Apocalypticism Now? – Chuck Pirtle (2015)
In a recent Chicago Review essay, Peter O’Leary attempts to trace a “way forward” between traditional workshop poetry and Language poetry, both of which have become academically institutionalized. He draws the right lineage (Pound, H.D., Olson, Duncan), but the wrong conclusions (grounding visionary poetry in a Christian apocalyptic tradition). There is another, more useful direction toward which O’Leary’s concerns can lead.
Part of what O’Leary objects to in both Workshop poetry & Language writing is that they have an aversion toward the visionary or spiritual. He speaks of a way between those two modes of writing; I say what is needed is a way not between but beyond both of them.
Where we can tie a way forward to O’Leary’s “apocalypticism” is not in the specifically religious sense he uses it (“suggests catastrophe or the quality of conclusion found in Revelation”). Apocalypse, etymologically, means “uncovering,” i.e. revelation. Revelation, of course, means to reveal, to uncover, to leave nothing hidden. This is what is needed: a poetry that uncovers the visionary, that reveals the spiritual in the material world.
George Oppen, mentioned in passing in the essay, wrote in a note in his daybooks: “Pound’s melopoeia, etc.—Amazing to have forgotten Noopoeia—revelation. Amazing to have forgotten lucence, translucence.”
Ed Sanders, in his essay “Creativity and the Fully Developed Bard,” comments on Oppen’s term: “Noopoeia covers sudden clarifications, insight and revelations on a localized, poem-by-poem basis (as opposed to mythopoeia—the biggest scale) as ‘The Secret Mind Whispers.’”
Revelation is what the secret mind whispers—sudden clarifications to reveal lucence
In-sight: descendental (Sherman Paul) not transcendental—the direction is down into the world, not up into the heavens—WCW “The Wanderer,” in which he’s anointed w/ the waters of the “filthy Passaic”—“The river began to enter my heart”: the gritty dirty material world became the source of his visions of the actual (as in Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” or Levertov’s “City Psalm” which ends “I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.”)
The spiritual is in the material (Oppen’s book of re-entry into poetry after 25 years of silence was called The Materials)
What is needed is the visionary, without visions (O’Leary writes of Joseph Donahue’s “desire that the visionary reality he has entered not be merely some dream, but a place of absolute reality.”)
One of my favorite lines O’Leary quotes from Donahue is “The archive of what is stands open.”
Allen Ginsberg renounced his 15-year quest for visions in his 1963 poem “The Change,” and through his Buddhist studies came to believe that clear ordinary mind is visionary consciousness—how can you get more visionary than uncluttered, unfogged perception of the actual world?
In the course of my exchange with Paul taking off from O’Leary’s essay, I came across the following by the Northwest artist Morris Graves, a brilliant description of the clarity of a visionary experience of/in the material world:
Silence over-worded:–This is It–now–perfect–everchanging–illusory–.
We each project our Spirit’s environment–private, apparently, beyond mind’s comprehension–yet including the universe + its Humanity–indebtedness + responsibility within the knowledge that the “Creation” has not been created–the interplay of paradoxes which governs our subjective-journey-through Deity–our journey back from sense’s-world-of nature to that conscious recognition that we are our undefinable Origin.
Only when conditioned by a “Vision of God,” + its resultant detachment, does man significantly use the language-of-his-actions to praise his journey’s environment– + to worship the miracle-of-the-illusion of his consciousness seeking + finding Rest.—-“Yes–so it is–so be it –Amen.” All is Void.
“We each project our Spirit’s environment” reminded me of Michael McClure, and a Shelley poem that he quotes in his book Scratching the Beat Surface, “Mont Blanc,” in which Shelley writes:
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves…
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around…
And McClure’s commentary on Shelley’s poem:
In 1816, the material of the universe in a point of novel self-comprehension…stood in the stance of poetry admiring itself from primeval past to most modern retreating glacier and roaring river—and naturally played upon itself and sang….These lines seem to be the energy of the universe expressing itself upon the complex organism of Shelley’s body as if he were a typewriter of protein spirit.
Now that is visionary consciousness and visionary poetry, and it does not depend at all on any god or gods or heaven or heavens, or any ideas about gods or heavens—but it does, totally and completely, depend on one human mind’s encounter with the largest mass of rock on the European continent: the spiritual in the material, the visionary in the actual.
—Chuck Pirtle