IN EMPTY SPACE
where entrails entwine
with the cerebral
blossom,
I cast myself to stones,
they caught me
and ringed a sphere
with what I became.”
-Paul Celan
“All life long
you are unhanding,
unhanding and unhanding
what was handed you.
All life long
you throw out the line of life.
You throw out the line, stinging
up from your guts.”
-Gettit Lansing
I have come to believe that long time practices and the archives of poetry are the starter and mother of the fermentative material of all ensuing, intersecting and parallel poetries. The term “archive” here used instead of tradition to indicatee the poetries transmitted variously in oral poetries, in books and other mediums, and through the memory of poets and readers and listeners. In our thoughts of poetry. Archives enlivened by constant use, reference and renewal.
Susan Howe writes: “More and more I have a sense of being present at a point of absence where crossing centuries may prove to be like crossing languages. Soundwaves. It’s the difference between one stillness and another stillness. Even the “invisible” scotch tape I recently used… Leaves traces on paper….”
Charles Stein offers:.
“…For possibility the past (meaning our concrete past but also everything that’s other) continues to be alive. Once you’re no longer involved with accepting a particular cosmological or ontological framework in the way it insists upon itself, once you’ve just jiggled that a little bit, suddenly all kinds of possibilities turn out to be alive.”
These poets further develop the intuition of Ezra Pound “that all ages are contemporaneous.”
Poetry’s radiating possibilities may stay alive in us and be described with the paradigms, vocabulary and practices we know from alchemy. The term alchemy used here to include various practices that work with states of consciousness and transmutation. An alignment of poetry and alchemy is a longtime track of thought variously worked in a vast laboratory of poetry and conversation through time. My intuition now (it took a while to come with resolution to this) is that poets (in all their various ways) have developed a spectrum of practices that may adhere to alchemical /sympathetic transformations that result in manifold forms .(Not poet as alchemist, which is an overly confining definition and not responsible to poetry’s largeness (or alchemies specificities) The historical waves/ways of poetry (a domain/practice/ side by side/ inside of/ enmeshed with, encircling and sparking off of other manifestations and forms) encompasses, surrounds and interweaves any individual poet’s forms.
Do not the interactions of any human life provide intermingled, layered, sometimes chaotic phases of gestation, coagulation, distillation and calcination. Periods of fired fertility and potency? Durations of reception and taking in and alternately seasons of resistance, closure, and rest. Within the crucible, retort and still of the poet’s consciousness/ body/ may occur interactions of heating/distillation/ union/synthesis/separation.
Jennifer Phelps in an essay on poetry and alchemy writes: “The alchemical process, and often the various coniuntios, are repeated many times before the self moves into the next stage of development.”
Adam McLean, in his essay, “The Alchemical Vessel as Symbol of the Soul” reads alchemy’s practices, actions and states of being and presents these in language that is relevant to a consideration of how poetry is thought, received and transcribed. McLean writes: “We should come to see that symbols are actually patterns of energy. In an exoteric sense this is so, for obviously any symbol held in our consciousness is manifested as an electro-chemical plexus in the neuron net in our brain. However, esoterically on the deepest level, a symbol is the pattern of etheric energy underlying its various different forms.”
MacLean further suggests utilizing alchemical traditions in a revitalized, sequenced practice of meditation in which the crucible is a heated and receptive attitude of consciousness; the retort is a sealed, boundaried container to concentrate the forces within. The open still is a state of mind for distillation and drawing upon universal energies. MacLean’s procedure describes one alchemical path; there are other ways.
The concept of alchemy is insufficient when applied to poetry as its central and only condition and structure, however. Poetry’s self-renewing creation (conceived of as a diachronic activity and archive, not as singular manifestations) transgresses all known frameworks and metaphors for its complexity.
To further amplify this connection, I offer these statements and excerpts from poetry. Like Vallejo’s scattered opals there are just as many other writings.
“Alchemy is the science of becoming aware of the whole project in which we are being engaged.”
-Robert Kelly
“I can only say real happiness yields from the worlds of poems. And its practitioners are secret, sacred vessels to an ancient divinity.”
-John Wieners
“IN EMPTY SPACE
where entrails entwine
with the cerebral
blossom,
I cast myself to stones,
they caught me
and ringed a sphere
with what I became.”
-Paul Celan
“All life long
you are unhanding,
unhanding and unhanding
what was handed you.
All life long
you throw out the line of life.
You throw out the line, stinging
up from your guts.”
-Gettit Lansing
“Then again, maybe it does feel like fire—the blue core of it, not the theatrical orange crackling. I have spent a lot of time staring at this core in my own “dark chamber” and I can testify that it provides an excellent example of how blue gives away to darkness—and then how, without warning, the darkness grows up into a cone of light.”
-Maggie Nelson.
“Blake asks us to read the tragic events of the present with the additional “prophetic” scale of seeing beyond to possible conscious evolution of human beings. This requires singular acts of transformation inside the alchemical work. The “event” is not just a matter of changing political philosophy or poetic form, but an actual process of mind and being non-separate from reading, with its torsional uncertainties and challenges to “selfhood”—the hardened mind that chooses war over eros.”
-George Quasha
“One has the peculiar sense that the body is neither material nor spiritual. That it is the alembic itself. Any unity or disunity takes place there….the issue then is a meeting of the elementals and intelligence.”
-Robin Blaser
“It became clear to me then that the aim of alchemy is not any concrete conclusion but the process itself, that the notion of transformation that underlies the metaphor & practice is transformation at both the mental/spiritual level and the physical/body-in-the-world & it’s reverse, world-in-the-body level. Rimbaud’s “alchimie du verb of course is useful here too. One of the poet’s alchemical-analytical tools of the trade is etymology, the knowledge-process leads you back to the ur-matter of the word.”
-Pierre Joris
“…with proactive awareness. Poetry is alchemy, and I believe my job as poet is to be open and lucid as I go about living my life in order to maximize the raw material for subsequent poetic distillation.”
-Eileen Tabios
“Breathtaking black star/Press yourself into my depths.”
-Alice Notley
“… drying gold/mental/chrysanthemum”
-Alice Notley
“Poetry is onto-poietic: it forges being. ..it causes Being to come to apparency and, conversely, to fall under occultation.”
-Charles Stein
“Sometimes I sing beneath the surfaces of things, or under the leaf turned up in rain, or in the corner with dust under a window. These are hidden singing& have to do with themselves, sing themselves & the things that are singing. All the dimensions of the work can scarcely be visible at once…What I’m at here are the cryptodes, the hidden singings which go to sustain one…”
--Robert Kelly
“Sometimes, I can’t read my own work clearly because, instead, I am focused on pulling a thread through the muck of my mind. I want to fly, but I am wearing heavy earth shoes. All of my writing is an attempt to shake off the dirt, despite how rich that soil might be.”
-Brenda Coultas.
“You find your own information buried in your body. It is still alive until you are not.”
- Fanny Howe
“The major constant in my work is change because I am not working at a work poetry – I am working at myself!...I encapsulate myself, feel my portability, smallness in a field of purpose…”
- Julie Patton.
“…its planked and diamond/boards its twisted/guts of ashy smoke/ripe and passions/thrust at least/ I smell/ cause all alone/and smelling/ here I lie.”
-Joshua Beckman
“I like this job of keeping an eye out, an ear pricked, keeping the body primed by energy from above and below.”
-Tracie Morris
“ Only the heat of one’s own discarded elements can produce the proper fire.”
-John Clarke (From Feather to Iron)
“As the universe externalizes this knowledge, bodying it forth, the body occultates it in crypto-emotional vales where it must be quarried through a form of mindfulness, an admixing of memory and desire.”
-Peter O’Leary
“Moon! It is no use flying away,
so you go up in flames of scattered opals;
maybe you are my gypsy heart
Who wanders in the blue, crying verses…”
And
”The anger which breaks the soul into bodies,
the body into dissimilar organs
and the organ, into octave meditations;
the anger of the poor
Has one central fire against two craters.”
-Cesar Vallejo
“Me, I am concerned with a vaporous cognition of traces, of volts in angelic vocation, which pre-exists data, which ignites the ghostly electric mass of our wavering planetary kingdom, this world with its realms of magnesium and barley, with tis broke somatic crafts of vertigo and slaver, with its shivering sea water suns spiraling with conundrums.”
-Will Alexander.
One of the tasks of deep readers of the art is to discern the buried , misclassified, ignored, accrued, fomenting, branching poetic continuities. Not only to discern but to live within the interconnected shaped actualities that poetry across time and place may become. Instances of what George Quasha and Charles Stein describe separately and variously as Emergent Form.
I am heartened by report of the swift regeneration of the New Jersey Pine Barrens after a 2018 fire started at the crossroads of Lost Lane and Penn Place that burned 283 acres. Astonished that tight Pitch Pine cones only open in such heat and then drop seedlings in the ashy burnt ground which is the generative environment for their regrowth.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
-John Donne
As most poets and many readers and observers of the poetry realms are aware; the contemporary spheres of poetry are interconnected. Poets are often drawn to write of the works that they love; they are often drawn to the poets who write the work they love.
Two of the authors of the four books of poetry discussed in this essay are distant acquaintances with whom I’ve been in the same room perhaps twice. I feel I’ve come to know them through their work. Two of the authors are long time companions in poetry. While there is no pretense of a removed, evaluative consideration, the reading of the writing is a response and meditation outside of that which is known of a person.
