Curious to know what you think about this list from The New York Times Magazine, Clarity readers. Agree? Disagree? Which of your favs made it? Which amazing game-changers were you shocked to see left off? Nabokov’s Lolita was named the clear winner, but apparently Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay wasn’t too far behind. Comments and thoughts below, if you please.

The NYT article also mentions the list of 100 greatest non-fiction books that the Guardian ran back in June. I’d love to hear your ideas about that as well.

I am for a poetry that makes nothing happen.

I’m for a poetry that is too young to date, but too old to overlook.

I’m for a poetry that wants to paint.

I was thinking of those huge paintings by Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan last summer. There must have been about fifty of them. I was thinking of the colors, the wide open space in them, the intensity of their shapes after the stun gun of subject matter. I was looking at myself looking at the canvases, standing in front of them. I was seeing myself, later, in his studio, in the chaos of it. I was thinking of his workspace in relation to his work. Order from disorder. I’m for a poetry that makes order from disorder. And maybe, sometimes, takes it back.

There’s pleasure in some kinds of confinement, like, say, a correctional facility of your own design. But that’s not what a poem is, in my book, not exactly, not a correctional facility… but, I believe that’s where poems come from, quarters you make and inhabit for a while. You have to find a good place to spin in, like the silk worms in the stalls on the dusty side streets of Shanghai. They spin themselves into an elegant net for display, for the tourists. And the net is all a person can see standing there on the sidewalk, not the worms, which aren’t really worms at all, but invisible makers, in the end, that turn into moths, or become a shell of themselves in a jar on a shelf.

I’m for a poetry that sets out to make something clear, something visually, sonically, spatially pleasing. Not opaque. Not obscure. Not overly sensual, either. Not cloying the way X’s poems are (do I have to name names?) overly rhymed, inside and out, sensual for sensuality’s sake, poems that fall all over themselves, that make out with themselves, loving themselves and the sounds they make way too much, so there’s no room, no love left for the reader. I’m for the reader. I’m for leaving some room for the reader, a lot of room.

I’m for a poetry that is tart, that barks a little, and maybe, sometimes, a lot, a poetry that calls attention to itself… but then leaves you alone. You know, the way you feel when the neighbor’s dog down the hall has finally stopped barking. And there’s suddenly silence. And you never thought of silence that way before, of the word: silence. But there you are on the couch, grateful to the damn dog for barking, the dog you were, moments before, dreaming of feeding a bad ham to. But now, you love that dog, because now you can practically taste silence in the wake of his bark, a new taste, one you never tasted before. I’m for a poetry that does that.

And speaking of taste, I’m also for a poetry that still smokes. A poetry that sends signals, words that are signs with their smells still attached, a little ash, a little resin, still sticky, still holding onto their scorched antecedents. I’m for words arranged in a way that makes you think about where they come from, word origins, words that take you back to the beginning of something, even if it isn’t their real beginnings, the places they actually come from, but an original place, one you imagined into being. I’m for words that were orphans until you gave them a sentence.

“Soy una norteamericana,” I told the young man dancing with me. I am North American. His eyes grew wide before smiling, pleased to be having an encounter suddenly more exotic than a weekday tango lesson at a cultural center. I was the only one over twenty two, much less not living in Rosario, Argentina, but my host—soon to be known as my “Mama Argentina,” garnered my free entrance at the local instruction.

I have taken tango lessons and attended enough milongas, or tango dances, in the states to appreciate the value of an authentic Argentine lesson. Teachers who had not traveled to Buenos Aires for their instruction had less credential than a yoga instructor who had never been to India. If location is everything for a business, for the arts, it is as necessary as fishing in the wilds for Alaskan salmon. The freezer version does not catch light diving headlong toward the ocean.

The instructor taught us boleos, which thrilled me since my American instructors preferred that we master posture and balance before moving on to difficult flourishes. Yet, the dance is famously compelling for those moments of whipping the arch of a foot from the hip like a blue and white bandera. I hoped the intimacy of eye contact, the subtle language of the body would transcend my elemental Spanish as I concentrated my full attention on physical communication. My young partner kissed me on the cheek to welcome me, a warmly open cultural greeting that caused me to notice how separately I am accustomed to holding myself.

The most significant observations about my own culture have come after recognizing it in contrast, and Argentina is striking in its cultural difference as well as its sharp geographical disparity. The pampas climb to the Andes, housing microclimates that vary from forests of cacti to grasslands grazed by llamas and vicuñas. The external mirrors the internal, and the arid miles of spiky desert reflect the hardships of the workers, from railroad to oil, who have had to strike for just wages, while the minerals of the Altiplano ripple through the ridges like the thick-blooded gazes of two sisters.

Here for research in translation, I joined my colleague and his Study Abroad group for three weeks in Buenos Aires, Rosario, and an excursion to Jujuy in the north of Argentina. Having taught English for years, I appreciate experiential education and encourage my advisees to intern or undertake service work that allows them to apply their knowledge, but it wasn’t until standing before the 2,700 year old ruins of the Atacama tribe that I began to imagine myself prioritizing that investment.

The limitations of a text-based education were apparent sitting across the breakfast table trying to understand the details of Argentine political history in my host’s dialect. We listened to the radio together while she translated the positions in the current presidential election. (Argentina is less than thirty years into their current democracy.) I was humbled by her desire to share her world with me. Later she typed a note onto my computer screen, in Spanish, after I shared a story about my ancestors’ farm in Virginia, that “we grow in relation to exposure.”

Her nephew Fabian speaks four languages. We found common ground in literature and talked about Jorge Luis Borges, whose quote he had memorized: “Death is life lived. Life is death that comes.” Perhaps travel is living such that when the swath is cut, the little road has stretched, for a time at least, across the Andrean cordillera.

Future historians will doubtless look back upon the Twentieth Century as an interregnum, a period typical of an uncertain transition from the disintegrating order of one civilization to that of a still-embryonic, coalescent society, whose proper order remains for the future. Such periods of agony are often a mixture of glory and abysmal horror, and our era is no exception. One notable singularity of this century has been that even the smallest of peoples have clamored for the recognition of their identity, seeking to assert their uniqueness even though they could scarcely hope to control their destiny. Not only peoples: sub-groups of our one species, castes and clans within them, and, within linguistic groupings, regions, provinces, districts; rural, suburban, urban; hills and valleys…and so on, until one finds today’s groups identifying themselves according to genders and sub-genders; arranging themselves into affiliation within or across ideologies usually constructed by the arbitrary selection of categories assigned arbitrarily, as the wounded, the sick, the dying, the young, the old, the chronically or acutely symptomatic disorders are separated in hospitals for different kinds of attention. Differentiation, not commonality, is the theme of our time, as in the exfoliating choices in the consumerist cultures of this civilization, all of which leads to increasing separation, an accelerating centrifugality boosted by the geometric increments of our sophisticated technology. William Butler Yeats’ vision of a gyre in the form of a rotating inverted cone, like a widening spinning top that tends entropically towards instability, his dismay and despair that the center he imagined could not, would not, hold, seen from our standpoint seventy-five years later seems to be both conservative and narrow, limited to social history: it is a vision that preceded that of the new vast universe(s) offered by Einstein and Hubble, for example, in which we began to think of history as larger than our own biological vicissitudes, and reached back both to the first signs of life and forward to the eschatology of all existence itself.

There is however one group that does not advertise its existence: The Tribe of the Poets. Perhaps because of its ancient and protean constitution it does not clamor fashionably like the demagogues of the ethnic or gender groupings. Everyone else seems to have had their logo or banner designed; envoys and consuls and lobbyists have been sent out with brochures promoting trade and tourism; they have mortgaged their children’s children for heavy weapons; they have taken their seats at the United Nations, and placed in the world atlas the names they prefer to be known by, if merely for entitlement at the eleventh hour to some carloads of surplus food and a medical team with vaccines, or a plea for foreign troops to save them from threatened extinction … playing their part in the game of the geo-politics that more or less balances the powers of this planet.

I speak here in the name of the Tribe of the Poets — that transtemporal, and ecumenical company of men and women always and everywhere invisible — and to speak of men and women is perforce to speak against the notion of “national literatures.” That it is a perpetual association is on the other hand paradoxical, since poetry is always the poetry of a specific language, and utters itself only in a specific time and place, emanating from persons in a local “community.” Where language is written down, poetry leaves traces of itself in texts; yet texts are at the same time both alive and dead, which is also paradoxical. Because a text is a thing, it may seem to be identical with a single people, a time and a place, and a people seems an entity that may appear to be identical with a polity. And it is the polity that forever confronts the spiritual company I call The Tribe of the Poets.

In what follows I intend to suggest some of the reasons for the reticence, the silence of The Tribe of the Poets whenever it is forced to stand in the presence of a “National” literature.¹

***

Our epoch has been one interminable trial session, during the course of which a hundred million and more men and women have been condemned by those slave-driving “archipelagos” of various tyrannical creeds that girdled the globe for 70 years — because they “erred in the formulation of their opinions,” or opposed their singular or private notions of “national identity” to those concocted by police masquerading as critics, politicians, or priests — and even revolutionaries!¹ Not only their souls but their bodies were tried; their souls by the darkest obloquy of enforced silence or isolating imprisonment, their bodies by execution, or by masse in wholesale slaughter — in Europe, in Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East, in Asia. Essentially, the pressure of enormous terror has been generated in order to at first contain, and then achieve the destruction of the soul.² After the Cold War melted away and evaporated, and as the consumerist ethos began to spread around the world, there was a change in tactics, one might say, if not in the strategy that seems to be impersonally evolved from the economics of our emerging Twenty-first century technology. The obliteration of whatever might be termed the soul is coming to pass by what is now called “dumbing down,” as a new sort of one-dimensional consciousness floods our days like a lava flow that burns and then will congeal to hardest stone covering the surface of history.

