John Keene, _Annotations_

 EXCELLENT BOOK...BUT hard to describe.

Let's say you took the first two novels in Proust's sequence À la recherche du temps perdu and then turned it into an erasure poem, lowering the word count by 90-95%, leaving some whole sentences, some phrases, sometimes a single word. Divide it into short chapters, somewhat on the lines of Lyn Hejinian's My Life. Then you might have similar to Annotations. 

The Proust comparison came to mind because those first two volumes cover Proust's life from earliest memories up through the end of adolescence, which is about what Keene covers here. But Proust's novels also include a lot of local circumstance, a lot about his interests and education, and something of the context of the times, and so does Keene.

The thing is, though, that in Keene it is all radically compressed--the whole thing is about 80 pages. Even so, reading it, you get something of the complexity, density, and range of a full-on, door-stopper autobiographical novel.

Not to mention that Keene seems to be observing some kind of protocol or compositional restraint, like Hejinian. I couldn't figure out what it was, but there was a kind of procedural regularity to the book that I felt but could not detect.

Anyway, outstanding book. Keene has been getting some kudos lately (National Book Award, no less) but even so he deserves  too be more widely known than he is.

Walter Benjamin, "Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin," trans. Stanley Corngold, and Friedrich Hölderlin, "On the Process of the Poetic Mind," trans Ralph R. Read III

 LACOUE-LABARTHE'S DISCUSSION of this Benjamin essay was so interesting that I wanted to track it down. It turns out Benjamin wrote it when very young, 22 or 23, and it went unpublished in his lifetime. The translation I read is in the first volume of Harvard University Press's Selected Writings.

I'm not sure I followed Benjamin every step of the way here, as the essay was not an easy read, but in it he contrasts the first version of Hölderlin's short poem "Dichtermuth" ("The Poet's Courage," per Hamburger) with its revision, "Blödigkeit" ("Timidness," again per Hamburger). 

I had read both poems in Hamburger's Selected Poems without noticing the one was a revision of the other, for they go in quite different directions, but with Benjamin's help I saw the connection. He too sees them as going in quite different directions, though.

The crucial relationship in "Dichtermuth," as Benjamin sees it, is between the poet and the gods. He writes: "The sun  god is the poet's ancestor, and his death is the destiny through which the poet's death, at first mirrored, becomes real. A beauty whose inner source we do not know dissolves the  figure of the poet--scarcely less that of the god--instead of forming it." The poem is "rank with mythology."

In "Blödigkeit," though, the crucial relationship is between the poet and other people. In this version, "The incorporation of the people into that conception of life in the first version has turned into a connectedness, in destiny, between the living and  the poet."

In "The Poet's Courage," the poet is at a point between people and the gods, but in "Blödigkeit" the poet is between the people and...life, maybe? Which sounds like a promising idea--not so much the "pale mouth'd prophet dreaming" as Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day, perhaps.

I found one of Hölderlin's own accounts of his poetics in a piece included in the volume German Romantic Criticism from Continuum's German Library. His prose in translation is even more daunting than Benjamin's, but I think Hölderlin did align with what Benjamin found in "Blödigkeit"--that is, the poet in a deep engagement with life/living that he wants to recreate in readers' minds: 

[...] one can say that in every element in question, both objectively and actually real, something ideal faces that which is ideal, something living that which is living, something individual that which is individual, and the question is only what is to be understood by this circle of effect. It is that in which and on which the poetic enterprise and process  in question is realized, the vehicle of the mind through which it reproduces itself in itself and in others.

Giacomo Leopardi, _Canti_, trans. Jonathan Galassi

THIS IS LOOKING like the year I catch up a little on the great 19th century poets that I can read only in translation. Hölderlin in November, now Leopardi in December. 

At the end of Adam Kirsch's NYRB review of Charles Taylor's new book, which Kirsch characterizes as about "poets who were writing elliptically about their visions and intuitions, trying to suggest cosmic truths without actually stating them" (e.g. Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Eliot) Kirsch mentions by way of contrast "poets who were writing great poems about what it feels like to live in a world where such truths are definitely absent," naming Leopardi, Matthew Arnold, and Wallace Stevens. Hmm, Leopardi named in apposition to Hölderlin...was it a sign? Then a friend mentioned that he was reading the Canti in Italian and enjoying them very much. So this must be the time.

And (drum roll) I loved Leopardi. He was writing in the 1820s and 1830s, but his relationship to the inherited Italian poetic tradition is roiled enough to make him sound like a modern at times, never more so than when he is dispensing entirely with any species of philosophical or spiritual consolation. Unlucky in love, too, it seems. But he never seems mired in the Slough of Despond, somehow. There is something lean and tough in his pessimism, and a vein of tart humor that keeps things brisk (especially in the sustained irony of  "Palinodia al marchese Gino Capponi').

My favorite: "La ginestra"--in English, "Broom."

I can't judge the accuracy of Galassi's translation, but it reads beautifully.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, _Heidegger and the Politics of the Poetry_, trans. Jeff Fort

 THE SAME FRIEND who recommended Agamben’s Holderlin’s Madness (which I have yet to read) lent me this, and it is one of the most interesting books I have read in a while.

My best shot at explaining what is going on here: Heidegger is one of the 20th century’s most articulate apologists and advocates for poetry—see in particular his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger sees the great poet as a kind of prophet, a vates, giving sensible form to the divine. Moreover, the (genuine) poet speaks his (or her?) people into their identity, their being as a people. Homer gave form to Greekness, spoke the Greeks into being. (Heidegger here following Hegel and Herder, I guess.) 

For Heidegger, the German poet was our man Friedrich Hölderlin.

