Whitmen

Hello Whitmanians (and anti-Whitmanians?)  let's see how far Walt's influence extends. Maybe we'll find surprising connections along the way. We know that Emerson greeted him as he would the sun. Ginsberg gave him a (bit?) role in one of our poems for the week. He's even said to be Bram Stoker's model for Count Dracula.

There must be many others. Gerard Manley Hopkins, for one: "I always knew in my heart Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel, this is not a pleasant confession."

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Hope you'll add to this collection, and maybe re-read some WW lines along the way.

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Thanks very much. Read this before but had long forgotten about it, which is good because it seems so fresh now after rounds of ModPo. Entranced with "pig-headed father" for some reason, having in it the image of a son leaving farm roots to make a name for himself ("carving") in the city. That done, he's making "commerce"—something which promises reunion but maintains distance.

The "pig-headed" part recalls lines from Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"—

It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil;  
I am he who knew what it was to be evil;  
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,  
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,  
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,  
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant;  
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,

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Here's a bit more of the letters themselves. Apparently there's been some poetry and fiction using this material.

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Hi, and thanks for this question. I've done some reading (but it seems "some reading" won't ever be enough to cover even an aspect of a poet like Pound), and so far, I believe that the "condensed" parts of Pound's writing, his involvement with imagism (as opposed to later vorticism, his epic poetry, the Cantos) was influenced by Asian forms. For example, much has been said about the haiku-like quality (as well as wild innovation) of poems such as his "In a Station of the Metro". I haven't read him acknowledging ED.

For now, I'm following some dates. Imagism was being created at around 1911-1912. Pound would produce essays regarding its principles 1913. The anthology Des Imagistes (perhaps the more proper coming out of Imagism as a collective / collected effort) would see light as a standalone by 1914.

What was the ED available at this time? ED's first collection would have been available since 1890, 20 years prior to Pound's essays on imagism. However, let's note that the only ED available back then were heavily edited: "The two editors made changes to the poems, regularizing punctuation, adding occasional titles, and sometimes altering words to improve rhyme or sense." It seems ED would only truly "dazzle"— assuming the form we see her poems now, her fascicles treated as final intent rather than drafts—in the 1955 collection.

1955 would see Pound detained in a psychiatric hospital after charges of treason during the war, some 17 years remaining in his life. ED was available to him, but if he owed her anything he was not as loud about it as he was with the Whitman "parentage".

Will be scouring the annotations to the Pisan Cantos next week and will be sure to return here if I find any ED-EP connection.

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I don't feel the antagonism myself. But I think it's possible to encounter these two and see them warring inside you. I think it's in the way a reader or writer absorbs the two. You could devote yourself fully to one, perhaps becoming critical of other paths (ex: Whitman's too wild or Dickinson's too solipsistic, etc) or you could nurture both in your use of literature, which is in keeping also with some things we found in both (Whitman's open to contradicting himself, Dickinson's keen on swerving from the groove).

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Yes "apparition" is such a tricky part of this. I'm sure others would argue how essential it is to the lines, but it also pushed me to think about the imagist call for the "exact word" especially if the phenomenon is itself inexact, too fleeting that it seems an "exact word" would somehow violate it. The haiku seems to me not only a form but also a state of mind. Do you think Pound's lines amounted to a failed attempt at a (new?) haiku?

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Eel soup! Found Dharker's tantalizing poem, and it engages (interrogates?) this age old quest for Flaubert's le mot juste.

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Agreed. It moves along with the moment, all that anxiety, perhaps alarm, maybe also a sense of promise, and she's shuffling with words, finding one that fits, one that will ultimately decide her next course of action: flee or fight or receive.

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(Digression, sorry, but I love how cutting it as a usual haiku makes "petals" sound like a verb.)

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"I think there was a better poem to be written." You may be right. It seems to me that if EP was to make a choice between poem+prose and poem-as-is, he'd take the longer version. He'll discard imagism for vorticism, his hokku yileding to (or absorbed into) the Cantos.

Anyway, it's important to add that even the root of the haiku tradition includes a haiku-prose variety called the haibun by Matsuo Bashō.