And yet, ironically, what was once thought of as the soul was in the West defined out of existence a hundred or so years ago. That was the time when the “crats” blossomed: econocrats, technocrats, and historio-psycho-sociocrats — all those self-designated experts of ours at work in the invisible bureaus where warrants were signed for arrest, torture, deportation, unlimited imprisonment or execution for whatever reasons those anonymous ones care to concoct. Not only in authoritarian and dictatorial societies. It is the “crats” who fabricate excuses for those who control the presses and the etheric bandwidths, the police as well as the oligarchy above them: the politicians, gangsters, and managers of society, and since the mid-Century, the loudspeakers and billboards of a commercial culture to which everything is subjected, and everyone subsumed. Almost all writers and thinkers, at least since Darwin have struggled against the modern, “cratic” way of defining the soul into nonexistence. As for the “spirit” of Western Man: today the pontifexes and revivalists of a global supermarket of creeds pump up the anthropopathic machine in the intensive-care wards of the advanced democratic polities, competing for profit with athletic teams for space in sports arenas, or filling hundreds of thousands of vacant seats with vast prayer meetings during the intervals between baseball and football and tennis and soccer and basketball seasons; as the militarized, totalist states of our era did with their parades, congresses of cultural forums, and round-the-year Olympics-type mass calisthenics. Common to all, however, their idea of the “soul” is conflated with the reified notion of a National Identity. Hence to speak of the “soul” today means to speak of the “soul” of this or that people as a nationality: or an ethnic collection of people, or their local religion, their songs and dances, or their cuisine, or their villages and houses and castles, rebuilt for tourist trade. Most often the soul is conceived as something like an essence, even if that essence is merely derived from the mining of scholarly materials, the records and archives of libraries.³ This abstract, merely obscurantist technique may be trivial in its commonplace, popular manifestation, that of the sleep-walking narcosis of consumer compulsion; when it is seriously applied for the arming of some souls for mortal struggle against other souls, it has proved not only reactionary but devastating, as newspapers have shown us for decades. That murder and chaos result is apparent in the most advanced, and liberal of societies of the West, whether it is official or spontaneously engendered by individuals who act out the shibboleths of racial or religious identities.

Nor do I wish, in referring the extinction of the “soul” to the early 19th Century, or shortly before it, to hark back to the Romantic figure of le poète maudit, a once grand, even grandiose figure that has devolved into the savage sentimentality today of the depraved adolescent, or modeling themselves on the personas of raging pop musicians, whose synthetic frenzies are rehearsed and produced for juvenile masses in stadiums. Le poète maudit was perhaps the first sign of reaction to the Enlightenment’s rationalist and then the industrialist Positivist attack upon the soul, and the brief Romantic period can be regarded as a fever, somewhat like the organism’s response to massive infection. Neither am I thinking of the dissociation of the artist from the social changes wrought by industrialization, which can be studied through the most part of the 19th Century under the head of “bourgeois individualism,” and lumped, after Poe and Baudelaire, with Symbolism, then with Dada, Surrealism, Neo-Dada & Neo-Surrealism, and the farrago of isms that have found the spotlight about every five years, all the little isms which used to be concocted by artists and announced in manifestos, but which are latterly the invention of caption writers and agents for celebrities and broadcast by half-baked newspaper reviewers or talk-show hosts. Those hectic episodes of the past might be likened to the organism’s various symptoms as the chronic malaise afflicting the soul, attacked now this, now that organ of the cultural corpus. That history is a concern of critical commentary — or used to be, when there was a garden for serious criticism of poetry, and not the sterile corridors of self-reflecting mirrors proclaiming “Theory.”

Rather, I suggest that promulgation of something called a National Literature became attractive over the past hundred years as the nation state became the chief form of political organization. Its incarnations jostle for shelf space in the Western entertainment emporium, playing to a myriad of “special” audiences such as ethnic, and sexual/gender groups, whose publications are as parochial as the magazines of plumbing supplies manufacturers, pharmaceutical houses, unions, or hobbyists, or religious sects, or a thousand identifiable markets. Whether defined by the Masters of the Interrogation Cell or the University Seminar, the very concept of a National Literature is merely irrelevant to the Tribe of the Poets. Seldom are they included in official symposia, colloquia, and conferences, because they are an equivocal element, also suspected to be dangerous. When they are paid to come to a scholars conference to read, that is all they are asked to do, and if they are professionals, they come to sell their latest books under the benevolent toleration of the 99% of literary scholars who don’t read them, or contemporaries in any case. The Managers, that portion of them who masquerade as Academics, will do well to remember that oblivion awaits those who degrade Poetry.⁴ (Although, for having defined the Soul away and consigned its vestiges to mystics and fundamentalist fanatics, they have already set one foot over the threshold into oblivion.) My views regarding the arrived and universally accepted notion of National Literature, whether it be that of a nation or diverse ethnic/racial/gender groupings within a nation, may seem arbitrary to those so committed to the absolute politicization of language that they are already insentient to their situation outside the noumenon of Poetry. If I am not mistaken, today’s Academy is the main source of the synthetic, manufacture of identities that groups of all kinds and sizes wear like tie-dyed robes to assert unique diversities that are scarcely more than a substitution of stereotypes lifted from our rich archives for the original energy of what Socrates suggested was the working of the god he called Eros.

I.

Discussing literature and speaking of “national characteristics,” scholars have usually tended towards the mode of vicious abstraction. The general categories used to define a group of people are derived, as Emerson noted [pace Coleridge] from poetic speech; hence a thing — mineral, vegetable, animal — seems to characterize a class of similar things. Metonomy universalizes; simile identifies; and metaphor transports. Poetic speech is responsible for our habitual, ingrained, perhaps inevitable tendency to confuse the one, the singular and unique, with the many; and the Many in turn with a still higher One. Among all our achievements as cultured animals, perhaps only mathematics has purified itself of metaphor. But we must always remember that arithmetic neglects (or avoids) from its first axiom the fact that what lives alone and in the particular alone– that no particular living thing has yet been fully described mathematically, moreover that it may be intrinsically impossible to do so. Even if the particular is located by being placed in a larger field, there is still a disjunction between the field or class and the existent individuals of which it is composed. Apart from the statements of mathematics, the “life” of a particular is given to our apprehension of an event or existent by means of poetry, that is, by poetic speech. Yet, while a poem is an artifact of language, it is itself contained within language. The poem is an especially interesting thing, because it suggests most of the problems inherent in our understanding of the nature of language. Language is the best example of a field or system of classifications that exists, yet cannot exist sans the particular event in a particular living individual. The poem is a complex of complexities, and metaphor is a brilliant, even blinding source of meaning, perhaps the sine qua non of all significance and meaning. We should constantly remind ourselves that it is the poetic in speech that makes it possible to say anything more than what we say when we point and say, A=A⁵

Still, we mostly and usually speak from many other motives than the expression of the poetic. Even when contemplating poetry we usually look elsewhere. We tend to avert ourselves from the event of the poem, which may be regarded as a kind of mirror of the world, or sometimes the sign of the noumenal, like a door into another world (although whether that universe is contiguous, congruent, continuous with or even immanent in what is called the world, is hard to say). Even as we look away from the poem, we nevertheless glimpse the world by its mediation. Perhaps the origin and development of language causes the historical process, with or without specific poems. Poetry, or poetic speech, is an ineluctable element in the individual’s history, too. Perhaps what any individual experiences and knows is a combination of language-as-given and its history. In any case, poetry can be considered as the “model” that forms a language, or upon which a language is formed. Poetry is also its source, which is why ancient texts are still sometimes studied.

II.

Poetry may be considered, if not a “soul” thing (absent whatever sense the word “soul” can once have conveyed) a hoard of “archaeological“ objects and artifacts. That is, poetry models linguistic identity; but it also contains the residues, or vestiges, or preserved, fossil remains of once-extant identities, even, if you will, “National Identities,” such as for example the vanished persons in the Old English epic of Beowulf. Unlike all other archeological remains, however, poetry persists into the present, relatively active, at least insofar as it can be known through texts, even the texts of extinct languages.⁶

III.

Poetry in its “active” forms, ancient or contemporary, expresses complex, persistent identities, national as well as individual (The Iliad for example, or Bhagavad Gita.) I call such identities “meta-identities,” because they are both in us and of us. They seem to be active in ways that elude the Positivistic definition, which is not self-reflexive, as is culture. They are meta-identities because they are certainly not ourselves, if we think of ourselves as the sum of our responses to our present situation in the realm that is our life’s temporal span. Nor are they the idealized identities that I consider to be “pseudo-identities”. Pseudo-identities are those produced by the illusions and delusions bred in us by whatever society prevails during our own lifetime. Pseudo-identities are cultural impositions upon us, — no matter though we usually believe them to constitute our very selves. Pseudo-identities, for instance, are the persons created in us by the poetry of propaganda, of advertising, the media, the State, and the institutions of the simplest tribal religion or worldwide œcumenes.

Neither should the meta-identities that poetry creates in us be thought of as “souls.” A soul is formed from a meta-identity, depending on how we grow through the poetic word, and beyond it. No one speaking a language self-consciously, that is, learning its songs and poems, can be unaware of its effects, and of how these effects tend toward the acquisition of meta-identity. This is the purpose of literary study, and it gives the subject whatever significance it may have. Proscription of archaic, ancient, or traditional meta-identities by our modern religious and/or political censorship that, through a vacuous education would prevent or usurp their dissemination suggests their importance and power. Banish ancient texts, you banish the latent “souls” of future generations. Psychologists are much interested in the process of language-acquisition in children, since it seems the key to the door that opens upon the understanding of the uniqueness of the human in us. Yet who today is interested in the child’s acquisition of those archaic meta-identities that poetry and poetry alone preserves? Only those who would prevent it — because they wish grown people to remain as ignorant as unschooled children. These persons have a long history; but they have become immensely more powerful, aggressive, and diligent in their control of society than could ever have been anticipated. They are the source of the threat to human development today, and by “development” I imagine an integration of what we always were, and are, which is in fact a species that, using tools, has changed and developed its powers since its appearance a few million years ago.

IV.

Ever since the rise of Positivism and its assumption of power over daily life in the early 19th Century, the social sciences, positivism’s main intellectual accomplishment, have taken it as axiomatic that Art, especially the art of poetry, is a nugatory factor in society. The social sciences are not merely taught to the bureaucrats, soldiers, and gangsters who police our world, but practiced by them. The social sciences have become their means to promulgate power. Because the social sciences are positivist, they regard all identities — whether they be a meta-identity, a pseudo-identity, or just a plain “personal” identity — as incidental, useful merely for measurement and management. What is important to the social sciences (including the new “socio-biology”) are countable bodies: these are the loci of the behavioral patterns from which the techniques of “socialization” may be derived. In the last analysis, perhaps it is only the bodies that matter: if only to be counted. For the positivist, bodies are traffic, the flow of which is understood as data graphed on a computer’s screen, so that it can be regulated by various “programs.” The effort of managers today is directed towards a higher efficiency in regulation. For them, identities are either chimerical or nonexistent. If they must be thought of as existential facts, then those facts (i.e., identities) are defined as minimal causative factors, hence negligible for planning purposes. Simply a number will do, and there is no end to the number of numbers.

But the conception of identity, first recognized in the models that the poetic in language provided, is bothersome. Even imaginary numbers are more useful to the equations of the planners than those irrefragable, refractory things, names. From the perspective of the social planners, names are better eliminated, by any and all means— short of liquidating the bodies that carry identities, since numbers need those same bodies in order to be counted. Identities also must be gotten rid of because they are contaminated by annoying traces of the metaphysical, and theological, those anachronistic carriers of possibly dangerous genes in the nucleus of the cells that constitute the social organism, individual human beings. Whereas philosophy has always had to contend with poetry, Positivism’s great discovery was that the elimination of meta-identities can be achieved simply by regarding them as inexistent.