The problem: Heidegger was a Nazi. His most passionate declarations about poetry and about Hölderlin come from the mid 1930s and early 1940s, a time when Heidegger was still closely allied with Nazism, although perhaps not as closely as he had been in. The early 30s. So…is there something a little too Nazi-like about Hölderlin, some toxic tendency insidiously entwined in the beauty? For that matter, is there some toxic tendency in poetry itself, at least the poetry that tries to step into the prophetic mode, that has the largest ambitions?

The whole question hits me where I live, as I am a longtime reader and, yes, admirer, of the Hiberno-Anglo-American modernists, who tended to have such ambitions. Think of Yeats and his relationship to Irish nationalism, of Joyce (or Stephen Dedalus) forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, of Pound’s hope to make The Cantos  a modern Sagetrieb, of Eliot in Desert Father mode. Joyce avoided drifting towards the authoritarian right, but the other three…urgh.

Lacoue-Labarthe does a deft job of getting Hölderlin out of this snakepit, with an assist from Walter Benjamin. But any poetry that traffics in what L-L calls “national-aestheticism” (which usually involves, upper-case-M Myth and setting out to be your people’s Homer)…look out.

Lacoue-Labarthe shed some new light on post-modern poetry for me, in that he made clearer why I sense what feels like a renunciation, an implicit disavowal of ambition, in poets like Ashbery, a kind of “no, thank you” to anything Heideggerian (or national-aestheticist, to use L-L’s term). 

My problem then gets reconfigured as: I actually like it when poets swing for the fences, so to speak. But can  they do that without succumbing to the snakepit?

Friedrich Hölderlin, _Selected Poems and Fragments_, trans. Michael Hamburger

 A WHILE AGO, a friend whose recommendations always work for me recommended Giorgio Agamben's Hölderlin's Madness, which I promptly resolved to read--but, I told myself, I had better read some Hölderlin first. 

I am a reasonably well-read person. German literature is a gap for me, but I have read Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Rilke, Mann, Grass, and a handful of others. Still, I had never even thought about reading Hölderlin. He just does not come up in Anglo-American literary discussions, I guess. Turns out, though, that he is a heavyweight. In one of the chapters of Alain Badiou's Manifesto for Philosophy, he talks about the 19th and early 20th centuries as an era when "poetry assumed some of philosophy's functions," serving as "a locus of language wherein a proposition about being and about time is enacted." Badiou specifies seven names in defining this "age of poets": Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Trakl, Pessoa, Mandelstam, Celan...and Hölderlin, the only one of this august company I had not read.

So, time to read Hölderlin. And in translation, unfortunately, since I know no German. Translation is always a leaky bucket, but you lose the most in poetry, I'd say. Hamburger's translations at least have a good reputation, and they turned out to be highly readable. This selection serves up 169 pages of translated Hölderlin facing 169 pages of Hölderlin in the original German, which seems a generous enough helping.

Hölderlin reminded me most of his English contemporaries and near-contemporaries, the Romantics, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge, due to a shared passion for the natural world, Shelley, due to a shared passion for classical Greece, and Keats, because he had no particular advantages of birth and suffered badly for love. But he reminded me most of the English Romantics due to his always swinging for the fences, to use a baseball metaphor. He's ambitious. He does indeed want to assume some of philosophy's functions, or perhaps religion's functions. He wants to galvanize the world, be (as Wordsworth hoped) its next prophet, be (as Shelley hoped) its unacknowledged legislator. 

That sort of thing is hard to sustain. Wordsworth and Coleridge ran out of gas, Shelley and Keats died young, Hölderlin lost his mind. But a man's reach should exceed his grasp, as Browning put it.

"I grew up in the arms of gods."

G. C. Waldrep, _The Earliest Witnesses_

 OKAY, NOW I am all caught up, and Opening Ritual (the new one) is supposed to be delivered today. Perfect timing.

"The earliest witnesses" is a term from Biblical scholarship, meaning the oldest surviving manuscripts of  a scriptural text. Older texts are better than the later ones, generally--closer to the source, less corrupted by transmission, and so on. The poem of that title in G. C. Waldrep's volume of that title may be about textual transmission--its opening line is "Let us write, then, the glistening poem"--but it seems to be more about seeing, "witnessing" in most familiar sense, unless it is about not seeing, for it is partly about the polyphemus moth, whose wings feature two big circles that look like eyes but are in fact just camouflage, with no capacity to see at all. 

More helpfully, maybe, the idea of "earliest witnesses" also carries the idea of presence, traces of presence, the fact of having been close to a presence. Many of the poems are set in particular places, most of them in England or Wales, where something sacred may have happened: churches, cloisters, sites associated with saints. The speaker has arrived with the expectation that something of the sacred still lingers about the place--and this reader, for one, is convinced that yes, something of the sacred does still linger, and yes, it found its way into Waldrep's lines, although I could never explain how.

There is a lot of formal variety here. Longer-lined poems that take their time, seem almost conversational, full of surprising lateral leaps and baffling juxtapositions; shorter-lined poems that drill down with a visionary intensity; poems in stanzas that could almost be Pindaric odes; poems in prose that could almost be journal entries; yet for all the variety, the book feels more unified, more a single book, than even the book-length poem Testament.

A sense of pilgrimage adheres to the poems, but also a sense of openness to the unplanned and unplannable. Right about midpoint of the book, there is a series of six poems set in a place called West Stow Orchard, and the first one kept making me think of the eighth chapter of Augustine's Confessions (the "tolle, legge" chapter), but why? Why does Waldrep's poetry seem like the most profound spiritual poetry of our time without any obvious markers of "spirituality" at all? How does he do it? 

"Should I then drink more from consensus's cup," Waldrep asks at one point. Please don't, Mr. Waldrep. Or not yet, as Augustine said in another context. We have a lot of spiritual poetry that has quaffed of that cup, but we only one G. C. Waldrep.