Having read all four books after November 8th, 2017, I found that each possesses a quality, among other qualities, of offering consolation. The humane intelligences of the communication and how these sequences further poetry’s capacities are thrilling. All four books offer a transmission of an attitude and something handmade and specific in the manifestations of what poetry may realize and what poetry is coming to be. As to how these poems are realized within the alchemical framework just discussed, I would offer that I believe that all four of these books result from intentional self-workings.
At the outset, Bronze (Lunar Chandelier Collective, 2018), by Billie Chernicoff, is a set of 108 linked poems whorled around a poet’s encounter with the images and actualities of various bronze objects of antiquity (and before then and from everywhere). The poet tells us so in the afterward: “A friend left a book about ancient bronzes at my front door.”
Several poems in Bronze offer brief footnotes that directly describe objects such as: “Vessel inscribed with demons.” and “…Erlitou wine vessel, its mouth the shape of a drop.”
“Bell lying quiet/in the pelvic bowl,/burial at Shanxi.” is the distilled entirety of a reading of one of these objects and forms one whole poem. You can’t help but hear and perceive the imagiste here. Just one of several ancestor threads that wind with care through Bronze. Chernicoff’s attention brings forward with meditative phrasing that tells - without narrating- of the variety of forms and magnitude of this alloy’s globally mythic presence. For example:
Bronze, a primer:
Venus copper, Jupiter tin.
Tin the sky god,
the hurler.
And the Chinese myth of beginnings:
In the beginning were three pots,
Earth, heaven, and a woman.
She said this is my bed, this is my sky.
The poet informs us: “Born of the great flood/after which both crops/ and bronze flourished.” The poem wraps itself around this evocative, disintegrating, yet durable core. The poet’s noticing among a world of facts and presences makes Bronzes an act of recovery. Notice that Bronze is a conductive, reverberating material of musical instruments and bells.
Bronze discovers/offers/relates/suggests/reports a response to various bronze objects that are enigmatic in their history, worn in their surface, barely discernable as things inside the poem’s sequences. Chernicoff’s exploration spirals from out of observation of aspects of these bells, sculptures, urns and mirrors; rarely the whole history, for the poet is mindful of their unknowability.
This aspect of Bronze in its attitude toward historical objects and places is akin to the attitude in Gustaf Sobin’s essays. The critical term among those essays was “vestige” in the sense of reading fragmented material remains so as to imagine evanescent and lost histories more fully. As Sobin realized, vestiges focus our attention to the whole life of a slice, the partial, the shred, the disintegrated. Chernicoff’s poems are a rare relation.
Chernicoff is not alone, among the poets, with her attention to bronze. Homer wrote this, as translated by Charles Stein.
“Idomeneus stabbed Erymas in the mouth
with the pitiless bronze,
and the bronze spear passed clean through
beneath the brain
and split the white skull bone asunder;”
Keat’s “Through Bronze Lyre in tragic order go” fixes bronze as an archaic material that is a medium and transmitter. But, bronze continues to carry that very real tarnished quality of imperium, of battle. In his “Endymion” it’s one of the “sick metals.”
“It is the bronze that reminds us that age and dying, of death itself has its own stages of fulfillment…” wrote Rilke in a letter about Rodin’s sculpture, reading into the substance its qualities of changeable durability.
Elizabeth Bishop tried to look into an Etruscan bronze mirror and was deflected by the darkened opacity:
“one of those corroded old bronze mirrors…
(how did the ancients ever see/
anything in them?).”
Carl Sandburg attributes to Bronze a conductivity that the poet listens through: “Yser, “… his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet.”
Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman” enlivens the French bronze sculpture of Peter the Great positioned in St. Petersburg. Bronze as flesh.
Hesiod’s Theogony gives account that in the “Bronze Age”…” Their only occupation was working with Bronze”. This view of bronze attests to an obsessive human compulsion to turn any material to instruments for war.
Among other effects, Chernicoff’s Bronze steadily layers the detailing of uses without insisting or defining. She follows the stages of change and creation.
Dragon, fire it up!
Wood and water
hiss skyward.
From such clouds
emerge the lost knife,
cup, earring, bell…
The word “lost” here a wise insertion, a reminder that these old things that we covet and dig for and dive for and look at in a museum are someone’s lost something. The things we ourselves may hide or drop or lose in grief and fear and on the run if the circumstance were such. I feel this is a durable gift these poems offer: a reminder of what things have been, are, and could be. A gesture to the invisibles who made and treasured these things.
A realization of how a substance may be a medium for poetry.
the cracks themselves,
truthful mouths,
bronze people who fight,
burn, and speak for you.
Chernicoff approaches bronze with a fluid approach that circulates language in relation to an object’s uses correspondences, yet she never encases the thing or insistently tells. Every poem contains diversions, pauses, an indrawn breath, switches. Phrasing creates a measure and experience of time. Therefore, a reader is drawn closely into the object as in the lines: “Inside bronze is of course/a rose, a dark perfume/”
and
“verdigris, even by moonlight/a lovely toxic green/holding a green torch,/green lotus, green book/…”
Here, the dark green smell of it is brought to our senses. It’s the tarnish and murk of bronze the poet gets up close with.
“Or there is nothing,/you can’t feel the sides. You breathe on the cusp/of the vast dark alone.”
With these two lines the secret underside of Bronze is fully put forth. A correspondence which is also signaled with the magic line:
“ I hardly know this vessel/ after all this time,…”
“Not the bronze but its mind.” proposes that the poem has written itself beyond a meditation on a set of objects.
I believe that the cusp, the vast dark is the composing, writing, receiving consciousness. The vessel that Chernicoff approaches and sees and senses: “In this mirror/you must bend down to look into…” and “This flame of speech.” Poetry with its magnetic force contends with objects, materiality, substances, language itself: “”You pull me down into your arms/you heavy old things,/you heavy old grave things.”
The poet, then, will “examine the cracks/and edges of things…” as “words as extrusions,/scraps, pure murk.” Chernicoff takes on the weight of words that- as bronze is- are incised, melted down, worn, reused.
“Thousands of nouns” is the copiousness of language - if you’re open to it- that the poem revels in and reveals as if the English language were an archaeology. “Anaphor, semaphore, athenor, amphora.” “cassowary”, “plumassier” are signs as sculpted as a bronze . Sinuously and wittily, Chernicoff reverses and substitutes and offers word play and remainders of old meanings.
“She brings you to a Sacred Place” Chernicoff writes. This she who haunts Bronze as a presiding presence is the force I sense the poet turns to at the cusp of the dark vast and the bright rim. As “undoer of knots”. A juncture in the composition where the old solidity of the bronzes weigh and the thingness of language feels like it freights poetry. Who takes the poem from its premise to unknown premises. A spirit that moves around this poem and whose energy is distilled from the poem’s work.“Of unknown origin” …“the one you’ve been waiting for” heralds her. “How old is she?” is asked and answered: “but her fourth hand, open,/holds the thing we can’t see.” “A woman set something afloat,/that’s all I know.”
A line that transmutes this material – poesis- is “the dissolution of bronze”. They say bronze can never be melted to its exact constituent alloys. Susan Howe writes “poetry is language stripped to its untranslatability.” They say most of the old bronze stuff has been melted down for other forms.
“if bronze were transparent,
if anything were,
you’d see
It’s raining into us.”
Might the” anything” be poetry “raining into us? In Bronze a relation to this ancient material is the undercurrent that flows through the poem without a limiting definition as to what that relation is.
We may have to continue to look for that ourselves.
Bronze generously allows for the effect of the reader’s exchange with the poems: “There is evidence of time and timelessness,
you decide.”
A lyric that is freshly formed and increasingly extensive in abstractions and utterance, I Love it Though (Nightboat Books, 2017) by Ali Warren, exemplifies the modulated, textured, unexpected shifts of this current in modern lyricism. I love it Though shows in its tone, tune, vibe, use of stops and compressed utterance and impression that Warren has read Alice Notley but also Eileen Myles and Jennifer Moxley and Anselm Berrigan; but also John Wieners and John Godfrey and Rae Armantrout. Clark Coolidge and Jack Kimball and the works of a whole set of West Coast poet comrades. These affiliations float over I Love it Though as a network of language styles, idioms, codes and permissions. I believe Warren talks to and back to this active archive of poetry. The larger impulse and most focused of her energies is directed, I believe, to daringly furthering how the lyric may tangle with and engage (as they say) the realms of early 21st century experience.
In the same possible world
in which I txt my boss
A poem may include the utterly wise line: the sun I think will heal everything.
One feels that Warren rows her boat out over the immense waters of poetic possibility with courage and liberty but also with a high level of control that dips in yet shapes within a measure and thoughtful selectivity as to what to draw in to the poem’s circumference.
I wish I could write a song
to make the world
yield
as desire can never perish
blind in the rush of weeds
The reader accompanies the mind that composes with amazement at the audacity of the poem’s encompassing topicality and breadth and depth of vectors that compactly fold together.
…while container ships brim
and caps and bergs
slope across the slog
The words encompassing and breadth used with consideration to the enormity of sources now at the disposal of poets. Among the wildness of sources, the syncopation found in I Love it Though is uniquely Warren’s own and which is in vivid relation to the English language lyric and metaphysical poetic.
On the way to Iowa City
to see my first sumac and coming to know
as if in revelation instead of simple clarity
The poems offer various, unusual, considered and unexpected occurrences of English language words of an older provenance and usage history:
and of all the gifts I sing
intent for intent
with garlands & candelabras
with laurel branches & ox-heads.