That is the present (implicit) position of Western social science. But it will very soon, indeed too soon, become explicit. Any fully-developed, sophisticated social science must assume that position. And even if social science may not reach that position tomorrow in theory, it will nevertheless come to it in practice for the means of data collection and processing, supported by 5th and 6th generation of super-computers on the way. In theory, after all, allowances can be made for bits of anomalous data — such as persons (i.e., identities), one might even say of persons that they are present, yet unaccounted for. Though some scattered thinkers still try to preserve the remnants of the legacy of Humanism, they are not strong contenders in the struggle for control of social science; that struggle is being waged by ruthless secular and theocratic powers today.

Still, even the would-be Humanist planner does not think to provide for meta-identities in his projections. In fact, chatter about a humanist social science is self-contradiction. Marx, for instance, like most social scientists in the early days of positivism who had no knowledge of the complexity of biology, may have permitted marginal allowances based on poetic models when he described the future paradise of communism. Lenin, though, was so ignorant of elementary human biology (what could be termed social ethology today) that he regarded the intellectuals, those specialized carriers of identities, as “vermin,” and started up the terror machinery to do away with such pests. Art is acceptable to Marxist planners as a Social Tool, or Weapon — when fabricated as a medium of controlled communication and instruction. (That way of thinking about Art is another aspect of McLuhan’s famous, apodictic formulation: the Medium is the Message.) Such a view reveals a barbarous way of thinking. Even as theory, it is deficient. In practice it is reactionary. Its votaries may have believed it, in whatever way the word “belief” be taken; but the world knows they also carried in plain view the weapons they used to enforce it. In any case, belief itself was and is unnecessary to bureaucrats, who flourished within the organs of the totalistic State, whether it be tiny Cuba to this hour or leviathans like China or the former U.S.S.R.’s empire. Art in such secular tyrannies was completely under their control. In the religious tyrannies that have remained and flourish today, as in the Islamic societies where religious authority and State authority are identical, Art and the Arts remain sequestered in various degrees of nullity or constant nullification. George Meredity observed 125 years ago or so that where women are not free, there is no comedy, for example. Since comedy is always, from its origins, founded on the satirical, we know that words, that is, the poet’s words, will be muffled if not suffocated by the controls of the fanatic and fetishistic shibboleths of prescribed modes of faith, of belief, or ritual observance.

V.

Insofar as poetry is integral to a National Literature per se, real poets will seek to remain apart from it. To the Tribe of the Poets there is no such thing as a “National Literature.” True, during the 19th Century, poets were instigators and leaders in movements aimed at breaking up autocratic empires in Central Europe and the Balkans, and many did speak of Nations and of Peoples. Their roles as revivifiers and even creators of written, vernacular “traditions” were persuasive and profound. The 19th Century ideal of National Literatures is invoked today as a means of dissent and resistance, as a call to self-consciousness or for consciousness-raising. Nationality in literature is a political-polemical proclamation, usually coercive; whereas the poet’s language is an accident of birth. Contemporary loudspeakers use the honorific, emotional term, “The People,” to suggest the idea, so-called, of a National identity based on the language a group of people speak. In short, the idea of “National Literature” common today represents the ersatz and kitsch materials prepared in our technocratic language factories. Such writings are processed, distributed and sold as advertisements for groups surrounded by borders drawn on the map by rulers; they are invisible lines, the parameters created by the surveys of social scientists. Styles in clothing, cookery, home furnishings, et cetera, are exported as the “creations” of designers based on the “traditions” of National Identities — Folk Chic. Talk about a National Literature is like the jingo flackery extolling high-powered “ethnic” dance troupes backed by symphonic arrangements of village tunes. To speak of a “National Literature” in connection with poetry is no more than to croon about a new line of dresses or dishes as the “poetry of clothing,” and “the romance of dining.” Nevertheless, for the members of the Tribe of the Poets, there can only be that event for which they work and wait: the coming of the poem. The poem comes into existence in the words by which it is constituted. And it is words that carry with them identities and the meta-identities; and words make the poems that constitute a literature.

VI.

So, what is the poet, rather, where is the poet, when it comes to thinking about poetry? We may regard the poet as the curator of society’s linguistic artifacts, that is, of its archaic identities, too — insofar as the poet can penetrate and comprehend the identities residual in words. In fact, it might be said that verbal artifacts are intrinsically archaic by the time they are twenty, or even ten years old. For that matter, yesterday’s poem is already an archaic event. The primordial time of the poem’s making has immediately lapsed into social time, that is, into history. It is in history that the scholar and critic assemble poems, the residues of poetic events, into the mosaic that, reified by textbooks into a “tradition,” constitutes a “National Literature.” What has that to do with poetry? For the poet, nearly nothing.

VII.

What does the poet do, if not fundamentally concerned with producing work under the rubric of a National Literature? The poet attends the primordial event from which the poem originates, and ministers to its speech. The poet thus acts as a self-appointed thaumaturge for certain psychic needs. (Uncertified. Unlicensed. Reward and punishment incidental. “Kill him for his bad verses,” cries a voice from the mob in Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar.) These needs may not be all that proximate in time or space. They can be latent or potential needs in an audience that may not exist in the poet’s lifetime, or if existent, may not be waiting for the poet’s words. The audience may not realize its need for those words before they are offered, if the poet is permitted to offer them by the local chieftain (or council of elders, or band of wild, young followers, or powerful businessmen or gangsters who also contend for its limited attention-span). Not a pleasant position to be in. But that is the position in which the poet is to be found in civilized, that is bureaucratized societies, whether ancient, modern-industrial, or the coming totalistic ones.

In the European experience after Homeric times, poets concocted and delivered the artifacts today labeled National (whether Nationalistic or Nationalized). Early on poets were absorbed by the priesthood and bureaucracy of the ancient city-states and empires in both the Near and Far East, where they purveyed more or less prescribed, commissioned placebos — the same sort of products for a National literature that would be approved by our present rulers. (A Sappho, an Archilochus, a Catullus offered something else, as did a Jeremiah, an Ecclesiastes, or the author of Job.) Today the poet also delivers a legible-anywhere pablum that may be termed Literature for Human Understanding — in other words, the greeting cards sold by UNESCO. It is predigested to suit the pseudo-identities demanded by its official vendors. A not altogether useless vocation.

Or, the poet acts surreptitiously, providing under-the-counter artifacts meant to assuage unacknowledged or forbidden needs. But, what could require an X-brand remedy for its well-being? The soul, for its needs are basically linguistic. And the thaumaturgical work it uses for its existential homeostasis is unimaginable to those who babble about National Literatures. Today, it is deemed unacceptable to implicate the poet in communication with souls or sordid traffic in them. The notion is repugnant to our way of thinking about human problems, whether we are believers in some sort of god or social planners, or both; because the term “soul,” that vaguest of all meta-identities, is but a shabby relic of fossilized religious systems from vanished cultures.2

Since, viewed from any present perspective the poet’s relationship to the soul is problematic, it is harmless to suggest that poetry makes for heroes (or strange men and women, when we consider what is usually the content of their lives and works). Such social types don’t fit well into the format required of those who produce works of National Literature. “Human understanding,” in the social science sense of it, may be the last thing poetry derives from, or works toward. The very term, “human understanding,” presumes a single mind in the species. Whereas poetry presumes the occurrence and representation of unique events, events that remain unique in each action-and-reaction by which a poem manifests its meta-identities in each living person.

Contrarily, “continuity,” or the “Tradition,” that is, the Cult of National Literature, is favored by both “socialist-camp” slave drivers and capitalist paymasters, as well as by the “revolutionary” “educational” advertisers who have taken over the means of production of thought and speech in our time. “Continuity” is sheer delusion; it is a straitjacket tied by the agents who repress the individual, even with benign instruments like communication. Continuity, or National Literature, is the armature of steel hidden within the mushy lectures of the historian in a classroom of a television series titled “Mankind.” Continuity is the nostalgia predicated by texts and teachers everywhere and nowhere.

VIII.

The Tribe of the Poets, in other words, those in whom poetry occurs poem by poem, is an anomalous group of individuals whose association is contingent. They stand in relation to the organization of literature in modern society as the Rechabites seem to have stood in relation to the kingdoms of ancient Judah, Israel, and Samaria. The Rechabites were tent-dwellers, old believers, keepers of an archaic form of faith. Their adherence to the memory of the foundations of the faith prevented them from being assimilated to the elaborate, corrupt manners of sedentary, civilized society. In effect, the Rechabites were keepers of conscience and the spiritual; and they remained so by staying tribal and nomadic, tent-dwellers amidst the cities. They were anachronistic witnesses to the primordial moments of the faith’s establishment, which continued to arouse in them an expectancy of the coming to men and women of the Lord, the creator of the soul, the Voice out of Nowhere, the Maker of Speech that is a special mode of speech, exemplary speech that recognizes the primordial events such as were signified by some of the songs called Psalms. The Psalms attest to hearing and re-speaking the words of that Voice, whose force makes its terrific and terrible incursion into the sleeping state we call our reality, a reality in which we dream our reasons. The Prophets went far beyond even that recognition.

Being like those primitivistic Rechabites of old, the poets are, metaphorically speaking, driven from the temple of official literature. Either they flee, or they must allow themselves to be kept as specimens, gaudy flies in the amber of a National Literature. The Tribe of the Poets may be permitted to come and trade in the marketplace, to observe festivals and compete for national prizes. They may also be likened to internal emigrés, or fugitives, or gypsies. They service the National Need whenever they are held up as exemplars of this or that aspect of the National Genius. But when they find themselves baffled by the super-rationalization of institutions of higher learning, they usually choose to serve neither the needs of a National Literature nor even the needs of their Tribe — preferring to meditate alone in the wilderness of themselves, often as not sleeping while awake and dreaming nightmares, sometimes growing as mad or arid as their private wastelands. That is a loss for poetry. Poetry can be lost in many ways, but its loss is always a loss of the soul — that meta-identity elicited via the poem as a kind of fleeting, primordial consciousness.

IX.

Because we are growing impoverished mentally and emotionally, and because rulers are forced to make ever more stringent plans for managing social economies, poets are considered expendable. In fact, the organizers have always suspected, that in the intrinsically-rationalized process of social planning, poetry — the unpredictable incursion of a voice from some elsewhere — is a luxury we can forego. Who can make plans based on the contingent, the fortuitous, and above all, the gratuitous? Poetry is not merely a luxury but also sets a subversive example against the rationalized order, because poets wait for those incursions of the voice, shutting eyes and ears to all our positivist engines whose operation fills the emptiness of their waiting with their twitters and roars.

