My indebtedness to a few haiku spirits

I've lately begun to see the terrible tragedies in Japan as a metaphor for that country's greatest cultural legacy: haiku. Natural disasters, & the terrible displacements and anguish they've caused, cannot ever kill the spirit of a deeply meditative people and nor will haiku shun the purity of form in deference to the fractal poetics of the postmodern world. How easily Western poetry, on the other hand, lacking the profundity & discipline of haiku (& with its penchant for tradition-bashing), shatters at the slightest force into a thousand pieces! The post-avant movement provides ample evidence of this fragility. And how stolidly Eastern poets defend and practice a style of writing that, if done well, can still the spirit itself.

It's the poets (haijin) infused with a sense of stylistic purity who've developed the form & kept it alive through a lifetime of haiku study, teaching and publication: a breed of writer marked by an almost Zen-line focus on their craft. I've encountered some remarkable people in my own brief stint in Eastern writing who've nourished the poetic heart in me, & whom I'd like to personally acknowledge here as teachers, mentors and friends: Susumu Tagikuchi, Karina Klesko and, of course, the irrepressible Ed Baker. They will always be the most formative Eastern influences in my life.

Susumu Tagikuchi

My first exposure to haiku came through Susumu Tagikuchi & his World Haiku Club (WHC) and World Haiku Review (WHR) where I saw some of my earliest efforts make it into print. I was struck almost immediately by both the traditional as well as transnational character of his Eastern poetry network, comprised primarily of Yahoo! groups, publications and conferences.Tagikuchi has globalized haiku, reaching out to an Eastern readership in many countries. Not that haiku hasn't had to adapt to individual poetic sensibilities. It's been subjected to experimention & generated a lot of debate on the purity of its form. The haiku nucleus, however, is the same regardless of differing national styles & temperaments: a cluster of essential principles from which there's really no wavering. Susumu Tagikuchi, a great doyen of haiku & tanka, has kept the debate alive for many years though careful to preserve traditional principles of composition. In an article entitled "Haiku as a World Phenomenon" he mentions, for instance, the recurrent tensions between "permanent values" and "changes" in haiku structure. Both his HAIKU (WHR) 1 blog and WHCvanguard Yahoo! group actively write & theorize about haiku form, one ranging from the most radical to neoclassical. 

Karina Klesko

If Susumu is the architect of his global haiku 'club', the teacher-student is the inspiration and impetus for the daily (mostly online) interactions among haiku practitioners. Tagikuchi is a friendly presence but WHC structure can't help but impose a certain distance between him and his students: only a few, in fact, have actually met him in person. His scale is felt mostly as expertise & group organization. Were it not for Karina Klesko, however, I wouldn't have known either founder or WHC; and without her I certainly would haven't learned the main Eastern forms, such as haibun, tanka, sijo and cinquain nor experienced (as energetically as I did) the simplicity of the creative act. Karina's is a single-mindedness of purpose I haven't seen in many poets. When I think of her worsening eyesight & the strain of constant writing & editing she's had to endure, I can't help admire her tenacity and devotion to work even more. She has an endearing presence that's drawn many to her. There was a time when we wrote together almost every day, churning out a  prodigious amount of work most of which was posted at her Yahoo! group but some even finding their way into the WHR & other online magazines. As she reminds me still, I'm a much better Western writer because of the time I've spent with Eastern forms. Karina currently co-edits the extremely popular Sketchbook E-Journal for Eastern and Western short verse forms.                     

Ed Baker

And without Karina's online poetry group I would never have met Ed Baker. In my opinion (& even Ed may disagree) he's a haiku master who's adapted his 'barebones' minimalism to art, the product of which is his Stone Girl poetics. I've also learned to appreciate the artistic influences in Ed's own work such as Cid Corman whom he'd personally known and corresponded with, ancient calligraphy and brushwork technique and a whole buddhist 'mindfulness' that permeates the man & his work. A friendship has naturally ensued as how would it be possible not to admire one of the most congenial people in the poetry scene today? Ed's also been something of a gateway into American poetry, the first to introduce me to names like John Martone, Carl Rakosi, John Perlman, Geof Huth, Frank Samperi, Jeremy Seligson, etc. and how diminished my familiarity with authors and literary styles would be without him. Ed's a friend and a mentor from whom I learn almost daily through correspondence and conversation, as well as an ally in the battle we wage against the lowering of poetic standards and integrity in the fashionable post-avant movements of the day. I've always celebrated Ed's work as a genre purity that's attributable directly to his Eastern roots.

CanPo: and why the Internet is just the place for it

Yes, that's right: CanPo, just like LangPo, VisPo and VidPo. What is it? Another poetry manifesto with all the usual idol-shattering & exhibitionism? Well, not exactly a declaration & not so much a new poetry as one that's been pushed underground by mainstream CanLit establishment (the people who get the dollars & top poetry gigs!) & that other funky university-bred stuff that calls itself one of many things: post-avant, mash up, conceptual, slam, flarf, fluxus, codework, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, text, appropriation, cleave, ecopoetics, restraint-based, cancellation, concrete, moving, jump-cut, etc etc. We're certainly not going to add ourselves to that growing crowd of third-rate writing class experimenters.

