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A Perfection in the Poise

Oct 142012

An exploratory twirl across a precarious bridge of words in “The Suspension”

The Suspension

bridge being
by its nature
incomplete

at either end
without anchors
heavily laden

and the wide
context of connection
of place

to place
like a man webbed
to his life

birth to death
pegged feeling
traffic

tickle across him
as he sways daily
going nowhere--

Watch the wind
now playfully
wake it

singing!

The punctuation of a pause. An incentive in the incompleteness of a phrase broken across the spine of several lines of verse. Like the tense energy of a bullwhip that gathers to a crisp crack that then echoes in the listeners’ ears, “The Suspension” attempts this trick of suave timing and intention. The effect is to leave a suggestion of multiple meanings and insinuations in each line far beyond the mere sketch that the words themselves provide. Laid out and read as a simple pair if sentences, there’s not a whole lot of intensity in the language. But, strung across the intervaled frets of the line breaks, the language gains enough tension to be play many different tunes without breaking the basic sense of the piece.

Read aloud sensitively, the voice is pulled toward a monotone. The monotone is a way of testing each word by its own merits, without prejudice. Each word adds its plink to the melody beyond (or absent) any assumed speaker’s intentions; like a tune clawed from a Japanese samisen, the spirit of the listener finds itself eerily manifesting in the perfected intervals between each line, word, and syllable. This method of versification trends toward the use of monosyllabic word choices since that lets each meaning-and-sound unit most easily have its maximum impact of implication.

In this poem, the tension of multiple meanings and implications begins right in the title. Let’s speed through the lines with some initial possibilities before we consider how all of these multiple meanings and some of the sound values add up to the sort of sculpture-in-motion of one of Calder’s merry mobiles–a stiffened, crafted and finished shape that still can change is outline even though the observer keeps his mind “still like the hummingbird.”

The Suspension(motion tensed to stillness; a paused act; implicit indecision; being let go or released from one’s usual work or task;)

bridge being(the physical object of the poem surpassingly introduced, the bridge; essence of the object, or being, is connection; connection between two of what, though; connection itself as a form of stasis; oxymoron of this stasis, which pulls the meaning in two directions at once; a suspension bridge is the lightest and most aerial kind of bridge, a tightrope across an abyss;)

by its nature(both naturally and in the outward manifestation of its interiority;)

incomplete(pulling away from the implied completeness or fullness of ‘nature’ in previous line; emphasized by its placement at the end of the stanza; having in air like the suspension bridge itself, a natural manifestation of the oxymoron;)

at either end(changes the focus from the bridge to its end-points; neither end is itself the focus, which keeps suspended feeling going; question arises: how exactly is it ‘incomplete / at either end’; the eye can look only at one end at a time, and so shifts back and forth; the mobile is twirling;)

without anchors(the nature of the incompleteness is modified: anchors remove it, complete the connecting nature of the bridge; raises the contemplation of an anchorless bridge; would it be like a kite let go in a storm; would it simply collapse;)

heavily laden(nature of the anchors; the lightness of the bridge requires weight too, like a kite when guided by a fist holding its twine; sense of oppression; loss of freedom; the weight of the past; a burden spiritual or physical;)

and the wide(opening the viewpoint; wideness of river; bringing in the existence of whatever is bridged over; bridge overcomes an obstacle, this is at least implied;)

context of connection(meaning, context, occur only beyond the actual span of the bridge and its anchors; no man is an island; riding the mobile is a game of blind-man’s-bluff; pattern requires perspective;)

of place(the context, albeit in a generalized noun;)

to place(place is doubled, like the anchors; origins and destinations are definite, but is the bridge equally real;)

like a man webbed(major simile of the poem is introduced: the bridge is like a man, man is like a bridge; continuation of slight anthropomorphization of “heavily laden”; “webbed” is an unusual word choice, the only metaphor in the poem; stringiness of suspension bridge referenced; man and bridge are tied down, laden; whether spider or fly remains unclear;)

to his life(life is the place of human context; destinations;)

birth to death(place becomes time; length of a man’s life is the width of his context;)

pegged feeling(subjective aspect of connection emphasized; burden underlined; suggestion of crucifixion, sacrifice;)

traffic(quick switch back the literal context of the bridge; many things, many thoughts, many feelings travel over the bridge of a man’s burdensome existence; once an electronic circuit is complete, information flows;)

tickle across him(quick switch back to the subjective context; “tickle” implies it may not all be suffering; annoyance of tickling; implied laughter too;)

as he sways daily(indecision of being pegged, webbed between obligations, burdens, anchors)

going nowhere–(man’s life, like bridge, although a means of connect is itself inherently directionless; induced oxymoronic meditative state; threat of meaninglessness; dash emphasizes stoppage;)

Watch the wind(first new clause, capitalized for emphasis; the invisibility of the wind is a hidden context of the suspension bridge, the medium of its swaying; like time is man’s invisible medium of his existence;)

now playfully(return to lightness of “tickle”; context of bridge is beyond bridge’s, or man’s control;)

wake it(invasiveness of windy context liberates the bridge from its burdens; no “patient etherized upon a table,” the bridge, the man, is conscious in his suffering, the necessities of his connections;)

singing!(wires of the suspension bridge hum and sing in the playful wind; reminiscent of Coleridge’s Aeolian Harp poem, which was a metaphor for the soul; trapped between places and contexts, weighted at both ends, run across by purposeful others, still expression, freedom, patterns of meaning and feeling are possible; )

Destinations Deferred

[Essays], Introductions, Rehearsing Repetitions on the Rappahannock

Oct 022012

The Ever-Arriving River

How do we know we have arrived?

