Cid Corman: the poetics

(for Ed Baker)


I'll give Cid Corman the number two spot after T.S. Eliot as the greatest English-speaking literary critic of the contemporary world. I can say my familiarity with the great editor from Utano grows apace, soon to overshadow even my own reverence for Eliot. It's a question of time. Corman's At Their Word: Essays on the Arts of Language Volume II (Black Sparrow Press, 1978)*, among his other books of criticism, is as finely crafted a book of poetry, translation and literary appreciation as you're likely to find in any period. It's a good place to find the always companionable and erudite, the generous-hearted and congenially uncompromising founder of Origin: a quarterly for the creative. But as Eliot's is always an unimpugnable authority, "cut in alabaster", Corman lives and works in "locales" ( 9), averse temperamentally to anything/anyone that wasn't always exactly where they just happened to be. It's a criticism not to be read solely but (as Ed Baker would say) "breathed".

In criticism, Corman has a way of harrying poetries that wont' live in this breathed space; with poets who write them he's usually even-handed but always curt. Judging by the correspondences I've read, I'd say he's reserved his harshest censures for the growing 80s "lang gang" movement of Bernstein and Silliman, and with good reason. Their crime was to "feed language into machined games", not lived spaces: and what ensued from this was a "rubble of brains" that Corman had no time for. Even in regards to the wildly complex and tragical Hart Crane Corman could find enough jeu d'esprit to say of him, "He is Hart Crane and hard up. He is near the long hiatus, quietus." (64) Poetry could never be too much a world apart without suffering consequences. Corman never hesitated, where justified, to upbraid even highly touted academic critics, like R.P. Warren, for sloppy readings: claiming to see what isn't there (again, note the sanctity of the real in Corman's poetics) is strictly anathema to sound poetical procedure. "...Warren in his eagerness to score points and sell his detour to us overlooks details that are pertinent and injects details that are just not there, nor implied." (35)

It was to the credit of Dr. Williams, on the other hand, that his eyes were "full each day",(50) the subject of the poem always expertly fitted to "the inescapably human element." (50) Again, the human and the permanent sanctity of the place where the poem, in its fullness, comes into being. Cormanian criticism is a reiterated statement of life, the human element never at war with creativity and the "concentrated presence" of the poem emanating from that life. The poem is in a master's hand nothing if not miraculous: "How simple! And how movingly concentratedly profound!" (82) There was a predilection for the sacred that made him Frank Samperi's only coeval in spirit. And criticism follows rightfully after the poem --never the other way around--in its own elegant compactness and brevity, never missing a beat. For the near perfect adaptation of the critic's language to poetry, there is the oration to Dylan Thomas,

He wanted his words like a bell to break backwards. He wanted to scatter sound, as it sounded, over a country-side like milkweed or rain. He wanted to tell fortune by the buttercupful. He wanted to roll forever in the grass of first love. Love always first thirst for him. He wanted to be the child that he will for us, or for me anyhow, always be. (69)

 Repetition is never a conceit: it rather unfurls (like great lyricism) the real sound, sight and touch of a poetical world always in its nascency. Corman makes you feel a Welsh childhood itself. And an even more eloquent summing up of a small Creeley poem, "felt" as much as it's read, gives a sense of Corman's reverence for poetical objects trying to "locate ground", Corman's favourite angle-shot. The style is spare, direct (parataxis comes to mind) but the effect is of a luxuriantly extended definition:

Here we have the horizon as distance, as what there is to be seen, objective, what one sees, more firmly, via distance, to be grasped, realized, a fix: a past a future present, but how things grow vaguer growing closer, impinge, enter, and one leans outward to/at something, anything, solid, to make and make hold.To add one's own make and take, a little, to what is there. The placement, the weave, of "there" and "here" is felt, pointed and carried. and the increasing uncertainty, as against the fixed "line" first (immediately) established, finds a quiet pathos at the close. A poem trying to locate ground. (76)

 The only way for the poet (as in the case of Wallace Stevens) to reach the extraordinary is oftentimes to cultivate smallness and intimacy with his simple surroundings: even if it's a matter of going from home to office, office to home. (92) It's perhaps for this reason that voice and music are tightly associated with place: the verse sounds as if it were at home the moment it's spoken and couldn't have been enunciated anywhere but there. As Corman said in "The Feeling in the Make of Poetry" (Origin 5, October 1978), "Ordinary speech does suffice: any word will do. But only when we fully enter it can it fully enter us what it is utterance is -- is song...One knows one is no longer at home in oneself--but rather dwelling in complete abode." What better example of a poetry that dwelt "in complete abode" is there than that of Larry Eigner. Citing the "hospital poems" (145) Corman speaks of Eigner "in his wheelchair" as the poet attuned to essential fixity and straightness, a "directness of vision" (147) that to all but the disabled must seem "grotesque".