And I can't lay claim to having named it either: it's Chris Faiers who, either intentionally or not, spoke of People's Poetry in those post-avant terms. I mean it seems we're already in a bit of a conceptual quandary from the outset: how to, namely, establish an allegiance to a distinctive Canadian tradition that's been sadly subverted & which a communitarian poetry ideal such as CanPo envisages will restore to something like its former glory. But a name like CanPo? Shouldn't we avoid the cutesy terminology of Ron Silliman and his L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E cohorts? Is adopting the title not a forced concession to changed literary tastes which no amount of ranting will alter? We ought to be in the game, after all, if we want to win.Those of us who want a true poetics back have to learn to navigate a middle course between subjection to the CanLit & post-avant tyrannies & reintroduction of the notion of the artist as a free, independent producer & consumer of cultural goods.

Even Marx cautioned wild-eyed revolutionaries everywhere not to storm the company gates at first but rather to be patient, working slowly & methodically to undermine oppressive regimes from within.Canada-Council and the university are regimes (make no mistake about it!) at the top of every radical agenda for critique & eventual overthrow. It's to them we turn our anger and not competing poetries out there. But we're not really communists nor are we prepared to go to the extreme of Black Bloc activism: we don't have to. I think of CA Conrad's "guerilla readings" at the Philadelphia Museum, an event marked by a friendly storming of a public space in order to read from the works of Gertrude Stein. Maybe we ought to storm Queen's Park and hold a similar sort of Al Purdy rally, once a year to commemorate the Purdy statue unveiling. As Faiers certainly will attest, poetry activism comes always as matter of safeguarding a national patrimony and its key symbols (such as Purdy's A-frame), things always bound to come under threat in a predominantly state-run cultural milieu.

Al Purdy statue at Queen's Park

CanPo is more than just a name & network comprised of symbols or sites consecrated to a ground-up literary expression (in decided opposition to the statist command structures in place today, with their regulations & protectionist policies). It's certainly all those things in one way or another. I'm particularly fond myself of poetry 'sites': I think of the Erland Lee barn where my own readings have been held or James Deahl's former downtown Hamilton "Artbar" reading series or Faiers's own annual Purdyfest celebrations in Marmora. Ours shouldn't be, however, just another cozy enclave of poets & poetries; it'd be likely to develop into another "official verse culture". And nor will I envisage for it any role in preserving a kind of pure Canadian poetics, whatever that means: such talk is mythico-political and will result in another closed system. And we oughtn't be too overly critical & resentful, prepared to give just unrelenting commentary on the inadequacy of competing literary expressions, since that would make the whole thing look elitist & exclusionary, which it isn't. Milt Acorn, founder of the people's poetry movement, would have found the idea revolting.

CanPo does operate internally to both the mainstream & fashionable post-avant. I'd like to think it does, in a strong sense, override both culturally through its vision of a literary commons characterized by openness & fairness and a real Canadian literary continuity. A good example of poetry community is to be seen in the The Grand Piano project , a "collective autobiography" of the early days of Language poetry in San Francisco. And speaking of Americans, I'd always thought the Olson-Duncan- led invasion at Simon Fraser in the 60s had prevented a Canadian modernism from fully developing. The radical Tish poetries of its day hadn't been good to people with a more traditionalist bent & all but killed the lyrical voice. A trend that would have continued were it not for the Internet. There's a very strong affinity, in fact, between people's poetry and a system of Internet linking & networking that by design works strongly towards developing a poetry community. Recently Faiers said he thinks Acorn, consummate conversationalist, would have loved the blog. Faiers:

Uncle Milty (Acorn) would have loved blogging. Milt always had several rants on the go - it was impossible to hang out with him without listening to at least two or three ... they did get a bit repetitious - if Milt had been able to blog his heart out, maybe he would have gotten the rants out of his system sooner & moved on to new areas ...

Software interface is not the same as a live interactive Purdyfest; wikis and blogs, Yahoo! groups and listserves, of course, are not an exact substitute. An Acorn rant wouldn't go as far on his blog. But Web 2.0 & social media are good for poetry, celebration and  research. It's just the place to critique the unholy alliance of Canada-Council, academia & their mainstream publishing outlets & the way they feed on the creative multitude: just the place to refuse to collaborate with any state-sponsored managers of the Arts, exposing them for the freeloaders they essentially are. Make no mistake about it: it's a distinctive type of "surplus value" they've extracted from artists, writers & independent researchers, one comprising of productive practices that they've both encouraged via state "multiculturalist"-style propaganda and then taken as their own so that today literary expression ("cultural capital") is practically indistinguishable from government policy. Here's the unusual paradox of the social welfare state acting like capitalists: and the even more unusual one of the radicals themselves today resorting to corporate tactics to cash in! And where do they go to do it: Internet.

