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An otherness inside us: complicity & transcendence from Whitman to Wright

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An otherness inside us: complicity & transcendence from Whitman to Wright

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Content AN OTHERNESS INSIDE US: COMPLICITY & TRANSCENDENCE FROM WHITMAN TO WRIGHT by Stewart R. Grace A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING) May 2015 Copyright 2015 Stewart R. Grace ii Epigraph There is an otherness inside us We never touch, no matter how far down our hands reach. - Charles Wright, “The Southern Cross” iii Acknowledgments There are a great number of people without whom this project would never have been completed. I am indebted first and foremost to the University and English Department for the opportunity to pursue my degree at USC, the faculty’s many years of support, and the privilege of a Middleton Fellowship. Thanks are also in order to the College Writing Program and Marshall School of Business for my continued employment, their pedagogical training, and their unfailing faith in my ability to teach their students. Individually, I am grateful for the support and guidance of my committee members: to John Carlos Rowe for the precision of his feedback, to Frank Ticheli for his unbiased perspective, and to Joseph Dane for his wit that helped me to keep it all in perspective. My thanks also to Marjorie Perloff for her challenge and expertise, to Aimee Bender for tolerating my foray into fiction, and to Bruce Smith for encouraging the kernel of this dissertation from the start. And to Mark Irwin – mentor, and friend – whose steady and patient guidance was paramount to the completion of this work. Lastly, I am grateful to my grandmother, Barry Osborn – the most ardent supporter of my higher education – and to my parents, Richard and Barry Grace, for their unending faith in me. iv Table of Contents ii Epigraph iii Acknowledgments v Abstract 1 Introduction 8 I. “An unminded point, set in a vast surrounding”: Walt Whitman’s American Liturgy 27 II. “Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence”: Dickinson’s Vicarious Intimacy 41 III. “The literal characters, the vatic lines”: Stevens the Prosodic Deacon 56 IV. “Things that divine us we never touch”: Wright’s Spiritual Catechism 74 Epilogue 84 Bibliography 89 Appendix A: Skeet Communion v Abstract An Otherness Inside Us: Complicity & Transcendence from Whitman to Wright seeks to trace a lineage of American poets whose language sustains an “otherness” beyond the human experience. What might have once been called a religious element according to our earliest comprehension of the term, language that is Transcendent becomes language that is “sacred” in its service as a conduit to the sublime. In studying the poems of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Wright, this project follows how phenomenological devices and prosody have changed the language of American Transcendence (and its effect on the American reader) over the past 160 years. It explores the tenuous moment of communion that occurs when we enter into the act of reading and writing poetry, traces this moment to American Transcendentalism’s “religious” roots, and argues that this communion continues through linguistic devices that reduce the barriers of time and space delineating reader and writer. Through this phenomenology, we transcend toward the “other” – the other half of our tenuous communion: readers toward writers of the past, and writers toward our future readers. Ultimately, the transcendent poet — capricious though he may be — uses this communion to sufficiently distract our conscious attention away from the act of reading, from our phenomenological place as readers; indeed, the poet acts as “theor”: that ambassador who leads us out of our consciousness and away from the city of ourselves. Also included in this dissertation is a volume of original poetry, Skeet Communion. These poems similarly use the phenomenology of transcendence to explore the complicit communion of writer and reader together as co-mythmakers. A meditation on the belief that words do, in fact, shape the way we see the world, these poems oscillate between the polarities of writerly and readerly perspective in an attempt to observe that which is “otherwise than being.” 1 Introduction The scandal is the stubborn resistance of imaginative literature to the categories of scared and secular. If you wish, you can insist that all high literature is secular, or, should you desire it so, then all strong poetry is sacred. What I find incoherent is the judgment that some authentic literary art is more sacred or more secular than some other. Poetry and belief wander about, together and apart, in a cosmological emptiness marked by the limits of truth and meaning. Somewhere between truth and meaning can be found piled up a terrible heap of descriptions of God. 1 More than any other art form, language “permits us to utter, be it by betrayal, this outside of being, this exception to being, as though being's other were an event of being.” 2 Language has the capacity to give life to that which is past, that which has not yet come to pass, or that which never will (or never can) come to pass; it brings here, makes present, and calls into being, that which (without words) would not be here, would not be present, and thus would not be. Words, then, have the capacity to summon the past and future, all of memory, even the impossible, to be witnessed in the present outside of thought alone; words give one being (for lack of a better word) the ability to transfer his thought to another being. Indeed, we often label the language that performs this transference “poetic," and poetic language continues to hold a magical, mystical, or even sacred place within our cultural consciousness. Rather than seek to fabricate a connection between poets and divinity, much less poets and a specific creed, this project more accurately establishes a lineage of American poets whose language sustains an “otherness” beyond the human experience — what might 1 Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1981), 6. 2 have once been called a transcendent or religious element according to our earliest comprehension of the term. Religion is thought to have developed from the Latin religio, or a respect for what is sacred, and a reverence for the gods. Furthermore, Cicero also traced the term to relegare: to go through again, or to read again. Finally, the root religare is to bind fast or bond between humans and gods. In sum, we have (re)connected that ligament of language that binds man with this “otherness” via careful consideration and reverence for the sacred word. Religious language, then, is made up of the language of otherness: words that allow us to reconnect with (or bind fast to) what is sacred through a careful rereading and repetition. Language that is Transcendent thus becomes language that is “sacred” in its service as the conduit to this other plane. It is only that language which allows us to – somehow - say the unsayable – or, at the very least, say that which comes from somewhere other – somewhere outside of our own consciousness. This project insists that — as the author of this language — the Transcendent poet’s role rarely lends itself to the broad categorizations of priest, prophet, or minister. More importantly, those poets who do act as “ministers” of language are defined not by their posture as worship-leaders themselves, but rather the phenomenological ability of their writing to make ministers out of an audience, to make readers who can themselves administer – in other words, carry on – the sacraments of language. The ability of this poetry to create a congregation of (ad)ministers thus distinguishes a distinctly American version of that service which all poetic language has (arguably) always offered to society and culture: that careful re-alignment of words, and a most democratic, vernacular, oral, and primitive act of both communion and prayer. Within its most transcendent form, the poet’s role and the text’s role become synonymous and indistinguishable; the function of autor (author) and the auter (altar) 3 become one, and the roles of writer and reader – the I and the you – move beyond the egalitarian (like Whitman’s ministerial role) and optative (like Dickinson’s vicarious role). In this capacity, the reader is not permitted the option to actually remain in the readerly role. He is required to assume the phenomenological authorial role in experiencing the text itself as it happens: to transcend his comfort zone, in a way — just as the poet himself has done so in the moment of creative genesis. This immediacy of the text does not permit the reader to remain a passive member of a murmuring congregation, nor a mere witness to a vicar or shaman. Rather, the transcendent poet may hope that the reader will become his own author (i.e., “alterer”) of poetic meaning and imagination to whom the text mediates appropriate communication with otherness. Rather than an expression of authorial intention or artistic skill, the original poetic act of writing then becomes an assertion of the sacredness of language itself, one that re-establishes the vernacular (i.e., the everyday word, and not the author) as the primal human link to the mystical, the divine, or the creative sublime. Ultimately, the transcendent poet — capricious though he may be — sufficiently distracts our conscious attention away from the act of reading, from our phenomenological place as readers; indeed, the poet acts as “theor”: that ambassador who leads us out of our consciousness and away from the city of ourselves. 4 Outline of Chapters I. “An unminded point, set in a vast surrounding”: Walt Whitman’s American Liturgy Michael Sowder, George Hutchinson, and others label the heretic Whitman as “shaman," “prophet," or “mystic” to resolve any conflicting roles of this author as interpolator of the divine word. Still, the role of shaman interprets the poet’s authorial voice literally within the first person narrative: “I” the prophet, “I” the shaman – Whitman’s “I," no doubt, in “Song of Myself." The reader (or listener) is automatically removed and relegated (at best) to the second person address: the “you” – literal or implicit - in the poem. Yet Whitman does not in fact replace himself as Christ or the great “I Am," nor does he place himself in the role of democracy’s priest. Whitman’s technique is not to replace himself as all-seeing poet in the deistic or messianic sense, nor in the role of prophet or shaman, but more appropriately in the ministerial role of prescribing performative language. He acts as a minister among a congregation of ministers. He’s out there with us, “a phantom” among phantoms floating at that “unminded point.” His antiphonic call-and-response format aurally enacts the “I” in Christian liturgical text that is not intended to signify the minister himself who is speaking, nor God, but the congregant (i.e., the reader). Like a liturgical text, the poetic voice and the text itself thus become instructional: a manual that, when read, preposes us to (re)commune with the sacred, divine or otherwise. 5 II. “Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence”: Dickinson’s Vicarious Intimacy Dickinson describes feeling (much like Emerson before her) without actually investing herself emotionally into her poems. In fact, she keeps herself largely apart from the poem’s narrative beyond the fact that she serves as the locative host for the poem’s action. The speaker of her poems feels “a funeral in my brain," not “my funeral in my brain” or “a funeral of my brain," and leaves the reader to surmise precisely whose (or what) death ceremony he is attending. As a kind of poetic vicar, Dickinson places herself in a role of substitution. We are invited to enter into her poems as witness to her service, yet we remain in this role of witness. Our interaction and reception of her poems remain largely through Emily’s eyes, and we still need her presence in order to remain locative. This vicarious priestly manifestation – and even Whitman’s ministerial role – remains distinctly American through what Emerson might call an “optative mood.” 3 In a seemingly permissive or Democratic manner, Dickinson and other Transcendental American poets keep the priestly borders of their poems open to the reader. While one is not necessarily obligated to engage in this communion with the sacred world, the invitation remains standing. III. “The literal characters, the vatic lines”: Stevens the Prosodic Deacon Growing up, Wallace Stevens’ mother read a bible chapter to him and his siblings every night before bed. Stevens even remarked how “often, one or two of us fell asleep." If Stevens was the sleeper, it may not be surprising that he held onto more of the sound of 3 “Our American literature and spiritual history are, we confess, in the optative mood.” (Emerson, ‘The Transcendentalist’, 1842; cited in F.O. Mattheissen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, Oxford University Press, 1968; 3) 6 biblical verse than its allusive content, that dozing state where the mind still registers the rhythms and presence of a mother’s voice rather than what she is saying. And throughout his work, Stevens does reveal himself as a poet of — never image, but — internal and external sound. If nothing else, his poems assert that the poetry of the sacred present must be first and foremost the poetry of these sounds. Words are the means by which we construct and preserve myth, and as such are primarily received aurally. This sensibility predicates the complicit communion of writer and reader together as co-mythmakers. Stevens reveals the impulse to actually incarnate the perceptions of the reader (and not himself) as reality. Unlike other Moderns, Stevens seemed acutely recalcitrant to predict the reader’s perceptions; rather, he offered space for them to inhabit the poem. Though not truly a transcendent poet, Stevens seems — at the very least — disaffected with the Modern Imagist gnostics. Rather, like some sort of prosodic deacon, he heralds postmodern poets who recreate reality through sound: poets who elicit a readerly experience that is “the same, / Except for the adjectives, an alteration / Of words that [is] a change of nature, more // than the difference that clouds make over a town.” 4 IV. “Things that divine us we never touch”: Wright’s Spiritual Catechism Levinas argues that in order to hover and retain its illeity, language must remain in a state of diachronic — moving and changing — thought. Wright and other postmodern poets allow for Levinas’ “diachronic thought,” this simultaneity of suggesting the infinite — a thought, image, or word — without strictly prescribing his own thought, image, or word. As 4 Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), 141. 7 such, Wright’s engagement with the sacred other is capricious in nature; it can simultaneously convey and betray, provide recognition with novelty, encompass the past and future, both memory and dream. His diachronic language connotes movement, development, and happening (though not necessarily progression) over time and space. As the literal diachronous increments of the modern world become increasingly smaller, less perceptible, and without symbolic record and witness (think email, texts, and tweets), the more difficult it becomes to capture or trace that diachrony itself. While bearing the ghost of transcendental and modernist traits, the contemporary poet thus finds spiritual authority through the ability to collapse the temporal and spatial limits of words, and – via this diachronous language that sustains Levinas’ illeity – thus hybridizes a new consciousness of spiritual Otherness. 8 I. “An unminded point, set in a vast surrounding”: Walt Whitman’s American Liturgy In March of 1992, the Walt Whitman Centennial Conference at the University of Iowa was abuzz over a cassette tape. Allegedly, the reel contained an 1889 or 1890 recording of the great grey poet reading four lines from his late poem, “America.” What’s more, the original audio capture was supposedly solicited by Thomas Edison, the inventor of the vertical wax cylinder upon which it was originally recorded. 5 Regardless of the recording’s authenticity (which, though seemingly positive, remains under dispute), there is an undeniable appeal to actually hear the barbaric yawp that has subtly shouted from the pages of Leaves of Grass for over 150 years. Though there is little historical record of Whitman’s oratory skill, we anticipate a performance worthy of his own archetype: “inspired as one divinely possessed, blind to all subordinate affairs and given up entirely to the surgings and utterances of the mighty tempestuous demon.” 6 Still, Whitman’s oratory writing style was likely a product of time and place. His first publication of Leaves of Grass came shortly on the heels of the Second Great Awakening, and immediately preceding the American Civil War. According to David Reynolds, Whitman “loved to attend wild evangelical revivals at the wooden Sands Street Methodist church, crowded with working-class young men and women.” 7 He even kept a regular column as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reviewing the style of Brooklyn preachers. He was thus a member of (and wrote for) an American audience that was intimately acquainted with the evangelically-charged address. From the preacher’s pulpit to 5 Ed Folsom, “The Whitman Recording,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 9.4 (1992): 214-216. 6 Lawrence Templin, “The Quaker Influence on Walt Whitman,” American Literature 42.2 (1970): 178. 7 Michael Sowder, Whitman’s Ecstatic Union: Conversion and Ideology in Leaves of Grass (New York: Routledge, 2005), 23. 9 the political stump, the public antebellum ear was a muddling of liturgy and lecture. The young country’s religious and political discourse mirrored the experiential conflict of American identity itself: the persistence of the individual within the communal. Though he hardly writes from any organized religious reference, what authorial devices might Whitman have borrowed from his fascination with the evangelical word, and how? Our phenomenological experience with poetry is largely dependent upon the reader’s imaginative location within the poem itself; that is, how the tense, pronouns, and articles of the poem position the reader in relation to the writer — in other words, where the tonal register of the poem places the audience. Perhaps this imaginative position is not unlike the role that the congregant is required to assume during various points of the traditional church service or camp revival – be it invocation, prayer, sermon, litany, hymn, or otherwise. Though he is less known for his poetry, consider the following lines from Emerson for comparative purposes: The Problem I like a church; I like a cowl; I love a prophet of the soul; And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see Would I that cowléd churchman be. 8 The “preachy” or sermonic tone of this poem is established by the extent which the audience (or congregation) is hardly required to imaginatively enter its language. The limit of the reader’s position (what we will later define as Levinas’ “illeity”) is quickly exhausted in the first line: first person singular address combined with indefinite articles. In other words, a poem that limits itself to the first person and the indefinite article requires the audience to 8 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poems (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1847), 17. 10 do very little: Imagine a thing (not the thing, or that thing, or even this thing), and receive the author’s opinion or feeling about it. The readerly congregant is free to yawn or snooze in his pew. Compare this to, say, a passage from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: I mind how once we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning; You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart, And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me that peace and joy and knowledge that passed all the art and argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the elder brother of my own, And that all the man ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love, And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed. 9 Here, the reader is potentially implicated into the poem by the first person plural (“we”) and second person address (“you”), though not necessarily so. “You," of course, could represent the God that appears on line 8 (though rather intimately), or – in typical Whitmanian egotism – the soul of the self. The indefinite article of “a transparent morning” – rather than the transparent morning, this transparent morning, or that transparent morning – combined with the past tense in the first seven lines makes the reader less sure of his implication in the memory. Whitman offers a memory, but not one that clearly defines if we have been there before, if ever. The final shift to the refrain of “Ands," from a reader’s perspective, changes the tone of the poem from a testimonial memory to a kind of homily (recitation of belief that Whitman guides us through) – but not in the antiphonal, catechetic 9 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982), 30-31 . 11 style of call-and-response. In short, there is space in this language for two things: Whitman and the other, the reader and the other, or Whitman and the reader — but not all three. One must either become the celebrant or ignore him in order to enter the poem. Still, there are other poems – even those with less overtly spiritual themes - where Whitman oscillates between the polarities of reader, writer, and other. The tonal register of this movement “installs itself in a locus where [reflection and intuition] have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been ‘worked over,’ that offers us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ both existence and essence.” 10 Helen Vendler describes this as a constant motion back and forth, a kind of “recurrent convergence” or “perpetual oscillation” within a play on articles, definite and indefinite: 11 Where the city’s ceaseless crowd moves on the live-long day, Withdrawn I join a group of children watching, I pause aside with them. By the curb toward the edge of the flagging, A knife grinder works at his wheel sharpening a great knife, Bending over he carefully holds it to the stone, by food and knee, With measur’d tread he turns rapidly, as he presses with light but firm hand, Forth issue then in copious golden jets, Sparkles from the wheel. 12 In this opening stanza of “Sparkles from the Wheel," Whitman almost exclusively uses the definite article to describe inanimate or abstract objects (the city, the live-long day, the curb, the flagging, the wheel). Simultaneously, he employs just a handful of indefinite articles for items that are human or animate (a group, a knife grinder, a knife). As we construct the scene in our minds, the definite article seems to demarcate those items that require less imaginative investment. That is, it could be any city, any day, or any given curb – what city or day 10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 130. 11 Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969), 172. 12 Whitman, “Sparkles from the Wheel," 514. 