Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
272
Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
272eBook
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Overview
The range of Songs of Degrees extends from the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Duncan to such “language poets as Bruce Andres and Susan Howe. Taggart closely examines the work of the objectivist poets George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky. Three essays are devoted to each of these poets, providing detailed readings of individual poems and considerations of each poet’s overall achievement. Taggart also concentrates on poets whose work has not been widely recognized or is only now beginning to be recognized. These include Theodore Enslin, Frank Samperi, and William Bronk. Taggart’s essay “Reading William Bronk” is the first extensive reading of this relatively unknown but truly outstanding poet. Taggart’s essays also focus on his own poetry. He describes the composition process and the thinking behind it, as well as the poet’s own evolving sense of what the poem can and ought to be. These very personal reflections are unique in their attention to current questions concerning form and the issue of spiritual vision. Avoiding political and cultural reductionism, Taggart throughout keeps his eye—and heart—on the poetic, singing his own “Songs of Degrees,” even as he discovers notes of the same music in the works of other.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817391324 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 692 KB |
About the Author
Marjorie Perloff is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University.
Read an Excerpt
Songs of Degrees
Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
By John Taggart
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1994 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9132-4
CHAPTER 1
Deep Jewels
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod, Or Love in a golden bowl?
— William Blake, The Book of Thel
It is well that George Oppen's Seascape: Needle's Eye is of very few pages. For these poems, even more than those in Of Being Numerous, possess a surpassing density, a coordinate density of syntactic surface and of undistracted reflection. It is my sense that both densities devolve without constraint into each other, betraying no spot-welding; that the initial difficulties a reader may encounter are worth enduring for the reward of words put in unusual, often exhilarating combinations and of a thought process which is terrifying in its honesty. If the book were longer, we might be tempted to read for striking single lines or images — how most poetry is read most of the time — thereby missing the truly organic and iridescent density of Oppen's poetry.
Density was not originated in poetry by Oppen. Our century has prided itself upon the refurbishment and near-idolatry of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. An indication of this is the denatured poetry of William Empson, a critic as poetaster whose work seems to have its single motive power in an admiration for metaphysical wit and complexity, so that his own poems read as literally senseless, voiceless puzzles, but not as poems. The object for the reader of an Empson poem, like the college student in a poetry class, is to "figure it out." Its satisfactions are those of the crossword puzzle. If it, and the only slightly less arid work of Tate and Ransom, were restricted to the crossword pages of newspapers, they would occupy their proper zone and provide their proper pleasure of riddle solving. The density of George Oppen's poetry, however, is of a wholly different order because his thought is of a different order. It is truly his own; he does not propose to entertain or to amaze by playing upon ideas already at hand, but to think, "naked," in the poem to some purpose. To make the distinction clear, consider a metaphysical set piece, Marvell's "On a Drop of Dew," which may well have served as a model for the above worthies.
Marvell's poem gains its density from complex variation and restatement of the equation: drop of dew = human soul, from tightly interlocked end rhymes with iambic lines kept supple by the ripple play of mono/poly syllable combinations within the line, and from frequent line-length alterations. The idea underlying the equation is a near-commonplace. Marvell links the dewdrop with the soul because it comes from heaven — "the bosom of the morn" — is whole and complete in itself, but is nevertheless restless and "unsecure" because "so long divided from the sphere." And as the dewdrop lies within the blowing roses, so the soul — "that drop, that ray / Of the clear fountain of Eternal Day" — is "within the human flower." In typical metaphysical conceit fashion, the dewdrop and Christian soul unite in
... how coy a figure wound,
Every way it turns away:
So the world excluding round,
Yet receiving in the Day.
Dark beneath, but bright above,
Here disdaining, there in love.
Marvell's poem ends, having coyly assumed something of a literal sphere shape itself, by interpreting the dewdrop's fragility as a soullike longing to leave this world — "It all about does upward bend" — and by identifying the dew with sacred manna, which congeals on earth only to dissolve and "run / into the glories of th'Almighty Sun." Marvell's density comes from the further and further outreaching series of variations made (and ending) on the first identification/equation, which in itself is "simple." In fact, it is a principle of such composition that the theme, for its variations to affect, must be uncomplex. Bach's "Musical Offering" doesn't suffer because its fugue subject was dictated without forethought by a merely competent amateur, Frederick the Great.
Oppen is most commonly associated with Pound, Zukofsky, and Williams. Though the work of each man is whole and distinct, Oppen, as well as Zukofsky and Williams, writes within the technical "understanding" of Pound. It's useful to look at the Cantos to see just how distinct Oppen's density is from Marvell's and from that of his most forceful contemporary master. Pound's density develops from his ideogramic method. An example of this is the following excerpt from Canto LXXX:
as he walked under the rain altars
or under the trees of their grove
or would it be under their parapets
in his moving was stillness
as grey stone in the Aliseans
or had been at Mt Segur
And it was old Spencer (, H.) who first declaimed me the
Odyssey
with a head built like Bill Shepard's
on the quais of what Siracusa?
