by Michael Helsem
'Pleasant.' -- The New Yorker" (blurb on Wicked Uncle)
"One wishes very much to believe in what Carlyle termed 'the hero as poet', for since in our time
the battle to make sense is normally lost, there is greater need to believe that someone did win it
than that particular poems succeed."
--John F Lynen (1966)
Time was, when the matter gave the style; ćsthetics stayed hid behind the arras; furnishing notes to a poem would have bordered on impertinence. No more.
"Three Encounters" is the title of a book by the Russian philosopher Solovyov. The first part, which exists interstitially (ŕ la "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead") within the space I imagine occupied by the nonexistent poem Galsworthy describes, is a recusatio: a refusal-to-write-on-a-given-theme poem. The second could be called a dicanic (accusation or defense) soteria (thanksgiving for someone rescued from danger or recovered from illness). The last, which is named after a character of Cordwainer Smith's, can only be a prosphonetikon (welcome to a traveller upon arrival at the point where the speaker is).
I wrote this poem in seven-syllable lines ('heptons"), paired, according to a system of my own invention ("rhime") whereby endwords that sum to the same number in English gematria (A=1...Z=26) are deemed equivalent. (I also alternate odd & even summed pairs, as an additional stricture.) Each section has 101 lines, with one line longer than the rest by 2 syllables; the whole poem, with coda, comes to 307 lines & 2153 syllables (both prime numbers). My reasons for this are mystical & programmatic. I have long wondered in what way a style can be said to embody the feel (not "spirit"--) of its times. Now, more than usual, exist contradictions--fundamental fissures. To reinvent a "classicism" in these mackerel-skyey days is to discover its yearning & its impossibility, closely entwined. So I devise an aesthetic that seeks to include as many opposites as possible; the more of these "perfections", the better (the more "congruent"). The combination of esoteric improvisational formalism, I call "tisma"; it may or may not be the best way to achieve this still-nascent dream.
As the uguisu bird is not a nightingale, though it seems expedient to translate it so, zuihitsu is not quite the same as Improvisation. "Following the brush" is more about absence of hierarchy, than absence of order. Inevitably this raises specters of analogy with music. I cannot say that every recurrence is equally crucial. But all of them are meaningful.
My poem seems to cherish rare names. Some of them are secrets I divulge only with difficulty; others reflect my idiosyncratic reading. To the degree that esotericism clouds my stream of expression, it faithfully conveys some of my own astonishment at the mystery & unfathomableness of each lived hour. Hours that writing may delve, like a bathyscape, to emerge with its few weird treasures. The circumstances of this composition, also require comment. (In part, they dictated the form.) I mostly write in my head as I drive, & only put on paper when it is convenient to do so, the product of my divided cogitations. This procedure, both hazardous & whimsical, lends, I believe the essential element of Geschichtlichkeit, 'historicity', to what might otherwise remain merely a sterile exercise of will. It is not the fruit of genteel leisure, nor an achieved craft. Obsessions vie with trivia in a characteristic mix.
Finally, there is the matter of Who Needs It? People seem to write for every conceivable reason except that they have this incredible new exciting poem they have to give to the world... Naturally, I'd like to think I'm solving a wider conundrum than yet another cairn of a poet's indefatigable vanity. One's present task, however, could only be something like: to revalorize good husbandry & the civic virtues. That task I defer to the modern narrative medium par excellence, film. --While the lyric needs of the day seem amply met by FM radio (or rather, its studied incoherence serves as a suitable screen for unconscious projection).
The current "Poetry Revival", I think, is not about poetry at all. Instead, a type of communion people are starting to realize they had lost, & which Rock these days even in its "alternative" manifestations, mostly fails to deliver. Not that our open mikes are any better, when we talk through everyone else's reading & leave just as soon as our own gets done. My first question hangs in the air, poets. My desuetude & my envy alike show how far i am from the "mirific word", myself...
Once in a conversation I thought I had something. I said it will be when the lights go out, that poetry will again come into its own. For the poets all along have lived in a world lit only by fire.
"When she had finished the main sheaf, she came on a much longer poem entitled, 'The Leopard,' wrapped round in a blank sheet of paper. ...Below the title was written the line: 'Can the leopard change its spots?' It was the story of a young monk, secretly without faith, sent on a proselytising expedition. Seized by infidels, and confronted with the choice between death and recantation, he recants and accepts the religion of his captors. The poem was seared with passages of such deep feeling that they hurt her. It had a depth and fervour which took her breath away; it was a pćan in praise of contempt for convention faced with the stark reality of the joy in living, yet with a haunting moan of betrayal running through it." -- Flowering Wilderness by John Galsworthy
The Leopard: Recusatio
I am a satisfied man.
