Each arid gulch a torrent broad and brown,
With logs and planks and what not floating down.
In the afternoon the clouds would thin and break,
But in the watches of the night the freak
Storms would begin again. Plans overthrown,
The members of the wedding hugged the phone
Trying to re-track guests, flowers, cake,
Musicians, church,
and preacher, while the bride MRB: Esther, I can
think of a number of great poets who wrote great poems that raised the world's
awareness of critical social issues. For EC: "Flower name poems," yes, it's an apt enough term. Although
to me it also calls up Paul Celan, who knew botany and much else and does use
all kinds of unusual vocabulary, who also accepted the premise that rhyme and
meter and traditional language are dead (though he knew how to use all three
and sneaked them in every now and then) and accomplished the near-impossible
feat of writing free verse that sticks in the mind. But Celan is, as the
physicists say, a singularity. He seems at times to be deliberately
carrying the premises of modernism ad absurdum. The tremendous power of his
work will only be released when it's understood that this path leads to a dead
end, that to go on we have to turn back. As to the environment, as you know, I am in the process of revising MRB: Congratulations on the Bellowing Ark publication-in-installments. EC: You've touched on another of those self-defeating notions that were
somehow foisted on poets by the twentieth century. In an essay published in Bellowing
Ark, "Volta" -- it's on my website now -- I try to talk about
the whole muddling complex. I've nothing against short forms per se. Even slogans have their place,
every age has had them. Another of mine (on the masthead of The Neovictorian)
is "Art for awareness' sake." In poetry if anywhere the
universe truly is a hologram, the whole implicit in the smallest part, and to
demonstrate this, to get the impact of the Big Bang into ten lines or so, is a
great thing Celan was perhaps the all-time master at this. But in his speech
"The Meridian" -- a text to which I keep returning again and again
-- Celan quotes a slogan by Mercier, a moderate writer of the French
Revolutionary period: "Elargissez l'Art." He quotes it with strong
reservations, he contradicts it, but still he quotes it, twice. My own view,
in any event, is that poets ought indeed to be thinking about how we might
reclaim some space. I remember first hearing from a fellow-undergraduate --
one of those people who are always anxiously straining to catch the latest
word in intellectual correctness -- the notion that a poem had to be short,
because a longer poem exceeds the reader's capacity to perceive it as a whole.
Well, but don't we expand such capacities by placing increasing demands on
them? My own early poems were all very short, not because I believed
they ought to be but because these brief flashes were all I could hold at
first. The ability to write longer poems is something that built up very
gradually, over decades. When I wrote my first poem of 500 lines, I felt I'd
crossed a threshold. Soon after that The
Consciousness of Earth assignment landed on me -- it was going to be a
prose response to Schell's Fate of the Earth, but one day this 130-line blank
verse prologue came out -- and this has forced me to work on building up long
argumentative and expository structures, a kind of musical organization of
ideas. Poetry is, as we used to say in the '60's, mind-expanding. Poetry is something very big. It goes beyond the confines of the individual
mind, like science. It came to me as a kind of initial breakthrough, again in
connection with Paul Celan, that just as the poem is a system, and the
life-work of a poet is a system, so there are also systems comprised of the
works of related poets, of all poets -- "That great poem, which all
poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since
the beginning of the world," as Shelley puts it. Think about poetry in
that light, and you see a whole new dimension open up -- what I've called
"macropoetics." I believe MB: Well, I certainly
agree that poetry isn't an optional hobby, and good poetry is a challenge both
to the poet and the reader: a very pleasurable challenge. Esther, thanks so
much for taking time to chat. I'm going to end the interview with an essay by
Esther that will be of interest to many of our readers . . . SYNCHRONIZING OUR WATCHES: THOUGHTS TOWARD A MACROPOETICS
by Esther Cameron
...that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one
great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world
-- Shelley
Elargissez l'Art!
-- Mercier (quoted by Celan in "The Meridian")
II. II.
Therefore, since all around are piled IV.
Heart,
We gather here to see faces from which we need not hide our face,
Crocus, seen
The Open Ones carry V. VI.