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Apparition becomes a sort of fleeting appearance if we remove the supernatural. Should we remove though?

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Joy. I'm taking that for you the poem was breathing fresh air into the transit scene?

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How two lines could overflow as sound, image, meaning.

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I'll direct you to a list like this if I see one. Or please, if you make one, tell me and I'll subscribe immediately. I'm afraid I'm only familiar with the Dickinsonians in the syllabus: Armantrout, Niedecker, Corman. I'm sure others will come up for me if I "read outwards" but it seems that when I'm dealing with Dickinson and her heirs, my tendency is to look deeply into their work rather than pick up on things and links that throw me off the groove (very un-ED of me, now that I think of it).

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His soil rich under both Pound's Cantos and Neruda's Canto General.

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From this Twain letter: "You shall see marvels upon marvels added to these whose nativity you have witnessed; & conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Result — Man at almost his full stature at last! — & still growing, visibly growing while you look." 

How very difficult it is for me (and it seems, for Ginsberg) to share this optimism. Still, how very infectious and "true" the way they sound it.

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Seems "father and son" had different Americas. I wonder about the relation though: could Ginsberg's America be the betrayal of its predecessor's hopes? or, could Whitman's America be the cause of the next America's despair? Did Ginsberg omit this discussion? Did he submerge it in the river Lethe?

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He's projecting his loneliness then, seeing a national malaise?

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Following you above, I think Ginsberg's conjuring WW as Dante did Virgil, making a guide out of his idol but at the same time making sure that the idol's less capable than he is (Virgil could not go beyond to Paradise because his limits lay in reason, neither baptized nor equipped to receive grace, whereas WW was out of touch, maybe out of kilter in a newer, less invigorated America).

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And how very different the ground of Ginsberg and that of Whitman. Ginsberg's shoes on a tiled floor, the produce and the cattle etc sorted or packed for easy, thoughtless consumption. Thanks.

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What do you think Ginsberg was trying to achieve by asking a forgetful (though not forgotten) graybeard?

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Not overboard, no! I think this is all about that brand of bizarre. That's as direct a link as a poet would claim of another. And it's in keeping with the conceit of "Song of Myself": what I assume, you shall assume. And here's Ginsberg assuming Whitman, soul and all.

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Would Whitman have loved such a boom as you described? I imagine Sandburg at home with with smoke and steel. But I wonder about Whitman, the limits of his inclusiveness, his idea of democracy.

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Ginsberg apparently carries a less affirmative view of the banks compared to Whitman. Where WW found life, industry, and democracy, Ginsberg saw death, alienation, and democracy. The death too of WW, therefore: as man and a savage set of poetics.

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"in the parking lot, waiting for you." That's a killer, and there were about two couplets there, one I loved:

              self. That common moment, unguarded,  
              skin to skin, why didn’t it make us change?  

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Same goes for me. Thanks for the Reines. Clicked your links and, yes! You're right. If there's only a way to subscribe to your exclamation points, I'd click that as well.

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Another acknowledged Whitmanian is Muriel Rukeyser. Fond of how she takes poetry to dark places. This leads to a sample

       :  Take my hand.          Fist my mind in your hand.          What are you now?

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Just discovered she's in ModPoPlus! Have also (just) begun compiling my postModPo destinations. ModPoPlus, the teaching forum, Rukeyser, and Reines are all in the bag.

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Happy when this happens to me. It means I'm still alive and connected, and that I (yet) have freedom to change my mind, legroom for exploration.

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From Mark Strand:

“Through you I shall be born again; myself again and again; myself without others; myself with a tomb; myself beyond death. I imagine you taking my name; I imagine you saying 'myself myself' again and again. And suddenly there will be no blue sky or sun or shape of anything without that simple utterance.”

Who deserves his place in this thread too if we believe Gregerson calling him one of Whitman's “most astute heirs and readers.” Farewell, Mark Strand. 

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Notes on John Ashbery’s “A Blessing in Disguise”

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,
But I, in my soul, am alive too.
I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you. You see,
You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps
Because you always tell me I am you,
And right. The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire.

