Poetry Is An Egg With A Horse In It

I find it both reassuring and somewhat dubious that at 78 I still harbor affections and enthusiasms that I enjoyed in my rebellious 20s. I’d be in a sorry state of deep remorse were it otherwise. Chief among these early affiliations is French symbolism, followed quickly by Surrealism, Dada, Marcel Duchamp, hypnopompic kabuki and the circumference of insanity. I had a special appetite for the work of Stephane Mallarmé, which was unabashedly difficult, and playful and sly and erotic and prodigiously self-propagating. My temperament matched Baudelaire’s antagonistic fillips to the inane and vacuous presumptions of bourgeois sanctimony. He had a genius for finding beauty in squalor and luxury in stark privation. He prepared me, at age 18, for the visionary deliriums of Rimbaud, whose defection from poetry for the louche commerce of guns and coffee in East Africa came as a big disappointment and an unending state of perplexity. Why? Why would anyone deny expression to the genius inhabiting them?

I believe the denial of the poet in Rimbaud for the pursuit of normalcy had lethal consequences. I believe it also accounts for Rimbaud’s evident dromomania. Even his brief flirtation with photography.

It wasn’t until I was much older that the lush orchestrations of Mallarmé’s poetry and prose poetry began to hold a certain fascination for me. He wasn’t as overtly exciting as Rimbaud’s psychedelic Illuminations, with their colorful imagery and robust deliriums, or Baudelaire’s dazzling sensuality, his silken orgies and gleaming boa constrictors and vague perfumes, but I find a deeply abiding intellectual stimulation in my Mallarméan immersions, a feeling of inner liberation, of unfathomable hungers and chance encounters. I’m drawn to the intense musicality of Mallarmé’s work, his subtle and tortured syntax, his fragmented phrasing and abrupt non-sequiturs, his ability to imbue the power of language with the vivid presence of the void.

Stephane Mallarmé's prose poems define the indefinable with a nimble fracturing of banality. The tight grip of academic rhetoric. It's one thing to deliberately obfuscate a point for the appearance of sophistication and another to reorganize perception altogether.

Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.

Wrote Russell Jacoby.

Russell Jacoby famously coined the term "velvet prison" to describe the intellectual stagnation of academics who are insulated and complacent within the university system, leading to a situation where "the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged". He argued that this institutional comfort breeds an intellectual decline, making it difficult to think critically or challenge the status quo. 

States the AI Overview on Google.

In Book 20, Part Four of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), Goethe describes the phenomenon of Dämonisch (the daemonic) – which he attributed to the artistry of violinist Nicolas Paganini - as a "mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher has explained.” Lorca referred to this in his essay “Theory and Function of the Duende,” where he describes the duende as a “power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept. I have heard an old guitarist master say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende surges up from the soles of the feet.’ Which means that it is not a matter of ability, but of real live form; of blood; of ancient culture; of creative action.” It is not something anyone needs to go into debt for at a university. “No,” Lorca continues, “the dark and quivering duende that I am talking about is a descendent of the merry daemon of Socrates, all marble and salt, who angrily scratched his master on the day he drank hemlock; a descendant also of Descartes’ melancholy daemon, small as a green almond, who, tired of lines and circles, went out along the canals to hear the drunken sailors sing.”

My first taste of duende occurred one summer afternoon in August, 1965, two months after graduating from high school, in the backseat of a friend’s car, a speaker in back of my head, Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” came blaring out, galvanizing me with its startling imagery. This prompted a search for poetry that had the same wildness as Dylan’s lyrics. A professor at San José City College revealed what I was looking for: “Le Bateau ivre,” “The Drunken Boat,” by Arthur Rimbaud. This adventure eventually led to the poetry of the beats, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso. Michael McClure. Philip Lamantia. Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger. Bob Dylan’s Tarantula. André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism.

