?

windowless
mirrored only
reflected folds
of velvet curtains
silken cushions

your hut 
on endless plains

windblown

light snow
whitening
the south sides
of furrows
& ruts

oblivious
to the cold

you

When I arrived at the bus stop at Westlake, I rushed into Pacific Place, which I knew was open even if the shops weren't, sat at a table, and wrote it down so that it wouldn't disappear like a dream as I became involved in the business of the day. This reminded me of Derrida talking about Socrates' distrust of writing because it weakened the mind by removing the necessity of remembering . . .

A Sentence

I have let this blog lapse. I have been so busy writing the instructor materials for my database book, that I have had little time or energy for anything else. At last, I am nearing the end of that task. My web site keeps getting redesigned in my mind, but, for it too, I have had little time.

I am going to return to this blog, but for now I am going to abandon any larger plans about its purpose and topics. I will just write.

Currently, this late November evening, with small patches of white hiding in the shadows from rains that have melted all the other pre-thanksgiving snows, I have a desire to write a sentence, a complex sentence, a labyrinth, really, of phrases and clauses in which the unwary reader can wander lost in a sea of particulars,the night rain rattling on the black of the window panes, any trace of the subject and verb long lost, hidden away like the orphan snow under a dripping eve; a sentence written, that is to say, in the manner of the late Henry James, in novels like the Wings of the Dove, in which any hint of an idea, any taint, any stain of a philosophical nature, dissolves into the mystery of the immediate; a sentence, furthermore, which will not fit into a tweet, which any editor would cut with an indignant stroke of a pen, and which most modern readers, if the term can be applied, will find unreadable.

Inger Christensen

Inger Christensen has what I would call a "structural imagination." She--like a few others such as Louis Zukofsky and Ronald Johnson--likes to create elaborate structures, complex verbal cathedrals or temples within which she can place her quiet hymns.

Christensen is a Danish poet, famous in Europe for her experimentations, but like most European poets, unknown here. She died in 2009.

I came across her through a translation of part of her Alphabet in Volume two of Poems for the Millennium edited by Rothenberg and Joris. It struck me as an incredibly beautiful hymn to existence. I went to Amazon and purchased a copy. This is the beginning of the section for the letter L:

life, the air we inhale exists
a lightness in it all, a likeness in it all
an equation, an open and transferable expression
in it all, and as tree after tree foams up in
early summer, a passion, passion in it all

[this from the translation by Susanna Nied, New Directions, 2000]

Each section of Alphabet keys on a letter A through N. The length of each section is determined by the Fibonacci sequence in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers. The poem is not only a great hymn to existence, but a plea for existence. As she notes not only trees and kingfishers but, "The atom bomb exists," "the hydrogen bomb exists" as do war and pollution and poverty.

I have also read her it, another massive and complex architecture within which swells a hymn to creation.

It. That's it. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond

[Also translated by Susanna Nied, with an introduction by Anne Carson--in interesting poet and translator in her own right]

I love the "structural imagination" of her poems, the creation of new forms and verbal games. I actually believe such structures enhance and enrich poetry, but that is a discussion for another day. Even more I love the depth of her humanity and her sense of the beauty and mystery in the world around her.

Paul Celan

A poem should resist meaning. It should stand immutable and irreducible, impossible to decompose into a series of propositions and statements. Nobody writes poems that resist meaning more than the German Poet Paul Celan, and yet for all that, they convey depth and power that is unmatched by other poets.

For the last two or three years I have been studying the poetry of Celan, particularly his later poetry. Paul Celan was born to Jewish parents in Romaina. During World War Two he was detained in a Nazi labor camp. His parents died in another camp. After the war he found his way to Paris, where, though fluent in many languages, he continued to write poems in German--the language of his mother, but also the language of the Nazi's that killed her. His early poetry fit into the European surrealist movement. His most popular poem, "Todesfuge--Death Fugue" is in this vein. But in his later years, he started stripping away artifice. His poetry became more compressed and impenetrable, but still conveyed some essential emotion just beyond articulation. It is the later poetry that interests me most.

Here is a complete poem (my translation, though heavily dependent on various cribs):

in the rivers north of the future
I cast out that net, which you,
hesitantly, weight
with stone written shadows

Although it resists meaning, one could still write volumes on this. The poem conflates time and space. What is it that the I is fishing for? Who is the "I", and who is the you? What do the stone shadows write?

Here are a couple of more passages that stir me--not complete poems:

something rushes through us
the first
of the world's last wings

And

Island meadow
you,
fogged in
with hope

Celan fought depression and paranoia most of his life. He committed suicide by drowning himself in Seine in 1970.