Poetry is not words on the page; not communications; not therapy; not entertainment; not filler on the schedule of 500+ channels of infotainment or even edutainment. In the planned global economy of the future, and it will be a planned one sooner or later, poets will be considered “social parasites,” as some already have been called in many regimes during this century. Poetry will bring those who utter it ostracism, banishment, exile, and sometimes a death sentence, as has happened in our time, and has oc-curred even to novelists who cite banned verses in their prose texts. To term a person parasitic, is usually the first legalistic step taken towards defining that one out of existence. We may be quite sure that the Tribe of the Poets will never be given, no, certainly not! even a paltry minute of air-time to speak to the world from any of the many tightly-controlled satellites in space, if only because they cost so much to put up and maintain. Besides, what could poets cry out from space? When that Soviet cosmonaut radioed down years ago that he could observe the Earth and our Solar System and the stars, but had not seen God, we were given a fine example of the arrogant banality of the creatures of technology; and an indication of the absolute poverty of their spirit. They cannot afford poetry at all. Poetry it seems is a luxury that probably will not be obtainable in our future. It will not be privileged to anyone at all. Until then, perhaps silence is the only thing to be heard from them, if that can be heard at all.

X.

Yet even if poetry were not to be banished as a privilege or luxury, the Tribe of the Poets represents a social liability. Because of the peculiarity of the poetic process and of poetic language, poets will be prevented from contributing their artifacts in the future because they will appear to be false values that could interfere with the Communications Network. Poetic language will not be written into the software of the social programmers because the universal, universalist, universalizing data-processor cannot account for the events we call poems. And then poetry shall come to seem like that thing called the soul: the thing that is not. Poetry cannot be surveyed, measured, numbered, stored, and it is precisely the surveyed, the measured, the numbered and stored that is accommodated by the determinants, parameters, and paradigms of a social reality based upon plans made with the aim of control. Like the sub-atomic particles described by the Principle of Uncertainty in physics, the poetry associated with the poem cannot be located in its constituents. Even if the planners attempt to manage its constituents with more powerful magnets, as it were, they will not be able to find and calibrate, let alone control poetry, although that seems to be the way they wish to go.

Far from establishing Pure Poetry as the speaking of the Unknown that is present yet not present in the language, structure, and allusions of the poem, the Abbé Brémond, for example, was in fact talking a perfect positivism. Instead of mysticism, Brémond’s idea was in fact positivism stood on its head, a positivism inverted by the poets’ pique with an exhausted culture. It is useless to speak of ineffables to the positivist mind-set, which simply declares that all talk of the individual, unique soul is nonsense. And who could fail to come down on the side of even the crudest version of positivism, when writers like Brémond seek to defend the ineffable, that is the poetic, by displacing it from the Earth in a flight of vacuous theological analogy?

My point however has been to suggest that meta-identities are what the poetry in poems prepares in us. That in fact they are a perfectly natural thing, though tending towards the transcendental if only because language itself includes time past, the dimensions of events that were and are no longer, and events that never were, or even never could have been, yet which persist through language.

XI.

We have not really begun to miss the soul. Not yet. We feel some disquieting symptoms from its loss; but it is believed that these symptoms can be treated. In that case there is no reason why poetry should be missed either. Like the Tribe of the Rechabites who wandered through the Kingdoms of Samaria, Israel, and Judah during the First Millennium BCE, the poets will soon be gone into the wilderness of our human past, that desert where none can live for long, and where so few today are disposed even to venture. They are leaving the Nations with their National Literatures to confront each other on the fields of explication and obscurantist, metalinguistic disputation about poetics, of propaganda and communications, and of mass entertainments that are nothing more than degraded and clumsy poetry. The Nations will arrange their hegemonies, their various overlordships and satrapies, their networks and provincial syndications of professors and bureaucrats; they will exchange delegations meant to display their “heritages”; they will divide up the booty of spoiled lives and ruined decades like scavengers disposing of the carrion they have themselves strewn about in the carnage of their so-called cultures. The emigration of the Tribe of the Po-ets will seem no misfortune to them, even if they disappear for whole epochs. But each of us is the loser.

The nature of poetry requires that the ground be always prepared, available for its arrival. For the power intrinsic to language is so profound that even where there is ignorance, hostility, destruction, and decay, it may yet, as in ancient theophanies, sometimes produce a poem. In the chaotic sleep we call our human existence, a poem is the record of a moment of illumination by the hidden, lost, mysterious, or obscured light of the soul.

Notes

• 1 It may be recalled that Jean Genet added one new avatar to the ancient types of authority, king, priest, soldier: that of the policeman. Cf. Le Grand Balcon.

• 2In his GULAG books Solzhenitsyn demonstrated how obsessed with souls the State Security organs of the U.S.S.R. have been from the very beginning, since they went to horrendous lengths in camps and psychiatric hospitals to combat and eradicate them. This, despite the irony that by suppression they tended to create new souls in men and women — a surprising accomplishment, considering this late hour in the history of civilization! — just as industrial diamonds are produced by means of immense pressure and ultra-high temperature. Today, the chiliastic sects of Christianity are producing their enclaves of possessed souls; some are widening their control by means of mass-meetings and television; and the Islamic fundamentalists are determined simply to obliterate physically, as they have traditionally done, any and all who lift their heads from submission to the rulings of the theocrats.

• 3An instructive example is the recent invention of the Ministry of Tourism in Mexico City, which found a vast culture extending from the heart, so to speak, of the Aztec domain in Mexico City all the way up into most of the Southwestern United States, once part of the Spanish Empire that destroyed it. This has been named “Aztlan,” and the word itself is meant to suggest to Mexican-Americans as well as tourists an identity that is singular and not a composite of various tribes from the Yucatan north. That it is vacuous, suitable merely for emblazoning T-shirts with the sun disk calendar is of no concern to tourist boards or leaders of a “Chicano” consciousness.

• 4When I met and became friends with one of the first few Chinese to be permitted out of the PRC after Chairman Mao’s death (he was given a year to acquire good enough English to translate Derrida and De Man, Baudrillard and the rest of those founders), he gave as a parting gift for my son, a graduate student in Chinese Archaeology, “the only thing worth reading”: an anthology of several volumes of the best Tang poets handed to him by his father. There is nothing better, his father had told him before he disappeared into the deathly slough of “re-education” in some desolate place in the West from which he was never to return.

• 5That A=A, is the beginning and the end of modern linguistic philosophy, so aptly named Logical Positivism.

• 6Even in the popular imagination, as in those terror movies in which an archaeologist reads the poetry from, say, The Book of the Dead, and brings a pharaoh back to vengeful life, although why the mummy should always be evil, bent on destruction, is another matter. Perhaps the “soul” of such long-dead creatures is irretrievable, even if the poetry can return the form to the living.

My parents must have evolved from frogs. Frogs seldom form families or care for their offspring; they just mate and jump. It took me twenty-three years to have a family; my brother Jack never did; and my sisters married Jesus.

I was born in the middle of a snowstorm in New York City, January 1913. My father left us in 1914. Didn’t come home one day. Deserted my mother, Jack, Elizabeth, Arleene, the baby, and me. My mother took us back to Virginia where her family lived; I guess she thought they would help.

My memory of her is a pink dress with puffy sleeves and lots of light brown hair piled up on top of her head. And she had tiny hands. That’s what she looks like in the only picture I have of her. My only memory is sitting on the floor, rolling a ball to my dog Buster and laughing in each other’s arms. Buster’s fur was soft and golden; my mother’s dress smelled like flowers.

She left in 1915. Went out one afternoon and didn’t come back. Jack told me she had gotten sick and couldn’t live with us anymore. Even though my mother’s parents were still living and she had four brothers and a sister nearby, none of them took us in. My father came down from New York, not to take us back with him; instead, he bundled us off to Michigan, same place he’d been shipped to by his mother when he was three. His father had died in a small dirty fort in the Dakota Territory. Elizabeth and Arleene were put in an Ursuline convent in Detroit, and Jack and me in an orphanage, a place called Home of the Friendless, in Muskegon.

It was raining and cold when the carriage drove up in front of the Home, and the wind stung our legs. We were still in short pants. It was a big house sitting alone in the middle of a field. Very tall with high gables. The walls were wet and yellowish, that yellow you look like when you’re sick. The windows were outlined in black and there was a wide porch with nothing on it. All the curtains were closed so you couldn’t see in. I remember when we got out of the carriage Jack ran the other way. My father chased him, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him up to the house.

Jack was yelling, “I don’t like it here.”

That night after supper, the women in charge took us upstairs to a long green hall. It looked like the rows of beds went on forever. A woman with red hair showed Jack and me the black boxes at the foot of our beds where we were supposed to keep our clothes. Only three lights in the hall: one at each end and one in the middle. They made shadows everywhere. At the back end was a big white room with toilets and sinks where we had to wash before we went to bed. That’s when Jack showed me the bruises our father made when he grabbed him.

We’d been at the Home for a couple of years, and one day a man walked in the door while we were eating lunch. I wasn’t sure who he was, but Jack knew right away. It was our father. He was a big man, tall, with dark brown curly hair, a broad nose, and a big dent in his upper lip. I remember how friendly he was with the women at the Home, draping his arm around their shoulders, telling stories, making them laugh. It seemed this went on for a long time, but finally we went into town and he bought me a tin wind-up airplane and Jack, a watch from Japan. On the way back, I got tired, so he picked me up in his arms and carried me the rest of the way.

He saved the biggest treat for last. “I’ll be back in three months. And then, you know what?”

Jack and I shook our heads.

“I’m going to take you to your new home.”

Jack and I skipped a circle around him, “What’s it like?”

“It’s a grand white house with a big yard to play in,” he said. “And you will have your own rooms; even your new sister has one.”

“We have another sister?”

Jack and I looked at one another like we didn’t understand how that could happen.

“But we’ll have our own rooms? For sure?” Jack asked.
“Elizabeth and Arleene, too?”

“They won’t be coming,” our father said. “I talked to them and they said they liked where they were living.”

I didn’t really know them, so I didn’t say anything. Jack squirmed a little.

Our new house was in Syracuse. He was sure we’d like living there, and we’d love our new mother.

“What’s she like?” I asked. “Like the one we had before?”

He said the best thing was to wait and see for ourselves.

That night, after the lights were out, I sneaked over to Jack’s bed, climbed under the covers with him and asked how we got a sister and a new mother.

“I’ll tell you when you get older,” he said. “We’ll be alright; don’t worry.”

The next day we broadcast our news to all the other boys in the orphanage. We were going to have a home, a family. We were going to leave. But three months passed, then four, and our father didn’t come back.

“All you did was hang around his neck the whole time he was here.” That’s what Jack told me when I asked if he’d heard anything.

Maybe that was the reason Father didn’t come back. We never found out; we never saw him again.

