"Il poeta lirico"
(The lyric poet)


The lyric poet, instead,
seated on the WC in solemn posture
is sure hat every crap he sets in motion
out of his tight sphincter
is poetry.


On Tue, 25 Dec 2001 22:47:22 -0500, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>In response to popular demand, here's the long poem of which "WTC,"
>previously sent, is a part. Hope you all get a kick out of it.
>
>
>Mission Creep
>
>
>1
>
>The Language Poets have a point: the act
>of sitting down to write a poem, the posture
>itself - or even walking
>to think about a poem, which implies
>leisure - triggers
>a kind of endorphin
>capitalism puts there. You can't help but
>sink into the elegiac,
>theatrical or clubby
>subject-position
>capitalism puts there
>unless you attack syntax
>*her breast warplanes mice
>I hoped ……… ! Lacan*
>and with it "the self,"
>till you achieve the detachment
>from received value-narratives
>of a Lenin (or, for that matter,
>a first-rate bond-trader).
>
>
>2
>
>Except for pain and death, life
>is a poem. It is endlessly subtle
>and, as people say, beautiful
>(saying this is part of the poem)
>and one would much rather
>interpret than change it.
>For changing is not living,
>and, changed, it wouldn't be life
>and would therefore be death
>or pain. When I'm sick or afraid,
>I can't stop reading.
>No satisfying conclusion,
>only sporadic dissipations;
>it must be an epic,
>an epic without a hero …
>(deciding you're the hero is part of the poem).
>
>
>3
>
>In the grievous 70s,
>I spoke with Seth Bernstein
>(who, I had recently learned, was a Jungian)
>about Jung and archetypes, condemning both.
>Jung seems to flatter artists
>by making them the mavens
>of archetypes, but it's a gilded prison:
>circles, cycles, airless truisms,
>one vast authoritarian tit ...
>I wanted an art without symbols.
>"It would have no life," said Seth.
>"It wouldn't fly, because you couldn't inflate it."
>On the contrary, I said.
>I wanted an art in which facts
>(the facts of my petty anguish)
>would remain jagged,
>attaching themselves like burrs to human perception;
>I wanted, as Jabès says
>(I had been reading Jabès), to "scratch empty space" …
>At which he gently, predictably asked
>what I was really attacking,
>thus earning his reduced rate
>as I would cheerfully relate
>if the subject of therapy
>were poetically worthy.
>
>
>4
>
>The "I"s that appear in a text incrementally weaken it.
>For I is a throwaway. I is Being's dandruff.
>I's regusted. I is
>whatever they say about it.
>I is someone else, whose name is Chuck,
>who in surroundings preternaturally simple
>yet social, a town, a field, speaks
>with total conviction and clarity
>to listeners who, for once,
>are capable of receiving them ...
>It's the Jesus scenario, echoed
>in hagiographic Thirties paintings
>of dictators, and by bin Laden,
>eating a pious meal with friends
>on a floor, on video. So when
>his hearers begin to move
>with a single transformative will, Chuck hesistates:
>*am I being original … ?*
>I is elitist, I is always wrong. Let's talk about you.
>
>
>5
>
>Suburban or rural tears - stifled
>so that some brute or child will not awake.
>A welcome chill of window-frost
>on bruises, the only friend
>the furnace going on.
>Or solitude, bulimia;
>or - lower - cold.
>
>In Jamaica, in the "Free Zone,"
>the pain of back and arms after twelve hours
>sewing, then
>the month's thirty dollars
>vanished with the job
>for somewhere even cheaper - oh,
>stop it. (I saw a documentary.)
>Stop. It's embarrassing.
>The conventions of our poetry and taste
>are those of the metropole.
>If you researched local color,
>context, people, loved them
>for a long narrative,
>critics would applaud your effort
>and virtue (meaning their own,
>in reading), and teachers might assign it,
>while you all went on drinking, eating, wearing
>whatever exports nations are assigned.
>Grow up. It's OVER.
>What exists is power.
>Regret is all in your mind.
>
>
>6
>
>I had one idea: there has never been
>a miracle. What counts as miracle
>is anomaly.
>Generally, water will not support
>a man walking.