Note: the photo comes from Wikipedia

Louis Zukofsky

The web site is in stasis while I rethink my design. But I decided I will try to make this blog more active. I intend to post brief reviews of some of my favorite and lesser known poets. I will start with a major influence, Louis Zukofsky.


I wrote my master's thesis on Louis Zukofsky's "A", or more precisely I wrote my master's thesis on "A"-21, an eccentric translation of Plautus's Rudens that incorporates a certain echolalia with the original Latin and manages to blend in a fair amount of Shakespeare as well. When I wrote my thesis very few knew of Zukofsky outside of a few poets. I came across him following a quote from Ezra Pound who dedicated his "Guide to Kulture" to him and Basil Bunting, "two voices struggling in the wilderness."

I found his book "ALL the shorter Poems" and skimmed through it. At first I wasn't impressed, but a few days later I had a dream in which I had opened the book and found beauties. The next day I opened the book again and there were indeed beauties there. Later that week I went to the local bookstore and ordered a copy of his newly printed epic called "A".

Zukofsky is often called a poet's poet, or sometimes even the poet's poet's poet. I would argue that there is no in the twentieth century--not even Ezra Pound--from whom one can learn more about the craft and structure of verse. In his poems you will find both masterful traditional verse forms and radical experimentation. I especially learned from his experiments with counting words per line rather than syllabi or feet. "A"-22 and "A"-23 are still breathtaking in their subtle audacity.

If Zukofsky's poetry was only about structure and form, it would not deserve any wider audience. But there is a deep humanity and compassion there. "A" at 800 plus pages in 24 sections, took a lifetime to complete. In the beginning the poet is brash, a progressive who explores the possibilities of social justice through communism. But, as time progresses, through world war two, Korea and Vietnam, as the world armed itself with nuclear weapons, Zukofsky increasingly countered with a nuclear deterrent of his own--the nuclear family, his wife Celia and his son Paul. In the end love may not triumph, but it does preserve what is still of value in the world.

Book Stores

I hate bookstores. I say this as someone whose palms sweat whenever he encounters a new bookstore, someone who has spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars in bookstores all across the country. What I hate about bookstores is the sense of futility they give me. So many books that are on shelves for a couple of months and then disappear forever into overstock warehouses or landfills. Any really good work is likely to be overwhelmed and lost in the sheer volume of what is published.

I also hate how authors I have followed for decades increasingly fall off the shelves to be replaced by newer, flashier books. (I am not talking about literary greats here, just good solid authors, who consistently wrote good stories . The situation is even worse with poets. Even excellent or great poets have very little shelf life.) I hate that I want to add my own books to that mass of print, and can't imagine that they would suffer any better fate.

I realize that almost everything that has been printed is available at Amazon or somewhere on-line. But it is not the same experience. When I go into a bookstore I don't know what I want. I browse, opening books, touching them, looking at the typeface, reading random passages. I go the poetry sections looking for old friends and new. I go to the philosophy section to see what they have (usually not much), then I browse the fiction and science fiction areas. My selections are tactile and visual as much as intellectual.

I hate bookstores. The Elliot Bay bookstore that used to be in Pioneer square downtown has just reopened on Capital Hill near where I work. I will show my hatred by not spending more than 2 or 3 hours there next week.

Alethe

Philosophical speculations from reading Heidegger's 1934 lectures on logic:
A tree--
why is it always a tree? Are trees hard wired into us as symbols of nature? Would that be true of people who live in a mostly treeless region? And what tree? I usually imagine a maple with broad limbs and green fluttering leaves, but sometimes I imagine a pine with blue clusters of needles. Would someone in the tropics imagine a palm tree or a mahogany? --

All part of the point, really. A tree, any tree, does not exist for our purposes. It is not there to provide us shade (though it may do so on an August day). It is not there to scrub carbon dioxide from the air, though we may be grateful that it does. It is not there to provide us lumber for our patios, though, sadly, only then do we value it by assigning it a price.

Its only purpose is to be itself, a tree, separate from any of our purposes. That is the root--pun intended-- of what Heidegger means by Alethe, the Greek word for truth which means "unhidden" or "not forgotten." Truth is the unconcealed. When we allow the tree, the broad flat leaves of the maple filtering sunlight, to present itself as itself, to stand, as it were, in the clearing, only then do we see the truth of it, the mystery. Only then do we encounter it in its "uncanny" otherness. Only then do we experience the sacred.