They threaten
Step off! The comets
And groom were parted by the waters wide.
At the last possible hour the rains abated.
Flowers were found; preacher, food, friends and band
Swiftly assembled in a plot re-planned,
And love's resolve was duly celebrated.
When the dust of postmodernism finally clears, I think we'll see that the
language is inexhaustible -- as long as we use it to grapple with the world. A
teacher of mine, the late Heinz Politzer, once wrote (I translate from the
German): "No one descends to Orcus just for a song." The
Orphic journey isn't possible without Eurydice, without some extrapoetic
desire or concern. The minute one denies this, the language becomes a closed
system and starts running down -- though only as far as the denier is
concerned! Eighty years ago one could still write a poem like "An Irish
Airman Foresees His Death," and now one hears that the language has worn
out! But for those who are still involved with the world through language,
there is no reason to think so.
Part of the modernist mistake, I think, lies in confusing two types of
innovation. The rules of chess were laid down some centuries ago. In all the
games that have been played since then, a bishop moves slantwise and a rook
does not. Very limiting, right? And yet I'm told that the number of
possible chess games is astronomical. There's no way all of them will ever be
played. In each of the games that is played the participants are passionately
absorbed, chess players innovate and develop their own styles, and yet no one
urges his fellow-players to let the rook move slantwise. No one would take
that as a serious innovation; it would be just a dumb suggestion that would
wreck the game. So here we poets are given an entire language, a set of poetic
forms (which can be expanded), and all the objects and relations in the real
world that language can refer to -- a game immeasurably more complex than
chess. And this is supposed to be exhaustible? The only thing that might be
exhaustible is the set of dumb suggestions (like writing without meter, or
without reference to the world) that don't explore the game's possibilities
but make it impossible to play. Over the last few decades Pound's slogan
"Make it new" has come to stand for this kind of mistake (whether or
not he originally meant it that way). If the counter-movement were to have a
slogan, it might be "Do it justice" -- "it" being the
poem's occasion. The impulse to write a poem often comes to me in the form of
an appeal from something that would otherwise be overlooked, to do it justice,
tell it like it is. If someone who also witnessed the occasion reads the poem
and says to me, "That's just what it was like," then I feel I've
done a good job. And since no two occasions are alike, the poem will then also
be unique and new.
I believe that there is such a thing. For it came as a difficult and
unaccustomed thought, some years ago, that the poetic process does not
necessarily stop at the borders of the poem; that poems, whole in themselves,
can also be taken as elements of a larger structure, as speeches in a play
which poets have been acting since the dawn of human mind, making up their
lines as they go along. With this recognition came a wish that this dialogue
could be more conscious, that it could have more of a presence in the world,
that the voices of poets could be heard as reinforcing one another - like the
voices in a fugue which, while pursuing their several paths, are yet bound up
in an underlying harmony.
True, every poet must hear his or her own inner voice, and must not be
deflected by political ideology or literary fashion from giving voice to his
or her perceptions. However, it happens that poets do see the same
things, do have similar perceptions and visions, or perceptions and visions
that can be recognized as bearings on the same points. And then there is room
for an act of recognition: a handshake, a publication of banns, some gesture
or ceremony that has not yet been invented. To keep track of such
recognitions, to invent such gestures and ceremonies and forms in which the
coherency of the poetic enterprise could become more manifest - this I would
like to call the social science of macropoetics.
Macropoetics has several interrelated aspects. The first is simply the
practice of attention, the art of noticing these connections. One product of
this practice would be a new-old poetic canon, where the central works would
be those to which the most connections lead. Since the purpose of a
canon is to help the next generation of writers to orient themselves, this
leads to the subject of the poetic apprenticeship, the personal poetic quest,
and how it would shape itself in the presence of a "macropoetic"
tradition. There is the aspect of form - the ceremonies, the gestures,
through which the recognition of poetic kinship would be expressed. And
finally, there is the re-expansion of poetry into domains of subject-matter
from which it has recently retreated.