Corman's saved his best praise of the poem's "complete abode" for a Lorine Niedecker memorial.  If "The devotion to poetry is the devotion to whatever human community" (91), perhaps his happiest hours were spent with her (With Lorine), at least in letter-writing. The reminiscences here are told in a medium in which Corman flourished: his piece comprising of "characteristic passages" from letters exchanged between them over a ten-year period (183). Corman's correspondences alone could easily run into volumes. They're full of  poetry submissions and spring floods, church-spires and good cheer and even offers of financial help ("if a bit of my pay check at some time in the near future will help you") (184): Corman even recalls how grateful a certain Scottish poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, was to Corman for introducing him to Niedecker. Another volume alone on poets Corman had established, introduced in the making here. She alone, however, had worked up enough nerve in 1931 to write to the Objectivist author of Poetry. Interesting, though, that she'd feared her "own folk impulse" (186) would have gotten lost in that Zukofsky "ice". Interesting the things poets had said to Corman in confidence.

Corman saved Niedecker for last because she was his best example of poetry that was nowhere but where she happened to be:  Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin near Rock River "that empties just beyond into Lake Koshkonong"; a small but tidy home with her own wellstocked library, "brown little stove" (211) & one-armed husband who could be "frightening" to kids; the library, printing press and hospital where she worked; the Black Hawk hotel where Cid and Shizumi stayed on their visit to the Niedecker's; the grave her husband was too "busted up" to ever see. Her poetry sang each place as assuredly as Samperi's sang his own East Side, Stevens's the Connecticut office he daily walked to or even Corman's the Kyoto pastry shop he'd lived and worked in. As is the life so the poetry. And as Niedecker was kind, gentle so were the poems and the "breathed" rhythms of "lake water" and "wing-bone" (208), her little "granite pail" and "clothesline post" (209).

Corman's right to follow the poem (as well as poet) always "along a given still vital line" (73). Nothing short of this very eventful presence is worthy of the critic's attention. Language can work as long as life does and the poem, honestly wrought, can never celebrate life more joyously than this. Life is its limit, Corman seems always to be saying, and at the same time the portal to infinitely more imagined communities. A poet's inward life is heir to the relations, loves and correspondences of the outside world. As he's reminded Samperi in letter after letter, it's in "livingdying" that we live and write the poem.
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*I will give page numbers only without specifying title of essay from which sources derive. I consider Corman's book of essay a work in its own right, the texture of commentary always smooth, always of a piece with everything else.

From Husserl to martyrdom

Edith Stein, Husserlian & saint

I'm oftentimes amazed at the types of intersections to be encountered between culture and divinity.

What's in phenomenology that two spiritual masters, Frank Samperi and Edith Stein and perhaps many more, have recoiled from it and named it inimical to the spiritual itself? After all, it was touted in its day as a doctrine of empathy with the world or a sane procedural suspension (epoché) of belief in the face of the absurd and problematical. The reduction of life-experience to radically lived (ego-centric) sensations seemed to offer intuitive certainty in regards to human knowledge. Some have seen in it a sort of "spell of the sensuous" (David Abram) from which the most sublime world-knowledge can derive still.

Samperi had, however, derived his distaste for phenomenology from what he thought was its wildly processual and reductivist nature: resulting in  a sort of metaphysical pagan nation-worship or, as he puts it in a letter to Cid Corman, "the Pretense that there's One Nation" to which everything can be traced and in which there's no room for his venerated "Tradition of forms". Stein herself must have seen in her own collegial relations with both Husserl and Heidegger similar allegiances of any sort of Weltanshauungen to essentially tribal notions of gender and ideology particularly and their always deleterious effects on intellectually gifted women like Stein. Her doctoral dissertation on "empathy", inspired and guided by Husserl himself, provided a way out of this intellectual hegemony: as she says, "Husserl...named this experience "empathy", but did not explain what it consisted of. Here was a gap which was worthwhile filling". She could also have said the same thing about the fashionable atheism she'd embraced in her Freiburg years. A gap is a gap.

So to a Dante-inspired poet and Discalced Carmelite nun something meant to be a privileged look into the world's own "hidden meaning and teleology" (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 18) was strictly anathema. To Samperi and Stein phenomenology was a pretense and a sham (though Stein had been asked even as a Carmelite to contribute to phenomenological discussions). Samperi called it "the great Usurper [who] taketh away the Kingdom of the Divine Intelligential Poet" (In Samperi's mind, poet Bill Bronk happened to be the Usurper in person). To both it amounted to the irreligious claim that the arts and sciences in general end in doctrine and perhaps a kind of rapacious will to be to which can be traced all the vilest human instincts. Saints and poets alike are bound to register the dangers first.