No gate blows open, no trumpet swings wide
Giving boogie-oogie oogie-boogie to the countryside.
Our horses must feed on grass, or perish.
So, too, our souls.  Having gone down the long defiles
All night, in a night that is not sure of ending,
Our souls paw their bellies and howl.
Even a ghost craves ghostly sustenance.

Have we arrived then, when midnight creaks
And starved souls howl at the wolvish moon?
Or must we still, in our hunger, kneel and pray?
Must a glittering track shiver in the sleepy pines
For the last mile shimmied on our knees?
Bend at that track, and drink with tragic hands,
With hands encased in silver to their wrists.

Drink and drink;  drink deep, O traveler--
Tomorrow we must find this river again.

The themes of this poem can be said to be paradise, pain, and persistence.

The first line of the poem immediately creates the context and then throws it into question.

How do we know we have arrived?

In the title it is the river that is arriving. In the first line the question is about our arriving. There is some confusion between whether it is the river arriving or us who are arriving. What is the relationship between these two arrivals?

What does arriving mean anyway? If the river is ever-arriving how do we know we’ve ever gotten anywhere? If we don’t know that we’ve arrived somewhere what is the problem that creates? These are the sorts of questions that are created by the tension between the title and the first line of the poem.

The reader and the narrator of the poem both seek reassurance on this point. The second stanza begins with a frustration of that seeking reassurance. Traditional signs of arrival, signs of having completed your journey, are denied the speaker and the reader both. “No gate blows open.”

“No trumpet swings wide,” the horn of Gabriel, the official welcoming at the gates of heaven, is absent from the countryside. There is no sound of welcome available to the traveler. Indeed the silence seems to mock the reader and the seeker. The “oogie-boogie” of 1940s swing music is unavailable to the traveler, and hides another pun in the poem only a footnote can provide.

This lack of welcome, this lack of acknowledgment, this lack of arrival, then create an intolerable tension in the poem. We are not only mocked, we are in peril. “Our horses must feed on grass, or perish.” The horses, representative of purposeful onward motion, must find some sustenance or die. Our sense of arrival is frustrated. We must seek a way to go forward even one more step in this unwelcoming countryside. The analogy to the spiritual context is made explicit in the first half of the next line. Our souls are directly compared to the horses which carry us onward. The long night of the soul is vividly evoked as “the long defiles / all night.”

The spiritual context of the seeking, the lust for Paradise, is underlined in the last line of the stanza “even a ghost craves ghostly sustenance.” So here we are. We are suffering, we are seeking. When will we arrive at this fabled “ever-arriving” river? The ever-arriving nature of the river is reminiscent of Heraclitus’s observation that one may never step into the same river twice. Will the river be the place of our renewal, our welcoming? Is it truly to be the destination that we are seeking?

The hope is set up in the poem that indeed the river will be the paradise our souls are craving. But on what sustenance Olar soul survive in the meantime? Is our desire for paradise itself the sustenance we seek? The third stanza asks these very questions. The conditions of “arrival” are mixed up with the conditions of seeking, the “starved” nature of the spiritual quest is itself considered a sign of arriving someplace. Our hunger for spiritual fulfillment has lifted us out of the ordinary daily context of our lives. We’re no longer simply mortal. We are mortal and spiritual creatures, locked into a quest. This seems a bit medieval and some ways. Like Parsifal with his vision of the Grail, we are beset with a vision of an overflowing, ever-arriving river. Our thirst is great in the darkness of our long spiritual night.

But mere spiritual hunger, mere spiritual seeking, are not enough to fulfill the requirements of arrival. We must still “in our hunger, Neal and pray.” To wish for spiritual fulfillment to seek the river is not enough. We must, even without the grass that are horses require, even without finding anything yet, we must “kneel and pray.” We must, even in the midst of our suffering, be grateful. But this is jumping the gun (or the gate) a bit here. First the poet ratchets up the tension of the seeker’s dilemma a few more notches. The pervasive use of the the communal perspective, “our horses,” “our souls,” draws the reader into alignment with the speaker’s quest. It is not dissimilar to the old preacher’s trick of addressing his disparate congregation confidently as a single community, a united entity, small before the greatness of The Lord.

In the desperation and tension created by the prolonged absence of paradise or the goal to which the traveler is headed, a vision of this final destination appears. In the middle of the woods, in the middle of the countryside a “glittering track” appears uncertainly in the moonlight. Is this the long-awaited “ever-arriving river”? Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. But our approach to it (whether it is real or imagined only among the “sleepy pines”) must be prayerfully attempted; we must move forward the “last mile” on our knees. But even here, even in extremis, the mocking humorousness of the situation is not neglected by the poet; this last mile, oogie-boogie style, is “shimmied on our knees.” It seems that we are to chuckle at ourselves in our spiritual seeking, our thirst to arrive. Perhaps there is some nobility in such a sly acknowledgement of our perpetual “shortcomings.”

This uncertainty of our arrival–emphasized from the first line of the poem–is no doubt why we are instructed to drink with “tragic hands.” And then there is the brilliant image of the hands, wet with this very ambivalent arrival, after our midnight creeping, after the anguish of our hungry souls “howling” for sustenance, “encased in silver to their wrists.” Our desire has brought us here, has manacled us to this destiny of seeking. Even in the very act of fulfillment there is to be no satiation; we are locked into a cycle of spiritual seeking. It is a rather grim image of that meditation many traditions label a spiritual practice or discipline.

But what other choice does the howling soul have? Given the poverty of our spiritual circumstances, given the hunger for arrival, we can only continue to seek. But now that we, with sufficient gratitude and desperation, have arrived at this temporary river, we should drink. Tomorrow we may seek, but tonight we drink!

Drink and drink; drink deep, O traveler–
Tomorrow we must find this river again.