These old words give textured sound and points of intermission and entrance to these poem’s signification, association, and reverberation. One device, old as the hills and just as durable is an alliterative echo with its Shakespearian echo mixed in with a hard eye for 21st century capitol:
who harks here
against misery against
private diminishment…
As with flashing lights on a freeway at dusk, a reader senses in this body of writing, distant and close unconfined presences.
call the operators
to open pathways
to vessels which gleam
This last line slyly alludes to the music and sinister image of twilight’s last gleaming, of amber waves of grain. There’s a pop song insouciance to I Love it So that provides a romantic, noir tonality and contemporary gleam. A conveyed intense response to languages of the extended moment and intention to go among the flux
to harness the force
of a thousand layings on
a gaping mouth
of no market purpose
walking blind
out into the road
Warren offers a sense of language as casual, knowing, linked and yet also constrained. Conditioned by social rules that prohibit ecstatic expression, romantic effusion.
yanking half-held tongues
and dangerous pronouns
the moon isn’t it suddenly there.
Warren takes a wise stand on information and how a world of experience and sensation translated into data may block “that thing” and all that thing’s potentials:
Inertia for those skeptics
in the building
Who think of the unknown
as hemorrhage-quick stop
that thing from surfacing
The poet swings from selectivity and control to a giving over, a surrender to the instant of the encounter.
I guide my hand through
an absurd and sticky
habit whose force
an inflatable estate
Among the lobate plains.
I am persuaded by Warren’s poetic dictum: the wisest person I know – the ocean. As it Comes from lived proximity and contains a sustained ironic, understated despair at the anthro in the Anthropocene.
Ultimately, with I love it Though, Warren finds and evokes a moving, fluid, yet discernable poetic ground in the “lilting wilting middle/where an outside used to be.”
It is with a happiness as at the onset of a longed for journey, that I take up the poetry of Elizabeth Robinson. This most enigmatic and singular of poetries is in a line of affiliation with Emily Dickinson. The metaphysical, querying, elusively physical perceiving Dickinson.
Here are two quotations from Robinson’s early In the sequence of falling things (paradigm press, 1990) that convey a Dickinsonian sense of inversion and cadence: I had a spiral that rose when I tried to be circular./It was a single brief sentence, firm able to retain grace.
and from Rumor (Parlor Press, 2018).
The night sky at its deepest hour
Is the color of flesh
Had we
only the sense to discern. Instead
something more dull than pain
obtrudes, goads-
a pink inflammatory compressing
bones or
galaxies
in its arthritic fuge.
Robinson’s poetry unwinds (and rewinds) in compressed whirls of discursive statement, enigmatic phrases that ribbon out, often with no essentialized, paraphraseable, recognizable situation we may hold or adhere to with certainty. The paths of these poems are completely other than any expectations of the occasions of a poem or categories of style or properly proportioned object and subject, distance and frame, measure and form. Yet, a speaker in the poem remarks on the loss of perspective even as the poem proceeds. There is a voice that ambulates, that registers, as things dissolve.
From Bed of Lists (Kelsey St. Press, 1990).
Now the field is is losing its sturdy terminology
The adventure and originality of the phrasing, rare vocabulary and the haunted environment of Robinson’s poem compels us to follow the line through its unexpected windings. Yet, where are we once in? I tried to set out a circumscribed yard of the sightings (SOFT). Nowhere you can get a hold of in any easy way, so you go in further: which I set wake/whose laying prospects sweep…yes stray (SOFT).
This is not an effect of modernist abstraction, obfuscated transparency or willed decentering of subject or self nor are these poems collages with a surface of fractures or a set of nonsyntactical words set at a distance as objects. They may be described as a sequence of discernments that enlarge the weave of thinking as in these lines from Apostrophe (Apogee Press, 2006):
The wandering made of fuzz and nap. Time takes objects and lays them flat. Then we can feel the pelt, that material, underneath our disorientation. My back pressed up against your back, and time’s tensile in between.
And from Bed of Lists:
I had no body /but saw things go through. Where the thick bottom layer/was a veil.
The reader follows the utterance. For there is a voice discernable in the formality of the language with sense of phrase and measure that echoes in sound tracings to the poetries of Dickinson yes, but also H.D., Jack Spicer, Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, and Paul Celan. With a quixotic, 19th century bookish idiom, a measuring, implosive, experimentally foraging, spiritually evaluative, radically reporting, desiring being speaks. However, the nature, origin and substance of that voice and its relation to the text is enigmatic and one utterance after another discloses the threshold of an unfolding, unseen situation. An unidentifiable intelligence registers through this body of poetry in the way that arctic expeditioners advanced across uncertain densities of ice. From Blue Heron (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2013):
Was walking a form of weather, a form
of following, falling from the form
as it twists?
It is poetry in its subtractions from our prosaic cognitions that falls from form and twists here. Utterance that articulates- at a risk of complete disintegration- the implication of each instant of perception. Offers: “Some burnishing movements that turn back into a state and inside a state, outside.” Swerves in the very midst of composition: “what alteration could better deride” rather than constructing vectors or a coordinating horizon. This immersion imprints traces upon the reader. A measured steady subtraction from assumptions that establish safe grounding.
From Apostrophe:
There was that gentle incline
inevitable
from A to B
the inside of the inside
whose ease makes one stumble
where this is no
finding ones way.
By way of revealed contradictions, divergent strands of perception, sensation and thinking weave a threadlike manifestation and are brought to an inexplicable, meaningful unity
Robinson’s Rumor, which was briefly quoted from above, is the most radical realization to date of the poet’s exploration of how The voice- a ring around the history-talking mouth turns away from, undoes, negates, lyric consolation. The forms of the five sets of linked poems of Rumor keep to Robinson’s array of variable line and stanza shapes seen throughout all her work. In some instances, space and silence interpolate between and within text. In other poems, the lines are single spaced and longish. Rarely is there a smooth lyric music or expectable progression. The form does not construct the poem but the necessity of the utterance manifests the shape. This is a music of tone clusters in space and silence that accumulate a whole telling. The extremity realized in Rumor is that the poems allude to, suggest, reflect. the consciousness of a predator and of an aftermath - possibly amidst - acts of horrific violence. Then, I wonder again: is this a radical surgery? The reader comes away with a sense of having come close to- even participating- in an evisceration. The poems of Rumor enact these acts without describing. It’s a process of elision and position…
Sometimes the viscera are so quiet
as to clutch their secrets.
This
quiet pleasure
in the sanctuary that lies in wait
in the temple of the body.
This is the rumor.
Therefore to carve a door in such a place
as to make feasible all ingress and egress.
One may gather from the whole of the set of poems, a fractured image of how this “surgeon” explains their acts to God, to themselves, to the victims as an “appropriation” of desired parts as I “dispatched them to the afterlife” and “…Each diminishment/beatifies the taker.” The astonishing aspect of this poem, the transgression of the subject aside, is how accurately the shifts in pronouns and uncertainty of the source of declarations dislocates or eliminates required structures that answer who did what to whom, when, and who is speaking? The perpetrator, it seems, speaks through the poem in an act of near shamanic intensity in which the poet sustains the other side to allow it manifestation and expression. .
There is another possible level of meaning. And that it is that it is the poet who is “the surgeon/ revisits the scene, its/ hermaphrodite wavering.” Indeed, it is as the poet wrote this but in a deeper sense that the whole enactment is the poet working through
“who is it that would present itself/
to you as a voice: that gloved or/hooded assertion…”
and further proposes:
“Who is authorship otherwise/than a craving for union”.
and
“Thought’s perambulation:/the sentry circles/ the story…”
The poet/poem realizes its capacities for an extreme porousness of identify and its penetrating entry into semblance. “I recruit myself as transparent” at “the site of violence. All that leaks through…” this “World in Liquidity”.
Although Rumor is extreme, the representation of other in all Robinson’s books starting with the early Bed of Lists is implied with a meshed tactility and inclusive consciousness. Rarely in Robinson’s poetry is the other represented as a distinct, whole figure seen at a distance, described or addressed in memory as entirely separate. The reader participates and also becomes enmeshed within. Self-definition is enlarged in a proximity and one participates in a powerful, intimate exchange that cannot be paraphrased. What just happened? One doesn’t know exactly and that is thrilling and brings us into a mutability of boundaries.
In an Explanatory Note for On Ghosts (Solid Object, 2013) Robinson writes:
Secondly, it should be taken for granted that this perceiver is not privileged. Rather, the perceiver is prepared for the experience on the basis of his or her having, so to speak, been eaten by pests. The condition is one of eroded defenses, of vulnerability.
further:
“This manner will be disorganized where it accurately follows the movement of the uncircumscribable through the deteriorated soul, through wormholes, past warren, glare”.
I believe that here Robinson discloses her poetic, a core and persistent return: the argument - of body and spirit. In all of Robinson’s poetry there is the suggestion, however obliquely phrased, that the vulnerabilities of the body are in a relation to the occurrences of an unknowable, quixotic and omnivorous universe. And that spirit and soul are actual entities and may speak. From Rumor:
the huge bulk of vision
as it violates the universe,
and so small
the cavity of sight.
and
….And a willowy body can apportion
its grace to curve even around so small
a thing as this. Benediction or chastisement.
Function and vocation fight.
physically I lick myself. I apply tongue
to disappearance. Work and works.
From in the sequence of falling things:
And all the parts of me
are hunting all the particles
are eating at air
I turned to theologies, theories and philosophical writings to locate a singluar underlying “framework” of Robinson’s poetry. I could not. The raw and singular reports of this poetry elude theoretical containment.