12 matters very little. This is not to say they are dispensable parts of Whitman’s image, though they are details the reader might retrieve from his imaginative stock. Though we do it subconsciously, the indefinite article cues our readerly imagination not only for those details which we must imagine for the very first time, but also (more specifically) the animate details that will help us locate ourselves as readers within the poem itself: The scene, and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me, The sad, sharp-chinn’d old man with worn clothes and broad shoulder-band of leather, Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here absorb’d and arrested, The group, (an unminded point set in a vast surrounding,) The attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive base of the streets, The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-press’d blade, Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold, Sparkles from the wheel. 13 Here, Whitman’s second stanza takes a drastic shift toward the definite article. Even those animate objects assigned to indefinite articles in the first stanza have become definite, for we (as readers) have already imagined them. We’ve been there before. Suddenly “A group” is “The group," “A knife grinder” becomes “The old man," and “a great knife” becomes merely “the light-press’d blade." Even the first-person “I” from stanza one has been replaced with “myself” in stanza two. As readers, we might even feel quite comfortable locating ourselves now within the poem as part of “the group” of onlookers, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Walt and the children watching the sparks fly. Still, Whitman effectively pulls the phenomenological rug out from under us. The indefinite article reappears in the second stanza by unexpectedly modifying the very roles that the reader seeks to potentially inhabit. “Myself” becomes “a phantom curiously floating," while “the group” is reduced (or expanded?) to “an unminded point, set in a vast surrounding." As readers, then, we too are 13 Ibid., 514-515. 13 left floating at some unminded point of our phenomenological experience. Though unsettling, Whitman leads us by the hand from reality toward illeity and transcendence, from “what is” toward “what is possible." The imaginative aperture of the indefinite article (through which Whitman originally prompted our poetic participation) is precisely the illeitic vehicle through which he deconstructs our readerly role. But why mess with transcendence? Why would Whitman – or any poet – so disarm the readerly location? Quite convincingly, Michael Sowder proposes that Whitman intended to convert his readers using the very rhetorical strategies employed by the evangelists whose oratory skills he admired but lacked himself. Religious conversion is a means of re- identification, one in which the former narrative of the self is abandoned and replaced with a religious narrative, or at the very least a new religious-self. Quite literally, we are re-born, or “born again." To do so, the individual must move through an intermediate state of passage (the conversion) in which the subject is annihilated and passes through what Sowder calls its own “blind spot." This intermediate stage has been called many things – ecstasy, negation, liminality – but it is almost always (and not unlike liturgical language) devoid of content but ripe with emotion. This emphasis on emotion undoubtedly belies the danger in the conversion gone awry, and what offers the opportunity for the convert to become so enrapt in the originality of their personal mode of awakening. Indeed, this phenomenon arguably contributed to the fracturing of Christian denominations in Whitman’s time and as we know them today. To Sowder, Whitman thus “saw his calling as one of staging performances of rhetorical religious power by which his readers would be carried up into a state of ecstasy, overwhelmed, and then the poetry would…transform them into versions of that new 14 democratic personality.” 14 As the Bible literally transforms concrete individuals into “subjects” by means of Althusser’s “interpellation” (a hailing or calling) in which they recognize themselves as subjects of the Lord, 15 so Whitman would hail to his readers through direct, second person addresses (“Reader, up there!”), and help them to recognize themselves as subjects of his new American religion. 16 Whitman’s rhetorical religious technique, however, more closely resembles the liturgy service than the personal Bible reading. It is not God “hailing us” as a subject in the church service, but more appropriately, we are “hailing God” to attend our gathering in his name. This reversal of Althusser’s interpellation model opposes Sowder’s argument in that it completely alters Whitman’s authorial role. Rather than offering “himself as a Subject to which his readers can reorient themselves as reborn subjects,” 17 I would argue that Whitman is a victim of his own linguistic spell. Whitman does not in fact replace himself as Christ or the great “I Am," nor does he place himself in the role of democracy’s priest. Rather, he skirts some degree of egocentric risk by acting as a minister among a congregation of ministers. He’s out there with us, “a phantom” (never the phantom) among phantoms floating at that “unminded point." A rather fitting, Democratic, and distinctly American approach toward sacred language, “Song of Myself” – and perhaps all of Leaves of Grass - was not so much a product of the Protestant culture in which it was written, but a more fitting adaptation of the evangelical liturgy to the church of the American body and landscape. 14 Sowder, 3. 15 Ibid., 6. 16 Ibid., 7. 17 Ibid. 15 Employing what Emerson might call an “optative mood," 18 perhaps Whitman and other Transcendental American poets thus sought to keep the sacred borders of their language open to the reader. While one is not necessarily obligated to engage in this communion with the sacred world, the invitation remains standing. In The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union, George Hutchinson argues that “Whitman sought the ‘origin of all poems’ and of all religions in the very attempt to revitalize his culture, and his search led him to the reconstruction of an essentially shamanistic aesthetic." 19 Indeed, most of Whitman’s work was written separately in fragments, in the moment of divine inspiration, and only later constructed and incessantly revised. A shamanistic theory resolves Whitman’s ecstatic connection of the body to the divine, bridges his religious and orgasmic subject matter, and even clears the American democratic and egalitarian hurdle: for historically, the shaman or prophet is best suited to “classless” societies where religion is not dominated by a hierarchical priesthood. 20 Still, the role of shaman interprets Whitman’s authorial voice literally within the first person narrative: “I” the prophet, “I” the shaman. The reader (or listener) is automatically removed and relegated (at best) to the second person address: the “you” in the poem. While Whitman may not have been an orator, it is undeniable that he wrote like one. “Song of Myself” begs to be read aloud. And while it is only mildly discomforting to remain under Walt’s direct gaze and address, how might we spatially orient ourselves as readers in a line like the following? I believe in you my soul…the other I am must not abase itself to you. 18 “Our American literature and spiritual history are, we confess, in the optative mood.” Emerson, ‘The Transcendentalist’, 1842; cited in F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford UP, 1968), 3. 19 George Hutchinson, The Ecstatic Whitman: Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1986), xii. 20 Hutchinson, xvi. 16 And you must not be abased to the other. 21 The moment that these lines are spoken (even in one’s head), the speaker or reader effectively becomes Whitman. More appropriately, he or she becomes the “I am.” Whitman’s pronouns and rhetorical technique effectively make us each a shaman, and ordain every reader his or her own assistance to the divine through language itself: “There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done…A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest." 22 Similarly, as the antiphonal call-and-response format aurally enacts, the “I” in Christian liturgical text is not intended to signify the minister himself who is speaking, nor God, but the congregant. Like a liturgical text, Whitman’s voice is instructional: a manual that, when read, preposes us to commune with the divine. Still, the insertion of the “I," or self, into any liturgical text remains troubling, lest it lead to a heretical muddling of the distinction between the divine and the devotee. Whitman’s “I am” quite literally (and intentionally, I might argue) echoes Exodus 3:14’s “I am that I am," or God’s name. Indeed, like Emerson before him (though with much more bravado), Whitman himself heartily declares his (and our) deific stature: Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from; The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds. 23 Here we see quite clearly what Whitman refers to in “Passage to India” as “the true son of God, the poet” that shall “absolutely fuse” nature and man. The poet becomes Christ, “the priest departs, the divine literatus comes." Still, I would argue that Whitman’s goal was not to replace himself as all-seeing poet in the deistic or messianic sense, nor in the role of prophet 21 Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 30. 22 Ibid., “Preface,” 24-25. 23 Ibid., “Song of Myself,” 51. 17 or shaman, but more appropriately in the ministerial role of prescribing performative language: O you solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you. 24 Though this passage is from the Leaves of Grass poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," it speaks to Whitman’s conception of the nature of singing and song. Not unlike the church elders scrupulously revising the Book of Common Prayer, or any other textually based religion for that matter, Whitman exhibits a heightened awareness of the importance that language itself plays in communication with the divine. He believed in communication as an act of creation, that words themselves absolutely fused man and nature in their ability to construct a connection: “Vocalism, measure, concentration, determination, and the divine power to speak words.” 25 To Whitman, it was not the way you spoke to the gods that mattered, but the very fact that you spoke at all. “Song of Myself” thus becomes less an assertion of Whitman (the poet) as Christ and redeemer, but more appropriately the egocentric risk of the American self (meaning you, Dear Reader) as Christ and redeemer. Are we to believe, then, that Whitman was creating a New American Religion based around — not himself, but — the self, with Leaves of Grass as its liturgical text? His second biography, written in 1883 by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke (and partially by Whitman himself) claimed Leaves of Grass to be the revelation and herald of a new religious era where poetry would successfully rescue religion by replacing it: Our churchgoing, bible-reading, creeds, and prayers, will appear from its vantage-ground mere make-believes of religion…What the Vedas were to Brahmanism, the Law and Prophets to Judaism, the Avesta and Zend to Zoroastrianism, the Kings to Confucianism and Taoism, the Pitakas to 24 Ibid., “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," 393. 25 Ibid., “Vocalism," 509. 18 Buddhism, the Quaran to Mohammedanism, will Leaves of Grass be to the future of American civilization. 26 To Bucke (and perhaps to Whitman himself), there is something unsuitable and lacking for American democracy in the country’s dominant Protestant and Puritan religious practices. After all, the United States’ ardent secularization of church and state required Americans, in some sense, to keep their spiritual and civil “selves” separate. In his essay “Walt Whitman: I Am the Man," Alfred Kazin describes Whitman’s world as one where Americans were surrounded by God, yet had no particular impetus to actually believe: “Like many of his countrymen in the nineteenth century, Whitman was drenched in religion; he positively swam in it, without having to believe in much of it. There was no personal God.” 27 This lack of a “personal” god, I might argue, is the direct result of America’s culture of collective congregants. While American democracy encouraged a civic identity of the unique self among a diverse company of equal citizens, many American churches maintained the Anglican leadership and agency of Christian service within the role of “ministers." Though “minister” refers to the ordained clergy in its most limited interpretation, ultimately all baptized members of the protestant church were considered to partake in the “ministry” of the “Body of Christ” (metaphorically, the congregational body of believers). While this was a more democratic or egalitarian organization of the church, its emphasis on the importance of communal (meaning group) access to God diminished the concept of an individual communion with the divine. Whitman’s “new American religion” was an effort to create a liturgical text 26 Richard Maurice Bucke and Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman (Glascow: Wilson & McCormick, 1884), 184-185; cited in Alfred Kazin, “Walt Whitman: I Am the Man,” in God & The American Writer (New York: Vintage, 1998), 118-119. 27 Kazin, 110. 19 capable of promoting a religious self that more closely resembled the established American civic self: It almost seems as if poetry with cosmic and dynamic features of magnitude and limitlessness suitable to the human soul, were never possible before. It is certain that a poetry of absolute faith and equality for the use of the democratic masses never was….I know very well that my “Leaves” could not possibly have emerged or been fashion’d or completed, from any other era than the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, nor any other land than democratic America… 28 Of any Christian denomination, the Quaker method of “unprogrammed worship” in the 19 th century perhaps came closest to a sense of egalitarian liturgy and individual communion with the divine. With no formal leadership, and based in communal silence, any congregant who was moved to speak could “minister” for as long as he or she was inspired to do so. Though he was no regular attendee of Friends’ meetings, it is no coincidence that Whitman’s mother was Quaker, and his grandfather closely associated with the Quaker leader Elias Hicks on Long Island. In an interview with Horace Traubel, Whitman himself acknowledged that “I have a sense of things that seems to precede all judgments – a something or other that does not immediately explain itself but likes, dislikes, not being able to say why. It’s the Quaker in me – in me strong here and there.” 29 Though it remains unclear why Whitman highlighted this faint religious thread of his ancestry and upbringing, Lawrence Templin argues that Whitman could feel the effect of the root similarities between his own mystical experiences and the experiences of the Quaker in silent meeting “centering down” and waiting for illumination. He correctly labeled this root similarity has ‘Quaker intuition.’ Through it he shared the Quaker concern for unity and humanitarian equality that lies beneath the surface of apparent religious formlessness and unworldliness in Quakerism. One could perhaps better phrase this as the paradox of the individual and the en masse, or of the 28 Whitman, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads," 661. 29 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 2 (New York: M. Kennerley, 1915), 207. 20 community achieved through individual intuition of the Inner Light, that works itself out in many ways in both Whitman and Quakerism. It was largely through Elias Hicks that Whitman seems to have got the sense of this paradoxical conception. 30 This “paradox of the individual and the en masse” was precisely what Whitman sought to rectify in the dichotomy of the American civic and spiritual identity. Though perhaps rooted in Quaker ideology, Whitman’s new American Religion was indeed a step beyond, lest he forgo the pernicious plays, concerts, books, fashion, and vanity that membership to the Religious Society of Friends would have shunned at the time. Whitman’s contention that Leaves of Grass could not have emerged from any other nation, at any other period in history, or if he had become a true Quaker insinuates a historical and cultural need for his text in antebellum America. While some critics have located this need in a potential attempt to unify a country on the edge of fracture from the impending Civil War, Whitman’s primary calling was more likely a response to the literary and rhetorical clime that contributed to any looming political state. As the voice of the Transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson had already bemoaned the efficacy of the American language on the nation’s culture. In an era filled with oration from the stump to the pulpit, Emerson spoke against men who separated (or drained) words from their evocative power and meaning, speakers who relied more on the emotional dilation of an affected inflection than the content of language itself: When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires – the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise – and duplicity and falsehood takes place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for 30 Templin, 168-169. 21 things which are not…and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. 31 Perhaps what Emerson observed in 19 th century American rhetoric was the very same communicative depersonalization that the Quakers sought to rectify in programmed, en masse worship that was centered around an emotional trance induced by rote repetition and monotone antiphons. More than anything, Emerson loathed the fraudulent, predictable exchange (or lack thereof) in which the speaker’s intent and effect was only to elicit a predictable response from the church congregation (“Alleluia!," “Amen!”) or rallied crowd (“Hear, hear!”). His concern was that ornate delivery inevitably masked a lack in content. The repetition of phonemes (in refrain, prepositions, rhyme) lulled the antebellum ear, diverting cognitive attention from the meaning of words to the way they sounded, a shift from denotation to the connotative qualities of language. The solution, Emerson proposed, was to write and speak in language rooted in the common life, a “language closer to American speech than to the idiom of Augustan gentility": 32 The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time…I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic;…I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low…This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. 33 Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was undoubtedly the first attempt to afford vulgarity and commonality to American literature, to write in an American dialect that had thus far been kept apart from the nation’s canon. Upon reading the volume, Emerson himself told 31 Leo Marx, “The Uncivil Response of American Writers to Civil Religion in America,” in American Civil Religion, Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones, eds. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 227. 32 Ibid., 228. 33 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar," 60-61; quoted in Marx, 228. 22 Whitman that “it meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.” 34 Leaves of Grass was the attempt to formulate a work of American vernacular in both construct and content, sound and sense, author and audience; what Norman Mailer was to call “’the reductive philosophy’ of the common man, a defiant use of forbidden, indecent language which looked to restore the hard edge of proportion to overblown values.” 35 According to Leo Marx, however, Whitman took the canonization of the American vernacular one step further than Emerson ever foresaw or intended: Whitman seems to recognize that the vernacular, as a medium of expression, can be effective only as part of a larger “program of culture." Literature alone cannot do the job…Whitman affirms that need for a “little healthy rudeness," not as an end in itself, but as part of the effort to achieve an essentially classless culture. In effect he is looking for a manifestation of the vernacular spirit that arises from an egalitarian way of life. 36 Simply writing in a crass tone, or merely describing lower-class subject matter alone, was not nearly enough to accomplish Whitman’s aim of a democratic, liturgical text for his new American religion. Indeed, I would argue that he viewed all poetry as inherently liturgical in nature as an exercise of linguistic communion with God. In its secularization of church and state, he sensed the inherent identity crisis in the established American Civil Religion. Like the emptiness in American literature that Emerson so feared, religion in America had become nothing more than a ceremonial monarch in political and daily life. It required nodding to, but it remained meaningless in content. It was full of emotion, yet only in the context of ceremonial, ritualistic, and habitual movements. Once again, there was no 34 Emerson’s Letter to Whitman; included in front matter of Leaves of Grass, 1855. 35 Marx, 233. 36 Ibid., 236. 23 “personal” God, and religion had become nothing more than an empty, placeholder concept. Quite appropriately, Whitman’s solution was to fill a void of nothing with anything and all, the self and the masses alike. In Whitman, we witness the linguistic muddling of personal and public prayer, and an abandonment of the historically instinctive desire to separate the sacred and (not quite profane, but) colloquial speech: the way we pray together at church, versus the way we pray at home, alone. There is a natural human impulse to somehow sanctify deistic language within the space of the temple, to set the sacred apart from everyday words. Perhaps Latin originally served that purpose for the Anglican Church, and perhaps the Litany and Book of Common Prayer maintained that effect for English Renaissance congregations. 200 years earlier, the litany itself was nothing new to English worshippers: the Latin format (borrowed from the Catholic Church) was used regularly in processions praying for God’s favor during troublesome times (weather, war, pestilence, etc.). Its translation to the native English tongue was the true novelty; a project commissioned by Henry VIII out of concern that Anglican worshippers “understode no parte of suche prayers or suffrages as were used to be songe and sayde.” 37 It was Whitman, I would argue, who then attempted to “translate” these Anglican liturgical texts and devices into something distinctly American: As long as the states continue to absorb and be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they stop short of first-class Nationality and remain defective.” 38 [emphasis mine] Walt Whitman thus did not reject the idea of an American Civil religion; rather, he sought to reform and relocate it to a vernacular liturgy capable of supplanting the official colonial 37 King’s Letter in Wilkins’ Councils vol. III, 869; in Francis Procter, A History of the Book of Common Prayer (London: Macmillan, 1878), 21. 