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]
Oct. 1, 2012

Verlaine: Man of Many Tears and Ecstasies

[Essays], Soiree de Poesie Francaise

Aug 182012

From the “Soiree” series. Short essays incited by the Soiree de Poesie Francaise held monthly at the Cranford TeaSpot in Cranford, NJ with my careful co-host Carrie Pedersen Hudak.

Paul Verlaine

The third was staring at his glass from out abysmal pain;
With tears his eyes were bitten in beneath his bulbous brain.
“Who is the sodden wretch?” I said. They told me: “Paul Verlaine.”
~~Robt. Service, Gods in the Gutter
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/3907/

Here lived and died a man of towering passions. All of his wisdom is the poverty of passion. To be blown about by the winds of his passion taught him all of life that he would ever know. His reaction to these buffets and blows of interior turmoil was to write exquisitely disciplined poetry. His poetry could contain and describe his wild passion; or, if not describe, indicate and evoke those passions in his readers. For, of course, Verlaine was one of the first masters and principle proponents of the idea that vagueness and nuance (or “the apprehension of reality though sensation” as Philip Stephan puts it more precisely) is its own value in the creative exercise of language. Naturally, when Verlaine came to write a directive adumbrating his new view of poetics in his justly famous poem “Art Poetique,” one of his first instructions to would-be poets is to “take eloquence and wring its neck!”

When passion is pursued in the mood of passion, and not “recollected in tranquility,” as Wordsworth recommends, special problems–both of validity and precision–arise. To be in the mood of passion is to be a bit intemperate and overblown, yet to represent or evoke that passion is to require the calm precision of the watchmaker squinting willfully at his bench. Perhaps only God could do the thing fully, sending a third of his tripartite self to live and suffer a life of passion, inspiring by his demise and titillating all of the arts for centuries. But if one must pen the poem as well as suffer its inspiration? How is one to do it? Even our man on the cross felt abandoned in such circumstances–and this is Verlaine’s precise starting point.

College DJs who play the loudest music often have a laid-back demeanor that they present between the tracks. Using loudness in amplified music as a rough contemporary equivalent for passion, we can tune in to limitless hours of top-volume hardcore screeds and screams punctuated by a laconically under-caffeinated tween’s wearily somnolent hypnosis-inducing voice. How else can one’s underpowered words bracket the screech of a jet engine? And this is world-weary wispiness that Verlaine often uses to approach his most emotive moments.

Surfers also have a lifestyle approach to their art. You can’t master the enormous energy of a righteous curl, you must surrender to it. And yet, of course, there is a great art in the surrender; a finesse, and a requisite strength. But, and this is the key distinction, one must throw one’s whole being into the task–including one’s habitual attitude toward life, the way you carry yourself in daily tasks. The surfer’s reward for going whole hog, for giving up any other way of life? The ride of their lives! A seemless oneness with the wave, with God.

Images of extreme delicacy are a hallmark of Verlaine’s poetry, and I don’t mind indulging in a few over-the-crest metaphors to make my point regarding his verse. Verlaine may be one of the most difficult poets, besides Mallarme, to translate and keep the emotional meaning of his work intact. This is to his credit, and to Poetry’s eternal glory. I feel that the way his translated poems best resonate is in their referring so deeply to imagined moments of perception, with all the indistinct machinery of subjective consciousness intact. I think of Robert Lowell’s short sweet poem “Myopia,” which perfectly capture’s the time between removing one’s eyeglasses and the onset of sleep as an objective correlative to how Verlaine’s poetic technique operates. But with Verlaine, much vaster ranges of emotion and ranges of subjectivity are handled with this sort of one-off precision. He did find a few sorts of experiences especially effective in his experiments, and one often comes across indistinctly heard music, voices in other rooms, the blurry warbling of a fountain, the smeariness of tears whose origin is unknown even to the weeper.

From the turmoil of his life, he brought forth dreamlets of beauty, remorseful echoes of joys gone by. Verlaine “grabbed for the gusto,” as we might say. And these moments of gusto, of beauty, then left permanent traces in his memory, which he recreates with the delicacy of watercolors and with a careful attention to suggestive detail–allowing the reader’s own imagination to be more fully engaged in the task of re-creation. What had been his private experience becomes your own private experience, since you must bring the details and explicit emotions to the piece that Verlaine creates. He will not profane the pinched heart with an abstract label; he will not narrow the field of his telescope with a name. In this way, his compositions are almost musical, with a suggested theme or setting, and with much of the enjoyment created by being subsequently aroused within the reader. Pornography perhaps achieves this same effect, but with a simple explicitness of imagery and soundtrack–and an equally stereotyped outcome.

Not for Verlaine such paucity of passions! We do, perhaps, feel some effect of being forced to squeak or groan upon command, as if our own feelings are not as great, not as sharply engaged as the author’s are. Too, there is a sense of exhaustion that can set in–not the intellectual exhaustion that happens when reading some brawny-brained poet, or the tiredness of tracing out too-whimsically filleted a plot, having trod from the Caucuses to moon-craters and back again–but an exhaustion at having to experince too deeply our own conjured feelings. With Verlaine, quite uniquely perhaps, there is an emphasis on getting out of the poem what you are able to bring to the poem. I think perhaps his poetry can get us to the irritable sleepiness of a good psychotherapy session; we have glimpsed the cunning crowded whirling of a few of our enmeshed emotional cogs, noted a few revealed connections that we hadn’t been conscious of before, and then, aghast, expressed, and, strictly speaking, satiated at feeling these new revelations, we need to return to our old selves for awhile. The mental incisions must heal and we must reassure ourselves of our old homey surroundings as we yawn and blink.