Robin Blaser writes in his essay, “The Fire”: “I watch words wander in our arrangement of them, on top of them, across the mirrors that things thereby become. The marvel of our delicate, pronominal I also needs to be honored. It stands or sleeps alongside things, in fact, alongside the whole world of its garnering.”
In three sentences which make their own kind of poem, Blaser voices a complex that is meaningful to our apprehension of Robinson’s work.
Fanny Howe, in her meditation “Bewilderment” elucidates a form of being in bewilderment that must be meaningful to Robinson’s work:
“…error, errancy, and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story. A story does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden. The contradiction and can drive “I”…into a series of techniques that are the reverse of usual..”
I would offer from The Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich for a relation to Robinson’s phrasing not only in sound but a kind of feeling: “…I thought that I might be able to bear looking straight ahead for longer than I could manage to loop upwards. After this my sight began to fail and the room was dim all around me…”
A kernel of strange brightness and of disclosing the negative way as in Norwich’s “…God showed me three nothings…”
There is a narrative impulse also in this poetry that reminds us of the 17th century American Puritan sermons and testaments. Of the lostness and desire that precedes transcribed experience.
I finally felt that I passed a gate in understanding the metaphysics of Robinson’s writing when I could connect what Paul Celan has given us. Robinson’s poetry is troubled. In the sense of the spirit troubled the waters. The great Celan presents a possibility for that trouble. Makes a path. And his effortful disclosures of his realization of how poetry comes into being may be taken very seriously by this American poet who was just nine years old, probably just starting to write poems, when Paul Celan passed from us.
Celan in his acceptance address “The Meridian” stated:
“…the poem stands fast at the edge of itself; it calls and brings itself, in order to be able to exist, ceaselessly back from its already-no-longer into its always-still.
This always-still can only be a speaking. But not just language as such, nor, presumably, just verbal "analogy" ether.
But language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation that at the same time. however, remains mindful of the borders that language draws and of the possibilities language opens up for it.
This always-still of the poem can indeed only be found in the work of the poet who does not forget that he speaks under the angle of inclination of his Being, the angle of inclination of his creatureliness.
The the poem is - even more clearly than previously - one person's language-become-shape, and according to its essence, presentness and presence.”
The poetry of Roberto Harrison has been a great companion during these past months of our planetary crisis. I loved Bridge to the World before but it has inscribed itself and shone ever more brightly in recent readings.
Harrison’s work deserves and requires a thorough and enlarged response. I may only acknowledge that I wonder at this work. If I can’t fathom all of its range than I hope someday to be able to but more so that readers of experience will respond. In the exploration of consciousness in Bridge of the World, Harrison articulates within the poems an array of expansive concepts including parallel universes, cybernetics, computer languages, the 4th dimension, co-existent worlds. A reader is challenged to encounter. The writings in this book are beautiful for the humanity the work articulates and its measured organic extended music. The poem offers an overture to a writers and readers who hope to utilize energies of consciousness to push beyond quotidian thought and language.
It would be easy, in the sense of superficial, to suggest that the intensities that Harrison has lived and refer to in his writing, are what make it strange. It is more actual to suggest that the strangeness of the work heals us.
I don’t mean to valorize the poet’s sufferings which as he alludes to them are: intermit ant audio hallucinations and periods of manic thought process or the exhaustions of Latin immigration: “…what language/remains at the end/of my migration…” and a lifetime of saturated experience. It is not the author’s suffering that enlarges us but that the writing through his expansions of mind and in spite of suffering that opens us to a universe of connections and blistering, cauterizing illuminations. A way through our individual, national and cosmic fractures.
Harrision writes: “Partly my writing is a way to pace the surfacing of the meanings (infinite) of these experiences” Further, he writes: “ It became clear to me that there were several threads of narratives to explain my life and that I could not resolve them. I aimed to focus on the truth, in all of its multivalence and movement.” Isn’t this clarification a liberating, incitement, a penetrating ray within the murk of so much literature?
This is not a poetry of identity nor eco nor confessional nor lyric or Language poetry. It includes and enlarges and confounds all of those categories for the poet admits “…I aim at cosmic vulnerability.” In fact, I shouldn’t even bring in such classifications for it is just such that these writings counter. I really don’t know of any poetry like Roberto Harrison’s though the writings of Antonin Artaud, Caesar Vallejo, Aimee Cesaire, Andre Breton, Phillip Lamantia, Alice Notley, Will Alexander, Franz Kamin, Brenda Iijima, Hannah Weiners and Leonora Carrington first come to mind as sharing in some of Harrison’s intensities, attitudes and intentions. Harrison states that Language poetry and a body of South American poetries (especially Honduran works) inspire his work and those connections should be explored by scholars. His writing clearly emerges in part from a lifetime of deep reading.
This is a poetic situated within a fluid location. Coordinated to cosmic vectors and simultaneously attuned to apprehension of the biological, etymological and zoological (in particular) as these strands of awareness move and emit vibration within the poet’s sphere of reception. Bridge to the World comes from a place that receives signals from myriad sources and processes through language in a profoundly complex way. Relays in a singular co-creative response within the universe and I mean Universe. The poems enact an awareness of a complex present. The body of the poet moves through this present yet also corrdinates to a far, fathomable, intuited future.
The three books of Bridge to the World are contrasting in shapes, line lengths and measure. It’s varied forms include prose passages, short compact lines and long line narrative lines. Each piece responds to its compositional pressures and necessities with the form that allows fullest realization.
Harrison’s great accomplishment is to project through the vocabulary and innate measure or songs a mental sphere that is fully sensory, spherical, vaulted, minute and panoramic: :
“…I arrive
to a place where these things and these
Songs, though still protected, become
the light and the dark
that I put together…” (6)
and
“….Silence reveals
the vast rents” (6)
Yet for the ecstatic communion evoked and achieved by means of utter pressure, attunement of the senses and careful transcription, these are not spontaneous odes. The sources for and scene of composition is revealed at a juncture of a negation within language and cosmological latitude:
a union
of the unsung
and a collapse
of each word
ever released
into the approximate
mapping
of the skies.
The tone is integrated and whole, however varied the shapes and range of extremity in logical sentence structures transcribing an excavation of holistic experience.
A compact description of his project is : “Hole in time – eternity – inhabiting the plane of body language and ignoring/bypassing information control.”
Bridge of the World is a thick, symphonic book and Litmus Press is to be honored for its commitment to Roberto Harrison’s writing which deserves international acclaim although the Milwaukee cultural community warmly sustains him and his wife, the poet Brenda Cardeno. A body of work such as Roberto Harrison’s in its visionary intelligences and encompassing planetary empathies goes on to further the work of previous visionaries and makes new and personal the streams of poetry that Romanticism, Surrealism and Afro-futurism have initiated.
“…but to write invisibly
through my heart, the residence of my mind,
evenly distributed
throughout endless Imagination’s
Oceans.”
Works Cited
Alexander, Will. Towards the Primeval Lighting Field. Litmus Press. 2014
Diana Arterian. “Spirit Flows From Pieces: Alice Notley’s Collage Art.” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2019/08/spirit-flows-from-pieces-alice-notleys-collage-art). Accessed 4/22/2021
Beckman, Joshua. Lives of the Poems and Three Talks. Wave Books, Seattle. 2018.
Bishop, Elizabeth. Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions.
edited by Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, Thomas Travisan. Univesity of Virginia Press. 2012.
Blaser, Robin. Fire: The Collected Essays of Robin Blaser. University of California Press. 2006.
Celan, Paul The Meridian: Final Versions – Drafts – Materials ed. Edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull Translated by Pierre Joris. Standford University Press. 2011.
Celan, Paul. Last Poems. Trans. Katherine Washburn and Margaret Guilemin.
North Point Press. 1986
Chernicoff, Billie. Bronze. Lunar Chandelier Collective. 2018.
Clarke, John. From Feathers to Iron: A Concourse of World Poetics. Tombouctou Books. 1987
Coultas, Brenda. “I Keep Them Because I Need Them, Part 1”. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2018/11/i-keep-them-because-i-need-them-part-1, Accessed 5/18/21.
Dunne, John. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne#tab-poems. Accessed 4.27.91.
Hesiod, Theogony. Trans. C.S. Morrissey. https://www.hoopladigital.com/play/11860240. Acessed 5.10.21.
Howe, Susan. That This. New Directions. New York, 2010.
Howe, Susan “The Difficulties Interview” http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/DIFFICULTIES6/Difficulties6.pdf.
Accessed 4/29/2021.
Howe, Fanny. The Wedding Dress. Meditations on Word and Life. University of California Press. 2003.
Joris, Pierre. “Alchemy: Metaphor or Practice?” essay read at the 2020 Conference, “Literature and Culture Since 1900.” University of Louisville.
Kelly, Robert. An Alchemical Journal. Io magazine, No.4, Alchemy Issue, 1967
A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.
Contra Mundum Press. 2014
Harrison, Roberto. Bridge of the World. Litmus Press. 2018
Lansng, Gettit. Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth. North Atlantic Books, 2009
Morris, Tracie. Quo Anima: innovation and spiritualty in contemporary women’s poetry.
Jennifer Phelps and Elizabeth Robinson, editors. The University of Akron Press.2019
MacLean, Adam. “Alchemical Vessel as Symbol of the Soul”. https://www.alchemywebsite.com/vessel.html. Accessed 4/22/21
Notley, Alice. Certain Magical Acts. Penguin Books. 2016
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books. 2009.
