Sometimes it's good to be alive

I recently discovered this band, The Swell Season, thanks to a Facebook friend. Maybe they are old news to everyone else, but they are new to me. Anyway, here they are performing one of their new songs on Czech t.v. (The singer's name is Markéta Irglová.) I'm glad I'm here on Earth at the same time so I can listen to this. I think this song is genuinely beautiful. It is pure. The gentle beauty of this music makes me feel ashamed of my own jaded literary efforts, and of the jaded literary world in general. I hope you enjoy it, whoever you are.

The Red Blog

As I noted in my last entry, I am very interested in the immanent publication of Jung's famous Red Book. It appears I am not alone in this, as The New York Times has just published a long article about this very event.

I'm ambivalent about this publication, as well as a bit excited. I'm ambivalent because I don't want the Red Book to become just one more consumer product. Granted, the book is priced at about two-hundred dollars, so it's likely that only committed Jungians (and, perhaps, especially-committed anti-Jungians) would purchase it. I don't know to what extent libraries will make it available. So it's not likely to be seen at all by most people, even by most book-reading people.

Nevertheless, though I am excited to finally see it, in a way I kind of wish it were still a legend rather than an available commodity. Its former hiddenness somehow seems more . . . well, more Jungian. Enough has been said about it in the autobiography and in the various biographies, and enough images from it already published, that I already kind of feel I "get" what the book is all about.

Of course, I'm going to buy it when it comes out, anyway.

Being even quasi-neo-Jungian (as I am) in this culture is an uphill battle. The inner life is under attack from every direction. The right prefers that people surrender their souls to the tyrannies of "traditional values" and naive, projection-based militarism. The left suggests that there are no true individual selves, only "subjects" whose supposed inner lives are merely the inscriptions of a variety of state socio-economic and political agendas. And then there is capitalism, which looms above and seeps into everything, from all sides, luring people into a fixation with what they can put into their mouths instead of what they put into their souls.

Then there's the internet, which becomes more and more distracting every day. As a Buddhist, I have trained to let go of the minutiae of petty, confused thoughts that flutter through my mind throughout the day. As a participant in Twitter, on the other hand, I've evidently committed myself to not only holding onto such thoughts but also sharing them with others, so that a weird, collective jabbermind is birthed into cyber-being. I love the internet, and obviously I still find it worthwhile (hence, this blog), but I am very aware of how distanced I have become from my own deeper feelings and thoughts since I went online (or, perhaps more accurately, since I started spending way too much time online).

Worst of all is the everpresent, soul-crushing irony that pollutes every atom of our culture. Jung's work in general, and the Red Book in particular, is a sort of mega-dose of anti-irony. It's impossible to read something like this and get anything valuable from it unless one checks one's irony at the door. I know that literary people are always very proud of themselves for using irony, because it does demand a certain degree of intelligence. And it is possible to use it in such a way as to deepen one's emotional response. But that is not the way it is usually used in contemporary life. It's a way of achieving and maintaining distance, of not letting anything in, not feeling anything too deeply or acutely, or at all. At this point in my life, I tend to view it as the coward's way. And, of course, I say that as someone whose own daily discourse is fully saturated with irony.

Reading the above-mentioned NYT article makes me wonder if I should have become a Jungian analyst instead of entering this strange literary netherworld of mine. There was a time in my life I could have gone either way. Joseph Campbell said that Protestants who lose their religion become psychologists, and Catholics who lose their religion become poets. I guess he was right. For better or worse, I'm on the poet's road. (Damn you, Robert Bly, for presenting an example that suggested this dream is possible!) My job is to figure out how to write poems that say what I want while still somehow being relevant to people in this culture.

I suppose this blog entry makes me sound like a cranky old man. I admit, I do think the culture is going downhill in terms of its devotion to irony and materialism. (It's going uphill in other areas, such as progress being made against sexism, racism, etc.) However, really, I guess, I am just a fringe dweller, and probably would be no matter what era I lived in. Granted, I suspect I would have felt more at home in, say, 1840s New England, hobnobbing with people like Emerson and talking about the Soul (with the capital S, baby). But even they were more fringe in their own time than is commonly realized.

What all of this blather amounts to is the realization (which I have semi-frequently and then forget about again) that I really need to take my soul life--that is, my soul's life--more seriously. Living in the internet age is not an excuse. I buy and buy and buy the books, but I've already known what I need to know for about a decade and a half. I could at least keep a damned dream journal, or something. I have one life, and it's already almost half over. When, on my deathbed, I look back on my life, I hope I will be able to say "I did everything I could to find meaning," rather than, "I made fun of shit and said snarky things."

Please let me live as I know I need to, O my unconscious.

