Borderline Poetry

Borderline poetry demands a leap. Said Deguy. Sweeter still, he added, is the vantage point of the mind from which one’s wandering is beheld. Amen to that. And what is a borderline poem? I see it as a form too loose and scruffy to be recognizable as a poem, just hints here and there that it means something other than where to invest your time and attention. Something discursive, but quick as a fox. Something fractured but monumentally seminal. A mongrel chlorophyl. A savage inclination. A disconnected milieu. A pilgrimage. An amorphous, embryonic prophecy incubating in the backroom of a louche grammar. Or perhaps something else altogether. Something awkward and raw but with a peculiar elegance bouncing up and down in a kind of prologue. Something with a clear chuckle of dexterity. Fingers busy on piston valves. The pleasures of a threshold. The annoyances of dirty dishes. The pitfalls of miniature golf. The quiet in a music studio seconds before the first note. A pregnant pause. A mind with 300 claws. The birth of a fresh new gestalt. An eye in a bucket of shivered perception, looking from side to side.

Borderline poetry is rude and unschooled. Dim, unnecessarily divergent, and marginal as a lunar commissary for lunatic extraterrestrials. It doesn’t require a license. Poetic license is an encumbering oxymoron. It’s an ox and it’s for morons. The freedom to do anything is paralyzing. You need constraints. Constraints are liberating. Like music. The first time I got in a poem I was listening to Ike and Tina Turner in a beach house near Three Tree Point near Burien, Washington. I just graduated from high school and the future had never felt so huge. So daunting. So dispiriting. So astounding. The music at that moment in time was phenomenal. And most of the people playing it looked like romantics from England’s Regency period. It made quite a good soundtrack for the aberrations of an impulsive youth with subversive tendencies. I’ve been trying to recapture that moment ever since. But it requires brisk salt air, the giddiness of youth, and an inferno to dip your quill in. Ike and Tina Turner were just the tip of the iceberg. It was when I discovered Charles Baudelaire that the door to another dimension opened.

Les fleurs du mal was the first borderline poetry I discovered. It was irreverent and sensual and contrary to the conventional morality of its time, which was recognizably obsessed with wealth and power and industry - just as in the U.S. of the mid-60s and Vietnam - and managing a conformable and passive public. Baudelaire had the heart of a warrior. He was not conformable. Baudelaire was marginalized and scandalized just as any other rebellious spirit, Shelley in England and Hölderlin in Germany. The most rebellious and romantic of the U.S. poets emerged in the 40s and were highly prominent and influential in the 60s, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka and Michael McClure. There were also Anne Waldman who – with Allen Ginsberg, founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado - Ted Joans, Joanne Kyger and Philip Lamantia, who was close in spirit and style to the French surrealists, and whose omnivorous appetite for the exotic and otherworldly found sustenance in Native American spirituality and Catholicism, and whose poetry rumbled and hissed with the ores of the marvelous. Gary Snyder, who was an odd hybrid between a Zen priest and a frontiersman, remains to this day, at age 96, a wise ambassador of ecopoetics. Gregory Corso was perhaps the most determinedly averse to the suffocating routines and compromises of institutionalized careerism. He lived well outside the walls of polite society, pursuing the life of a vagabond and often relying on the support of other writers and admirers to survive.

I found Gregory Corso’s stance the most appealing; he did more than write poetry, he lived it. His life was poetic. His bearing in the world was the stuff of romance and poetry. Institutions such as universities compel a certain conformity to certain standards, in exchange for which many advantages are conferred, such as a salary, which secures stability, and status. This, however, also compels one to live in a cage whose bars are invisible but whose proscriptions are real. Even those with tenure can find themselves without a job if they openly express political concerns contrary to the stated positions of the university in whose employ they enjoy their privileges. Maura Finkelstein at Muhlenberg College – a liberal arts college in Allentown, Pennsylvania – became one of the first tenured professors dismissed after posting content on social media critical of Zionism. Sang Hea Kil, a tenured professor at San José State University, is reported as the first tenured faculty member fired from a US public university in connection to pro-Palestinian campus protests. And in the novel Stoner by John Williams, the protagonist – William Stoner, a stoical and highly motivated teacher passionate about literature - is punished in subtle but damaging ways because he refuses to pass an incompetent student. While a work of fiction, I don’t for a minute believe these things don’t happen with alarming frequency.