There are many risks inherent in this strategy of creation. The reader may be too young, naive, or emotionally undeveloped to be able to bring to the poem the sorts of feelings that the poet-surgeon is so delicately attempting to diagnose and evoke. Verlaine’s poems may simply seem weak or vague to such a reader. But Verlaine is too careful a craftsman to allow even the casual reader to dismiss his efforts, which are so very exacting in their forms. A bedpost chiseled by Bernini is not just a bedpost; a slip of the tongue by Freud himself is a fraught affair! The labor of Verlaine’s efforts are obvious even when the effects are ephemeral.

It is this tenacious veracity in the technique that can let even the most vigilant reader relax into a trusted relationship with the innovative tricks that Verlaine is attempting in his verse. He has the strict form of a Parnassian, and the cutting-edge content of a symbolist. Baudelaire first opened these floodgates, and in English the emphasis on vague evocativeness came to a head in the early Yeats. Yeats uses Irish myth and the flitting world of faerie to float the reader to new realms of daydream and emotional meaning. Writers like Verlaine, like the Impressionists in painting and Debussy in music, sought to create new feelings and sensations that did not yet have a name. Whether such a search for new experiences can ever bear true fruit, I cannot say. But even a old saw needs to be re-toothed when it wears dull. Each age seems to have its own “sensibility,” its sense of itself as being different from those who came before, and from those who trail after. Perhaps this is all that may be reasonably said about the matter–the vortex where style and substance intersect.

Andre Breton: Fun and Fascination

[Essays], Soiree de Poesie Francaise

Jun 062012

From the “Soiree” series. Short essays incited by the Soiree de Poesie Francaise held monthly at the TeaSpot in Cranford, NJ with my careful co-host Carrie Pedersen Hudak.

Andre Breton

Please cover your eyes for a moment. Feel your fingers over your eyelids, feel how more profoundly loud my voice has become….

What can one say about surrealism? It is a literary form innovated and defined by Andre Breton. You may already be familiar with the idea of nonsense randomly injected into poems, or the idea of retrieving errant bits of dreams for display, and possibly you have experimented with the discipline of automatic writing, where one writes uninterruptedly for a set period of time without any editorial, story, or lyrical intention. But what I would like to resurrect most in this short note about the contribution of Andre Breton is the overriding sense of *fun* that the surrealist enterprise was both driven by and tried to drive back into life.

For Breton, dreams were an opportunity to snare some of our original, unscripted, individual responses to actually being alive. With eyes shut, with the paws of Morpheus firmly over our daytime sight, dreams open another portion of ourselves to examination. As opposed to Freud (to whose pioneering work the surrealists owed much), who saw in dreams the resolution, re-enactment or re-engagement of a set palette of timeless dramas, traumas, and family situations, the surrealists saw subconscious life as an arena in which we were ourselves without the conscious mediation of society’s rules. We spend most of our lives learning to obey these rules in all their intricacy, forming our characters to exist within the set of behaviors our culture considers acceptable. In dreams, however, we are free to commit murders, rapes, enact heinous revenges and lusts, or dawdle on pink river banks plucking inexhaustible daisies sighing “Love me, love me not.” We can engage in the sort of endless lolly-gagging that neither society nor we ourselves would allow in our day-lit existences.

Surrealists–Breton foremost among them–sought ways to bring this liberated feeling of the dream realm into our daily and artistic lives. Automatic writing, dream journals, and other tactics were employed to get us closer to the sense of expansive liberation and terror of dreaming and farther away from our self-definitions and all-too-self-conscious self-definitions. And one of the key feelings that accompanies liberation is an expanded sense of *fun* and hilarity. “I’m doing this because I can, and not because I must. What fun!” Joy, games, the innocence of childlike guesswork and play are all key components in the surrealist enterprise.

And this is where surrealism most closely resembles its immediate artistic ancestor, Dada. The whole world had been mapped, and, with WWI, blown to pieces. Dada emerged from the energy of *rejection* of the status quo that had brought the Western world to the massacre of total war. But even in the midst of this overwhelming demolition, the self was still throwing out its imperative nonsense in millions of unbounded dreams each evening. Some twenty-five percent of the globe is living in a dream as we gather here. Who is to say that those dream heroes, dream agonies and joys are not more ultimate than our own repetitive waking obsessions? As smoke curls from a pipe, our dreams, thrown into the light, reveal the hidden currents of the atmosphere that surrounds us. It is the old tale of the fish not seeing the stream that sustains him. Surrealism has a more improvisational and eternal character than Dada. It is rooted in each individual’s original confrontation with Life. Whether that confrontation with life is ridiculous or daring none can say–it is itself, bound to no ritual past or completed self-conception. It exists in pure, ecstatic *discovery*. What new continents will unfurl in the explorer’s wake?

Being open to our unknown selves, to mystery as the essence of our existence and not some unsolved corner of the puzzle of what it is to be–is to live in creativity. Every rule is transformed from a necessity discovered by some dire trial-and-error experiment mired in accumulated history to the fun and temporary rules of a game–a game of peek-a-boo we play with the mystery of which we are composed. With surrealism, we swim constantly at the edges of our boundaries–hop-scotching happily among our myriad aspects.

I do think that Breton’s many manifestoes of surrealism should be seen in this light: as invitations to play *this* game with him, and not some other game. To enunciate such a plethora of principles and “rules” is its own sort of wry in-joke that challenges the prejudices and pre-conceptions of its own previous iteration. As the classic tune of the American West sung by the out-sized folklore character Pecos Bill playfully proclaims: “Don’t fence me in!”

2/19/12
Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]

Victor Hugo: Humble Egoist of Infinity

[Essays], Soiree de Poesie Francaise

Jun 052012

From the “Soiree” series. Short essays incited by the Soiree de Poesie Francaise held monthly at the Cranford TeaSpot in Cranford, NJ with my careful co-host Carrie Pedersen Hudak.