Or what tennis court
near what pine trees?
The procedure is juxtaposition by displacement: or, or, or. The reader must locate "he" in a quick succession or montage of settings without indication whether first or last is any more "the" setting than any of the others. Pound's lines are written so as to transform the reader into a camera operator constantly adjusting the focus as to follow an event, a movement, and as a consequence is moved in the process. The act of adjustment is maintained if the scenes are extremely opposite one another, an oppositeness made emphatic by word-sound syncopation: under rain altars, undertrees, under parapets; Aliseans, Mt Segur, Spencer, Shepard's, Siracusa; tennis court, pine trees. Pound's density is generated by the cumulative scene/sound pattern or mesh (vortex/ideogram), a "patterned energy" in Hugh Kenner's phrase, which is made up of rhetorical reversal displacements, abrupt juxtapositions of people and places not usually connected in their own space-time made to seem even more so by close repetition of single words and near-sprung-rhythm syncopation of subword sounds.
Despite the brevity of this example (from a canto that contains Washington, Debussy, Symons remembering Verlaine at the Rabarin, Santayana, Waterloo, Andy Jackson, the author's curiosity that Mr. Eliot has not given more time to Mr. Beddoes, the obligatory Chinese ideograms and Greek tags, plus all the standard axes of Pound's mind), the means of achieving density are no more complex than those found in Marvell. In fact, they are probably simpler. Pound's variations are made upon Pound. As one reads through the Cantos, there are fewer and fewer surprises. Both themes and variations tend to assume, amid constellations of ever-multiplying exotic reference, fixed identities. Quantity and strangeness of reference with masterly control of cadence are the elements of Pound's density.
My suggestion has been that Oppen's density is somehow distinct, and therefore particularly valuable, from the metaphysical play upon received ideas and from Pound's self-ideogramic method. To be sure, he is much closer to Pound than to Marvell. I think this is because Oppen has chosen to stand fast to the conception of image as center, foundation, and base for composition. Which, if not Pound's original notion, is surely his emphasis. Oppen's task as a poet sympathetic with this emphasis has been to avoid flat-out duplication, to turn it to his own use. What he, along with Zukofsky and Williams in their different ways, has successfully attempted is "to construct a method of thought from the imagist technique of poetry — from the imagist intensity of vision." (The statement comes from Oppen's interview with L. S. Dembo in the Spring 1969 issue of Contemporary Literature.)
This is the necessary achievement, what every poet conscious of tradition and "self-conscious," must manage: to adapt an existent body of technique and thus gain access "into" language and one's own mind. The language is the poet's to begin with, but only as a public trust; without a current, viable technique, it remains only as so much potential for the living writer, containing only what is already known. There is also the chance, then, not simply for "expression," but rather for search and discovery in one's own voice and through one's own vision. Such an adaptation (of image from Pound, of overall form consciousness from Zukofsky) allows Oppen to think actively in his poetry. Is this not the true goal, beyond the superficial release from closed metrical writing, of Olson's composition by field, of Duncan's desire that the poem contain all the "incidentals" of its composition process? For if we cannot do this, no matter how fine the style, nothing will be done. Poetry will lapse, as it has lapsed with a Swinburne, with a Robert Bridges, with each gentleman's present-day equivalents, from its high heuristic function to pinching the cheeks of a perennially debased "beauty." Historically, Pound's "desuetizing" and the whole modernist cleansing of tools have been useful. Now, however, the time has come to stop echoing "no ideas but in things" and to engage the poem directly that the searching mind may find there its rightful place for discovery. Let the poetics take care of themselves.
The peculiar density I would claim for the Seascape poems is a byproduct of Oppen's willingness to so engage the poem. Not endlessly to prepare for its never-to-be hyperpurified state, but to use it now. What finally distinguishes Oppen's work from that of his immediate sources is the character of his own mind. I will evade psychoanalysis and argue that the mind most resembling Oppen's is that of William Blake. What's most striking about Blake is his incredible "freedom of statement." The man is capable of saying anything in pursuit of exact statement. Who else in English poetry would write serious conversations between a clod of clay, a worm, and a daughter of beauty (Book of Thel)? Who else can put down such terrifying questions as in "The Tyger" or be as religiously vindictive ("The death of Jesus set me free: / Then what have I to do with thee?" in "To Tirzah")? Who else can insistently point out social injustice ("London," "The Chimney-Sweeper") and at the same time write the flat-out platitudes that make up most of the Songs of Innocence? The answer is not George Oppen; it can only be William Blake.