Like good venture capitalists some of the erstwhile 60s Tish poets have paid a kind of forced obeisance to the Web: Frank Davey, Fred Wah and bpNichol, for example, are figures associated with the Simon Fraser revolution who've been digitized, a once thriving live campus and lecture hall activism reduced to links and online submissions. (I can't help feeling, however, that bpNichol would have chafed at the idea of his lifework being converted into digital archive: his spirit was too pure, & his work too mindful of the materiality of art). What happened? Whether as public archive, not-for-profit community venture or forum for academic discussion, the end-game is the same: the capitalist mantra of converting institutions into markets is being sounded everywhere. Let's face it: in Canada the Arts have been institutionalized. Readers, contributors and the odd troll are generously contributing to what Hardt and Negri in their celebrated book Empire refer to as "immaterial labor", "that is, labor that produces an immaterial good such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication" (290). "Immaterial" is also synonymous with "abstract", as in abstract bureaucratic decrees that are always very far removed from the real live conditions of artistic creation Ministry directors seek to control.

bpNichol

But there we go again talking like Marxists, & even borrowing current communist denunciations of internet technologies as the most advanced form of capitalist exploitation &how, in particular, it infiltrates the very productive processes (such as blogging, file sharing, free software use) that keep it going. Bloggers like me are, according to this, the unsuspecting dupes of software designers and the Zuckerbergs of the social media world who've amassed fortunes because we've been helping ourselves to all their free stuff. Managing to entangle users in sticky webs of circuits & drives, only a few profit from the potential of "informatization of production" (again, Hardt & Negri). Jodi Dean's argued very passionately for just such a position in her book Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive.  I happen to think the communist critiques (to which Dean is uncritically tied) are ridiculously misdirected and I've tried pointing that out to her at her blog: capitalists these days are pretty hard to tell from the socialists & radicals of old.

As I've already said, the "commons" is an idea that can be put to good uses where CanPo is concerned. I won't hesitate for a second to suggest it's rather bureaucratic arts-funding regimes in partnership with academics and mainstream publishing that are the "culture capitalists" who've turned the free labor of artists & writers into an "immaterial" type of property. The multiculturalist credo of inclusivity, fairness & equity in the Arts may even be compared to the "free software" and "open access" lure of informational technologies. Time was in Canada when culture and government were suspcious of each other, and a bpNichol could cause a furor in the House of Commons over his poetry. Perhaps that's something we need to think seriously about.

Frank Samperi's "sanza mezzo": the poet, book and God "without intermediaries"

I never receive a gift without acknowledging gift and giver, and when it's a book of poetry gratitude will always take the form of respectful tribute to poet & work. The tribute I pay is to poet Frank Samperi whose work sanza mezzo (New Rochelle, NY: The Elizabeth Press, 1977) lately arrived as gift by Claudia Samperi-Warren when I'd purchased Samperi's major works Quadrifariam, The Prefiguration and Lumen Gloriae. It's a delightful little hardcover edition, barely 20 pages in all, one of 400 copies printed in Verona, Italy "from Dante type on Magnani rag paper" that comes enclosed in its own cardboard slipcase. I'm grateful to Claudia for an opportunity to reflect, again, on a book and poet.

I'm tempted to see sanza mezzo, above all, as a microcosm of the poet, his life's work as well as literary influences. Perhaps each of Samperi's works is closural in that sense: as John Martone remarks in his "Introduction" to Spiritual Necessity, "[Samperi] wrote but one long poem with structural complexities reminiscent of Dante's Commedia". The minimalism and spacing clearly derive from the years of his Eastern apprenticeship with Cid Corman or, at the least, show a deference to a more contemporary, objectivist style with which he had to compete (Ron Silliman's ungraciously referred to it as as "stripped down poetics of Cid Corman or the shorter works of Louis Zukofsky"). The title, a phrase taken from Dante's Commedia: Paradiso (Canto VII:  "sanza mezzo" appearing twice in 67-72) is the impetus for this and perhaps most of Samperi's writings; from it derives the origin of divine goodness and the clear hope that divinity can be found in the world, sanza mezzo, directly, eschewing earthly avenues.

The book searches for the divine but not just among the verses: there are also the silent illuminations of blank pages generously interposed, serving to give quiet meditative "pauses" to the act of reading. Samperi envisages an "other shore" poetics where the world masks the "source/veil/without/medium", & the heavenly ascent is always preferable to a cold intellectualism. The academic or certainly the mainstream crowd was to Samperi what the Renaissance 'mafia' were to Dante, and in places that disorientation of the pilgrim-poet in a hostile secularist setting gives us a distinctive type of 'inferno'. Poet-pilgrim "passes over stream/into/dream while human and natural processes whirling round him offer only a precipitous view of the road ahead:

other life
pauses
water
other shore
smoke
from
flame
snuffed
steps
to
base
of
hill
plucks
rose
light
leaps
falls
dead

A text that's epiphanic in this way might be said to depart from Dante's own allegorical design: in any event, even in Dante allegory may be just another of those "intermediaries" that contact with God will make superfluous. Divinity is a participatory event, direct, unimpeded by the usual literary figures, always nourished by the poet's verses. With Martone I'd gladly announce sanza mezzo as a complex Dantean aesthetics that isn't interested in tracing medieval tropes (a sort of scholarly navigational tool), & confidently argue for a self-contained text to be read along the lines of a sutra or surah. It's perhaps this mistaken identification of Samperi with a staid medievalism that made poet look unapproachable and irrelevant in his own day. But God is accessed—directly and through the text itself. Samperi's book of poetry, operating at the level of both spirit and text, means to be the illuminated image of divinity itself. If anything this bold can be done how insignificant, after all, the reigning Objectivists, & the Language & Fluxus opponents must look!