Victor Hugo

The courage and freedom to imagine one’s society contains within it the capacity to re-imagine it. This is the deep seed of all revolutions. A renewal or re-imagining of conscience is what every change in the social order requires. The industrial revolution came upon Europe in Hugo’s era, calling forth the equally large energies of individual artistic innovation. Reality was changing–the imagination needed to change as well.

Hugo invented the “realistic” or “naturalistic” novel–a form of artistic expression as broad and multifarious as the new industrial reality confronting the France of his day. And this form, being reflective of reality (a mimesis, as the ancient Greeks would say) could keep pace with the breakneck changes of his Victorian era. Indeed, so effective was Hugo’s artistic solution to confronting his contemporary reality that a whole school of naturalistic novelists grew up in Hugo’s gargantuan shadow.

But it is Hugo’s poetry, acclaimed in his day by a poetry-hungry audience, that shows the fire of his spirit and the philosophical feeling that impelled his will to contribute to his society through literature. In his poetry, besides heroic and harrowing story-poems, we get some extended philosophical “meditations.” I wouldn’t put them anywhere other than in the category of “meditations” because it is the subjective feelings aroused by his philosophical conjectures that are the real focus of the poems.

Hugo imagines his individual mentality adrift in an infinite abyss of space–making his self infinitely tiny and insignificant in comparison. This is a philosophical correspondence with the religious notion of humility before the awful throne of God. And yet, at the same time, Hugo imagines–feels–that all the threads of thought and feeling that go zinging about in this infinite abyss actually meet at the crossroads of his heart and his head. Hugo is the humble egoist of infinite space!

In human terms, Hugo is a nothing–just like the rest of humanity before the infinite–and, therefore, he can use his private philosophical feelings as a basis to create universal art. His ambition springs from his humility before the vast, new, roiling experience of Life with a capital L. Hugo is nothing–but, we all are nothing–therefore Hugo can speak for all of us! This is a paradox made clearest in his philosophical poetry.

How much more marvelous a solution to the overwhelming dilemma of the Industrial Age. Instead of becoming an inward-looking miniaturist of his private feelings, Hugo leverages our shared insignificance before the infinite to create some of the largest, broadest, most weepingly human art since Shakespeare.

Black Champagne Intro

[Essays], Black Champagne, Introductions

Sep 142011

Dear Reader:

Let me elaborate (without belaboring) my point in print. Let’s say one questions the status quo: Hey Quo, what’s up with that, yo? The question, by its very nature, throws doubt upon the validity and durance of the status quo, or things as they are. Maybe things should be arranged otherwise, maybe other arrangements or interpretations would be more penetrating and correct, or would open avenues of action that would be grander or more satisfying. Questions, in this respect, are like headlights that can help us sketch out the dimensions and "give" in the fog that surrounds us.

What questions, in and of themselves, cannot do in these circumstances is prove anything about the validity of the status quo one way or another. Because one can formulate a question about the status quo does not, in itself, undermine things as they are in any way. Hey Quo, are you sure that the ground is under my feet? This question does nothing to remove the ground from under your feet–it is simply a question–a question that can start a process of discovery that itself should be questioned and not simply assented to because it undermines current understanding. This is what I meant about "questioning the questions."

A question is simply the first step on a path that may eventually lead to the heady heights, and vast new perspectives, of disproof of the status quo; but the question is not the map, the donkey, the traveler, the sweat and the path all in one. The ground under your feet is solid until physics comes to eventually prove–through assertions and demonstrations (the sweat and donkey, etc.)–that in fact the ground is mostly made up of empty space between those tiny head-spinners, atoms.

Questions start the discovery, but the doubts are only worth paying attention to when evidence begins to solidify their guesswork with a bridge to a new reality, a new solidity. This goes on forever and ever, and even our views of bridges past begin to be swallowed up in the present fog and our next new journey can be to re-tread the paths of discoveries "past."

But then, what is Time, really?

Gregg Glory

Greetings from Mt. Olympus Introduction

[Essays], Introductions

Sep 022011

Oh, Little Wilfred dutifully read 
the Bible with his Mum and walked 
with verse effervescing in his head.

~~Owen in England, Daniel J. Weeks

Take a psalm, and bring hither the timbrel, the pleasant harp with the psaltry. Blow up the trumpet in the new moon, in the time appointed, on our solemn feast day.
~~Psalm 81

Introduction

Like a father pruning the limbs of his children, I have looked over my creations with a lenient eye. The worst verse has been relegated to the back of the book and is fit only for prurient scholars’ noses. If you wish, this last section of my collected works may simply be lopped off with a kitchen knife. But then, alas, you would lose the redoubtable “triple index,” which includes not only the Titles and First Lines of each of the poems, but the memorable cannon-shot of their final, triumphant line as well. This fixes a deficiency I feel in every big volume of verse my thumb has troubled to fiffle across.

I had long harbored a desire to collect the refuse of my muse, the afterburn of endless nights of wild inspiration, in a volume of collected poems. As the mirror disclosed a forehead growing more and more Shakespearean with the incrementing eons, the tagalong shadow of my desuetude became increasingly intolerable. Mortality would soon collect me and leave my litter of poems to a sadly disordered fate. I must act!

~~Gregg Glory 2010

Questioning Is Questing

Poetry is my Kingdom, Phylum, and Species

Western civilization is in a cul-de-sac. At the end of that cul-de-sac is a guillotine. Beside that guillotine stands the hulking executioner in his greasy black hood. Through that hood peer two red, maddened eyes. Below those eyes, as through a lazy tear, shows a long, slavering wolf-thin grin. Lightning stitches knots in the dead, leaden skies. Thunder interrupts the prayers for the dead. Doom. DOOM. DOOM.

Even so, my life is filled with primroses and wishes. I sit here—or lie, rather, languid as an American Oblamov rolled in his snoozy comforter— building my empire of words.

