Thank you for this. I've been rereading Berger recently; but also thinking a great deal myself about what it means to write poetry from a position of relative privilege and certainly relative democracy, tranquillity and safety, in a no-war zone.
I know that poetry can save your life – it has mine, in certain ways, a few times – and needs to be out there; but it still can feel like an indulgence as the writer.
I've also been thinking about Adorno's dictum 'no poetry after Auschwitz'.
This is not exactly what you address, but relevantly tangential, I suppose. Relevant to being a creative: what is one's responsibility; what is one's task/duty (difficult word to use) in the face of it all?
Yeah, I did find myself thinking of Adorno as I was writing about Berger's essay. Partly also because I've been reading Andrew Shanks's translation of the poetry of Nelly Sachs, in recent weeks, and the correspondence between Sachs and Paul Celan.
I didn't really get to it in the post, but I was struck while copying out the passages from the essay by Berger's locating the age of prose, in which the future held promise, in the 18th and 19th centuries. I've written elsewhere about Berger's work as a reflection on the failure of the hopes of 1968, and of the historical moment of the late '60s as a kind of last 'high-water mark' of modernity and its optimism about the future – but what I see more clearly, revisiting this piece, is how that coexists with his identification with his father's experience of World War I, and the sense that 1914 marked an even greater rupture in that linear faith in reason and progress. So if I'm understanding him right, it's WW1 that Berger sees as the point beyond which poetry has to take over from prose, but that brings us – as you say – to WW2 and Adorno's famous challenge to the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz, which has probably been oversimplified in the way it is often quoted.
In the end, I'm back to what I think Berger said in that collection of his poems, about poetry being what he does when nothing else works. And I think of Zadie Smith after 9/11 saying 'We don't write the books we want to write, we write the books we can't not write.' To the extent that this is true of where writing comes from, then each of us does what we can't not do, though not without being aware of the position from which we do it and how this contrasts with where many others find themselves.
Perfect response, Dougald. Am with you, and with Zadie Smith too.
Also thanks for the link re Adorno and Celan.
I hadn't seen Berger's work as stemming from the failure of the hopes of 68+; that's interesting. Do you have a link to your writing about this?
I wonder whether the question behind my question is more to do with WHAT poetry can/must be written at such times of transition? Also, there is a potency in writing anyway, because – what else is there to do?
I have barely written in the last year (all my time being taken up with a regenerative land project here in Brittany), and it is SUCH a relief to have started again, and know that, after all, perhaps I do have something to say. That is what I too can't NOT do, and I have been feeling actually physically ill for poetry's absence after so many decades of it (I know I sound like a self-pitying fin de siècle poet saying that!).
Interesting what Richard Kurth says. Richard, I like all you say and agree with you; and yes, Dougald, it IS a conversation-stopper. I first heard it when I was one of a few poetry tutors leading a weeklong poetry school for a well-known psychospiritual organisation. We had been discussing political persecution and the role of poetry; and beside me it happened there were two Jews. One of them quoted it (I believe she was opening it for discussion, not being obstructive), and, although initially no one knew how to respond, after the break we had a very interesting group session on just this.
Curiously, the essay I quote from where he writes about the hopes of 1968 was written about the Isenheim altarpiece at Colmar. Also among my current reading is an extraordinary book about Paul Klee's Angelus Novus – Behind the Angel of History by Annie Bourneuf – and among the many things I'm learning from it is that Klee's painting (which Walter Benjamin owned and which inspired his famous 'angel of history' passage, among other things) seems to have been partly modelled on (or a riff on) Grünewald's depiction of the Resurrection in that altarpiece. Given Benjamin's significance for Berger, there's a huge amount to think with here, that I'm only just getting started on.
Gosh – these intricate interleaving webs that the universe throws up. (I didn't know Benjamin owned that Klee). Thank you for another series of fascinating starting points which I now want to follow up! – and I look forward to reading your writing on it all when it emerges. I'll look at that essay of yours over the next day or two.
On another note, it has to be said that I miss the early Hine/Kingsnorth days of DM: the inspiration, passion, commitment, vision of how it might be, could be.