This bill of indictment against philosophers and the fruits of cognitive labour was no pose. And the denunciations were more than figurative. In the absence of Greek dichotomies between intellect and the world (which Husserl thought he'd disposed of with his handy notion of experience,"Ehrfarung") the Christian hoped for real bodily transfiguration, real earthly paradise: a radical type of "depersonalization" strictly incompatible with the "Material Ideal" (as Samperi describes it in his 1969 notes on Dante) of process philosophies. After the conversion there's no leftover "matter" anywhere. Again, Samperi:

         no poetry has been written in this century -- propaganda yes!
         verse yes! but a poetry not an end in itself no!
         unless , of course, I exclude
         myself -- and I am not being
         egotistical...
         Therefore: to withdraw from
         the literary world is a must.
         This proves than our style no
         style is Ars imitatur naturam in sua operatione.

For Stein the only real "depersonalization" was to be found within the "narrow space" of her monastery: an even more enforced type was, of course, to be reenacted in her own extinction at Auschwitz. As she says just weeks before her deportation,  "To erect the structure of holiness in it, one must dig deep and build high, must descend into the depths of the dark night of one’s own nothingness in order to be raised up high into the sunlight of divine love and compassion." Instead of Husserlian "empathy" there were "depths of the dark night" into which the convert eagerly burrows.

What drove them both from enlightened rationalities  to this credo of withdrawal must lie somewhere in that vacuous knowledge metaphor always more terrifying in its results than in its methodology: or perhaps, more specifically, in just that Husserlian equation of 'being' to the way things actually appear to be. Something in that must have seemed a gross usurpation of the mystic's way: something terribly inimical to the creative spirit that Samperi (encouraged by Corman) termed "bureaucratic". Presumably, no one but the saint or poet-pilgrim could lay claim to a sort of 'mystic's' love of terminal understanding along such lines as Stein's own:       

         Are you the ray
         That flashes down from the eternal Judge's throne
         And breaks into the night of the soul
         That had never known itself?

But mystics and poets presume to know nothing, after all. Knowledge for them is agoraphobic. The vessel fills with "ray" only and understanding abetted by grace alone becomes "divine intelligential". And what is "grace" but the suppression of "difference" (as between the street and hermitage, the university office and the ovens) and embrace of the celestial journey "sanza mezzo" ("without intermediaries"). There's nothing here for phenomenologists to gnaw on, not a single shred of sense, judgement or life-world. There's prayer and the abyss.

Perhaps it's not too incredible to suggest that significant poetries have always purposely courted "the dark night" and looked indifferently on the ashes.

Welcome, Penn!

How delighted I am to see that Penn Kemp will be following my humble "Word-Dreamer" blog. Poet laureate for the city of London, Ontario, in 2010, she is Canada's foremost sound-and performance-poet. I consider her a poetry institution and among the most respected literary figures in Canada. I've published an article in Ascent Aspirations on Penn's sound poetry. A few blog posts on Penn can be accessed through "Labels" sidebar.

Welcome, Penn!

Connection between pot and poetry? Why, yes...

"I'm high as fuck on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, man!"

 Now that the Duke University study on how Cannabis use affects the developing brain has proven that the stuff is inherently "toxic" and messes with intelligence, permanently, I wonder if this just might be the reason why all the really "bad" poetry arose out of a single 60s New American Poetry era. I've always suspected that this rather sudden turn for the wildly experimental was a matter of brain receptor overload.

I've always thought the Cannabis-creativity link made by the 60s poet hippies was consequently both meretricious and absurdly self-serving: and in the end just another excuse for lack of talent. Nothing feeds the imagination more vitally than the plain simple realities that filter in daily through the senses. This unglamorous and plodding life will always give our truest & deepest insights.

I can't help but see just that same aversion to reality in most contemporary poetry. It's for this reason that the worst poetries also always seem to spring from the campuses, always high on theory, always prone to 'guru' worship: the very 60s qualities that have taken on particularly virulent and destructive urges in our own age (I think of people like Kenneth Goldsmith, for instance, and his poetry of wilful plagiarism). A return to 'sobriety' may just cure what's been ailing poetry since the Donald Allen anthology.

It's true, after all: pot makes you stupid and nowhere is this more evident than in all the bad poetry still flourishing out there. The connection is no longer fanciful. The drug culture is so pervasive still that even if poets are not as chemically dependent as their 60s forebears, they do continue to write as if they were. The damage done.