I’ve spent long, sad years loving people I never could come to know. Strangers whose alien minds lived other lives, pattering after petty pursuits I never really could come to understand. Now I fear that my own kindness and lack of company has led me, in an easy dream of desperation, to see Helen in every barmaid’s face.

Cold are the coals I have gathered, betrayed by a generous impulse that led me to love first and question second. Over evil rapids I have roved, slouching to the salt dissolution of the sea, who should have been climbing heavenward with Manfred—my eye upon some solitary cloud-wracked peak where every subtle shifting shape suggests a new, unborn greatness (or an old noble greatness renewed) to the seeker’s keen and lonely imagination. Instead, I have sunk my mind among warm elbows at a crowded table, seeking fellowship in banal company and dissipating what genius drifts to me in shrunken rounds of tavern talk. Few have been the companions time has tested true. I recall my Mom, downed in her home hospital bed and not the bed of her marriage, pointing at my nose with a red, imperious finger, demanding first and foremost (loved son or no) that I “tell it true.”

To that improbable pipsqueak queen, crippled yet proud as the devil in her flowered hospital gown—and to her regal charge–I keep my pledge.

I do not condemn others for my misjudgments, but, looking at the litter of years, I begin to perceive that there was something of method in my mismeasure. Questioning is questing. Leaving a question open encourages all comers to the query to have the experience of exploration; each hypothesis is happy to go unconfirmed, as long as the hypotenuse is mutually traveled by writer and reader in the coracle of a quatrain. There is something of Emerson in this energy of questioning, but none of his faith in God’s final ground, the rock of reality.

Lewis and Clark stood equally on the grass banks overlooking the Missouri. Who could say with assurance, seeing them leaning into the wind with their hands shading their eyes, which of the equal pair could see the coming settlements most clearly? Who invoked a vision, and who merely scratched a map? It is only now, with time, that I recognize that there is a necessity underpinning every river’s haphazarding. That, somehow, only a drunken Lewis who shot out his heart in dread despair could have whispered the new world aright into an impatient Jefferson’s ear.

May such dubious wisdom as my pain has gathered serve me well henceforward. May the narrowing of possibilities sharpen my focus, as when a saltine’s pinhole, brought close to the eye, removes the blur of distant things, clarifying every tiny difference and shutting out peripheral static.

In the poems that follow, however, it is the sharing of experience, the open stance of questioning without conclusion, that is most in evidence. And, in the extreme case of “Rehearsing Repetitions on the Rappahannock,” a meditative stance—at once open, aware, and inconclusive, is instantiated without the rhetorical crutch of a question mark.

My old compatriot in the arts, Lord Dermond, fondly dubbed me “the questioning poet,” and steadfastly refused to call me anything else. At the time, and still perhaps, since I myself am no settled question, I took delight in the name, seeing all things as things in flux, and enjoying the jouncing ride of the rapids, the variegation and contrast of the speeding banks. Dan Weeks, assembling a selected works of mine some years ago titled “The Death of Satan” also came to find merit in my querulous habit of mind.

It is only now, as this labor of years surrounds me on every desktop, that I am coming to feel that the best strength of my youth has been wasted elaborating a maze of quizzes instead of attempting to soar, however falteringly, into the omniscient sun. Was it a deficit of pride that had me prefer puzzles to plumage? Or some more insidious hidden desire to be touted and touched instead of respected and feared? Well, here I am again, ending each sentence with my shepherd’s crook (?) instead of the thunder god’s triumphant stab and pang! So much of our humanity is mist and mystery; so many of our hours slide by in incapable ignorance. But what makes our lives worth the sinning that created them is the moment the mirror comes clear, as if in a revelation, and every face confronts the tragedy of its character.

Miles to Go

This poem has no details 
If you won't carry water 
100 miles in your hands.

Break through the skim of ice 
In December, right behind that silent glass factory 
All one tall shadow on the Raritan.

Watch your hands shiver. 
Feel your wet cuffs the first 20 miles 
Until the sky is a shard in your palms,

And you fret about cutting your wrists 
Accidentally.

Why the Title?

Well, my original idea for the title was “Welcome to Mt. Olympus.” This warm, generous, applauding pat-on-the-back hand-up welcome to my potential audience reflects well my open nature: I’m a born patsy. My book of verse plays is called “A Million Shakespeares” in the same spirit. It has always been my conviction that there’s a spark of greatness in each of us—waiting only for a willing wind or closely blown kiss to fan that spark to flame. My friend and fellow-poet Dan Weeks had an instructor at Washington and Lee who was always gesturing to his class to “Join me up here on Mt. Olympus, people!” And I share that spirit of invitation and incitement. In a humorous mood, the title’s blandishment reminded me of postcards, bent and abandoned in their twirling black wire racks. And, as I frequented rock clubs in Asbury Park for several eons beyond my youth, postcards made me think of Bruce Springsteen’s famous debut album cover; a simple postcard with the words “Greetings from Asbury Park.” Inside each letter is a montage of vistas and perspectives, snipped snapshots. I certainly hope my words are so amply packed.

Finally, my mind wandered to Wallace Stevens’ (whose book I uncomprehendingly purchased with several weeks of paper-route pay as a 16- year old, and God know why) “Postcards from the Volcano”—a jewel of meditation on inter-generational sharing. Well, now you know something of how my knobbed and hobbled mind spins its dials and generates the green lightning of its associations, touching together black earth and blank sky. I hope it is just roadmap enough to encourage and ward your roads’ wandering more, well, let’s say more, rewardingly.

….. Here’s a million words. If only they were nickels, I’d be rich!