NY Times. “Take A Look at How Quickly a Forest Can Recover From a Fire.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/nyregion/nj-pine-barrens-fire-regrowth.html
Norwich, Julian of. Revelations of Divine Love. Penguin Books. New ed. 1998.
O'leary, Peter. “Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry.” Chicago Review, vol. 55, no. 3/4, 2010, pp. 84–99. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23065678. Accessed 26 Apr. 2021.
Patton, Julie.
Phelps, Jennifer. Quo Anima: innovation and spiritualty in contemporary women’s poetry.
Jennifer Phelps and Elizabeth Robinson, editors. The University of Akron Press.2019.
Quasha, George. “Blake Contemporaneously.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2014/04/blake-contemporaneously. Accessed 4/26/21.
Rilke, Ranier Maria. Rodin. Translated by David Slager. Archipelago Books. 2004
Robinson, Elizabeth. Apostrophe. Apogee Press. 2006’
Bed of Lists. Kelsey St. Press. 1990.
Blue Heron. The Center for Literary Publishing. 2013
in the sequence of falling things. paradigm press. 1990
On Ghosts. Solid Object. 2013
Rumor. Parlor Press. 2018.
Sobin, Gustaf. Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc. University of California Press. 2009.
Stein, Charles. “Looking for Oneself: Contributions to the Study of Charles Olson”. http://charlesolson.org/Files/SteinQuasha4.htm.
Accessed 4/22/2021
Stein, Charles. “The Illiad Book VI.” http://www.charlessteinpoet.com/poetry/translations/the-iliad/. Accessed 4/27/2021.
Stein, Charles. Placing Space, Picturing Time: Time, Space and Emergent Pictorality in Some Recent Painting(s) of Terry Winters. Autonomedia, 2016.
Tabios, Eileen. “Maganda: Thoughts on Poetic Form.” Melus .Filipino American Literature. 2004. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4141799?seq=1. Accessed 4/22/2021.
Vallejo, Cesar. Malanga Chases Vajello. New Translations and Notes. Three Rooms Press. 2014.
Warren, Ali. I Love it Though. (Nightboat Books).2017.
Weiners, John. Supplication: Selected Poems of John Weiners. Wave Books. Seattle. 2015
IN EMPTY SPACE
where entrails entwine
with the cerebral
blossom,
I cast myself to stones,
they caught me
and ringed a sphere
with what I became.”
-Paul Celan
“All life long
you are unhanding,
unhanding and unhanding
what was handed you.
All life long
you throw out the line of life.
You throw out the line, stinging
up from your guts.”
-Gettit Lansing
Susan Howe writes: “More and more I have a sense of being present at a point of absence where crossing centuries may prove to be like crossing languages. Soundwaves. It’s the difference between one stillness and another stillness. Even the “invisible” scotch tape I recently used… Leaves traces on paper….”
Charles Stein offers:.
“…For possibility the past (meaning our concrete past but also everything that’s other) continues to be alive. Once you’re no longer involved with accepting a particular cosmological or ontological framework in the way it insists upon itself, once you’ve just jiggled that a little bit, suddenly all kinds of possibilities turn out to be alive.”
These poets further develop the intuition of Ezra Pound “that all ages are contemporaneous.”
Poetry’s radiating possibilities may stay alive in us and be described with the paradigms, vocabulary and practices we know from alchemy. The term alchemy used here to include various practices that work with states of consciousness and transmutation. An alignment of poetry and alchemy is a longtime track of thought variously worked in a vast laboratory of poetry and conversation through time. My intuition now (it took a while to come with resolution to this) is that poets (in all their various ways) have developed a spectrum of practices that may adhere to alchemical /sympathetic transformations that result in manifold forms .(Not poet as alchemist, which is an overly confining definition and not responsible to poetry’s largeness (or alchemies specificities) The historical waves/ways of poetry (a domain/practice/ side by side/ inside of/ enmeshed with, encircling and sparking off of other manifestations and forms) encompasses, surrounds and interweaves any individual poet’s forms.
Do not the interactions of any human life provide intermingled, layered, sometimes chaotic phases of gestation, coagulation, distillation and calcination. Periods of fired fertility and potency? Durations of reception and taking in and alternately seasons of resistance, closure, and rest. Within the crucible, retort and still of the poet’s consciousness/ body/ may occur interactions of heating/distillation/ union/synthesis/separation.
Jennifer Phelps in an essay on poetry and alchemy writes: “The alchemical process, and often the various coniuntios, are repeated many times before the self moves into the next stage of development.”
Adam McLean, in his essay, “The Alchemical Vessel as Symbol of the Soul” reads alchemy’s practices, actions and states of being and presents these in language that is relevant to a consideration of how poetry is thought, received and transcribed. McLean writes: “We should come to see that symbols are actually patterns of energy. In an exoteric sense this is so, for obviously any symbol held in our consciousness is manifested as an electro-chemical plexus in the neuron net in our brain. However, esoterically on the deepest level, a symbol is the pattern of etheric energy underlying its various different forms.”
MacLean further suggests utilizing alchemical traditions in a revitalized, sequenced practice of meditation in which the crucible is a heated and receptive attitude of consciousness; the retort is a sealed, boundaried container to concentrate the forces within. The open still is a state of mind for distillation and drawing upon universal energies. MacLean’s procedure describes one alchemical path; there are other ways.
The concept of alchemy is insufficient when applied to poetry as its central and only condition and structure, however. Poetry’s self-renewing creation (conceived of as a diachronic activity and archive, not as singular manifestations) transgresses all known frameworks and metaphors for its complexity.
To further amplify this connection, I offer these statements and excerpts from poetry. Like Vallejo’s scattered opals there are just as many other writings.
“Alchemy is the science of becoming aware of the whole project in which we are being engaged.”
-Robert Kelly
“I can only say real happiness yields from the worlds of poems. And its practitioners are secret, sacred vessels to an ancient divinity.”
-John Wieners
“IN EMPTY SPACE
where entrails entwine
with the cerebral
blossom,
I cast myself to stones,
they caught me
and ringed a sphere
with what I became.”
-Paul Celan
“All life long
you are unhanding,
unhanding and unhanding
what was handed you.
All life long
you throw out the line of life.
You throw out the line, stinging
up from your guts.”
-Gettit Lansing
“Then again, maybe it does feel like fire—the blue core of it, not the theatrical orange crackling. I have spent a lot of time staring at this core in my own “dark chamber” and I can testify that it provides an excellent example of how blue gives away to darkness—and then how, without warning, the darkness grows up into a cone of light.”
-Maggie Nelson.
“Blake asks us to read the tragic events of the present with the additional “prophetic” scale of seeing beyond to possible conscious evolution of human beings. This requires singular acts of transformation inside the alchemical work. The “event” is not just a matter of changing political philosophy or poetic form, but an actual process of mind and being non-separate from reading, with its torsional uncertainties and challenges to “selfhood”—the hardened mind that chooses war over eros.”
-George Quasha
“One has the peculiar sense that the body is neither material nor spiritual. That it is the alembic itself. Any unity or disunity takes place there….the issue then is a meeting of the elementals and intelligence.”
-Robin Blaser
“It became clear to me then that the aim of alchemy is not any concrete conclusion but the process itself, that the notion of transformation that underlies the metaphor & practice is transformation at both the mental/spiritual level and the physical/body-in-the-world & it’s reverse, world-in-the-body level. Rimbaud’s “alchimie du verb of course is useful here too. One of the poet’s alchemical-analytical tools of the trade is etymology, the knowledge-process leads you back to the ur-matter of the word.”
-Pierre Joris
“…with proactive awareness. Poetry is alchemy, and I believe my job as poet is to be open and lucid as I go about living my life in order to maximize the raw material for subsequent poetic distillation.”
-Eileen Tabios
“Breathtaking black star/Press yourself into my depths.”
-Alice Notley
“… drying gold/mental/chrysanthemum”
-Alice Notley
“Poetry is onto-poietic: it forges being. ..it causes Being to come to apparency and, conversely, to fall under occultation.”
-Charles Stein
“Sometimes I sing beneath the surfaces of things, or under the leaf turned up in rain, or in the corner with dust under a window. These are hidden singing& have to do with themselves, sing themselves & the things that are singing. All the dimensions of the work can scarcely be visible at once…What I’m at here are the cryptodes, the hidden singings which go to sustain one…”
--Robert Kelly
“Sometimes, I can’t read my own work clearly because, instead, I am focused on pulling a thread through the muck of my mind. I want to fly, but I am wearing heavy earth shoes. All of my writing is an attempt to shake off the dirt, despite how rich that soil might be.”
-Brenda Coultas.
“You find your own information buried in your body. It is still alive until you are not.”
- Fanny Howe
“The major constant in my work is change because I am not working at a work poetry – I am working at myself!...I encapsulate myself, feel my portability, smallness in a field of purpose…”
- Julie Patton.
“…its planked and diamond/boards its twisted/guts of ashy smoke/ripe and passions/thrust at least/ I smell/ cause all alone/and smelling/ here I lie.”
-Joshua Beckman
“I like this job of keeping an eye out, an ear pricked, keeping the body primed by energy from above and below.”
-Tracie Morris
“ Only the heat of one’s own discarded elements can produce the proper fire.”
-John Clarke (From Feather to Iron)
“As the universe externalizes this knowledge, bodying it forth, the body occultates it in crypto-emotional vales where it must be quarried through a form of mindfulness, an admixing of memory and desire.”
