Poets in Law School

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.--Shelley

We take to law because our love has failed.
We study how to sue instead of sing.
We still plead; but our pleadings have a sting:
They're meant not to reach out, but to be hurled.
Farewell, the uncorrupted word that held
In visionary light each common thing,
That fitted symbolism like a ring
Upon the hand of the abandoned world.

Here we avoid each other's eyes in shame,
Learning our lawyer tricks, earning the blame
For half the evils of this addled time.
Wish that other folks had valued us
When we spoke to them in truth and trust.
They cast out reason, when they turned from rhyme. 

Love's Catechism

That water may be taught to flow uphill,
The sun to rise out of the western ground;
That lively ichors from cold stones distill,
That our lost years may somewhere yet be found;
That roses blossom at the arctic pole,
That freshets purl across the desert path,
The swift-sent arrow will not find the goal,
Nor the slow tortoise feel Achilles' wrath;
That there may be two hills without a dale,
That lions may be taught to draw the plow,
That moth-wings make invulnerable mail,
That war-ships founder on a drowned man's brow:
All these false things true lovers must believe,
For the world wears worse, when these illusions leave.

MB: Mike Burch chiming in again, this time with Esther Cameron. Esther is a poet, essayist and editor of The Neovictorian/Cochlea, an excellent poetry journal with pages populated by some of my favorite contemporary poets, including Richard Moore, the subject of May's interview. Esther, your journal has such an interesting name: would you care to enlighten our readers as to how and why you chose it, before we dive into your poetry?

EC: I thought of "Neovictorian" first, because, well, I consider myself a neo-Victorian. Maybe I wanted to be a bit provocative in my way. Of course the Victorian period was, like all other epochs of human history, a mixed bag. But I see it as a time when poetry tried to step into the spiritual gap left by the scientific debunking of religion, and to shore up a social consciousness that was being shattered by the impact of industrialization and capitalism. Why give up? If I had to choose two favorite Victorian poems, they'd be Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (which to me is about the struggle with cynicism) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Cry of the Children," which actually helped inspire the effort to pass child labor laws. "Cochlea" was an afterthought. The cochlea is the labyrinth of the inner ear, shaped like a spiral shell. It symbolizes the intense inner listening in which poetry is written and read. I considered replacing the original title but couldn't quite bring myself to back down from a clarion call. So I kept the two titles as alternatives, and I think having the two titles also pays tribute to that tension between culture and nature which poetry often tries to mediate in one way or another.

MB: I like the journal's title, and it continues to grow on me, which is what "things poetic" are supposed to do. Esther, your comment about Browning's poem made me think immediately of William Blake, a poet who spoke strongly for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised, particularly the children of the poor. Who can forget his chimneysweeps or his railing against the industrial revolution's "dark Satanic mills?" Which leads to an interesting question in light of your comments about Victorian poetry: what do you think of modern critics of poetry who would have us believe it's too late for poetry to have a social conscience, much less a social purpose? Can poetry change the world? Should it try?

EC: Everything we say or do changes the world. And if a person has a social conscience, surely their poetry will also have one. We respond to what moves us, and hope to move others in our turn. That's life, and I don't see poetry as an exception to this -- rather as a heightened instance. Of course, the poem has to be written for its own sake. But the writing of a poem is a struggle of the form-giving eros ("builder of cities," as Auden said) against thanatos (entropy, chaos, indifference).

And social action is or should be the same thing. The important thing is for poetry not to lose its own center; then, instead of becoming subordinated as propaganda to political agendas, poetry could help social activists to design a way of social action that would respect the individual soul and the immense complexity of the world, and run on delight more than anger. In a way my latest poem, "A Wedding in the Texas Flood" (all true!), turned out to be about that. Love wins in that situation, with a lot of logistical hard work, despite hell and high water. And the making of the poem was a somewhat similar process!

MRB: I'm sure our readers will enjoy the poem, so here it is:

A Wedding in the Texas Flood

The waters had been rising for a week,
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
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.

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   instance, earlier today I wrote a mini-essay on Yeats' "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" for a poetry forum called "Verses University." In the poem, Yeats touches on the dilemma of an Irish pilot, Robert Gregory, who fought alongside the British in World War I, even though many Irishmen, including Yeats, considered the British oppressors and doubted that the Irish would be any worse off under the Germans' brand of oppression. Today, the Earth itself seems to be under siege, yet modern poetry has become more and more silent on environmental issues. I do see a number of what I politely call "flower name poems," in which poets who seem to think the language is worn out rely on the names of unusual flowers and plants to bail them out. But that's about it. A little bird tells me you're not in sympathy with those poets . . .

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.

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.

As to the environment, as you know, I am in the process of revising an epic on the ecological crisis -- The Consciousness of Earth, which is appearing installmentwise in Bellowing Ark.  It's in blank verse, with a strong traditional base, though some colloquialism does come in, as with Frost. I suppose it's in a personal style (inevitably), but my focus is not on creating a style but on poetically synthesizing a various modern knowledge, pulling this knowledge together and reintegrating it into a humanistic consciousness, a poetic continuum that is represented by the instrument of Milton and Wordsworth and Frost.  To do this is poetically quite challenging and amusing. But I'm not doing it only for the sake of the poetry, and I hope the work will be read by some who not only enjoy the poetry but share my faith that poetry can actually help us think about these things in a more coherent and hopeful way. 
 
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.

MRB: Congratulations on the Bellowing Ark publication-in-installments.   That's quite a coup! I'm in complete agreement that a small plethora of zingy-but-zany slogans have not helped modern poetry: Pound's "Make it new." Williams's "No ideas but in things." Andrea del Sarto's "Less is more," channeled, of course, through Robert Browning. Rather than "less is more," I like to think "best is more." Modern poetry has become minimalist almost to the point of nonexistence, and poets who espouse "verbal reticence" don't really shut up, they just convince readers they have nothing to say worth hearing. If poetry is "the best words" as Coleridge maintained, shouldn't we want more of them, not less? Your thoughts?

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 that by exploring this dimension we'll find ways of amplifying all our voices, reclaiming for poetry its rightful position in human life. As we understand more about how the human mind works, we see that poetry isn't the optional hobby it has seemed to many in the technological age. Fred Turner's essay "The Neural Lyre" is one beginning. Poetry is what holds society, and even the individual personality, together. People can do without poetry, just as they can let machines do all their physical, work, but it's not very good for them, individually or collectively. The challenge before all of us now is to make this point. And by taking up that challenge, I believe we'll also bring out the best in ourselves as poets.

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")

In this essay I am going to transgress a commandment of W. H. Auden's, by attempting to "commit/ A social science." I have already coined a word - a questionable act, unless one is very sure there is some previously unnamed thing that needs recognition. 

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.

                                    Therefore, since all around are piled
                                    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.

                                    Heart,
                                    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

                        We gather here to see faces from which we need not hide our face,
                        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:

                                    Crocus, seen
                                    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 Open Ones carry
                                    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.

                        They threaten
                        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!
                        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.

Compare these lines from Plath's "Gulliver" with Celan's references to the "step" that is an "act of freedom," the extraplanetary excursions in The No-One's Rose.

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.

                      The comets
                      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.