The other kids started getting mean: punching and tripping us, putting things in our beds. Maybe we had bragged too much. I stopped paying attention at school. Only did my homework because Mrs. Moon at the Home made me. She’s the only person there whose name I remember. She always wore a dress with flowers on it and she could pick up even the biggest boys, throw them over her knee, and spank them until they cried.

I would throw my homework in the street on the way to school. The result: I was kept in the second grade for three years. The last year my knees were raw from rubbing against the bottom of the desk. The littler kids called me “Henry Friendless.” It didn’t help that I had a lisp. Jack was better in school. He was a whiz at math and his teachers spent a lot of time with him.

When I was ten, the cook at the Home made me a cake, and Jack sat beside me. Usually he was with the older kids.

“Henry, you’re old enough to know. Our real mother didn’t get sick and die like people said.”

I remember he started to whisper.

“She jumped off a bridge into the river, that old wooden bridge across the Potomac. Somebody saw her; they said she kind of floated down to the water and then the current swept her away. They never found her.”

“But isn’t it against the Commandments to kill yourself? Why would she do that?”

Jack said she was depressed about Father. That he’d left. She’d come back to Virginia where she’d grown up and couldn’t find us another father.

“We were happy in New York before you came along,” he said. “Everyone was together.”

This was my fault? Being here like an orphan. I felt horrible. It seemed like I had cramps in my stomach for a year after. The people at the home got worried so Mrs. Moon took me to see the doctor. He poked me all over, I had blood tests, even gave me an enema, but couldn’t find anything wrong.

In the summer they would take us to Camp Hardy at Blue Lake. It was in the middle of the woods, a big lake; even the older kids couldn’t swim across. There’s a picture with Jack and me at the camp. We’d been picking blackberries in the brambles. I remember all the kids had berry juice all over their faces and hands, they had us go swimming to clean off. That’s something I was good at, swimming. Used to win all the races.

In the photo I’m in a too-big shirt with rolled-up sleeves at one end of a line of scraggly looking kids; Jack’s standing five feet away on the other end. That’s what it was like.

He made out we weren’t related. We didn’t look a lot alike, so he got away with it. I had curly blonde hair, a narrow face, and a nose I didn’t grow into until I was eighteen. Jack had dark brown hair; his face was round, and his ears stuck out.

While Jack and I were at the orphanage some of the other kids got adopted. When that happened, the other boys walked around: looking at the ground, starting fights.

The adopted kids said, I’ll come back to visit, but they never did.

I asked Mrs. Moon, “Why can’t I be adopted?”

She said, “As long as your father is still alive, you can’t be. It’s the way it works.”

By this time, I was probably too old to get a family anyway. All the people that came to the Home were looking for little kids.

But, when I was fourteen I got adopted, sort of. Because it was too far to walk to St. Jean’s High School, Dr Wilson, the man who took care of my stomach aches, said I could have a room in his house. And they promised the Home that he and his wife would watch over me. I think he felt sorry for me. That’s how he looked after the tests showed nothing, when I told him what had happened with my mother and father.

I had a room in the attic, my own room, where the ceiling sloped down on the sides and I had to bend down to get into bed. I put my pants under the mattress every night so they would look creased in the morning.

Dr. and Mrs. Wilson were in their sixties I think. They both had gray hair, though hers was more silvery, and they had what everyone said were “kind” faces, wrinkled into smiles that came easily. It was a quiet home. Nice after living with forty other boys. In the evening Dr. Wilson read books, like Tale of Two Cities and Don Quixote. Mrs. Wilson usually sewed or played the piano. And he would see I did my homework and quiz me on my lessons, especially biology. When I had trouble in lab, he found a couple of frogs and showed me how to dissect them.

“Here, Henry, hold the scalpel like this.”

He put his hand over mine to show me how to slowly and lightly glide the scalpel across the skin without cutting into the muscle.

“Now for the abdominal muscles, same light touch. There, you did it. Now there’s the heart and the liver.”

Then he explained about how they lived, and how they reproduced.

With his help I raced through high school in three years. I was determined to make up for taking so long in the second grade. And maybe I wasn’t going to Harvard, but I was going to learn as much as anyone who did. I put together a “Map of Knowledge.” In a little blue notebook I outlined every subject in the world and the best books for each. For History of Economics, the best book was Hobson’s The Science of Wealth; for Social History, Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Then I started to read. I was on my way.

Jack? I forgot to mention. He went off to Harvard the year before I moved to the Wilson’s. Got a scholarship. Haven’t seen him since.

My grades weren’t quite good enough to get a scholarship and I didn’t have any money, so after I got my high school diploma I went to Washington to look for a job. I didn’t know anybody, but like everyone else in the 1930s, I went there because the government was hiring. I started by digging the foundation for a new building on 14th Street. That lasted six months. Then, I was a clerk for the Department of Agriculture for six months. Then I repossessed cars for the Capital Service Bureau.

One day, out in Virginia, I found the red Chevy I was looking for. Parked in front of the guy’s apartment. Scanned the area, no one in sight, had the key in the car door. I was five-six, 120; a guy twice my size came bursting out of the building, a baseball bat in his hand, swinging it in my direction.

“What you doing with my car?”

“Mr. James, you haven’t been making your payments; it’s not yours anymore,” I said. “I’m here to take it back.”

“Hell you are.”

He kept coming. I ran. Back to the office and resigned.

About this time I met Martha. She came from a family with seven kids; they all grew up in the same house in a small town in Massachusetts near a lake. Her father came home for supper every night. They had a garden in back of the house. I took her skating; she was good. And she had an infectious, throaty laugh.

A month later I inherited two thousand dollars from an aunt I’d never met. Jack, Elizabeth, and Arleene inherited too. I don’t know what Jack did with his. My sisters had to give theirs to the convent.

Me, I bought a used Model A Ford, a sporty tan coupe, with a front seat that folded down for a bed. Then took off for California. One of my ancestors had captured Monterey from the Mexicans; another was a 49er who had tried to get rich panning for gold. I drove the southern route so I wouldn’t get cold sleeping in the car. When I got to the top of the Tehachapi’s at El Tejon Pass, I figured I could save gas by turning off the engine and rolling; the car cruised right into downtown LA.

At the end of three months I’d seen the Observatory, MGM, the Pier, and gone to the movies at Grauman’s. Spent time at La Monica Ballroom on the Pier trying to meet girls.

“Hi, my name’s Henry. Would you like to dance?”

“You don’t look like you’re from around here. You going to be here long?”

“Don’t know; it depends.”

“What do you do?”

“Well, nothing right now,” I said. “I’m thinking of going to law school though.”

“Yeah, sure, let’s hook up when you’re ready to go to trial.”

I went north to Monterey to see the Mexican Customs House my great-great-grandfather, Commodore Sloat had captured. Then to Angels Camp where my great uncle Henry Perrine had panned for gold. It’s a place Mark Twain visited some years later.

One night, I sat down under a tree by the Stanislaus River and looked at the water milling against the banks. Heard the croaks of distant frogs. That’s when I put it all together, about how even I had been jumping around. And I thought about Martha. And I went back.

The recent news of Al and Tipper Gore divorcing after 40 years of marriage has sparked a national conversation on matrimony, a particularly resonant topic for me at the moment.

You see: I’m on the other side of the spectrum. I am getting divorced after a mere eight months of saying “I Do.” Despite the brevity of my union, it still hurts like a dart to the heart and I am extremely embarrassed. With that said – I can only imagine what the Gores are feeling. They have lived a public life on a global stage, survived a presidential campaign, and raised a few children. Not to mention the wealthy assets and property they have amassed through the years that will have to be divided upon their separation.

Dwelling on the elements of their unfortunate reality has made me look inward and take a new perspective on the collapse of my own short-term nuptials. Fortunately, we didn’t have any kids and we only own one house, but the whole endeavor has still spawned a surplus of questions: Did I dodge a bullet and ease the pain by folding in the cards before a year? How would I feel if I spent the better half of my life with my wife and our love crumbled after several decades? What exactly constitutes a successful marriage?

Those who know me were extremely surprised when I first told them I was getting married. I’m talking shocked – like the first time Screech saw Jesse naked pole-dancing in Showgirls. I was not the settling down type. My best friend and I would constantly joke that “marriage is not a word – it’s a sentence.” The truth is, I fell in love like a lot of young people do – fast and furious on a crowded dance floor in a trendy Boston bar. My grandmother had always warned me that lightning would strike one day, and I had gotten electrocuted over the head with a fierce bolt. We moved in together within a few months and took a luxurious vacation to Europe, I proposed on a Lite-Brite in the lobby of her office building three weeks later. I took the bulk of my life savings and bought her an overpriced rock and used a huge chunk for a down-payment on a new construction townhouse. We spent the entire summer planning this majestic and innovative wedding and the legwork actually was worth it. The event was a smash success and exceeded my expectations. I always said if I was going to get married I wanted something out of this world – like fireworks, fire eaters, and midget-tossing. I settled on a breathtaking museum venue, personalized paintings, and a Frank Sinatra lounge singer. No midgets were thrown and fire was absent.

We spent our honeymoon at a top-notch resort in Jamaica – drinking kegs of frozen cocktails, eating jerk chicken, and getting massaged by freakishly strong Rastafarian women. It was an exciting and passionate love affair and I’m sure if we outlined the life details of the Gores it would sound even more captivating. So what went wrong?

My situation perhaps is a bit more transparent. We were what a friend referred to as “the tumbleweed and the street lamp.” At least on paper. I am a social butterfly who has had the same friends since high school. I love adventure, vacations, and constant stimuli. I also don’t work in the corporate world. I am an aspiring novelist and independent publicist who never knows where his next paycheck is coming. I’m laid back, creative, and athletic. She is a meticulous and successful accountant for a major healthcare firm. Her ideal night is lying on the couch, watching Gilmore Girls, and planning the intricate details of her retirement plans while she calculates how much it would cost to add crown molding to the den. I guess the bottom line is that sometimes opposites don’t attract. For the record: I didn’t want the divorce and there was no one else involved.

But the Gores? Life partners for four decades. Like-minded activists. Proud parents of four successful children. How did their long love fade like a crayon tattoo in a downpour? When we wrote our own vows and announced them in front of our family and friends – I believed what I said and I was ready to honor them. But when the idea of being locked down to someone for eternity causes supreme anxiety and depression – in today’s hyper-stimulated world is it wrong to want to run for the hills?

Strangely, although I am financially, spiritually, and romantically wounded beyond repair, I don’t regret the entire experience. I joke with friends that I have pulled a Men In Black and flashed my brain of all past memories. But the truth is, marriage is difficult and complicated. Whether it’s a few months long or several decades. It’s like a plant that has to be constantly watered. Mine died on the vine and failed, but so do half the marriages in America. There is an old saying: “If practice makes perfect – how come nobody is perfect?”

