Some ideas for an "other shore" poetics: reading Samperi's "The Prefiguration"

Frank Samperi

passes over stream
into
dream
other life
pauses
water
other shore (sanza mezzo)         

To be saved I must
slip away from the moderns (The Prefiguration)

It is better, I mean, to be here,
   Where the mind can act
   And make light where there is none,

Than with the crowd, whose mouth defies the sun.
   No I can never go; it is dark beyond my gate;
   And my mind could not live out there (The Prefiguaration)

Why hasn't the abject particling of Language poetry today really gotten anybody's attention? Silliman who's the neoned eye of contemporary America & who likes to post Occupy protesters, of course, will never see as poet Samperi does,"noticing less in front/than behind" (Infinitesimals). Like leftist scholars watching the action from their hotel windows.The transfigurative potential of work, i.e. the sense that it's been done & yet is perpetually nearing the poet's ear, "as if that time [of sitting, journeying, writing] were without reference to another time far back or up ahead" ("Morning and Evening"), seems to have been lost on America's most influential avant (ironically enough!). John Martone certainly knows that nearing presence as if Samperi "stood behind me, looking over my shoulder." Presence felt as breath & spirit. Of transfigurative poetry it can be said (what can never be said of Language poetry),  

The moment you looked into a pool to see heaven was
the moment you in heaven saw a man looking into a pool
to see heaven—("Morning and Evening")

Silliman and Samperi can't ever have been in the same city, can they? They were both reflecting on language at about the same time, weren't they? Every place poet Samperi passes equals the angel in the park, which is to say that a thing seen in a state of motion will reveal its own true nature ("Crystals"). In a kind of Marxian equation we can say the angel is the poem's true "value-form", but not ,of course, til its physical form (the "matter language") has been shucked: here Dante's being stood not on his head but on his poet laurels. It's the spirit of a poetry that we want but without the period associations with the great Florentine. With single-minded devotion to one seer, one late medieval work, Samperi, by his Bronx window, writes angels, old men, the homeless: Samperi who's occupied the park a long time ago & ridden the bus long before the author of Ketjak.

Towards the ideal (goal) of an "other shore" poetics I'll reflect on some exemplars culled from my reading of The Prefiguration, the first in Samperi's celebrated three-volume work comprising of The Prefiguration, Quadrifariam and Lumen Gloriae. By exemplar I mean a distinctive principle of verse construction inspired & guided by the primary Dantean archetype, and capable of its own Commedia journey. In exemplars matters of relation, direction & backwards and forwards motion (any "commotional" concept like these) are irrelevant. As in a collective memory anything able to be 'transfigured' is revealed in poetic forms (or shadows or "companionships" or "confrontations", etc) only: of light, wind, falling birds, almost always randomly given and, again, part of poet Samperi's daily journeys. Though to be found in these only a syntax can be learned and above all an integrity that leaves the poet with no real audience in this world ("Morning and Evening") and a courage to write honestly, since he's bound for the "other shore".

I admit I've carved Language opposition firmly in stone, with Silliman mentioned often as he's done the most to hide the "other shore" from view. The Sentence is, to begin with, a fake abstraction "non solum quantum ad formam, sed etiam quantum ad materiam" ("Morning and Evening"), & worth the pains of disavowing. Any poetical principle that's been accepted by decades of followers as a chose jugée will necessarily occult and denigrate the real. As an object of material consumption only it's been tragically cut adrift from the spiritual with which alone the poem can form community, a neighbourhood, park. The poet reciting the alphabet in the streets is bound to be ignored. And all the poet-academics huddled around their grand piano who think the Sentence, scribbled in the margins, is an essence-grasping thing will also be ignored. Again Aquinas, "in rebus quidem corporalibus apparet quod res visa non potest esse in vidente per suam essentiam".

The mistake, in other words, is to look for the "multiplicity of individuals in a single species":  the sea instead of shorelines gesturing continually towards it, as poet Samperi will say. The sea is at times nothing but ice ("Ferns"). There's too much thought (and the logic of poetry can't do without its pounding negatives), & not enough movement. It's also why Wallace Stevens got it wrong: lakes are never more reasonable than oceans. In short, remove the individual, the Poet, lyrical "I" (whatever), and the man, poet or work, however coerced, will remain eternally perpendicular to the world ("Morning and Evening"). The matter & form of the Sentence, without the true glorified body of the world, won't appear different from anything else & that is the poorest way to get along with angels:

If there's longing for confraternity with the angels, then
every movement a man makes to establish such is a move-
ment toward specific difference ("Morning and Evening")

I once said, for example, that a Watten line, given in many Google translations at once, is suddenly nowhere to be found. Extinction always results from decontextualization. And because something dead like a Watten verse doesn't move— perhaps only an academic's circularity at best— journey is out of the question. Exclusion from the Commedia is another terrible result of decontextualization work. Samperi's poem, on the other hand, is the Gift ("Morning and Evening").