38 Whitman, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads," 671. 24 creed. Inserting his “healthy rudeness” into the form and function of the political stump speech and the evangelical sermon, he used language itself as “a weapon, an instrument, in the service of something larger than itself” against a presiding text that only “looks at itself as an end – as a fact to be finally worshipped, adored. To me that’s a horrible blasphemy – a bad smelling apostasy.” 39 Whitman’s seemingly heretical insertion of the vernacular American self was an attempt to democratically individualize religion, a movement that was part and parcel of his time and place in both his form and content. His work commodified the Christian liturgy’s use of prepositions, articles, and pronouns in relation to God the same way that revisions to the book of common prayer had attempted to do; yet perhaps more effectively so, as he was able to universalize Christian connotation while retaining the spatial relationship so intrinsic to the American worship of God. Whitman’s truly rebellious American move, then, is to effectively remove the preposition from poetic god-speak and song. For Whitman, the British linguistic group-worship of the Anglican God (the “we” of/by/for from/through/to God) is simply translated into the American “I." "Let us pray" (together) suddenly becomes "watch me pray": prayer with an audience. Or, even worse, "let us pray," but to ourselves. Whitman's move is no less than heretic: the effective replacement of Christ with the Poet, or even Christ with the self in his often ambiguous use of “you” and “I” – whether the reader becomes audience or orator himself when reading the text. Whitman’s muddling of first and second person pronouns is not unlike the revisions deemed necessary in what is arguably the most recited text in the American Book of Common Prayer: The Lord’s Prayer. What was “Our Father, which art in heaven” in the original 1662 BCP later became “Our Father, who art in heaven” in the 39 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 4 (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1953), 121. 25 American 1789 BCP. Similarly, “them that trespass against us” was changed to “those that trespass against us." While these changes can be justified by a more modern English usage that may not be quite on par with Whitman’s base vernacular, it still slightly humanizes the deity from being a potential “thing” (“which”) to a more human individual (“who”). Though retained somewhat within the nebulous use of pronouns, both Whitman and the BCP ultimately sought to shrink the spatial relationship of God and man to its most infinitesimal state without entirely eliminating the distinction between the self and the divine. The gap between deity and individual becomes less clear, and the line of communication between them becomes more so: We consider bibles and religions divine – I do not say they are not divine, I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still, It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life, Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they are shed out of you. 40 A nation’s need for a worship text in its "own" language necessitates native-tongue liturgical materials and poetic "translations" as an essentials means toward national identity. Whitman was not, as some critics contend, a false prophet – only one limited by the task of creating a true linguistic translation from deeply seated religious texts. To truly depart from America’s English roots would be the impossible feat of translating into an as-yet undeveloped American tongue that was not English. Recognizing this, Whitman turned prepositions on their head by combining them with ambiguous pronouns, oscillating articles, shifting modes of address, catalogues, and the transformation of the poetic “I." In doing so, he kept and exploited the very tools that the English (and American) church itself used to delineate between their subjects and the divine, yet he also stripped them of their depersonalizing power. Whitman thus eliminated the effect of the preposition in its capacity 40 Whitman, “A Song for Occupations," 359. 26 to deny the presence of the divine within the self. Though he used them for his own devices, his technique required a hearty dose of pronoun ambiguity, and this had the effect of spatially locating the individual self within the divine interaction while never actually designating which placeholder the self was intended to occupy. The result is a truly transcendent trinity – the self, the divine, and the “other” that are one. The “other” represents Whitman’s ambiguous pronouns, oscillating articles, and readerly fluctuation between speaker, author, and audience. This dynamic readerly state ensures that, in reading Whitman, there is a constantly negotiable interaction between Whitman, ourselves, and the divine. The result is nothing less than a more reciprocal, Democratic, and American form of glorification and worship, one in which we praise God, praise Whitman, and praise ourselves. 27 II. “Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence”: Dickinson’s Vicarious Intimacy In his introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Selected Works, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the father of Transcendentalism may have modified the Puritan belief that – via careful observation – man can interpret the natural world as an expression of divine or providential will. For Puritans, the “ideal reader” of this divine will is undoubtedly the minister or elder of the church. For Emerson, however, it is the poet – or, more appropriately, the man of sufficient imagination – who performs the service of interpretation or intercession within an inherently divine natural world. 41 Emerson assumes this priestly authority of the writer (over the painter, the architect, or the musician) 42 via the simple fact that most men think in words. The very vehicle in which we converse with our subconscious intellect – Emerson’s “soul” – is (possibly unspoken) dialogue, and “It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with the beauty of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart to others the same knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is the sayer.” 43 It is not for alliterative purposes alone that Emerson designates the seer as the “sayer," rather than the writer. As the soul converses with the poet, so the poet must also converse – and not merely document – his experience within the reader: 41 John Carlos Rowe, Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 7. 42 “Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul’s worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and most permanent, in words.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address” in Selected Works, 85. 43 Ibid. 28 The man enamored of this excellency becomes its priest or poet. The office is coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush. 44 It is clear here that while Emerson finds any man capable of assuming the authorial priestly role, he is only justified in this role if he can truly create; that is, he must converse with the reader as a contemporary of the world. 45 Rather than merely repeat (i.e., describe) his own experience of the world, a true priest of the soul uses language to replicate his creative experience within the reader himself. Furthermore, it is for this very reason that Emerson bemoaned the efficacy of the American language on the nation’s culture. In an era filled with oration from the stump to the pulpit, Emerson spoke against men who separated (or drained) words from their evocative power and meaning, speakers who relied more on the emotional dilation of an affected inflection than the coeval content inherent within language itself: When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires – the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise – and duplicity and falsehood takes place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not…and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. 46 44 Ibid., 86. 45 “The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, -- life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon what age of the world he fell in.” Ibid., 87) 46 Emerson, “Nature,” Ibid., 35. 29 Perhaps what Emerson observed in 19 th century American rhetoric was the very same communicative depersonalization that was lacking in the American canon. The soul of the British poet was no longer contemporary to the American experience, nor could the spiritual camp meetings of America’s Second Great Awakening elicit more than a predictable response from the church congregation (“Alleluia!," “Amen!”) or rallied crowd (“Hear, hear!”). 47 Emerson thus justifies the American poet’s assumption of the priestly role due to the insufficiency – at least in his opinion – of “priestly” authorities present in the United States during the 19 th Century. Intellectual men (and women) of a book-learned class were merely “making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul” and often made the grave mistake of attaching the deific qualities of the creator upon the creation itself: Yet hence rises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. 48 Here Emerson is aware of the improbability of separating the product of the creative act from the creative action itself. The recipients of art understandably assign this sacredness to art itself; indeed, how can an audience receive the act of writing without the text, hear composition without musical performance, view illustration without a painting, construction without architecture, or the act of sculpting without sculpture? Though every man may not 47 “I am not ignorant that when we preach unworthily, it is not always quite in vain. There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment. There is poetic truth concealed in all the commonplaces of prayer and of sermons, and though foolishly spoken, they may be wisely heard; for each is some select expression that broke out in a moment of piety from some stricken or jubilant soul, and its excellency made it remembered.” Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” Ibid., 87) 48 Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Ibid., 61. 30 be capable of the act — for Emerson — every man is capable of the action. The action itself, therefore, is universal; the act (i.e., product) is not. Art – the thing created – is bound to the artist, whereas making art – creativity – is universal. While the terminal act is repetitive and redundant, the action remains mutably replicable. Emerson’s true ideal poet, then, would be one who, through the language of his own experiences with the divine, is able to inspire his readers to recall or pursue their own spiritual connection to the over-soul. The poet’s task is to illuminate his reader’s consciousness of self-divinity: I behold with awe & delight many illustrations of the One Universal Mind. I see my being imbedded in it. As a plant in the earth so I grow in God. I am only a form of him. He is the soul of Me. I can even with a mountainous aspiring say, I am God, by transferring my Me out of the flimsy & unclean precincts of my body, my fortunes, my private will, & meekly retiring upon the holy austerities of the Just & the Loving – upon the secret fountains of Nature. 49 Emerson steers around the inherent heresy of this assumption by stipulating that the poet’s (or any man’s) ability to converse with his own godliness is immediately proportional to his own morality. As Christ once exemplified the literal manifestation of godliness among men, 50 so too must the poet who seeks to inhabit the priestly role. What poets, then, can so transfer us out of the flimsy precincts of our bodies to where we, too, might become godly? 49 Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1960-1982) 5:336-37; cited in The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings, ed. David M. Robinson (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 13. 50 “He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think…the understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.” The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not build on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythos, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before.” Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” Selected Works, 83) 31 Though Emerson was undeniably adept at describing the priestly poem in his prose, it remains arguable as to whether he succeeded in performing such feats within his own poetry. Consider the opening lines of his poem “The Problem” for comparative purposes: The Problem I like a church; I like a cowl; I love a prophet of the soul; And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see Would I that cowléd churchman be. 51 The poem begins with a rather forceful, verbal ambiguity. Does Emerson mean to compare himself to a church and cowl (“I [am] like a church”), or is he merely expressing a reserved fondness for them? The following line (“I love a prophet of the soul”) disappointingly pushes us toward the latter interpretation. Rather than a bold, implicit Whitmanian “I am," the reader is reserved to receiving Emerson’s sermon (in other words, how Emerson feels) rather than stepping into the poem’s aperture of conversation himself. Emerson may be a prophet, and though he may have every desire to make fellow prophets of his audience, he fails to usher or administer us with him into that role. The poem is full of declarations, and Emerson merely states (rather than implies or demonstrates) that he “love[s] a prophet of the soul.” As we read later in “The Problem," Emerson’s “Art might obey, but not surpass. / The passive Master lent his hand / To the vast soul that o'er him planned.” Yet how can one remain an (oxymoronic) “passive Master”? By Emerson’s own reckoning, the poet who lends too much of his own hand forsakes true utterance for pedantry — the seeing-sayer becomes seeing-writer, which might indicate why so many of Emerson’s poems pale in comparison to his prose. 51 Emerson, Poems (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1847), 17. 32 Though we cannot be sure of her exposure to his prose, Emily Dickinson was evidently acquainted with (and affected by) Emerson’s first volume of poems. 52 Consider how her “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” performs a more conversational (rather than declarative) authority using subject matter comparable to Emerson’s “Problem”: I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro, Kept treading — treading — till it seemed That Sense was breaking through — And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum — Kept beating — beating — till I thought My Mind was going numb — And then I heard them lift a Box, And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again. Then Space — began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race, Wrecked, solitary, here — And then a Plank in Reason, broke And I dropped down, and down — And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing — then — 53 Dickinson describes feeling (much like Emerson before her) without actually investing herself emotionally into the poem. In fact, she keeps herself largely apart from the poem’s narrative beyond the fact that she serves as the locative host for the poem’s action. Dickinson’s speaker feels “a Funeral, in my Brain," not “my funeral in my brain” or “a funeral of my brain," and leaves the reader to surmise precisely whose (or what) death 52 Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: the Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001) 219, 221. 53 Emily Dickinson, The poems of Emily Dickinson: including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts, ed. Thomas Herbert Johnson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1955), viewed on The Dickinson Electronic Archives, emilydickinson.org. 33 ceremony he is attending. Like the mourners in the poem treading back and forth, her audience is – thus far – searching for sense to break through in the poem’s meaning; yet Dickinson – as host and bodily officiate – is willing to wait for her readers to be “seated” before the service begins. This moment of aperture offers the reader an opportunity to enter into the poem, to witness — and not just receive — the poem’s action. In what is perhaps a metaphor for the drum-like mimicry (“beating, beating”) of overly allusive, book- learned British poetry that Emerson decried, Dickinson and her congregant readers witness the death of intellectual feeling and creativity (the “mind going numb”). Once the Box (potentially the book or written word) and boots of lead (typeface, perhaps?) are removed from Dickinson’s soul, we are transcendentally released from the body (“space began to toll”). Plus, we are returned to the oratory creative act in which language began (“Being but an ear”). Left solitary on the wreckage of Art, both Dickinson and her congregants are forced to re-know the world with god-given senses (hit a world at every plunge / and finished knowing – then - ), rather than experience the world solely through bookishness (the written word) or the vicarious mimicry of others. Here, “Being but an ear” is equivalent to what Emmanuel Levinas’ calls the moment of true Transcendence: the event in which “being” passes over to the other - that which is different than being, other than existence, and other than language. 54 Transcendence via language, then, occurs via the phenomenological linguistic experience “through which the artist (and preacher) disappears as ‘passive’ and ‘patient,’ not showing him or herself.” 55 54 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1981), 3. 55 John S. McClure, Otherwise Preaching: A Postmodern Ethic for Homiletics (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), 5. 34 Cristanne Miller attributes much of this distanced intimacy to the poet’s epistolary grammatical structures, and claims that Dickinson herself believed “that a ‘syllable’ has meaning when it is ‘delivered’; a word ‘just / Begins to live’ ‘when it is said’, when it is ‘made flesh’ in the act of communication. 56 ” Given Dickinson’s solitary lifestyle and volume of written letters on record, it is no wonder that we find these stylistic tendencies in her poems. Miller even insinuates that, for Emily, writing a poem is like writing a letter to an unnamed recipient, and that through this epistolary grammar the poet can “control relationships, meeting her correspondents only in an ‘imaginative’ or ‘aesthetic union,’ that is, a union that can only with difficulty (or by death) be taken from her because she has constructed it herself through and in language.” 57 Yet what remains when the speaker does - figuratively - die? The reader and the words? The reader and some “other”? If Emerson’s priestliness (or, at best, gnostic mysticism) fails to fully usher in this authorial sacrifice, Dickinson succeeds via the homiletic role of a vicar — and places herself in a vicarious role of substitution. We are invited to enter into the poem above as witnesses to her service, yet we remain in this role of observation. Our interaction and reception of the poem remains largely through Emily’s eyes, and we still need her presence in order to remain locative. Each of these homiletic manifestations – and even Whitman’s ministerial role – remain distinctly American through what Emerson might call their “optative mood." 58 In a seemingly permissive or Democratic manner, Transcendental American poets keep the priestly borders of their poems open to 56 Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 1. 57 Suzanne Juhasz, “Reading Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” ESQ, 30, no.3 (1984), 179; cited in Miller, 10. 58 “Our American literature and spiritual history are, we confess, in the optative mood.” Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” 1842; cited in F.O. Mattheissen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford UP, 1968), 3. 35 the reader. While one is not necessarily obligated to engage in this communion with the sacred world, the invitation remains standing. And yet that invitation seemingly does not come without instruction. If we dare to enter the poem as witness to Dickinson’s service, we are directly instructed to keep our mouths shut - or, at the very least, to keep the peace. As implicit members of “some strange race," we are forced to inhabit Silence - the only locative “other” in the poem that exists for congregants outside of Dickinson’s “I” after the ceremony’s climax. Dickinson’s body and the body of congregants together become an image of quiet disorder: the body as shipwreck - silent, inert, and temporally frozen. It may be argued that this freezing of the temporal world is precisely what makes Dickinson’s work representative of the Transcendentalist movement. That is, the strict vocation of readers to enter the poem in a controlled and static role (i.e., silently) allows them to then transcend this role at a later optative aperture: I heard a Fly buzz — when I died — The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air — Between the Heaves of Storm — The Eyes around — had wrung them dry — And Breaths were gathering firm For that last Onset — when the King Be witnessed — in the Room — I willed my Keepsakes — Signed away What portions of me be Assignable — and then it was There interposed a Fly — With Blue — uncertain stumbling Buzz — Between the light — and me — And then the Windows failed — and then I could not see to see — 59 59 A 82-4. “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -.” Facsimile manuscript; viewed on Project MUSE: Annie Finch, "My Father Dickinson: On Poetic Influence." The Emily Dickinson Journal, 17.2 (2008): 35. 36 Here, Dickinson demonstrates what Paul Crumbley coins her Dialogic voice, whose frequent and unconventional use of the dash “both challenges the linear progression of sentences and emphasizes the uncertainty of poetic identity.” 60 According to Crumbley, even the Dickinson family edition of Webster’s 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language contains an exemplary entry for “dash” that quotes Virgil’s 55a verso: “quos ego —,” or “that which I am,” echoing Exodus 3:14. In the poem above, these dashes not only signal optative apertures for the reader to enter into this poetic identity, but they further mystify what few locative clues are present for readerly occupation. There are no mourners here as observed in “I felt a funeral in my brain," no literal congregation for the reader to silently join as witness. It might be argued that “the Eyes around” employs synecdoche to summon an audience who has wrung dry the “Heaves of Storm” with tearful sobs — but Dickinson also oddly capitalizes nearly every common noun that we encounter (Fly, Stillness, Room, Air, Eyes, Breath, King, Keepsakes, etc.), as if to draw special attention to every inhabitable role in the piece. Serving as a kind of “No Parking” sign for those on a more leisurely literary cruise (i.e., this one’s reserved for the King), these capital cues push the reader to inhabit either the first person (the dead/dying “I”) or simply float in some strange, mutable purgatory - the phenomenological out-of-body experience in a poem about death. As readers, Dickinson asks us to empty our eyes (“wring them dry”) from the visual storm of written text. Rather, it is the “breaths” (metonymy for oral recitation, spoken word) that appears to be gathering for the last Onset and witness of the divine (“King” as Christ/God). For Dickinson, our “willing keepsakes” are those parts of ourselves that are readily assignable to language — the sign, signifier, and signified that commune in our ability 60 Paul Crumbley, “Dickinson’s Dialogic Voice” in The Emily Dickinson Handbook (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 105. 