I have been reading and writing and publishing poetry for 35 years. During this time I have kept my ears open for the sound of significance, for the exceptional poetry that is worth returning to. From the sum total of my life and literary experiences to this point, an esthetic has been distilled. Making this esthetic explicit will not only help to make clear to the assiduous reader the criteria the poetry in this anthology was selected by, but also perhaps to help form a touchstone and make a contribution to the esthetic of other readers. Poetry has a purpose: to elevate the state and feelings of the listener or reader. The purpose of language is disambiguation. Great poetry is disambiguation that stays put.
"A Reason to Read" consists of four main elements. Once presented, they can be considered from any angle and in any order as they make up the structure of spiritual access. Initially however, the first element will be an extract of prophecy as identified by the early 20th century novelist and critic, E.M. Forster in his work Aspects of the Novel. The second element, actually a system of measurement and evaluation, is the Buddhist concept of Mahamudra, as expressed by Garma C.C. Chang in his translation and annotation of The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. Poetry, like many other durable substances, can be created in response to pressure. Native American expressions of their faith and fate at the genocidal hands of the European Incursion provide a measurement of how high the human voice can soar under pressure, and are the third element. The fourth element is modern or contemporary psychological therapies that seek to reconnect people to their emotions or feelings primarily through the motion in emotion, ie bodies. Because these feelings are organically and physically related to prophecy, the therapies are tremendously useful. They include the neo-Reichian Radix Therapy of Chuck Kelly, Alexander Lowen's Bioenergetics, Fritz Perls' Concentration Therapy, and the more cerebral but still crucial, since it is the brain and nervous system that wires the human being and body together, Neuro Linguistic Programming of Richard Bandler.
Traditionally significant and leavened throughout, in addition to the four main elements, is a compendium of traditional concepts of how poetry can be created, presented, and evaluated. Among these would be Matthew Arnold's concept of poetry as a religion, Frederico Garcia-Lorca's elucidation of the gypsy aspects of Duende, or the irrational awareness of the presence of death, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's admonition to make a "willing suspension of disbelief" in order that poetry may have its intended effect, and William Wordsworth's still contemporary concept of poetry as being the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity." These and other traditional concepts of poetry are an elastic bag with no known limits. While not under discussion here, it is pertinent to mention that I have been the beneficiary of such American contributions to the poetic traditions as Ezra Pound's dicta to make it new, a variation on the Doctrine of Perpetual Novelty, likewise the Duende which can never repeat itself, the variable foot and resultant musicality of William Carlos Williams, our greatest poet, and the "Projective Verse" and "Composition by Field" contributions of Charles Olson. At least two poets in this anthology have consciously tried to make a theory out of their practice and the observable practice of others: Darrell Gray in his "Actualist" esthetic and Bob Watt's "Inferior Poetry" concept. All of Watt and Gray are recommended reading.
The practice of poetry has a practical intent, namely its purpose to elevate the spiritual state of the listener or reader. Whatever is most apt to provide that elevation of the spirit will work. The only limits set upon poetry are the self imposed limits of the imagination. The elements set forth in "A Reason to Read" provide a structural platform rather than a set of limitations. Other people and poets may arrive at states of sublime spirituality through other methods. That is fine by me. The path and the destination are one. The way of going is referred to as style. The more styles we have and the more style we have, the higher we are apt to be able to get. The current state of social and political disintegration, brought about by forces one level of comprehension beyond conscious human control, has contributed to the identification of spirituality as the best permanent choice of coping behaviors. In Toynbee's terms, this universal state (what's left of the American Empire) has boiled our choices down to supporting the state, revolting against it, or elevating our spirituality. The equally practical matters of material, financial, mental, and physical well being make their contribution to a robust spirituality. We get better behavior from individuals in a spiritually elevated state.
In the quest for an elevated spirituality and a working esthetic for the evaluation of poetry, first resort to E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel may seem to some to be an odd or inappropriate choice. Why bother with prose, some will wonder, since poets, hundreds of them in fact, have written large and small on what poetry is, how it works, and why it matters. Wouldn't it make more sense to start with poets on poetry. It would if we were concerned here with the individious distinction, occurring in English only about the middle of the 18th century, or barely 200 years ago, between poetry and imaginative prose, but we are not. We're after bigger game here; we want to know the structure of spiritual elevation. We are after the effect one human voice can have on the state of it's hearer and are not in the least bound by the categories concocted by taxonomists seeking to make the disorder they perceive in the universe manageable.