These Are My Dramas

So, now and then I get into a Moleskine state of mind. Even though I already have a few blank ones, I feel a need to buy more. I write poem drafts in them, and if I were to keep a journal I would journal in them. This week was very eventful insofar as I bought a couple of ruled ones for the first time. Moleskine or not, all of my writing journals, for both home and out-and-about use, have always been unruled. Maybe you think this is unimportant. However, I must have spent an hour or two the other day trying to decide whether to make this switch.

Maybe it’s because, as a poet, I am very sensitive to white space on the page. Maybe it’s because my Zen training has made me especially sensitive to the use of white space in some varities of traditional Chinese and Japanese painting. Whatever the reason, I’ve always felt a strong, visceral preference for unruled paper. It feels spacious, open, vast. And I can draw on it, too.

But now the ruled paper has called to me. It feels more “literary,” in a 19^th-century sort of way. For instance, I’ve seen Whitman’s notebooks from the first drafts of what would become Leaves of Grass; his notebooks had ruled paper. And the resistance the lines provide—the anti-spaciousness, if you will—is kind of nice to work against. It just feels more writerly. Plus, I can draw on ruled paper, too, if I really want to.

(Of course, it could also be that the ruled paper just gives me a handy excuse to buy new Moleskines. Can’t use those unruled ones, no, no, no.)

Perhaps some of you may scoff at my disproportionate concern for such things. What can I say? I am a writer. These are my dramas. (Actually, I have other dramas, but this is not that kind of blog.)

On a related note, this book is being released next month, and it just makes me so f-ing happy. (Seriously.) C.G. Jung is probably my central intellectual/cultural influence. His ideas are fundamental for me (however much I may have strayed from them in my actual life. Damn you, grad school!). Finally, someone is publishing a facsimile of his famous Red Book. Many of Jung's central ideas derive from a period known as his “creative illness,” which sounds euphemistic but really isn't. He had a sort of mid-life near-schizophrenic crack-up, but he climbed out of it and forged this psychic raw material into ideas. He kept a journal (not a Moleskine, alas) of his “active imagination” dialogues with symbolic figures in his own psyche. He then reworked these journal entries into this beautiful Red Book, combining the dialogues and ideas with fascinating and often beautiful little paintings of his own. It is a modern holy book of the soul.

This book has always fascinated me. I consider it representative of what I’d like my body of poetic writing to be.

It's actually on exhibit in New York this fall. I’m sorely tempted to go, even though I can't really afford the trip. I mean, it’s the Red Book! For me, this is like seeing the True Cross, if there were a True Cross. At any rate, I’m damned well buying the facsimile, even if it is very pricey. His insights are like talismans than I can use to ward off the evil spirits of banality and nihilism that devour our culture so rapaciously. It is my hope that reading this book, and just looking at it, will propel me back into the Jungian waters that used to nourish me so well, and which gave birth to my sense of poetry vocation in the first place.

As far as that vocation is concerned, I guess I’ve once again accepted that it is just my fate, no matter how horrified I am by many of the trends in contemporary poetry. Maybe my work has a place here, or maybe not. (I did get a nice acceptance e-mail recently from a very fine journal, the subject line of which read “Your wonderful poems.” Maybe the ice is beginning to crack.)

One of my current projects is an essay/presentation called “That I was blessed and could bless”: Toward a Poetics of Joy. Let’s just say that I am very concerned about what poetry has become, especially since I’ve resigned myself to the job. It seems so narrow now. I was talking recently to a non-lit, non-creative-writing professor at a local university, and when I mentioned that I was a poet, she said, “I like Billy Collins. He gives me a chuckle.” Of course my first impulse was outrage at her (inwardly, anyway; outwardly, I just smiled and said, “He is very popular.”) But then I thought, can I really blame her? Why would any sane person who isn’t already fully embroiled in the poetry world submit to the grim, often-petty, hair-shirt “interrogations” of language that constitute a good chunk of contemporary poetry?

At any rate, I didn’t get into poetry to confess anything or to subvert the relationship between signifier and signified. So, currently I’m trying to develop a poetics that makes, or regains, some room in poetry for the sort of experiences I consider worth having as a human being. (This is not to say that I find there to be no room at all for such experiences in contemporary poetry. As with any polemic, I guess I’m focusing very strongly on the side I disagree with.)

I will continue to fuss with these thoughts—possibly in a Moleskine!

(This blog entry is not brought to you by The Moleskine Company, though it might as well be.)

A Victorian hallucinogen!

My current favorite quote, by Adam Gopnik in his book Angels and Ages, about Darwin’s On the Origin of Species:

 

“It’s a Victorian hallucinogen, where the whole world suddenly comes alive and begins moving, so that the likeness between seagulls and sandpipers on the beach where you are reading suddenly becomes spookily animated, part of a single restless whole, with the birds’ giant lizard ancestors looming like ghosts above them.  What looks like the fixed, unchanging solitude of the beach and ocean suddenly becomes alive to, vulnerable to, and endless chain of change and movement.  It’s a book that makes the whole world vibrate.”