In a single narrative stream made up of untitled and predominantly disaggregated places (city mixing with country scenes, the bucolic with a lower Manhattan cityscape, hieractic with vulgar: rivers and darkening skies sometimes set as backdrop to "starlight" & "perfectly modulated song"), only a single capitalized letter separates verses.  Someone (unnamed) who "goes to the window", looking out onto a cityscape of storey houses & skyscrapers, moves, or is indeed moved, or is a poetic principle of motion moving

From room
room

moon

road
screen

haze

hillside
hazier

Since he begins from a place of silence & inwardness, objects & events in Samperi's world clamor for his attention, whether "Lovers leaning against oak" or the clanging of rock falling down the fire escape. He does look out from a "Tower solitary", ennobled by the God quest, and looks among the ruins for the idealized landscape of "white gowns", "plenilune" and, again, the "perfectly modulated song/heard from grove". The verse beginning at "Lovers leaning" captures particularly well, in both meter & imagery, a process of divine-mirroring as bodies and branches, river and "sky darkening" become first a shadow spreading languidly over land & then a sort of sacrificial immersion in water whose gentle rippling in the lovers' palms is now indistinguishable from garment folds. Image of the divine sparkling in the hand turns majestically into the figure of the poet-prophet:

Lovers leaning against oak
watch their shadow
lengthening
river few steps below
mirroring hill
not their body
not branch
sky darkening
reflected
neither
they move
angling
gold their
element
stoop
cupping
water
worlds
folds
their
very
garment

And that the poet sees divinity doesn't seem to be compromised at all by the fact of an omnipresent New York city that he leaves only in religious rêve. Purity of heart required for the journey to God may have supposedly come as the fulfilment of an earlier (unstated) atonement for earthly sin, Samperi the poet himself becoming the allegorized traveller. Samperi does not, in Augustinian fashion, simply contrast earthly and divine cities, & make the latter the more desirable choice. The city is itself a terrestrial paradise where the light of vision itself can leap and fall dead, pulled sometimes upwards, sometimes downwards: and any religious symbology worthy of the name that can't substitute a "crown left" for an "eagle right", "Tower" for "sea/valley", that can't invoke the very freedom of poetry, will risk sullying the celestial object. Anything posing as obstacle to God is shown to be in itself weak & transitory: language without God clearly in its sights cannot achieve Hopkinsian ectasy. And as to the ultimate question of the poet's relationship to his own inspired book, Samperi lets the great Florentine give the answer in a passage from the Commedia (cited in Quadrifariam):

Maraviglia sarebbe in te se, privo
   d'impedimento, giù ti fossi assiso,
   com'a terra quiete in foco vivo ( Canto I of Paradiso:139-141)

It's remarkable, indeed, that as regards the poet, he can see the object of his heart, without impediments, sanza mezzo,as if he were a quiet principle of poetic composition as intent to pursue God as water pursues land and fire sky. I believe that the unnamed viewer & creation of his work he oversees from his tower window are emanations of a divine source to which the poet, book in hand, aspires.

Poets and bloggers who've written to the tragedies in Japan

I've so far seen a few responses by bloggers & poets (and blogger-poets) to the terrible earthquake & tsunami tragedies in Japan. Art must find a voice even amidst terrible destruction & loss of human lives. It's possibly the only ethical imperative it must obey. I will continue to post more tributes in poetry as I find them.

William Michaelian, poet, artist, & chronicler of the daily sublime has written a wonderful poem at his popular Recently Banned Literature site, entitled "Disaster" (reposted here with permission):

Far away, in an alley,
the earthquake
of one fallen
homeless
man

In true Eastern economy, not a single word is out of place & the "man" ending William's remarkable piece poses a finality that is more than just figuratively real.

Friend, poet and one of Canada's leading lyrical voices, Andreas Gripp, has recently shared with Katherine L. Gordon and myself, via email, a poem on the disaster (posted with permission) entitled "11/3/11".  Andreas's poetry of the devastation has taken the Eastern route also, softening the terrors via blossoms, snow and the child, even preserving amidst destruction a national ('origami') cultural tapestry that natural disasters can't ever subvert.

The cynic in me, on the other hand, might be tempted to read this as the fragility of culture itself, even one as great as the Eastern, in the face of Nature. Does Art prevail or does it, mammal-like, always manage to survive by burrowing deep in the ground, & arising when the sun's out?

Blossoms
were the first to fall,
in the rumble
that ruptured the calm,

and the land was shaken
as a globe of snow
in the hands of a beaming
child,

and window and wall
were cast to the earth
like an expulsion
from heaven of old,

boats and cars
both raced in the rush
of a fleeting, fatal
sea,

and the homes of Sendai
buckled,
as an origami’s
fold,

were carried
with all the dead,
in the swell that defied
the tide,

and the sirens screamed
of fire,
reactors wailed
of melt,

while the callous sun
descended,
teased millions
with its kiss of light.