Forster's critique, actually lectures delivered at Trinity College in 1927, have a chatty personable quality that makes them easy to absorb. Himself nearly as great a novelist as the English language can boast, Forster put his clear and compassionate mind to the differentiation of some aspects of novels. We are most concerned here with section VII entitled "Prophecy," which by placement and implication, Forster takes more seriously than other aspects. With the other aspects, such as plot, people, pattern, rhythm, fantasy, and so forth, we are only peripherally concerned. The only four novelists that Forster could identify to illustrate the prophetic aspect are Emily Bronte, Fydor Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, and Herman Melville. He is not, thank God, at all concerned with what he calls the narrow aspect of a prophetic foretelling of the future, but rather with an "accent" in the prophet's voice.
I've read many of the novelists he pares away while en route to identifying the four he selects and they are eliminated for cause and on internal evidence. I've also read, and in many cases re-read all of the work of the four in question, except Melville's novel Mardi. I have saved Mardi, in somewhat the same way a gourmet would hold back a bottle of vintage wine. I am going to need an impressive lift someday and when I do, I will finish reading Melville. Both Lawrence and Melville wrote poetry also, most of which is noticeably inferior to their prose. The works of Bronte, Dostoevsky, Lawrence and Melville are the most interesting in prose literature. Forster speaks of the accent in their voices, of their ability to sing, of the tone of their voices. Their stimulations are many and diverse, but their ear for song is what unites them and what relates them to poetry. Immersed too completely in some instances, in the poetic life of Pocatello, Idaho; Seattle, Washington; Berkeley, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; and now finally in Walla Walla, Washington, I have heard in the poets' voices this same tone and accent of prophetic voice. There can be no substitute of course, for the whole enchilada, and serious readers, whether skeptics or affirmators, will one day soon want to read not only the chapter on "Prophecy" but the entire Aspects of the Novel. It is a short book and the lift is vertical.
It is the voice of prophecy that extends us beyond our social containers and into the realm of human feeling. Bronte with the transcendent passion of Catherine and Heathcliffe, Lawrence irradiating especially our sacred erotic nature, and Dostoevsky's capacity to convey the sensations of extension and a translucent sinking, stimulate a transcendent spiritual elevation and release. In Forster's terms, it is ultimately Melville's undercurrent of depth, where we notice the stress and the intervals but fail to catch the words of the song that constitutes Moby Dick or The White Whale's most significant aspect--only that someone has been singing. Moby Dick (for short) is a funereal poem, a dirge disguised as a eulogy for a rapacious economic system that will one day spit us all out. There are no better books. As Lawrence himself once said of Melville, he got deeper than metaphysics. The significance of artistic methodologies for releasing human emotions is not lost on us for most of us are trained from birth to cadge our feelings and suppress, contain and otherwise thwart their expression. Unexpressed feelings result in the increase and buildup of negative emotional intensity. It is to getting rid of this angst and anguish that prophecy appeals.
There are of course far more tidy methods for the release of feelings than the "intermittent realism" of the prophetic novelists, particularly the application of contemporary psychological processes, but they are absent the esthetic element which gives spirituality its transcendent qualities and we'll get to them shortly. In partial summation, Forester says: "Prophetic fiction, then, seems to have definite characteristics. It demands humility and the absence of the sense of humor. It reaches back--though we must not conclude from the example of Dostoevsky that it always reaches back to pity and love. It is spasmodically realistic. And it gives us the sensation of a song or of sound. It is unlike fantasy because its face is towards unity, whereas fantasy glances about. Its confusion is incidental, whereas fantasy's is fundamental...Also the prophet--one imagines--has gone 'off' more completely than the fantasist, he is in a remoter emotional state while he composes." So too does prophetic poetry display these characteristics.
Forster does not include James Joyce among the prophets, saying that "A prophet does not reflect. And he does not hammer away." Of Joyce he also says, "...in spite of all his internal looseness he is too tight, he is never vague except after due deliberation: It is talk, talk, never song." And it is the song with which we are concerned. The song that will touch our emotions directly and by stimulating the release of emotion, elevate our state so that we might be equal to the disambiguation of each succeeding moment with all the style at our command. It is possible of course to "talk" oneself or others a little higher, and at any given moment many are doing just that. The biosphere, or the infinitesimally tiny part of the universe in which we can live without life support, gives off sound. It is the ultimate responsibility of the poet to learn to hear and recognize these sounds that are the essence of existence and to get as many of them as possible across to other poets and people.