I still have a hard copy of the manifesto. And I realise now I must also have that essay in hard copy – it seems so long ago now.
I know the feeling. But there is no privilege without responsibility. A privileged person does have a duty to respond. Like prayer, poetry starts with listening to something outside yourself, interpreting, making it your own and responding in your own words. A gap is traveled. An offering is made to the world. Even when nobody else reads it.
Well, yes, sometimes, Richard. (Being a conduit?) I don't like to admit it because it's a bit woowoo. But yes. Beyond 'left brain'. I like it when I can get my ego out of the way and stand to one side of what perhaps (perhaps) needs to be said; or is at least saying itself.
I guess that means you do, too? From what you write I have the sense you 'know' this field one stands in on such an occasion...
One thing I know is that try as we might things never add up without remainder. I certainly don't add up. This is source of joy.
So I never feel like a conduit for something that needs or wants to be said (like Mohammed taking dictation from the Angel Gabriel in a cave). Rather the not me that wants to be said wants to be said by me in my own words. It wants me to make it my own. So, since it's a two way street, there is ego in it, and ego's energy, will.
I hear you about the woo woo. It saddens me that we have to have such a concept to point at somebody building a business.
Thanks, both of you, for this conversation, which I am grateful to listen in on. What you say about how "things never add up without remainder" is beautifully put, Richard, and speaks directly to me.
I wonder if you could unpack the last bit you said a little further, about "woo woo" and the need "to have such a concept to point at somebody building a business"?
Lovely, Richard; esp the idea of joy coming from not adding up.
I think 'conduit' was the wrong word. I don't mean what the New Age calls 'channelling'; more like standing in a shower of rain that stops one thinking. Ego, I suppose, comes in at the redrafting process. Would you agree?
Someone said - can't remember who - that if a poet is someone who is struck by lightning, then it's the job of a poet to go out into storms as often as possible... (my paraphrase). I get that. It's what the Celtic tradition would call 'Awen': Yeats' 'fire in the head' of inspiration (which I've co-opted for my programme of poetry courses and retreats).
Like Dougald, I'd be glad to hear more about your intention with the woowoo and business bit?
Once again your instincts lead you to the right place.
I recently spoke at a workshop exploring the role of poetry in the climate crisis. I was conflicted, because I find when poetry is used to help a political project, it will in ways refuse and get lost. What I found myself saying is that the prose explanations are crumbling around us, while the poem remains, and poets will need to step into that new reality. Reading Berger's descripting of early protests being "written in prose" rang a giant gong for me. Poetry is often brought in to serve these prose-written movements, but that's actually kind of backwards.
Rumi has a tale describing a limping goat lagging behind the herd, which comes to a cliff and must turn around, and suddenly the goat in the back is in the front. I think there's something of that going on today.
If I were to explore Berger, what book would you recommend I begin with?
Thanks, Rob. It does seem as though we've been instinctively groping towards a similar understanding of these things!
In terms of where to start with Berger – probably 'The Shape of a Pocket', which is the essay collection that first led me into his work, or perhaps the 'Into Their Labours' trilogy which grew out of his experience of living alongside the last generation of traditional peasants in the Haute Savoie region of the French Alps.
This essay that I wrote for Issue 1 of Dark Mountain was an attempt to tell the story of why his work matters so much to me:
Nov 23, 2023·edited Nov 23, 2023Liked by Dougald Hine
Rob, I'm interested in what you say here. I'd agree that poetry isn't easily co-opted to serve our political ideas; not unless we've agreed to dwell in the quiet deep heart for long enough for seemingly-spontaneous emergence of the poem.
I'd also agree that prose explanations are not holding the walls up (nor even taking them down when needed); yes, what remains is poetry.
Berger: I liked 'And our Faces, my Heart, Brief as Photos'; and also his book on animals – can't remember the title, maybe 'Why Look at Animals'? – might be significant, though not as ecocentric (from memory) as I wanted it to be.
Climate: I think this little poem from Jane Hirshfield in 2004 is a stunner:
GLOBAL WARMING
When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.