I’m OK with having a Cindy Crawford-like mole on my reputation. If Al Gore can endure and persevere after such an extensive relationship – so can I. Sure I don’t have his money or recycling skills, but I have a cool Boston accent and when I say “Havad Yad” chicks dig it.

I wonder though, since he invented The Internet – does he gets preferential treatment on Match.com?

When I was eighteen I began to carry a condom in my wallet. I can’t recall where I got it, because I had a paralyzing fear of buying them. This anxiety extended to bringing it around with me. I imagined someone going through my wallet, pulling it out and giving me a skeptical look. “What’s this?” they’d ask.

“Optimism,” I’d cleverly reply. They would chuckle and give me a you old rogue look and we’d both go about our day. If only I were as witty in real life as I am in my head.

Maybe a week after I started carrying it, I met my step brother and step father for lunch at the Boston College cafeteria. I’d just come from the gym, where I pretended to lift weights while staring at girls on treadmills. I was wearing athletic shorts without any pockets, and I absentmindedly put my wallet on the table. During our meal my step brother, Hale, began to casually rifle through it. Inevitably, he came across that little blue plastic wrapper, pulled it out, and snickered. I shook my head subtly. He then burst out into a quiet fit of laughter and put it back. My stepfather pretended not to notice. When I got back to my room, I took it out and slammed it in a drawer. That was the last time I kept a condom in my wallet, and I soon forgot about it. It wasn’t until several years later, at the tender age of twenty-one, that I would have to reopen that metaphorical drawer.

***

I’ve never hyperventilated before, so I can only assume that’s what I’m doing now. I’m sitting in the intern corner at work, trying to go through my usual morning routine of reading all the articles on ESPNsoccernet. Razan, my Middle Eastern co-intern from Boston University looks across the table, concerned. I am a little nervous around her, because I am from New Hampshire, where everyone is white. We have never talked about our lives outside of work. I’m not sure whether to confide in her or start sobbing hysterically. I can’t even look at Steven Gerrard celebrate his goal on the screen in front of me. I’m pretty sure my life is over.

“Umm… is everything okay?” she asks. I think she’s noticed that I’ve sweat through my button-down shirt. I really admire those strong stoic types that can suffer in silence, but it’s not a skill I have.

“Yes. No. Actually, I may have gotten someone pregnant.”

Razan is shocked. I think mostly at the idea of me having sex.

“Okay. Calm down. I’m sure you didn’t. What happened?”

I go to great lengths to avoid sharing sexual details with any girl, never mind one I barely speak to, so I try valiantly to leave out anything that would garner a PG-13 rating.

***

I just got back from Birthright. This is the free trip to Israel even secular Jews like me are invited to go on, with the hopes that we will mate like bunnies. The guest speaker on the second day joked, “It’s not Birthright, its birth rate.” At least we thought he was joking until we saw that the trip leader had an entire backpack full of condoms.

On the second night we heard the youngest member of our forty person group having very loud sex in her room with one of the soldiers who accompanied us. We laughed, but I think we were all a little traumatized. It was a bonding moment.

This is where I met Janie, the twenty-six-year-old divorced mother of one, who would be attached to my hip for twelve days. Janie is from Dallas. I didn’t know there were Jews in Dallas. She teaches elementary school there, loves her daughter and hates her ex-husband. I play Grand Theft Auto IV in the middle of the day, usually while drunk, and still call “fives” whenever I get up from a seat. One of my roommates once stole my seat after I did this, and I almost threw him down a staircase. I take it very seriously. Also, they don’t have “that’s what she said” in Dallas, which is my go-to response to just about everything. This limited our ability to communicate.

I was sitting next to her on the tour bus while she explained in frustration why every other guy was too short, fat, skinny, taken, or alcoholic to be her fling for the trip.

“Hmm… ” I said.

“Geoff’s really cute,” she told me, “too bad he has a girlfriend.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, staring at the desert outside the window. I turned up the air conditioner.

“Too bad you’re not a little older,” she said, giving me a sisterly pat.

“Geoff is like four months older than I am.” Janie pretended not to hear. I turned on my iPod. Eventually, reluctantly, I invited her to join in watching Arrested Development. She laughed at all the wrong parts.

Janie warmed up to me soon after that. Maybe it was my witty references to fantastic video games like Call of Duty and Bioshock. Maybe it was the 35 to 5 girl to guy ratio. Either way, it was clear by the third day that we were an item, though we hadn’t hooked up. We spent almost every moment together, except when I intentionally hiked faster to get away. By the fifth day of the trip I was beginning to question the value of a relationship with someone who complained about shopping and teaching and divorce and alcoholism and all those adult things I didn’t care about, when I could be talking about myself with Geoff and Dave.

On the sixth day Janie and I were napping in a hammock by the Dead Sea. I was tired out from a twenty minute water-treading competition I’d had with a freakishly athletic girl that ended in a draw, called on account of boredom. I had just enough energy left to hook up. I shared this thought with her. We agreed to go back to the room.

Dave walked up to us, carrying beer. “Hey guys, wanna play cards and get drunk?”

“Definitely,” I said, forgetting about sex.

A few days later, we got to a kibbutz on the Israel-Lebanon border just before sundown on the Sabbath. Aware that we had just minutes to buy alcohol before the stores closed for thirty-six hours, but unaware of where they were, we ran around the kibbutz like blind, flaming rabbits. I experienced the unique pain that comes from sprinting uphill in flip-flops. We got to the only store with minutes to spare and bought a four-dollar Alaskan vodka that I have never seen in the U.S. and hope never to see again. Geoff, Dave and I polished this off in short order, and complemented it with liver-shriveling amounts of barely-drinkable Israeli beer.

Afterwards, we gathered outside one of the rooms in plastic chairs, where every guy besides me demonstrated an impressive ability to play the guitar. I debated trying to play the first three chords of “Seven Nation Army,” which had taken me weeks to learn, but I still couldn’t get them quite right. I opted instead to subtly hint to Janie that we should go back to my room: “HEY! LET”S HOOK UP!”

She told me she didn’t hook up with guys when they were drunk. I had trouble processing this, possibly because of the Alaskan vodka. I tried to explain that I didn’t hook up when sober, but she was unmoved. It didn’t help my case that I was having trouble forming sentences. She started to hint at something depressing involving her ex-husband. I squirmed uncomfortably in my green plastic chair.

It wasn’t until after we returned from Israel that Janie gave in to my suggestions of sex. Her flight to Dallas from Boston was delayed until the next morning, so we went back to my apartment. After introducing her to my roommates, we went to my bedroom. I decided not to mention I was a virgin. The last time I’d done that, the girl I was making out with had laughed at me and called me creepy. Instead, I made a series of educated guesses, based on a combination of the internet and late-night HBO specials.

I unwrapped a condom for the first time in my life and stared at it in confusion. I wrestled with it for around a minute before tentatively deciding I’d put it on correctly. Holding it was unsettling enough, so I didn’t want to look too closely. Meanwhile, I tried vainly to look nonchalant, like I struggled with condoms all the time. I rolled my eyes and said something about the inferior design of this particular brand. I hadn’t yet had it, but I’d already decided that sex was the most awkward, terrible thing in the world.

Some people might want their first times to be magical-candlelit-romances. They are girls. At twenty-one I just wanted there to be a first time. I found soccer posters to be a more-than-adequate substitute for candles, though I could feel Steven Gerrard’s eyes on me the entire time. After seven minutes of awkward exertion, I mentally gave myself a B + overall and an A for effort. I added a few points for managing to keep my shirt on the entire time. Not a bad result, considering I only knew one sexual position, and was afraid to try any others. I sheepishly told her not to look while I wrapped a towel around my waist and sprinted for the shower.

When I got out, for reasons that are now unclear to me, I wandered upstairs to the common room. My roommate Mara was sitting watching TV.

“Did you guys just have sex?” she asked, disgusted. Mara had a very low opinion of anyone who found me attractive.

“Nope,” I lied. She looked at me suspiciously.

“Biddy was loud,” she told me. She shuddered to accentuate her revulsion. Mara was very dramatic.

“I want to watch Scrubs.”

“Too bad.”

Disgruntled, I returned downstairs to find the evidence of my inexperience and poor condom selection.

“Maybe you should take the morning-after pill,” I suggested, suddenly learning I was pro-choice. I was pretty sure the morning after pill was something I had heard of before.

“Oh,” Janie replied, “I don’t believe in that. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.” I could and maybe should have mentioned the obvious ideological conflicts that mentality has with the use of condoms and birth control.

“Hmm. . . ” I said instead.

“You know,” said Janie, looking around, “your room is actually kind of gross.” I followed her gaze to the wall, where large swaths of black mold were growing next to the headboard of my bed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I thought about returning to the birth control debate, but I hated arguing and I was tired. I turned off the light and fell asleep.

The next morning she woke me up to say goodbye. “Nnnnghhh” I said, and went back to sleep. It was a storybook parting.

My cell phone alarm woke me up three hours later, playing the James Bond theme song. For one precious moment I had no idea where or who I was. I took a deep breath, then threw on a pair of tattered jeans and a button-down shirt and biked to work.

***

A couple years earlier I walked into my step brother’s room when I got up for school and saw that the ceiling had collapsed onto his bed. After checking to make sure he wasn’t in it, I went to inform my step father that there was massive flooding in our house and went to school, thinking “this is not my problem.” He was impressed, confusing indifference with composure.

I would like to have retained even a sliver of that composure now. This is very much my problem. Janie has to stay in Texas because she has joint custody of her daughter. I will have to move to Dallas, abandon all my friends, and go somewhere where the most popular sport was, until very recently, lynching. Everything is shittier in Texas. I finish relating my tragic tale to Razan, having unsuccessfully tried to avoid using the word “sex” at any point.

“Well, she was on the pill, right?” asks Razan. I have a vague idea of what the pill is.

“Yeah,” I say, Googling ‘birth control.’

“Then you’re fine.” Birth control, Google tells me, is 92-99.7% effective, depending on how regular the girl is taking it. But I consider even a one-in-a-thousand chance a reasonable one in a poker tournament. I fervently hope my little soldiers are worse at swimming than I am at cards.

I look pleadingly at Razan. She can see I’m not comforted by our Google forays.

“Look,” she says, “why don’t you write her a message asking her to let you know when she finds out?”

This strikes me as entirely inappropriate to do over Facebook. I navigate to her profile and send her a message. With Razan’s help I get through the day without stress-puking. Back home, I am watching Scrubs when my roommate Josh walks in.

“Did you have sex last night?”

“Nope.”

“Dude I saw a condom in the trash can.”

“Then, yes.”

“Gross.” I get up and turn the TV off as I head downstairs. This is a habit that infuriates Josh, as I do it regardless of whether someone else is watching TV at the time.

I make my way to my bedroom and look into the trash. The condom is sitting there, half covered by a bag of Nacho Bugels. Judging me. Broken, because I put it on the wrong way.