A surprising lot of misleading nonsense has been composed over the centuries concerning the visual and imagistic aspects of poetry. While I am willing to recognize the primacy of the visual system among our five senses, it is just the primacy of the visual system which makes it so susceptible to being thrown into high relief by an exquisite appeal to first, the auditory system, and then to complete the triangulation with an overwhelming kinesthetic or physical sensation. The unifying sensations are as rapid as any neurotransmission and can occur in random order. We have perhaps been too enthralled for too long with the traditional romantic notion that our feelings are located or centered in the organ of the heart, or worse by the intellectuation of the feelings to the extent that we turn them into thoughts and locate them in the brain. Kinesthetic esthetics, or the art of motion, properly locates the feelings in the muscles, (see the work cited above of Reich, Kelly, Lowen, Perls, and Bandler), where they have been stored by our traditional churchy and other fears. The tone or the accent in the voice is most crucial for the tone is established by the attitude toward the subject. The typical prophet's attitude might be composed of different parts humility, desperate seriousness, a fine eye for significant detail, a face toward unity, the ability to reach back from a remote state, and a sense of hearing that can make music or song out of language.
Prophetic novels have a "wreaked air" inside them and so too does prophetic poetry. It is after all, the emotional jail of western civilization that we are trying to break out of. Other cultural troves approach human life with different esthetic equipment. I can't imagine for a moment that the felt reality of the Japanese culture, for example, where feelings are far less apt to be traditionally denied and the surface of things held in high regard, would find the prophetic esthetic remotely appealing. In the robust Buddhism of Milarepa, a Tibetan considered by his acolytes to be the Buddha reincarnate, however, there exists a way to evaluate language hierarchically to see how close it is getting to the elusive "song" qualities we seek. In "The Gray Rock Vajra Enclosure," a song to explain among other things, the four stages of Mahamudra, Milarepa sings "A wandering thought is itself the essence of Wisdom." The four stages of Mahamudra are the stage of One-Pointedness, the stage of Away-from-Playwords, the stage of One-Taste, and the stage of Non-Practice. These stages correspond to levels of enlightenment. And we need to become aware of what is enlightenment and what merely resembles enlightenment. In terms of the composition of poetry, or prose, I am asking the four stages of Mahamudra to refer to levels of capacity reflecting insight into the human condition.
The first stage, that of One-Pointedness, could include practically all writing that succeeds in putting voice to paper by pen, or once of hitting typewriter keys, and now of the relentless electronic fingering click of the word processor. Regrettably, most poetry never gets beyond the first stage of enlightenment: "I think, therefore, I write and type and even without ever having past through the requisite Cartesian doubt, imagine my work is full of wisdom and poetic virtues." I have read and presented my own work in over 30 of the adjacent 48 states, have owned and read thousands of books of poetry, and listened to hundreds of poets read their own works. Ninety percent of the poetic population are kidding themselves.
The second stage of Away-From-Playwords is a step in the direction of enlightenment. Playwords litter the poetic landscape like the bones of drought abandoned cattle. Puns, figures of speech, intrusive alliteration, palindromes, decorative similes, poorly mixed metaphors and other bric-a-brac of language, are evidence the poet is aware that he or she is using words cleverly but not much else. The results are chiefly limited in appeal. Shakespeare knew to put his puns in the mouth's of his most contemptible characters. Any poetry might have some of this bric-a-brac in it. It is when the bric-a-brac is displayed as the essence when it becomes most loathsome and necessary to avoid. Pass right along to something more interesting that does more than resemble enlightenment. The emphasis on hearing the song and the tone of voice suggests that many would be poets fail because they have no usefully engaging attitude, are tone deaf to boot in other words, and write with tin ears.
Transcending Away-From-Playwords to the level of One-Taste represents a mature stage of enlightenment and not a lot of what passes for literature gets this high or goes beyond. It is where, for essential contrast, the work of James Joyce stalls out. He gets so wrapped up in the punning potential of the 17 languages he wallowed around in that he fails to recognize what a small box cleverness finally is. If cleverness was all that counted, Joyce would truly be the greatest writer in English. Cleverness is worth something, but all that deliberate calculation makes the vagary suspect and the talk tedious. The best "talk" in English is written by scholars and other focused writers considering objective subject matter one order of magnitude more pertinent than the clever poet focused on the intricacies of his own personality. That is the primary source of information not directly obtainable from experience. Any bright young man [or woman], as Kenneth Rexroth once said, can be taught to be arty but great works of art are nobly disheveled. The prophetic prose writers identified by Forster are as often clumsy as clever, because it is not the finished product that concerns them the most, but the motion in the forward rush of emotion that ultimately makes such a satisfying statement, far above the mess of all the contrivance of the merely clever.