I cannot ever think of me, I desire you
For a room in which the chairs ever
Have their backs turned to the light
Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.
If the wild light of this January day is true
I pledge me to be truthful unto you
Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day
On the wings of the secret you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

I prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you”
You must come to me, all golden and pale
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.

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Possibly, the poem itself is speaking, the conceit being its possession of soul, life, an I. “You must come to me, all golden and pale” reminds me of Corman’s “It isnt for want”.

       I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
       Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

I get from this a way for a poem to mean things, this poem’s particular way, which is emotive, seeking immediacy (like Whitman). That line containing “knowing you may be drawn to me” could mean a couple of different “ways” depending on the which word takes emphasis. Again, these accents are their own defense... (or, in this case: disguise)

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Let me submit a candidate for a paraphrase of those lines. That our “slant” of light, our personal angle, brings to the poem something neither anticipated nor imagined by the poet (or the poem). What’s amazing here is the tone, it could be matter-of-fact (ex: you always have a way of thinking about these things). Could it also be celebratory? Maybe not as explicitly as Whitman’s. In the end, we’re projecting ourselves into all these lines. The poem doesn’t demean that I think (doesn’t say: you’re just telling me I am you), but it doesn’t go all out Whitman either (What I assume, you shall assume).

So this is just me (as “always”) projecting my desires and anxieties onto / alongside / prompted by the openness of this poem.

Upon rereading, that considered shift from expected to “suspected” jumps out.

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Exactly how it is for me too. The lines that take me there are “I pledge me to be truthful unto you / Whom I cannot ever stop remembering” and “Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me” though it’s still as puzzling as ever, yet something I accepted, as the “wings of the secret never to be known.” I mean sure, okay, as long as we’re flying there.

And we do.

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“Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day” Recalling Janus now as old Rome’s marker between wartime and peacetime.

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Colors. I was thinking that the poem could be referring to things other than poetry (prosaic things perhaps, following the Dickinson exploration), the other things that preoccupy us. Colors might mean visual enticements. Might also mean allegiances, as in flags.

It hums well with the play of light throughout the poem, and the room with all those weirdly oriented chairs. Makes me think of the stained-glass that adorn cathedrals.

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Props to versatility. He has very short ones too (found a handful), gems of wit and whimsy. That compare and contrast thread sounds like a good idea, but then I don’t think you’re capable of a bad idea. Ashbery’s curated by deft, able hands in these halls.

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Today’s rereading of the poem, along with your comments, yield me a sense of contentment. To feel the presence of something deeper and unsayable, but also to be at peace with the fact that you'll never ever know, never ever see.

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Perfect! And Gillig does mash-ups. Thanks!

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Your comment on Ashbery’s plural “you” takes me back to Whitman’s large, multitudes-I. 

“A Blessing in Disguise” seems a direct response to “Song of Myself”. The title of one can be written over the other, blessing-as-song / song-as-blessing (an understanding of the Whitmanian project: generous offering, promise of plenitude, illumination), self-as-disguise, disguise-as-self (a re-appreciation of “the persona” or masked-I that Whitman overtly wished to strike against, strike off, trying to eliminate the you/I distinction—resulting however, or perhaps it was Whitman’s design all along—in increasing I/I distinctions, creating a great many selves that “contradict myself”).

I found some references to grass (the image elected to serve for/as Whitman’s conceit). Following the light downward “inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees / That seem to shine at me toward you” I see “you” as the grass.

“The pastel girth of the day,” the sun's halo or its effect, which for the I seems to be illumination but for the you, age and decay, as in the beauty of leaves of grass wilting, "“all golden and pale”.

So perhaps our Ashbery has found a way (or ways, or guises, or poetics) toward Whitman as one who “most honors” him, one “who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”

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Hi. The lines were from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

       I am the teacher of athletes,
       He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
       He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

A really strong passage regarding influence. He’s making a contest out of it. Even if one of his athletes (Ginsberg, Ashbery, Pessoa, Pound) were to best Whitman, their feat would only serve to prove the worth of their teacher.

Ashbery asserts himself, registers “despair and isolation,” but also (I think) expresses his gratitude, singing and dancing his “I” to show how much he had learned.

