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 Rae Armantrout’s “The Way”

Card in pew pocket
announces,
“I am here.”

I made only one statement
because of a bad winter.

Grease is the word; grease
is the way

I am feeling.
Real life emergencies or

flubbing behind the scenes.

As a child,
I was abandoned

in a story
made of trees.

Here’s the small
gasp

of this clearing
come “upon” “again”

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A— don't think so. fact is, my reading's prospered now that you brought it up

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D— I made only one statement / because of a bad winter. I remember a point being made before that this statement might be a financial statement of sorts. Bad winter suggests an extremity. One statement could also be refer back to "I'm here" or to this poem which, although perhaps one statement (The Way), is clearly composed of several utterances, places, periods of time, and frames of reference.

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D— A "bank statement," maybe? But maybe the statement here is the aforementioned "I am here." This person has nothing to offer but herself, the winter having perhaps taken everything else away.

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D —I like how you phrased this question. Most readings usually automatically assume that a trail of pebbles ought to lead somewhere, that a thread decides the value of a maze. What if there's a trail but no destiny? A possibility, since the trail alluded to is composed of bread crumbs, the way therefore described (and created) by something both impermanent and important.

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D— Putting it that way, it seems to me now that the vision of "The Way" parallels Paris Spleen.

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D— These notes are precious! Thanks for relaying, sharing. I like your personal touch, your reflection on the process, how even the act of bringing it to us here could be riddled by mis- or missed readings, additions, over-reading. (Considering now if losing the way is, itself, the way.)

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A— "gasp" truly

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D—
ascending the stories
a tree at a time
clearing the
throat for your gasp

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A— happened to me. sounded beautiful and very true to the reader's (and her father's) life, so I said that I want my poem to mean what she meant, and that I'm grateful she had it mean that way

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A— take every poet's explanation of her poem as a performance, an annotative performance. give it some privilege, but not sole authority (even other readings by the self-same poet can be seen as another performance, like being in the theater for the same play but on another night). other readers could "perform" it, in fact every reading, even interior, undisclosed readings are already performances of the poem in the mind, an inescapable process of co-creation. like this one in particular's likable because armantrout explains her poem with little apparent restraint, supplying the sources, offering some interpretation, but never closing the circle. not every poet is capable of that. in her discussion of "I am here," it seems to me that she's also a meticulously selective reader of texts around her. wonder if this process somehow contributes to her generosity

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D— Life is what happens when you are busy making other fun. Go all out!

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D—
or as in Bergv
all, half-Way's
all the Way yo
u'll ever need

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D— Reading "VIA" and "The Way" through you as quests of sorts. And that greasy inferno sounds like a wonderfully slippery slope, not sure if Virgil's got enough virtue to drag Dante away from that eternal spectacle.

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D— Bergvall made a sort of Limbo with "VIA," keeping Dante from fully entering Inferno (but also from fulfilling his maybe self-ordained destiny) through the loop of (the conceit of?) his own translated words. Burn!

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D— Could this also apply to this story made of trees? I hope you see it as a good thing, this openness of the poem.

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A— false perhaps in that sense as you described, but also as a trail that disrupts the "flow" of language or reasoning

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A— we can only wish. as do the kids. but perhaps there's only (greasy) adolescence

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D— That threw me off. How it's framed here, it appears so. Story made of trees, the pulp of trees as paper, or through the hidden word "leaves" or out of identification with Hansel and Gretel. But the aspiration or destination that the story carries (or with which it resonates, that the story also is, how can that be worldly? At most it's (infected with) a hope to be something other than the world. So we go at it again and again, as mantras and chants (maybe Wiccan spells) promise to carry us elsewhere or inward.

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D—To end up in a place of worship after expecting a place of candy canes and chocolate sprinkles.

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D—
"as soon as" yes
but not one moment before

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A— WORD

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D— Thanks for this exhilarating view of your involvement. I am (for some reason) picturing you as that guy in the courtroom sketching the scene while the judge and the lawyers close read the evidence for the rest of us. Most interesting presence.

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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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