“Fuck you,” I whisper. I sit down and wonder what will happen to me.

Lots of influence. Lots of anxiety. The graduation photo that once stood on the baby grand stuffed into the small living room on the sixth floor just beneath the ash-dropping chimney of the incinerator shows a 16-year old with clear eyes and the carved features of some unknown, handsome youth. Somehow it does not show the acne, although an-aged writer sees in his shaving mirror today its faint scarred pittings. Neither does that picture reveal the sturm und drang about to erupt from a nascent selfhood, or suggest that those eyes, distracted by glimpses of unexpected Beauty, are already beginning to burn with a desire to find and hold whatever appears to manifest it. What might suggest, perhaps reveal it in moments promising to be unendurable? Poetry.

Well, yes. But where was the idea of Beauty (again that majuscule “B”) to be found incarnate in the Bronx in the mid-Nineteen Forties? For me it was in Wallace Stevens. The somehow moral structure of the æsthetic: whatever was sensuous, sinuously ineffable, transitory as wind, the gaiety of grand speech, the colloquially sublime manifested in undulant sentences, wave after wave of free-floating clauses, passionate yet detached, buried or sublimed in the intellectual, the skeptical and ironic: là bas, là bas …. Such range of language, such nuance; such an elegant, elaborate, secure sensibility, in and through which reality itself was marvelous yet etherealized into the music of an utterance far removed from the grungy quotidian of the Bronx, the filth of roaring Manhattan’s million grimed windowpanes, its old soot-filmed black and brown stone.

Still, this ephebe was not that ephebe whom the Master’s verses conjured up suggestively, characterized as such sans the least solidity of form: this ephebe was an uncured, common clay jar, filled to overflowing with the riotous emotions of a New York-born child of working-class immigrants. So that the Master’s manner reconstituted in him was reborn every morning, driven by an adolescent’s spasmodic strivings, a blind, blinding Sehnsucht, despairings expressed in the fearful and fearsome cyclothymia that often erupts late into the second decade of life. And bulimia. And the terror of paranoia. Et cetera. Scarcely those mild, pastoral hootings attended to by some Sunday’s languid feminine soul at ease on a chaise in a comfortable bedroom, upstairs, overlooking her green and sweet-meadowed Connecticut countryside, faintly accompanied by the clashings of tiny ring cymbals, castanets or the maundering arpeggios of a viol or skilled fingers strumming a classical guitar. This ephebe’s French tradition came up confronted by inbred recollections of a slum beside the Marché aux Puces in Paris, of murdered maternal great-grandparents, shot unceremoniously to death in the ghetto of the Marais, their student assassin, for all one knew yet alive and rotting away on Devil’s Island: “A New Raskolnikov: Crime and Punishment in La Rue de Rosiers!” And on the father’s side, the remembered hammering hoofbeats of Cossack horses galloping to and fro along the right bank of the Dniester River in the tumultuous months of 1918 and 1919, the rattle of machine guns as Red and White cavalry overran that hapless hamlet called Izhvonits in Bessarabia. The effect was a symphonic cacophony when that nightmare of the remote past was mixed in a medley of bebop’s hyper-accelerated, driven counterpoint, those Prezzed, Dizzied, and Birded lightnings and thunder. Anxiety and influences imploding. Result: manic exhilaration:

MANIFESTO: ANARCHY

As we took the bashed in temples
of the moon in tow through
the cataracts of time and rolled
them seaward down to sink
years of prince and princess crowded
cheering on the banks of childhood,
jubilleeing for night’s drowned dogs
as we farewelled for the dawn….
And we brained the catch of ages
in our hold, drifting down
history’s nightmare river,
and our eyes flashing from the mast
spotted old men hidden crouching
where reeds like blinded stalks
of telescopes pointed broken
at fate’s old fading stars…
Hands over hands ran up our flag,
the sun shone full
for victory: we sang, we slaves,
for the capstan’s heave and ho
as we trawled leaping on shoals
of salmon into the tossed
brackish gulf, running now before
the land wind and riptide,
and our prow dipped deep as it drank
the typhoon blue world

Not that Stevens, the man revealed decades later in biography would have gratulated such ephebic hubris. Although its contrary corollary, a hurrah product of pure imagination in six quiet tercets, is a fair imitation of Stevens’ mode of allegorized landscape, even the compassionate yet hardnosed titling of this poem, its Pacific Ocean setting not that of a peak in Darien, but some vacant stretch of sand in Baja California:

SOME ARE CALLED, SOME NOT

His western sun was a flaming firebird
trailing low over the warm gulf of desire,
an agèd phoenix flapping down to rest.

The light was going from him. Bats rose up;
flittering from their ambush they hunted
his fleeing ghosts of hopes. The world grew blear.

From this tan Pacific strand hungrily
he’d scanned the waters; empty, all empty
save gulls who screamed and fretted over scraps.

Yet this was sacred world: here were no temples,
no constructs to cajole the mind, only
the naked embrace of primal sky, earth, sea.

Here this meditative youth had squatted
fasting, seeking, and found in the sea,
that mother of movings, mere sea, no source,

when the wretchedest hint from destiny
was all he asked. And he sat down and wept
as the seawind fought the dusk overhead.

And perhaps Stevens might have approved of a painting poem from that same sad suite of Schwärmerei, a vision from Dürer, the poet’s imagined self entering the nightly, lost, dark wood of a desolating urban landscape, only now in hendecasyllabics, and rhymed too, a self-assertive touch to disguise their provenance a little, the 18-year old collecting some non-taxable interest from his bond to the Master:

A DREAM OF DÜRER

Sooty hoarse siren, cry from the dark, mauls the night,
Hustles him from sleep. Somewhere from far, far it calls.
He goes. No sounds other than that horn, no light
Other. An insinuation of dawn, blue and chilled;
Sifted crystal powder hoars the town. Though it
Rimes on this gray world like faint music, he still
Stumbles into a mesh of silence; visions accost
Him with things like trees, gnarled, jib jabbering old
Laughter. He creeps on, mumbling St. George, hero’s name, lost
Once in this maze as he. On his phantom horse he meets
The phantom dragon. He fights; he dies. And resumes
His way, emerging in the morning on the streets.
Still dazed, hears through the day that forsaken shriek
Of his midnight express, a thousand expresses, each
Perhaps the signal. To errantry or error they call. If he break
His mission, what will his Lady say? His Lord, his God?
Forfeits then his liege; wanders, lazar begging with bell….
His bones will rot, swine root among them in the sod.

Not only is the debt plain, but so is the effort at self-liberation through rich language and an estheticized projection of a psychological crisis, with at the same time a terrible doubt about the curative efficacy of the dreams of words. The skepticism of Stevens is preserved, and clearly marked, his commitment to language too, and his way of intensifying variations on a theme. By such echoing a young poet made explorations into himself, something his model never did, never propounding dramas of the inner, unconscious life directly, not even in his plain-spoken last years. A good example is a fantasia of a poem the title of which is irrecoverable to me now:

…Nights he’d traveled, skulking along the reeds by day.
Downwind now he heard baying hounds, white beasts

swift as the river, coursing him, heard the long drums
of angry blacks thrumming behind him in the brakes.

His prize, pilfered from their temples of the moon,
the sacred offerings of Hamites, Tibuu, Fulah.

Tuareg, stank fierce in his pouch, already stinking
like his own living flesh that crawled in mud, dying in

the Sudan sun. As he, alas, these votive meats
will rot, these newcut foreskins, birth thongs like shriveled

sinews, bones’ ash of wizards mixed with a pocketful
of gnomic beads: red cords, glass bits — profound formula!

articles compact with juvescence, glory come again,
and he, the courier of gladdest tidings, Elixir

Vitae! his cry, he, night’s nuncio clean escaped
out of sleep’s darkest continent, his contraband

concocted of currents of pure mind: primitives
of mind’s most ancient crevasse, from far beneath all

animal concurrences or surgings, from the
scrapings of a last, a deepest floor of history,

where brine washes over periwinkles scattered
on a strand, that lone shore where beyond memory

once trysted moon, and stars, and simple sun,
that first cohabitation of innocent elements.

Ah, but his hopes are slaughtered now. The dogs of dawn
leap upon him, rend the dream. Tall spearmen jabbing

his corpse dismember a hero, spoil their despoiler,
toss his offal to the Nile, and return towards dark.

Crocodiles push off from flats, gobble his remains.
What vain hope of succor had he then from day, when

nothing attests his deed to the stranger who wakes
and tastes the rancid garbage of a mere dream?

Or, what man of day, which rules a hemisphere away,
can succor take from sleep, when jealous tribesmen catch

each day’s emissary sent to plunder night,
kill each knight of promise, who dies to reach his day?

One doubted, not merely because the Master also doubted in his endless self-communings, but for other reasons, perhaps much more potent, reasons compounded by the times. What youthful imagination could have absorbed the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the terror of the immanent destruction of the world presaged from now until the end of human time? What hopes could have remained green with the opening of the concentration, rather the extermination, camps? I was scarcely sixteen when those events stunned me. Theodor Adorno declared at that time all possibility of poetry was extinguished forever in Auschwitz. Celan adumbrated it and perished; after him the Hungarian poet János Pilinzsky also attempted the approach to absolute zero. Two years later, taking Stevens in, I made his work a vehicle for my own engine. But that engine was ticking over so fast, it never could have occurred to me that Stevens, long gone into middle age by then, had himself been unable to take in the decades of the great dictators and the convulsion of the World War; neither by means of his manner of speech nor in his imagination did he confront our post-war Western world’s lost civilization and its aftermath, nor even attempt to account for it. Where was this world revealed by the poets? Its new, powerful dreams and thoughts were to be found now in science, in psychology, technology, in anything but the poets, who as always looked at the present by looking at the past. We had no Gottfried Benn to say to us, as he had said to writers after World War I:

My generation still had certain literary residues from earlier ones to latch onto: father son problems, Antiquity, adventure, travel, social issues, fin de siècle melancholia, marital questions, themes of love. Today’s generation has nothing in hand anymore, no substance and no style, no education and no knowledge, no emotions and no formal tendencies, no basis whatever — it will be a long time until something is found again.

Addendum: confusion and bad writing alone does not make one a surrealist.

We found about us in the 1950s what was familiar enough: a sentimentalized consumerist culture that had no sense of the tragic, that had never known the tragic and did not understand it. We were yet to encounter the macabre farce of the debacle in Vietnam.

Yet one does not easily renounce a sight of one of the gates to the heaven of poetry. Yes, Walt Whitman was also there for me, and adored, but it was foolhardy to put on his singing robes: it would only come out Sandburg; or Norman Corwin; or Allen Ginsberg. (Although turning him over one could find satire or humor: Kenneth Fearing and Ogden Nash; or the endless Poundian prophetic of Kenneth Patchen. He had fared better in our century in French and in Spanish: to return him to America after 1945, when our Democratic vistas were obscured by the ineluctable subterranean undermining of totalitarian evil was no longer possible.)