Spaced Out

Now and then, someone or some circumstance will call my attention to some artist whose work had not been, prior to that moment, especially important to me.  But for some reason I happen to be newly receptive, and suddenly that artist's work seems really essential as a clue to my own doomed, quixotic project.  

So, currently I'm really interested in the Spanish/Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926).  

I remember seeing pictures of a couple of his buildings in an art history textbook I read many years ago, and I thought then that his work blew the doors off that of the other architects featured.  Unfortunately, that's as far as I got.  I've always tended to skip the architecture section of art history books, because I don't work in that medium; no medium save dance could be further from my two-dimensional writing and drawing activities.

My intention here is not to extol the virtues of Gaudi's work.  Obviously, his buildings are absolutely extraordinary, marvelously dreamlike, almost erotically organic.  And the man himself was also quite fascinating.  But when I get interested in an artist's work, my primary response is to want to steal from it in some way.  This has led me to the consideration of how exactly a poet might steal from an architect.

What would be the literary equivalent of one of Gaudi's buildings?  For that matter, what would be the literary equivalent of any building?  An architect controls the way a person experiences space; walking into a cathedral feels different than walking into a tiny residential space.  What is the literary equivalent of the way a cathedral's interior raises a person's consciousness into its lofty expanse?  What is the literary equivalent of the way a small room almost demands a sort of intimacy and humility?  Do poems contain and complicate psychic space as buildings do physical space?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but they seem very promising as ways to re-conceptualize the way a writer leads a reader through a psychic space.  Modeling poetry after painting is old hat by now, but I don't know of anyone who has tried to translate architectural ideas into poetry.  I think I would like to try to do this.

First, I have to learn some architectural ideas.   Another lacunae in my arts education that demands to be filled.

P.S.  Yes, it has occurred to me to reread Bachelard with these questions in mind, though I'm really more interested in the literary equivalent of space than in actual reference to spacial elements.  

I used to know a guy with a big tattoo of Baudelaire's face on his arm

It actually looked more like Don Knotts.  

I have no interest in getting a tattoo of Baudelaire, but I do share his dream of "the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without [formal] rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie . . . ."  

Okay, I haven't actually written any prose poems yet, but I've had a sort of breakthrough in terms of how I want to write them.  I think I may have stumbled across a strategy for writing these prose poems that could be for me what Berryman's basic Dream Song form was for him.  Not that I think these will be even a tiny bit as good as Berryman's poems; I just feel that this strategy might allow me to finally say what I want to say in the same way that the Dream Songs allowed Berryman to finally write the poems he was born to write.  Lots of them.

I don't want to say much else about them, because that may anger the gods, and they might tell the Muses to shut up.  But I am sort of excited about writing these.  I hope they turn out half as well as they promise to be in my imagination.

Mind you, I'm referring to how well they will satisfy me, not necessarily the reading public.  It could be that what I really want to say is strangely irrelevant and even obsolete to the poetry community.  But I don't care.  Publishable or not, these may be my real work.

Oh, line breaks.  We have had a love-hate relationship for so long.  But I've got to let you go.  I've met someone else.

2009, You Fickle Bitch

So, it turns out that my optimism regarding 2009 was a bit misplaced.  Once again, the masters of the PhD universe have foolishly denied my attempts to storm their castle.  Well, one school admitted me without funding, which I thought might be do-able with loans and such (at least for one year), but that's looking dubious.  Thus, I amback where I started.  I'm still taking some classes toward high school teaching licensure, but I don't think I can do that much longer, either. 

Anyway.  I've also been thinking a lot about writing mi poemas, if not actually writing much.  Or at all.  But I feel things are looking up in this area, because this morning I had a brainstorm about how to solve my problem with finding a new form and a new voice.  It is the kind of brainstorm that makes me think, "Duh, how retarded was I not to think of this sooner?"  I am feeling a strong desire to write prose poems!

I used to be really into prose poems, but I haven't felt at all close to that form for the last few years.  Now, suddenly, it seems like exactly the form I need to use.  Instead of fussing with lineation--wondering whether I should stick with the traditional flush-left variety, or try Wright's drifty dropped line, or go full-on Graham-eque--I will go in the opposite direction. 

I'd already decided that in my new poems, I want to use dream logic,  and I also want to invite in many sub-voices, archetypal ones, mystical ones, psychoanalytic ones, lyrical ones, all sorts of different registers and cadences.   So now I'm thinking how excellent it would be to let them all pool together in a thick yet spacious linguistic field, a.k.a. a prose poem.  Plus, I have to admit that my prose is probably better than my verse.  (I almost said "better than my poetry," but as Russell Edson said, the opposite of prose is verse, not poetry.) 