Jane Hirshfield
Loved the Rumi story. Gives us all hope. Elaine Aron, I think it is, speaks of the 'outliers' on the edges of the herd, whose job it is to listen, be alert, warn the rest. Poets?
"whose job it is to listen, be alert, warn the rest." I would imagine any herd of animals has individuals tasked with that job of scouting for danger. Only the human herd punishes or ignores the outlier.
I have heard about the Berger book, Why Look at Animals? What a beautiful title!
There's a resonance here with McGilchrist, too. I'm remembering the passage where he writes about bird's eyes, and how they use the right eye (left brain) to look at details like what they are pecking at and the left eye (right brain) for that wider scanning of the horizon for possible threats. Following that, it sounds like the job of the right brain "to listen, be alert, warn the rest".
Interesting. How little we know about how to see. Also the sense of seeing our way out of the tunnel vision which always has us "progressing forward." That "forward thinking visionary" is starting to look kind of demented.
Grateful to have read Berger's words through yours today. I doubt I can ever not think of poetry as speaking to the immediate wound--what a gorgeous, brutally truthful way to talk about the power poetry has to speak honestly, and the labour of poetry.
"All other human pain, however, is caused by one form or another of separation" (Berger).
Poetry re-connects us despite a rather crude cultural artifact that imitates and displaces relationship, to our great detriment. I'm reminded of something I wrote recently (could this be related to your point?):
The prevailing consensus-reality is not a network of authentic human relationships, but of financial connections separating people that, as French economist André Orléan points out, "...reunites separated individuals by building for them a common horizon, the desire for money, and a common language, that of accounts." Thus there are two unbreakable constraints on the possible emergence of the worldwide human community of peace and restorative stewardship that could sustain our species and our Biosphere: the impassable barrier between us, and the colossal infrastructure of scarcity-accounting that is its substance.
The language of poetry, some languages that are essentially poetic, and the still-intact cultural heritage of indigenous peoples, seem to work in a realm prior to or outside of this cultural structure.
To your point, perhaps prose does not: because it is the very language in which modernity is constructed in our minds (and replicated externally). Of course my poor attempt to conceptualize this is likewise constrained, leaving it to the reader to apply a poetic eye, meaning being endogenous to the brain (and thank you all, for bringing this mysterious faculty to the party).
And there is literature that transcends this structural limitation. Occasionally I find (to my delight) your own writings enter that magical realm.
Yes to Poetry! It allows space for something to grow, its roots hidden not exposed to the merciless Stare.
As to torture I cant help but sense that deep down The Modern World is so torturous that we have closed our eyes lest we see the continuum that we are in some sense caught up in the all. Or something like that . . .
A man says lilacs against white houses, two sparrows, one streaked, in a thinning birch, and can't find his way to a sentence.
In order to be respectable, Thorstein Veblen said, desperate in Palo Alto, a thing must be wasteful, i.e., "a selective adaptation of forms to the end of conspicuous waste."
So we try to throw nothing away, as Keith, making dinner for us as his grandmother had done in Jamaica, left nothing; the kitchen was as clean at the end as when he started; even the shrimp shells and carrot fronds were part of the process,
and he said, when we tried to admire him, "Listen, I should send you into the chickenyard to look for a rusty nail to add to the soup for iron."
The first temptation of Sakyamuni was desire, but he saw that it led to fulfillment and then to desire, so that one was easy.
Because I have pruned it badly in successive years, the climbing rose has sent out, among the pale pink floribunda, a few wild white roses from the rootstalk.
Suppose, before they said silver or moonlight or wet grass, each poet had to agree to be responsible for the innocence of all the suffering on earth,
because they learned in arithmetic, during the long school days, that if there was anything left over,
you had to carry it. The wild rose looks weightless, the floribunda are heavy with the richness and sadness of Europe
as they imitate the dying, petal by petal, of the people who bred them.
You hear pain singing in the nerves of things; it is not a song.
The gazelle's head turned; three jackals are eating his entrails and he is watching.