Catastrophes and Trophies

[Essays], Introductions, The Timid Leaper

Aug 312011

Preface to The Timid Leaper

Catastrophes and Trophies
Report from a Victor and Victim

This collection is actually the combination and slight rearrangement of four separate volumes of verse; almost all of these poems were written in the calendar year 200I. It’s not much to show for a year of human life–that rich mystery we are twisted into by such a resolute hand. The main emphasis of this collection (as I hope will be quite clear) is Nature. Nature and Naturalism are not quite the same thing, however, and I have always had my own disagreements with those who took too dogmatically Thoreau’s painful premise “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” The Timid Leaper sets the keynote of this mixed approach. I hope this collection achieves some grace while trying to attain such goals. It is the beauty of man’s reach exceeding his grasp. The Timid Leaper leaps, not from any discernible goal he might attain, but from some more subtle cause, some interpenetration of events that defies analysis and germinates poesy. The sub-title is “inner nature poems,” and that is to help show that the weather for humans is never merely a matter of what’s over our heads it’s what’s in our hearts as well.

A victim of depression during the composition of these verses, I noticed an inability or unwillingness to assign purpose within myself. I was lax and ready to suffer unmitigated disasters with little more than a shrug and a tear. This is really a rather hopeless state of affairs, as a number of the poems outline. I remained staunchly impressed, however, with Dame Nature’s capacity to excite the recognition of meaning within myself. As meaningless and adrift as I may have been, I could not help but notice that Nature still evoked in me the wry acknowledgement of a more masterful hand in the pictures I kept seeing both before me and within me. “No Wood to Sing Through” shows the adaptability of natural instincts and impulses. It was inspired by my observation of a catbird still thriving without its native habitat, and by my own reflection that I was seeing something meaningful even when my depression had revoked my self as any inherent source of meaning. Something was helping meaning to survive even in the brain of someone who refused the acknowledgement of meaning. Something in me wanted, at least, for meaning to survive or, more exactly, for the expression and acknowledgement of meaning to continue happening, despite my conscious wishes. This is a form of nature’s nurturing weather that is both harsh and humbling. Can’t I be meaningless if I want to? Don’t take that shred of self-definition away from me! But, opposite of Sartre perhaps, it seems that meaning remains contiguous with essence, even when that essence wishes to exile meaning. It is this co-created weather of inner and outer that is charted in this volume of verses.

Full of wily wit and a bastard’s bravado, The Sword Inside was the first burn and purge preparing a place for a new self to take up residence. I had to be rid of old hopes that I had harbored too long. Hopes are the white lilies of the soul, and when their time is past, they fester as fast. There were reconciliations to be made here as well, and rueful acknowledgement followed hard upon the heels of aptly rapid self-wit. Well-rooted weeds and lingering things were burned out, or hacked at with a saber. Some villainy of habit and temperament had to be acknowledged and integrated, a black sheep returned to the fold. Such traceries of whim explored and displayed in The Sword Inside were the iron rungs I used to clamber back from the void.

The section entitled “The Soft Assault” stands apart for its being the documentation of a very severe personal storm and so shows the purely human side of the weather. Nature purists and vegans of nature poetry may safely skip this section if they do not want their nature poetry too irredeemably mixed up with the human roots of that poetry in the poet. This section is the fever chart of one of love’s bitterest victims. The natural phenomenon of the “inner weather” gives these poems their place in this collection. My retreat into nature, and nature’s “soft pursuant touch” of my capacity to keep seeing meaning no matter what, are a direct result of the catastrophes alluded to within these poems.

Indeed, it was nature’s “soft, pursuant touch,” that I could not shake off, and that led me back to myself as more than a recording barometer of outside events. Nature creates great art, but she uses dirty fingers. Soon enough, I was actively pursuing designs and meanings of my own in the material that Nature had fauceted upon me. I was ready to assign parts to clouds and prompt the trees with dialog. When this hubris expressed itself too heavy-handedly, the poems themselves rebelled and those poems have been expelled from this collection as a complete botch. But, as I now think significant, I was saved. And more than saved, I had become a victor from being a victim. Out of my personal catastrophe, I have extracted this volume of verses, which will serve as well as anything for a trophy.

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]

Venom and Agony

[Essays], Introductions, The Departed Friend

Aug 212011

Innumerable inchoate feelings all seeking expression and definition contemporaneously are here encoded for the reader. But with myself, and with that art which I most highly value, understanding precedes expression if what is made is to be art at all. In these poems I was caught in a curiously Edenic mode. I was surrounded and imbued with a richness of griefs, and still had not one syllable to name them. I had all the full feeling a human art could cry to posses and none of the sensibility through which to express it. The chaos of my grief had borne its lapidary apple, but I had yet to eat of it and understand. Cynicism is the crassest shortcut between a full heart and an empty mind-empty but well-ordered. It is no coincidence that minimalism is the reigning contribution of the latter half of the 20th century to expression’s vocabulary. It is comprehension without being comprehensive; it comprehends through vital exclusion; it is a supreme form of denial and, as such, never makes a positive, uncynical stand, and can never be ‘proven’ wrong. Invulnerable and vapid, its objects glare in diminished insistence. Ashamedly, I must say that this twerpy type of cynicism makes its debut in lines of what follows here as well. Mostly in the toothless conclusions of the poems there is the oversimplification of a scab, and not the long-thumbed memory of a scar. Perhaps the elision of a decade will help to sort my inner chaos into outer order; perhaps selective forgetting and cowardly crowding-out of old memories with new heartaches will perform the aesthetic grunt-work that poetry demands and that my sensibility exhorts. But oh how my heart cannot wait the decade out! Ruptured, not enraptured, I ululate before my auditors-more full of sighs than songs.

Gregg G. Brown

Nov 2, 2004

The Departed Friend Style Notes

Endnotes, The Departed Friend

Aug 212011

There are lots of questionmarks in these lines, as befits my ignorance. A friend of profoundly poetic tenor pointed out to me the other day that I also enjoy employing negative statements that imply or outline a positive poetic feeling. If I were to have written Hamlet, for instance,

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Might have sounded something like this instead:

Not to be or not not to be, is that the question?