At any rate, I'm feeling more excited about writing than I have in a while, so that's a good sign. 

In related news, I have a poem in the excellent new issue of RHINO, so buy that.  There's a link over on the right.  And another of my poems will be presented online at Glass: A Journal of Poetry (also linked over on the right), but not until August.  But what they have up now is also worth reading, so check them out.

Here comes the other hand!

One thing I would like to do in 2009 is blog more regularly and substantially. So this is a step in that direction.

I am confident about 2009. Maybe it’s just because I’m so glad 2008 is over. For whatever reason, I have a good feeling about 2009. Especially creatively. I still haven’t quite managed to reinvent myself as a poet, but I think I’m moving in that direction.

As I wrote in my Facebook status: I feel like, as a poet, I've been like the North in the Civil War (according to Shelby Foote) --- fighting with one hand behind my back. 2009 is when the other hand comes out, baby! I really feel that I have not yet begun to write.

Returning to my Jungian roots is an element of my little scheme. About ten years ago, I had a moment of clarity, while browsing in Shaman Drum bookstore in Ann Arbor, as to my vocation. I would be a poet, and Robert Bly’s poetry (which I was buying at the time) and the work of C.G. Jung (especially his extraordinary “Red Book”) were to be my keys to the kingdom.

For some reason, I have never quite been able to achieve what I envisioned so many years ago. Maybe it’s because, like everyone else, I keep getting pulled down into the undertow of the manic extraversion that is our culture. Maybe I just wasn’t mature enough to pursue the inner life as seriously as I hoped to. Maybe I’m still not. But I’m feeling that 2009 might finally be the time for me to get my psychic shit together.

I’ve never been one of those poets who has to struggle to find a theme or an overall vision. Perhaps because I started writing poetry a bit later than most poets, I’ve always known what to write about in the larger sense. What I struggle with is the details: what to write about, specifically, in each individual poem, and how to handle that stylistically. As I’ve previously noted, Jorie Graham seems promising to me as a link between my past work and my future work, since she also writes about the interplay between mind and not-mind (I hesitate to say mind and world, because mind is part of the world, as I see it), as I do; she also lets her form bend and flurry in keeping with her thoughts, which I still aspire to do.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. (What the hell; it’s a blog.)

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that I am confident my poetry is about to take a leap forward, or at least a hop forward, in 2009. I hope this will lead to more publications. I’ve got two poems coming out in journals this year (in RHINO and Lake Effect), and I really hope to have more. I must admit that, despite my being a Jungian introvert, my relative lack of publications thus far is really frustrating to me. I am not one of those writers who writes for himself; I want to participate in the culture. It’s not that I want to be famous; I just want to be read. (Okay, I wouldn't mind being a little famous. But that's not my primary motivation.)

I’m hoping there will be a big craze for poems about the ontological status of matter. Fingers crossed!

Also, I intend to finally start doing some cartooning again. I started out as a cartoonist, long before I was a poet, and for a couple of years now I’ve been feeling an itch to get back to that. Sometimes this is more important to me than the poetry. Sometimes not. I’m writing a graphic novel, and improving my drawing skills in the meantime. I hope to actually begin production (which means pencilling and inking the actual final for-print pages) by late spring or early summer. Until then, I hope to post scans of an old comic-book that I made and self-published when I was 19. But first I have to find a copy; I can’t remember where I put the damned things.

So, creatively, my life is full. Not so much otherwise, but that’s not unusual. It seems I’m to be one of those people who lives for his work (and for watching DVDs of Doctor Who; I love that show so much). Therefore, I’m pleased that the work seems to be taking off, published or not.

2009 will also likely decide my professional future: PhD/professor? High school English teacher? Bum? (I’m hoping for the first, not entirely horrified by the second, and wouldn’t be surprised by the third.)

In future posts, I’ll try to elucidate my various brainstorms in greater detail, probably related to the things I’m reading. Right now, I’m about to begin a big coffee-table book about Joseph Cornell. How he fits into the great project, I don’t know, but I have a clear feeling that he does. Then Simic’s book on Cornell, then some of Simic’s own work. Then I might delve into Rilke for a while; I’ve been feeling drawn to him again. And Jung/ian stuff on the side. And drawing practice. And watching Burn Notice and Battlestar Galactica and 24 online (damn you, mid-season-starting tv shows!). And the things I do for money. Honey.

Thanks for reading.

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Just a little something to watch

Here's a bit of video related to my last post. I promise to have another real post soon.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08312007/watch.html