Oppen, however, is equally capable of saying absolutely anything. For here is a veteran of all the "make it new" wars who can still write the near-sentimental "Sparrow in the cobbled street, / Little sparrow round and sweet" ("Stranger's Child" — The Materials), who can register social protest: "Now we do most of the killing / Having found a logic / Which is Control" ("Power, The Enchanted World"— Of Being Numerous), and not least a poet who can write a poem of quiet affection for a woman "Clear minded and blind / in the machines / And the abstractions and the power" who
... sought for a friend
Offering gently
A brilliant kindness
Of the brilliant garden
("A Kind of Garden: A Poem for My Sister" — Of Being Numerous). Oppen is also the poet of moral warning:
Wolves may hunt
With wolves, but we will lose
Humanity in the cities
And the suburbs, stores
And offices
In simple
Enterprise.
("A Narrative" — This In Which)
If Blake and Oppen mirror one another in a shared ability to startle by an unannounced directness, by an "unreasonable" pursuit of exact statement, which is not so much irrational as unmannered in traditional modes of procedure, there are also differences. The most important of these is Oppen's refusal to construct a mythic universe, a reduction of the universe in which we all live, for a richer poetry. The splendor of, say, The Four Zoas comes from Blake's mythic synthesis, which is a little familiar in its separate parts and yet remains strange as a whole. It is Blake's preoccupation with his synthetic myth universe which makes Eliot's remark that he did not see enough of the universe decently accurate.
Oppen is placed by his refusal to make such a synthetic construction at the disadvantage of continually refinding his subject in each new poem. (This may explain why he is drawn to serial organization, e.g., "Image of the Engine," "A Language of New York," the title poem from Of Being Numerous; the series permits any number of variations without forcing new beginnings and without losing sight of the object.) There's positive gain, though, in that each poem demands great effort, each potentially as crucial as others of the past, so that a sense of the "problem" seen whole — there are no bravura rhetorical climaxes in Oppen's poems — emerges.
Earlier I cited a section from "Power, The Enchanted World" as an instance of social protest. When quoted more fully, it becomes more complex.
Now we do most of the killing
Having found a logic
Which is control
Of the world, "we"
And Russia
What does it mean to object
Since it will happen?
It is possible, therefore it will happen
And the dead, this time dead
"Complex" is hardly the word. For the difficult question and its sad, hard answer offer us no relief — as they should not — there is no "answer." This is what cannot be found in Blake, who has all the answers, and what, though the word sounds nearly freakish, makes Oppen's poetry "tragic." It is not Aristotle's tragedy, nor a tragedy of any time other than our own, when neither heroic victory nor defeat can be had but only never-ending struggle, the terms of which are never quite clear.
One had not thought
To be afraid
Not of shadow but of light
Summon one's powers
The tone remains brave, though none of Blake's angels will appear to light our way. There's no requirement for such a tone. It is a gift, humane and generous, from Oppen's persisting mind. What good can it do? Only what all great art does: to lay out the human facts a little more clearly. Not salvation. We may see more if we listen closely to this man who has dedicated himself to "the rare poetic of veracity."
That last phrase comes from "West," one of the poems in Seascape. It belongs with another phrase, this one from a later poem in the same book, "Song, The Winds of Downhill": "out of poverty / to begin / again." Together, the two phrases define Oppen's practice from Discrete Series to Seascape. Thus Oppen is always beginning again out of a relative poverty of poetic resources with each new poem. "Relative" because, while deliberately avoiding the multilayered richness of Blake's myth universe, the clean slate per se is not really possible. All our acts have histories. The result of such a consciously assumed attitude is a density even more intense than that of the previous books.
An indication of this is Oppen's use of the ellipsis. Prior to Seascape it serves to indicate shifts in cadence which are also shifts in the downward thought progression of the poem. As a result, the reader can follow the composing mind more directly, the removes of cookie-cutter syllogistic form reduced, can feel that one is witness to a mind in actual serious process, a process unrehearsed for the cultural occasion of "poetry," deliberately impoverished and resolutely active. The ellipsis connects the moves of this process and reminds us that something has been left out — that for all his sincerity, both poet and reader are still involved with artifice —. Reading Oppen's poems, we must try to fill in these indicated gaps if we are truly to read them. This is not a strategem à la Robbe-Grillet or Nathalie Sarraute to engage readers more intimately but to inform them simply (and forcibly) of the process, of the development, of the choices that are being made.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Songs of Degrees by John Taggart. Copyright © 1994 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword,Deep Jewels (George Oppen),
The Spiritual Definition of Poetry (Frank Samperi),
Reading William Bronk,
Zukofsky's "Mantis",
How to Do Things with Words (Bruce Andrews),
A Preface (poetics),
The Poem as a Woven Scarf (poetics),
On Working with Dancers (poetics),
Louis Zukofsky: Songs of Degrees,
Play and the Poetry of Susan Howe,
Of the Power of the Word (Robert Duncan),
George Oppen and the Anthologies,
Call Me Isabel, Call Me Pierre (Charles Olson),
A Picture of Mystery and Power (Susan Howe),
An Ongoing Conversation (Theodore Enslin),
Introduction (poetics),
Come Shadow Come and Pick This Shadow Up (Louis Zukofsky),
To Go Down, to Go Into (George Oppen),
Works Cited,
Acknowledgments,
Index,