MiPO 2005

                There is no poetry but of the creative acts of kings and gods
                and of the servile dreamers they hallucinate.
                                                                                  —Allen Grossman, from Summa Lyrica

To place a king or a god at the origin of poetry is decidedly at odds with our assumptions about the privilege implicit in poetic speech. The fact that Grossman goes further and invalidates poetic speech originating anywhere else may even provoke the suspicion, in some, that he is kidding. He’s not kidding. Kings and gods, at one time, were given to the pursuit of poetic speech. That time has passed—poetic speech no longer flows from kings or gods. We look to the latter instance, then; we look to the hallucination, which is possible. That is, it is not unthinkable for us to conceive of poets as hallucinatory voices dreamt into place by some mysterious “higher” authority, if by authority we mean simply the in-tandem mechanisms of the dream-apparatus. Poetic speech, in this latter instance, can be understood to provide a service for kings and gods. That service, if we think it inversely, implies a kind of bondage, and the word “servile” stresses it. Poetic speech, then, so long as it remains poetic speech, is not yours. It issues always through you, never from you; it issues from a dream within a hallucination. Your opportunity is small—it is to submit to the dream; it is to allow the dream and the service it provides to take place through you.

We are not accustomed to thinking of “creative acts” in this way, which is to say, as devoid of personal and social intentions. Nor are we accustomed to thinking of hallucination in this way; we understand hallucination nowadays to suggest mental or physical deficiency, irresponsibility, danger. Grossman places hallucination at the very foundation of things—not a spontaneous personal malady but an abiding source, synonymous with the fact of the powers that persona is forever subjected to. Persona, then, is never the creator of poetic speech, nor is it the primary concern of poetic speech. Rather, poetic speech is always a dream, and a dream that exists before persona; this dream unfolds as a demonstration of the servile nature of persona. As it opens itself up, a poem plumbs persona’s troubled tenancy within the dream and thereby disintegrates the specificity (the alleged autonomy and the knowability) of persona. One thinks of Dickinson’s: “I am No One/ who are you?” Within this disintegration of persona, the function of persona is made clear. No specific autonomous persona is capable of demonstrating this kind of clarity; each specific persona is capable only of becoming the site of the dream whereby this clarity finds itself out.

To achieve a specific autonomous persona is to engage with one’s dream without understanding it as a dream, and thus, it is to imagine oneself as not subject to the contradictions that have given rise to one’s being. Grossman’s statement is particularly jarring because it severally undermines the vanity of persona, insisting above all on its recurrent foundationlessness. It is founded, after all, in something that could not be more other to our ordinarily imagined selves: divine hereditary hallucination. But his statement is not really mystical; kings and gods are never said to actually exist, and there is no reason to suggest that Grossman believes they do. We can and should maintain our common sense and say that kings and gods exist only in our imagination… but what we imagine is not whatever we like (as we so often assume)—to the contrary, our practice of imagination is all but wholly determined by a specific history (a history of terms and of ideas and of the sentiments they make to carry). We enter into that imagination, then, on its terms, not ours. Kings and gods, whether they were ever real or not, are nevertheless, as imagined entities, built in to our practice of language, and especially into our practice of poetic language.

Like language itself, the poem is something that is always (to a very great extent) there already, and the poet enters into it to verify it or to feel its uniquely peculiar glamour more than he comes into it to claim it as his own. And while poetic space may be said to be vulnerable to a kind of history… it may also be said to be invulnerable, and to insist on a host of contradictions that are on-going and culturally universal: power/submission, belief/doubt, creation/destruction, dream/reality. A Blake quote comes to mind: “without Contraries is no progression.” And Celan: “Speak—but keep yes and no unsplit.” Blake’s notion of progress, here, must give us pause. What is poetic progress?

One thing is certain: poetic progress is in no way connected with the progress of a persona. Poetic progress progresses on its own—progresses not through persona so much as through the crisis of persona, the failure of persona. Think of persona as a kind of humming; to the extent that this humming might decrease in volume, the music playing in the next room might become audible. We might say that our ability to decrease the volume of the humming is our ability to dream, which is the same as saying that our ability to hear the music in the next room is our ability to dream. To speculate on the relationship between the humming and the music in the next room is not my intention here; I am satisfied to point out that it is a decrease in the humming that allows for the other music to enter into “our” realm. This other music, the music is the next room, is not ours—it is deeper, older, and its authority is akin to the authority of what, at one time, was referred to as a king or a god.

Poetic speech, the music in the next room, progresses like any music, which is to say, not by way of its instrument so much as by way of logics in the sounds the instrument is capable of. Those sounds have a past, and in that past its future is to a large extent coded. At its most powerful, poetic speech is its own thing, with its own imaginary destiny. The poet’s privilege is not creativity but proximity to creativity, proximity to the dream that allows access to a new instance in this parallel history. Poetic speech is like the ocean. We all know about it, know “what it is,” its history and what it’s made of, etc… but then suddenly one finds oneself standing there beside it, and it is not an idea—it is a real thing, a real phenomenon.

At this moment one does not create it so much as allow it to create itself, and allow it to be absorbed, yet again, into the history of its idea. That might sound bleak; why should one bother? In the moment of a poem’s utterance there is, perhaps, a kind of vitality. Celan describes it as a “gleam” “in the swell of wandering words.” It may be that we do not want that gleam. It might be argued, that is, that it simply seeks itself.