Self, Variations

Whitman’s expansive self recalls for me what people tell me about atman and Brahman in Hinduism and confirm him as a mystic, in a certain sense.  His “mysticism” is based in “empirical” description but a phenomenon under his description isn’t “just there.”  It’s there as we’ve seen it and experienced it and felt it.  It’s there as it’s run through our brains and been spit out as particular words.  Letting words do their work is simultaneously letting our brains do their work – that’s the entire brain system / body, from head to toe and back again.

I need Whitman’s expansive empirical mysticism, or something like it, from time to time, perhaps often.  However, there can be a disconnect, a bit of the pie in the sky, and this is where I relate sometimes more with some portions of Ashbery, where we have the expanded sense of self but now drastically more finite.  I’ll never get over the first words of his I read years back, the opening of his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), opening poem,

            I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
            Elsewhere we are sitting in a place where sunlight
            Filters down, a little at a time,
            Waiting for someone to come.  Harsh words are spoken….

            (From J.A., “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”)

We might start with the air of Icarus before he gets too far, before the emergency, and before a potentially fatal fall and end up sitting right where we are, waiting, in the sun, filtering to a little spot there within eye-shot of a maple, in a squabble.

-bbc

"Love Poem Against the Spring"

I’ve been reading Marianne Boruch’s first book, View from the Gazebo, and thinking about how sentiment may very well simultaneously be the first tool in the poet’s box and the first hurdle a poet is obligated to overcome. It’s kind of the Chuck Berry riff of writing poems; it cannot be denied, but must be applied with care and timing. More specifically, I’ve been reading “Love Poem Against the Spring,” a poem that opens with lines that neither deny nor reverse sentiment:

Spring means nothing but camouflage

so we dare to say these corny things.

It’s spring once more - no irony, no high-modern cruelty. Instead, Boruch acknowledges all the existing green that any new attempt at green blends into. She acknowledges the unavoidable matrix of sentiment that consumes any new declaration of love, the “camouflage,” the “corny things.”

     She concedes spring and its purple flowers, but never denies her own discomfort: “OK, they’re cute. My hunger’s not.” I like that the speaker’s ache stays complex. She is accused of being a computer by a friend, but the calculations here are clearly the necessary (and probably futile) steps to avoid breakdown: “Perhaps the pretty air / exaggerates some things.” These concessions to sentiment nearly mask the anger. The intelligence here just exasperates the sense that the speaker, more alert and alone for defying a mindless vernal camouflage, is utterly disconnected, and by the end of the poem she has earned her take on an image common enough to be cliché but strangely effective in triplicate. She has earned her collapse into a heightened state of emotion that could be “sentiment” if decades of academic poetry workshops had not thrown sentiment out with the bathwater:

Last night I saw three couples, incredible throwbacks,

strolling into the dusk, two so giddy, they’d love anything.

I’m quiet as a brick. But for spring

this far I’d go – glad, I guess, to shed this coat. It’s you

I crave, you who gets more stunning

as we age.

                              -- G.F.A.