But having coined a Greek word for an assemblage of thoughts, let me begin the
exposition in the form of a story. Bear with me, reader, in my switching
back and forth between personal narrative and systematic exposition, between
history and geometry, between the Tao and the halakha, just as, in my own
poetry, I switch between free verse and formal verse (more the latter lately,
I must admit). Each way of looking at things is in some sense true, as light
is both a particle and a wave, as "masculine" and
"feminine" types of intelligence both have their uses.
This finding of "talismanic" connections between one's life and the
things one reads: I suspect that this occurs oftener than people admit, that
the thought surfaces only to be dismissed as silly or pretentious. But this
unexamined reaction presupposes a difference between poiesis and "man's
search for meaning" - to borrow the title of Victor Frankel's book, which
Janine, again, brought to me the summer after Celan's suicide. It seems to me
that the poem is nothing other than a crystallization that occurs occasionally
in the course of this search, this quest. Symbolism could not occur in poetry
if it did not occur in life. One's personal symbols may, then, be something
like one's own key to the tradition.
I am reminded of Sylvia Ashton-Warner's book Spinster, which is about the
teaching process. The protagonist teaches Maori children to read by finding
out which words are most meaningful to each child. By learning to read these
words, the child gains a sense of power and is thus impelled to learn more
words. And I also think of Kafka's parable, "Before the Law,"
where it is revealed at the end that each person has a door into the Law that
is meant for them alone.
This apprenticeship was a matter of sheer accident and instinct. It happened
largely in despite of the teachings I was receiving in the academic and
literary milieu. The academic teachers, some of them very learned and
sensitive, did teach attention to a written text; but there was no place in
the curriculum for attention to the text of one's own life. Insofar as the
writing of poetry was taught, it was taught as a "craft," and
oriented toward a literary marketplace where one's fellow-students would be
one's future competitors. The important thing was to seem original while
avoiding a self-exposure that could incur unfavorable comment; questions of
ethics, or the direction one's life was taking, were mostly considered
irrelevant. Fortunately, Berkeley in those years was also a place of
psychological and social experiment, where many people were writing poetry in
an extracurricular way, just to keep track of what was happening to them. Few
of the poets I knew then eventually became known, but they and their words are
still part of my own inner constellation.
I'd like to think that the elements which I plucked, so to speak, from the
academic and countercultural milieux in the '60's could be combined into a
macropoetic curriculum. I dream of a milieu in which it is understood from the
outset that the quest for one's place in the poetic tradition is also a quest
for the meaning of one's life, that while learning the tradition one also
undergoes something like a training analysis. It is important to learn craft,
of course, but in my experience craft, beyond a simple acquaintance with the
form-book, is best learned by responding to the poems that have spoken to one,
and by writing on occasions when there is a need for craft. Thus, as an
adolescent I had learned to write sonnets by reading those of Millay; and I
reverted to this form after Celan's death, when the form became a kind of mast
to which I could lash myself while around me the sirens howled.
The encounter with Plath and Celan which I've been alluding to rather than
describing was a kind of initiatory experience, which I fell into unprepared
and unguided. It was like falling into an entirely different culture. On my
flight from an academic world where I had been expected to write a
dissertation on Celan's poems in the tone of one untouched by them, I stayed
for a few days in the house of a very temporary commune, where I found a copy
of Black Elk Speaks. Black Elk reminded me of Celan, and of Buber's Hasidic
masters. Like those masters but, alas, unlike Celan, Black Elk underwent his
visionary experiences in the presence of others who knew what such visions
were and who were able to help him - in a phrase that impressed me deeply at
the time - to "dance your vision before the tribe." (In his book
Earth's Mind, Roger Dunsmore comments very beautifully on this communal
poetics.) There must be an art of helping one another do this, that we
could find again.
At this point the Macropoetic Muse said to me, "Don't try to summarize.