The stage of Non-Practice, where the poet has achieved the level of prophecy, is indicative of the deep, serious, desperate circumstances that they write from, having recognized the entire human race to be on, as Eugene Lesser says, "the edge of a precipice." Evidence accumulated in my experience with poetry suggests that it is difficult and seldom if ever possible to rise more than one level above where the poet started. In other words, the "prophetic" poets collected in this anthology nearly all begin at the stage of One-Taste, and rarely if ever at the level of Away-from-Playwords or down to One-Pointedness.
The greatest American Indian poet, Nezuacoyotyl, the philosopher king of Texcoco one generation prior to Cortez, whose name translates as the Starving Coyote, has prophetic elements, although he personally never suffered any depredations at the hands of the Spanish Incursion. Many examples of the wandering thought as the essence of both song and wisdom could be cited from the extant work of American Indians, since not only was their situation sad, deep, and desperate, their feelings were closer to the surface where their fate was sealed. Mangus Colorado the Navajo, after being allowed to return from Bosque Redondo said, "We were so happy, we felt like talking to the ground." Black Elk, the Lakota medicine man once observed, "Everything in the universe is trying to be round." Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, when finally forced to surrender said, "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." Tatanka Yotanka or Sitting Bull once said, "I am here by the will of the Great Spirit, and by his will I am a chief. My heart is red and sweet, and I know it is sweet, because whatever passes near me puts out its tongue to me." It would be both wonderful and impossible to reproduce in these pages the utterly vertical sound of Sonny Mosquito, over a drum on the Rosebud Reservation in Crowdog's Paradise, leading the singing of the AIM (American Indian Movement) song circa 1974. Contemporary American Indian poets have such ready access to this stage of Non-Practice, that practically everything they write is easily imbued with the aspects of song. Their compositional problems are of a wholly different order. They are in the nature of responsibility taking, a process that can be intensely painful, and in far more cases than just the American Indian one, systematically avoided. A work that is all song is finally as stultifying as one that is completely clever.
Responsibility avoidance is the national and perhaps even the international pastime. That is where the great psychiatrists and psychologists enter the picture with full force. There is more than a hint of truth in the application of the works cited by Reich, Kelly, Lowen, Perls and Bandler and their relationship to human feeling. Feeling is as likely to be stored in the muscles as it is in the traditional valentine heart. The literal heart, the genitals, the muscles around the eyes as erotic organs, the muscles of the feet and legs, which either ground you or leave you off balance, the arms with which you express the longing in the human breast, the way you hold on, these are the physical equipment of emotional spirituality. Mobilizing feelings held here is most rapidly done in Radix Therapy with help. The Concentration Therapy of Perls can be applied individually to practically anything. Nothing will ground you quite as quickly as Bioenergetics. Lowen's books, The Betrayal of the Body and The Physical Dynamics of Character Structure, available in many languages, make the relationship between denied feelings and a crippled spirit clear. Lowen, a psychiatrist, cites Dostoevsky as often as he does Freud. The Neuro Linguistic Programming work of Richard Bandler, as in Using Your Brain For a Change, is indispensable help to get and keep you in the same place where the sound of prophetic poetry can take you. Motion and emotion move the song along.
There is a different type of fatality awaiting the contemporary inhabitants of North America (just as the Indians in their turn were done in by a bigger Spirit than the one they had in mind as being loyal to them--an utterly inadequate projection), and a related but different fate for the rest of the world's inhabitants. The premier American geographer, Carl O. Sauer, observed that it is accumulating divergence, rather than cyclical repetition easily charted by lazy observation, that requires attention. As we spiral into divergence at ever accelerating rates, the passionate need to stay connected to our deep feeling for ourselves and for the past has broken through many surfaces. Which may be why, that although Forster could only identify four major prose writers as being capable of "prophecy," there are many poets in this anthology who are. It is related to the increasingly desperate human situation. Only song will suffice; other writing stalled out in descending order at any of the 3 lower levels of Mahamudra might just as well be linoleum or wallpaper.
Prophecy is apparent in other art forms as well. In movies, the one that reaches back the furthest and includes more people with depth of feeling, is the Soviet film Siberiade by Andrei Mikhalkov Konchalovsky. Among traditional English poets, the most exemplary of "prophecy" are Wordsworth, Yeats, and of course Shakespeare with his fabulous objectivity. Much of Shakespeare's most prophetic utterances are directly cribbed from Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis. This is very germane, since the entire prophetic linking up with the past may be our efforts to reconnect with the lost cultural roots of the pre-Christian Celtic European past, the foundation of Ovid's great work. Modern Spanish poetry has it in abundance in the works of Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Frederico Garcia-Lorca. The Japanese, having been wise enough to avoid Christian oppression in favor of their other domestic and imported brands, seem largely immune to prophecy. Aspects of it do however seem to be present in the best work of Miyazawa Kenji.