>Statistically, the dead don't revive.
>The loaves and fishes were closer
>to real miracle, i.e., contradiction.
>
>Father would stay dead
>but I could have a drink and talk with him.
>He would remain that somewhat alarming figure,
>at the same time showing
>the calm I saw in a few dreams.
>I would continue in this fate and body,
>and not. Name any date;
>imagine drawing the curse from it.
>Choice, even whim would be the key.
>A God who would guarantee
>that state, then exit,
>would be something.
>
>A less original corollary
>(Ivan Karamazov's thought)
>is that to thank God for a miracle,
>popularly defined, means
>oppressing those who didn't get one.
>The just would therefore see
>atheism as piety,
>their only comfort in refusing comfort.
>
>That was my idea.
>
>
>7
>
> *These died, in any case* …
> - Pound
>
>Let the hucksters work
>the edges of the crowd;
>they're quiet, their money small and innocent.
>The flag they sell, on every kind of shirt,
>pin, purse, with occasionally a roused
>eagle,
>will be the only metaphor.
>
>The shops along the narrow streets,
>now ending half a block
>from Broadway, are going out of business -
>"after ten years," their signs announce
>above cheap luggage, cellphones, replicas
>of Liberty;
>they thank "the community."
>Those windows have been cleaned,
>but ten feet up - and up and up -
>a purplish paste
>composed of paper, stone, and people
>wraps every floor.
>
>The smell venturi-ing from the crater
>in the warm fall wind
>is the smell inside something.
>Traffic has stopped; one of the hoses is leaking.
>Visiting firemen
>from Jacksonville and Portland
>in their dress uniforms
>move purposefully, grimly,
>yet also barely move.
>For the crowd is as thick
>as the flowers it lays,
>the names it signs, the words it writes
>on sheets that hang from the fences,
>and no one wants to be here or to leave;
>
>even the intellectual
>who for the first time
>feels, with a double horror,
>what it is to belong and to believe.
>
>
>8
>
>I like those places where it's pointless,
>unprofitable or,
>for the moment, impossible
>to scrap the past:
>long blocks of brick apartment buildings,
>shells of a hidden, stoic life;
>loose boards and nails, not even picturesque,
>in rural slums;
>factory towns where factories have closed
>and no boutiques moved in;
>the desert.
>
>"Jewish Desert-longing Finds Expression"
>read a sign at the Degenerate Art exhibit.
>
>It isn't the past I feel in such places,
>or opportunity,
>but a constant blind probing
>like the repeated clutching motion of premature babies.
>
>I think how I could wander in the desert,
>given supplies and time,
>and not know that the desert spread, or when
>the great waste of Nebraska, Iowa
>was made to bloom,
>the air made breathable again,
>till looking up I saw -
>dark, stately, vaguely pyramidal,
>heading into port -
>an immense starship.
>
>
>9
>
>Redoing Stevens along marxist lines
>is thankless; for the obsolescence
>of Marx and of complex post-Symbolist verse
>make it as pointless
>as the plottings of the gents
>at *New Tradition* or *Chronicles of Decay*
>for a Christian Society or Tonal Music -
>another antiquarian cabal.
>
>Redoing Stevens along marxist lines,
>the imagination isn't
>the busy, endlessly pervasive force
>he imagined
>but a small constituency
>one can't afford to favor or ignore.
>It faces material obstacles
>I visualize as an editress.
>(Portraying the problem this way, or at all,
>already queers my chances.)
>She is highly educated, perfectly nice,
>wants things to be nice,
>and having found an irate but lyrical Black,
>some mournful Gays and enough Women
>to serve justice,
>she is willing to see (I flatter myself)
>what the imagination has to say.
>Seeing it, she responds with visceral loathing
>for which she must find concepts, or not,
>and glares at me across the frontier of language
>where history says tasteless hurtful things.
>We go on meeting like this.
>
>Redoing Stevens along marxist lines
>requires faith in words, which keep no faith,
>kindness for something that refuses kindness,
>the use of unreflective surfaces
>as mirrors, wholesale deportations from
>(or to) the past and other
>theaters of the combat that defines
>redoing Stevens along marxist lines.