Merriam-Webster defines ‘borderline’ as a: being in an intermediate position or state; not fully classifiable as one thing or its opposite, i.e. a borderline state between waking and sleeping, or b: not quite up to, typical of, or as severe as what is usual, standard, or expected, i.e. borderline intelligence, borderline hypertension, or c: characterized by psychological instability in several areas (such as interpersonal relations, behavior, and identity) but only with brief or no psychotic episodes.

I’m drawn to intermediate states. Gray zones. Crepuscular fugues. Calamity and prologue. The mystical and the physical. Bardo – the liminal state in Buddhism between death and rebirth. Barzakh in Islaam, the phase between a person’s death and their resurrection. The mesophase in physics in which matter is intermediate between a solid and a liquid, such as block copolymers, materials that can self-assemble into complex mesophases like lamellar (plates, scales, layers that are flat and thin) or hexagonal structures. Archaeopteryx, a raven-sized carnivore featuring a blend of reptilian, dinosaurian, and bird-like traits, such as feathered wings paired with teeth, claws, and a long bony tail, represents an intermediate state between dinosaurs and birds.

My favorite intermediate states are related to human consciousness: hypnopompia and hypnogogia. Hypnopompia is the state of consciousness between sleeping and coming awake and is characterized by a dreamy euphoria in which hallucinatory phenomena freely associate with very little, if any, intervening rationale. Hypnogogia is the same, but occurs as one falls asleep. I frequently enjoy hypnopompic states – it’s a fabulous way to emerge into the world – and have no memory of ever enjoying the same state as I fall asleep. I just fall asleep, quite often with BBC 4 Extra in the background, The Goon Show or Desert Island Discs Revisited.

Reading frequently constitutes an intermediate state between being alert and fully attentive and being elsewhere, floaty, delicate, dreamy and abstract. The effect is exponentiated if I happen to be reading poetry. And if the poetry happens to be borderline poetry, I sublimate into a quivering ethereality of accumulated cumulus and towering, stratospheric speculations, often with negatively charged particles creating a massive electric field that discharges as lightning.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry is in many ways borderline. Each poem reads like a lightning-fast, epiphanic burst of insight, each word quivering like a blob of mercury on a flat surface.

Rimbaud’s Illuminations are emphatically borderline. They exist somewhere between chasms of azure and wells of fire.  He along has keys to this savage side show.

Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger: borderline. The gunslinger shoots metaphysical bullets.

Bob Kaufman’s Blue O’Clock: seven shaking angels revealing our pain.

Borderline poetry is difficult to market. People like to know what it is they’re investing in. They want assurances. Nobody likes feeling insecure. This is especially true of award panels. This insures that anything borderline remains in the wilderness.

We live in a world of taxonomies. Definitions. Categories. Divisions. Ranks. Class. Grade. Grouping. But it’s a false world. It’s a world based on counterfeit assumptions. Authenticity scares the shit out of the rich. It gives them a thrill. Just watch their eyes as they sit at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. I like Oscar Wilde’s brilliant phrase: they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The borderline poem, situated at the threshold between a solid, unidimensional signification and a volatile polysemy, resists absorption and materializes a boisterous autonomy. The subjective element is nevertheless maintained as a potential liposuction. Something must be left for the consumer. The greater the effort to participate in the realization of the work and its structural dynamic, the greater the need to lubricate its gears with greasy contingencies. Jean Tinguely’s metamechanics comes to mind, as does disproportion, pink stationary, heavy lifting and vodka. Not just in the sublime, as Kant thought, but in all beauty the author mediates objectivity with a cue stick and lets calculus do the rest. One becomes conscious of own’s own nullity and compensates for it with a foreignness that pokes at things with a long thin feeling. What such an aesthetics does when it finally gets off the ground no one can really say. The privilege of the artist is to see with the work’s own eyes. One might call it a clairvoyance. And is a borderline.