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Thanks for the opportunity you opened. When the Buddha was quoted, I remembered Freud’s reflection on Oedipus where a young man’s passage into manhood was seen as an elaborate rite of killing his father. The father’s shadow threatens the growth of the boy, a sense I get from these lines:

       And right. The great spruces loom.
       I am yours to die with, to desire.

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Yes, that whole (grand!) Greek business of sons killing fathers, fathers eating sons. If only an opt-out were possible. Maybe JA was attempting something like that here.

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I don’t wish to reduce Ashbery to Whitman (as Whitman already seems ever eager to absorb everything into Whitman), but let me see how far I get reading with everyone here taking WW as my slant of light.

(Which is just my way of saying please don't get too annoyed.)

So perhaps “they” here refers to grass, all the colors they wear through the various seasons (JA: “golden and pale”) but also all the colors they absorb by way of earth and decay (WW: “among black folks as among white, Canuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff...”). Therefore, “they” might echo all those multitudes within Whitman large I.

JA's second line seems an assertion of itself (of the poem) “But I, in my soul, am alive too.” When WW says “I loafe and invite my soul,” he’s inviting the reader, but the reader who has at least partially accepted being of or with WW’s “I”. But while JA seems willing to loafe (even fly), he also wishes to retain his self, his soul.

This, in spite of WW’s (forgivable) claims upon him.

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Yes and yes to you. This is happy work for me too. Glad you brought up Crane and Rimbaud. These I shall now read (with amatory Martory) alongside our JA.

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       Let’s keep knotted kisses to ourselves for a long time
       Until another day erases
       The trace of each passing.

Hello, Martory! Glad to make your acquaintance.

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Yes, and more:

       the clear distances of the city the factories without smoke
       bathed as at their birth stammered
       a trial hello
       that only ended however
       in this word round as a doubloon
       placed on the edge of that day
       by a considerate friend
       the sun on your arms naked against my cheeks

Thanks!

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Yes, we found a lot here that could also go to the context/culture thread The many accents of his French connection, JA’s friendships, his translation work. I also found a link or two here from you and Jon for those who’d like to read more articles about him.

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A good new image to work with. Perhaps the learning to be done’s waiting outside?

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Snake in the garden? I like your point about his phrases too, stuff like

Yes, 
You see,
or suspected, perhaps
And right.

And I wonder how essential they are to his poems. These seem like the kind of phrases you’ll be asked to cut out in poetry workshops. But they contribute to a tentativeness, a sense of the open path, we can walk whichever way our feet might lead us.

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Delicious. And I hope that my last thought before the first night of this new year will be an imagination of these mighty, unperceived trees.

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Mention was made of isolation and despair. Those could be the trials we’re looking for. Or those could be consequences of those trials.

Backtracking to the Greeks, we have Prometheus presenting two packages to the gods. These were proposals, two prototypes, one of which would decide the type sacrifices man would thereafter be required to burn to earn divine favor (ie, blessings). Wiki has it:

Prometheus slew a large ox, and divided it into two piles. In one pile he put all the meat and most of the fat, skillfully covering it with the ox’s grotesque stomach, while in the other pile, he dressed up the bones artfully with shining fat. Prometheus then invited Zeus to choose; Zeus chose the pile of bones.

Blessing in disguise here could be the nourishing meat secured in the “grotesque stomach,” which could be a way of looking at the human lot. Or, at poetry as a thing to be unwrapped, laid bare, consumed.

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A take on the question of intent, though I don’t think it’ll be answering any of the questions above except for “What do you think?”

Attracted to poets who are concerned with opening their work, making sure it is intrinsically many things for many people and many things also for one very studious reader. Maybe because this poet is in touch with the fact that the making of a thing (poem, Nobel’s dynamite, rice cake, treatise) does not arise from only one cause but from many, that the process perhaps partakes from even her smallest desire, her secret anxiety.