From Penn Kemp, poet laureate of London, I've received via email the following piece entitled "Facing the Epicentre" from her Luminous Entrance, a sound opera for climate change action (dvd, Pendas Productions), posted with permission:

The time has now come when Earth

forces work us over. The day sparks.

How can we stabilize the Earth? When

she quakes, we too tremble in fear and

resentment. (How dare our mother shake

us off, like a bitch come in from the rain?)


Just when we had our lives organized,

our houses arranged the way we like,

our business minded, our minds at ease.

On vacation.


Just then. Foundations heave.

No leg to stand on. Upright is not

an option.

What is happening below the waves?

“When the ocean floor has burbled

cartographers must draw new maps.”

We still tremble on uneven ground.

Dreams caution us to acquiescence,

acceptance, equilibrium. We respond

with surface calm but the network

of nerve trembles with the earth.


Inner and outer hang on a thread.

The North Pole shifting an inch

makes the Earth rounder. May we too

round out our differences.

Penn has provided the best commentary herself for "Facing the Epicentre": "I so believe in the power of art to shape emotion into action for change, and help, in this case, for Japan... This poem was edited a year ago, the night before the Haitian earthquake, but it still stands!"

Canadian poet & activist Chris Faiers in his Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens blog offers the following tribute piece (reposted with permission):

blue Buddha
draped in white
mourning cloth

now sits above the snow melt in my front yard,
Green Tara incense smudging hope
for the land of Basho ...

He gave me in email correspondence an interesting account of the creation of his poem which I will give here in its entirety:

it took some time & reflection for me to think of any remotely appropriate response. I knew I had to do something ceremonial, so I took the blue Buddha from her backyard perch & placed her on the unused birdfeeder pedestal in my front yard. Then I draped her in a ceremonial white kata given to me at PurdyFest last summer by Theodore of Snow Lion Meditation Shop. I burned a stick of Green Tara incense to complete the installation. Then I wrote the haiku ...  

Canadian poet Irina Moga has posted both artwork by Hokusai and personal reflections of her own at The Continuous Poem. She's retold a tragedy through an ancient painting with its "surge of surreal walls of water" and claw-like waves. Irina wonders, as I do, if poetry made only of words can ever mirror (or even withstand) the unleashed forces of a tsunami. Again, which forces prove to be stronger here: natural or cultural?

Claudia Samperi-Warren has given her own response to the national disaster at poetfranksamperi through expression of gratitude to a place where her father poet Frank Samperi had lived for a time. It's there Samperi had forged a lifelong friendship with Cid Corman and perhaps developed a type of pure Eastern sensibility to complement his own work. Here are cultural influences that have survived unimaginable natural catastrophes. As Claudia says, "[m]y blog has received over 200 page views from Japan since it started. The connection that my father received then and now seems to have transcended over time."

At Issa's Untidy Hut Don Wentworth has posted poet Scott Watson's first-hand account (in the form of email updates) of the devastation at Sendai where he presently resides.

Joseph Hutchison at The Perpetual Bird has written a haiku (reposted with permission) that's given a  particularly eerie sort of horizon for any future Eastern poetics:

hazy moon in steam
from the cracked nuclear plant—
ghost-light passing through

I suggested in my reply that perhaps "season words" (kigo), as in the original Issa haiku after which Joseph's has been fashioned, may have to include the visible presence of radio-active "haze" as part of their poetic language, a creepy nuclear feature that can't be ignored. The  "ghost-light" presence is perhaps intended to lament the end of a purely natural haiku sensibility. A fact which reinforces my own cynicism as regards the ability of Art to withstand unfeeling cosmic forces.

Samperi writing Dante: or reflections on poetry's pure heart

no wonder then being humble is then pain, and being pure is then faith (Frank Samperi)

Claudia Samperi-Warren has graciously given me, along with Frank Samperi's three main works Quadrifariam, The Prefiguration and Lumen Gloriae, her father's entire translation of Dante's La Divina Commedia: Paradiso. Claudia's gift of a work it cost the great poet many years of patient study & academic labour to produce deserves from me a careful reading and literary appreciation, at least. I think perhaps it's time for me, through an appreciative look at Samperi's translation of Canto I: Proemio del Paradiso (only the 'argument' and 'invocation' sections) to align myself clearly with a notion of poetry's pure heart that I've been drawn to most of my life. (I'll be following my old Italian edition of Dante's work edited by Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio, Le Monnier, 1978 for textual & critical guidance). Purity is a fit subject of poetical analysis. Samperi's wonderful translation is one set on its own intensely personal search for the divinity inside all things. In the era of the Objectivists, Fluxus and "Language" poets the call to follow Dante must have seemed peculiarly autre chose.

With no formal academic training (none that I know of), Samperi's mastery of the Commedia had been mainly a self-taught one. Translation is always a type of writing, & the purer the motive and the truer the translator's poetic heart, the closer, indeed, does translation work get to the glory of subject matter. Samperi must have been led by this same vision translated into contemporary language, and for that a type of purity is requisite. Purity means the Dantesque vision of the poetic Empyrean (l'Empireo) to which the poet and Paradiso text aspire: the very realm of intellectual light, love, & joy. Both text as translation & poet-translator try for a paradisaical place where God, angels and the blessed reside. Samperi's task, given his devotion to Dante and his own innate spirituality, was to reconcile epic quest with the abject secularism of writing itself.

