“Blood” may only be used for its rhyming with “mud,” as Viktor Shklovsky says. We have no choice but to acknowledge the artificiality of our means, the construct of language, the artifice of any poem as a series of literary devices. Yet what we must acknowledge we must also override, we must destabilize and hoist the ironized bits of the dismembered literary corpses, the literary devices we’ve sown together, into the thunderstorm and sometimes LIGHTNING the monster lives! When I cut myself, it’s not a construct that bleeds.
This poststructuralist critique has lent vitality to poetry that tends to counter and consume it, has expanded modes of expressivity beyond the descriptive/image driven and rational discursive through a suspicion of habituated poetic modes of expression and of the shaping of both worldly and aesthetic experience. The finishing off of literature has always been a great help to literature. Mallarmé wrote a poem to end all poems with “A Throw of the Dice,” as if any single instance of chance could abolish chance. Whitman unleashed a virus that threatened to make everything a Whitman poem, or at least a part of the Whitman Sampler. Even as equivocating a poet as John Ashbery, through the prolific and tangential profusion of his work, seemed for a time to be threatening to destroy the distinction between what was and wasn’t poetry. (There is no more exquisite, lively, and welcoming body of work in poetry than what Ashbery continues to give us, none more world enlarging.) Poetry always needs more fuel, different fuel. For every time poetry has consumed itself, it has managed to turn up elsewhere, incendiary, primitive, unable to be snuffed out. The monster lives!
As much as by way of claims of power, poetry continues to ignite because of its renewed humiliation and reductions, the stripping of its armor (the first thing Apollo did to Patroklos when Patroklos thought he was really hot shit was knock his helmet off). In witnessing its own burial, poetry chafes up its primary spark, its basic principles and drives, its basic and fundamental centrality to the human dilemma, both in representing it as subject but also as site from which poetry comes, its occasion. Poetry is a manifestation of the spirit as it triangulates itself through the desires and limitations of meat, meditative inklings of immortality, and the play in the manipulation of aestheticized materials. It forgets about itself as code making, has the supreme confidence of handling elemental fuels. The word then is not only fit referent but also magical embodiment of the thing, the word takes its flesh from the world. Transubstantiation. The names of the dead are not to be trifled with. Forgiveness is asked for. And power. And self. We have arrived at the primitive.
Before we became obligated only to our minds, we were obligated to the world, its bodied conception and celebration and morning. Our poems are what the gods couldn’t make without going through us. We were answering back, not making codes, not manipulating literary devices, but offering thanks and accusation, mimicries of fundamental mysteries, the simplicities of urges that are always with us in the language of the creature, experience, weather. Our poetry is our haunting and adventure.
“Say you think life is trembling,” wrote Willem de Kooning of an idea he picked up in Kierkegaard. “Pretty soon everything trembles. Raphael trembles. Poussin trembles.” De Kooning’s point is that it doesn’t matter so much what you think as you think it with a conviction that arises from the closely observed and considered world itself. I’m asking you here to consider poetry that is unhindered by doubt (while acknowledging that doubt can begin the inspiration toward liberation), a poetry that arises out of recklessness and is composed of convictions of first needs, first minds, of truth in language arising from the active impulse of emotion, moving through the calculations of the rational toward irrational detonation.
By the primitive I mean exploration of primary human dilemmas, the assertion of the monstrous if need be, the instinctual, visceral, sexual, rogue, absurd, sometimes derangement as a form of innocence. Primary even in afterness. Not ironic.
“It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.” —Wallace Stevens
I ask you as a poet, reader, to always remember your first urges, why you wrote your first poem. Everyone is a wonderful poet up until the third grade. I saw it when I taught as a poet in the schools. The sublime coincides with the ridiculous, babble with referent, the witnessed phenomena with the combustion of name in song of dazzling appeal, of play. The alphabet presents itself as an unsolvable mystery to be frolicked in. Words themselves create reality through music and incantation: “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.” The profligacies of rhyme, its irrationalities bring forth new realities. The world arises from naming and naming itself is a product of hilarity, invention, fortuitous accident, the elsewhere and elsewhat and elsewho, the imagination. So too darkness, the sense of desertion, profound isolation, inadequacy, that you will never be loved enough no not ever, connect us to the primary wellsprings of poetry as children. Same as now.
Having a conversation with a couple of dreary poets a while back, I lamented how little the imagination is referred to in discussions of the merits of poetry and one said she felt the imagination played no part in her work because she certainly wouldn’t want it thought of as imaginary. “Oh Imagination,” proclaims Wordsworth in The Prelude after crossing the Alps but missing the peak, the peak experience in fog. The imagination plays as much a part in the creation of reality as it does in the confections of the false; “the whims of imagination . . . alone [cause] real things” (Breton). It is what we appeal to and rely on when our empirical data has proved insufficient to the case. THE HIGHEST ACCOMPLISHMENT OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE IMAGINATION AND THE HIGHEST ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE IMAGINATION IS EMPATHY and the ability to love, and if you don’t think that takes a profound part in the creation of the world, please close this book right now.
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Excerpted from The Art of Recklessness with permission of the publisher, Graywolf Press.