37 to translate and interpolate emotion, feeling, and thought into singular words. Yet here it is sonic experience — and not written word — that interposes at the final moment, the onomatopoetic buzz that bridges the self with the spiritual world beyond death. That “blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz” — with such odd adjectives, none of them accurate and yet all seemingly fitting — is the thing that interposes between the self and the other (“between the light — and me”). Between speech and text, then, the oral expression appears to be purer in the relationship of ecstatic witness. In fact, we can observe a more visual representation of Dickinson’s auditory emphasis if we radically strip Dickinson’s poem of all but those capitalized common nouns: Fly Stillness Room Stillness Air — Heaves Storm — Eyes Breaths Onset — King Room — Keepsakes — Signed Assignable There Fly — Blue — Buzz — Windows While admittedly subject to great liberties, this skeletal rendering demonstrates how Dickinson progressively dismantles the reader’s locative opportunity. While the first two stanzas contain declarative, locative nouns on each line, the third and fourth stanzas degenerate to just three or two lines as she relies more heavily on implied synecdoche (“Eyes” as onlookers) and metonymy (“Blue” for air, “Buzz” for Fly). Monosyllabic, ontological nouns (“Eyes,” “Breaths,” “Onset”) are juxtaposed with multisyllabic legal 38 language (“Signed,” “Assignable”) that practically implies a kind of divine litigation. Though this decomposition offers fewer assignable roles for the reader as the poem progresses, the imaginative aperture is proportionally widened at the same rate. Thus, as the poem unfolds, Dickinson pushes the reader into a progressively challenging phenomenological experience. Simultaneously, she further conflates and mystifies her own locative role in the poem. Dickinson herself claims that “when I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse — it does not mean — me — but a supposed person, 61 ” and Miller claims that the poet “would have it both ways: she addresses multiple audiences with the intimacy of speaking privately to a close friend. For the recipient of a poem, it would be difficult if not impossible to detect the fraud.” 62 However, this distanced intimacy goes even further to blur the reader’s conception of both Emily as author and herself as recipient. If Dickinson’s poetry confounds the locative roles of both author and reader much further than simply witness and substitution, perhaps her “letters to the world” become (by proxy) letters to ourselves - wherein reading them, we are forced to both hear and speak the unsaid: It is upon losing what we have to say that we speak - upon an imminent and immemorial disaster - just as we say nothing except insofar as we can convey in advance that we take it back, by a sort of prolepsis, not so as finally to say nothing, but so that speaking might not stop at the word - the word which is, or is to be, spoken, or taken back. We speak suggesting that something not being said is speaking. 63 (Italics mine) How, then, do we retain speech without the text - or a seemingly vanishing road map? Even if the oral utterance communes us more efficiently with that which is beyond ourselves, serves as the vehicle toward transcendence - what remains but Dickinson’s 61 Dickinson’s July 1862 Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (L268: Crumbley, 94). 62 Miller, 14. 63 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 20-21. 39 shipwrecked Silence after a poem about death? Despite the implications of her reclusive existence, sound recording technology had barely emerged during Dickinson’s lifetime. Beyond live oral recitation, written text was the only available form of linguistic record that might be translated into phenomenological readerly experience. It’s quite possible that Dickinson’s failing Windows, then, are quite literally the eyelids closing in death, or at least a shuttering of the proverbial “windows to the soul." Yet her poems argue that the ear is the soul’s true window - without which we might still literally “see” with our eyes, but could not truly understand (“see to see”). Ironically, we use “you see” to prepose a statement that will attempt to explain, that will offer such understanding. What’s more, our reply often confirms this. “I see” is synonymous with “I understand," when so little of our communication happens outside of language. In fact, what we do “see” through language more frequently requires a creative act on the recipient’s behalf - in order to truly see (that is, both observe and understand), we must imaginatively enter the poem and inhabit a space of witness. To borrow from Paul Celan, Dickinson’s “language, notwithstanding its inalienable complexity of expression, is concerned with precision. It does not transfigure or render ‘poetical’; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible. True, this is never the working of language itself, language as such, but always of an ‘I’ who speaks from the particular angle of reflection which is [her] existence and who is concerned with outlines and orientation. Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won.” 64 And rather than poetic radar (I imagine how you look), Dickinson’s summons is poetic sonar (I imagine you by the way you sound). Her propagation of inhabitable nouns, dashes and line breaks dictate our locative and temporal positioning as readers within the text: they move us. 64 Paul Celan, “Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris, 1958” in Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16. 40 Yet she is a poet who - while moving us - is also moving herself. The moment we become settled, we glance back only to find that — capriciously — she’s not there. We find she’s some “other” place: somewhere outside of written language, somewhere altogether different. 41 III. “The literal characters, the vatic lines”: Stevens the Prosodic Deacon In his 1933 essay The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism, T.S. Eliot critiques Matthew Arnold’s contention that poetry would gradually replace those cultural myths (religion, science, philosophy, and the like) that could no longer adequately interpret the modern world. 65 Despite his belief in the ability for literature to inflict a (somewhat delayed) moral impact on society, 66 and a consequent need for a self-imposed vigilance regarding what we read (i.e., aesthetic “taste”), Eliot did not believe that poetry should presume to be a wholesale substitute for religion. Like his contemporary T.E. Hulme, Eliot’s seemingly Classical roots made him fear religious substitution within the (often heretic) “infinitude” of the Romantics. Still, Eliot and other Moderns were unsuccessful in separating the spheres of poetry and religion; rather, they advanced a sacred language that American transcendental poets had already begun to speak. Where Whitman began to challenge and adapt the writer’s role as priest, Eliot and other modern American poets adapted religion (even in a culture where it was largely held that “God is Dead”) with a poetics that combined both Classical and Romantic classification. 65 “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry”; in Religion and Literature: A Reader, Robert Detweiler and David Jasper, eds. (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2000), 7. 66 “The common ground between religion and fiction is behavior. Our religion imposes our ethics, our judgment and criticism of ourselves. When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.” T.S. Eliot, “Religion and Literature”; in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1975), 100-101. 42 In his 1924 collection of essays entitled Speculations, T.E. Hulme argues that the essential difference between Classical and Romantic philosophies lies in the way each regards man: “One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent.” 67 Because the Church typically aims to moralize men via this order and tradition, Hulme argues that Christianity has always taken the Classical view. 68 The problem with Romanticism, then, is that it allows spiritual fervor to “spill” outside of the orderly bounds that religion provides to human experience: Part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities…The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don’t believe in God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion. 69 It is apparent in this passage – as Eliot was later well aware – that Hulme is making an argument more based upon religious Belief – and Christian Belief, specifically – than on the 67 “Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress. One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.” T.E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, Volume 3 (London: Routledge, 2000), 116. 68 “One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.” Ibid., 117) 69 Ibid., 117-118. 43 holistic idea and function that religion provides to man. If Belief (in a power, origin, or place outside of ourselves) is the utmost service religion provides to mankind, then religion is simply that myth that does not yet acknowledge itself as mythos, or at the very least requires its followers (through faith) not to acknowledge its content or message as myth. Myth, like religion, requires a latent currency where the seer must be historically separate from the sayer. That is, the seer (original orator, prophet, or medium) must have temporal authority over the sayer (the re-teller, translator, or priest). Modern poetry (and Transcendental poetry before it), I would argue, was not attempting to act as a substitute for religion at all. Rather, the Moderns sought to retain the mythic qualities of religion – its vast capacity for belief – while closing the time quotient between the seer and sayer of that myth. It is essential to note that, according to Eliot, this capacity for belief was not dependent upon a state of agreement. That is, the reader need not necessarily subscribe to whatever belief the poet or author presents in the text. Rather, the beliefs of the author – whatever they may be – must be believable to the reader; they must instill what Coleridge called a “willing suspension of disbelief": 70 When the doctrine, theory, belief, or ‘view of life’ presented in a poem is one which the mind of the reader can accept as coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of experience, it interposes no obstacle to the reader’s enjoyment, whether it be one that he accept or deny, approve or deprecate. When it is one which the reader rejects as childish or feeble, it may, for a reader of well-developed mind, set up an almost complete check. I observe in passing that we may distinguish, but without precision, between poets who employ their verbal, rhythmic and imaginative gift in the service of ideas 70 “Coleridge, when he remarked that a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ accompanied much poetry, was noting an important fact, but not quite in the happiest terms, for we are neither aware of a disbelief nor voluntarily suspending it in these cases. It is better to say that the question of belief or disbelief, in the intellectual sense, never arises when we are reading well. If unfortunately it does arise, either through the poet’s fault of our own, we have for the moment ceased to be reading and have become astronomers, or theologians, or moralists, persons engaged in quite a different type of activity.” IA Richards, Practical Criticism, 277; cited in T.S. Eliot’s “Use of Poetry," Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, 85. 44 which they hold passionately, and poets who employ the ideas which they hold with more or less settled conviction as material for a poem; poets may vary indefinitely between these two hypothetical extremes, and at what point we place any particular poet must remain incapable of exact calculation. 71 Here, Eliot describes that our aperture into the poem (as participant, witness, or the like) cannot occur if we cannot – at the very least – believe (that is, fathom) what the poet is proposing. We are not required to fully understand (much less agree with) the proposition, but we must be able to conceive it. This need not be limited to an author’s explicit expression of belief in a text, but can be anything within the bounds of the imagination required by the text itself (narrative, image, sound, or otherwise). What Eliot is really getting at, then, is the need for the poetic (authorly) imagination not to surpass the limits of our own. The poet is not lending us his mind so much as highlighting the capabilities of his reader’s mind, opening windows and doors that – while they may have never been locked – have never been persuasively opened before. The modern poet thus does more than Emerson’s command to extemporaneously “mount to paradise by the stairway of surprise”; 72 he also shows his reader the location of the stairwell, beckoning her to follow. The modern poet who illuminates the capacity of his reader’s mind – rather than showcase the superiority of his own – is also he who will perhaps fulfill Eliot’s advocacy for “wide appeal," and popular enjoyment. 73 71 Eliot, “Use of Poetry” in Selected Prose of Eliot, 86. 72 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Merlin I." Poems (New York and Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904). The initial draft of these lines on a stray lecture sheet reads: “Do not the great always live extempore, mounting to heaven by the stairs of surprise?” 73 “The classic must, within its formal limitations, express the maximum possible of the whole range of feeling which represents the character of the people who speak that language. It will represent this at its best, and it will also have the widest appeal: among the people to which it belongs, it will find its response among all classes and conditions of men. Eliot, “What is a Classic?”; in Selected Prose, 128. 45 Eliot and Hart Crane inherited from Whitman an obsession with the present and reality – in the ability of poetic language to somehow incarnate this immediacy on the page. Each had the ability to so incarnate both the outside world and their perception (and emotions) regarding the outside world. Still, it would seem that neither was truly able to move beyond the solitude of his own perceptions in the avoidance of proximate intimacy with the reader. Fellow Modernist poet Wallace Stevens, on the other hand, expressed the impulse to actually incarnate the perceptions of the reader (and not himself) as reality. Unlike other Moderns, Stevens seemed acutely recalcitrant to predict the readers’ perceptions; rather, he offered space for them to inhabit the poem. This sensibility predicates the complicit communion of writer and reader together as co-mythmakers: The eye’s plain version is a thing apart, The vulgate of experience. Of this, A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet – As part of the never-ending meditation, Part of the question that is a giant himself: Of what is this house composed if not of the sun, These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate Appearances of what appearances, Words, lines, not meanings, not communications, Dark things without a double, after all, Unless a second giant kills the first – A recent imagining of reality, Much like a new resemblance of the sun, Down-pouring, up-springing and inevitable, A larger poem for a larger audience, As if the crude collops came together as one, A mythological form, a festival sphere, A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age. 74 74 Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), 132. 46 It would seem that Stevens is excruciatingly aware of the need for the poem to encompass the present (“the eye’s plain version," “vulgate of experience”), as well as the poet’s role to both contextualize this present within a past (“these houses," “giants," “these difficult objects”) and translate this present into a potential future (“the never-ending meditation," “the question that is a giant himself”). The Modernist desire to sustain religion’s mythos without its theology requires this sense of a storied collective, of words and giants that are together “a great bosom, beard and being, alive [in the present] with age.” That collective, however, must anticipate not only the future reader, but all future readings - and so Stevens fumbles with our hand in Emerson’s dark stairwell mounting to paradise. Stevens embraces that the creative action of reading (i.e., Interpretation) is responsible for half of the myth, and that as readers we must often play the “second giant” who slays the first (i.e., the author, previous readers). To mount the stairwell of surprise — to participate in the myth-making — is to provide a “recent imagining of reality,” and thus “a larger poem for a larger audience": Professor Eucalyptus said, “The search For reality is as momentous as The search for god.” It is the philosopher’s search For an interior made exterior And the poet’s search for the same exterior made Interior: breathless things broodingly abreath. With the Inhalations of original cold And of original earliness. Yet the sense Of cold and earliness is a daily sense, Not the predicate of bright origin. Creation is not renewed by images Of lone wanderers. To re-create, to use The cold and earliness and bright origin Is to search. Likewise to say of the evening star, The most ancient light in the most ancient sky, 47 That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates, Searches a possible for its possibleness. 75 Here, Stevens advocates for the “original cold” and “original earliness” to inhabit the daily (i.e., present) sense, and he expresses that the Modernist images of lone wanderers (like Eliot, Crane, or even Pound) cannot encompass the present; they may capture the cold and earliness and bright origin, but they do not use it. It is the phenomenological difference between the words one employs to recount a cold, bright, early morning, and the words one actually uses on such a morning. True, Eliot attempted this to some extent (think of The Waste Land’s “Hurry Up Please Its Time”), but typically these were limited to conversational speech. Stevens reveals himself here as a poet of – never image, but – internal and external sound. If nothing else, this poem (along with “High-Toned Old Christian Woman," “The Man on the Dump," and “Of Modern Poetry”) asserts that the poetry of the present must be first and foremost the poetry of these sounds. Words are the means by which we construct and preserve myth, and as such are primarily received aurally: The poem is the cry of its occasion, Part of the res itself and not about it. The poet speaks the poem as it is, Not as it was: 76 Through prosody, Stevens thus heralds future poets who recreate reality through — not words, but — said words: 77 poets who elicit a readerly experience that is “the same / Except 75 Ibid., 137-138. 76 Ibid, 135. 77 “In the end, in the whole psychology, the self, / The town, the weather, in a casual litter, /Together, said words of the world are the life of the // world.” Ibid, 136. 48 for the adjectives, an alteration / Of words that [is] a change of nature, more // Than the difference that clouds make over a town.” 78 When this “alteration of words” pertains to pronouns and anaphors, it would appear that Stevens takes pains to oscillate between the referential polarities of reader, writer, and other. Helen Vendler describes this as a constant motion back and forth, a kind of “recurrent convergence” or “perpetual oscillation” within a play on articles, definite and indefinite. 79 While she cites the parallel refrains of “a” and “the” from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, I prefer the oscillation between definite articles and associative pronouns in “Large Red Man Reading”: There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae. They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more. There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life, Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them. They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality, 80 [emphasis mine] In the entirety of “Large Man," there is not a single indefinite article. Steven’s exclusive and frequent use of definite articles, then, creates an authority reminiscent of the confessional (as opposed to Whitman’s testimonial: “I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning”). The use of “those," of course, rhymes with “ghost," but also creates an anapestic prosody that echoes the Biblical parable of parables – specifically Luke 8 from the King James (“they are they…”). Imagine if Stevens had written “There were some." Not only would the short “O” sound fail to echo the long “O” of “ghosts” and “those," but it would also lend more freely to the dreaded sing-song of iambic pentameter - diminishing the 78 Ibid., 141. 79 Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969), 172. 80 Ibid., 130. 49 incantatory hoof-beats of the refrained anapest at the start of each line. Read aloud, Stevens then pushes his reader into the role of scriptural lay reader (as opposed to Whitman’s homily leader). One can almost hear the compulsory The Word of the Lord at the end of this lesson, much less the congregation’s murmured antiphon response: Thanks be to God. Perhaps it is no great surprise that — in 1900, at the age of twenty — Wallace Stevens bought a small copy of the Psalms he would carry in his pocket throughout his adult life; he did the same with a pocket copy of the Proverbs purchased in 1901. 81 Growing up, Wallace Stevens’ mother read a bible chapter to him and his siblings every night before bed. Stevens even remarked in letters how “often, one or two of us fell asleep.” 82 If Stevens was the sleeper (he admitted having to look up who Saul was), 83 it may not be surprising that he held onto more of the sound of biblical verse than its allusive content, that dozing state where the mind still registered the rhythms and presence of his mother’s voice rather than what she was saying. By invoking only half of the synesthetic memory (perhaps the only half he knows), he offers what John N. Serio claims to be a typical Stevens theme: “‘the greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.’…an irony in the poem in that the ghosts never get to experience reality, only the reality-making power of the poet as a reader (or interpreter) of reality: ‘They would have wept to step barefoot into reality.’ Even this is a typical strategy of Stevens: evoking the antithesis by denying it. We feel the reality that the ghosts cannot experience and thus appreciate it all the more.” 84 Again Stevens appears to lament the very modernist tradition from which he springs: as readers, we will remain literary apparitions — 81 Eleanor Cook, A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2, 19, 25. 