New to Berger but I like what is being tied to into that Campanga business here. The phrase "making sense" has an air to it of fabrication. It is an instrumetal approach to apprehension that, rather than a sensual entrance into relation, is a working of what the senses brush up against as if all is mere material. I imagine poetry is a tzimtzum of language where the litero-certain and the unambiguous are withdrawn in order to make room for the ambidextrous and multi-valent. There is a certain kind of silence about it that, with that drawing back from certainty, changes the species of revelation mustered into being. The endgame of fabrication is an intimacy that culminates in a complete distance (person to thing) while poetry's endgame is a distance (the metaphorical) whose endgame is to make strangers into companions.
That is what kicked up reading this post. Don't blame me.
Thanks for these further elaborations on the episode.
My mother writes poems, but I havent inherited much of her gift. This might be a skill that needs developing.
You expressed in the episode your gratitude for the 'weave' of authors and thinkers that you're part of. We are still digesting the outcomes of the elections here in NL and with everyone talking about how the outcome shocked them, showing them how much they are living within a 'bubble'. I really like your idea of being part of a weave, as all that bubbles do is burst or harden and exclude the ins and outs, while weaves have a sense of cocreation, of possibilities to join in, being stronger in a fabric then as a single strand. (And also in the fantasy stories that shaped my youth like DnD the weave is the source of all magic, so that might help in associating with the word).
Anyway, thanks for introducing me to your weave and the inspiration it provides.
Thank you for this. I've been rereading Berger recently; but also thinking a great deal myself about what it means to write poetry from a position of relative privilege and certainly relative democracy, tranquillity and safety, in a no-war zone.
I know that poetry can save your life – it has mine, in certain ways, a few times – and needs to be out there; but it still can feel like an indulgence as the writer.
I've also been thinking about Adorno's dictum 'no poetry after Auschwitz'.
This is not exactly what you address, but relevantly tangential, I suppose. Relevant to being a creative: what is one's responsibility; what is one's task/duty (difficult word to use) in the face of it all?
Thanks, Roselle, and good to hear from you!
Yeah, I did find myself thinking of Adorno as I was writing about Berger's essay. Partly also because I've been reading Andrew Shanks's translation of the poetry of Nelly Sachs, in recent weeks, and the correspondence between Sachs and Paul Celan.
I didn't really get to it in the post, but I was struck while copying out the passages from the essay by Berger's locating the age of prose, in which the future held promise, in the 18th and 19th centuries. I've written elsewhere about Berger's work as a reflection on the failure of the hopes of 1968, and of the historical moment of the late '60s as a kind of last 'high-water mark' of modernity and its optimism about the future – but what I see more clearly, revisiting this piece, is how that coexists with his identification with his father's experience of World War I, and the sense that 1914 marked an even greater rupture in that linear faith in reason and progress. So if I'm understanding him right, it's WW1 that Berger sees as the point beyond which poetry has to take over from prose, but that brings us – as you say – to WW2 and Adorno's famous challenge to the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz, which has probably been oversimplified in the way it is often quoted.
In the end, I'm back to what I think Berger said in that collection of his poems, about poetry being what he does when nothing else works. And I think of Zadie Smith after 9/11 saying 'We don't write the books we want to write, we write the books we can't not write.' To the extent that this is true of where writing comes from, then each of us does what we can't not do, though not without being aware of the position from which we do it and how this contrasts with where many others find themselves.
Does that make any sense?
Perfect response, Dougald. Am with you, and with Zadie Smith too.
Also thanks for the link re Adorno and Celan.
I hadn't seen Berger's work as stemming from the failure of the hopes of 68+; that's interesting. Do you have a link to your writing about this?
I wonder whether the question behind my question is more to do with WHAT poetry can/must be written at such times of transition? Also, there is a potency in writing anyway, because – what else is there to do?
I have barely written in the last year (all my time being taken up with a regenerative land project here in Brittany), and it is SUCH a relief to have started again, and know that, after all, perhaps I do have something to say. That is what I too can't NOT do, and I have been feeling actually physically ill for poetry's absence after so many decades of it (I know I sound like a self-pitying fin de siècle poet saying that!).
