Imaginal Paintings

I think you may all enjoy these images by Israeli artist Orna Ben-Shoshan. Her Web site says: "Orna’s artwork involves opening her consciousness and channeling images that come to her from a different realm of existence." In them you may recognize aspects of Henry Corbin's Mundus Imaginalis.

I was led to Ben-Shoshan via the new issue of Ekleksographia (see my just-previous post), "curated" by Amy King. Thanks, Ms. King!

Ekleksographia #2

Linh Dinh has a short but packed poem in the new issue of Ekleksographia, a imaginally charged online lit mag. Linh shares virtual space with the irrepressible Adam Fieled, and Annie Finch, and Tomaž Šalamun, a new-to-me poet named Tomas Ekström, and ... well, let's just say it's a hell of an issue....

Thanking You in Advance

Please read Bill Knott's Neve Campbell Villanelle at your earliest convenience. Thank you.

Mexico Books 2009: Immanent Visitor

I can't pretend to understand the writing of Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz. It seems to arise from the imaginal without taking on the perceptual particularities we've come to expect from poetry in the long wake of Imagism and Objectivism (no, not the silly philosophy of Ayn Rand). For me, reading Saenz is similar to reading Blake's prophetic books, but Saenz doesn't seem to be presenting a coherent visionary system; his poems are more surreal than symbolic—but in many ways even stranger and more compelling than almost any surrealist poetry I can think of. In Mexico I read him in a hammock swayed by strong sea winds, in a bed at night while the same wind pummeled the palm trees around our bungalow, in a beach chair, on a bar stool, even while dragging my bare feet through hot raw-sugar sand: I couldn't put the book down! But when I was finished I couldn't have said, and can't say now, exactly what the experience was like.

Most of Saenz's poems, as presented in this collection edited and translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, take the form of long-lined sequences and prose paragraphs; but all share an incantatory quality that makes them feel both hieratic and (for want of a better word) experimental at once. Here's an example, the first section of "Anniversary of a Vision":

The floating world is lost, and the whole of life catches in the
        spring light of your looking,
—and while you repeat yourself in the echo, horizon bound
        in smoke, I regard your departure,
clear substance and hope dehiscing into distance:
you live on that sweetness when beauty, sorrowing, glances your
        way,
and you emerge in half-profile
to the iron ringing of nighttime instruments, golden and blue, a
        music shining and throbbing and taking wing
in the hollow of my heart.

I don't dare look at you lest I not be inside you, and I don't praise
        you lest joy steal away
—I'm content just to watch you, and you know this and pretend not
        to look at me
and you bounce around, exaggerating everything with divine
        insight,
as if you were riding a horse or a motorcycle
—your extravagance amazes me, drills joy into me, it is my daily
        bread
—when it rains, at a turn of the head, shouts fly from your
        shoulders,
and you stroke your cheeks and your applause echoes in the water,
        in the wind, and in the fog
—it amazes me how much I love you!
I yearn for you the moment I hear you,
a sepulchral music vanishes and my death steps out of you,
beloved images become visible to the musicians
when it's you who is listening
—always, the musicians exult in silence
when it's you who is listening.

Who is "you"? A lover? A wished-for lover? God? We know no more after reading all seven sections of this poem than we do after reading this first one, doubtless because Saenz has no interest in the everyday details of autobiography. Saenz doesn't give his "you" a name, as Bonnefoy, for example, does in On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, and yet both poets seem to be wrestling with a similar experience: a love that exalts to the brink of annihilation.

Unlike his poetry, Saenz's prose doesn't seem to irrupt from a trance; it is more meditative, more reflective. Take this section from the poet's first book, The Scalpel, a prose section from "Homage to Epilepsy" entitled "The Door that Opens to Mystery":

        It's possible to conjure a door, not a door through which children pass into a timeless room, but an authentic door that opens into mystery.
        To conjure a preamble to lunacy, so that all those who fabricate nothing have no idea what to do.

        That child, I know, harbors secrets to a door that might lead into mystery while bypassing, let me be clear, the attendant putrefactions.
        There is a door. That door is open to you, to me, to everyone. It is open to the rats considering you night after night from the moon.
        The child must be allowed to go on with some of his hairs and apiece of the door to mystery before he stops recognizing the streets and rocks.
        (This is the secret of the door.)

"Real life rears its head and goes under," Saenz writes in "To Cross This Distance," and also: "I long for enchantment." The ground note of his poetry seems exactly that: the longing for enchantment. The intensity of longing recalls Vallejo's, but Saenz—at least in these translations—never seems desperate. He has something of the Sufi about him, a wildness at heart that cannot swallow "things as they are." I imagine Saenz would read Stevens and bark, "But the blue guitar changes nothing!" Saenz, as Jerome Rothenberg notes in his jacket blurb, writes "relentless" poetry, a poetry of ultimate things. I could not bring myself to love it, but I see the genius in it and hope that Saenz, who died in 1986 after a decades-long battle with alcoholism, finally fulfilled his "passion for goodbye."

A View from the Outside

If you haven't seen Martin Earl's farewell post on Harriet, read it now. As is often the case, the outsider sees us more clearly than we can see ourselves....

The Poetry of Dick Cheney

In Peter Green’s illuminating biography of Alexander the Great, Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C., I ran across an eerily resonant passage concerning torture. The incident involved Alexander’s decision to bring down one of his most experienced generals, Parmenio, who had served under Alexander’s father Philip and whom he considered a rival, by framing Parmenio’s son Philotas for treason. Philotas was falsely charged with conspiring to murder Alexander, a crime whose penalty was death; but Alexander needed more in order to establish grounds for getting rid of Parmenio. Here’s how Green describes the situation:

[I]t was agreed that Philotas and his fellow-prisoners should all suffer the traditional penalty—death by stoning. But there were two things Alexander wanted to get first: a written confession from Philotas himself, and some sort of statement implicating Parmenio. Craterus, Hephaestion and Coenus were therefore authorized to torture Philotas until he provided both. [...] Then he withdrew to his quarters and let them get on with it—or, according to Plutarch, observed the proceedings from behind a curtain.
          Before morning the torturers had their written confession and probably enough extra details, imagined or remembered, to implicate Parmenio as well (at one point Philotas asked Craterus, with weary cynicism, to explain just what it was he wanted said).

Alexander, like Dick Cheney, understood the purpose of torture, which is not to elicit the truth but to produce useful lies.

Evidently, though, the ancient conqueror lacked Dick Cheney’s poetic nature, since Alexander freely used the word “torture,” while Cheney uses the euphemistic metaphor “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe the same practice. And what an influential poet Cheney has turned out to be! Look how the usually unpoetic mainstream media have mindlessly adopted his metaphor.

Do we really need to ask if poetry can matter? Clearly when it comes from the highest levels of our government, it matters a great deal more than the instructive details of history.

Exemplary

I'm a fan of Britain's first female poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, but who knew she would be setting such a fine example for PoBiznesspeople everywhere?

Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy has announced a new prize celebrating poetry in all its forms, following her first audience with the Queen today.

Funded by Duffy's donation of her yearly £5,750 stipend as laureate to the Poetry Society, the prize, known as the Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry, will be awarded annually throughout Duffy's 10-year term as laureate.

Read the whole story here and a new interview with Duffy here, in which she succinctly defines poetry as "the music of being human."