82 L, 173 (25 June 1912); in Eleanor Cook, “Wallace Stevens and the King James Bible," Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 130. 83 L, 176 (11 Aug 1912); in Cook, 130. 84 Poem-A-Day Interview from Knopf Doubleday, 28 April 2010; viewed on wednesdaypoet.typepad.com. 50 dark shadows in that Emersonian stairwell he bids us climb — should we remain without an aperture into our poetry. He evokes our readerly participation by acknowledging how we are (far too often) denied it; thus, we inhabit the pronoun. We become the future ghosts: His value is that he describes and even celebrates (occasionally) our selfhood- communings as no one else can or does. He knows that "the sublime comes down / To the spirit and space," and though he keeps acknowledging the spirit's emptiness and space's vacancy, he keeps demonstrating a violent abundance of spirit and a florabundance of the consolations of space. He is the poet we always needed, who would speak for the solitude at our center, who would do for us what his own "Large Red Man Reading" did for those ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, "and spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked. 85 ” Beyond his oscillation of pronouns and articles that we observe in Large Red Man, Stevens’ work often orients us within this communal solitude via a slow, terse parataxis — not only the extra beat afforded by the article, but the identifiability of the definite article over the indefinite.: One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; 86 Beginning with the ambitious pronoun “one," the reader is implicated into a role that is equivocal with the speaker — in other words, there is indeterminate space within “one” for reader, writer, and other to inhabit the poem. Furthermore, the pairing of definite pronouns with concrete nouns (“the frost," “the boughs," “the pine trees”) and indefinite articles with 85 Harold Bloom, Introduction, Wallace Stevens, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985), 5. Quoted in John N. Serio, Introduction, Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems, ed. John N. Serio (New York: Knopf, 2009), xiv. 86 “The Snow Man," Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), 14. 51 abstract nouns (“a mind”) reinforces a readerly occupation of the indeterminate role. Consider if Stevens’ lines had been written thus: One must have the mind of winter To regard frost and boughs Of pine-trees crusted with snow; While removing the definite article dismantles Stevens’ monotonously stressed syllabics, it also diminishes the imaginative effort required from the reader. Frost, boughs, pine trees are merely ideas - generalizations of objects that the reader can quite easily “evoke” from memory. According to linguist Ellen F. Prince, this readerly familiarity with a referent (or “givenness”) can be classified into four major categories: Evoked, Inferrable, Unused, and Brand New. 87 The inclusion of the definite article, however, slides the imaginative act toward the more demanding referent that is either inferred or (ideally) brand new: And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun, and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place 87 Ellen F. Prince, “Toward a Taxonomy of Given - New Information," in P. Cole (ed), Radical Pragmatics (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 237. Paraphrased by Peter Bekins, “Nonprototypical Uses of the Definite Article in Biblical Hebrew.” Journal of Semitic Studies, LVIII/2 (Autumn 2013), 227-228: “Brand New referents are new to both the discourse and the hearer, and they are typically introduced by an indefinite noun phrase. Evoked referents are usually old to both the discourse and the hearer, and they correspond to the anaphoric use of the definite article…An Unused referent has not been previously introduced into the discourse, but it is identifiable to the hearer based on general knowledge…Finally, Inferrables correspond to the associative use of the article in which the referent has not yet been introduced into the discourse, but its identity can be inferred based on association with another referent in the near context…In its prototypical use, therefore, the definite article signals the hearer that they are in a position to identify the referent of a noun phrase. 52 For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Even a cursory inventory of locative nouns indicates an overwhelming dependence upon the definite article 88 , whereas only a handful of roles remain unassigned (One, winter, snow, ice, misery, who, nothing himself, nothing) or indefinite (a mind, a long time, a few leaves). Though Stevens invokes two nouns more than once (echoing “the sound” three times, and “the wind” with “same wind”), the only nouns he transforms are “the snow” (from “snow”) and — of course — “nothing." Just as we become comfortable in the scene painted by a bombardment of definite common nouns, the rapid transformation of “nothing himself” (evoked) to “nothing” (inferrable) and finally “the nothing” (brand new) impels the reader to inhabit the roles of (not merely) “One," “the listener," and “the nothing." Just as we felt the reality that the ghosts were denied in “Large Red Man," we are impelled to feel absence made definite. Even James Merrill’s iconic reading of “The Snow Man” indicates a small distinction in this final assignment of the definite article; while Merrill uses the unstressed “schwa” pronunciation for every other article (rhyming “a” as “uh” and “the” as “thuh”), he pronounces the final definite article with the long e sound: “thee nothing that is.” Suddenly, “One” becomes a cataphor that points forward to “the listener” or “nothing”; “there” is now a strange, negative exophor pointing to an equally indeterminate point. Even if only by sound, the speaker quite literally implicates the reader’s absence, or the reader as absence - the direct article progressing from a stuttered filler (“uh”) to an archaic “thee” who is equally relegated to “nothing that is." Some “otherwise than being," we stand both witness and removed — like hovering, inarticulate ghosts: 88 (The frost, the boughs, the pine trees, the junipers, the spruces, the glitter, the january sun, the sound, the wind, the sound, the sound, the land, the same wind, the same place, the listener, the snow, the nothing) 53 The wind blew in the empty place. The winter wind blew in an empty place — There was that difference between the and an, The difference between himself and no man, No man that heard a wind in an empty place. It was time to be himself again, to see If the place, in spite of its witheredness, was still Within the difference. 89 Somewhat ironically, Stevens’ empty place is not at all empty. The speaker is there, or we are there, or no man (meaning a man, the man, or any man) is there - that “one” presence is required to observe that there is nothing else present. This kind of negative description (the ghost’s lack in Large Man, The Snowman’s nothing) performs an act of creation by removal, dedicating more words to denote what is not there than what is. Rather than assign his readers a locative role in his poems, or allow them a list of potential roles to inhabit, Stevens’ requires his readers to gradually eliminate these perspectives altogether. The poet’s act of deconstruction thus prompts the reader’s imaginative act and, paradoxically, widens the readerly aperture within the poem: we can construct our own ghostly nothings. there are words Better without an author, without a poet, Or having a separate author, a different poet, An accretion from ourselves, intelligent Beyond intelligence, an artificial man At a distance, a secondary expositor, A being of sound, whom one does not approach Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect. —— 89 Stevens, “Extracts From Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas," IV. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Random House, 1990), 255. 54 We do not say ourselves like that in poems. We say ourselves in syllables that rise From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak. 90 Charles Altieri argues that Stevens gives voice to the impersonality that fellow Modern poets used to reconcile the romantic “I” with the vague Victorian “we." Yet unlike so many Moderns, he “looked to how the constructive and performative aspects of rhetoric might make that process transparent, so that [he] could invite [his] readers frankly to participate in the distinctive energies that the rhetorical impulse could gather. Rather than use rhetoric to persuade, [he] would use rhetoric to establish identifications with what it feels like to construct possibilities for changes of heart” 91 Yet I would argue that Stevens’ mythic impulses move far beyond the romantic and rhetorical. Rather, Stevens continues a model of sacred language by absorbing Whitman’s adaptation of the structures of biblical poetry (anaphora, pronouns) and extending Dickinson’s conception of the word as creation via absence (articles, her dash). His work thus seeks to illustrate that words (written, spoken, or read) are inherently mythical - that language is, in fact, the thing that it represents 92 - even when that thing is, for lack of a better word, nothing at all: In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock, Of such mixed motion and such imagery That its barrenness becomes a thousand things And so exists no more. This is the cure Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves. His words are both the icon and the man. 93 90 Stevens, “The Creations of Sound," Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems, ed. John N. Serio (New York: Knopf, 2009), 157. 91 Charles Altieri, The Art of Twentieth Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 128. 92 Claudia Yukman, “An American Poet’s Idea of Language," in Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1988), 243. 93 Stevens, “The Rock,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 527. 55 Words that seek to signify nothing run the risk of relinquishing interpretive authority - of becoming either (truly) nothing or a thousand things in the creative act of the reader. They demand that we partake in the process of imaginative meaning - and in doing so, bestow some semblance of choice upon us. 94 This authority itself insinuates that both text and recipient are somehow changed in the act of reading - that text and reader together become “other” than they were before. The phenomenological experience of reading Stevens’ work, then, is a lot like transcendence. Language that is “both the icon and the man” creates much more than meaning and ideas - it creates new sayers of an old speech: This inability to find a sound, That clings to the mind like that right sound, that song Of the assassin that remains and sings In the high imagination, triumphantly. 95 94 “The law of chaos is the law of ideas, / Of improvisations and seasons of belief. // Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and / The mass of men are one. Chaos is not // The mass of meaning. It is three or four / Ideas or, say, five men or, possibly six. // In the end, these philosophic assassins pull / Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains. // The mass of meaning becomes composed again. ” “Extracts From Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas, V.” Ibid., 256. 95 Ibid. 56 IV. “Things that divine us we never touch”: Wright’s Spiritual Catechism In his seminal work of philosophy, Otherwise Than Being, Emmanuel Levinas argues that Transcendence entails the event (also called esse, or essence) in which being passes over to the other (that which is different than being). By this, he does not mean death or dying (which would be not being), but simply that which is other than being, or other than existence. Levinas finds that language is tied up in being, or can at least represent being, and thus “Otherwise than Being” might be interpreted as “Otherwise than language." Transcendence in language, then, occurs via the phenomenological linguistic experience not based in the word itself; that is, our temporal and spatial relation to the Other that we encounter in receiving words. Not unlike Emerson and even Modern writers like Eliot and Stevens, Levinas acknowledges the power of language – and particularly poetic language – to so delineate this distinction between the Other (be it God, Nature, or Author) and the Self: Before putting itself at the service of life as an exchange of information through a linguistic system, saying is witness; it is saying without the said, a sign given to the other. Sign of what? Of complicity? Of a complicity for nothing, a fraternity, a proximity that is possible only as an openness of self, an imprudent exposure to the other, a passivity without reserve, to the point of substitution. It is thus exposing of the exposure, saying, saying that does not say a word, that signifies, that, as responsibility, is signification itself, the- one-for-the-other. It is the subjectivity of the subject that makes itself a sign, which one would be wrong to take as a babbling utterance of a word, for it bears witness to the glory of the Infinite. 96 Here, the authority of the sayer is acknowledged regardless of any denotative transmission within the stated words (“saying without the said”). For Levinas, the sayer himself, in the act of saying, is an implicit witness to the infinitude of meaning, performing a creative act that 96 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1981), 150-151. 57 entails a (sometimes subconscious) selection from the infinitude of language and sound. For Levinas, the primary function of a word – it would seem – is not its finite ability to convey information within the said, but its capacity for infinitude, or illeity: in other words, the ability for some speech to actively detach from “the thought that seeks to thematize it and the language that tries to hold it in the said.” 97 Language, then, more than any other art form, “permits us to utter, be it by betrayal, this outside of being, this exception to being, as though being's other were an event of being.” 98 Language has the capacity to give life to that which is past, or that which has not yet come to pass, or that which never will (or never can!) come to pass; it brings here, makes present, and calls into being, that which (without words) would not be here, would not be present, and thus would not be. Words, then, have the capacity to summon the past and future, all of memory, even the divine, to be witnessed in the present outside of thought alone; words give one being (for lack of a better word) the ability to transfer his thought to another being: My words echo Thus, in your mind. ———— Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? ———— And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, 97 “The saying in the said of the witness born signifies in a plot other than that which is spread out in a theme, other than that which attaches a noesis to a noema, a cause to an effect, the memorable past to the present. This plot connects to what detaches itself absolutely, to the Absolute. The detachment of the Infinite from the thought that seeks to thematize it and the language that tries to hold it in the said is what we have called illeity. One is tempted to call this plot religious; it is not stated in terms of certainty or uncertainty, and does not rest on any positive theology.” (Ibid., 147) 98 Ibid., 6. 58 And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. ———— Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. 99 Still, Levinas is aware of the reflexive paradox bound up in the difficulty of naming that which is sacred, or that which “shall-not-be-named”: But one immediately wonders if in the formula "otherwise than being" the adverb "otherwise" does not inevitably refer to the verb to be, which simply has been avoided by an artificially elliptical turn of phrase. Then what is signified by the verb to be would be ineluctable in everything said, thought and felt. Our languages woven about the verb to be would not only reflect this undethronable royalty, stronger than that of the gods; they would be the very purple of this royalty. But then no transcendence other than the factitious transcendence of worlds behind the scenes…would have meaning…The there is fills the void left by the negation of Being. 100 How can we signify things that do not exist with things that do? In signifying them, do we deconstruct their identity as sacred, set apart, or “not being”? How can one both simultaneously say and unsay? Levinas argues that in order to hover and retain its illeity, language must remain in a state of diachronic – moving and changing – thought: The otherwise than being is stated in a saying that must also be unsaid in order to thus extract the otherwise than being from the said in which it already comes to signify but a being otherwise…Can this saying and this being unsaid be assembled, can they be at the same time? In fact to require this simultaneity is already to reduce being's other to being and not being. We must stay with the extreme situation of a diachronic thought. 101 What poets, then, allow this “diachronic thought," this simultaneity of suggesting the infinite – a thought, image, or word – without strictly prescribing my thought, image, or word? Who can simultaneously convey and betray, provide recognition with novelty, can encompass the 99 T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1943), 3-4. 100 Levinas, 4. 101 Ibid., 7. 59 past and future, memory and dream, in one text? Levinas’ diachronic language connotes movement, development, and happening (though not necessarily progression) over time and space. As the literal diachronous increments of the modern world become increasingly smaller, less perceptible, and without symbolic record and witness (think email, texts, and tweets), the more difficult it becomes to capture or trace that diachrony itself. While bearing the ghost of transcendental and modernist traits, the contemporary poet finds spiritual authority through the ability to collapse the temporal and spatial limits of words, and – via this diachronous language that sustains Levinas’ illeity – thus hybridizes a new consciousness of spiritual Other. In his poem “The Southern Cross," Charles Wright explores the purgatory that we inhabit between the memory and the imagination, the self and the “other” self of past and future alike: Things that divine us we never touch: The black sounds of the night music, The Southern Cross, like a kite at the end of its string, And now this sunrise, and empty sleeve of a day, The rain just starting to fall, and then not fall, No trace of a story line. ______________ All day I’ve remembered a lake and a sudsy shoreline, Gauze curtains blowing in and out of open windows all over the South. It’s 1936, in Tennessee. I’m one and spraying the dead grass with a hose. The curtains blow in and out. And then it’s not. And I’m not and they’re not. Or it’s 1941 in a brown suit, or ’53 in its white shoes, 60 Overlay after overlay tumbled and brought back, As meaningless as the sea would be if the sea could remember its waves… 102 Here, with “no trace of a story line," Wright refuses to ground his reader within a narrative or setting. There is night and day, the rain falls and does not fall, yet one is left chasing after Wright’s kite string in an effort to fill the “empty sleeve” of time and space that he offers. In the second stanza, Wright throws out potential locative morsels. We move from 1936 to 1941 to 1953 (nearly twenty years!) in a matter of lines, as if Wright were spraying our temporal and spatial imagination with his toddler’s hose-watering, merely splashing images with the rivulets of memory, “overlay after overlay” that are (he admits it) meaningless in their singular significance. The flashes he provides are too fleeting to remain without the reader’s effort to sustain them, for as soon as one is offered, “it’s not. And I’m not and they’re not.” Here, Wright’s language is diachronous, moving incessantly between (his) memory and the (reader’s) imagination. Here is the truth. The wind rose, the sea Shuffled its blue deck and dealt you a hand: Blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. 103 “The Southern Cross” is a meditation on what we do – or can – know (the past, memory) versus what we do not – or cannot – know (the future, or the imagination). Romanticism would tell us that the memory is finite and the imagination infinite. Still, Wright expresses how we wrestle with the finitude of both memory and the imagination daily. For Wright, infinity accurately refers not only to that which is immeasurably vast, but that which is also immeasurably small: 102 Charles Wright, The World of Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 42. 103 Ibid., 45. 61 Time is the villain in most tales, and here, too, Lowering its stiff body into the water. Its landscape is the resurrection of the word, No end of it, the petals of wreckage in everything. 104 Memory, then, has the capacity to be infinite in its collection of (seemingly) insignificant details, even at the expense of forgetting large, momentous events. These details – or petals – rest disordered, innumerable amongst the wreckage of everything else we quantify as memorable. Still, their “meaningless” annunciation in the word resurrects the landscape of time in the imagination of both the writer and reader alike. It is no surprise, then, that the requirement of readerly investment in the poem (via imagination) mimics the process of writing the poem itself. Just as the reader must chase the kite string of his grounding imagination, so the writer must chase the kite string of memory and (often) fill in the gaps with his own imagination: There is an otherness inside us We never touch, no matter how far down our hands reach. It is the past, with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere… Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it Year after year, But who can ever remember enough? 105 In lyric poems like “The Southern Cross," the role of the poet is to act as spacemaker. The lyric, more so than the narrative or any other art form, seeks to make a space for itself. It is not itself a narrative, but a piece of the greater narrative of lyrics that has gone on ad infinitum. For Levinas, the collective word can come to represent a kind of eternal word en 104 Ibid., 51. 105 Ibid., 48. 62 masse, the vehicle through which “God speaks to each man in particular.” 106 As such, a lyric poem does not necessarily constitute a narrative in and of itself; however, lyric poetry can constitute a narrative in the space that it creates between writer and reader. A single lyric poem is comparable to one petal of memory, whereas lyric poetry is the entire memorial ruins: Everyone’s life is the same life if you live long enough. 