At that time, Ginsberg was renouncing his youthful college years’ allegiance to the Elizabethans and Van Doren, and setting out his charming and zany adaptation of Whitman’s rodomontade, after having passed his qualifying exam with W.C. Williams. I couldn’t take that seductive and too-easy road, since I was attempting prose as well, Joyce having been the exemplary figure before my eyes from my fourteenth year. (What Ginsberg’s way amounted to in the end was put wittily by my friend the late Henri Coulette, whose couplet, “The Collected Poems of What’s His Face,” was published posthumously in 1990:

Sixteen thousand lines, give or take sixteen —
And no two lines that you can read between.

Oh, like Allen, one hankered after Blake and Whitman, and one took from Dylan Thomas: I alternated the prosody of my stories between the mean scrupulosities of DUBLINERS and the dithyrambics of Thomas (as in a story of my 22nd year, “Eat Aaron and the Night Rider,” published, incidentally, in the same number of ACCENT as Wallace Stevens’ “The Planet on the Table,” in 1953, which was admired by a graduate student editor named Stanley Elkin, who adapted that style and never left off, whereas, having done it for a few luminous pages I was through with all that.) Still, it had to be acknowledged that exactly fifty years stretched between Stevens and myself as ephebe, a whole half century, and those several different worlds of the world’s experience had intervened as well — his influence naturally was the cause of great anxiety. The struggle with and against and through Stevens, if indeed it was a struggle, is observable not only in the suppressed poems of my late teen years, but as it was to be repeated during the next decade, with my fealty given most of all to TRANSPORT TO SUMMER, the book that had hit me so very hard as an 18-year old, a sophomore, your true ephebe. Out of the 35 poems in my first published book (WHATEVER LOVE DECLARES, Plantin Press,1969), I would trace one, “Laboratory,” formally, to HARMONIUM.

LABORATORY

In this bottle you see morning
on this shelf is grass
here are specimens of turning,
nights which you must pass

love distilled from antique mirrors
tinctures made of breath
pills of joy and powdered terrors
things to ease your death

the formulas of secret fears
catalogues of dreams
the bones of hope, the flesh of tears
what is, and what seems

all, all has been found out, tested,
certified as true;
time alone must be invested:
we depend on you.

I’d acknowledge others as being indebted to Stevens’ succeeding books: such poems as a set of three savage things made up of tercets, called, “The Technique of Love,” “The Technique of Power,” “The Technique of Laughter.” Two others, “Philosophical Transactions at Montauk,” and “Katabolism, or, The Natural History of Love,” are made from what I acquired from the Stevens of TRANSPORT TO SUMMER, though, again, he might not have granted his seal to this epigone. Not because of what they look and sound like: 100-syllable stanzas, more or less, loose pentameters in 10-line stanzas that I thought I had found in TRANSPORT TO SUMMER. Such poems as the two I have just mentioned speak, it is true, in tones of lofty and tenderly ironic disinterest. But Stevens might have been irked because they are redolent of the flesh, soaked in its fevers, desperate for extrication, and helpless to achieve it – Well, I was in my early 20′s after all, and Stevens was a year or two from his end, and really had no strong desire for Woman, except as a distant form, perhaps. Possibly I was conflating “The Comedian as the Letter C” with parts of AURORAS OF AUTUMN. Still, though not the first attempt to say goodbye to the engorgements of sexuality, “Katabolism, or, The Natural History of Love” succeeds in its genially heroic accommodation of the overwhelmingly sensual and erotic to a view that is also, I think, Stevensesque by virtue of its remoteness, a somewhat cruelly tender yet achieved distancing of the knower from what he knows — the result being the sort of tension that I then thought made for the poetry in Stevens. As for instance:

The giant blooms amidst green damnation,
swollen ecstasies of this timeless realm,
elegant, unblessed. Old hothouse roaches
trot along lianas on their roach affairs.
Hot, hot beneath glass, the dour pineapple
and the sweetish lemon, greengold and thinskinned,
ripening sans honor: athletes and esthetes.
Fat frogs squat steaming in bowers of blood
and tumorous copper carp fin idly
at the conduit. There is nothing but life.
There is nothing but life but love. The pyre…

Or perhaps it was in the very fact of such tension that the poetry resided for me? Leaving youth’s youthfulness behind, no longer subjected helplessly to the imperious blows of the sensual fist, one learned how words both mitigated its hammering, yet somehow preserved its effects and its affect. By the time another 25 years had passed, one began to see that Stevens’ way with language was also Stevens’ way with the world and the flesh. And one saw too, something of his reticent, not to say bleak, heart, as cold as his imagination was hot. But, as an ephebe of 18, 19, 20, one adored those twinned devils, world and flesh, as one adores the inside of the pulpy fruit’s firm, ripened meat; one risked the gaudy, the sensational, the sentimental, the extravagant, and the obscene of passion. And much later too, one still does, decade after decade. Perhaps it is just a matter of temperament after all.

So that if one reached for the palpable, moving, odoriferous, bleeding yet resilient breathing body, if one loved the very life of the things of this world, one had to bid adieu to Stevens…at least until it was time to bid adieu to the inter-fleshings of the phenomenal world that were not merely language, and figurative, not merely the phantasmal Stevensesque “mind.” Or, if one had somehow come to suppress it, one learned the repressed always returns, as it did for me in my 40′s, in this elegy, a sort of paean and elegiac ode to Aphrodite. (Actually much of Stevens’ poetry, even that of his ephebe, was elegiac in nature, and is therefore something rooted in Classical poetry, as in the late Latin “Pervigilium Veneris.”) Where else, among one’s contemporaries of the 20th Century, would one have learned the lushness of metaphor, and learned to dare to use it sans embarrassment, but from Stevens? An homage to Stevens then, this poem from my third book, IN MEMORY OF THE FUTURE:

ON A WINGED PHALLUS, ROMAN,
BRONZE WITH BRONZE BALLS, THAT I GAVE MY FRIEND,
A TOKEN TO BE HUNG ON HIS KEY CHAIN

Asleep, curled in your pocket,
he waits, his wings quivering,
and with his two old friends dreams
of those moist, those blue mornings
before these shrinking, white days
that crack our chilled hearts like glass
came to tell us of winter

Do you remember those breasts?
How straight she walked, eyes opened,
her long arms held out, her hands
strong and tapered, cupped flowers,
offering you her friendship,
like the touch of love’s kindness
her smiling lips showed she knew?

Out of an early hour,
with a flecking of salt spume
you could taste on her shoulders
and her hair heavy with youth,
faint stars caught in its coiled ropes,
she had come to greet you, yes,
so that you would see, and know

And you woke, as though the sun
were waking too, round and warm,
and growing from her belly
as she stood there in silence,
waiting till you rose, and stood,
till you let your locked thoughts go
and welcomed her against you

Again! Again and again!
Don’t you remember her breasts?
that bright sky that shone on you
as the garden turned drifting
amongst those mountain orchards
and the sun pressed sweating down
on their swollen, dripping fruit?

And then she laughed, how she laughed!
her smooth limbs flung blazing wide
then wound round you tightening
as you thrashed in terror, trapped —
all that day long you struggled,
a beast, child, man — a young god
crying and singing and wild

as the hot red dusk crumbled
and fell in ashes on you
where you sprawled between wrecked walls
your bones burning themselves out
your mind staring at that sky,
cold, blind, black and high, so high….
Don’t you remember her, now?

One thing you should know about my father is that he has an abnormally large stomach. The kind of stomach that, if x-rayed, would reveal a picnic bench of five angry truck drivers demanding a 4th serving of fillet mignon and mushrooms (if they happen to be sautéed and available). With that being said, my dad is not a particularly overweight guy. In fact, he spends an hour on the elliptical every morning and works out compulsively every weekend. He’s in good shape for a sixty year old and he’s got a hell of a heart, or so I thought.

When he called me a few days ago and said that he had a “widow maker,” which translates to “a severe blockage in the left main coronary artery,” I sunk a bit, but not too deeply. For some reason I was never worried. Perhaps I was in denial, perhaps I was being insensitive, but I knew he would make it through this setback. While undergoing the scheduled procedure this past Wednesday, the doctor discovered that four arteries leading into and from the heart were 95% clogged, contrary to the prior finding of one 67% blockage. While only one stent was originally planned for the procedure, four stents were used, and in the heat of the moment bi-pass surgery was deemed unnecessary. Hence, my dad made it through with only one complication: he now had cardiac arrhythmia.

Cardiac arrhythmia― abnormal electrical activity in the heart that causes it to beat too fast, or too slow, and can result in cardiac arrest, a stroke, or sudden death.

After the operation the doctors tried to correct this side effect by attempting two separate procedures involving two different sets of cardiac drugs, but had no success. To prepare for the third procedure, they shaved his chest, doped him with lithium and morphine, and shocked his heart with defibrillator paddles in the hope that they could reset the rhythm. They were unsuccessful, even after a second electrifying attempt.

So when I arrived in the Critical Care Unit for Arrhythmia at 6:40pm in the Bronx this past Wednesday, I could see that my dad was in a hospital fog of catheters, drugs, and machines that chirped every couple of seconds.

“Simon, It hasn’t gone away yet. There’s an extra beat in there, you see the monitor?” He pointed at ECG, it wasn’t a beautiful symmetry. “They’re going to try another procedure at 12:00 tonight.”

“Dad, I think we should try a visual meditation.”

“Ah Simon, I don’t know”

“I think we should, okay?”

“How long is it gonna take?”

“A couple of minutes, but if we really focus, who knows what could happen.”

“Bob, try it, it can work,” Joanne (my dad’s wife) added, who was also in the room with us.

I was expecting a southern eye roll, but he consented, “Okay.”

I pulled a chair to his bedside, placed my left hand on top of his heart, and started to relax myself. I felt a familiar tingle in my hands and began: “Take a deep breath in, and slowly let it out. Take another deep breath in, and slowly let it out. In the center of your heart, you see a beautiful, calming, rejuvenating white light. A light that, with each breath, grows in its love, warmth, and healing abilities. A light that calms you, and brings your heart back to its ideal state, a state of love, a state of health, a state….” And we continued this meditation for another 10 minutes until a nurse opened the door and asked us to leave so that she could change his catheters. “It’s also a shift change, so you’ll have to wait outside the CCU till 7:30,” a half hour away. I took my hand off his chest and walked out as she pulled the hospital sheets off his legs.

Thirty minutes later we walked back in and my dad looked at us. “I have something to tell you. When you left the room the nurse looked at the monitor and realized that my heart was back to its normal rhythm.” The ECG showed a different symmetry. “You did it. I always believed in meditation, you know, I used to meditate myself.”