Just pick one novel that you think is important, and then pick others that 'go
with' it. In the course of discussions, a coherency will appear." Which
novel should I start with? At our interview Celan had said (he apparently also
said this to others) that he had settled in Paris because of Rilke's one
novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Because of Malte, I
contented myself with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, rather than
attempting Ulysses; chose to discuss The Castle rather than The Trial. The
usual choice for Proust, Combray, fitted well. I wanted to begin with Flaubert
and Dostoevsky, but which of there books would fit here? An unexpected answer
came: The Adolescent, a book that turned out to be extraordinarily rich and
revelatory. Joyce Carol Oates' them, which a friend had recommended the winter
before, crashed the party, and an allusion in them prompted me to discuss
Madame Bovary rather than The Sentimental Education. Musil's Man Without
Qualities was also on the syllabus, but was not discussed for lack of time. A
student free-associated to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which I had read
but had not thought of because its tone repelled me; it turned out to be very
much a part of the configuration. As the Macropoetic Muse had predicted,
coherencies did show up - to the point where the students and I felt that we
were talking, not about seven books, but about one. Later I tried to fix
this configuration in a manuscript entitled The Web of What Is Written
(abbreviated, in 1974, WWW!). Besides the above-named works, the manuscript
included chapters on some texts that I thought showed alternatives to the
pattern enacted in the novels: Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Simone Weil's essay
"Human Personality," Laura (Riding) Jackson's The Telling, Buber's
Hasidim, Black Elk Speaks, and finally a fantasy-novel - Peter Beagle's The
Last Unicorn. In both parts of the work Celan is of course quoted passim.
Thus, as a first "assignment" after the initiation, I had been led
to address the task of canon-building. The works that I chose, taken together,
were like a recurring dream. The complex of novels was unified, like each of
the individual novels, by a common symbolism; the same situations kept
recurring. This was partly a matter of direct or indirect influence - I was
really talking about a family of novels, whose later writers had been aware of
the earlier ones. Most of them point backwards to Dante's Commedia (a central
reference point for the major poets of the twentieth century as well). Proust,
Joyce and Kafka all regarded Flaubert as the "master" and had been
more or less influenced by Dostoevsky; Rilke is sui generis, but he too refers
to Flaubert; Pynchon's novel is rife with allusions to Joyce, Kafka and Rilke;
Oates refers to Madame Bovary, though the main source of them is not
literature but, according to the author, the actual life-story of a woman who
certainly does not seem like an "Oates character." them serves as
confirmation that The Web of What Is Written is about things that really
happen to real people. Of course, the configuration is not closed; any number
of other works can be "associated into" it.
This sort of "canon" is an associative complex, rather than simply a
collection of "great books." Like a dream or novel, the WWW is
unified by a central concern, namely a wish that the poetic imagination might
be employed in creating something like a true "earth household," a
modus vivendi that would be happier and more "sustainable," as they
say, than present arrangements. In the works I have cited, introspection on
the craft of writing takes place - in this light. ("In the light of
U-topia," as Celan put it in "The Meridian.")
A group of poets with this canon as background would have a common
understanding of the forces that come into play when one writes and shares
poetry. They would be spared much confusion, and would be better able to
recognize both obstacles and allies, and to be generally - to use a word
underlined by Celan, Simone Weil, Mandel'shtam, and Dante -
"attentive."
In "The Meridian," Celan writes: "The poem is solitary. It is
solitary and on the way." Yet through his citations of and allusions to
Buechner, Lenz, Mercier, Kropotkin, Landauer, Schestow, Pascal and others -
citations that are not mere display, but show that he has had experiences that
helped him understand their words, that he has grappled with their questions
and understood their positions - he creates the sense of a common poetic
space, within which each one traces his or her own path, but attuned to the
others and with a sense (he plays on the multiple meanings of Sinn: sense,
meaning, direction) of a possible convergence.
In the years after Celan's death I kept seeing poems in literary magazines
that seemed like reflections of him, and at one point collected these into a
small anthology called "Convergent Vision." Later, in the
house of the late Dr. Israel Chalfen, the biographer of Celan's early years, I
saw a pencil drawing by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, likewise made in the '70's,
entitled "Toward a Center." It consisted of scattered dots that
congregated more densely in the middle, in a shape vaguely reminiscent of
Breughel's Tower of Babel; if it were not for the title one could not decide
whether it is aggregating or scattering. The drawing is very like Celan's
oeuvre as a whole. Whether it is a gathering or a scattering is up to our
interpretation and decision.