107 _____________ Places swim up and sink back, and days do, The edges around what really happened we’ll never remember No matter how hard we stare back at the past: 108 _____________ The life of this world is wind. Windblown we come, and windblown we go away. All that we look on is windfall. All we remember is wind. 109 Here, wind is synonymous with breath. We remember seeing through saying, remember being through what is said, and memory itself becomes an artifact of the imagination. The poet who uses diachronic language with a high capacity for Levinas’ illeity becomes a kind of capricious catechist, a homilist whose language exists equally within being and the otherwise-than-being, the messenger of Wright’s “unimaginary part of what is 106 “That this signification of saying without the said would be the very signifyingness of signification, the-one-for-the-other, is not a poverty of the saying received in exchange for the infinite richness of the said, fixed and admirably mobile, in our books and our traditions, our sciences and our poetry, our religions and our conversations; it is not a barter of the duped. The caress of love, always the same, in the last accounting (for him that thinks in counting) is always different and overflows with exorbitance the songs, poems and admissions in which it is said in so many different ways and through so many themes, in which it apparently is forgotten. According to the word of Jehuda Halevy, with his eternal word "God speaks to each man in particular." (Levinas, 184) 107 Wright, 48. 108 Ibid., 49. 109 Ibid., 54. 63 imaginable." According to colleague Steven Cushman, Wright once commented that “Free Verse is Negative Capability," hearkening to Keats’ assertion that a great poet “is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason, ” capable “of remaining content with half knowledge.” 110 Cushman argues that Wright’s free verse is mindful and self-conscious about technique without being overly wed to formal aesthetics — what Wright himself playfully coined as his UFO (Ultimate Formal Organization): an interest in Form itself (the architecture of language), rather than preexisting forms themselves (say, the sonnet, terza rima, or rondeau). Wright’s free verse — or Negative Capability — then appears to formally lend itself to Levinas’ diachronic thought; it is form that — though formal — appears indeterminate to the reader. As Wright’s splattering of short-syllabled images resembled his childish hose-spraying, his Ultimate Formal Organization is quite often mimetic of the poem’s content rather than established formal structures themselves: The afternoon clouds are like a Xerox of the morning clouds, An indecipherable transcript, ill-litanied, ill-limned. There is no consolation, it seems, there’s only light. Right there, beyond our dark spot. Imagination is merely the door. All we can do is knock hard And hope that something will open it. Around the corners of the known world, blue stanzas link The lines of the first great poem, there is no second. Idleness anchors us. Nothing accomplished, nothing retrieved, 110 Stephen Cushman, “The Capabilities of Charles Wright”; in The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright, Tom Andrews, ed. (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1995), 222- 223. 64 We’re posed like water striders above the secondhand stars. We have a taste for the untasteable, the radiant roof of things, The unimaginary part of what is imaginable. We wait between goodbye and hello, an ounce of absence, an ounce of regret, Standing on one foot, whistling a half-remembered tune. Mystical twos and mojo, God sockets, clouds roll across the sky, Letting the light come down on some, taking it back from others. 111 While Wright’s work rarely maintains a strict metrical pattern, his syllabics do lean heavily toward odd-numbered lines. Wright himself remarked that “I work with seven-, thirteen-, nineteen-, fifteen-, nine syllable lines. Those are the five lines that I’m interested in. Especially the thirteen syllable line, with four to five, usually five, stresses.” 112 Though Cushman attributes Wright’s “oddness” to a superstitious fascination with the number 13 and the unknown (i.e., Negative Capability’s comfort with “half knowledge”), 113 his propensity for odd syllabics may be more bound to the nature of odd numbers themselves. The poem above, for example, roughly sustains the following syllabic pattern (dropped lines parenthetically marked in bold): 15-(9-6) // 13-7 // (10-7)-9 // (9-4)-12 // (6–9)-14 // (10-7)-16 // (10-9)-13 // (10-6)-15. Of 23 lines on the page, there appear to be 12 that contain an odd number of syllables and 11 that contain an even number — a rather even split, actually. However, Wright’s use of the dropped line often pairs even-syllabled lines with lines that are (not surprisingly) odd. “The dropped line is to Wright what the dash was to Dickinson: It allows him to annotate various kinds of junctions within his lines at the 111 Charles Wright, “Snake Eyes,” Buffalo Yoga (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 63. 112 Charles Wright, Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977-1987 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1988), 108; quoted in Cushman, 227. 113 Cushman, 227. 65 same time that it enables him to maintain the left-to-right horizontal sweep of his lineations.” 114 Combined with the traditional capitalization of each margined line, it also calls into question the exact nature of a “line” – forcing readers to be content with half- knowledge of when a line starts and stops, and uncertainty in how each line distinguishes from the next. If we define a line to include the dropped line that immediately follows, the resulting line naturally becomes oddly-syllabled, and our ratio of odd to even for this particular poem becomes 13-3. Thus, the dropped line thinly disguises portions of odd- syllabled lines to be even — offering just a semblance of balance, or an echo of iambic pentameter that is — in fact — not at all there. What’s more, this disguise is an undeniably effective means of avoiding the rigid form of disyllabic feet: pairing even-to-even or odd-to- odd syllables in a dropped line would always result in an evenly-syllabled sum. Annie Finch argues that Wright’s odd “ghost of meter” reaches toward form “to express – or to locate – reassurance in physical realities or accepted poetic tradition," that “the iambic pentameters are both more tentative and more resigned” due to his “metrical belatedness.” 115 Conversely, I would argue that — like Whitman and Stevens before him — “his prosodic dialectic between willed and unwilled poetry…implies that the pentameter needs to be transcended because it has been mastered” 116 by someone else. Once again, Wright’s Ultimate Formal Organization thus seeks to mindfully engage with form in order to transcend it and (potentially) create new forms; he moves away from (or at least oscillates around) form rather than constantly reaching toward it. Perhaps Wright’s affinity for the odd-syllabled line in free verse also comes from the metronomic quality of these numbers. 114 Ibid. 115 Annie Finch, The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Ann Arbor: The Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), 134-135; with obvious allusion to Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 116 Finch, 134. 66 Unlike even numbers, the odd number always has a median — it requires a middle ground, one that must exist in the interim and cannot be divided equally into two. This median may formally act as a kind of transcendent anchor: a spatial repository for Levinas’ “otherwise than being," the aperture for diachronous thought. Helen Vendler remarks how Wright’s poems often “stop in the middle, with a mixed yearning and premonition, instead of taking a resolute direction backward or forward…this pause which looks before and after.” 117 In a landscape we do not understand, whatever and everything We know about it. Unworldly and all ours, it glides like the Nineteenth Century Over us, up the near hill And into the glistening mittens of the same clouds Now long gone from the world’s pond. So long. This is an old man’s poetry, written by someone who’s spent his life Looking for one truth. Sorry, pal, there isn’t one. Unless, of course, the trees and their blow-down relatives Are part of it. Unless the late-evening armada of clouds Spanishing along the horizon are part of it. Unless the diminishing pinprick of light stunned in the dark forest Is part of it. Unless, O my, whatever the eye makes out, And sends us, on its rough-road trace, To the heart, is part of it, then maybe that bright vanishing might be. 118 More than a literal pause (“So long”), Vender attributes this literal and figurative caesura to the influence of Eugenio Montale, whose poems taught Wright “how to move a 117 Helen Vendler, “The Transcendent ‘I’," in The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright, Tom Andrews, ed. (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1995), 1. 118 Charles Wright, “Ancient of Days,” Caribou (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), 16. 67 line, how to move an image from one stage to the next. How to create imaginary bridges between images and stanzas and then to cross them, making them real, image to image, block to block.” 119 Rather than subscribe to the Italian Futurist’s insistence upon “eradicating the ‘I’” from literature, Montale believed that the man who communicates is the transcendent “I” who is hidden in us and who recognizes himself in others. But the transcendent “I” is a lamp which lights up only the briefest strip of space before us, a light that bears us toward a condition which is not individual and consequently not human…The attempt to fix the ephemeral, to make the phenomenon non- phenomenal, the attempt to make the individual “I” articulate, as he is not by definition, the revolt, in brief, against the human condition (a revolt dictated by an impassioned amor vitae) is at the base of the artistic and philosophic pursuits of our era. 120 Wright’s “attempt to make the transcendent ‘I’ articulate” is thus a pursuit of both meanings of the word: an effort to speak fluently via a joint between writer and reader. With Wright and his predecessors, one does feel that the roles of writer and reader – the I and the you – move beyond both the egalitarian (like Whitman’s ministerial role) and optative (like Stevens’ diaconal role); the roles are made nearly synonymous and indecipherable. In this capacity, the reader is not permitted the option to actually remain in the readerly role. He is required to assume the phenomenological authorial role in experiencing the text itself as it happens, and just as the poet himself experiences it in the moment of creative genesis. This immediacy of the text does not permit the reader to remain a passive member of a murmuring congregation, or a mere witness to a vicar or shaman. Rather, the poet of Negative Capability demands that the reader become his own author (i.e., “alterer”) of poetic meaning and imagination to whom the text mediates appropriate communication with the sacred other. Rather than an expression of authorial intention or artistic skill, the original poetic act 119 Charles Wright, Halflife, 64. 120 Eugenio Montale, Auto da Fé (Il Saggiatore, 1952), quoted in Vendler, 11-12. 68 of writing becomes an assertion of the transcendent capabilities of language itself, one that re-establishes the vernacular (i.e., the everyday word, and not the author) as the primal human link to the mystical, the divine, or the creative sublime. In a way, the poet of Negative Capability sufficiently distracts our conscious attention away from the act of reading, from our phenomenological place as readers. He is a capricious minister: that ambassador who indeterminately leads us out of our consciousness and away from the city of ourselves. In order to so suspend us into the world between transcendence and reality, Wright takes pains to further oscillate between the referential polarities of reader, writer, and other. Helen Vendler describes this in Stevens as a constant motion back and forth, a kind “perpetual oscillation” between definite and indefinite articles. 121 I would argue that Vendler’s recurrent convergence of the definite and the indefinite occurs both on the level of the article and the pronoun in Wright. Furthermore, this convergence occurs threefold in order to allow room for the poet, the reader, and their communion. That is, Wright’s poems most closely resemble that of the catechism (not sermon, reading, homily, collect, or prayer). The poet as catechist (and reader as catechumen) is a literal and impulsive instruction in how to re- commune with the sacred other through language. This requires the threefold notion of testimonial (first person “I”), instruction (second person “you”), and communion (first person plural “we," or possibly use of the third person). In “The Southern Cross," Wright uses all three of these — yet he limits each to a separate part of the work. Consider the following stanzas (two of which we’ve already visited), with each beginning a separate section of the poem: The Big Dipper has followed me all the days of my life. 121 Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969), 172. 69 Under its tin stars my past has come and gone. 122 ---- Here is the truth. The wind rose, the sea Shuffled its blue deck and dealt you a hand: Blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. 123 ---- There is an otherness inside us We never touch, no matter how far down our hands reach. 124 Wright’s pronoun shifts and definite articles combined with sectional breaks allow the reader to accommodate the oscillation of perspective without disorientation, to provide for Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s paradox of both “immanence and transcendence in perception." For transcendence and immanence not to be exclusive phenomenological states, what is perceived (i.e., read) must “always contain something more than what is actually given," something at the limit that escapes and remains wild from our attempt to encompass it in our experiential horizon. 125 It must have the capacity to talk back, to surprise us, to explode our horizons while sustaining the two-sidedness of phenomena. 126 Wright further accomplishes this by habitually structuring metaphors using a genitive link: “the blank sky of the page," “the blue plate of the sky," “the slow snow of daylight." 127 Cushman notes this pattern’s resonance with the scriptural authority of the King James Bible (“the sword of my mouth," Rev 2:16); yet more interestingly, he notes the interpretive ambiguity that this grammatical structure creates. The pattern “A of B” simultaneously indicates both possession (B’s A) and transformation (B is A). The genitive-link metaphor thus “represents 122 Ibid. 123 Wright, The World of Ten Thousand Things, 45. 124 Ibid., 48. 125 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Primacy of Perception (Chicago: Northwestern UP, 1964), 16. 126 Michael Yeo, “Perceiving/Reading the Other”: Ethical Dimensions” in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, Thomas W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher, eds. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 40. 127 Cushman, 236. 70 most vividly the process of transubstantiation by metaphor…the conversion of one object, phenomenon, or substance into another….a conversion of the ephemeral into the abiding.” 128 Still, these words are sacraments for the greater act of transubstantiation that occurs throughout much of Wright’s work: the transcendence of reader (B) into author (A). In this poetic eucharist, we have witnessed that Wright writes in devices that are at once instructional, testimonial, and communal. And to read them – much less their role in a secular world – is to engage in a compulsory (rather than optative) phenomena supporting the belief that language itself is sacred, and that it gives life to things outside of ourselves and others. In so reading them, catechistic poets like Wright teach us quite literally to “sound down” that unnamable muse that appears to stem outside of ourselves – memory, emotion, imagination, and the like: Out of our own mouths we are sentenced, we who put our trust in visible things Soon enough we will forget the world. And soon enough the world will forget us. The breath of our lives, passing from this one to that one Is what the wind says, its single word being the earth’s delight. Lust of the tongue, lust of the eye, out of our mouths we are sentenced… 129 For Levinas, it is perhaps the specific use of adverbs that creates language with a heightened illeity, language that necessarily inserts the reader into a position of active being through the collapse – or accelerated lapse – of space and time between author and reader: 128 Ibid., 238. 129 Wright, 230. 71 The lapse of time, irrecuperable to conceptual identification, will be expressed figuratively as the adverbial. Adverbs inflect Being (which the verb makes ‘resonate’ for us); they do not change it. The adverb expresses the autrement; literally, “other-ly” than Being, not another order of Being. 130 Though we see plenty of adverbs and the gerund verb form in “The Southern Cross," I would argue that the present progressive tense (which we do not see in the Wright) also expresses the implicit lapse of time. Consider the present progressive tense that establishes immediacy in John Ashbery’s “At North Farm”: Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night, Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. But will he know where to find you, Recognize you when he sees you, Give you the thing he has for you? Hardly anything grows here, Yet the granaries are bursting with meal, The sacks of meal piled to the rafters. The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish; Birds darken the sky. Is it enough That the dish of milk is set out at night, That we think of him sometimes, Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings? 131 The first line of this poem could easily have been written without the adverb entirely (“Somewhere someone is traveling toward you), or even without the present progressive (Somewhere someone travels toward you), but the combination of the two has the effect of continuity, the inference of ongoing action happening at the precise moment that the statement is written (much less read). What’s more, the result is an imperative urgency that the reader must visualize this happening right now in the present, rather than an ethereal past or future that spatial and temporal locators like “somewhere," “sometimes," “someone," 130 Bettina Bergo, "Emmanuel Levinas," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) 131 John Ashbery, A Wave (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), 1. 72 “anything," and “always” might otherwise suggest. Further, there is the paradox of using the present progressive to convey both the expectancy and anonymity of our impending guest: the visitor (death?) that is simultaneously inevitable, imminent, and unknown. Ashbery’s tone here resembles the mystic seer, the soothsayer reading our palm, throwing the bones, or gazing into his crystal ball (a convex mirror, rather). Still, the first person never takes voice here beyond “we” (never “I see”), and the most incessant word, the locus of the visualization, remains necessarily “you." And rightly so, since it is you who must conjure up this image as you are reading the poem — whether it is the first or fortieth time. In a way, then, Ashbery’s poem itself becomes the crystal ball (or, again, convex mirror), and the reader himself becomes the seer through the act of reading. 132 The “I," even the author himself, would seem to fade into the phenomenological background of reading entirely. Like Wright’s work, Ashbery’s poem forces the reader to bear a kind of heightened memorial witness, to become so implicated in the creative event that he becomes unconscious of (and thus unattached to) his readerly posture. For Levinas, this implication is an effect of proximity synonymous to being held hostage: Signification, the-one-for-the-other, the relationship with alterity, has been analysed in the present work as proximity, proximity as responsibility for the other, and responsibility for the other as substitution. In its subjectivity, its very bearing as a separate substance, the subject was shown to be an expiation for another, the condition or unconditionality of being hostage. 133 132 Proximity is the subject that approaches and consequently constitutes a relationship in which I participate as a term, but where I am more, or less, than a term. This surplus or this lack throws me outside of the objectivity characteristic of relations. Does relationship here become religion? It is not simply a passage to a subjective point of view. One can no longer say what the ego or I is. From now on one has to speak in the first person. I am a term irreducible to the relation, and yet in a recurrence which empties me of all consistency. (Levinas, 82) 133 Levinas, 184. 73 It is perhaps this notion of captivity that separates Poetic Catechists from what has been referred to as the poetics of embodiment. 134 This is not a question of switching bodies, or even minds, for that matter. Embodiment would only be an extension of vicariousness in an age where reality becomes more “virtual” every decade. Rather than rob the reader of her identity, the Poetic Catechist robs the reader of her place. He steals the whole of her (body, mind, and soul) from the complicit readerly role and places her entirely (or at least halfway within) the realm of the other. “Embodiment” would imply a return to status, a resumption of time and place, and reclaiming of our original roles. Still, true transcendence would suggest more permanence than that. Can one ever return if the imagination and memory – or reality – become indistinguishable? The artist alone cannot sustain the heroic imagination, and the child cannot return to the convention and safety of childhood. 135 Only Reason forgets, the imagination – never. 136 : The tongue cannot live up to the heart: Raise the eyes of your affection to its affection And let its equivalents ripen in your body. Love what you don’t understand yet, and bring it to you. From somewhere we never see comes everything that we do see. What is important devolves from the immanence of infinitude In whatever our hands touch — The other world is here, just under our fingertips. 137 134 Ashbery is “establishing, for one thing, a different relationship between writer and reader, a relationship that looks ahead to the poetics of "embodiment" as practiced by such later poets as Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, Maggie O'Sullivan and Karen MacCormack.” Marjorie Perloff, “Normalizing John Ashbery," Jacket Australia Issue #2 Online (December 1997). 135 Mark Irwin, “Three Notions of Truth in Poetry," American Poetry Review, Vol. 37 No. 4, (July/August 2008), 47. 136 Peter Handke, “The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire” in Slow Homecoming (New York Review of Books, 2009), 190; cited in Mark Irwin’s “Three Notions of Truth in Poetry." 137 Wright, 211. 74 Epilogue I’m neither the straightener of silence nor the crispness of shadow on snow; I’m the shape of my own melting eaves. 