-Peter O’Leary
“Moon! It is no use flying away,
so you go up in flames of scattered opals;
maybe you are my gypsy heart
Who wanders in the blue, crying verses…”
And
”The anger which breaks the soul into bodies,
the body into dissimilar organs
and the organ, into octave meditations;
the anger of the poor
Has one central fire against two craters.”
-Cesar Vallejo
“Me, I am concerned with a vaporous cognition of traces, of volts in angelic vocation, which pre-exists data, which ignites the ghostly electric mass of our wavering planetary kingdom, this world with its realms of magnesium and barley, with tis broke somatic crafts of vertigo and slaver, with its shivering sea water suns spiraling with conundrums.”
-Will Alexander.
One of the tasks of deep readers of the art is to discern the buried , misclassified, ignored, accrued, fomenting, branching poetic continuities. Not only to discern but to live within the interconnected shaped actualities that poetry across time and place may become. Instances of what George Quasha and Charles Stein describe separately and variously as Emergent Form.
I am heartened by report of the swift regeneration of the New Jersey Pine Barrens after a 2018 fire started at the crossroads of Lost Lane and Penn Place that burned 283 acres. Astonished that tight Pitch Pine cones only open in such heat and then drop seedlings in the ashy burnt ground which is the generative environment for their regrowth.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
-John Donne
As most poets and many readers and observers of the poetry realms are aware; the contemporary spheres of poetry are interconnected. Poets are often drawn to write of the works that they love; they are often drawn to the poets who write the work they love.
Two of the authors of the four books of poetry discussed in this essay are distant acquaintances with whom I’ve been in the same room perhaps twice. I feel I’ve come to know them through their work. Two of the authors are long time companions in poetry. While there is no pretense of a removed, evaluative consideration, the reading of the writing is a response and meditation outside of that which is known of a person.
Having read all four books after November 8th, 2017, I found that each possesses a quality, among other qualities, of offering consolation. The humane intelligences of the communication and how these sequences further poetry’s capacities are thrilling. All four books offer a transmission of an attitude and something handmade and specific in the manifestations of what poetry may realize and what poetry is coming to be. As to how these poems are realized within the alchemical framework just discussed, I would offer that I believe that all four of these books result from intentional self-workings.
At the outset, Bronze (Lunar Chandelier Collective, 2018), by Billie Chernicoff, is a set of 108 linked poems whorled around a poet’s encounter with the images and actualities of various bronze objects of antiquity (and before then and from everywhere). The poet tells us so in the afterward: “A friend left a book about ancient bronzes at my front door.”
Several poems in Bronze offer brief footnotes that directly describe objects such as: “Vessel inscribed with demons.” and “…Erlitou wine vessel, its mouth the shape of a drop.”
“Bell lying quiet/in the pelvic bowl,/burial at Shanxi.” is the distilled entirety of a reading of one of these objects and forms one whole poem. You can’t help but hear and perceive the imagiste here. Just one of several ancestor threads that wind with care through Bronze. Chernicoff’s attention brings forward with meditative phrasing that tells - without narrating- of the variety of forms and magnitude of this alloy’s globally mythic presence. For example:
Bronze, a primer:
Venus copper, Jupiter tin.
Tin the sky god,
the hurler.
And the Chinese myth of beginnings:
In the beginning were three pots,
Earth, heaven, and a woman.
She said this is my bed, this is my sky.
The poet informs us: “Born of the great flood/after which both crops/ and bronze flourished.” The poem wraps itself around this evocative, disintegrating, yet durable core. The poet’s noticing among a world of facts and presences makes Bronzes an act of recovery. Notice that Bronze is a conductive, reverberating material of musical instruments and bells.
Bronze discovers/offers/relates/suggests/reports a response to various bronze objects that are enigmatic in their history, worn in their surface, barely discernable as things inside the poem’s sequences. Chernicoff’s exploration spirals from out of observation of aspects of these bells, sculptures, urns and mirrors; rarely the whole history, for the poet is mindful of their unknowability.
This aspect of Bronze in its attitude toward historical objects and places is akin to the attitude in Gustaf Sobin’s essays. The critical term among those essays was “vestige” in the sense of reading fragmented material remains so as to imagine evanescent and lost histories more fully. As Sobin realized, vestiges focus our attention to the whole life of a slice, the partial, the shred, the disintegrated. Chernicoff’s poems are a rare relation.
Chernicoff is not alone, among the poets, with her attention to bronze. Homer wrote this, as translated by Charles Stein.
“Idomeneus stabbed Erymas in the mouth
with the pitiless bronze,
and the bronze spear passed clean through
beneath the brain
and split the white skull bone asunder;”
Keat’s “Through Bronze Lyre in tragic order go” fixes bronze as an archaic material that is a medium and transmitter. But, bronze continues to carry that very real tarnished quality of imperium, of battle. In his “Endymion” it’s one of the “sick metals.”
“It is the bronze that reminds us that age and dying, of death itself has its own stages of fulfillment…” wrote Rilke in a letter about Rodin’s sculpture, reading into the substance its qualities of changeable durability.
Elizabeth Bishop tried to look into an Etruscan bronze mirror and was deflected by the darkened opacity:
“one of those corroded old bronze mirrors…
(how did the ancients ever see/
anything in them?).”
Carl Sandburg attributes to Bronze a conductivity that the poet listens through: “Yser, “… his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet.”
Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman” enlivens the French bronze sculpture of Peter the Great positioned in St. Petersburg. Bronze as flesh.
Hesiod’s Theogony gives account that in the “Bronze Age”…” Their only occupation was working with Bronze”. This view of bronze attests to an obsessive human compulsion to turn any material to instruments for war.
Among other effects, Chernicoff’s Bronze steadily layers the detailing of uses without insisting or defining. She follows the stages of change and creation.
Dragon, fire it up!
Wood and water
hiss skyward.
From such clouds
emerge the lost knife,
cup, earring, bell…
The word “lost” here a wise insertion, a reminder that these old things that we covet and dig for and dive for and look at in a museum are someone’s lost something. The things we ourselves may hide or drop or lose in grief and fear and on the run if the circumstance were such. I feel this is a durable gift these poems offer: a reminder of what things have been, are, and could be. A gesture to the invisibles who made and treasured these things.
A realization of how a substance may be a medium for poetry.
the cracks themselves,
truthful mouths,
bronze people who fight,
burn, and speak for you.
Chernicoff approaches bronze with a fluid approach that circulates language in relation to an object’s uses correspondences, yet she never encases the thing or insistently tells. Every poem contains diversions, pauses, an indrawn breath, switches. Phrasing creates a measure and experience of time. Therefore, a reader is drawn closely into the object as in the lines: “Inside bronze is of course/a rose, a dark perfume/”
and
“verdigris, even by moonlight/a lovely toxic green/holding a green torch,/green lotus, green book/…”
Here, the dark green smell of it is brought to our senses. It’s the tarnish and murk of bronze the poet gets up close with.
“Or there is nothing,/you can’t feel the sides. You breathe on the cusp/of the vast dark alone.”
With these two lines the secret underside of Bronze is fully put forth. A correspondence which is also signaled with the magic line:
“ I hardly know this vessel/ after all this time,…”
“Not the bronze but its mind.” proposes that the poem has written itself beyond a meditation on a set of objects.
I believe that the cusp, the vast dark is the composing, writing, receiving consciousness. The vessel that Chernicoff approaches and sees and senses: “In this mirror/you must bend down to look into…” and “This flame of speech.” Poetry with its magnetic force contends with objects, materiality, substances, language itself: “”You pull me down into your arms/you heavy old things,/you heavy old grave things.”
The poet, then, will “examine the cracks/and edges of things…” as “words as extrusions,/scraps, pure murk.” Chernicoff takes on the weight of words that- as bronze is- are incised, melted down, worn, reused.
“Thousands of nouns” is the copiousness of language - if you’re open to it- that the poem revels in and reveals as if the English language were an archaeology. “Anaphor, semaphore, athenor, amphora.” “cassowary”, “plumassier” are signs as sculpted as a bronze . Sinuously and wittily, Chernicoff reverses and substitutes and offers word play and remainders of old meanings.
“She brings you to a Sacred Place” Chernicoff writes. This she who haunts Bronze as a presiding presence is the force I sense the poet turns to at the cusp of the dark vast and the bright rim. As “undoer of knots”. A juncture in the composition where the old solidity of the bronzes weigh and the thingness of language feels like it freights poetry. Who takes the poem from its premise to unknown premises. A spirit that moves around this poem and whose energy is distilled from the poem’s work.“Of unknown origin” …“the one you’ve been waiting for” heralds her. “How old is she?” is asked and answered: “but her fourth hand, open,/holds the thing we can’t see.” “A woman set something afloat,/that’s all I know.”
A line that transmutes this material – poesis- is “the dissolution of bronze”. They say bronze can never be melted to its exact constituent alloys. Susan Howe writes “poetry is language stripped to its untranslatability.” They say most of the old bronze stuff has been melted down for other forms.
“if bronze were transparent,
if anything were,
you’d see
It’s raining into us.”
Might the” anything” be poetry “raining into us? In Bronze a relation to this ancient material is the undercurrent that flows through the poem without a limiting definition as to what that relation is.
We may have to continue to look for that ourselves.
Bronze generously allows for the effect of the reader’s exchange with the poems: “There is evidence of time and timelessness,
you decide.”