Some lines by Hoelderlin, another of Celan's teachers, come to mind:
The summits of time, and the beloved ones
Are neighbors growing weary upon
Most severed mountains,
Then give guiltless water,
O pinions give us, with truest intent (Sinn)
To cross over and to return again.
make yourself known,
here too, in the middle of the marketplace.
Unsupported by social
arrangements that recognize the sacred character of poetry, he was simply too
vulnerable. In his early years he seems to have attempted to form
alliances with other poets - the dedications of several poems are the trace of
this - but, for whatever reason, these alliances do not appear to have lasted.
This must have been at least part of the reason why he was unable to
"gather yourself, stand" as he wrote in a late poem. Celan suffered
a mental breakdown and committed suicide; others have survived, but at the
price of muting the voice of the heart and sacrificing the possibility of
vision.
In the spring of 1971 I realized, with a shock that unhinged me for a while,
that all this concerned me personally. At this remove in time the main thing
that puzzles me is: why was I surprised? But there may be some
psychological barrier to the idea of a common poiesis. Bloom's Anxiety of
Influence relates this barrier to the Oedipus complex, and I think he may be
right, if one adopts the view of the Oedipus complex which Erich Fromm
expounds in The Forgotten Language, to which an Orthodox rabbi free-associated
in a conversation with me some years ago.[2]
I come back to the idea of some sort of pedagogy or spiritual midwifery, by
which poets who had passed that narrows could help pull others through it,
into a mental space where the sacred trust among speakers is (re-)established.
Most of what I have written since then has been addressed to this task. I have
tried to assemble groups of poets, and I have also tried to envision an
organizational form. In 1975, at the start of one organizational attempt, I
wrote down the poem which I perceive as the center of my own work:
INVITATION
to hear the sound of honest speech, to share
what dreams have etched upon the sleeping brain,
what the still voice has said, when heavy hours
plunged us to regions of the mind and life
not mentioned in the marketplace: to find
and match the threads of common destinies,
designs grimed over by our thoughtless life --
A sanctuary for the common mind
we seek. Not to compete, but to compare
what we have seen and learned, and to look back
from here upon that world where tangled minds
create the problems they attempt to solve
by doubting one another, doubting love,
the wise imagination, and the word.
For, looking back from here upon that world,
perhaps ways will appear to us, which when
we only struggled in it, did not take
counsel of kindred minds, lay undiscovered;
perhaps, reflecting on the Babeled speech
of various disciplines that make careers,
we shall find out some speech by which to address
each sector of the world's fragmented truth
and bring news of the whole to every part.
We say the mind, once whole, can mend the world.
To mend the mind, that is the task we set.
How many years? How many lives? We do not know;
but each shall bring a thread.
The language of this poem seems far from Celan's. Yet some months later, when
the collection of Celan's last poems (Zeitgehoeft) appeared, I received some
assurance that I had correctly divined the way he wanted to point for others,
even if he was unable to walk it himself. The second-to-last poem is as
follows:
from the hospitable table,
tiny, sign-
sensitive exile
of a common truth,
you need
each grassblade.
("But each shall bring a
thread.")
And his very last poem ends:
the stone behind the eye,
it recognizes you
on the Sabbath.
("Faces from which we need not hide our face.")
Celan's life-work ends with the invocation of one of the oldest of social
forms, a form which creates a sacred time. Within that time, "work"
is forbidden. "Work" is legally defined by the prohibition of many
concrete acts, such as buying, selling, writing, cutting, tearing, sowing,
reaping, building. But one is also supposed to cultivate a certain Sabbath
mood, a mood of peacefulness and joy. Supposedly, in welcoming the Sabbath,
one receives an "extra soul," which departs at Havdalah, the
ceremony that returns one to weekday reality. Around the time that Zeitgehoeft
came out, I read Abraham Joshua Heschel's book The Sabbath, which quotes a
midrash according to which the original light of Creation was a light by which
one could see from one end of the world to another. When the First Human
sinned, this light was hidden, but it can still be seen on the Sabbath.