138 When I began writing poetry, poems were the things you wrote when you had something to say that came from a place of feeling. Those feelings — so you thought, or so you were taught to think — came from some place deep inside of you, and the act of linguistic creation resided in your ability to convey (dare I say impose) that feeling upon whatever poor soul was willing to read the insightful musings of a brooding teenager. When this fountain of inspiration runs dry, young poets are often coached to employ various exercises to surpass the struggle of writing what they want to say, much less saying what they want to write — automatic writing, the exquisite corpse (a kind of group-written poem), backwards poems, and the like. In college, the backwards poem was a particularly useful tool to explore a language of “Otherness” by attempting to write the opposite — word by word — of an already-written piece. For me, the result was often a poem with subliminal content whose style was another author’s entirely. Consider how a backwards poem written from Donald Justice’s “The Wall” transforms an intimate narrative of the Book of Genesis into a more discomforting readerly role: Decidua The falling leaf is never notable. Its purpose, seasonal: unfinished, an uprooted tooth, the vascular cinch. So long as they decide, we are comfortable. Antlers too, are tender. They tend to fall late, marcescent. That is the second truth. The Wall The wall surrounding them they never saw; The angels, often. Angels were as common As birds or butterflies, but look more human. As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe. Beasts, too, were friendly. They could find no flaw In all of Eden: this was the first omen. The second was the dream which woke the woman. 138 Stewart Grace, “Fugue," The Shepherd’s Hour (Handbound Chapbook, 2005), 50. 75 The first was the wound of your mother. It sang and sang so as to clean the walls. Pealing, the sonic chamber tuned aloft. We are warned of what can never happen. We are shown nothing of the furling ash. We are told and told of nothing but the moth. We have it here, the hollow squatting barren. As we step back, the russet wings unlatch. She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw. As for the fruit, it had no taste at all. They had been warned of what was bound to happen. They had been told of something called the world. They had been told and told about the wall. They saw it now, the gate was standing open. As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled. 139 Though the reader remains largely safe in Justice’s poem via the traditional past tense of storytelling, he cracks a small readerly aperture in the final couplet of this sonnet by shifting suddenly to the past progressive — the illeity of his language thus increases, as the reader is forced to become (not merely a witness, but) a witness to memory. A reversal of pronouns in my own poem is perhaps even more jarring: rather than a narrative of the past or memory, the reader that is quite suddenly thrown into an increasingly uncomfortable description of the present (we are comfortable, the wound of your mother, we are warned, we are shown, we are told) must ultimately be called to action (we have it here, as we step back). This linguistic compulsion of readerly movement or action, then, encourages being's other as an event of being," 140 or the diachronic thought of being both witness (reader) and participant (subject) to the poem. We have examined how Wright sustains this oscillation of perspective without disorientation (Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s paradox of both “immanence and transcendence in perception) by habitually structuring metaphors using a genitive link: “the blank sky of the 139 Donald Justice, Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2004), 13. 140 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1981), 6. 76 page,” “the blue plate of the sky,” “the slow snow of daylight.” 141 I have fond memories of Charles instructing a workshop of undergraduate poets at the University of Virginia, stating that “very few nouns deserve two adjectives, and none of them deserve three.” Yet Wright’s use of the genitive link is a clever maneuver around his own rule, and a technique that allows two words to further the illeity of a single noun (“blank” and “sky," for example, both furthering our imaginative construction of “page” via the genitive link). My own “Remora Wellbore” similarly attempts to workaround the double adjective through a meditation on the double-noun and gerund-noun pairs that frequent our own naming of the zoological world: Everything that has ever been an animal understands death: take the venus flytrap, take the praying mantis, take the nodding donkeys in the Lost Hills Oil Field of Kern County, California. What to name the soup digger: call it horsehead sucker, call it pumpjack grasshopper, call it the thirsty thirsty bird. You, prime mover, you are only a piston reciprocating away the middleground, only ever the knife cleaning the knife. 141 Stephen Cushman, “The Capabilities of Charles Wright”; in The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright, Tom Andrews, ed. (Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1995), 222- 223. 77 Wright has often claimed that he writes about “Language, landscape, and the idea of God.” Though the content of my poems is not typically as grounded in landscape as Wright’s work, they do often share his impetus to “intuit what’s behind that landscape," to use landscape’s language (or language’s landscape, as it may be) to reconnect with — not God, but — an idea of God: a spiritual otherness. Like Wright, I too recall the “sparring match I had for about 10 years with the Episcopal Church, in which I was raised, in which I was tremendously involved for a short amount of time and from which I fled and out of which I remain. But it had a huge effect on me. It’s a strange thing about being raised in a religious atmosphere. It alters you completely, one way or the other. It’s made me what I am and I think it’s okay. I can argue against it, but it has given me a sense of spirituality which I prize.” 142 Still, this sense of spirituality in my most recent poems remains ungrounded in an Imagist landscape tradition like Wright’s. Modernist experimentation with the language of automatism is perhaps closer to my grammatical style: A marked tendency to repetition – A phrase would seem to get into the head and keep repeating itself at every opportunity, and hang over from day to day even. The stuff written was grammatical, and the words and phrases fitted together all right, but there was not much connected thought. The unconsciousness was broken into every six or seven words by flashes of consciousness, so that one cannot be sure but what the slight element of connected thought which occasionally appeared was due to these flashes of consciousness. But the ability to write stuff that sounds all right, without consciousness, was fairly well demonstrated by the experiments. 143 Lemmata They built the kettle out in the field an indentation 142 Charles Wright, Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977-1987 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1988), 74. 143 Leon M. Solomons and Gertrude Stein, “Normal Motor Automatism," American Psychological Review (September 1896): 506. 78 They build the kettle out of the field meaning peapod, caught in a kernal of installation. They are buildings kettling fodder that fire the packing weight away. What builds: tomorrow, the kettle bright silage granary who will thresh me incendiary city. In the above poem, we undoubtedly see my own repetitions of phrase slightly altered by tense-shifts (built, build, builds) and verb-noun transformations (build/buildings, kettle/kettling) that tether the reader more gradually toward the continuity of the gerund verb form and progressive present tense. As we viewed in Wright’s adverbs, this tense progression creates a similarly heightened illeity, a language that necessarily inserts the reader into a position of active being through the collapse – or accelerated lapse – of space and time between author and reader. Rather than an ongoing action happening at the precise moment that the statement is written (as we studied in Ashbery’s “At North Farm”), the reader is led up Emerson’s stairway of surprise through tense progression (past, present, future) before the imperative insertion of the first person in the penultimate line (“who will thresh me”). The result is an imperative urgency not unlike Ashbery or Stevens, where the reader must 79 gradually visualize this landscape in the perpetual present via a language of heightened illeity and otherness. In September 1896, Gertude Stein’s first published piece of writing appeared among the pages of the Harvard Psychological Review. Written in conjunction with her Radcliffe College classmate Leon M. Solomons, and under the guidance of renowned psychologist William James, “Normal Motor Automatism” detailed a series of experiments performed in automatic writing. As the sole participants of the study, Stein and Solomons examined each other “to determine the limits of normal automatism, and, if possible, show them to be really equal to the explanation of the second personality.” 144 This exploration of a subliminal consciousness was perhaps the first of Stein’s efforts to demystify (or, at the very least, re- envision) the act of writing, a cognitive theory of language that later led her to create texts that used words in the service of composition rather than information. I would argue that this exploration of the subliminal creative personality is simply a pursuit of Levinas’ Otherness outside of the charged language of the church, and one where authorial agency is similarly transferred from conscious intention to the (author’s) subconscious sublime. Rather than an expression of authorial intention or artistic skill, Stein and Stevens (among other Moderns) believed that the act of writing still becomes an assertion of the supreme “otherness” of the text itself, one that re-establishes poetic language as the primal human link to the mystical, the divine, or the creative sublime: The imagination never delights twice in the same thing. This is a fundamental principle in poetry. The principle may be more broadly stated, as follows: the imagination never returns or the imagination delights less in the same thing…The poet, in moments of exceptional concentration sometimes experiences an automatism in which the poem writes itself. It seems as if the imagination realized its intention, however obscure its intention may have been, with an instantaneous directness. The obscurity of the intentions of 144 Ibid., 493. 80 the imagination, (the source of poetic urgings), and the accomplishing of the imagination’s will by miraculous shortenings of mental process cannot be very different, in poets… 145 Like her initial work with Solomons, Stein’s follow-up experiments focused on the capability of inattention to act as an anesthetic to consciousness during the writing process. 146 Subjects were compelled to read a story while writing continuously. Material from the story would bleed over into the writing, notably small words that could be written before the mind was in fact able to register that the word had in fact been replicated. Conversely, long words were often partially written, though not necessarily completed before moving on. According to Stein, this portrays the distinction between consciousness received from the mind (i.e., mental consciousness) and consciousness received from the arm (physical consciousness). The moment at which the subject becomes aware of the written act (i.e., “I am writing” vs. “I have written”) is crucial to any semblance of personality or agency toward the creative act. 147 Skeet Communion This ain’t no rifle you said, it’s a shot gun. Forget aiming. Follow the movement and pull. Like go, it is the dismissal. 145 Wallace Stevens, “Three Manuscript Endings for ‘A Collect of Philosophy’” in Wallace Stevens: A Celebration, Robert Buttel and Frank Doggett, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 51. 146 “It is his anaesthesia which makes automatism possible. What in his case is done for him by his disease we had to do by acquiring a control over our attention.” Gertrude Stein, “Cultivated Motor Automatism," American Psychological Review (May 1898): 305. 147 “The feeling of personality – that a given act is done by us – always disappears whenever our knowledge of the act is acquired purely by return sensations…the feeling of effort is not essential to self-consciousness.” Solomons, 511-512. 81 Send them up like wafers, small-loaded paten bursting on the roof- mouth of the sky. There is no blood. Just clay sound bore-bodies, a battue of breadcrumbs, song of the meatbelly: Adoration, adoration we bird you away. Though written well before my current study, the above poem does perform a kind of subconscious negative description akin to Stevens (the ghost’s lack in Large Man, The Snowman’s nothing). Repeatedly, the reader must first establish what is not (“This ain’t no rifle," “forget aiming," “there is no blood”), engaging in the act of creation via elimination or removal. Much like Stevens, the reader is neither immediately assigned a locative role nor provided a list of potential roles to inhabit. Rather, he/she is required to gradually eliminate these perspectives altogether and hover among some otherness that straddles between the second person (“you”), first person plural (“we”), and imperative commands (“pull," “go”) that potentially apply to both subjects. This indeterminate progression toward proximity (i.e., you - we - let’s) thus prompts the reader’s imaginative intimacy and, paradoxically, widens the readerly aperture within the poem: we, together, are spirited away. The essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human. What, if anything, lies beyond the human – God or the gods, the daemon or Nature – is matter for great disagreement. What, if anything, defines the range of the human is scarcely less sure. 148 148 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), cited in Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 117. 82 This awakening of the semantic consciousness should prevent instinctual reactions to language, 149 making otherwise-than-readers less easily manipulated by language that values authorial intent over the power of words themselves. In rejecting our traditional reading habits and accepting our roles as conscious readers who can create our own meanings, we become congregants of a linguistic otherness that glorifies the divinity of language itself. Though Stein wrote often about the artistic endeavor in terms of religion, 150 Solomons was certainly careful to “leave out at once all the alleged phenomena of spiritualism, as being still under dispute and being equally inexplicable on either of the two theories between which it is the purpose of these experiments to decide.” 151 More likely, Stein began to develop a theory of her own in which “there is no demarcation between my conscious and my unconscious self as I am my conscious self in other words there aint no such animal.” 152 Stein’s protestation is thus not explicitly with the supernatural (or “second personality”), but with her inability to see the supernatural as being at all distinguishable from herself. More than liturgical incantations or stylistic Biblical authority, the “automatic” style of Transcendent poets acts as a (re)naming of the world — a return to the primal oratory speech act given to Adam in naming Eden’s animals (Gen. 2:19-20); we attempt to regard objects displaced of any associative significance and bestow them with language. The reader thus becomes an encyclopedia of naming, a dictionary that honors the naming act as much as 149 Dana Cairns Watson, Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2005), 46. 150 see Linda Watts, Rapture Untold: Gender, Mysticism, and the ‘Moment of Recognition’ in Works by Gertrude Stein (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 25. 151 Solomons, 509. 152 Gertrude Stein, “To Kitty or Kate Buss” in Portraits & Prayers; cited in Ulla Dydo, The Language That Rises (Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2003), 435. 83 the Oxford English Dictionary (and, more recently, Google’s Ngram Viewer) 153 honors the naming occurrence to this day. If language is indeed the conduit of knowing, so it becomes the conduit of unknowing, or re-knowing, as well. Re-description and dialogue replace argument as a form of communication, and the poet teaches us to use language not terminally, but originally. The Transcendent poet’s instigation of (not automatic writing, but) automatic reading facilitates a linguistic experience that places the reader in active pursuit of Aristotle’s primary poetic task: to describe – not what has happened, or even what is happening, but – that which is possible. 154 More than anything, these American poets’ methodologies seem starkly conscious of language’s life outside of the human vessel, that language is not a conduit for the author, but the author a conduit for language. True transcendence, then, can only occur in the linguistic act, and the superior ability of language itself to shape the consciousness of our world over that of the author to wield it. 153 The Google Ngram Viewer charts the written occurrence of words and phrases found in over 5.2 million books published between 1500 and the present day. 154 “From what we have said it will be seen that the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse…it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be.” Aristotle, Poetics, Ingram Bywater trans. (New York: Random House, 1954), 234. 84 Bibliography Altieri, Charles. The Art of Twentieth Century American Poetry: Modernism and After. Malden: Blackwell, 2006. Aristotle. 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Hall & Co, 1988. 89 Skeet Communion 90 Table of Contents The Body is Nothing More 92 Anna Annelida 93 Waiting at the Massage Parlor 94 Dream Sequence, California 95 Entrainment 96 Terra Preta 97 Morte Annerire 98 Buoyancy 99 Portrait with Pneumothorax 100 Baptism at Rappahannock 101 Doppler 102 The Tower Shoot 103 Portrait in a Basilar Membrane 104 Apogee For the Automobile 105 Burial 106 The Shepherd’s Hour 107 Tuamotu Harvest 108 At Kiptopeke 109 From The Third Story 110 Decidua 111 Lunula 112 Diseases of Affluence 113 Lemmata 114 San Camp Bernardino 115 Remora Wellbore 116 Tuber 117 February, Seneca Lake 118 Self Portrait Without Dog 119 Skeet Communion 120 Azimuth 121 Guillotine Trees 122 91 For the Sake of Argument 123 Infarction 124 Jujube 125 Marrow 126 Recursion 127 Artichoke 128 Ventroliquism 129 Myopia: The Rood Screen 130 God as Lepidopterist 131 Aria 132 Canis 133 For Helike 134 Chant, Exeunt 135 Postscript to Our Father 136 92 The Body is Nothing More than a weapon a long armful of gun barreled marrow fired from the burled hip joint with the voice and spittle of a dog that has brought back the slow bone. 93 Anna Annelida Guilty worm, I need you every day to tell me that somewhere the world sings and knows nothing of sorrow. That I can refuse to act rapidly not quite the practiced mantis not always penitent to the green. That I am the blue fly on the trowel head moving only after some other movement: a single thread or arc making a freckle in the earth the spermatozoa a leonid, alone and Aha! the exclamation in your discovery 94 Waiting at the Massage Parlor If you’re anything like me you don’t want to be greeted when you arrive the room greets you by being exactly the way you left it like the basic purpose of the photograph is to show you the same scene over and over again the one that you missed in real life. 95 Dream Sequence, California We are in a house that is not our house. We are in a house that is not our house but the husk of a house that we broke into as kids. The broke-down carriage house at the end of the road with the silo open to the sky. There is a silo in the living room. Rather, the silo is our living room. There is a mosaic floor of rectangular wooden slots that our parents have been assembling by hand. The floor is finished. Finished except for the spot where the dinner table goes. My mother is still sweeping up pieces from the floor’s assemblage. My father moves along the walls strategically flicking switches for heat and light. I begin to flick every switch I can find, because I want to help. When he asks me why, I tell him because you have to turn something on to know if it is working. Why not leave them all on, I say, in case they’re all connected. In case they only work in pairs. He tells me this is costly. He tells me he won’t be here soon. He tells me he won’t be leaving instructions for switches. No schematics for what’s wired to what. My dog breaks into the mini-fridge, steals the Kraft Mexican cheese blend of cheddar & jack, refuses to listen until tackled. I know he’s being bad because somewhere, I’ve been gone. My sister’s pug makes a terrible sound when his tongue gets stuck in the dustbuster where he has been ferreting for dental floss. It’s alright, she says, we’ve seen this before. At the dog park. My grandmother arrives with gifts for everyone. She apologizes for not bringing beers. She feels that we should have some. It’s time for everyone to change into their Christmas clothes. Mine are in the next room, lying in the dark underneath the Christmas tree. My mother tells me to put them on because they are taking up too much space on the floor. 96 Entrainment Beneath the bonded rugs all silk and chores and jute there’s a single hoofprint on the floorboard though it’s unclear whether it came before or after the flooring, if you brought all of Indiana inside for a quick hoofing, the old stamp and go. You tell me, check in every once in a while. Ask yourself, am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing. This is pacing, this is rectifier, this biased locomotion: the door. This is movement without knowing you’re moving. You be the farrier. I’ll be the shoe-snug horn. 97 Terra Preta What is it that makes us imagine that we like being out in the open when all we really want is to be caged, sufficiently? It isn’t the ground dwelling part that we fear it’s the lag time the whole-form of dormancy. Imagine yourself immediately after death nourishing your left loved-ones, hands all over you wrists passing over you daily scrubbing you from their hands as you sluice down the drain. Everyone shivers at the thought of the change we want in death: chum bucket over the rail tilled ashes in the garden 98 Morte Annerire As for the Bubo, burn it with gold or iron. Just iron, then, and cover with cabbage stalks and a quartered pigeon. As for the wheals, there being quite a few, dark hemorrhages, let them be smothered outright with an ointment of turpentine and poison ivy leaves, but lacking the onion, feces, crushed glass and mustard seed; let these be withheld. Viz. Alternatively to the treatment with iron, a bird may call to apply the cabbage. He is a doctor and healer of wheals. The quaranta giorni will stop the hemorrhaging, forty days of seclusion and anointment. Dying quietly, you will never leave without the fear of curfew sounds, like glass, like tinkling of becchini’s ankle bells. 99 Buoyancy What is flashing washes away the light by fixing the text on a single point. We remove the preposition the limb to save the man and know remorse. What is buoyed moves toward the relevant forgets the tangential stream of stops. Which came first The buoy or the bell Di-di-dah-dah-di-dit. On the horizon there is another raft of a word that is more fun to say than buoy. Close your mouth and shout it to me with both of your hands. Dah-di-dah-di-dah-dah one for the candlestick one for the dark. 100 Portrait with Pneumothorax “the teacher in the London convent who when I produced "I amn’t" in the classroom turned and said -- "you’re not in Ireland now." ~ Eavan Boland, “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951” Just a bit of blighted air caught somewhere over the Celtic Sea: A bleb, small bulla, English gas in holding cells, the pleural spaces empty. It’s those fags, mother said, all those cigarettes she hates; runs in the women, father insisted, and not the speech of Joyce, and Pearse, or Yeats. Níl mise Éire inniu here they cut beneath my breasts. Today I am not Ireland epidural, x-ray the dark side of the chest. 