So the "other shore" poetics is, at a literal level, a "Cry out to the angels above the city—"a type of invocation or representation certainly of the misery of quotidian existence ("Morning and Evening") but, more crucially, a figural balance between poets and the world. Echoing Levinas poet Samperi speaks of the "face to face" encounter, vision sanza mezzo, one where not even poetry can ever be reduced to an approach ("Crystals"). With Levinasian ethics comes a care for the other the experimentalists have all but trashed. Why would Watten not want to be properly "prefigured" in the first place and not recognized as a transmitter of vital literary culture? Do Watten & Samperi not live in the same world? Through successive generations of readers—not reasoners!— the 'figural' is always destined to appear as a 'prefiguration': and it's angels who gesture the most assiduously towards a world. Subserving the marketplace appetite (as poetry theorists & practitioners do) is a living death equal to the State ("Crystals"), as if we were talking about cultural bureaucracy. And the fate that awaits the poet playing with linguistics can be particularly bad: the most incoherent type of logomachy imaginable.

Below are found some ideas (intimations, perhaps) for an "other shore" poetics gathered together as a lengthening set of recommendations,meant not so much as a curative as restorative: the restoration of something like a world lost in pernicious Language simulacra. They're also referred to as exemplars. I offer, after poet Samperi, only the singular since it alone is the giver of calm and only a "multiplication of species" sings a world that's been stolen from us. To develop the singular into full-blown exposition, however, would be to bring it within earshot of the next generation of Samperi readers: never quite near enough to be felt per suam essentiam but definitely close to the ear.

1. Substitute Commedia for langue: the angel's idealized rhymes for abject particling. The torqued heave of creation itself is sufficient;

2. shed the poetry body to free the seer. Language poets who can't shed the poem necessarily resort to "commodity fetishism";

3. restore the rich tenant of Form/Song, who goes by many names, Dolores, Claudia ("Ferns"), & a child's moon repeated over and over ("Morning and Evening"), the forsythia of conjugal love ("So Close");

4. reading is a type of wing beat: no, reading like the I walking past the El is pure wing beat;

5. the tercet in Dante is certainly an Infinitesimal;

6. the Infinitesimals on rag paper become the new minimalism (interchangeable with verse, sura, sutra, etc), not the"stripped down poetics of Cid Corman" Silliman thinks it is;

7. poetics is never the political but simple poverty or life before God,  the feeling useless, taking the bus home, walking over a "dried stream" ("Branches"), alone;

8. spirit is attentive to rivers and beyond river-banks to the "other shore", like the I riding. In the river the impetus is to go forward. As both Chesterton and poet Samperi wish to say, only the dead can be a complete "afterthought";

9. in Samperi the pigeons flash like the angel at composition. Let's face it, Armantrout, Watten would probably self-consume trying;

10. the Sentence is always "a mean reflective position" ("Morning and Evening") and is why the poem must be shed. I rather like poet Samperi's reducing contemporary poetics to a "Unitary Field Theory" that misses shorelines altogether, everyone being usually too sea-avid. When will they perceive, "Unde perfectio naturae angelicae requirit multiplicationem specierum, non autem multiplicationem individuarum in una specie."

11. talk of failure's forbidden here ("Of Light");

12. in langue metaphor is a trap (Infinitesimals), to be shucked like the poem;

13. like the skop who sings of dead warrior-princes set adrift sings poet Samperi;

14. every poem is a "chipped virgin" or a broken Cupid's head ("Song Book"): the ones protesters haven't taken outside yet and smashed in the streets. The soft self-effacing voice of the "chipped virgin", in particular, imitated by poet Samperi;

15. don't ape the avants, not even Dante or Samperi: "ape Buddha" ("Song Book");

16. number your symbols: eight is for birds, for example;

17. You and I are chief religio-poetic signifiers, yes, as meaning they refer to the You that I essentially am;

18. the soul's limping body ("Of Light");

19. lights and shadows blossom or spring like memory, a fluttering;

20. "whenever it is possible to integrate two separate elements into a single larger element by imagining them as sharing a common participant, the reader will do so" (Ron Silliman)
                                             OR
"If a work is primarily addressed to God, then it follows that the audience isn't essential—in fact, a period that places the movement in the audience whose referential is the standard that impedes draws to itself a principle whose point is finally to exclude totally: therefore, it is right to say that no identification can be telically intended when a work is so primarily addressed." (poet Frank Samperi).

I like how 'telos' tragically cancels the Silliman reader here;

21. to know is to know "angelically" ("Morning and Evening"), every time;

22. the sentence is a Prefiguration, & not the other way round ("Morning and Evening"), sometimes street-dependent (as in the case of a man), sometimes river-dependent (as in the case of an angel);

23. beyond the freight yard is death, & dead leaves;

24. every flame is dying to drop like snow: a kind of buried memory at work. Anything as vital as this will have to await John Martone;

25. memory as a falling of birds ("Branches")—ah!;

26. between every light & shadow a boy falls, the place marked by flowers;

27. see dying as an image of moon-lit hands ("Ferns");

28. some men go about their business, some go to their sorrow ("Morning and Evening");

29. a "new heaven and a new earth": imagine that ("Crystals")!

30. memoria: che miseria!

31. the poet (after Samperi) learns to scan noise;

32. "Neither to sow nor to reap—" ("Morning and Evening")

33. Sunset Debris, for all its questioning, never gives us rows of drunken, feculent images;

34. can the author of Ketjak ever "see beyond" the drunks lying on the street, which means "to gather them up and feed them"? ("Morning and Evening");

35. only in poet Samperi's work do you know where commentary ends & poetry begins.