Interesting what Richard Kurth says. Richard, I like all you say and agree with you; and yes, Dougald, it IS a conversation-stopper. I first heard it when I was one of a few poetry tutors leading a weeklong poetry school for a well-known psychospiritual organisation. We had been discussing political persecution and the role of poetry; and beside me it happened there were two Jews. One of them quoted it (I believe she was opening it for discussion, not being obstructive), and, although initially no one knew how to respond, after the break we had a very interesting group session on just this.
I value this conversation. Thank you.
Thanks, Roselle! Yes, I'm all for staying with the trouble that Adorno brings with that line, if it can be put that way.
About Berger, this essay that I wrote a long while ago gives some ways into it:
https://dougald.substack.com/p/death-and-the-mountain
Curiously, the essay I quote from where he writes about the hopes of 1968 was written about the Isenheim altarpiece at Colmar. Also among my current reading is an extraordinary book about Paul Klee's Angelus Novus – Behind the Angel of History by Annie Bourneuf – and among the many things I'm learning from it is that Klee's painting (which Walter Benjamin owned and which inspired his famous 'angel of history' passage, among other things) seems to have been partly modelled on (or a riff on) Grünewald's depiction of the Resurrection in that altarpiece. Given Benjamin's significance for Berger, there's a huge amount to think with here, that I'm only just getting started on.
Gosh – these intricate interleaving webs that the universe throws up. (I didn't know Benjamin owned that Klee). Thank you for another series of fascinating starting points which I now want to follow up! – and I look forward to reading your writing on it all when it emerges. I'll look at that essay of yours over the next day or two.
On another note, it has to be said that I miss the early Hine/Kingsnorth days of DM: the inspiration, passion, commitment, vision of how it might be, could be.
I still have a hard copy of the manifesto. And I realise now I must also have that essay in hard copy – it seems so long ago now.
I know the feeling. But there is no privilege without responsibility. A privileged person does have a duty to respond. Like prayer, poetry starts with listening to something outside yourself, interpreting, making it your own and responding in your own words. A gap is traveled. An offering is made to the world. Even when nobody else reads it.
I rewrite Adorno: After Auschwitz more poetry.
Realising how little I know about the context of Adorno's remark, I found this paper, which offers a bridge between Adorno and Celan: https://www.academia.edu/30592726/Poetry_after_Auschwitz_Celan_and_Adorno_Revisited_2005_
Thank you. I realize I have no idea of the context of the remark, only that I have heard it many times and been irritated.
I can understand that! It does get invoked as a kind of "conversation stopper".
Yes, a fragment thrown with motivation.
Beautifully put, Richard.
Thank you for your kind words. May I ask you a question? Do you ever feel drawn out by, sought by, something other than yourself to write poems?
That would be a privileging.
Well, yes, sometimes, Richard. (Being a conduit?) I don't like to admit it because it's a bit woowoo. But yes. Beyond 'left brain'. I like it when I can get my ego out of the way and stand to one side of what perhaps (perhaps) needs to be said; or is at least saying itself.
I guess that means you do, too? From what you write I have the sense you 'know' this field one stands in on such an occasion...
Yes I do.
One thing I know is that try as we might things never add up without remainder. I certainly don't add up. This is source of joy.
So I never feel like a conduit for something that needs or wants to be said (like Mohammed taking dictation from the Angel Gabriel in a cave). Rather the not me that wants to be said wants to be said by me in my own words. It wants me to make it my own. So, since it's a two way street, there is ego in it, and ego's energy, will.
I hear you about the woo woo. It saddens me that we have to have such a concept to point at somebody building a business.
Thanks, both of you, for this conversation, which I am grateful to listen in on. What you say about how "things never add up without remainder" is beautifully put, Richard, and speaks directly to me.
I wonder if you could unpack the last bit you said a little further, about "woo woo" and the need "to have such a concept to point at somebody building a business"?
Lovely, Richard; esp the idea of joy coming from not adding up.
I think 'conduit' was the wrong word. I don't mean what the New Age calls 'channelling'; more like standing in a shower of rain that stops one thinking. Ego, I suppose, comes in at the redrafting process. Would you agree?