Reading this, I had a sense of recognition; I felt that I had seen Celan's
poetic landscape in just that light.
The kind of openness that Celan's poetry demands can evidently only come about
within some kind of structure. "How but in order and in ceremony/ Are
innocence and beauty born," as Yeats put it. "Structure" is
often felt as a constraint, but the poetry of the ages bears witness that it
is possible to express one's personal views within the constraints of
structure. To envision the "keeping of the Sabbath" as at least a
goal (to be pursued as best one can in this 7/24 world) is to draw at least
the outline of a framework within which the sacred exchange might take place.
The Internet of course opens new possibilities by allowing people to meet in
forums to which each person contributes in the time available to him or her.
My own first attempts to convene a meeting of minds in real time suggested to
me a second kind of formal measure (actually a very ancient one that has been
frequently revived in the "counterculture". In order to avoid
tensions over who should speak next and fruitless "debates" where
people attack each other's positions instead of reporting from their own, it
is helpful for participants to speak in turn, without interruptions, and for a
fixed length of time (five minutes seems to be the right measure). Whenever
people relax into this procedure, the results are moving and significant. Of
course, this procedure can only be carried out in small groups - twelve seems
to be the maximum. Next, I envisioned some regular liaison between groups, a
tiered structure such as Jethro suggests to Moses in Exodus 18, or possibly an
interlocking structure, with each person being part of at least two groups-
someone with a better head than I have for scheduling problems might be able
to work out the ideal scheme. Again, the Internet opens new
possibilities. An Internet counterpart of the meeting I've described would be
a forum in which participation is limited to ten or twelve and all
contributions would have to be in poetic form (no "workshop"-type
criticism of the type Joseph Salemi have both lambasted on Expansive Poetry
and Music Online, in which judgment seems to preclude understanding). Again
there could be some form of regular liaison among the groups.
Beyond the agreement to participate in a formal structure, the
"macropoetic" association would not require uniformity of opinion
among its members. Nor would any voice be officially representative of the
association. The social effects would flow from the presence within the
community of this kind of deliberation, from the resonance of voices that
speak as individuals, but as individuals aware of one another.
Such an association would, I think, want to keep track of its
"proceedings," archiving the poems brought to the meetings and
anything else the members wanted the association to keep. With computer
storage, this would not be difficult.
But storage ultimately requires a locus in space, and so it would be important
to establish a "poets' house" in as many communities as possible,
with meeting-rooms for groups of poets and for larger assemblies, as well as
computer rooms. The house is an archetypal symbol of the mind as well as
the community. Even as a mental image a poets' house can help poets to orient
themselves, serve as a beacon of "convergent vision." In 1993 I
developed this image in a poem called "The Hexagon."
The organization, as said, would be the "form" of the
"macropoem." Just as sonnet form can help one to state a thought in
the most pointed and impressive fashion, so the organization would be a
pointed and impressive statement of the transpersonal nature of poetic
thought.
This, to my mind, is self-destructive. For if one drops the claim that poetry
is useful, the chances of someone's finding it sweet are also diminished.
There are activities to which people gravitate naturally (like sitting on the
sofa in front of the television) and things that they may do at first even
with some reluctance and repugnance, for the sake of utility, and then come to
enjoy (like exercising, or reading poetry). Someone who doesn't believe poetry
is useful has no incentive to make that effort of concentration which the poem
demands. Moreover, when we advocate for things like the establishment of a
poets' house, we can best demonstrate the effectiveness of poetic language by
using it. By reviving the tradition of Hesiod and Lucretius and Dante and
Pope, we shall become better able to plead our own cause.
For poetry really is useful as an expository device. If you ever have trouble
organizing ideas in prose, try blank verse. That is how my environmental epic,
The Consciousness of Earth,[3]
began. I felt, when the blank-verse prologue suddenly flashed into shape out
of a nebula of prose, as though I'd just reinvented the wheel in some culture
where the wheelwright's craft had inexplicably been forgotten.