It's here Samperi chooses purposely to reside, freed in translation work, at least, from the spectacle and daily disappointments of mundane life. Perhaps translation dulls momentarily the melancholy of memory itself. It's in reading Samperi's Paradiso that his own life-narrative can be most keenly felt. (Claudia's poetfranksamperi blog is a valuable chronicle of her father's struggles: the Cid Corman-Samperi correspondences, in particular, are instructive of the way Samperi continually defined himself & his work in relationship to a largely unappreciative literary world). Perhaps the poet, through Dante, has written his own life and via the imperfect medium of language is taking the mystic's own path to the divine. As in Donne poetry is both canonical (doctrinal) — Samperi had given as much careful attention to the biblical &Thomistic theology that undergirds Dante's poetics— and intensely lyrical. Perfection of spirit (the 'purity' of heart I've referred to) conjoins here with hard won skill. I believe, in a word, it gave him the impetus to acquire the language, skill & tough spirituality for work as Dante translator.

The first twelve lines (in the Proemio, preface section of Canto I) make up the argument, the next twenty-four the invocation to the god of poetry, Apollo, the whole containing the essence of the entire third cantica, section that is the Paradiso: first the Italian, then Samperi's translation with reflections of my own

La gloria di colui che tutto move
   per l'universo penetra, e risplende
   in una parte più e meno altrove.
Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende
   fu' io, e vidi cose che ridire
   né sa né può chi di là sù discende;
perché appressando sé al suo disire,
   nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,
   che dietro la memoria non può ire.
Veramente quant' io del regno santo
   ne la mia mente potei far tesoro,
   sarà ora materia del mio canto.

The glory of him who moves all
   penetrates thru the universe and shines
   in one part more and less elsewhere.
I was in the heaven which takes more
   of his light, and saw things which to repeat
   one neither knows nor is able who descends from there;
because our intellect, approaching
   its desire, deepens itself so much
   that the memory cannot go behind.
Nevertheless, as much of the holy reign
   as I could treasure up in my mind,
   I'll now make the material of my song.

In language worthy of the divine author "who moves all" the argument establishes the "glory" of both poetry & the spiritual quest it initiates (as Samperi envisioned, wrote & indeed lived it as poet-translator). The image of the divine artisan & source of the verses Dante, and then Samperi, record is cast in pure light: in fact, God is light and the intellect capable of approximating to its divine source is, to that degree, intellectually brilliant.No terrestrial impurity can pose any sort of challenge to the verses and versifier establishing God as source.  But, of course, language that attempts to repeat the original vision will necessarily fall short, & Dante's saying so— "saw things which to repeat\ one neither knows nor is able who descends from there"—recalls the recusatio trope (or feigned self-deprecation of the author) in the face of his daunting task. It's from this perceived failure that, while perhaps a poetical conceit in Dante, may be the cause of real literary angst in Samperi. One with which Samperi's friend, mentor & advisor is particularly sympathetic.

It's a distinction Samperi refers to in his correspondences with Cid Corman (in "1/12/78", parts of which are reprinted with permission). In a discussion about Canto XIII, Samperi establishes the triad of humility, pain and the purity of faith:  "no wonder then being humble is then pain, and being pure is then faith..... but Dante is secure in his Art - unitively - beyond the distinction and so are we then any of us - in orientation: given up to the reception, i.e. as readers". Here's acknowledgement of the humility, and then pain, attendant upon a study of poetry as "unitively" majestic as Dante's. Sensing this inner anguish caused by the scope of his Dante project Corman, who's ever a paternal influence, promises a return home & some sanguine advice for his friend. "Perhaps my returning to America will be of some use to you and others: I like to think so - though it is best to temper hopes in the face of what we know is THERE and has to be "dealt with"somehow." The "THERE" in Corman's admonition is probably a literary milieu entirely dominated then by Zukofsky, Olson, & Creeley, and an American milieu he knows is not given to thinking of verses in Thomistic terms & will treat Samperi's efforts with scorn.

The rather lengthy invocation to Apollo (lines 13 to 36) may be seen not just as a vindication of the powers of poetic influence but, within the Paradiso's Christian framework, a kind of prayer, a humble & contrite petition to Apollo father ("padre") for skill ("divina virtù") and the gift of the laurels ("le foglie") if successful. The poet as vessel ("vaso"), a Pauline image, is worthy of the laurels the more completely he allows Apollonian influences to work inside him:

O buono Appollo, a l'ultimo lavoro
   fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso,
   come dimandi a dar l'amato alloro.
Infino a qui l'un giogo di Parnaso
   assai mi fu; ma or con amendue
   m'è uopo intrar ne l'aringo rimaso.
Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue
   sì come quando Marsia traesti
   de la vagina de le membra sue.
O divina virtù, se mi ti presti
   tanto che l'ombra del beato regno
   segnata nel mio capo io manifesti,
vedra'mi al piè del tuo diletto legno
   venire, e coronarmi de le foglie
   che la materia e tu mi farai degno.
Sì rade volte, padre, se ne coglie
   per triunfare o cesare o poeta,
   colpa e vergogna de l'umane voglie,
che parturir letizia in su la lieta
   delfica deità dovria la fronda
   peneia, quando alcun di sé asseta.
Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda:
   forse di retro a me con miglior voci
   si pregherà perché Cirra risponda.