Someone said - can't remember who - that if a poet is someone who is struck by lightning, then it's the job of a poet to go out into storms as often as possible... (my paraphrase). I get that. It's what the Celtic tradition would call 'Awen': Yeats' 'fire in the head' of inspiration (which I've co-opted for my programme of poetry courses and retreats).
Like Dougald, I'd be glad to hear more about your intention with the woowoo and business bit?
Thank you.
Once again your instincts lead you to the right place.
I recently spoke at a workshop exploring the role of poetry in the climate crisis. I was conflicted, because I find when poetry is used to help a political project, it will in ways refuse and get lost. What I found myself saying is that the prose explanations are crumbling around us, while the poem remains, and poets will need to step into that new reality. Reading Berger's descripting of early protests being "written in prose" rang a giant gong for me. Poetry is often brought in to serve these prose-written movements, but that's actually kind of backwards.
Rumi has a tale describing a limping goat lagging behind the herd, which comes to a cliff and must turn around, and suddenly the goat in the back is in the front. I think there's something of that going on today.
If I were to explore Berger, what book would you recommend I begin with?
Thanks, Rob. It does seem as though we've been instinctively groping towards a similar understanding of these things!
In terms of where to start with Berger – probably 'The Shape of a Pocket', which is the essay collection that first led me into his work, or perhaps the 'Into Their Labours' trilogy which grew out of his experience of living alongside the last generation of traditional peasants in the Haute Savoie region of the French Alps.
This essay that I wrote for Issue 1 of Dark Mountain was an attempt to tell the story of why his work matters so much to me:
https://dougald.substack.com/p/death-and-the-mountain
Thanks, Dougald! I'm looking forward to reading.
Rob, I'm interested in what you say here. I'd agree that poetry isn't easily co-opted to serve our political ideas; not unless we've agreed to dwell in the quiet deep heart for long enough for seemingly-spontaneous emergence of the poem.
I'd also agree that prose explanations are not holding the walls up (nor even taking them down when needed); yes, what remains is poetry.
Berger: I liked 'And our Faces, my Heart, Brief as Photos'; and also his book on animals – can't remember the title, maybe 'Why Look at Animals'? – might be significant, though not as ecocentric (from memory) as I wanted it to be.
Climate: I think this little poem from Jane Hirshfield in 2004 is a stunner:
GLOBAL WARMING
When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.
Jane Hirshfield
Loved the Rumi story. Gives us all hope. Elaine Aron, I think it is, speaks of the 'outliers' on the edges of the herd, whose job it is to listen, be alert, warn the rest. Poets?
Yes, I've heard that story about Cook. Amazing
"whose job it is to listen, be alert, warn the rest." I would imagine any herd of animals has individuals tasked with that job of scouting for danger. Only the human herd punishes or ignores the outlier.
I have heard about the Berger book, Why Look at Animals? What a beautiful title!
There's a resonance here with McGilchrist, too. I'm remembering the passage where he writes about bird's eyes, and how they use the right eye (left brain) to look at details like what they are pecking at and the left eye (right brain) for that wider scanning of the horizon for possible threats. Following that, it sounds like the job of the right brain "to listen, be alert, warn the rest".
Interesting. How little we know about how to see. Also the sense of seeing our way out of the tunnel vision which always has us "progressing forward." That "forward thinking visionary" is starting to look kind of demented.
Yes, absolutely, Dougald.
Grateful to have read Berger's words through yours today. I doubt I can ever not think of poetry as speaking to the immediate wound--what a gorgeous, brutally truthful way to talk about the power poetry has to speak honestly, and the labour of poetry.
"All other human pain, however, is caused by one form or another of separation" (Berger).
Poetry re-connects us despite a rather crude cultural artifact that imitates and displaces relationship, to our great detriment. I'm reminded of something I wrote recently (could this be related to your point?):
The prevailing consensus-reality is not a network of authentic human relationships, but of financial connections separating people that, as French economist André Orléan points out, "...reunites separated individuals by building for them a common horizon, the desire for money, and a common language, that of accounts." Thus there are two unbreakable constraints on the possible emergence of the worldwide human community of peace and restorative stewardship that could sustain our species and our Biosphere: the impassable barrier between us, and the colossal infrastructure of scarcity-accounting that is its substance.
