May 12. I cannot think of altering anything. Why shd. I? I do not write for
the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you."
G. M. Hopkins (Journals/Letters)
Any intersections with the spiritual poetics of Frank Samperi today are rare as they are beautifully insightful: I purposely seek and celebrate them and not because of my own scholarly interests in the person I consider contemporary America's greatest poet-mystic. Samperi's time has come. As relatively brief and largely uneventful as Samperi's life was, he was bound to attract a few of the best spiritual 'lights': certainly Robert Kelly, Robert Lax, John Levy and David Miller had been marked by it. It was particularly with the young poet from Australia, David Miller, Samperi confessed to feeling a particularly deep kinship. Miller was not just an admirer but defender of perhaps the one American poet whom the Objectivists would have had most reason to fear (if, of course, he'd had the hearing he'd deserved). The young Miller seemed to have understood that very well.
Miller's own interest in Samperi had come originally through Corman's Gist of Origin anthology and a review by Clayton Eshleman (which by Samperi's account Miller had found unfavourable). It was through Miller's help that Samperi's The Kingdom (for which Miller had written the Afterword ) was published in the UK (Todmorden: Arc Publications) in 1975. Samperi had certainly thought highly enough of the promising young poet to begin a four-year correspondence with Miller, even recommending him to the esteemed editor of Utano: as he said in his 4/6/77 letter to Cid Corman (excerpted here with permission), "I think he's got something...and yes! his intelligence his honesty...So you see Australia (known for rare singers) brings forth, too!" Miller repaid the kindness with his own personal tribute in his December 1991 "Obituary: Frank Samperi", saying that "he was essentially a man of real generosity, and I will never forget the way he befriended and encouraged me, as a younger writer, when I first contacted him in the late 1970s."
David Miller has been kind enough to send me not only his articles on Samperi but some selections (Series 6, #1, #7 and #8) from his ongoing Spiritual Letters writing project announced here. I'd like to reflect on these because I believe, if I do so attentively enough, I will perceive the generous hand of the spiritual master from whom this "rare singer" had inherited much. It's certainly not a case of 'imitation' but of Miller's own intuitive affinities for what Samperi (in his 80s Corman correspondences) had called the "atrium": a uniquely sacred 'lighted' space where the world's hard conditions can "dissolve" (as Samperi would always say) into a poetry of exquisite purity. Samperi's Letargo is the exemplum of a poetics of "lethargy" or "forgetfulness" that amounts to a momentary 'ecstasy'. The similarities with Miller's "Spiritual Letters" are worth noting just in terms of that place where spiritual poetries really originate. However, Miller has taken that Samperian sense of dissolution to its true holocaustal ends.
In his Series 6, #1 piece there are moments of "lethargy" that lie interspersed (set off by italics) among the events of a homecoming, burial and postburial reminiscences on an enigmatically Maximilian Kolbe-figure the circumstances of whose life and death seem also too unmiraculously prosaic.
After the memorial service, we visited the cemetery and drank ouzo and poured it over his grave. We went on to a taverna, and exchanged stories about him, surprising each other over and again. He spread linseed oil varnish over the painting's surface with his fingers, removing the excess with the heel and side of the hand. To touch, to kiss: as if the chasm didn't exist. The fire forms itself into a sail in the wind, then a vault, enclosing him. Deported to the labour camp, he was stripped of his priestly garments, shaved of hair and beard. He shared the little bread he had with those who were sick or dying, up until the time he was shot..There seem to be journeys without compass, encomiums without clearly named bodies and even entire countryside villages without lineage (as if we'd gotten a view from an Auschwitz train). The ordinariness of travel, family and even reflections on art, all meaning to be cross-referenced somehow, do undermine any sense of a single sustainable hagiography (as if the piece were about a single Kolbe-type figure), which is, of course, the effect of the porousness of prose poetry. Any attempt at a description of the gallery painting, for example, would have robbed the whole of its ineffability: any mention of artisic 'referents' would certainly be as inexplicable as the identity of the poet-narrator, a lone viator travelling presumably alone until his encounter with the female cicerone (or lady with "with the scarf over her dark hair"), or even as inexplicable as the exact nature of his wanderings.
She wandered through gallery after gallery, finally stopping when she came across someone standing absorbed in front of a large abstract painting. Recognising it from a previous life, she said to him: You know, I did that. From the long, horizontal upstairs window, I could see fog drifting across and enveloping the bay. Eight years of painting and re-painting, building up and scraping back and building up, gluing pieces of wood and bits of jewellery to the surface and painting over them... -- Should I attempt a description?Perhaps the whole spiritual letter began and ended, in rêve , at "the long, horizontal upstairs window" only (as so many of Samperi's own most intensely spiritual illuminations did) or "in front of a large abstract painting": in either case, the place is essentially the same. Window and paintings are just surface skim to the essential dream state in which poet-mystics and faceless travellers alike participate . Between the "travelling home" and final pronouncement on the essential unintelligibility of the "Material Ideal" (again, Samperi) there can only be these moments of world-"forgetfulness" always ranging (however fitfully) "to infinity". It's certainly better to "forget" than to continue with these terrible reminiscences.
The Series 6, #7 and #8 pieces similarly gather around the same sort of unnameable (but not inexplicable) roommates and gallery hosts and even a university tutor, and in both( what I thought the mention of boats and a traveller from Greece had made obvious in the #1 piece) a sense of the l'Autre too smudged by mundaneness to be of any real philosophical interest. But it's not a spirituality bludgeoned by Beckettian dialogue either, though there is dialogue here. A narrative interspersed with verse this time--giving them both the feel of a haibun--is its unitive force, trying to dissolve life's unbearable antinomies (of childhood and spiders, baby cubs playing with toys and a dogs bitten on the face, cozy flats and lashing rains) into a final immersive, almost covenantal 'sea' image: "It's the sea that the heart lives on, and the sea is salt; it's salt the heart lives on. A stark ark. Often one by one, and none by none at times. Wind, hail, heavy rain, thundersnow...heart's beat."(#7)
The deceptive stillness of #8, or the temptation to dwell on more forms of youthful dreams, is a prelude to the holocaustal. Here's a certain cross-reference to the Kolbe-figure in #1 that's made the turn to the ovens more certain. It's the only way to prepare the child for the "everything you desire is permissible" lie. In the face of this, there's the more realistic adulthood of faeries who turn suddenly mean & lay the innocents on burning coals. And no amount of "bad boys, cigarettes in their mouths, cocky poses" will help carry her into sunny Junes. To a Jew, the child or dreamer "You either burn or you swim..." To continue the journey by ship motif, as we do again here, is to find oneself this time jumping into a sea of corpses.
To Samperi's "lethargy" there's Miller's more horrible henosis (or purificatory cleansing of worldly dross): perhaps itself a type of genocidal unity of "Spark, flame, smoke" to which everything's ultimately reduced in the spiritual letters, relegating even imaginative reality to phantasm or dream. Of the poet's elemental water, earth and fire not a single one escapes destruction. Samperi had mentioned a sort of "spiritual conversion" to Hebraism in his Corman correspondences and characterized the outright rejection of his own writings as "holocaustal". Perhaps attuned to this sense of the slaughter of literary innocents begun in Samperi, Miller's consigned the imaginative efforts of any essentially disprized spiritual poetics to a final perdition: "in dark looking out". The young David Miller had understood very well, indeed.