O good Apollo, for this last labor,
   make me so complete a vessel of your power,
   as you require from the gift of the belovel laurel.
So far the one peak of Parnassus
   was enough, but now with both
   it is necessary to enter the remaining arena.
Enter my breast, and inspire
   in the same way you drew Marsyas out
   of the sheath of his members.
O divine power, if you grant me yourself
   so that I may manifest the shadow
   of the blessed reign marked upon my mind,
you'll see me come to your beloved tree
   then to be crowned with those leaves
   which the material and you make worthy.
They gather rarely, father,
   for the triumphs of caesar or poet,
   fault and shame of the human will,
that the peneian leaf should bear
   joy upon the joyful delphic deity,
   when anyone thirsts for it himself.  

If I have to try to get inside the poet-translator's own head, & heart, reflections like mine might seem fanciful. But reading Dante is reading Samperi. The enormity of Samperi's task, as Corman and his friend both knew, was bound to be the cause of the course of "humility, pain and purity of faith" the poet would have to follow. Dante is a very fitting travelling-companion. Samperi may have seen in the invocation the forces of divinity & savagery that could serve as outlet for his own gnawing frustrations. Spirituality without guts is meaningless: it must be a triumphal procession of "poet or caesar".The god of the Muses may be enough to win his soul completely ("Entra nel petto mio") but without the ruthlessness to flail opponents alive ("e spira tue/sì come quando Marsia traesti/ de la vagina de le membra sue") the road ahead would have seemed even more unbearable. Or perhaps Dante may have meant to establish himself as gatekeeper of poetic purity & guard against the enemies of the time (as were the secularist poesy of the Objectivists, "Language" schools, etc. in Samperi's day). It's tempting to suggest that both Corman & Dante played similar roles as protector of poetic skill and integrity in regards to Samperi himself.

I'm not suggesting that parallels, even the few I've discovered in only 36 lines of Canto I, between Dante & Samperi can be consistently drawn. To find any at all requires a great deal of literary & biographical contextualization that will certainly give pride of place, among other things, to the rather extensive Corman-Samperi correspondences. But Dante's a figure with whom Samperi felt a literary and spiritual kinship. And Samperi's a poet with whom I share a love of Dante & its classical (old school) Thomistic underpinnings. To reflect on a work of translation undertaken almost as devotional will show where the poet's sympathies, interests & personal vulnerabilities lie, and it's to these I'm led as I read a fabulous translation. I suppose, even with limited exposure to a body of work, I find myself already writing Samperi.

"A lakeshore dig"

A poem inspired by the recent discovery of signs of early aboriginal or early 19th century Euro-Canadian settlements along a stretch of Lake Ontario not far from where I live.

A few sparrow twigs down shore
 & to the woods
(ensconced there in Sioux lookouts,
 or nearer)

The forage has long since melted,
  and cattle, elk
 are a living animal aura at best,
  today—

a site's been dug, but not exactly a
  maize allotment
with arrows grinding into the ore.
  god's a borer!

Spring's a time for La Salle's prow
  seen from here
and ridges played out and foamy,
  on rainy days

Few scalding leaves & some ol' wet
  Iroquois crud,
falling slowly off the trowel,
  clay-like

The 'sentence' according to Stanley Fish

The reward for the effacing of ourselves before the altar of sentences will be that "incidentally" (what a great word!)—without looking for it—we will possess a better self than the self we would have possessed had we not put ourselves in service. Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more? (Stanley Fish, How To Write A Sentence)

It's not too surprising to me that Stanley Fish, America's premier scholar, teacher & writer, respected everywhere for wide erudition in general and in particular for his famous reader-response approach to literary studies, should write a text on the nature & uses of the 'sentence', aptly titled How To Write A Sentence: And How to Read One (Harper Collins, 2011). A book on the sentence in the age of fashionable dissonance (such as Ron Silliman's New Sentence), & the wildest experimentation with language and poetic form imaginable might strike some as both suspicious & odd. But to me it's welcome relief from the countless bizarre language manifestos that have informed the act of writing today. If the author appears a little condescending it's understandable given the appalling misuse of language prevalent among even academics. Fish's book couldn't have come at a better time.

The tone throughout is friendly but pedagogical; the procedure is even schoolmarmish but very user-friendly, with author offering a series of easy to grasp grammatical principles based on the very best models (some even his own). Here are the ABCs not for the illiterate but literati. Consider the claim, among the many that Fish offers as axioms of effective writing, that "forms are the engines of creativity" (30), clearly privileging formal arrangement of parts over parts by themselves, or content, even suggesting simple substitution exercises as a way to put sentence principles such as this to work. Rewriting Lewis Caroll's "Jabberwocky" opening in ordinary usage, for example, is a good way in which to show the clear and logical relationship of part to whole (the "formal requirement" of sentence construction) & see that without form content, however ingeniously contrived, is empty or "a mere pile of discrete items" (33). Again, schoolmarmish, yes but who talks anymore about the primacy of form or, for that matter, of the forms of argument? The only other work that's as plain and outspoken about 'form' is perhaps Timothy Steele's Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (though here it's metrical form the author is hoping to resuscitate).