The language of poetry, some languages that are essentially poetic, and the still-intact cultural heritage of indigenous peoples, seem to work in a realm prior to or outside of this cultural structure.
To your point, perhaps prose does not: because it is the very language in which modernity is constructed in our minds (and replicated externally). Of course my poor attempt to conceptualize this is likewise constrained, leaving it to the reader to apply a poetic eye, meaning being endogenous to the brain (and thank you all, for bringing this mysterious faculty to the party).
And there is literature that transcends this structural limitation. Occasionally I find (to my delight) your own writings enter that magical realm.
Yes to Poetry! It allows space for something to grow, its roots hidden not exposed to the merciless Stare.
As to torture I cant help but sense that deep down The Modern World is so torturous that we have closed our eyes lest we see the continuum that we are in some sense caught up in the all. Or something like that . . .
Holy moly, I haven’t come across any Berger poems before. Where would you direct me for more..?
Here you go... https://smokestack-books.co.uk/book.php?book=93
Done! What a feeling it is to be on the cusp of diving into a new pool of poems!
This arrived today, and it feels like someone arriving on my doorstep with a feast
On the poem as remainder —
"Spring Drawing 2" by Robert Hass
A man says lilacs against white houses, two sparrows, one streaked, in a thinning birch, and can't find his way to a sentence.
In order to be respectable, Thorstein Veblen said, desperate in Palo Alto, a thing must be wasteful, i.e., "a selective adaptation of forms to the end of conspicuous waste."
So we try to throw nothing away, as Keith, making dinner for us as his grandmother had done in Jamaica, left nothing; the kitchen was as clean at the end as when he started; even the shrimp shells and carrot fronds were part of the process,
and he said, when we tried to admire him, "Listen, I should send you into the chickenyard to look for a rusty nail to add to the soup for iron."
The first temptation of Sakyamuni was desire, but he saw that it led to fulfillment and then to desire, so that one was easy.
Because I have pruned it badly in successive years, the climbing rose has sent out, among the pale pink floribunda, a few wild white roses from the rootstalk.
Suppose, before they said silver or moonlight or wet grass, each poet had to agree to be responsible for the innocence of all the suffering on earth,
because they learned in arithmetic, during the long school days, that if there was anything left over,
you had to carry it. The wild rose looks weightless, the floribunda are heavy with the richness and sadness of Europe
as they imitate the dying, petal by petal, of the people who bred them.
You hear pain singing in the nerves of things; it is not a song.
The gazelle's head turned; three jackals are eating his entrails and he is watching.
New to Berger but I like what is being tied to into that Campanga business here. The phrase "making sense" has an air to it of fabrication. It is an instrumetal approach to apprehension that, rather than a sensual entrance into relation, is a working of what the senses brush up against as if all is mere material. I imagine poetry is a tzimtzum of language where the litero-certain and the unambiguous are withdrawn in order to make room for the ambidextrous and multi-valent. There is a certain kind of silence about it that, with that drawing back from certainty, changes the species of revelation mustered into being. The endgame of fabrication is an intimacy that culminates in a complete distance (person to thing) while poetry's endgame is a distance (the metaphorical) whose endgame is to make strangers into companions.
That is what kicked up reading this post. Don't blame me.
Thanks for these further elaborations on the episode.
My mother writes poems, but I havent inherited much of her gift. This might be a skill that needs developing.
You expressed in the episode your gratitude for the 'weave' of authors and thinkers that you're part of. We are still digesting the outcomes of the elections here in NL and with everyone talking about how the outcome shocked them, showing them how much they are living within a 'bubble'. I really like your idea of being part of a weave, as all that bubbles do is burst or harden and exclude the ins and outs, while weaves have a sense of cocreation, of possibilities to join in, being stronger in a fabric then as a single strand. (And also in the fantasy stories that shaped my youth like DnD the weave is the source of all magic, so that might help in associating with the word).
Anyway, thanks for introducing me to your weave and the inspiration it provides.