Biologically speaking, the ability to write poetry didn't evolve only as a way
of transcribing personal impressions and perceptions and emotions, although
doubtless there has always been an element of personal display. But above all,
poetry evolved as a technique for summarizing and recording the perceptions of
the group. The poet is very much a product of group selection, delegated to
think and feel for the community as well as him- or herself. Those who
are inconvenienced by the presence of thought in the community would like very
much to push us into various solipsistic corners, but we shouldn't let them.
One thing that Plath and Celan have in common is that both are Oedipal
mourners, having each lost a deeply-loved parent early and in a terrible way.
(Plath's father apparently refused treatment for an illness that would have
been curable; Celan's mother was murdered by the Nazis.) For both of
them, loss of the loved parent makes the world into a wasteland.
Throughout this writing, the conclusion of Plath's "Sheep in Fog"
has been going through my mind:
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.
And in Celan's "Black
Snowflakes" the mother's voice speaks of "the world that will never
grow green, my child, for your child." In both of them there is a sense
of being radically exposed. Yet at moments this becomes a sense of radical
freedom:
Step off seven leagues, like those distances
That revolve in Crivelli, untouchable.
Let this eye be an eagle,
The shadow of this lip, an abyss.
This very personal sense of deprivation, abandonment and exposure correlates
with negative perceptions about the state of the world. In Celan's case this
seems obviously understandable - although, in the shadow of his Holocaust
experiences, his discomfort with post-Holocaust culture is often overlooked.
In Plath's case the connection is less obvious. Yet her first breakdown began
in a close encounter with commercial culture, as an intern at Mademoiselle.
This encounter with dehumanization may have had as much to do with the
"Holocaust" imagery in her poetry as paternal abandonment.
The sense of "orphanhood" must also have something to do with the
way in which both use language. Both of them have a trick of making each
individual word stand out as if it was the only word ever spoken, alone in the
silent waste of the universe.
Have such a space to cross
("Night Dances")
The instinct to produce this
effect must be part of the reason why both abandoned traditional form after a
formal apprenticeship. Abandoned it, more or less: there is a kind of
crying out for form, a sense of form approaching and never quite arriving, in
the amphibrachic meter of Celan's broken-up lines, in Plath's off-rhymes, and
in a kind of "crystalline" organization that seems to happen from
the poem's center. The formal poem "shelters" the word,
whereas in free verse the word is out in the open. The style of both Plath's
and Celan's work dramatizes the exposed position of language, of human
consciousness, in a universe that was, as Celan put it in "Conversation
in the Mountains," "not thought up for you and me."
But in Celan's work, especially, the "stepping-off" from the world
is also the search for the Archimedean point. There is an invocation of a kind
of global consciousness, an encompassing solicitude. Something like the
"universal parenthood" Schell invokes in The Fate of the Earth:
Without violating that mystery,
we can perhaps best comprehend the obligation to save the species simply as a
new relationship among human beings. Because the will to save
the species would be a will to let other people into existence rather than a
will to save oneself, it is a form of respect for others, or, one might say, a
form of love. (...) This love, I believe, would bear a resemblance to the
generative love of parents, who in wanting to bring children into the world
have some experience of what it is to hope for the renewal of life.
Perhaps the association of poets I am trying to start would mean a formal
acknowledgment of this "universal parenthood."
In any event, I hope that this note on Plath and Celan makes it clearer how
their work could evoke a wish to produce, not only more poems, but also an
overarching form, within which poetry could develop under more favorable
conditions, gathering strength to speak to the world at large.
[2] Whereas Bloom emphasizes the "Oedipal" conflict between the father
and son, Fromm sees the "Oedipus complex" as an expression of adult
longing for the childhood world of love and solicitude. The obstacle to this
is not the father as rival but the imperative of conflict that seems to rule
the adult world.
[3] Currently being published in installments in The Bellowing Ark,
beginning with vol. 17 no. 5 (September-October 2001).