If talk of content filling form sounds platonist (& certainly Chomskyan), and suggests the most feasible sentence paradigm this simple subordination of content to grammatical form makes possible, it's clear the sentence is, as Fish says, "a mold into which innumerable contents can be poured" (31). And since form is the receptacle of content, it follows for Fish that language is what gives shape to our reality, its almost boundless capacity for creativity and the interesting literary nuances we especially strive for in our poetry: effective writing is, in a word, a matter of style (40-43). In his own words, "The language's resources are finite, but the effects that can be achieved by deploying them are not, and the skill of writing is to find those (formal) resources that will produce the effect you desire." (44) There aren't so much appropriate topics for writing as individual styles in the sense that nothing substantive can be said about anything without exploiting first the "(formal) resources" of the sentence:

[Sentences] promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organization of the world. That is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated. If you can write a sentence in which actors, actions, and objects are related to one another in time, space, mood, desires, fears, causes, and effects, and if your specification of those relationships is delineated with a precision that communicates itself to your intended reader, you can, by extrapolation and expansion, write anything: a paragraph, an argument, an essay, a treatise, a novel. (7-8)

Sentences will tend to have the force of propositions, to be nicely layered into an evolving thought, mood or impression, the product of the author's controlling intelligence & constrained always by the logic of sense (It's not surprising Fish even offers the great analytical philosopher J. L. Austin's work How to do Things with Words as a kind of classic analysis of sentence structure).The subordinating style, for example, (or hypotaxis) is a type of construction in which it's more important to pay attention always to the relationships of causality, temporality and precedence embedded in a sentence than to a bare display of content alone. The additive style (or parataxis), on the other hand, opts for a more natural, spontaneous & unpredictable presentation of materials, foregoing control & artfulness in order to give a more vital immediacy to things. But whatever the style (and, of course, there are always interesting overlappings) the principle of priority of 'form' over matter always prevails.

Principle prevails even when confronted (as Fish is) with the example of the wilful looseness and extreme circularity of a Gertrude Stein,

If a sentence is a structure of logical relationships—the mantra I urged on you only a short while ago—what exactly is a sequence of words that, like Stein's, pushes logic and coherent, consecutive thought away? At its furthest reaches the additive style may achieve a degree of looseness, of associative nonconnectedness that is radically antithetical to sentence making, at least as I have wanted you to understand it. (73)

or the even more challenging, more subtly interiorized windings of a Virginia Woolf narrative (78-79) where both a subordinating (exquisitely controlled) and a more prominent coordinating (more imaginatively untethered & free-roaming) style intertwine. In an earlier post on Virginia Wolf I characterized, in regards to what I considered to be the essential poetic qualities of her prose, Wolf's masterly sentence use (which I named the 'Sentence') as comprising the most insightful juxtapositions & contrasts (never just connections) between the human condition and a readily available language of passion & death. Fish's analysis of both Stein & Woolf have crucial implications for the posterity of the 'sentence' as an organizing principle of reality & language since it appears that skill, whether in tightly- or loosely-knit structures, alone underlies the writer's craft: in other words,  'formalism' serves as a foundation on the strength of which even creative stylistic digressions must be seen after all as variations on an ideal pattern.

Before you can follow these "rules," which amount to the flouting of the decorums of hypotactic prose, you must first master those decorums; you can't depart from something with confidence unless you are full practiced in the something you are departing from. Behind every paratactic, additive, associative sentence—even the ones written by masters like Woolf and Stein—is the subordinating, tightly designed, and controlled sentence that is not at the moment being written.  (84)

Mastery of the "formal components" is the sine qua non of effective writing: in fact, the sentence can change the very appearance of reality and subject it, in the hands of a master, to the most skillful nuances & indirections. And it takes, of course, an equally adroit reader to see that. In short, good writing must turn to good reading else it would be seen as an empty 'form'. From the the carefully placed first and last sentence to the one that refers only to itself (to name only a few of the techniques by which the 'form' of expression can mold the reality it names), writing seems designed to lead readers through a series of interpretive strategies made possible by style: and this richness is the result of cleverly arranged "formal and content categories" in which the sentence will invariably appear once it's read.

I've covered only the essentials of Fish's wonderful little book, leaving out a lot of the brilliant individual analyses, and certainly enough of the text's design and development to emphasize the primacy of form. Fish is an unabashed Formalist (notwithstanding the attention he's given to content & writers who've experimented with 'form' to great effect), & the message may be really a veiled warning to a postmodernist world more interested in uninformed irony & the dismantling of grand narratives than in harvesting the transformative potential of an effective writing style (as he argues in his classic Is There a Text in this Class?). The point is to "think of language as an experience rather than as a repository of extractable meaning": in short, as form infused with significant content. (67) The spokesperson of Interpretive Communities, Stanley Fish is committed to a view of writing as shared insight & of  "artfully made sentences" as the most elegant means of attaining it. Ambiguity for its own sake is clearly anathema.