A lyric that is freshly formed and increasingly extensive in abstractions and utterance, I Love it Though (Nightboat Books, 2017) by Ali Warren, exemplifies the modulated, textured, unexpected shifts of this current in modern lyricism. I love it Though shows in its tone, tune, vibe, use of stops and compressed utterance and impression that Warren has read Alice Notley but also Eileen Myles and Jennifer Moxley and Anselm Berrigan; but also John Wieners and John Godfrey and Rae Armantrout. Clark Coolidge and Jack Kimball and the works of a whole set of West Coast poet comrades. These affiliations float over I Love it Though as a network of language styles, idioms, codes and permissions. I believe Warren talks to and back to this active archive of poetry. The larger impulse and most focused of her energies is directed, I believe, to daringly furthering how the lyric may tangle with and engage (as they say) the realms of early 21st century experience.
In the same possible world
in which I txt my boss
A poem may include the utterly wise line: the sun I think will heal everything.
One feels that Warren rows her boat out over the immense waters of poetic possibility with courage and liberty but also with a high level of control that dips in yet shapes within a measure and thoughtful selectivity as to what to draw in to the poem’s circumference.
I wish I could write a song
to make the world
yield
as desire can never perish
blind in the rush of weeds
The reader accompanies the mind that composes with amazement at the audacity of the poem’s encompassing topicality and breadth and depth of vectors that compactly fold together.
…while container ships brim
and caps and bergs
slope across the slog
The words encompassing and breadth used with consideration to the enormity of sources now at the disposal of poets. Among the wildness of sources, the syncopation found in I Love it Though is uniquely Warren’s own and which is in vivid relation to the English language lyric and metaphysical poetic.
On the way to Iowa City
to see my first sumac and coming to know
as if in revelation instead of simple clarity
The poems offer various, unusual, considered and unexpected occurrences of English language words of an older provenance and usage history:
and of all the gifts I sing
intent for intent
with garlands & candelabras
with laurel branches & ox-heads.
These old words give textured sound and points of intermission and entrance to these poem’s signification, association, and reverberation. One device, old as the hills and just as durable is an alliterative echo with its Shakespearian echo mixed in with a hard eye for 21st century capitol:
who harks here
against misery against
private diminishment…
As with flashing lights on a freeway at dusk, a reader senses in this body of writing, distant and close unconfined presences.
call the operators
to open pathways
to vessels which gleam
This last line slyly alludes to the music and sinister image of twilight’s last gleaming, of amber waves of grain. There’s a pop song insouciance to I Love it So that provides a romantic, noir tonality and contemporary gleam. A conveyed intense response to languages of the extended moment and intention to go among the flux
to harness the force
of a thousand layings on
a gaping mouth
of no market purpose
walking blind
out into the road
Warren offers a sense of language as casual, knowing, linked and yet also constrained. Conditioned by social rules that prohibit ecstatic expression, romantic effusion.
yanking half-held tongues
and dangerous pronouns
the moon isn’t it suddenly there.
Warren takes a wise stand on information and how a world of experience and sensation translated into data may block “that thing” and all that thing’s potentials:
Inertia for those skeptics
in the building
Who think of the unknown
as hemorrhage-quick stop
that thing from surfacing
The poet swings from selectivity and control to a giving over, a surrender to the instant of the encounter.
I guide my hand through
an absurd and sticky
habit whose force
an inflatable estate
Among the lobate plains.
I am persuaded by Warren’s poetic dictum: the wisest person I know – the ocean. As it Comes from lived proximity and contains a sustained ironic, understated despair at the anthro in the Anthropocene.
Ultimately, with I love it Though, Warren finds and evokes a moving, fluid, yet discernable poetic ground in the “lilting wilting middle/where an outside used to be.”
It is with a happiness as at the onset of a longed for journey, that I take up the poetry of Elizabeth Robinson. This most enigmatic and singular of poetries is in a line of affiliation with Emily Dickinson. The metaphysical, querying, elusively physical perceiving Dickinson.
Here are two quotations from Robinson’s early In the sequence of falling things (paradigm press, 1990) that convey a Dickinsonian sense of inversion and cadence: I had a spiral that rose when I tried to be circular./It was a single brief sentence, firm able to retain grace.
and from Rumor (Parlor Press, 2018).
The night sky at its deepest hour
Is the color of flesh
Had we
only the sense to discern. Instead
something more dull than pain
obtrudes, goads-
a pink inflammatory compressing
bones or
galaxies
in its arthritic fuge.
Robinson’s poetry unwinds (and rewinds) in compressed whirls of discursive statement, enigmatic phrases that ribbon out, often with no essentialized, paraphraseable, recognizable situation we may hold or adhere to with certainty. The paths of these poems are completely other than any expectations of the occasions of a poem or categories of style or properly proportioned object and subject, distance and frame, measure and form. Yet, a speaker in the poem remarks on the loss of perspective even as the poem proceeds. There is a voice that ambulates, that registers, as things dissolve.
From Bed of Lists (Kelsey St. Press, 1990).
Now the field is is losing its sturdy terminology
The adventure and originality of the phrasing, rare vocabulary and the haunted environment of Robinson’s poem compels us to follow the line through its unexpected windings. Yet, where are we once in? I tried to set out a circumscribed yard of the sightings (SOFT). Nowhere you can get a hold of in any easy way, so you go in further: which I set wake/whose laying prospects sweep…yes stray (SOFT).
This is not an effect of modernist abstraction, obfuscated transparency or willed decentering of subject or self nor are these poems collages with a surface of fractures or a set of nonsyntactical words set at a distance as objects. They may be described as a sequence of discernments that enlarge the weave of thinking as in these lines from Apostrophe (Apogee Press, 2006):
The wandering made of fuzz and nap. Time takes objects and lays them flat. Then we can feel the pelt, that material, underneath our disorientation. My back pressed up against your back, and time’s tensile in between.
And from Bed of Lists:
I had no body /but saw things go through. Where the thick bottom layer/was a veil.
The reader follows the utterance. For there is a voice discernable in the formality of the language with sense of phrase and measure that echoes in sound tracings to the poetries of Dickinson yes, but also H.D., Jack Spicer, Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, and Paul Celan. With a quixotic, 19th century bookish idiom, a measuring, implosive, experimentally foraging, spiritually evaluative, radically reporting, desiring being speaks. However, the nature, origin and substance of that voice and its relation to the text is enigmatic and one utterance after another discloses the threshold of an unfolding, unseen situation. An unidentifiable intelligence registers through this body of poetry in the way that arctic expeditioners advanced across uncertain densities of ice. From Blue Heron (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2013):
Was walking a form of weather, a form
of following, falling from the form
as it twists?
It is poetry in its subtractions from our prosaic cognitions that falls from form and twists here. Utterance that articulates- at a risk of complete disintegration- the implication of each instant of perception. Offers: “Some burnishing movements that turn back into a state and inside a state, outside.” Swerves in the very midst of composition: “what alteration could better deride” rather than constructing vectors or a coordinating horizon. This immersion imprints traces upon the reader. A measured steady subtraction from assumptions that establish safe grounding.
From Apostrophe:
There was that gentle incline
inevitable
from A to B
the inside of the inside
whose ease makes one stumble
where this is no
finding ones way.
By way of revealed contradictions, divergent strands of perception, sensation and thinking weave a threadlike manifestation and are brought to an inexplicable, meaningful unity
Robinson’s Rumor, which was briefly quoted from above, is the most radical realization to date of the poet’s exploration of how The voice- a ring around the history-talking mouth turns away from, undoes, negates, lyric consolation. The forms of the five sets of linked poems of Rumor keep to Robinson’s array of variable line and stanza shapes seen throughout all her work. In some instances, space and silence interpolate between and within text. In other poems, the lines are single spaced and longish. Rarely is there a smooth lyric music or expectable progression. The form does not construct the poem but the necessity of the utterance manifests the shape. This is a music of tone clusters in space and silence that accumulate a whole telling. The extremity realized in Rumor is that the poems allude to, suggest, reflect. the consciousness of a predator and of an aftermath - possibly amidst - acts of horrific violence. Then, I wonder again: is this a radical surgery? The reader comes away with a sense of having come close to- even participating- in an evisceration. The poems of Rumor enact these acts without describing. It’s a process of elision and position…
Sometimes the viscera are so quiet
as to clutch their secrets.
This
quiet pleasure
in the sanctuary that lies in wait
in the temple of the body.
This is the rumor.
Therefore to carve a door in such a place
as to make feasible all ingress and egress.
One may gather from the whole of the set of poems, a fractured image of how this “surgeon” explains their acts to God, to themselves, to the victims as an “appropriation” of desired parts as I “dispatched them to the afterlife” and “…Each diminishment/beatifies the taker.” The astonishing aspect of this poem, the transgression of the subject aside, is how accurately the shifts in pronouns and uncertainty of the source of declarations dislocates or eliminates required structures that answer who did what to whom, when, and who is speaking? The perpetrator, it seems, speaks through the poem in an act of near shamanic intensity in which the poet sustains the other side to allow it manifestation and expression. .
There is another possible level of meaning. And that it is that it is the poet who is “the surgeon/ revisits the scene, its/ hermaphrodite wavering.” Indeed, it is as the poet wrote this but in a deeper sense that the whole enactment is the poet working through
“who is it that would present itself/
to you as a voice: that gloved or/hooded assertion…”
and further proposes:
“Who is authorship otherwise/than a craving for union”.
and
“Thought’s perambulation:/the sentry circles/ the story…”
The poet/poem realizes its capacities for an extreme porousness of identify and its penetrating entry into semblance. “I recruit myself as transparent” at “the site of violence. All that leaks through…” this “World in Liquidity”.