In the poems that follow there is much that is doubted, and many an assertion will not come unattended by its qualifier. After all, what king would step forward into such august company as you yourself provide without his page? Good my page, let us go forth like Wenceslas and provide for our poor and hungry souls the wine and meat of poetry, cibum et vinum . Notwithstanding all the misfires and queries contained in here, I know with severe certainty, as if gripped by a divine hand of lightning, that the feeling is true.

I will not wait for some un-looked-for good to come, but will make my present its own sufficing memory.

Gregg G. Brown

Jan 1, 2005

Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God Intro

[Essays], Introductions, Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God

Aug 172011

Poetry is like a Dear John letter or your baby’s first word–more is being said than you can understand all at once. Thus it was on my early Spring vacation to a furiously, fragrantly blossoming California, and especially during my visit to famed Yosemite–I was beautifully confused. In Yosemite the strange experience of grandeur is evoked, perhaps for the first time, and this new territory takes some time to be mapped and civilized into the acknowledged borders of our being.

In Yosemite, you can see God’s thumbprint on His creation, the signature of an artist who has otherwise removed himself from his work. But in Yosemite, His grandeur is too manifest, too manly, too vividly veridically vibrant, to remain unacknowledged. And while I was on vacation, sipping beer in the shadow of God, as it were, I began to have a feeling for the identity behind the whorls of that triumphant thumbprint.

I walked from whorl to whorl while Spring broke from the earth in blossom after blossom.

Pig’s Ears

[Essays], Falcon Waiting, Introductions

Aug 112011

The gift of speech

Sentiment is the key. If the reader can be thrown strongly enough in a certain direction, or into a certain mood, then that feeling can create a connective web or atmosphere that holds the whole poem together: the web transformed into a nexus of human-centered meanings.

As with Wordsworth or Coleridge’s conversation poems, the reader is hip-checked by direct statements of strong feeling in the direction of the mood in which the poem will actually function as a poem and not merely a collection of statements. It is a wrestler’s work and no mistake. It is not the aesthetician’s golden ladder of words, nor imagination’s grand view, nor the jeweler’s precise chiseling of a potential diamond. It is a gross and direct appeal to the self-pitying piggy heart of common humanity that gives such poetry the emotive energy to soar. It’s the last weeks of an intense political campaign where rhetoric and competition have roiled winner and loser in a single vat. It is five seconds to go on the fifty yard line. Desperation, excitement, and commitment are all called up from the slop bucket of survivor’s guilt of evolution which has hazarded us this far.

But how to achieve this peanut-cracking rhetorical gore and gong-show ga-ga excitement in the current age, when rhetoric, speechifying, and fine sentiments have been frowned from the field of human communication? Only in television ads, charity appeals, and the Sunday sub-culture of evangelical shtick are such techniques still commonly employed.

Unless I was going to print my poetry on the side of a collection tin underneath the photo of an abused puppy, I was S.O.L. I thought to myself, How would Gomer Pyle propose to his lady-love and manage to be heard as more chivalrous than cartoonish? A proposal of marriage is a domestic moment of high drama in our reproductive lives, with a long shadow of consequences that hang from the act, casting back from the future a certain darkness or atmosphere upon the proposal’s moment. So, in imagination, I put myself into Gomer’s size twelve army boots and bent down on one knee. And shazzam! I saw Polly Pureheart a-blinkin’ down at me–so unbearably lovely in the moonlight near the babbling cr’k. And as much as I wanted to marry that Pureheart, and cherish and care for her, and hold her in my clumsy arms under the sighing weeping willow tree . . . . I, I, well, I just couldn’t say anything at all. I had been struck dumb by the immensity of the moment, and the intensity of my own feelings. The fear of rejection and the vulnerability of showing my truest soul were there as well, like a lump of flour in my throat. Yet, for all that, my intentions were clear to her, and Polly in her pity looked down with love in her eyes, and a simple, life-altering “Yes” on her lips. I was blessed.

What I took from this hillbilly vision was that clear intention–or direct statement of strong feeling– followed by silence, or a break from the intensity of that intention or feeling, can moisten the wry eye of the reticent reader, and cattle-prod a passive Polly into action. I wondered, with my personal penchant for potent possibilities and alternative scenarios, if a rhetorical question, sincere in the motivating gears of its feelings, could work as well as a bald blurt of hurt or happiness to create this space of silence in a poem– and which would then invite the reader to lean in and leer– not as a vampire umpire calling strikes– but as one of the dusty boys in pin-stripes ready to get dirty and knock some mud off of his cleats. I’ve tried this approach in the following poems too. (How’d I do?)

A question, such as

      How can we talk about love when everything's wrong?

creates a silence of need and self-doubt projecting from the speaker. If the reader has ever felt a similar doubt or moment of confused longing, then, I figured, a space of receptive silence and co-creation will occur. The poem just may succeed its way into meaning.

A direct statement of strong feeling, like

      It's going to take a very great person
      To just stand there and love me.

creates a similar silent space. The adjoining observations about a menacing sky, an aggressive squirrel, and some quietly patient horses all give that sentiment its fertile dung in which to blossom. Exacerbating or contradicting–both–can call that statement into greater relief. The squirrel and horses have nothing directly to do with the feeling the speaker is bludgeoned by– and yet, in the explosive silence of embarrassed eavesdropping the criminal reader has been plunged into– these props take onto themselves all the concomitant feelings that the words of the poem refuse to provide. They are the willow tree and moonlight to Gomer’s gulping proposal, his brown eyes swimming with unsayable sentiments that must still–somehow–be understood if he, and, downstream, the species is to survive.

Will you take my hand?


GREGG GLORY
Feb. 14th, 2009

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