Coleridge's "willing suspension of dis-belief" is very straight forward and will always be germane. It is possible to refute Shakespeare, or any other lover babbling in your ear, entirely if done line by line. You must be willing to hear the prophets out if you are going to be able to hear their song. Wordsworth also is still hot news, although his appraisal that the best poetry is the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity," is one of the most misunderstood and misapplied concepts available to us. All six elements in the appraisal have to be present or the results will reflect the process poorly. Far too many poets rush to open their mouths using only one of the six elements, or sometimes two, or even three. Many are spontaneous and simply gurgle without flowing. Others attempt to regale with their feelings, even though they are not powerful or strongly held. Many are incapable of re-collecting whatever feelings they may have had. Tranquillity is a rare state to get into, let alone maintain. If the feelings are not powerful, not spontaneous, and unrecollectable, stand by to be bored by any of several hundred thousand ways to be a bad romantic.
Going very far into Duende here could be counterproductive, for it has some resemblance to and may be the Celtic gypsy equivalent of the Tao--the longer you talk about it, the less of it you have. But looking up the full treatment in Garcia-Lorca is highly recommended in either Deep Song and Other Prose, "Play and Theory of the Duende" as translated by Christopher Maurer or Poet in New York translated by Ben Belitt as "The Duende: Theory and Divertissement." The relationship between gypsies and spontaneous movement should be apparent, as they say it comes up to you from the soles of your feet, a sentiment Lowen would recognize instantly. They say life will kill you but they won't say when. Singing is the most convincing thing that will both reconnect you with and save you from your own death.
So I am back to the beginning with a very unruly flower unfurled. Is poetry a bona fide religion, or can it or should it be, a la Matthew Arnold? What else besides the deep feeling of connectedness can be believed in for long? This is especially important for speakers of English, where our traditional emphasis on individualism and the rights of individuals, plus the psychological maturation process which attempts to turn us into self-responsible islands, isolates us one from another. I am sufficiently aware of the elaborate belief systems that pass for the world's major religions, belief systems that exist often without a shred of reproducible evidence, to realize that they purvey no spiritual relief. These religions are in fact the "evil" they incessantly warn us against. Reawakened feelings are evidence of connectivity. Rejoice as you can. Not everyone will hear the songs of all the poets herein. But everyone will hear the songs of some. The more song you hear, the more connected you become. Nothing would give me any more pleasure than to know that a song or two here or even many might send you searching for the rest of that poet's songs (or imbue you with the courage to sing yourself), for that is the ultimate purpose of all theory and criticism: to lead you to the evidence itself. Learn to listen for the sounds of the universe in your own world. So many of these poets are already dead: Charles Foster, Charley George, Darrell Gray, d.a. levy, David Sandberg, Charles Bukowski, Ricardo Sanchez, Bruce Embree.
This poetry was created in the second half of the 20th century, largely though not exclusively, in the Pacific Northwest. It is the work of independent poets, few of whom are or were acquainted with one another or even with one another's work. It does not represent the work of a school, no flying wedge of culture driven through the stout academic resistance of the university system where prophecy (other than explicit budget cuts) is about the last thing they want to hear. Very few prophets can remain for long in the employ of the state legislature system of so-called higher education. As far as I can tell, only one of these poets, Ronald Koertge, ever received an NEA grant, although several books by included authors were published with the assistance of the NEA. The anthology has nothing to do with nationalism, America, or any sociological hotboxes of cultural misrepresentation. There are several hundred poets, many of whom are friends and acquaintances of mine, whose work I have read and listened to, who aren't represented here. I don't love them any less for that; they compose in different ways for different ends. They simply don't compose with the intensity of this interest in prophetic sounds. I mention this to make clear that the work has been chosen from a large expanse of possibilities.
These poets sing with a wide variety of voices. Among the very best of them, the prophetic elements are apparent throughout their work. Not all the poets in PNSP exhibit all the elements of prophecy all the time or to the same degree, though more of it is often displayed in longer work. If you have the knack organically, it is not something you can leave behind without distress. In other poets, many represented here by shorter works filled with epiphanic flashes, it seems to occur only occasionally. And as one disparate and highly distinctive voice, Bob Watt of Wisconsin says, "The best poetry is still in the air and has not been written yet." This anthology is intended to be the beginning of at least as many things as it is the culmination of. It is an instrument to tune your soul on, to answer the question, what is the structure of the spirit. You are responsible for the songs you sing.