The Fire

“Particles” (1969)

I have to divide my response to this essay in two: on the one hand, I’m thrilled by the distinctions he draws; on the other, I’m left at the end unable to describe or define in positive terms how genuine art might work politically in the world.

So first: I share all the skepticisms and rejections with which Blaser opens the essay—though I wish he would elaborate more on certain points: “Basically, magic is a kind of knowledge, not power”; and a little later “the problem of authority.” I’ve long wanted to understand better the conception of “magic” that is so central to the work of Duncan, Spicer, Blaser, in its particularity. And I wish somebody would try to discuss the attraction of “authority” for Pound especially, in its particularity, without dodging—as Blaser distinctly does—the very real blindness and stupidity, the past and present atrocities involved. But then I suppose Blaser’s just rushing to get these things out of the way: “leading you into a corner where a particle of land is all you’ve got.”

“The organs of thought are the sexual organs of nature, the world’s genitals.” That seems central: the faith that our particular work, thinking, if it is free and thus public, is continually shaping the world we live in. Which seems to amount to Unamuno’s faith: Brute force will win, but it will not convince, and conviction is what ultimately matters.

This is where I get stuck, wondering what particle of land remains to us now in which “conviction” or “persuasion” or its opposite could happen. I haven’t read Arendt, I get hopelessly muddled when I try to imagine in any particularity what our political reality consists of now, or what it might consist of “in a more meaningful time,” and I don’t know what, as a citizen or a poet, to do next. I’ll try to write more about this, but I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts. I don’t think I’m the best person to start a conversation on this essay, which I find so exhilarating, inspiring, accurate, and at the same time frustratingly vague and horribly elusive. 

a phantom capital P

I like that. I like space for play. Though I’m not sure how much is “new” or “postliterate” about our awareness of the textual relationship, that two make a tango in time.

Then we know what “here” is, and that it is three-dimensional at least. “My poetry in relation to poetry.”  Well, “mine”—the particularity of what Bernstein in the review you linked wants to call his “voicelessness”, the thing that goes out and grabs onto and arranges and holds together in relation all these other things that aren’t in the usual sense “personal”—it’s “introjective rather than projective” as Bernstein also finely says. “My poetry in relation to poetry”—my magical pomposity wants to put a capital P on that last: poetry as, precisely, a community, assemblage of companions, echoing mess-hall and altar of the dead. There are all kinds of problems with that capital P though, and Blaser is perhaps wise to avoid it: there is no general or neutral or single Tradition to refer anybody’s poetry to, even if we stay within “the western box” (again CB quoting RB quoting Chas O), and the word “poetry” itself is an abstraction, a distancing, from the particularity of whatever poems present themselves. Though of course on the other hand Blaser’s point again and again is that there is no need to think of “single” poems, that they speak together in series, that they don’t ask to be lopped and lonely items to then be strung together arbitrarily into anthologies, strings of flowers. So that the abstraction is a generative—and humbling—gain in perspective: that “poetry” is what makes “my poetry” possible, and what it cannot fail to live “in relation” to. And we’re still in the holy forest, with “Jeremy Prynne explaining / the abstact     ‘it simply / means distance’ / rain, rain, dear Zeus / on their cornlands and / their pastures” (in “Image-Nation 7 (l’air”). And then the negative formulations have the virtue of pointing outward, elsewhere, at the moment they specify what the present work (is and) isn’t doing.

Is how I read that sentence (which I hadn’t thought of at all till you kindly invited it in). “I am here writing about my poetry in relation to poetry.”

first

Robin Blaser begins the essay “The Fire” with a simple declaration staking out a specific territory of concern:

I am here writing about my poetry in relation to poetry.

Like many of the lines here, this statement is so simple, so matter-of-fact, and with so much in common with the shape and texture of so-called ordinary speech (what the professors might call ‘vernacular’) a reader may be forgiven for passing to the next line and to the others beyond without a pause to regard the implications the line sets in motion.

For example: 

Where is here?

What or who is present here?

What is this stuff called poetry?

Perhaps a reader does not need to answer these questions before proceeding further. Perhaps only a rough idea of an answer is sufficient to fill in any blanks with whatever and still carry on toward meaningful transactions in the realm the essay maps.