I aligned myself with the beats decades ago. I never liked hippies all that much. Most of the ones I met were shallow and pretentious and somewhat theatrical; many of them had enveloped themselves in the disarming gauze of a faux innocence to challenge the dreary, soul-killing controls of capitalism, or embedded themselves in fantastical Tolkienesque worlds weirdly superimposed over the bitter realities of the industrial world. Many of them named their children Rainbow and Moonbeam and danced like fairies in the moonlight. It’s rather sad, what happened. And it happened so quickly. When the spartan conditions of poverty inevitably soured to such an extent that the toxic predations of wealth suddenly started looking attractive, the most vigorous of these radicals were first in line for Reagan’s Good Morning America mode of unbridled consumerism. Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker. Tom Hayden transitioned into mainstream politics. I remember a lot of friends and acquaintances suddenly working for corporations. They rationalized this move easily with the phrase, “we can change things from the inside.” And how did that work out? It’s little wonder Gen Z has so much contempt for boomers.

I admired the beats for their intellect, their candor, their sense of adventure, their embrace of Dada spontaneity, and their fearless and sometimes nihilistic, sometimes Dharmic embrace of ways and means contrary to the delusional pursuits of the American Dream highly unpopular in American culture, such as harboring an openly adversarial position toward conformism and the kind of soulless, bourgeois complacencies that have resulted in our current dystopic landscape.

Most of the beats are dead now. Gary Snyder, who was a central figure not only to beat culture but a strong advocate of wilderness preservation and ecological health and integrity, as well as a highly disciplined practitioner of Zen, is still alive, and still revered as a public figure, even in mainstream culture. As of this writing, he is 95.

Snyder wrote one of my all-time favorite poems. It’s titled “What You Should Know To Be A Poet,” and is short enough to include here:

all you can about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
                        and the moon.

your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.

at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.
the illusory demons and illusory shining gods;

kiss the ass of the devil and eat shit;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
                              and maidens perfum'd and golden–

& then love the human: wives     husbands     and friends.

children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.

work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion,
                              hunger, rest.

the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy

real danger.     gambles.     and the edge of death.

I’m 99% on board with the recommendations of this poem. Everything. But one. The “work, long dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted / and livd with and finally lovd. exhaustion, hunder, rest.” That part is utterly foreign to my nature. I’ve had a lifetime of working long dry hours of dull work and hated it. Love it? Are you frigging kidding me? Every job I ever had never served as anything other than a source of money. End of the work shift, I felt like a turd squeezed out of the sphincter of commerce. It added nothing to my life but anguish, despair, and exhaustion. The nicest thing to ever happen to me was retirement and social security. I was finally – in old age – able to have time to create, reupholster my self-esteem, and do my writing. 

Bu the other stuff, about being a bad-ass passionate ecstatic shamanistic visionary fucking fun-loving philosopher with one foot in hedonism and the other foot in minstrelsy mischief and eccentric mystical phantasmagoric pursuits is terrific advice. Nor do I see any of that as a job recommendation.

Poetry was not an activity relegated to a quiet scholarly vocation, oak-paneled rooms, leaded windows in ivy-covered towers, awards, retreats, lectures, sabbaticals, academic panels and conferences, the polite society of the professoriate. That’s were poetry turns curdled and careful and stylishly chic. Poetry – the kind of poetry Snyder’s poem evokes - was the province of the desperado. The gambler at the edge of death. King Lear’s sad, forbearing clown. Ophelia’s lunatic rage against the abuses of fate. Hamlet’s scathing to be or not to be. Charles Bukowski’s inebriated smile.

I see the poet as a seasoned detective. The world is a crime scene. The human spirit has been murdered. There’s no lack of suspects. No accountability either, for the thousands upon thousands of zombies walking the streets, heads bowed, faces expressionless, voices corralled by fear and censorship.

Marianne Moore once defined poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” But a moment ago R shared a definition of poetry she saw on Facebook today, written by a fourth grader: “poetry is an egg with a horse in it.”

That’s brilliant. I can’t top that. All I can do is keep it warm, and wait for something to hatch.