Although Rumor is extreme, the representation of other in all Robinson’s books starting with the early Bed of Lists is implied with a meshed tactility and inclusive consciousness. Rarely in Robinson’s poetry is the other represented as a distinct, whole figure seen at a distance, described or addressed in memory as entirely separate. The reader participates and also becomes enmeshed within. Self-definition is enlarged in a proximity and one participates in a powerful, intimate exchange that cannot be paraphrased. What just happened? One doesn’t know exactly and that is thrilling and brings us into a mutability of boundaries.
In an Explanatory Note for On Ghosts (Solid Object, 2013) Robinson writes:
Secondly, it should be taken for granted that this perceiver is not privileged. Rather, the perceiver is prepared for the experience on the basis of his or her having, so to speak, been eaten by pests. The condition is one of eroded defenses, of vulnerability.
further:
“This manner will be disorganized where it accurately follows the movement of the uncircumscribable through the deteriorated soul, through wormholes, past warren, glare”.
I believe that here Robinson discloses her poetic, a core and persistent return: the argument - of body and spirit. In all of Robinson’s poetry there is the suggestion, however obliquely phrased, that the vulnerabilities of the body are in a relation to the occurrences of an unknowable, quixotic and omnivorous universe. And that spirit and soul are actual entities and may speak. From Rumor:
the huge bulk of vision
as it violates the universe,
and so small
the cavity of sight.
and
….And a willowy body can apportion
its grace to curve even around so small
a thing as this. Benediction or chastisement.
Function and vocation fight.
physically I lick myself. I apply tongue
to disappearance. Work and works.
From in the sequence of falling things:
And all the parts of me
are hunting all the particles
are eating at air
I turned to theologies, theories and philosophical writings to locate a singluar underlying “framework” of Robinson’s poetry. I could not. The raw and singular reports of this poetry elude theoretical containment.
Robin Blaser writes in his essay, “The Fire”: “I watch words wander in our arrangement of them, on top of them, across the mirrors that things thereby become. The marvel of our delicate, pronominal I also needs to be honored. It stands or sleeps alongside things, in fact, alongside the whole world of its garnering.”
In three sentences which make their own kind of poem, Blaser voices a complex that is meaningful to our apprehension of Robinson’s work.
Fanny Howe, in her meditation “Bewilderment” elucidates a form of being in bewilderment that must be meaningful to Robinson’s work:
“…error, errancy, and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story. A story does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden. The contradiction and can drive “I”…into a series of techniques that are the reverse of usual..”
I would offer from The Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich for a relation to Robinson’s phrasing not only in sound but a kind of feeling: “…I thought that I might be able to bear looking straight ahead for longer than I could manage to loop upwards. After this my sight began to fail and the room was dim all around me…”
A kernel of strange brightness and of disclosing the negative way as in Norwich’s “…God showed me three nothings…”
There is a narrative impulse also in this poetry that reminds us of the 17th century American Puritan sermons and testaments. Of the lostness and desire that precedes transcribed experience.
I finally felt that I passed a gate in understanding the metaphysics of Robinson’s writing when I could connect what Paul Celan has given us. Robinson’s poetry is troubled. In the sense of the spirit troubled the waters. The great Celan presents a possibility for that trouble. Makes a path. And his effortful disclosures of his realization of how poetry comes into being may be taken very seriously by this American poet who was just nine years old, probably just starting to write poems, when Paul Celan passed from us.
Celan in his acceptance address “The Meridian” stated:
“…the poem stands fast at the edge of itself; it calls and brings itself, in order to be able to exist, ceaselessly back from its already-no-longer into its always-still.
This always-still can only be a speaking. But not just language as such, nor, presumably, just verbal "analogy" ether.
But language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation that at the same time. however, remains mindful of the borders that language draws and of the possibilities language opens up for it.
This always-still of the poem can indeed only be found in the work of the poet who does not forget that he speaks under the angle of inclination of his Being, the angle of inclination of his creatureliness.
The the poem is - even more clearly than previously - one person's language-become-shape, and according to its essence, presentness and presence.”
The poetry of Roberto Harrison has been a great companion during these past months of our planetary crisis. I loved Bridge to the World before but it has inscribed itself and shone ever more brightly in recent readings.
Harrison’s work deserves and requires a thorough and enlarged response. I may only acknowledge that I wonder at this work. If I can’t fathom all of its range than I hope someday to be able to but more so that readers of experience will respond. In the exploration of consciousness in Bridge of the World, Harrison articulates within the poems an array of expansive concepts including parallel universes, cybernetics, computer languages, the 4th dimension, co-existent worlds. A reader is challenged to encounter. The writings in this book are beautiful for the humanity the work articulates and its measured organic extended music. The poem offers an overture to a writers and readers who hope to utilize energies of consciousness to push beyond quotidian thought and language.
It would be easy, in the sense of superficial, to suggest that the intensities that Harrison has lived and refer to in his writing, are what make it strange. It is more actual to suggest that the strangeness of the work heals us.
I don’t mean to valorize the poet’s sufferings which as he alludes to them are: intermit ant audio hallucinations and periods of manic thought process or the exhaustions of Latin immigration: “…what language/remains at the end/of my migration…” and a lifetime of saturated experience. It is not the author’s suffering that enlarges us but that the writing through his expansions of mind and in spite of suffering that opens us to a universe of connections and blistering, cauterizing illuminations. A way through our individual, national and cosmic fractures.
Harrision writes: “Partly my writing is a way to pace the surfacing of the meanings (infinite) of these experiences” Further, he writes: “ It became clear to me that there were several threads of narratives to explain my life and that I could not resolve them. I aimed to focus on the truth, in all of its multivalence and movement.” Isn’t this clarification a liberating, incitement, a penetrating ray within the murk of so much literature?
This is not a poetry of identity nor eco nor confessional nor lyric or Language poetry. It includes and enlarges and confounds all of those categories for the poet admits “…I aim at cosmic vulnerability.” In fact, I shouldn’t even bring in such classifications for it is just such that these writings counter. I really don’t know of any poetry like Roberto Harrison’s though the writings of Antonin Artaud, Caesar Vallejo, Aimee Cesaire, Andre Breton, Phillip Lamantia, Alice Notley, Will Alexander, Franz Kamin, Brenda Iijima, Hannah Weiners and Leonora Carrington first come to mind as sharing in some of Harrison’s intensities, attitudes and intentions. Harrison states that Language poetry and a body of South American poetries (especially Honduran works) inspire his work and those connections should be explored by scholars. His writing clearly emerges in part from a lifetime of deep reading.
This is a poetic situated within a fluid location. Coordinated to cosmic vectors and simultaneously attuned to apprehension of the biological, etymological and zoological (in particular) as these strands of awareness move and emit vibration within the poet’s sphere of reception. Bridge to the World comes from a place that receives signals from myriad sources and processes through language in a profoundly complex way. Relays in a singular co-creative response within the universe and I mean Universe. The poems enact an awareness of a complex present. The body of the poet moves through this present yet also corrdinates to a far, fathomable, intuited future.
The three books of Bridge to the World are contrasting in shapes, line lengths and measure. It’s varied forms include prose passages, short compact lines and long line narrative lines. Each piece responds to its compositional pressures and necessities with the form that allows fullest realization.
Harrison’s great accomplishment is to project through the vocabulary and innate measure or songs a mental sphere that is fully sensory, spherical, vaulted, minute and panoramic: :
“…I arrive
to a place where these things and these
Songs, though still protected, become
the light and the dark
that I put together…” (6)
and
“….Silence reveals
the vast rents” (6)
Yet for the ecstatic communion evoked and achieved by means of utter pressure, attunement of the senses and careful transcription, these are not spontaneous odes. The sources for and scene of composition is revealed at a juncture of a negation within language and cosmological latitude:
a union
of the unsung
and a collapse
of each word
ever released
into the approximate
mapping
of the skies.
The tone is integrated and whole, however varied the shapes and range of extremity in logical sentence structures transcribing an excavation of holistic experience.
A compact description of his project is : “Hole in time – eternity – inhabiting the plane of body language and ignoring/bypassing information control.”
Bridge of the World is a thick, symphonic book and Litmus Press is to be honored for its commitment to Roberto Harrison’s writing which deserves international acclaim although the Milwaukee cultural community warmly sustains him and his wife, the poet Brenda Cardeno. A body of work such as Roberto Harrison’s in its visionary intelligences and encompassing planetary empathies goes on to further the work of previous visionaries and makes new and personal the streams of poetry that Romanticism, Surrealism and Afro-futurism have initiated.
“…but to write invisibly
through my heart, the residence of my mind,
evenly distributed
throughout endless Imagination’s
Oceans.”
Works Cited
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edited by Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, Thomas Travisan. Univesity of Virginia Press. 2012.
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Celan, Paul The Meridian: Final Versions – Drafts – Materials ed. Edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull Translated by Pierre Joris. Standford University Press. 2011.
Celan, Paul. Last Poems. Trans. Katherine Washburn and Margaret Guilemin.
North Point Press. 1986
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IN EMPTY SPACE
where entrails entwine
with the cerebral
blossom,
I cast myself to stones,
they caught me
and ringed a sphere
with what I became.”
-Paul Celan
“All life long
you are unhanding,
unhanding and unhanding
what was handed you.
All life long
you throw out the line of life.
You throw out the line, stinging
up from your guts.”
-Gettit Lansing