This is what I love about Dickinson and Stein, Niedecker and Perelman. If, at the outset, the intent is for a poem to mean in many directions, then we’re cool. A poet might very well react to a reader’s surprising (brain-beyond-the-groove) reading with lines like Ashbery’s:

       You hold me up to the light in a way
       I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps

Most of the writers I know are prosaic in the sense that the work must mean one thing (often referred to as “the main idea”), must get us to the point in the shortest, most memorable route possible, and yes, it’s an indispensable way of composing. It runs industries, assembles the broiler, constitutes nations, etc. But it would be impoverishment were that the only way to do poetry.

For writers like that, one-track and fabulously so, I try to honor them by getting their intent and nodding my head repeatedly. But for others like Ashbery, I can really just walk around. That’s his gift. I could try to get his intent without that having to be the point, like a game of chess in the context of a wide-open afternoon, so winning is not the thing, the sunset is.

Even when Ashbery tries to explain a poem of his, he words it carefully so that it sounds as if he’s just one reader of the poem (just so happens he’s also the writer). He just got to the poem before everybody else, but we can all have a look-see. And it’s poems like his “These Lacustrine Cities” and “A Blessing in Disguise” (charged with the writer's intent, but welcoming of the reader’s intent and—paraphrasing you in the webcast—moment and temperament) that make possible such northern lightly, quantum physical, mystically humming threads as these.

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Ginsberg Thread

Read the poem, or listen to Allen Ginsberg read "In a Supermarket in California"

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AN—  thanks for finding that out

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AN—  yes, i think that does evoke the underworld. esp those aeneid and odyssey scenes where the heroes bribe the dead to come rise briefly from the mouth of hades by digging a pit under a tree and filling it with the blood and innards of slain animals

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AN—  seems that (to ginsberg) whitman had the better end of the deal, and the better generation. it seems a touch cruel of ginsberg (instead of slaying the father) to import whitman to his time/hell and let him take on a diminished role with diminished faculties while he (ginsberg) retains more of the acuity and less (if none!) of the lethe

DE—   An interesting take. Whitman teaches straying from him after all. Anyone who wishes to undertake that must somehow psychically and of course aesthetically "reduce" the father/forebear. Otherwise, no transcendence/straying shall occur. Ginsberg has to imagine his courage-teacher as in some way less capable of facing this present with its supermarkets and commercialism and dwindling (shelved) selves.

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DE—  I found Dante here as well. I'm interested in where Ginsberg (Dante) wants his Whitman (Virgil) to take him. Dream-like, hallucinatory, or in keeping with the underworldly Inferno, the supermarket almost immediately takes the form of antiquity's hell the moment Ginsberg thinks of the outside.

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DE— That kind of makes this more of a hell—the fact that the Virgil here is also lost, a Whitman forgotten (Lethe) and forgetful. Dante could always count on Virgil, guide, protector, and translator. Ginsberg wants this Whitman to become a true Virgil, but it seems he has been rendered sterile thus displaced in the supermarket.

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AN— in dante's comedy, the great poets and philosophers of antiquity can't pass beyond limbo to purgatory because of their paganism and their loyalty to reason. reason (and a secular ethics that come with it) somehow saves them from hell, but it also too limiting to allow them paradise (or the purgatory that leads to paradise). following this, these two are somehow saved (or cursed), having no destiny (which way is your beard pointing?) other than to know now, to perceive now, but to forget later (lethe). just a tentative take. i'll have to read those limbo passages at some point to be sure

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DE— You sound like a poet yourself. But it's true, when your insides are reeling and you're lost in a crowd or a place of routines, the place takes on the shades of inferno and the routines suggest the cyclic punishments of hell.

AN— yes, i like this intertext! making whitman a teiresias does produce sound associations. teiresias who was not always in full control of his senses, who was sometimes male, sometimes female! he is definitely (if sometimes only momentarily) a courage-teacher to heroes like ulysses. also aeneas, i think :)

DE— Me too. Yes, Aeneas was also directed to seek counsel and help from Tiresias. It was said "that Tiresias, of all mortals, was permitted to keep a clear head about mortal matters" here. I'd like to read more into that because Whitman as Tiresias does not seem to have a clear head at all. But his questions about the murder of prokchops and other things seem to come from a special, underworldly insight into human affairs.

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AN— clarification: ginsberg's insanity, right?

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AN— to charon? (not to whitman?) because of the tendency toward the Lethe?

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