101 Baptism at Rappahannock After Robert Hass Draw the darkening circle of something wet and resting. A stern-footed egret toeing the live, bloated mass of a red eft, the swift dusting-off of concentrated pitch from the second atom. Make sure that the atom is dually sided. Hum out loud early this morning but out of your eyes, like an enemy with the shallow bowls of pleasure, a brush altogether content. Forget how, moving that way, nothing crystallizes: vanity, ash, nail, men, me or the others. Drape your large knees over your belly, a tender boredom from their weight, as a fullness from bread. Enter your adult sea, littered with the weather And green copper watering cans. We are required to do like this. Loathing, they say, because location is scattered by abrupt densities. Be different for him, and forget nothing. The way his mind arranged his feet, the idea of his mother lifting him, how he awoke. There are years where the mind is as burnished as sound, seconds that are the bad thought arrested. Some ferocity, these dusks and daybreaks pinging droplet, droplet, droplet. 102 Doppler “About the colored light of double stars and some other stars of the sky” The observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer. A ship meets waves at a faster rate when sailing against the waves than when sailing along with them. The same goes for sound and light. A white star receding with progressive speed would successively turn to green, blue, violet, and invisible. A white star approaching with progressive speed would turn to yellow, orange, red, and invisible, the so-called new and missing stars, all colors of the rainbow, disappearing continuously. As the star moves toward the Earth, the light waves coming from it are compressed and shifted toward the blue. Their loss is their disappearance. So must the starry sky appear of each individual us. No more is heard to justify. 103 The Tower Shoot Soft, slight, patient, mute, and then he hears them, the feet of Te Whiro leading to the kill. This darkness can go now that the mind has found its false claim to insignificant blood. Now he moves with green under a lattice of bristled pines and splintering blinds of chlorophyll, hunting for something live, something foul. He takes twelve in flight, every one a male, and each shot from behind, for the breasts make the most tender meat. There the brief second later when the tiny guilts bubble upward, Satan, Judas, work, lust, history, like the breathing in one’s skull whispering: mercy– “These fillings beneath the boots”–a lightness he names Lucifer, a lightness he names Te Whiro, how their palms come stalking to sap his soul before it is just, light and free, his shouldered weapon barely cocked to the emerald shocked neck down when a pheasant wings aloft: a muscled jewel recoiling from the plumage of the wood, the stunning horror of stilled life. 104 Portrait in a Basilar Membrane The foghorn’s only job is to blurt one name across the water. Its reason is the sonority. Your name flounders in one decibel. An animal, wearing the skins of other animals, calling in tongues and translations that are only the harmonic equivalents of your full name. There is not always a response. Sometimes it is only you, coming back and proclaiming the same frequency again and again. It’s patterns, really: The raked, rapid government of a slatted field; the sine wave coming upon itself in an unfolding promise. I approach from the left, the higher left, and leave you low and to the right. Which axis did you think you were? Or perhaps you expected me longitudinally – ranging to you by degrees. Here then: You have become my seasonal proportionality, my directional vice. I take you from the East. 105 Apogee For the Automobile I’ve never killed anything that hasn’t run away to die but turning and turning in the widening cloverleaf the small blip of roadkill is the tree falling without a sound in Los Angeles, is every motorcycle runnelling past that flicks a frequency is that lick-black water shucking away from the body. 106 Burial Your voice will not stay. It will slide from your teeth outward, transfixing the wet earth like a slow sword, spreading into a space for itself. And from the small jewel of your back, that weighty arch of nerves, will shoot a tree for every vertebrae, an orchard’s roots around the whitening bones. You will unfold yourself as pages of the book, like so much breath upon the water. Did you think it mattered, box or breeze? Did you think that they could ever shut you in? 107 The Shepherd’s Hour In the waist-high toewaters beyond the gorse, below the ridging sands, you will yield once to the prodding current when Tangiwha demands payment for your footing: even laughter, its echoes can be well spent. Still, you cannot stay here: the kelp-shroud’s leather strands hide green-lipped shells, oysters smirking proud and coyer clams. The mussel’s slender hips, not one inch wide, exposed to each foot callus; and the water clear as the tide resists the murk in hoarded breath. You come infected with the deftness, an angel of wrists and the twine of shoulders, forgetting the undertow, your back a shirt of numbered molting skin, digging, as if mad for a fat shell in the bright pane of pools, and whispering Come, Matua. Come on. Unearth me now. 108 Tuamotu Harvest In Manihi, palms are fidgeting. The browned, warbling boys are silent, and in boats, music is luffing. The breeze is pecking every window and making a raucous with the laundry. In this hour of the shriveled algaes, the nitrogen begins its slow dance, the deep narcotic alchemies. They will not stop arriving, these wheeling limbs beneath the sea, and ear- logged men will still come down to reassemble shards of sun. Here they will write their diagnoses: The last breath is almost soundless, swift like the turtle’s gasp; the next-to-last breath is exhaled, is outward with the outward sea; the third-last breath is swallowed, an oyster and an icicle in one. My boat has neither air nor fire, my men have large lungs the shape of Africa. When day comes down, the sea hikes up a skirt of grey and green, and later the sun in the roundwood current screams like a saltwater pearl. 109 At Kiptopeke Off islands thatched with spartina, floating skate eggs carry their taut blanket corners, black stretcher and bandage. Carried shoreward, they hyphenate the beaches, fearing the fiddlers, swimming windward over oyster beds. These were the first who sought the good shallows for dying, to be buoyant, flourish, and slacken all lines. Deny, fisherman, that you ferried the broken shells to these creeks of nesting osprey, south of the great concrete ships, punctuating the Chesapeake depth, the long inland ellipse. You kept none out of apathy, calved the marshes with water laid to water: Starved from half-drawn breaths, too proud to share with neighbors, to raise a daughter. You layer the skins of the living. How wasteful: with circles of years, the ringing of bells. In slumping sands the loggerhead turtles beach at prop-boat crossings, pectorals heaving, while a young man reels a drum from his net, imperfect, heavy as the great white bird calling its name above the waters: Regret. Regret. Regret. 110 From The Third Story look she said the trees have opened up there are lights where the city is and oh there are mountains I never knew 111 Decidua after Donald Justice The falling leaf is never notable. Its purpose, seasonal: unfinished, an uprooted tooth, the vascular cinch. So long as they decide, we are comfortable. Antlers too, are tender. They tend to fall late, marcescent. That is the second truth. The first was the wound of your mother. It sang and sang so as to clean the walls. Pealing, the sonic chamber tuned aloft. We are warned of what can never happen. We are shown nothing of the furling ash. We are told and told of nothing but the moth. We have it here, the hollow squatting barren. As we step back, the russet wings unlatch. 112 Lunula little moon, lunula. half a moon, lament. the dial in your eye is quick and occasionally violent. salute, salute along the vein go back and kill it better. the arcing disks on fingernails white walls of half a prayer. pray, pray, lunula for ballast and for lightning: two hands full a god who’s good and north of everything. 113 Diseases of Affluence or Why I am Allergic to Soap It is 1952. There is a young woman kneeling on the bathroom floor. She is bathing her first-born son. There are paper sunflowers on the walls. The order for cleaning another body, she assumes, is the same that she uses for cleaning her own. Some parts come before the others. Grasp soap, chest first, then abdomen. The gastrointestinal tract of a normal fetus is sterile. The wallflowers above her have no stems. She washes his genitals from the front, then the front of his legs, his feet. On the back of the toilet, a blue tissue plumes upward from a sagging fabric chimney. After vaginal delivery, a mother’s feces populates the infant’s gut with bacteria. Every third sunflower on the wall is surrounded by bees. The woman envisions vaginal birth as something messy. She moves up the back of the child’s legs, his backside, scrubs his genitals from the rear. The shag rug on the floor beneath her hugs the base of the porcelain. Leaning forward, the tub’s edge is cold against the stitches in her belly. She dabs his back, arms, and armpits. For Caesarean infants, the first vector for microbial transfer is not the mother; rather, there are the nurses, other infants, the surrounding air. The natural development of gut flora may be delayed for over 6 months. Outside the window, real sunflowers move affirmatively in the garden breeze. Only their nodding heads are visible above the sill. The mother washes her son’s neck last, and his head. The face is difficult; she is careful around the ears and the eyes. She has never washed a face other than her own. The heads of the sunflowers peek over the yellow garden wall at passing cars. Below, a bright bird plucks a small, moist worm from the soil. The dripping boy, my father, is wrapped in a yellow bath sheet. On a table in the next room, a bouquet of sunflowers pushes outward in a glass vase lined with cellophane. Cradling her son, my grandmother lifts her breast over the edge of her robe, her areola the color and shape of a dark stigma. The room is full of flowers, my father’s lips are petals. She winces lightly as her nipple meets with the child’s gum-veiled teeth. 114 Lemmata They built the kettle out in the field an indentation They build the kettle out of the field meaning peapod, caught in a kernal of installation. They are buildings kettling fodder that fire the packing weight away. What builds: tomorrow, the kettle bright silage granary who will thresh me incendiary city. 115 San Camp Bernardino just sun-up now and barely easier to tell that the width of the fountain has nothing to do with its height there is a bright hive sixty feet overhead with plenty of wick and plenty of oil and I’ll want to remember what it’s like to be on fire. The ashes scuffing against my eyebones in their white, white shoes. 116 Remora Wellbore Everything that has ever been an animal understands death: take the venus flytrap, take the praying mantis, take the nodding donkeys in the Lost Hills Oil Field of Kern County, California. What to name the soup digger: call it horsehead sucker, call it pumpjack grasshopper, call it the thirsty thirsty bird. You, prime mover, you are only a piston reciprocating away the middleground, only ever the knife cleaning the knife. 117 Tuber Peeling the potato skins –scuppering the innards, shelling the vitamins – leaves more and more of guts, and stronger chins of russet curling in your hand surer and surer, the blade end to end, the dexterous ego, lengthened. 118 February, Seneca Lake All I want is to walk across this little power, to join the saintliness of leaving a road upon the waters. There, in the center, I could listen for the old song: panting whisper of oars, a hull’s iron tongue. Lakes, harbors, rivers barter winter’s thousand gowns from a blue bed. They only offer death, elaborate death. Just think, Seneca speaks, this could be your only shadow. Your skin like a weak peach: my gathered chrysalis, immense marrow. 119 Self Portrait Without Dog This was never quite was it? how we imagined we’d get old. But it’s here un-balsamed sight the days left still No sonnet. No play-fire. No soul. 120 Skeet Communion This ain’t no rifle you said, it’s a shot gun. Forget aiming. Follow the movement and pull. Like go, it is the dismissal. Send them up like wafers, small-loaded paten bursting on the roof- mouth of the sky. There is no blood. Just clay sound bore-bodies, a battue of breadcrumbs, song of the meatbelly: Adoration, adoration we bird you away. 121 Azimuth Things taller than us decide the light we know. We stand something upward and the westerly ground has no morning sun: the good day lost in shadow. There is eastern ground that will never know any burning alteration: no halted evening glow. The ember ready we move like wicks prontissima, allegro. As long as the stander stands things taller than us decide the light we know. 122 Guillotine Trees Ten till on a Tuesday beech trees spread up with limbs like scaffolded axes overlords of the straight line of street hoods. There is only potential in the passenger. Without one, we’re just curbed bracts cutting a little piece of the lord’s undying light, sharded into the kinetic queue: a place to put things when we’re not putting ourselves inside of them. 123 For the Sake of Argument We are pouncing out the fire through the memorialized slats of your teeth. Mammoth balloon, there will be no short graces muttered from this table – only the bracing felt-strewn dawn of a bachelor’s aces. They burr and burr at you. You move through this city so flawlessly. Aren’t you still growing still sped? I’m laying down the bars. Balancing the cairns. Speaking in sentences that shrug up their shoulders like the trees do here. Buy me bananas. A whole, whole bunch. There was nothing weightless about it. Only the charming abscess of an over-watered succulent. And you never remember them till they’re done: something washed and waiting, the article hung out to stay exactly the way it is. 124 Infarction To my grandfather Before the one plated artery there is a door of bone outlined in those dire sodiums and if you are on the lipid errand don’t stop here be reasonable there are enough purled dressings to make this heart a fens with something bright in the water and so much gravity stuck in the strange tread of your mouth that what you said after the knock was only it is I, enzyme, and there is not enough house for you. 125 Jujube The tree a red date: thorny branches, leaves shiny green: ovate, acute, and a finely toothed margin. Flowers five wide and fruit, eventually wrinkled with the consistency and taste of an apple. Here I hold your last beckoning in my mouth where the edible oval of your body lies barely a clingstone: small drupe. 126 Marrow We want to back it all up freeze that shored up chalk of our bodies and slice off the cross sections to get to the good stuff: little radial bone-stars spun out of the galaxies of flesh. We might continue here transmute the word fracture into fractal and talk about the later bone-stars: white dwarves of your fingernails black holes of your eardrums even the red giant of your heart. Only these themselves are not stars but gravity just the appearance of all that vacated light and the effect of what is not upon what is. We can’t swear anything away. We can’t prove that they are still hanging still above the back-toweled clouds. 127 Recursion or The Human Gnomon Project It is forty-nine years from this morning. An aging man is fumbling with the silverware in his hands. At the table setting in front of him, he moves the little fork outside of the big fork. In the next room, there is a glass bowl filled with dough. Thrust in its center, a rubber spatula stands straight upward. At the kitchen countertop, his daughter’s daughters press shapes into the dough. The boy-shapes are only small versions of the man-shape, the girl shapes only little women. In Geometry, a gnomon is a shape formed by removing an exact, smaller version from the corner of itself. The man scratches his head and hops the little fork inside of the big fork. One of the girls lays a man-shape onto the corner of a baking sheet. Behind her on the tile backsplash are labeled sketches of herbs: rosemary, thyme, fennel, mint. One over the stove that declares “medoc”, and nothing else. The man begins to set a place to his right, this time beginning with the knife. Three cookies are added to the sheet: one in each direction. Their arrangement is not linear, but square. Two cookies by two cookies. The man begins to set a place to his left, omitting the forks entirely. In mathematics, a gnomon is the piece needed to transform a figurate shape into the next bigger shape of its kind. The daughter adds five more cookies, one to every end and a single one to the corner. Three cookies by three cookies, square. Walking around the table, the man lays each small fork atop each big fork in fluid arches. He stacks the spoons in concentric beds. The daughter gently drapes the dough outline of the man-shape over the boy cookie, lays the woman’s intaglio over the small girl’s relief. Outside, a sundial sits blanketed in snow. 128 Artichoke after Sappho’s Fragment 4 Your heart layers itself absolutely, but I wonder if mine can – Think of the leaves, how their soft detachment would be for me: no deckled hollow to shine in answer – just this face, drawn-out and hungry; bruised, having been stained by the weight of your body. 129 Ventroliquism Darkness blinking the shut eyes of necromancy assuaging their way into your pickled wicks and candled stubs of your thumbs. You fidget knitting them all out rotting knots or smoothed tombs of the wipe-past heart. Touch of glances altogether over even before they start. 130 Myopia: The Rood Screen I. Nave Watch Him, the bright iris in the window, two large, dilated palms orbiting the sill. Here He enters into my field, His pupil, and for hours I have been practicing how to keep Him in my peripheral. Now for candor, to advance, kneel dark within the retina, and suffocate, test the white sclera’s ripe imperfection, a stigmata, an altar. II. Chancel Now entering the pit, sharp central fovea, the clerics surround me in colorful clothes (their rods, their robes, and their cones – bifocals): Saints of acuity, Ansler and Snellen, past these I find clearing, blind accommodation, Maria, Jesu; lacrima, lacrima, lacrima. 131 God as Lepidopterist with people Fill the room archangels the aurelian that they are all blond Act surprised and honest that there is no radiance Know this because they tell you their birthdays or whatever kind of days Archangels enter the world upon within wings and they all land in October like paneled stations They are sculpture glacial martyrs of disorder Michael with an apple leaf pinned to his forelock Slaps you on the back with his wing and replacing the marsh with featherless ardor he says Hey man it’s my birthday while Gabriel leans in the corner eating a banana with a sticker saying I was raised by The cormorant like a consonant only wishing for some curved violence Mother nature my own tailstock this tool-rest That dead-center Azrael still besetting the lathe of our necks. 132 Aria It’s not your voice that I want. I’m sick of syllables. It’s the sounds you make once you’ve emptied your limit of words: a spent ink cartridge, a hollow-throated gaping fish, a broken woodwind. Tell me your name without using your lips. But first stop talking to me. I want to know what it sounds like when you exhale. 133 Canis The dog’s thigh, rearing spooned piling, tells the impulse and the action and the joy of it. Pedigrees rise, they are keepers, Borzoi guard of lithe grey speed, the Mastiff: jowls. To breed – we, rovers of their purity, who choose, from milk-toothed puppyhood, the bitch and sire; whose whelp will classify as Spitz. What terrier routs your vermin? Humanity’s? Retrievers of fault, the after-angels, Kerberos, Anubis, come wearing mantles: flare of merle, blooming fawn, piebald, brindle. And you that die these deaths, the field trial, feel their dew claws just behind the neck, the withers, pawing out your sins: pastern of the shepherds. 134 For Helike Now that the settlement is over Now that the broken border Now that the archaic structure so like the salted body pushes forward, Emmanuel, the florist, rewards himself. He decides what grows after the water: he shall overflow and go over he shall reach even to the neck with flowers, with auroras, the singular purple polishing ornaments, with order. What comes after catastrophe, he says, is precious because there are no names for backwards corollaries the negative constellations the wagon, the plow, the dipper, the door: great Ursa there, the revolving bear Helike, formerly, because it turns around the pole. Oh, Emmanuel! You are a brave little musket ball hurtling yourself, rushing forward as the confident artist marks the solstice of our imagination, and explains that whatever does live here must remain, must also stay must never cease to be. Try telling that to the dormant corset of the sun wrapping its slatted arms around the world, longitudinally: the day this one cylindrical day shaken free. 135 Chant, Exeunt ask me to sing language and I will still want music here you can use this delicate knife to produce the blues stop a moment could you do it over languid as a honey fiddle & sweet like weak sleep but let love go it only wants to swim with our smooth white shadows. 136 Postscript to Our Father After Catullus I am already living inside your love. The old man still rummages at the door as I toss him pennies to go away. It is still evening. Give me one winter and we’ll never leave the house: one kiss at any hour, each day, or every hour of any day, and each hour of every day. Throw them at me when I am too old to count.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Grace, Stewart R. (author)

Core Title An otherness inside us: complicity & transcendence from Whitman to Wright

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 02/23/2015

Defense Date 02/02/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Dickinson,OAI-PMH Harvest,phenomenology,Poetry,Stevens,transcendental,transcendentalism,Whitman,Wright

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Irwin, Mark (committee chair), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member), Ticheli, Frank (committee member)

Creator Email sgrace@usc.edu,stewgrace@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-536338

Unique identifier UC11298749

Identifier etd-GraceStewa-3204.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-536338 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-GraceStewa-3204.pdf

Dmrecord 536338

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Grace, Stewart R.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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