Or perhaps more considered answers to these questions would equip and inform a reading. Perhaps a reader’s personal stake in these concerns helps to follow Blaser through his subtler arguments and through the kinds of logical reversals and presentations of multiple negative case he sometimes favors, as in this line from the second paragraph:

I believe there is a reality, which, given the leisure to live for it, is neither conceptual and systemized in the ordinary sense of these words – nor image-less.

or:

…it is not the elegiac loss which interests me, but the difficulty, the activity, of holding on …

and:

To hold an image in the line by sound and heat is to have caught something that passed out there.

and, later:

I mean here that imagination is more a power to take in and hold than it is a power of making up, though it must in its activity take responsibility for the uncreated.

and in this kernel of method:

I am trying to describe the foreigness, the outsideness, as a kind of metaphor for the sense I have of the process that leads to a poem, which again is outside, when made, and is akin to translation, a word which in its parts holds the meaning of the word ‘metaphor’, the bringing over. This is here a problem of describing the process of inclusions, which as a man’s work extends, enlarges and must take in both earth and sky. The heat I’m after is not simply the personal heat of the meeting, the recognition, but a heat and a passion which are of the nature of existence itself. The personal, yes, but then the translation of the personal to correspond with larger and larger elements, images of earth, is a process of inclusion – a growth of sensibility in Valéry’s phrase, but also a making which is not self-expressive. To be included, to be caught, to be brought over.

“The Fire” 1967

Broadly, a statement of passionate commitment to the community of poetry as it looked from the bay in 1967, with Duncan and Spicer as immediate contemporaries, friends, and Olson and Zukofsky as major teachers, with perhaps more authority because of a greater distance from Blaser’s own scene. It’s fascinating to see him take that whole exciting ferocious muddled elated discourse of the time and make it personal, a matter of clear-eyed anecdote and humble practice, guided but not bolstered by others’ words.

Even more interesting are the ways her distinguishes his own directions in poetry—though throughout the essay it’s hard to tell when he’s talking just about his own work and when he’s talking about his work AND Spicer’s collectively. (I think there’s a similar ambiguity in “The Practice of Outside,” which brings an emphasis on narrative which I take to be much more Blaser’s than Spicer’s.) “I am literal about that reality. It is, I think, the purest storytelling to try to catch that light—and the difficulty of it, the loss of it, is personal.” And: “it is not the elegiac loss which interests me, but the difficulty, the activity, of holding on to it.” This is a major difference from, say Spicer, who is constantly interrogating a loss of light, a loss of reality in language, and sometimes seems to want to rub salt in the wound.

There’s a repeated emphasis on force  that surprises me: I suppose in the sense of inevitability or physical law, rather than strength of will to “force something”: “To hold an image within the line by sound and heat is to have caught something that passed out there.” Which reminds me of Pound’s image of (“image” as) a rose made of metal filings rearranged by a magnet; and Louis Zukofsky’s “The tune’s image holding in the line” and his early emphasis on “objectification,” just the making of the poem or the making of whatever it’s made of into an “object” by a “sincerity” of “thinking with things as they are.” (I’ve been reading Mark Scroggins’s great new LZ biography.)

And the emphasis on “image,” praising it against the “conceptual and imageless,” is a big difference from Duncan’s and Spicer’s usually negative use of the word (“The Beatles, devoid of form and color, but full of images” …). Image is so big in Blaser’s work—”Image-nations,” etc., and his imagination is really more precisely and vividly pictorial than RD’s or JS’s: though his sense of image as combination, even collage of independent elements, as in Bruno’s astrological mnemonics he cites (Taurus and Saturn), is far from Pound’s imagism and very much of a piece with the other Berkeley poets’ emphasis on magic.

This is getting longwinded. Is this the kind of thing we want, Rich? What else:

Intriguing figures of the serial: “the processional aspect of the world”. “Each piece is in effect an extended metaphor (another word is probably needed)”—what word?

And the beautiful sense of cosmology in poetry: “The processional aspect of the world has to be caught in the language also. The body hears the world, and the power over the earth over the body, the city over the body, is in terms of rhythms, meters, phrasing, picked up—the body’s own rhythms pick up or it would shake to pieces.” I love that, I love that, I love that—the awestruck renewal of neoplatonist Renaissance cosmology in mid-century American (not necessarily American, but that’s RB’s emphasis) poetry: a project that, forty years later, looks heartbreakingly distant and exotic.

I like the way “local” anecdote, anthropology and translation break into the essay: “the world” is here and not just “poetics”. (I think the essay was partly a response to Duncan’s criticism of his Nerval Chimeras.)

That’s my takes on the thing, for now. I’m excited to be in this internet living room with you chatting about this bon Fire.