Knowing what the despair is
About, & not without trials,
I yet can watch the pillbug
Climb; love the dawn's moods scroogechess
And all, weigh the featherstone
Of my ambivalent art
Like a swollen boil ebbing
And still I crave that scarab
Tumblebug, Absolute Space.
Songs for the crowd is a trap
And so is: flung to the sky.
Should I compile anecdotes
Spitting ponds against the drouth,
Leaving to my shawabty
The task of significance?
I change lanes narrowly, miss
All but a tithe, soft triage,
Bibelots to friend cloister
Exile that is our Zeitgeist--
But now a new Ćon draws on
What's a wan vates to do?
Dwines the glut petroleum;
Byzantium in zugzwang.
I call it a junkie's life
"Mad", scrawled on the whitewashed cell
Love should shatter, never does.
Sometimes I set down my book
And blink: the whole globe fighting
Comes roaring back, kerygma
Only anger. Why is it
We seem to find the blind black
Drink so divine? Will that bring
Our coveted fair morning?
Worse-in-the-sunlight sadness,
My tireless cerecloth-bombyx;
Two TV's going, big sphinx
Of quartz, kraal reality...
No such squidly screen I'd ply
But find myself in Job's fjord
Again, shadows flickering
As I urge charmed flapdragon
From my glove-clad font of runes,
Funes the Kamikaze.
Tribe dialect, forlorn dream
Of ravencroak pipe o' clay
Still; I mux it up. Tisma
Sings in my turquoise sanjaq,
Goddess be cognizant of.
Gibbous in the twilight at
Where two smokes contest the field
Our world hardly beguiles here
These jaquemarts of Ewigkeit:
Caravan to Zaqaziq,
And the gnarled hand slides a bead.
Look! I have made a taant Ka
Fit for the races...consonant
With pin-stripe & gastropod,
Suasive in the twisting glass.
Verse is not this base science.
Shimmer of perilous give,
The cherisher long candled
Once a temple of reason
Left one dim corner unnamed.
Lies sprinkled in solitude
Spiritual orichalcum
There would sometimes back, dictate;
Ichor from the Hyades.
Then men wanted to anele
Their desires & their buffed up
Toys with the extreme quoc-ngu:
Epic became, & grokking,
A thing of squalid Babel.
Retire to my cabana,
Or else vend bitter bezique
To waxfed ears, I trow. Prayer
Worse than ass rhodomontade
Cures this siege of discernment
That spoils my bread & my sleep.
So now I'll quell the grackle
Sagely by leaving Baja
Hikes to Sxwaixwe & the dead;
He too, is blitzed by his Work.
He too, oft scorns the numen.
What can I tell them but love
Hides at this wary Imbolc,
And will not be had by force?
I & my lover shall walk
Together & her hazel
Eyes shall shyly tell me so
Recondite is this swimming
And flying heart-xenolith.
Lapis or oodoolay, foehn
Within from fubsy Luna,
And you who parse this grammar,
All in my weaving tinchel
I capture. Twyborn sunlight
Funnelled to calligraphy
Smouldering on wood, limit
Where flame flowers, the color
Of asphodels. Maremma
The less, & the more of veldt:
That poem I am to utter never.
Feb 5-8 1998, sum 709 (prime), 101 lines
scroogechess- opening by only moving a pawn to the third rank
shawabty (Egyptian religion)- a magical doll that can be sent on errands
vates (Latin)- poet & prophet
zugzwang (chess)- a position in which any move, loses
kerygma- (Greek) proselytizing
bombyx- silkworm moth
kraal (South Africa)- a compound
flapdragon- dangerous sport
tisma (Tilha--a S. Berber language)- magic
sanjaq (Yezidee religion--the Druses)- one of 7 bronze effigies of Malak
Ta'us, the "Peacock Angel"
jaquemart (French)- the little figure in a moving-tableau cuckoo clock
Ewigkeit (German)- eternity
Zaqaziq- the place in modern Egypt closest to the site of ancient
Bubastis, sacred to the cat-goddess Bast
taant (Kentish dialect)- too tall for its width
Ka (Egyptian religion)- ego, will
orichalcum ('mountain copper')- a goldlike alloy in classical times
anele= anoint
quoc-ngu= the Vietnamese alphabet
bezique- a game
Sxwaixwe ('xw' is a voiceless, labialized, uvular fricative)- a lake
deity of the Coastal Salish tribe in Washington State
numen- the aura of magical power surrounding a sacred object
Imbolc- Groundhog Day
xenolith- a stone of a different sort than what it's embedded in lapis- the Philosopher's Stone
oodoolay (Australian)- Rainmaker's Stone
foehn- sirocco
tinchel- a ring of hunters & hunting dogs encircling their prey
narrowingly
twyborn- of double origin
Maremma- a notoriously noxious swamp in Italy
"M.H. was born in Dallas in 1958. Shortly afterwards, fish fell from the sky."